UCI’s Doctors of Diversity

When UC Irvine graduates tossed their caps into the air at commencement last month, a surprising number of the mortarboards came from fledgling social scientists.

Belying its reputation for turning out physicists and biologists in overwhelming numbers, the campus granted social science degrees to nearly 40% of its 4,000 graduates. That’s an increase from nearly 30% of the total only seven years ago.

In that period the percentage of students receiving degrees in biological sciences dropped from 22.5% to 13.6%. One dean said a likely reason for the decline is the realization by premed students that they can get into medical school even if they do not major in biology.

Of course, future doctors do have to pass required courses, including biology, in the hard sciences. But exposing them to courses outside their chosen field can open new areas of thought. That interaction with potential economists and psychologists can also help later in life when the doctors treat their patients. Recent years have seen a welcome trend in courses for future doctors in how to speak to patients in understandable language and the need to spend more time with worried folks on the other end of the stethoscope.

For a while in the last decade, UCI limited the number of students majoring in psychology and economics, usually due to lack of faculty or space. For next fall, the cap will be on information and computer science majors.

Computer science also has become a popular field in the past decade, as students grow up in homes with computers and witness great strides in technology.

But UCI still has a deserved reputation as a welcome host to top-flight scientists, including Nobel Prize winners in physics and chemistry. Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone is a renowned atmospheric scientist who chaired a panel on global warming assembled by President Bush.

Still, the university is right to realize that, by their nature, academic centers benefit from diversity and should encourage the pursuit of truth across a variety of disciplines.