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Steady as He Goes
The appointment of a physicist as dean of the Graduate School signals a new dedication to the “hard” sciences at Yale.
March 1994
by Bruce Fellman
As one Thomas Appelquist was having a bad day. In a burst of budget-cutting last fall, Congress had just voted to kill the superconducting supercollider, the giant atom-smasher under construction in Texas. The $11 billion machine was designed to answer questions that researchers like Appelquist had puzzled over for the past decade in attempts to describe the forces and particles at the heart of the atomic nucleus. But the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, a Yale faculty member since 1975, hardly had time to grieve, for as the SSC was being scuttled, he was settling in as dean of the Graduate School. At a university long known as a bastion of scholarship in the humanities, the appointment of a “hard” scientist to oversee the training of the University’s more than 2,500 graduate students is likely to prove a major contribution to the nation’s scientific future, supercollider or no. “I hope that my being here sends a message that science is a major component of Yale and that scientists can bring a valuable perspective to the administration,” says the new dean.
Appelquist is not the only scientist to have occupied the post of dean. Biologist Keith Stewart Thomson, curator emeritus at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and psychologist Judith Rodin, who this summer will take office as president of the University of Pennsylvania, have also headed the Graduate School. Most recently, the job was held by Richard Levin, now President of the University, but also a distinguished practitioner of what some have referred to as the “dismal science” of economics.
Regardless of scholarly discipline, whoever sits in the main office of the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS) in the coming years must confront some new administrative hurdles. Not the least of them is that a substantial number of students, chiefly in the humanities, are pursuing efforts to gain University recognition for a student labor union. In addition, the Graduate School is still suffering from the effects of the University’s divisive debate over restructuring the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (See Yale Alumni Magazine, May 1992.). That debate, coupled with New Haven’s urban trouble is blamed for last year’s drop in graduate applications. A less-than-stellar academic job market resulted in a further chill, which was compounded by an unprecedented turnover in leadership—counting Appelquist, there have been four deans in four years.
While a number of problems persist, the Graduate School appears to have turned a corner. “Overall, applications are up more than 10 percent,” says the new dean, “and we’re optimistic that we can get things going again.”
Michael Zeller, who took over as chair of the physics department from Appelquist in 1989 after Appelquist became director of the division of physical sciences and engineering, has no doubt about his colleague’s prospects. “Tom’s been remarkably effective as an administrator,” says Zeller. He also has praise for the new dean’s academic work, which has helped establish Yale as a major contender in an area of physics known as condensed matter theory. On the extracurricular side, Appelquist serves as president of the Aspen Center for Theoretical Physics, an organization that encourages scientific inquiry beyond the confines of academia. “Aspen,” says Zeller, “is a typical Appelquist move—take an idea, and make it grow and prosper.”
There is more to Aspen than science for Appelquist. A trim 52-year-old, the dean is a regular at Payne Whitney gymnasium, where he swims and runs for exercise. But he prefers the mountain air, and is often joined on his hiking trips in the Colorado wilderness by his wife Marion, a teacher at the Hopkins School in New Haven, and their two children, Daniel, 24, and Karen, 12. The fact that Aspen is also the site of a renowned music festival is another plus; the dean’s taste runs to Beethoven string quartets, but also includes country-and-western.
As an administrator, Appelquist has a reputation for calm and stability.
Like Levin, he is known as a consensus-builder with a genuine sensitivity to people. His colleagues describe him as someone who takes well-reasoned and analytical approaches to problems. “The last thing he does is shoot from the hip,” says one. “He always takes good, long, careful aim.”
This low-key, deliberate approach is as much a result of Appelquist’s upbringing in Indiana, where he fell in love with physics early and later majored in the subject at Illinois Benedictine College, as it is an outcome of his advanced training at Cornell, where he earned a doctorate in 1968. (He went on to junior faculty positions at Stanford and Harvard before coming to Yale.) And it is an approach that is likely to both delight and infuriate members of the Graduate School community.
Dorann Bunkin, a Law School student who works with Appelquist in her capacity as president of Yale’s Graduate and Professional Student Senate, likes what she has seen so far. “He’s very willing to listen,” says Bunkin, noting that the new dean has gone out of his way to attend her organization’s meetings and come to grips with the issues that affect graduate students. Among these are a new graduate center, expanded health-care insurance, and a more responsive bureaucracy.
Not all of Appelquist’s constituents share Bunkin’s enthusiasm. Members of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), which has clashed repeatedly with previous administrations over its demands for formal recognition as a union, are already at odds with the new dean. GESO spokesman and former president Corey Robin, a fourth-year graduate student in political science, says that the crux of his group’s running battle with Appelquist and his predecessors comes down to a difference of opinion over a definition. According to Robin, a graduate student is, first and foremost, an employee of the University and therefore deserving of all the benefits enjoyed by Yale’s other unionized workers. “The University is being extremely disingenuous in treating us as non-employees,” says Robin. “Its rhetoric does not match reality.”
Appelquist sees the situation differently. “Graduate students are here primarily to be educated,” says the dean. “Their employment as teaching fellows and research assistants is an integral part of their education“
The most public disagreements between GESO—which may, depending on who does the counting, represent as few as several hundred and as many as more than a thousand graduate students—and the administration have come over the use of what is known as the grievance procedure. In simplest terms, the procedure allows students to lodge formal complaints about such issues as various forms of discrimination. In Appelquist’s view, that has never included protesting matters of University policy; the dean was supposed to be the judge of what constituted a legitimate grievance. But Appelquist admits that the document is vague, and therein lies the source of an ongoing problem. “It was fine for a simpler era, but this is not a simple era,” says Appelquist, who is moving toward having the terminology rewritten.
