Rachel Adams

Lessons from the Lab

By Jack Bradner 

Illustration by Selin Ho

At the beginning of my first American Modernism class with Professor Rachel Adams, she asked the room for a quick show of hands: how many prospective or current English majors were present? Aware of a heavy majority of the class, I tentatively raised my hand. Professor Adams then asked how many STEM or Biology majors were present. No hands this time. Before getting into the details of the course, Professor Adams noted that—in addition to being a professor of English and Comparative Literature—she was a Biology major. 

Other than an English and Comparative Literature professor and a Biology student, Professor Adams is a decorated scholar of Disability Studies. As she continued to discuss the sciences in her American Modernism lecture—as a formal, historical, cultural, and thematic problem—I grew eager to hear about her experience in the lab. From course content to careers, it  appears that the English and Biology classrooms couldn’t be farther apart. But in this conversation, Professor Adams shows how interdisciplinarity and intellectual curiosity underpin a symbiotic relationship between these seemingly disparate fields.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

The Blue & White: Why did you choose to study biology?

Rachel Adams: One of the great things about this job is that you’re on a campus where you can learn anything you can imagine. One year, I had a fellowship with the Heyman Center, which meant I had a reduced teaching load. So I thought, well, I will sit in on a biology class and see what that’s all about. I realized that really I was fascinated, more than I thought, but also that I would need to work harder in order to get anything out of it. And so, I started to really do the work. 

To officially take these courses, I had to use a benefit that all Columbia officers have, which is that you can take one course a year. But I soon discovered that taking one class a year was not going to be enough to do the STEM courses that often extend through the entire year and have labs attached to them. I needed to enroll in a degree granting program, which meant that I could take three classes a year. And so, I stumbled into becoming a biology major, and started taking the required courses.

B&W: In 2013, you released Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery. I’m curious: do the experiences you detail in your memoir collide with your interest in or pursuit of Biology?

RA: Henry motivates everything I do. He has motivated me to ask, in my opinion, the most interesting humanistic questions of my career. In our class, we’re going into our week on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I’m thinking about what it means to write from the perspective of a person who’s intellectually disabled. To attempt to imagine my son’s brain and what it would mean to have a just society for people who think in such different ways has been hugely motivating for all of my work. And it did propel me towards science. 

At first, I thought the question I was going to answer is ‘Why are doctors so ableist?’ and ‘Can I identify all the ways that STEM education teaches people to be prejudiced against those who are different, especially medically different?’ And in some ways, those prejudices do get reinforced. But in many other ways, I see a lot that makes me very hopeful. I love talking to the students in my classes and hearing about the reasons why they want to be doctors. There is a huge amount of work to be done to change  medical education. Unfortunately often, people get to med school with these wonderful aspirations, but between studying and the unjust systems of health care and insurance work in our country, it’s absolutely ironed out of people in the most dehumanizing way. 

But that’s not the fault of undergraduate STEM learning. So yes, there’s room for improvement, but in other ways, I feel very good about what our students are learning. It’s actually made me able to talk to doctors in a more educated way and to understand where they’re coming from. It’s been a wonderful adventure, both parenting my son and studying science at the same time.

B&W: In one of our earlier conversations, you noted that you started taking classes at Barnard instead of Columbia. Why was that?

RA: I had heard about this legendary “Intro to Bio” class at Columbia, designed by Professor Deborah Mowshowitz, who was famous throughout the land for this very particular and incredibly demanding course. Unlike a more traditional biology class, this one had an education by problem-solving approach. When I started out, this made me absolutely terrified. Somehow, I got it into my head that Barnard would be more traditional, so I would at least start my studies there. As you know, Barnard is extremely competitive. They’re all just incredibly smart and good at STEM. As somebody who was terrible at science in high school, I found it very intimidating to be in the company of all these women who are just tremendous students.

But the other thing about Columbia biology was the prerequisites. Unlike Barnard, where I believe you start in your first year with biology, most people at Columbia don’t take biology until their second year. [Barnard classes] were really wonderful, but I learned the hard way that my benefit didn’t pay for them. Someone in Low Library had been kindly making these exceptions for me and pushing money around. Finally, he said, ‘Look, you have a benefit, and you should use it at Columbia.’ I actually just took Columbia’s “Intro to Bio” last year and loved it. I was literally trembling on the first day.

B&W: In your essay series “Book+Worm”, you describe re-entering the biology classroom as a “feminist project.” Since 2017, how has your study of biology confirmed or complicated that goal?

RA: I’m kind of blown away by the diversity. I actually think the STEM classes are more diverse in terms of racial demographics—I don’t know that they’re more gender diverse—than in the English major. STEM tracks speak to a broad swath of ambitious people, and I do think there are a lot of students who come from more working-class or first generation college families, who cannot justify doing a major like English. Even though I will say English majors have just as much job success as anyone else, it does not sound that way to a family that is sacrificing everything for college. 

