Ohio Needs the Liberal Arts to Strengthen and Sustain Technological Innovation

In January of this year, Intel announced plans for new semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Licking County, Ohio, a $20 billion investment to build what is projected to be the largest semiconductor manufacturing site in the world, creating thousands of jobs. These jobs will require a skilled and educated workforce, so it is not surprising that the January announcement was followed quickly by news in March that Intel will invest $50 million in grants over the next decade to establish semiconductor manufacturing education and research collaborations with universities, community colleges and technical education institutions in Ohio.

I am very excited about the opportunities these grants will provide to both students and graduates of Ohio colleges. Much of the attention of the first round of this initiative has been focused on technical education, and rightly so; there is a need to bootstrap the technical skills of the regional workforce in advance of the opening of the first plant in 2025. This means funds for upgrading curricula and lab equipment to enable students at a range of post-secondary institutions to have hands-on experience with the techniques demanded in the manufacturing plants. These investments will reinforce a pipeline from schools to well-paying jobs, strengthening the economy and providing significant opportunity for many Ohioans.

“Technical innovation is fueled by flexible thinking, the ability to integrate ideas and methods from a range of disciplines in order to solve complex problems.”

While this first round has focused narrowly on STEM education, Intel would be smart to expand the focus as the program develops in future years. At all levels of post-secondary education, technical skills alone are not sufficient to build a workforce that can sustain innovation in the long term. Technical innovation is fueled by flexible thinking, the ability to integrate ideas and methods from a range of disciplines in order to solve complex problems. Excellent communication and writing skills as well as interpersonal skills that are acquired through the course of a liberal arts education are essential for effective leadership when cultivating teams capable of executing on the theoretical. And this type of thinking is developed through learning in a liberal arts curriculum.

I reflect on the centrality of the liberal arts to STEM innovation not only in my work as the president of a liberal arts college, but also from the perspective of a biophysical chemist interested in solving important and complex problems at the interface of the physical sciences and medicine. In fact, the importance of flexible, integrative thinking is best illustrated by the biggest breakthrough in science last year: the prediction of the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its primary sequence. For 50 years, scientists have grappled to understand how the sequence of amino acids — the order in which these subunits are attached — determines a specific, complex three-dimensional structure. This is no abstract problem: the development of new pharmaceutical therapies (including new therapies for newly emerged diseases such as COVID-19) depends on knowing the structures of critical proteins. While protein sequences are derived very quickly from genetic information, the three dimensional structure often takes much longer, and labor intensive, experimental work. The ability to determine their structures computationally will have a significant impact on life sciences and medicine, particularly on drug development.

The two research teams who published papers on AI-driven prediction software nearly simultaneously in 2021 — the programs AlphaFold2 and RoseTTA-fold — are case studies in the value of multidisciplinary, integrative thinking. These algorithms approach the decades-old problem from an information systems perspective, not first-order principles of chemistry or physics. The problem required a solution from folks who could see the potential from integrating approaches from vastly different disciplines. This is the type of broad, integrative training that the liberal arts provides, an essential complement to the development of specific technical skills.

“Gone are the days of a lone scientist in the lab sequestered from the outside world. Work in any type of research or technical field is now done in a collaborative environment in which skills of listening and relating to someone or looking at a problem from multiple viewpoints are intrinsic to the process.”

Moreover, the innovation economy requires problem solvers who can think critically while engaging with peers and mentors in a collaborative environment. Gone are the days of a lone scientist in the lab sequestered from the outside world. Work in any type of research or technical field is now done in a collaborative environment in which skills of listening and relating to someone or looking at a problem from multiple viewpoints are intrinsic to the process. This is also part of the foundation of a liberal arts education. The same skills used in a lab group discussing a set of observations during an experiment are also cultivated around a seminar table where you work as a group debating ideas back and forth about the meaning of a text.

There are innumerable stories of innovators in science and technology who got their start with a liberal arts education. Harold Varmus, Nobel Laureate who first identified “normal” genes that could develop into cancer-causing genes (oncogenese), was an English major from Amherst College. Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, studied history and literature at Harvard and didn’t take her first computer science class until her senior year. Decades earlier, chemist Carl Djerassi’s research into oral contraceptives made him the “father of the pill.” Djerassi was a member of Kenyon’s Class of 1943, and beyond his expertise in science, he enjoyed a career as a poet, novelist and playwright. And newly minted Kenyon graduates Raul Romero (international studies), Aaron Lambert (international studies) and Tomas Munoz Reyes (economics and mathematics) have leveraged crowdfunding technology to change how humanitarian aid is delivered around the world through their Yakera project.

As we look to strengthen Ohio’s education infrastructure with an eye towards building and sustaining a pipeline of innovative talent, technical skill development may be a starting place, but the program should not end there. We must work to build opportunities for students at all levels (K-12, two-year, four-year and graduate institutions) to complement technical skills with rigorous liberal learning. Ohio’s liberal arts colleges, long a strength of the state’s workforce development, are ready to join in this effort.