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A Word about NEXA
- Leonardo
- The MIT Press
- Volume 18, Number 4, October 1985
- pp. 216-217
- Article
- Additional Information
NEXA, the Science-Hbmanities Convergence Program at San Francisco State University. was established in 1975 by a development grant from the (U.S.) National Endowment for the Humanities. It was the first program funded by the U.S. federal government that had as its explicit educational purpose the reconciliation of the sciences a n d the humanities, those fragments of what Marjorie Hope Nicolson once called “the broken circle” of our cultural history. NEXA’s functions are several. First, it undertakes to plan and offer a series of courses. each focusing on a crucial or compelling intersection between our scientific and humanistic traditions, and each team taught by a pair of specialists, one from the sciences and one from the arts or humanities. Series titles have included “Time in Human Consciousness ”, “The City in Civilization”, “The Einsteinian Revolution”. NEXA also has founded and maintained a faculty seminar that provides for presentations. discussions and debates among representativesof the 15 academic fields represented by the NEXA faculty. This seminar. now in its eleventh year, has been for the last seven of those under the supervision of Edwin Nierenberg. It is also in this seminar that new course ideas are fostered and existing ones reviewed and revised. Further, it is in the faculty Editor’s Note -Thejournal editors wish to acknowledge the efforts of Editor Bryan Rogers and Symposium organizer Charles Shapiro (Department of Physics and Astronomy, San Francisco State University), who were instrumental in developing this Special Issue of Leonardo based on the Bronowski Retrospective symposium. . A Word About NEXA Michael Gregory (cducator), NEXA, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132. U.S.A. 216 Michael S. Gregory forum that conceptions for public events first take shape and then are defined, planned and brought to successful fruition (sometimes more than a year later). Supported by grants from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund and major funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in recent years, NEXA’s collegial network has been expanded into a consortium to include California State University campuses at Los Angeles. Long Beach, Bakersfield, Fresno, San Bernardino, Pomona, San Diego and Dominguez Hills. Pilot NEXA curricula exist at three of these campuses, and more will be added as support permits. David Meredith and Michael Krasny (presently) have supervised the building of the NEXA consortium. Another venture that NEXA has undertaken is a program of public events, ranging from guest speakers to large symposia that are national, and sometimes international, in scope. It is the purpose of these events to demonstrate the NEXA ideal of ‘convergence’ and mutual interdependence between the humanities and the sciences. We believe that together the sciences and the humanities form a single unbroken continuum of ideas, motives and values that are distinctive of our civilization. The symposium “Jacob Bronowski: A Retrospective” has been the culmination of NEXA’s public events series to date. The symposium formed the basis for the collection of essays which comprises this issue of Leonardo. Topics of previous public events series included “Sociobiology : Implications for Human Studies” (presented in 1977 by Anita Silvers); “Recombinant DNA: Public Policy at the Frontier of Knowledge” (1977,funded by the California Council for the Humanities and planned by Anita Silvers and John Stubbs); “Einstein’s Century” (1980, the result of planning by Charles Shapiro and Melanie Sperling); and in its first intercultural venture, NEXA presented “Culture and Technology: China and the West” (1971, planned by me with invaluableassistance from the late Kai-yu Hsu). It was in the same spirit of convergence of the sciences and humanities that Charles Shapiro, supported by a grant to NEXA from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund (coordinated by Michael Krasny), organized the Bronowski Retrospective to focus equally on Bronowski’s powerful contribution to both aspects of our cultural heritage. Indeed, for incisive intelligences such as Bronowski’s, the debate over what constitutes ‘science’ and what constitutes ‘humanities’ has been finally revealed as less than a platitude, perhaps by now no more than a nullity. For trained awarenesses such as Bronowski’s, the world and human activities within that world form a spectacular, luminous and kaleidoscopic unity. It is in celebration of that unity, freshly brought to being...