To the Editor:

I am grateful to Nina C. Ayoub for understanding the core premise of my book Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: that interdisciplinary research enables us to ask questions that the bunker mentality of academia can keep us from exploring ("Pondering Poultry," The Chronicle Review, January 28). She even captures the pleasure, intellectual and personal, that interdisciplinary research affords, commenting on the "quirky mash of essays on chickens and the interplay of biology and culture that manages to blend all of [my] interdisciplinary interests." She's spot on—and for that, too, I thank her.

I can't thank Pennsylvania State University, however, for deciding just two weeks before this review appeared to abolish the very academic program that makes research like mine possible. The Science, Technology and Society program, or STS—of which I am the acting director as well as a core faculty member—provides a rare and lively community that makes possible first-rate interdisciplinary teaching and research: the physical space, the conversations, the undergraduate and graduate courses, the reading groups drawing together students and faculty from across the university (scientists, writers, rural sociologists, historians of science, geographers, physicians, and literary critics), and the multidisciplinary collaborative research projects sponsored by the NSF and the NEH.

We in the STS program at Penn State are devastated, but more than that, we are puzzled. Why would a program that so closely matches the most recent strategic plan of our university, at low cost and at an ever-increasing rate of social and technological relevance, be targeted for elimination? Budgets involve choices, and choices ideally involve prioritizing future needs as well as relying on past assumptions.

As we have argued in a letter to our president and provost, the STS program meets one of the core criteria of our strategic plan: "fostering research, instruction, and outreach in emerging interdisciplinary fields of great societal importance." The STS program offers a newly approved undergraduate minor in sustainability, an undergraduate minor in disability studies, and courses in environmental studies and bioethics, as well as a dual-title Ph.D. program in biomedical ethics and biomedical humanities that is days shy of curricular approval.

These are the very areas I explore in my book—the "quirky mash of essays on chickens and the interplay of biology and culture" that Ayoub remarks on—along with "musings on such public-policy issues as risk management, the avian-flu scare, and the societal costs of industrial agriculture." She calls my book quirky, but she means it in a good way, I think. "Quirky" was also used to describe the STS program in the one-page confidential document recommending our closure to Penn State's Core Council, or so I have heard. (No report has been made available to us.)

I wonder if that bad quirky isn't just another word for certain kinds of students: ones who are capable of investigating and speaking across disciplinary lines, engaging with the social and ethical implications of current scientific and technical issues, and in so doing linking the classroom to the community and the world. If that's quirky, we need students like that, and Penn State should know it.

Susan Merrill Squier
Acting Director
Science, Technology, and Society Program
Pennsylvania State University
University Park