Liberal arts colleges have a long, prolific history of sending students on to graduate school and careers in science, both as front-line researchers and to serve as the next generation of faculty. They enroll about 1 in 12 undergraduates, but turn out almost 1 in 6 future Ph.D.s in science and engineering. Oberlin, Reed, Swarthmore, Williams, Wellesley, and similar schools that concentrate on undergraduate education and award few if any degrees beyond the bachelor's take pride in their ability to train future scientists—despite, or perhaps because of, their small size. "We have open doors," says A. Malcolm Campbell, a biologist who teaches and conducts genomics research at Davidson College in North Carolina. "The students come in, they ask questions, we get them into our labs. The students are not afraid of their teachers. Teaching is highly valued here, as is the mentoring and the hands-on access to research opportunities. It's the right mix."

"The cutting-edge science is done at the R-1 [Research 1, or major research] universities. No one would quibble with that," says James M. Gentile, recently appointed president of the Research Corporation, who has served as dean for the natural sciences at Hope College in Michigan. Regardless, Gentile says, "there are wonderful liberal arts colleges across the country where the intensity and fervor of teaching" is akin to the passion that scientists bring to the lab at research universities.

THE BRIGHT AND (NOT SO) BOLD
Skeptics suggest that liberal arts colleges' success in turning out scientists is attributable more to their admissions offices than their science faculty. At Reed College in Oregon, for example, the median SAT score for the class of 2007 was 1,359 (out of 1,600 points). The national average for entering freshman was 1,026. "It's not like we turn coal into diamonds. They come in bright," says Peter J. Russell, a Reed biology professor. "Basically we channel them... [and] stimulate them to perform at their highest level."

Channeling is an important function of the liberal arts colleges. With small student-faculty ratios and courses in which professors know every student by name, these schools are adept at steering students into the sciences and other rigorous majors.

What liberal arts colleges may do best is to open a path for students too diffident to push their way forward. Consider molecular biochemist Manju M. Hingorani, who joined Connecticut's Wesleyan University in 2000. She specializes in DNA replication and repair, publishes regularly, and collaborates with HHMI investigator Michael E. O'Donnell at the Rockefeller University in New York. Hingorani says the attention that faculty lavish on the undergraduates at Wesleyan is unimaginable at a research university. "I'm here all the time. I'm here at 7 in the morning. I'm here at 8 at night. I'm here on weekends. It's not just me, it's most professors," says Hingorani. The undergraduates whom she remembers from her teaching assistant days were "the ones with initiative, willing to knock down the professor's door if that's what it took. At Wesleyan, we have so many students who are a bit more tentative—bright, even brilliant, students who maybe just need to be in a class with only 10 students so that they can speak up and say, 'OK, I have an idea.'

"The bright and bold," says Hingorani, "they'll do great anywhere. It's the others who are bright but maybe not so bold who benefit the most from places like this."

Small colleges often turn students on to research. "Students here often don't know about research as a career," says Nancy H. Kolodny, a professor of chemistry at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. "It's our responsibility that they find out about it as early as possible." A Wellesley alumna, Kolodny took chemistry to fulfill a distribution requirement, then spent two summers in a lab with other Wellesley students, courtesy of the National Science Foundation. "If I hadn't gone to Wellesley or another small liberal arts college, I never would have gone into research," says Kolodny.

REAL SCIENCE
Access to faculty is easier at small liberal arts campuses than at most R-1 universities, says molecular biologist Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University and a former HHMI investigator. "In addition," she says, "students in small liberal arts colleges aren't spending their time with disgruntled eight-year graduate students terrified they won't get their Ph.D.s and five-year postdocs terrified they won't get a job."

When A. Malcolm Campbell was finishing graduate studies at the Johns Hopkins University, a professor bluntly warned him, "Don't go into teaching. You'll go brain dead." Campbell ignored the advice, headed to Macalester College in Minnesota, and later joined the faculty at Davidson College, where he has found a balance between the classroom and the laboratory.

While most newly trained scientists emerging from Ph.D. programs and postdoctoral fellowships at major research campuses elect to stay within that universe, scores make the decision that Campbell made. Teaching at top liberal arts colleges allows them to do important research, although at a slower pace than in the hothouse R-1 university world.

Reed College avidly recruits faculty with such interests. With 1,340 students—a quarter of whom major in math, science, or engineering—Reed hires faculty with a research interest as well as a passion for teaching, then provides the infrastructure that allows them to do both, according to biology professor Peter Russell. "We have a fully fledged stockroom and two assistants to prepare our labs," he says. That means Russell, who experiments with budding yeast, can spend time in the lab talking with students about "the serious stuff, not telling them how to pour gels."

At California's Harvey Mudd College, all 700 undergraduates study science or engineering and are eager for collaboration. "I've had students from four departments in my lab—biologists, chemists, physicists, and engineers," says Elizabeth J. Orwin, a professor of engineering and biology. In her research on growing cells that may one day constitute replacement corneas, "I've got students not only working on the tissue, but also trying to get the matrix material. We've got engineers building a bioreactor so we can grow these things with the same physical, mechanical, and chemical stimuli that they have in the eye."

"At a bigger campus, I couldn't take any risks or do anything that would lead to my not publishing," Orwin says. "A place like [this] gives you the opportunity to explore things you might not do at an R-1 university."

