Introduction:

Dr. W. Curtiss Priest was most recently a Research Affiliate in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (CMS) from 2002-2007.  Curtiss contributed to CMS at the interface between media and public policy.  For example, in 2004 he was involved in FCC Public Forums, providing podcasts for forums that might have gone unheard and in 2004 published Media Concentration: A Case of Power, Ego, and Greed Confronting Our Sensibilities in Volume 53 of the American Law Review.  Dr. Priest  moderated and participated in several MIT Communications Forum Events. The forum was originally established by Ithiel De Sola Pool, author of Technologies for Freedom.

In the Fall of 2007, Dr. Priest began the MIT Program on Knowledge, Learning & Progress within the School of Humanities.  Having had various appointments at MIT, both in the School of Engineering and the School for Humanities and Science, Dr. Priest has continued in the legacy of C. P. Snow's 1959 Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures.  In particular, there is a pressing need to restore the task begun in the Age of Enlightenment, when not only could scientists explain matters of physical nature but various key figures of the Enlightenment realized that if science can explain physical nature, and as mankind was a product of physical nature, science would be able to explain the choices and actions of men or women.

As vividly described by E. O. Wilson, in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, what followed after the Age of Enlightenment has been ages of confusion where, when science could not quickly provide answers to difficult problems related to families and societies, many reverted to religious dogmas to maintain order.  The discipline called philosophy, no longer hinged to a scientific basis for beliefs and values, became vague and diffuse.  And, those in disciplines of the Humanities, such as Literature, took back the reigns of defining a society's culture.

The MIT Program on Knowledge, Learning & Progress was formed for two reasons.  First, as the result of many years of Dr. Priest's IT experience, it was becoming clear that the publication of billions of web pages and the scanning of millions of books was resulting in yet further divergence from the dreams of the Enlightenment.  The enlightened man or woman saw the world simply and completely.  The existence of disciplines is not to be viewed as ways in which everyone walls their knowledge off from each other, but, simply the secondary need to specialize in areas where extensive knowledge in a field (or domain of knowledge) is knowledge only to the specialist, and is noise to everyone else.  By calling it noise, we do not denigrate the knowledge, but simply are saying that the symbols that constitute that pattern of nature is not central to viewing nature as a whole and may be considered "noise" without loss of vision.

In terms of consilience, from the Greek, meaning a common groundwork for explanation, the way colleges and universities are filled with scattershot disciplines, students are neither given the confidence nor basis for a unified view of our world.  And, the problem extends to US K-12 learning.  Curricula is devised that precisely undermines a child's ability to achieve consilience and a sense of knowledge simplicity.  As a child progresses in school grades, each class of each higher grade is focused on a narrower view of the world and more and more on details, and, yes, noise.  For example, in Earth Science, the child sees a unity across the sciences and this course is typically taught at 7th grade.  The learner learns, say, what determines the periodicity of moons revolving around planets, and so has also learned some physics related to gravity.  In the same course, the student learns that the ecology of pond life involves single living cells and also learns that soap phosphates can disturb the ecology of the pond by overly providing nutrients to some organisms -- so the student has also learned some biology and chemistry.  But, what happens in High School ?  Strangely, the student now must take a course only about chemistry.  And the ways in which chemicals relate to say industry or to human health are at best in the footnotes.

The second goal of the MIT Program on Knowledge, Learning & Progress is to re-introduce consilience at the University or Institute level.  While MIT is cited every day in some newspaper article or journal about its wondrous achievements, this Institute could provide us with even greater tools with far humanitarian purpose.  Dr. Priest has been trying for over thirty years to coax this highly respected Technological Institute to grasp behavioral science so as to provide tools to improve their family's lives or their communities, or its country's forms of governance.  MIT must, as must almost all of the US' Universities, Colleges and Institutes provide a reinvigorated response to Enlightenment.

And if such an endeavor sounds too challenging we must recognize that in many of the natural sciences MIT promises the impossible.  For example, it will "solve the energy problem."  But, even for those at MIT to know whether a solution will be ecologically and socially sound, there are few, inside, that even think to address such issues and, even if so, those faculty or staff are not integrated with those contemplating the technological solutions.

It is as if MIT does not believe that the very same technological powers they use to "solve a problem" can also be put to answering the advisability of the solution.  And, as MIT's School of Humanities is about studying culture, and do so without the aid of behavioral science-based technological tools of analysis, that School is not able to be of service or aid to MIT 'technologists.'  And, as Wilson describes, even the Scientists in that school (like all such schools) are so specialized that they lack the eyesight to recognize sociological, economic and/or political consequences of many sorts.  In fact, each time some entity within MIT attempts consilience it is treated a bit like a virus in an entity with an immune system.  One constant, inherent conflict, especially as non-defense, Federal funding diminishes, is that MIT, via the Industrial Liaison Program or dozens of other Center/Associate programs has a tight bond to US Industrialism.

Many, often simply uninformed in consequences do have genuine worries that one who sees consequences will agitate this symbiotic relationship with industry.  As an example of this and the lack of Enlightenment, in the Spring of 2007, the visionary, Dr. Negroponte, was replaced as the head of the MIT Media Lab with a Director who, in contrast, has a strong track record in the Corporate world.   And, as an illustration of how those in the Humanities believe it is only their province to grasp and convey culture, a  full Professor in the Literature Department publicly warned the new Media Lab Director, reading from Brandt's book, The Media Lab:  Inventing the Future at MIT, and instructing him that, from now on, culture, will remain theirs, and by thinking and saying so only continues to erect the barriers that C. P. Snow, Wilson and many others have identified as harming our institutions of higher education.

Regardless of how high these barriers are at MIT (and many like it), it is the hope of Dr. Priest and his close colleagues that, with time and with convincing evidence, MIT will come to embrace what it is fully capable of addressing for this country and for world community and sustainability.

Dr. W. Curtiss Priest is the Director of the Center for Knowledge, Learning & Progress in Melrose (MA), previously the Program for Information, Technology & Society in the Center for Policy Alternatives at MIT and the Program on Knowledge, Learning & Progress in the MIT School of Humanities, up to January, 2008. Dr. Priest was described in a recent Newsweek article as one of the "Fifty People who mattered" most on the Internet.

Anticipating the Internet in a 1972 thesis at RPI, Curtiss has most recently concentrated on bringing learning tools to filling the "81%" of our children's time not spent in schools.

His 1985 Report on information and intellectual property to the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment provided a framework for the Office of Technology's influential Report to Congress, "Intellectual Property Rights in an Age of Electronics and Information."

Activities:

Building the World Brain:

I am not saying that a World Encyclopedia will in itself solve any single one of the vast problems that must be solved if man is to escape from his present dangers and distresses and enter upon a more hopeful phase of history; what I am saying — and saying with the utmost of conviction — is this, that without a World Encyclopedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatsoever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles.  As mankind is, so it will remain, until it pulls its mind together.  And if it does not pull its mind together then I do not see how it can help but decline.

Issues related to Intellectual Property and Media Ownership:

U.S. Federal Communications Commission (U.S. FCC): 1975.

C. F. Kettering Foundation, Dayton, OH, Consultant, Consultant: 1973

U.S. National Science Foundation, grantee: 1972.

2004 - present      Liaison Officer between the Learning Technology Standards Committee -- Learning Object Metadata Committee (under the IEEE) and the Committee on Cataloguing: Description and Access (CC:DA) of the American Library Association (ALA)

1978 – present     Member, American Economics Association (AEA)

1969 – present     Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)

1975 – present     Who's Who in the East