Luce technology professorship search begins

A University faculty committee is preparing to fill the Henry R. Luce Professorship in Information Technology, Consciousness and Culture, a permanent tenured faculty chair funded by a Luce Foundation grant.

Though the University provides many opportunities for the study of the specific technical underpinnings of computers, the Internet and neuroscience, there is little opportunity to explore their impact on the human experience, according to an announcement from the University's Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations.

The Luce professor will investigate how these technologies change culture and history. The professor will also study how different cultures develop technologies that reflect their values and ethics.

Associate Provost Georgia Nugent '73, who leads the search committee, said that the effort to create the new professorship "has been driven by a recognition that students want to study how technology and culture intersect."

"We want [the professor] to think about technology in ways much broader than computer science or electrical engineering as disciplines," Nugent said.

"The Luce professor will think about these issues fulltime," she added. "It's unlikely that one person will be able to span all three of the disciplines covered by the professorship because there is such a wide range of issues to explore."

For example, Nugent explained, the professor might explore how computers that people can wear might change their daily lives. The differences between virtual and face-to-face communication, the opportunities the Internet affords for trying out different identities and the ways technology might affect the gap between rich and poor are other areas of interest, according to the committee that is choosing the Luce professorship.

Ruby Lee, an electrical engineering professor who sits on the committee, said she hopes the Luce professor will investigate how computer hardware and software can be designed to be compatible with ethics and values.

"I think that engineers are designing the fabric of future societies," she said.

The University must fill the position by September 2002 to be eligible for the grant. Though the committee is just now starting to evaluate candidates for the position, Nugent said several scholars whose work is similar to what the committee hopes the Luce professor will do have come to campus to talk to the committee.

One of these, a professor of American history, has created an instructional website about the Civil War, Nugent said. Another is an architect who studies how technology changes the ways people use space and a third is a philosopher of technology.