Why this topic of
transdisciplinary research to advance
the human condition is important to me,
or maybe not, it
might not help you explain or understand,
my background is in religious studies.
My PhD is in New Testament and early Christian thought.
On a regular basis that has nothing to
do with what I do in my job,
I'm usually talking to scientists,
and social scientists, and to other folks.
I was saying to my co-panelist Emily today,
I'm like a college freshman,
because every day I get to talk to faculty
who are really passionate about what they do,
and it's like when I was a freshman
in college and I would come back to the dorm and say,
"I'm going to major in
economics," and the next day I would say,
"I'm going to major in bio,
I'm going to major in," and that's the way I
feel about my job, is really excited.
But the background in me that has
a Masters of Divinity and a PhD in New Testament,
always wants to say to those people, "So what?"
Because that was a question that was
really crucial in my previous life.
For me, transdisciplinary research
is about answering the, so what?
I want to back up a step,
and we're going to try some audience interaction here.
If you have your phone and can download the Slido app,
or if you have your computer,
you can login to slido.com.
This is an app that enables
us to poll you in the midst of the conversation.
You can also ask questions,
and at the end we will ask you to use it as a place to
post your questions so that others can see them.
If you get to Slido,
you don't have to register or anything,
it's just a freebie.
The code for our particular session is A136.
I'm a Mac user so Windows and
I have a tempestuous relationship.
The first poll, if you go into A136,
now this is not showing up there.
That's not fair, is it?
It's not fair.
No, it's noticeable by its absence.
It is.
Yes.
How many of you are in Slido?
A couple of you, and you go to A136,
the first poll asks you,
"What is your primary disciplinary focus?"
If we can figure out a way, oh,
I know why, it should be going.
Excellent, just had a thought,
maybe because we're still projecting.
Okay.
Just talk amongst yourselves for a moment.
[LAUGHTER]
Clearly we worked out all the kinks
between the three of us.
Every one of them is gone.
Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to stop that,
and then if we come over here. Oh, hurrah.
Hurrah, okay.
You will see this question in the polls section,
"What is your primary disciplinary
focus?" You all seeing that?
So far I'm not updating,
it says that none of you have answered,
and I'm not connected,
but eventually we will
get there and see that it is working.
I'm just curious and I thought you might be curious.
Are you seeing results?
[BACKGROUND] Okay.
Since I'm not seeing them,
at least this part of
the technological experience [BACKGROUND].
I'm trying and every time I do
that it doesn't [BACKGROUND].
When I say try now to reconnect,
nothing happens.
[BACKGROUND] [LAUGHTER]. Okay.
Maybe somebody could just tell us.
Thirty two percent social sciences.
Hurrah.
Okay. Thirty two percent social sciences.
What percentage of final performing arts
do we have here today?
[BACKGROUND] If you all are here,
I know that technology is not your thing,
but try, let's represent, folks.
[LAUGHTER].
Humanities?
[BACKGROUND] Eighteen, good.
Natural Sciences?
[BACKGROUND].
Surprising, okay.
Mathematical and computer sciences?
[BACKGROUND] Okay.
Engineering? [BACKGROUND] Okay.
The stem are representing.
Professional?
[BACKGROUND] Two, welcome.
We need you. We need the professions.
Veterinary sciences?
[BACKGROUND] Hopefully no dogs
will become sick during the course of this presentation.
Agricultural sciences?
[BACKGROUND] Okay.
We're a fairly diverse group,
and keep logging in, there will be
other polls if I can figure them out.
If technology becomes too difficult,
we will forgo it.
[BACKGROUND] If only I could. Moving on.
In addition to who's here,
I want to talk about something we all share,
and the brief version of it is,
we're not normal in this room.
To be a little bit less judgmental,
let me say we are not typical.
It's helpful to point out,
I think, that as folks,
most of whom have advanced degrees,
we are in the vast majority,
or vast minority, of America.
As folks whose lives are centered in
a university, we're not typical.
In terms of advanced degrees.
First of all, only 34 percent
of Americans have a four year degree.
Right away we are more educated than the majority,
and that makes us atypical.
Only 13 percent of Americans have a master's degree,
and only three percent have a doctoral degree.
Now, I know it felt when we were applying to
our doctoral programs like everybody was doing it,
but it turned out not so much.
I point that out in part to
say that the place where
we are living the majority of our lives,
and where we are spending the majority of our energy,
is unfamiliar to most of the people around us.
Apropos of the first comment,
I was really stunned that in Chile,
universities are among the most trusted institutions.
I'm certain I was not the only person to
Google and to discover that in America,
universities are not even a category you can trust.
[LAUGHTER] We're not even an option for being trusted.
I think that is stunning and stunningly upsetting.
I'm backing up a step to say, "Well,
I think your very presence here today
says you believe in what you do,
and you intuitively know
that it makes a difference to society."
Intuitively knowing it isn't enough.
We need the language and
the incentive to make the case for this,
clearly not just in the university,
but outside the university.
A recent study found that 62 percent of people polled,
thought that having a higher education system
was good for society.
Twenty one percent of those were iffy.
They were in a sea.
Only 40 percent of people thought that having
higher education was valuable for society.
The other option was,
is it mostly of personal benefit
to the people who get a degree?
At least as many people thought it
was mostly personal benefit.
Now I love benefiting my students,
and I know my experience in
higher education has been a benefit to me,
but that's not why I went into it,
intuitively and perhaps in articulately.
I went into higher education.
I went into the university because I
thought that here was a place I could make a difference,
not just in the lives of individual students,
although that happens and God knows,
it makes my day when it does.