On the feminist side of it, I see other ways that certain patriarchal traditions or values continue in STEM that are more submerged in the humanities. But I’m blown away by how many successful women scientists and mathematicians this experience has brought into my orbit. It’s also caused me to go back and reevaluate my youth. I went to this all girls school that makes the argument that, in such an environment, girls are not held back by sexism and thus learn that they can do anything. At the time—this was the 80s—it was still okay to be a girl who was like, ‘I just can’t do math or science,’ so I always did the bare minimum. I wish that somebody had inspired me, or that I had tried harder. I don’t know that I could have done that as the person I was in the 80s, but I’m also learning that it’s not too late to learn things.

B&W: On that feminist point, how has looking back on studying STEM in high school in comparison with your present studies changed your feminism or your interpretations of feminist literature?

RA: In some of my more simplistic humanities mindsets, I had a very monolithic idea about the culture of STEM. It does continue to be more gender traditional than the humanities, and I have heard stories that make my hair stand on end. 

As I got into these classes, I learned, first, that it’s very interesting to study the biological bases of human differences. One thing science teaches you is that we are more alike than different. Life itself has much more in common than it does different: we have likeness with fruit flies, slime molds. When I was in the chemistry department, I found that so many of the instructors I had, either grad students or very young professors, were gender non-conforming in various ways. I came away thinking that chemistry is a very queer-friendly department. This idea one might have that everyone is a man in a white coat, or something simple minded, really is turning on its head.

B&W: How does that experience change the way you reflect on the English department and teaching in a, perhaps, less diverse setting? Can the two disciplines improve together?

RA: I wish they would cross pollinate. In another way, the sciences are not progressive at all in that they have very strict ideas about the milestones one has to pass. It’s incredibly demanding in that way. Whereas in the humanities we are more improvisational, more about self-realization. It became very evident to me the extent to which certain humanities disciplines and the humanities in general, at this moment, is a path that many students feel they simply cannot afford to take. I think that is a general problem with the world that we live in, and with the cost and the sacrifices people are required to make to enter into higher education. It’s really sad. We humanists are working really hard, but we need to do better at communicating why the humanities are a crucial part of a just society with civic-minded, engaged critical thinkers, whatever their politics are. It also has become all too evident very recently that scientists have failed to communicate the value of what they do. Probably the biggest evidence we have of this today is climate change. 

B&W: When studying American Modernism, we acknowledge the (unfortunately common) prejudices of our authors: Pound’s antisemitism and Fitzgerald’s visceral disgust with the MGM sideshow freaks are two of many examples. In science too, abuse and prejudice have historically underpinned groundbreaking discoveries. Whether teaching a novel or working with HeLa cells, how should teachers navigate this tension?

RA: That is a wonderful question. In some ways, we are much better equipped in the humanities to do that because human culture is our subject. A problem that I see in STEM is that there is so much knowledge required of a student, particularly for either the pre-med track or PhD. There’s so much they have to know, so many credentialing processes that they have to go through that there is just not time for the history of science, the ethical questions, and the questionable choices. 

I was really gratified, two separate times, when I taught the first ever undergraduate class on Precision Medicine. I taught with a biochemist—Sam Sternberg, who was part of the team that discovered CRISPR—with a medical sociologist, and with a bioethicist. We had a lot of Medical Humanities majors but also straight STEM majors. We were coming at the questions of genetic knowledge and genomic medicine, which is basically what precision medicine is at present from many different disciplinary angles. 

B&W: In my Frontiers of Science lecture this week, when my professor put three past students on the board, the first one was Sam Sternberg. When you’re talking about the discrepancies between students of English having this monolithic view of the sciences and students of science, not having time to absorb the history of what studying, do you think the Core Curriculum—in classes like Frontiers of Science or Lit Hum—help us get that equilibrium? Or is it still not enough? 

RA: I have devoted my life to being part of a liberal arts education, and I firmly believe that that is the best way to educate fully rounded, curious, engaged students who are the future of our society. So I just can’t say enough about the importance of a liberal arts education, and I include the Core Curriculum in that. I talked to Sam a lot about this. I think there are a lot of reasons why he appreciates his Columbia education. One of them is that because he went here, he was exposed to literature, the arts, history, and intellectual history in ways that a lot of people who are very serious about STEM never have access to. 

I will tell you as a scholar that one of the things that almost always happens to me in the doctor’s office is that the person examining me wants to talk about what they read: ‘I love Edythe Gordon’ or ‘what would you recommend to me?’ It’s probably GPs (General Practitioners) in particular, who are feeling like there’s something missing from their lives that they get from reading books. They always want to talk about books.

B&W: I have another question more from the student’s perspective. Our Core Curriculum offers avenues for students to explore their interests across disciplines, but at the same time, I recognize a competing pressure to specialize early in one’s college career, even at schools like Columbia that are devoted to the liberal arts bedrock. What advice might you give to Columbia students trying to navigate that tension between a pre-professional pressure and the liberal arts?

RA: I’m on the Committee on Instruction, so I recognize this is a very real pressure. One of the big tasks that we did in my time there is to move our system over from the concentration model to the minor model. It used to be possible for a student not to have a major and just concentrate in something. That was, in part, a recognition of how much of someone’s coursework was taken up by the Core. But, I think the minor system is actually a great way to allow people to have other areas of specialization.