One by-product of professor-student collaboration is that faculty scientists often publish papers with undergraduates as coauthors in peer-reviewed journals. Because most liberal arts colleges have few if any graduate students or postdocs, "we have to bring undergraduates into that niche" for laboratory research, says Scott F. Gilbert, a professor of biology at Swarthmore. Admittedly, it's a slower process. "It takes a long time before you get a paper out," says Gilbert.

Thomas Wenzel, a professor of chemistry at Bates College in Maine, says that "the research I am doing at Bates is of similar quality to the work I did during my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Colorado, and the students are not frustrating me. They make my job worthwhile." Wenzel advocates getting undergraduate students involved in research right away. "I do semester-long projects in my first semester general chemistry class right off the bat instead of weekly, boring three-hour experiments. That way, they get really engaged."

PREPARATION FOR LIFE
For some students, that engagement turns into a lifelong passion. Renowned scientists who are alums of liberal arts colleges often remember their undergraduate days with fondness, and they speak highly of the education that prepared them for life in the laboratory and the public arena. HHMI's Cech attributes part of his scientific success to his study of the humanities and arts at Grinnell. "In addition to whatever exposure one gets to undergraduate research at these places," he says, "maybe it's the liberal arts education as a whole that gives you the broad-based education needed to be an imaginative scientist."

David C. Page, an HHMI investigator at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, remembers Swarthmore's honors program and seminars as key to his personal and professional growth. "You were given a topic and some suggested readings and expected to show up and discuss the topic intelligently. That meant we needed to be completely comfortable with the library and with critically analyzing and digesting the scientific literature without someone holding your hand. This made me better able to take on new intellectual pursuits with minimal supervision."

Another HHMI investigator, neurobiologist Joseph S. Takahashi at Northwestern University, is still struck by the fact that "every science course I took at Swarthmore—and there were a lot, like 16—had a lab associated with it. That is unheard of." In a course taught by physiologist Kenneth Rawson, Takahashi became fascinated with circadian rhythms, a topic he pursues to this day.

Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in an article written more than a decade ago for an Amherst publication, said that in a small liberal arts college students can learn "the arts of exposition and criticism that scientists often wait too long to learn. Most scientists spend an extraordinary amount of time reading, writing, and speaking, for which imagination, critical analysis, and clarity of expression become more important than any technology."

Varmus, who majored in English at Amherst and also obtained a master's degree in literature at Harvard University before finding his way to medical school, called himself "a confirmed proponent of prolonged adolescence and career indecision."

David Baltimore, now president of the California Institute of Technology, agrees that it's better to devote a good part of one's undergraduate years to unconstrained exploration, which is a bit more likely, even expected, at a small liberal arts school: "This is one time in your life when you can get broad experience and develop those things that are not standard scientific capabilities."

NIFTY FIFTY
Intellectual hothouses such as Swarthmore, Reed, and Oberlin have produced science Ph.D.s in significant numbers for decades, and more recently other liberal arts colleges have been doing so as well. Some benefited from a buyer's market for new science Ph.D.s in the 1970s and 1980s, when limited opportunities at the major research universities led more young academics to consider careers at smaller colleges, where they could combine teaching with research.

When Oberlin College organized a group of liberal arts colleges in 1985 to seek more government and foundation support for their science programs, they were dubbed the "Nifty Fifty." That number has since grown. When the Research Corporation released its 2001 Academic Excellence study of undergraduate science research, it counted 136 public and private colleges that were endeavoring to combine serious research with committed teaching.

The approach of getting undergraduates into labs with faculty, not only as mentors but also as research partners, no longer is exclusively the province of highly selective, private liberal arts colleges. It has now caught on with a growing number of other private and public colleges as well.

Mark Jacobs, long a star on the biology faculty at Swarthmore College, was wooed by Arizona State University (ASU) in 2003 to become dean of its Barrett Honors College. ASU's honors students "are just as smart as the Swarthmore kids," says Jacobs. "You've got to invent a way to get the kids into labs, and that's what we're trying to do." Few universities offer labs with every science course the way Swarthmore does, and fewer still have full professors teaching those labs, he notes. "Undergrads are a lot more ready and willing to embrace real research than lots of older-style professors would ever believe. The old conception that students are bothersome fleas that have to be flicked off the professor's hide is breaking down," says Jacobs.

California State University at Fullerton and Western Washington University also exemplify public colleges that engage their undergraduates in research. After three decades at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Arlan Norman became dean of the College of Sciences and Technology at Western Washington University, which has 12,000 undergraduates. Norman says Western Washington endeavors to get science majors "working side by side with faculty who are experienced teachers and researchers. There is not the hierarchy of mentorship that often exists in primarily research institutions, where the undergrad works with a grad student, much of the grad student's work is supervised by a postdoc, and the postdoc reports to the faculty lab director."

So the liberal arts college model of science education and research is spreading. At Wesleyan, Manju Hingorani says of her 14-hour days in class, office, and lab: "I am very tired, but I am so happy. I see the faculty and students committed to science and more research money around me, and at many other institutions as well. It is a very exciting time."

Cancer researcher Thomas R. Tritton, president of Haverford College, once suggested that an inexpensive way to gauge the vitality of scientific research on a campus was to walk by the labs at 11:30 p.m. and see how many lights were on. For now, liberal arts colleges are keeping their laboratories' lights burning.

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Photos (from top): Jason Grow, Robbie Maclaren

Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
Summer 2004, pages 10-21.
©2004 Howard Hughes Medical Institute