But also in the world around us,
partially because of whom those students will become,
but partially and currently in my current job,
almost exclusively, because of
the ability and the incentive to bring together
these incredible minds and
bodies that are the people at the university to say,
don't just keep it inside the ivory gates,
go out there and do something with them.
Now I know inside,
like think of the ivory gates because at IU,
right across the street from my office is
the iconic entrance to IU called the sample gates,
so that's it marks very
clearly the difference between
the university and the community.
In pushing out beyond those gates,
the first thing I have to recognize is Boyd,
the life in the gates is busy,
and it demands all of you,
and so trying to work outside of it,
trying to work outside of your department,
much less outside of your university,
is incredibly challenging.
But it's something we desperately need to
do for a couple of reasons.
I'm going to table the world needs us
reason and to say the university needs us to do it.
That the surveys don't ask if universities are
trustworthy is of the same genre of
problem as the fact that we all know
public education or public funding
for education is dropping like a rock.
Public universities are not really public
anymore in terms of publicly funded in the US.
We see it when our elected officials
question the results of
99 percent of scientists on things like climate change.
That's partially a political decision,
and it's partially based on
a distrust or a lack of respect for it.
I don't mean respect me way,
but a lack of recognition
of the value of what it is we're doing.
We have to make the case for
this if universities are to survive.
While the certification of skills is important,
that's the easy case to make.
It's the one that parents demand we make every day.
It's not going to be enough to keep us afloat.
We have to in order to continue having
this place we love to
be because it's too hard to be if you don't love it.
In order to do it, we have to
take that case and make it explicit.
There are a lot of initiatives
around the country to do that,
and I'm going to talk briefly about
one where I'm working at IU.
Then I'm going to hand it over to Emily and Andy to
talk about both things at Colorado,
and then how you can start
or increase your ability to do it.
At Indiana University, we have
three Grand Challenge programs or three grand challenges.
The first one is precision health,
the second one is preparing for environmental change,
and the third one, which I currently run,
is responding to the addictions crisis.
Indiana is one of
the most highly impacted states by addictions.
Ten years ago, it was methamphetamines.
Now it's opioids, both prescription and illicit opioids,
both natural opioids like heroin
and manufactured opioids like carfentanil.
It's a huge crisis in
our state as we all know it is nationwide.
Our president said to a group of us
in the summer, spring of 2017,
we're going to invest $50 million in partnering with
the states to solve
the opioid crisis and the addictions crisis in Indiana.
In six weeks, tell us how we're going to do
that. It was a great summer.
[LAUGHTER] One of the things that our committee realized
was that the only way we're going to
solve the addictions crisis
is through transdisciplinary research.
You can't attack this from just one place.
You can't just shut down
drug mills because people will go elsewhere.
You can't just create jobs,
although that's a part of it.
You have to create hope and resilient communities.
But if you just do that,
and people still don't have networks,
they're still going to be without hope,
and there's going to be no help.
You have to address the fact,
and these models tries to demonstrate that addiction,
like most of the wicked problems we face,
is multifaceted,
and so it happens at an individual level.
There are biological, genetic,
psychological factors that lead
people to be either more inclined to addiction,
more vulnerable to it,
or to respond more negatively when they start using.
But there are also
organizational and interpersonal relationships.
There's plenty of evidence to demonstrate
that folks from who are isolated,
you spoke earlier today about isolation.
Isolation is one of the key predictors of addiction.
Communities are a factor.
We see much higher rates of addiction in Indiana,
in communities where heavy manufacturing
has left and nothing else has come in.
In fact, the single job category
which puts a person in Indiana at
highest risk of addiction is not unemployed.
It's being in retail.
What we'll think about it most retail in
the '40s and '50s was a solid middle-class occupation.
You could be working at
the local butcher store and raise a family.
Now retail is largely in convenience stores,
where you're working 20 hours a week,
and you have another job at another store,
where you're working 20 hours a week,
and you have another job at another convenience store,
where you're working another 15 hours a week,
and you still can't pay your rent.
You're in retail, but it is not a living.
We need communities that have
options beyond that for people.
It's also a social and public policy issue.
Just a quick example, in Indiana,
we have needle exchanges
in some forward thinking communities,
and thank God because it's a huge way of reducing
the harm that accompanies intravenous drug use,
hep-c, HIV, similar illnesses.
It's illegal in Indiana to have a syringe.
We have needle exchanges,
but if you actually possess a syringe and needle,
you are now in violation of the law.
In some communities that didn't really
like having needle exchanges,
cops would stand two blocks away
from the needle exchange
and bust people for having needles.
That's a social and public policy issue that is
compounding the harms associated with addiction.
If we don't address that,
we're not going to get very far.
We realized we had to address it in all of these ways,
and we came up with five areas that we thought we
had expertise that would attack these things.
But from the start, we said,
"You have to work together across these areas."
Data science and analytics undergirds the whole thing.
Basic applied in translational research is everything
from the neuroscience of addiction to treatment options,
education, training, and certification,
both of people who can treat
addiction and education and training of
more people in the communities
through continuing education so
that we have a more educated citizenry,
community and workforce development and
policy analysis, economics and law.
We couldn't do this and we won't succeed if,
as is currently the case,
we have a lot of work going on in some of
these areas and not much in others,
we will fail if I can't get the balance different
and also if I can't get people
to talk to each other about it.
We will also fail if we try to do it for
the people of Indiana
rather than with the people of Indiana.
That's been one of our hardest lessons.
Universities are really good at doing things for war,
like we excel at that.
We're moms. [LAUGHTER] We're
not so good at doing things with,
and we need to be better at that.