I completely recognize that there are certain majors, like Biology, where you do have to be pretty single minded. That’s why I’m delighted that we have the Core. If you come in when you’re 18 years old and you know that you want to go to med school and that a lot of your time is filled with those courses, then why not have the the rest of the time filled with classes that generations of people have designed to give you a well rounded look at human cultures? You don’t end up with a broad picture of what’s out there when you just pick what happens to fall across your screen. 

B&W: I’m also curious about your experience in the classroom and lab. After our class watched Modern Times, you compared Dorothy Richardson and Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘shocks,’ a visceral term describing society’s encounters with then-new television technology. What were the shocks, if any, that you encountered when crossing into Biology?

RA: The thing that shocked me the most was the ageism. STEM often privileges young people, the way that young people’s bodies work, and the way their minds work. In some ways, the humanities and maybe social sciences are more suited to a wider spectrum of brains, maybe that’s why the doctors want to read novels. [STEM classes] are very accommodating of people with disabilities, in some ways but not in others. I can never see in the microscope because I wear glasses. Culturally, it’s all set up around a person who can come at 8pm, start a review session then, and be there until all hours. One of the things I value about Columbia is how we have the postbac pre-med. The classes are much more diverse age-wise than you might think, and I think that adds a lot of good to them. 

You will know nothing about this, because you’re a young person, but one experience of aging is that you feel like the same self that you were when you were 20, and then you look in the mirror or are treated a certain way by others, and you realize, ‘Oh, I am actually a middle age person.’ Occasionally that means every so often I meet a person who is really into having a middle-aged, mom-looking person as their lab partner. Most of the time, the students flee to the far corners of the room, going with the friend that lives in their dorm. I really have had to contend with that. 

When I first started, I would lead with my story, and then I realized: A) they do not want to know this; and B) the more you tell them this, the more you are ‘other’ to them and they want to work with someone who’s more similar to them. There are two lessons in this, and one is me assimilating more to the student. Now, I don’t try to interview them, which my son has told me is ‘so cringy,’ but I do try to learn because I’m so curious about the undergrads.

B&W: In your essay series, you also jokingly contrast the “authoritarian” science classes with the “sunlit seminar rooms” of the humanities. I laughed when I read that. I’m curious how, from a professor’s perspective, those differences have changed the way that you approach your teaching in an English classroom.

RA: It definitely has changed, but mostly for the good. Those were some of my stereotypes about STEM classes. I have been struck by the generosity of people. There is this sense that we are all just up against so much, and we are going to help. 

In Disability Studies, we talk about universal design and Universal Design for Learning, which is about adapting curricula and classroom design to maximize the number of learning styles addressed. Of course, at Columbia, we only see a very privileged segment of the population, but within that we have people with all kinds of learning differences. In science, there really are multiple modes of presentation. When I took [General Chemistry], you had PowerPoint slides, a textbook, problems that you solve, and online platforms. Sometimes they would show videos so you could see a process. Then they would do experiments, and you actually see something explode. Chemistry led me to appreciate multiple modes of instruction and project-based learning, which I now do a lot of. I mean, we’re also all scrambling with AI and it’s interesting in STEM. They’re a lot more comfortable with people using AI because of different norms and different kinds of knowledge.

B&W: Do you have anything more to say about AI?

RA: Yeah, it’s very distressing. In STEM, they’re much more friendly about it, and I have learned some things. I was taking this neurobiology class for a couple of weeks, and they actually had a beta of a program, a self-contained AI that was just for that class. And the idea was, you feed your notes into it, and you can have it quiz you on things, and the more you put into it, the more deft it gets at helping you to learn the material. We spend all this time just talking about the evils of this path, and here’s someone saying, ‘No, this can actually facilitate your learning.’ 

Whereas in humanities, because we want the kind of thinking that we worry that the AI is doing for students, we have to be much more thoughtful about how we use it or don’t use it. The other thing in the humanities and social science is the ways that AI reinforces what’s already known. A lot of our research comes through thinking and reading and writing, not through working in a lab. We can’t do that if we’re using AI, and students certainly can’t do that if they’re just getting what’s already known. We want you to come up with the next thing. 

B&W: Do you think that you’ll ever graduate or stop taking classes?

RA: I don’t think I will technically graduate, but I hope I will always take courses. One of my favorite recent innovations at Columbia is, it used to be called Lifelong Learners, but now they have this community learning initiative where you can allow auditors to take the class. I absolutely love having those people in class. They bring all kinds of knowledge and experience to the room. They’re often told very sternly not to participate. But sometimes they can contribute really interesting stuff that maybe no one else in the room knows about. I absolutely love that variety, and I aspire to be that kind of person, somebody who’s always learning something. But it is humbling, and I see why not all of my colleagues want to do this. You do really have to humble yourself, do a lot of code switching, and confront your own aging. But I’m okay with that for now.