Letters to the Editor

11/19/09 6:00pm

Rice-BCM merger clearly thought-out

To the Editor: Like many, I have followed the discussions involving the Rice-Baylor College of Medicine merger as closely and as carefully as I could over the last few months, especially the carefully crafted reports from the Faculty Merger Review Committee, the Faculty Advisory Committee on Collaborative Activities and the work of the subcommittee represented by what has come to be called the Boles Report on the Medical Humanities, in which I took an active part.

I am writing this letter as a single contribution to the ongoing discussion. It expresses the personal opinions of a single faculty member whose thoughts on the subject at hand have been shaped primarily by three factors: five years of administrative experience as chair of a department within the School of Humanities, a profoundly interdisciplinary department for which faculty research and graduate training are key and central components; numerous discussions with the administration about the potential merger, primarily in arranged meetings with other chairs, but also in other formal and public university contexts; established intellectual research interests in psychoanalysis, psychiatry and the psychology of religion and a seven-year history of working with colleagues and graduate students in the department in order to form strong links at BCM and the Texas Medical Center in these fields.

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My position can be described as one of "guarded optimism" and stated this way: Should the Board of Trustees, the administration and their financial and legal consultants decide that a merger is in Rice's best interest, I am in support of such a merger.

My reasoning can be articulated in three parts:

1. Given that so much of the key institutional information is extremely sensitive and so confidential, and that, even were it all somehow available, no human being can adequately assess all the variables, much less foresee the future, I do not think it is reasonable to expect certainty or complete assurance on any decision. We take reasonable risks regardless of whether or not we choose to act, although it is true that the risks are greater if we choose to merge. Hence I reject, in philosophical principle, any argument that emerges from a rhetoric or position of certainty, and I hear all the faculty positions advanced so far, including my own, as positions articulated in good faith in the light of an always limited knowledge. More information, of course, could emerge that would change this fundamental uncertainty and result in a clear and unambiguous "Yes" or "No," but I do not see that yet, at all.

2. Very personally speaking now, I want to say this: In my five years of working closely with most of the administration on a number of important issues involving the department or the larger university, I have, in every single case, found the reasoning and final decisions just, fair, balanced and thoughtful. I thus think it is entirely reasonable to put my trust in the same administration when it comes to immense issues like the present one. In essence: Win my trust in the small and medium day-to-day, year-to-year details, and you win my trust in the once-in-a-lifetime mega-issue.

3. Finally, although I fully recognize that the humanities will not be the main benefactor of such a merger, I see this possibility as a very significant opportunity and a catalyst for some segments of the humanities. Whatever the academy and the larger world will look like in 10 or 20 years, the role of the sciences, the neurosciences and bio-medicine will certainly play a much greater, not a lesser, role. The humanities need to address, embrace and, where necessary, challenge these developments, not retreat from them. Perhaps more radically, I am entirely confident that the humanities have something vital and important to contribute here. Humanists, after all, possess methods to analyze and study precisely that which the sciences have left out of their own methods and conclusions: what we might frame as subjectivity, self, mind or consciousness, both in its internal immediacy (which no one really understands) and in its mediated historical refractions through culture, history, art, language, literature, religion and so on.

In short, should such a merger take place, the humanities have something vital and fundamental to contribute, and so we need not interpret such a major development as a "taking away." We should rather hone our own disciplinary voices and lobby, hard, for sufficient financial resources to make any future merger a boon not only for the biomedical sciences, but for the humanities and the university as a whole, much as the FMRC and the subcommittee represented by the Boles Report have already done for us.

Jeffrey J. Kripal

Chair of Religious Studies

Religious Studies Professor

This letter was originally presented for the Faculty Senate before publication in the Thresher.

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