The University’s Contemplative Sciences Center hosted a major public event Tuesday- when it brought media mogul Arianna Huffington and New Age guru Deepak Chopra to host a meditation on the Lawn. Luring Huffington and Chopra to Grounds garnered significant publicity for the center. But the move comes across as an attempt to gain publicity for its own sake, and possibly to the detriment of the center’s academic goals. The star-studded stunt could harm the Contemplative Sciences Center more than it helps it. People still don’t know what to make of the recently launched center. For some, “contemplative sciences” sounds like a contradiction in terms. The public attachment of Chopra and Huffington to the center might feed perceptions that the center does nothing more than spout New Age malarkey.
The Contemplative Sciences Center was founded in spring 2012 with the help of a $12 million gift from Paul Tudor Jones and his wife Sonia. Sonia is a well-known yoga devotee. Around the same time that the University announced its plans to launch a Contemplative Sciences Center, Vanity Fair ran a feature that chronicled the former model’s efforts to launch a chain of yoga studios. The article gushed: “Sonia Jones, at 44, is a walking advertisement for the physical benefits of Ashtanga [a form of yoga]. She’s slim, but in a toned way rather than an annoyingly skinny one. Blonde and tan, she is warm and ebullient, more earthy Australian than uptight Greenwich grande dame.”
Paul Tudor Jones, on the other hand, is best known for pugnacity, not contemplation. A former boxer with an estimated net worth of $3.7 billion as of September 2013, he penned an editorial in June 2012 supporting the ouster of University President Teresa Sullivan. And he nabbed headlines last spring when he told attendees at a Commerce School symposium that women with children can’t excel in macro trading because as soon as a “baby’s lips” touch their bosoms, they lose the focus required for high-stakes investing.
Roughly 200 people attended the meditation event Tuesday. Chopra’s and Huffington’s ruminations on stress and well-being bookended the half-hour meditation session. Huffington and Chopra are big names. Neither, however, supplies much intellectual content.
Chopra is a proponent of alternative medicine. One idea he has pushed is that of “quantum healing.” Chopra uses “quantum healing” to refer to healing that takes place at a level that we cannot sense. Critics have deemed Chopra’s appropriation of quantum theory nonsensical and pseudoscientific. Physicist Brian Cox, for example, has argued that the term “quantum healing” is “cataclysmic tosh” that contributes to a widespread misunderstanding of modern physics. Outside the world of self-help and alternative medicine, Chopra’s work seems like gibberish at best, pseudoscience at worst.
Huffington is no paragon of academic rigor herself. Her appearance on Grounds drew criticism from a few University alumni and faculty who insisted that Huffington’s 1988 biography of Pablo Picasso plagiarized the work of Lydia Glasman-, a former art history professor at the University. In the 1990s, Glasman accused Huffington of stealing ideas from her unpublished Ph.D. thesis. It was not the first time Huffington had been accused of plagiarism. Her 1981 biography of Maria Callas led to an out-of-court settlement with Callas’ biographer Gerald Fitzgerald.
Religious Studies Prof. David Germano has played a leading role in founding and directing the center. In a recent University press release, Germano framed the center as a brain trust that aspires to tackle mind-body problems from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, religious studies, neuroscience and medicine. He mentioned research projects examining the effects of contemplation on depression and issues related to end-of-life care training.
For the center to be a worthwhile part of the University ecosystem — not merely the whim of a rich donor — it needs to do serious academic work and engage the University community in productive ways. While the center’s attempt to expose a range of people to meditation suggests good intentions, having Chopra and Huffington headline the event does little to dispel suspicion toward contemplation or the “contemplative sciences.” In contrast to the research projects Germano mentioned in the news release, the New Age spirituality of Chopra and Huffington — while it may help some people find meaning — is anti-scientific.
Huffington told the crowd that people should strive for “more wisdom, not more data.” This claim sounds nice, but it is vacuous. Few would argue that the University is merely gathering data. Academic inquiry, taken broadly, involves assembling data and then interpreting that data in order to generate knowledge claims. Maybe wisdom without data exists. But this is a religious claim, not a scientific one. And setting wisdom and data at odds seems anti-intellectual to a troubling degree. Data, ideally, is a source of wisdom.
The Tuesday meditation event put the center on the map, but it might have inflicted damage on the center’s still-developing reputation. If the Contemplative Sciences Center wants to take contemplation seriously, its next event should be more in line with its stated academic goals.
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