From Stanford University


Professor Marjorie Grene,
Department of Philosophy,
UC-Davis
              October 29, 1974

Dear Professor Grene:
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     I was happy to receive your communication of Oct 22 on your plans
for a National Humanities Institute.

     It is an attractive, stimulating idea, and I would like to help
-- within the severe constraints of temporal reality.  Ideologically,
I would put great weight on the interdisciplinary communication you
seek to foster; and I have often puzzled what we could do to foster
community as between UC and Stanford; and indeed within my own
institution: the realizations are less evident.

     If you really want to hear more from me, we should continue this
discourse by phone, or perhaps a personal meeting -- (at Stanford? --
ah, there's the rub).  I would need to know more about the shape of
the programs before accepting a responsible role; but you may certainly
use my name in your application as one of your "consultants".

     To move from procedure to some substance:

1.  You may be straining too hard for a UC-system wide effort, and for
multi-departmental arrangements for their own sake.  It is already
difficult to make things move on a single campus; I can see some
rationale for, say, the SF-Berkeley-Davis axis as the starting
nucleus, and in that framework, cover Stanford as a source of
auxiliary critique.  (If you do go statewide, you should not overlook
Caltech as a resource).

2.  Alternatively, you might develop the substantive possibilities
of efficient inter-campus educational cooperation.  What is the
existing pattern at UC?  (I have often wondered what a helicopter-taxi
service between UCB and Stanford would have done to the structure of
research and scholarship at our institutions.)

     Have you made much use of TV or telephone communication
(hopefully high quality wide-band lines) for educational purposes?

 3.  The arrangements you specify are still notably deficient in
people from the natural sciences.  Whatever their uses and limitations
as resources, they would be important as consumers, and perhaps also
in the academic policy issues.  Karplus may be helpful in
identifying the most cogent possibilities.  I did not see Wes
Churchman's name in  your prospectus -- he would be another portal.

4.  May I ask  you to send me the course catalogs (faculty directories
for each of the prospectively participating (sic) campuses?

5.  I am enclosing some information on our Program in Human Biology
(of which I am one of the 'founding fathers').
This has some obvious parallels to your own aims.  One of my main
disappointments has been precisely the deficiency of humanistic
content in our (formal) curriculum and academic planning. Part,
doubtless not all, of our problem here has to do with the locally
available disciplinary resources.  (We have very little history or
philosophy of science, for example, at Stanford; and ethics is
sporadically attended to by mobile junior faculty; I was sorry we lost
Tom Schwartz a couple of years ago.)

     Another program, "VTS", centered in the Engineering School, may
also interest you.

     Note these are both undergraduate studies:

6.  My "course" in genetics as a career is still a gleam, but I
probably will do it next Spring.  It is intended to meet the personal
needs of students in my own department, which would be distributed
by wider advertising.  However, I am eager for help in framing it,
reading lists, etc., and I would not object to accommodating one
observer from your program.  My future plans for such a course depend
on the outcome of this experiment.

7.  Who can quarrel with "personal identity" as the axial theme of
ethics?  While this has emerged publically perhaps most strictly 
in the context of the abortion debate, I have been wrestling more with
the issues of continuity: physiological ("personal memory");
informational (in the tradition of the educator; genetic.  As we
approach the hypothetical possibility of (medical) immortality, or
merely extension of life span, these issues will surely drive some of
our most urgent conflicts of social policy.  May I trouble you for the
reference to Taylor's writings that you so admired?

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transcribed from xerocopy of handwritten ms. 12/98
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