Professor Doc Uhl

If you talk to the majority of the students who have taken BiSci 3 (Biological Science), they will tell you that you need to take this class. At first, the class sounds like your run-of-the-mill science course, but it is much more than meets the eye. This class invites students into a semester long self-discovery process that often culminates in a radically expanded sense of awareness. To gain a deeper understanding of this unconventional class, we interviewed the man who created this groundbreaking course himself – Doc Uhl.

HC: Can you tell us a little about your class, BiSci 3?

DU: First of all, it’s shamelessly autobiographical. I have a distant mentor, Parker Palmer, who wrote The Courage to Teach. He says in his book, “We teach who we are.” It took me awhile to understand the truth in that until I realized that the important teachers in my life weren’t those who taught me certain facts. Instead, what excited me was their aliveness, their passion and their playfulness. They stood out because they showcased a different, more vital way to engage with life.  

As for the course itself, BiSci 3 is a GenEd course, a course about how to live and how to become ever-more fully human. What does that mean? Well, in my experience, humans have the potential to be thoughtful, loving, compassionate, creative, wild, soulful, mirthful, intuitive, courageous, imaginative and much more! With this in mind, I do everything I can to build the notion of becoming ever-more-fully human into BiSci 3. I do this by inviting students, week-by-week, to play with new ideas and new ways of being and thinking. Each class offers a new challenge, a new way of seeing, a fresh doorway into experiencing, and with it, the promise of a new way of being.     

Central to the course is becoming aware that we live in stories. For example, many of us have the story that earth is mostly just scenery, just background and a supply house that is separate from us. Viewed through this lens, earth becomes an object, and we are at liberty to take whatever we want from her by whatever means. Let me be clear: We don’t do this willfully, but because we live in a wrongheaded “story” that blinds us to the larger truth. Namely, that earth is our mother and the living force that nurtures us day by day.     

So, BiSci 3 is about uncovering dysfunctional stories and creating new, life-affirming stories that guide us into a deeper relationship with earth. Ultimately, the course is about growing up. After all, college is that moment when most of us are on our own for the first time. This means that it’s a time when we can begin, if we choose, to question everything that we have been conditioned to believe to fiercely seek truth. It’s a time even to rebel and to say “no.” By doing this, we assume authorship of our unique and precious lives.   

HC:  What is your favorite part about teaching this class?

DU: My favorite part is that this class teaches me so much because the class is never the same. BiSci 3 has been an arena where I can make mistakes, and I make them all the time. But when I make them, I don’t think I’m stupid or anything of that nature because making mistakes is one of the ways that I learn. Making them makes me “smarter.”  

For example, if I have a certain idea of how I want a class to go but students are clearly bored with what’s going on, this calls on me to let go of my agenda and let go of control. And I have noticed that when I let go of my need to micromanage, my class comes to life. I call it steering into the curve or – in other words – being real! The trick is to sense where the life is in the classroom and steer into that. Instead of trying to control the class and lecture for 40 minutes, I’ll maybe lecture for 15 minutes, perform a demonstration, do a group activity or create a space for students to share their experiences. It’s about reimagining, moment-by-moment, what’s possible in a room with 500 people. As a teacher, that’s what I love.

HC: What is the major takeaway you hope your students will get from this class?

DU: My hope is that my students might slowly fall in love with earth, their larger mother. I use the word “love” because it reminds me that we are all recipients of earth’s care. We owe our breath, our life, to earth! But, too often, we fail to love her in return. So my hope is that students, all of us, really come to love earth. How? Well, think about it: If we love something, we want to be near it, physically. We want the best for it. We want to make its needs, our needs. We want to protect it fiercely. My dream is that we might all come to love earth in this deep and expansive way.

HC: Is there anything that many people do not know about you?

DU: I have a daughter, Genny, who is going to be 30 in a couple of days. She just finished a 3000-plus mile walk from Mexico to Canada along the Continental Divide Trail. It took Genny five months and much of it was hiking above 8000 ft. I’m so proud of her. She has done a great thing living for five months in the wild! And it hadn’t been easy. For example, she called me one day during this excursion and said that she had been hiking in the early morning, and that it had been the most glorious and ecstatic day of her life. But, just two hours later, she was caught in a fierce hail storm, and she confessed to being huddled in tears between two boulders. When you’re out like that, things are constantly changing – it can be very stressful, life and death even! You discover what you are made of. I’m just proud to be her father.   

HC: What is something you cannot live without and why?

DU: Aside from oxygen, water and food, I think for me, I need to have a sense of purpose. Not a purpose like needing a good-paying job so I can have a lot of money. No, for me it’s more of a deep need to leave the world a tiny bit better than when I took form here. I happen to believe that a more beautiful, saner and kinder world is within reach that is possible, and I work to make that dream ever-more a possibility. For me, it’s a journey of a lifetime to believe that I might play a small part in helping that possibility become a reality.

HC: Do you have a motto that you live by?

DU: All the time, and they just keep changing. My current motto is, “Change me into someone who can let the Great Spirit take the lead.” I’ve spent so much of my life trying to have control. Those who work with me closely, like my BiSci TAs, can tell you that I’m bit of a micromanager. So, for me, this new motto is about letting go of control and letting “the Great Spirit,” the universe, take over. For me, the motto means simply trusting that things will work out and that all is as it should be!   

Life is mysterious. It’s about surrendering, and this is not a common stance, especially in a culture like ours that equates surrendering with weakness and teaches us to fight back. But what I am talking about is a conscious surrender. Here’s an example – when I was 58 and my sweetheart was in her 40s, she wanted to desperately be a mother. But, at the time, I had a story that being a father at 58 was inappropriate. However, I slowly realized that this was my partner’s last opportunity to become a mom, and I knew that she would be an extraordinary mother. So, I stopped worrying about how other people would look at me, and I looked at her, her goodness and her desire. Now, we have a beautiful, eight-year-old daughter. So, this is an example of when I was able to surrender my need for control, open and soften to my partner’s vision for her life. In the end, you might say that we both surrendered to the universe – we let the universe have the last word.

HC: What is one of your biggest dreams in life?

DU: My first thought was that I feel like I’m living the dream. I’m doing work that I love, and I’m healthy. My second thought is that I’m 66, and I’m acutely aware of my own mortality. For men, as they move to the end of their own professional life, the word “legacy” often comes up. For quite some time, this teaching that I get to do with young people has been the love of my life, and I would love to ensure that it continues, grows and blossoms after I retire. If that could happen, that would be a wonderful thing. In this vein, I have a colleague in Boston who is recreating BiSci 3 at Boston College. She strongly believes BiSci 3 needs to get out in the world, and she’s working on doing just that. So, my dream is that BiSci 3 not only continues here at PSU but plants itself on other campuses and in places around the world.

In the end, I see it as a course on how we can truly grow up and fulfill our birthright as nurturing, generative human beings. In my view, we are here to love, practice gratitude and have fun. Not necessarily “fun” like watching a movie or going to a football game. Spectating is great, but, in my experience, not nearly as satisfying as directly participating in life right here, right now.  

I am coming to see that the path to a happy and full life is really pretty simple. It’s about laughing from our bellies, singing in the shower, whistling our way across campus, engaging in work that is meaningful and simply loving and opening to life just as it shows up minute by minute.   

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