Dr. van Wyhe is founder and director of Darwin Online, the complete works of Darwin online.  He is a Senior Lecturer in the history of science in the Departments of Biology and History, National University of Singapore.  He also is a Bye Fellow of Christ’s College  (Darwin’s college), Cambridge University and a Fellow of the Linnean Society.  Among other things, his research has challenged the traditional view that Darwin was afraid to publish or kept his theory secret for 20 years. Click to view flyer

Three years ago, San Diego State University launched a sustained, intentional conversation dubbed the Common Experience. The goal of this type of dialogical voyage was to promote a sense of intellectual connection across the campus and into the community. In 2009, San Diego State expands the initiative and embarks on a worldwide discussion. The global discourse springs from shared perceptions regarding the logic of celebrating the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth (1809) and the sesquicentennial of the publication of his On the Origin of Species (1859).

Darwin links together the natural world, as On the Origin of Species attests, and subsequently maps humanity within that natural order. Just as Darwin searches for a unifying principle behind the seemingly unrelated, complicated and diverse elements of nature, so too does the Common Experience model — and 2009 as the “Year of Darwin” — seek to unite the seemingly unrelated, diverse contingents that comprise many a college campus.

“Personal interaction invigorates the educational process. With our Common Experience, dialogical learning flows seamlessly wherever faculty and students come together — in traditional campus settings, in the community and even in the international arena,” said Stephen L. Weber, President of San Diego State.

The rationale behind the Common Experience

San Diego State started a Common Experience in 2007:

• To imagine a scenario in which students, faculty, staff, and community members read the same book and engage in an ongoing conversation bounded by a common theme
• To facilitate a conversation within the classroom that spills across the campus and into the community
• To continue the discussion for months in an age characterized by information packaged as 30-second sound bites, and to do so over a number of platforms, from discussions with authors and academic panels to artistic interpretations and outdoor films

To put it in Darwin’s own words from On the Origin of Species:  

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or one … from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”