To Robin and GESO, however, the dean’s position—and that of his predecessor, Richard Levin—violates the organization’s interpretation of the procedure’s sketchy guidelines. As they see the matter, the administration, faced with a challenge to its policies, should send such challenges to an independent committee for evaluation and action. Robin says that the administration’s failure to do so is evidence that Yale “doesn’t want to give up any authority and power over decision-making.” Robin argues that the formation of a union may be the only way to break the logjam. “This is all about governance, fairness, and respect,” she says.
Appelquist says he wants to ensure that graduate students have all the respect his administration can muster, but he hopes to reach some sort of acceptable compromise and avoid unionization. “It gets you into a confrontational way of doing business, which is not something that appeals to me,” he says. “It would also, I think, run counter to the reason students are here. I’d like to believe that we’re developing a culture in the Graduate School where students are working with the faculty, rather than for them.”
Such administrative issues are part of the decanal territory, but Appelquist is trying to maintain his research momentum while addressing them. Having served on many National Science Foundation and Department of Energy committees, he was awarded the prestigious Senior U.S. Scientist Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1985 and last year became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He still has subatomic worlds to explore. “Tom’s always done very fine work,” says Kenneth Lane, a professor of physics at Boston University and a theorist with similar research interests who is collaborating with the dean on an upcoming paper (Appelquist has written or coauthored more than 100 scientific papers and delivered dozens of lectures around the world). “He’s smart guy and a good listener.”
He is also not afraid to stick out his neck, notes Lane, as he recounts a tale about Appelquist’s pivotal role in what physicists term the “November Revolution” of 1974. As atom smashers became increasingly powerful after the Second World War, they revealed that the subatomic world was populated by far more than the familiar electrons, protons, and neutrons. In attempting to make sense of a complicated bestiary of particles responsible for the world as we know it, theorists came up with what is known as the “standard model.” At its heart, the model suggested that the fundamental building block of the atomic nucleus was an entity that physicists whimsically dubbed the quark (the name comes from a line in Finnegan’s Wake).
There are, according to current theory, six different kinds of quarks, five of which have actually been seen. In the 1960s, the first quarks—“up” and “down”—were discovered, and later in the decade, researchers observed the “strange” quark. Since these particles are always found in pairs, Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow hypothesized the existence of a quark with a property he called “charm.”
In 1974, Appelquist made a bold prediction about the way this charmed particle—if it in fact existed—should behave. “We thought he was nuts,” recalls Lane, summing up popular opinion at the time.
But a few weeks after Lane had heard Appelquist’s talk on quark behavior, researchers found it behaving in precisely the manner the researcher had outlined. This conformation of theory to observation helped establish the credibility of the standard model and sparked an intellectual revolution Notes Lane: “Tom’s been a leader in the field ever since.”
For physicists, the predictive power of the model has been, says Appelquist, “our great achievement—it’s been years since anything didn’t fit—and yet we know that the theory is incomplete.”
To probe the internal structure of atoms, scientists shoot an atomic target with high-speed “bullets”—beams of protons, neutrons, or other particles traveling at close to the speed of light—and study the damage that results from the collisions. Just as it takes more energy to pierce a steel plate than a balloon, the situation is similar in the subatomic realm. The fundamental forces that hold the component parts of an atom together vary in strength; overcoming the atom’s natural reluctance to reveal its secrets has required scientists to come up with beams that pack increasingly higher and higher energy wallops.
Theory and experiment have been in agreement at the energy levels that are currently available to scientists, but at the higher energy realms where so far only theorists have been able to roam, the previously reliable equations start yielding results that “essentially violate common sense,” says Appelquist. To rescue the standard model from such an untoward fate, Appelquist has developed a set of modifications called the “walking technicolor” theory. These generate reasonable answers and offer the possibility of a simple and elegant explanation of a long-standing problem: why each of the various particles has its characteristic mass.
There is, to be sure, a competing theory, known as “supersymmetry,” and when work began two years ago on the supercollider (a project Appelquist helped design), physicists were hopeful they’d eventually be able to see which notion made the right predictions. But the supercollider is now history. “It’s kind of depressing to think that by the end of my career, I may not get the answers to some of the things I’ve been curious about,” says the dean, adding that the SSC’s demise is more than just a personal loss. “It makes me concerned about our nation’s commitment to basic research and about the willingness of this government, particularly Congress, to sustain its interest in and support of a big science project.”
Still, despite the end of the SSC and rumblings in Washington that money be directed to applied rather than basic research, funding for the kind of fundamental science that underwrites a considerable portion of graduate student training has, in general, fared well in the Clinton administration. For humanities graduate students however, funding is much more tenuous, a situation that results in a considerably smaller support package (the average science research assistantship is roughly $13,500 for 12 months; in the humanities there are two principal stipend levels—$9,500 and $5,000—for a nine month period). Appelquist hopes to eliminate at least some of that gap through a concerted fundraising effort geared toward the endowment of additional fellowships.
Beyond that, he cites another challenge he anticipates during his term as dean. Following the recommendations of the Committee on Governance of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—a committee on which Appelquist served—President Levin has added critical new responsibilities to the job descriptions of the deans of the College and the Graduate School. Much of the oversight of the arts and sciences faculty, which had been entirely within the purview of the provost, is now in the hands of the two deans, who will work with the departments on such things as faculty development and searches. “The strength of the Graduate School—the strength of the University—depends on the strength of the faculty,” says Appelquist. “That’s the bedrock. Overall, we’re in good shape here. My sense is that it’s a good time to be a graduate student at Yale.”  |
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