Professors Anne and Hal Roth: Contemplative Studies

When students hear about the Contemplative Studies department at Brown, their first reaction is one of confusion. What is contemplative studies? Is that like religious studies? Meditation? Well, yes and no to all of the above. Listed on the contemplative studies department page, the concentration and initiative is comprised of “a group of Brown faculty and students with diverse academic specializations who are united around a common interest in the study and application of contemplative states of mind. At the center of work is the study of the full range of human contemplative experiences in an effort to catalogue them, to understand their phenomenology, and to comprehend their scientific basis.” It’s clear just from all this that the Contemplative Studies department is one of the most innovative concentrations at Brown. Which makes its history, conception, and development so unique.

The CRC was able to speak to two professors from the contemplative studies department, Anne and Hal Roth, in the Spring of 2017 to learn a bit more about the department.

One of the CRC staffers sat down with Anne and discussed how Contemplative Studies originated at Brown, “Contemplative Studies sprung out of the Willem Collegium about ten years ago which was this kind of think tank that Brown sponsored. My boss, Professor Roth, and this guy from physics, Brad Marston, they ended up participating in this collegium, and what they discovered speaking to members of the  larger group was that contemplative studies or some mindfulness practice was a great kind of underground success at Brown. Numerous members of the faculty were not only engaging in some form of mindfulness practice but they were applying these practices into their own pedagogy.”

With this in mind, Anne said that Hal, Brad, and a few other faculty members began creating this brainchild that would soon grow into the contemplative studies concentration. The next steps taken there was a start in a series of discussions and establishing the contemplative studies program which has been a ten year long process. According to Anne, “we weren’t an official concentration until a year and a half ago, the way we graduated people with a contemplative studies degree was through independent concentration.”

Contemplative studies as a field is constantly interacting with other areas of study, particularly within Brown, “even if a student is science oriented and goes on our science track, they are still expected to take humanities courses to learn how contemplative studies developed in various cultures in historical studies over time. Humanities students are doing science work and vice versa and historical studies over time. Humanities students are doing science work and vice versa and everyone is required to do a breadth course which has something to do with creative arts. Even within that rigorous rubric, as long as students can justify a particular course that has applicability to contemplative studies, there is a fair amount of room for students to bring courses to us.

Anne goes on to discuss how students are still working out new ways to bridge the relationship between separate disciplines and contemplative studies, “a young man came to me about a month ago and he’s primarily doing work in theatre and playwriting and as we’re talking about the courses he’s taken by Erik Ehn, who is very into mindfulness and its application to playwriting, and it’s clear to me that he’s been struggling to put courses together. What he was really moving towards on his own was a concentration in contemplative playwriting, so we mapped out other courses he could do to complete the concentration. It’s through talking with students like this that they help build on the contemplative studies curriculum.”

At this, Hal came into the room and begun discussing his experience with the Contemplative Studies, “Back in the fall of 1999, I noticed there was a grant being listed it was a contemplative pedagogy grant for designing a course that had contemplative process involved in it. I very quickly put something together and it had meditation practicum as part of the course. They funded me and I taught my first course in 2000, the Theory and Practice in Buddhist Meditation. And the radical proposal was to actually find a way to incorporate contemplative practice in a university course.”

When prodded a bit more about what exactly contemplative studies was and how it was incorporated into an academic setting at Brown, “Normally one would do contemplative studies if you went to a mosque, a monastery, a synagogue. When you go into a contemplative practice in a center devoted to that practice, you learn the cognitive framework in which the practice is embedded then you’re asked to believe the truth of that framework. We can’t, don’t do that in a secular university the nature of reality and how the practices it in, we can teach you what the framework is and you decide for yourself; that’s the critical first person approach.”

According to Professor Roth, the history of the Contemplative Studies is a long, rigorous, but ultimately, rewarding one, “during the Willhelm Collegium on learning, someone gave money in the name of former Brown President Wayland to support faculty in doing interdisciplinary studies. Brad Marsten and I kind of brainstormed this contemplative mind in the interdisciplinary approach for a symposium and we got money to bring in guest speakers and we started meeting every three weeks and we talked about our own work and there was this interesting collection of oddballs and eccentrics we were all in different departments. We were all representing the science, the humanities, and the arts and drawn together because of our interest in contemplative practice, and we got the idea, “Maybe we can make something out of this.” We established a contemplative studies initiative and now six or eight different campuses have copied us and it came out of specific conditions here.”

Since it took some time for Contemplative Studies to become an official department, we asked Professor Roth to expand a bit on the process of how students attempted to concentrate in the subject through independent concentrations, “so, before all this, we had students come to me interested in this and try to get an independent concentration [for contemplative studies], and they often were turned down. But starting in the academic year 2004 we had our first independent concentrator, Kate McSwain, she did a kind of neuroscience and mindfulness honors independent concentration. Little by little, we started picking up more students and by the time we became a formal concentration, there were 15 that had done an independent concentration with us and there were probably 50 in any given year, depending who was on the committee.”

Even with McSwain paving the way for concentrating in contemplative studies, it still took a few more steps, and help from the students, to get the department going, “Our students are wonderful. One student in 2006 said “you should set up a website,” and, imagine the world ten years ago, different place, so I said “sure” so we set it up and it looked great, and we had a website before a lot of fully funded departments did. I had a lot of people congratulating me for my new department, and I felt like the Wizard of Oz after peering behind the curtain. Students who didn’t want to go through the hassle of applying for an independent concentration would do contemplative focuses in existing departments. So we advised a lot and we gained more profile on campus, we irritated more people, and we had a couple of secret supports at key levels in the administration who helped us along. I think, as I look back on it, the whole conception of the field was really new when we first started advising students and it’s the students making up their own concentrations and investigating the science and the arts and the humanities. I learned a lot from what our independent concentrators did and it gave me a greater sense of the field and we started to attract faculty members from outside and I think the Open Curriculum really helps contribute to that.”

Professor Roth agrees with the sentiment that Contemplative Studies department seems to represent the Brown mission statement, “in some ways, contemplative studies is the ideal Brown concentration. We had students over for Thanksgiving were saying it has a lot of progressive social and psychological and spiritual values that a lot of students who come to Brown like, and it has a lot of science and humanities grounding it, so it’s really interdisciplinary in a deep way. To be interdisciplinary to not overly focus, not limit yourself and I think that’s one of the beauties of the Brown undergrad education, the potential to carefully pick out a range of course to pick out your courses and realizing you’ve got four years where you have this luxury of studying what you want with the world’s best thinkers. There was a concrete way in which the Open Curriculum made it possible to develop the contemplative studies program.”

Professor Roth and Anne closed out with some advice for students looking to either concentrate or even dip their toes into the contemplative studies field, “One of the things that students come to appreciate when it comes to contemplative practices is that we are not isolated and independent units, we are part of a series of contexts that help create meanings in our life. The immediate social context of family and friends and whatever communities we’re in, these contribute very much to our experience were this constantly changing matrix of interrelationships and in doing that you start to come and appreciate that we attain meaning and significance in our relationships. We appreciate the greater context in which our lives occur and naturally develop other regarding values and take into account the feelings and values of others and the larger world and environment we live in."