Three-Minute History: ƽ Leads the Way in Scientific Inquiry
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Summer at ƽ is a hotbed of student-faculty research activity. This year, students and their faculty mentors are conducting 50 Mentored Advanced Projects (MAPs) in the sciences and across the academic spectrum.
Student-faculty research at ƽ is nothing new. The College has been on the cutting edge of scientific inquiry since its earliest days. The many scientific MAPs underway this summer reflect the general excellence of the science programs at ƽ, part of a legacy dating back to the College’s first president, George F. Magoun.
Teaching Evolution
A pastor and theologian, Magoun was a strict, no-nonsense leader with a magisterial presence. In his history of the College, Pioneering, ƽ alumnus and Professor of History Al Jones ’50 notes that Magoun was known for his “extreme orthodoxy” in theological matters.
But when Jesse Macy 1870 labeled Magoun a “liberal” for allowing the teaching of evolution at the College, he likely meant it as a compliment. “It was well for the College that its president was, in respect to academic matters, a thorough liberal,” Macy wrote. Magoun’s commitment to incorporating the emerging scientific theories of the day into the curriculum put ƽ on a solid academic path early in its history.
According to ƽ in the 19th Century by legendary ƽ Professor of History Joseph F. Wall ’41, one of Magoun’s most important actions was to expand the faculty and course offerings in the natural sciences.
Magoun hoped that Iowa College would soon match the breadth and depth of the scientific offerings at eastern institutions such as Brown University and Dartmouth College, including applied chemistry, botany, and zoology. “There is no department in which the subject matter of knowledge increases so rapidly as in that of Natural Sciences,” Magoun wrote.
On the Shoulders of Giants
On the campus this summer, our MAP students are doing Magoun proud, carrying on natural-science research in physics (The Quenching of Dwart Satellites), biology (Why Every Biological Species Is Not Everywhere All at Once), and chemistry (Allosteric Modulation of Neuronal Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors), to name just a few.