Diversity? You can whistle for it

Tim Birkhead was tickled Pinc by a conference on creativity, not least because it was an antidote toa culture of uniformity

I have just returned from a most remarkable conference. Pinc (People, Ideas, Nature and Creativity, www.pinc.nl ) is about creativity: living it, talking about it and inspiring it. The concept is sheer genius.

It involves getting together what at first sight seems like an unlikely combination of people. The speakers included a Nasa scientist; a wooden-boat builder; the world champion whistler; and a man who had lived alone with grizzly bears over a summer. In between 15-minute talks, there were short films and the day finished with a virtuoso performance by a 16-year-old violinist.

The experience was explosive. It made me realise that most of the time most academics lead rather narrow lives, pursuing research down increasingly narrow tunnels. It need not be like this. Universities are huge intellectual organisms, but how many of us know more than a handful of people outside our own discipline or department?

Pinc was a one-day university with all its doors open, allowing a blast of fresh inspiration to engulf us. The highly motivated speakers were obsessed with the same thing: turning ideas into something tangible - which is what most academics attempt to do. Similarly, the audience comprised people whose lives and jobs are improved by ideas: businesspeople, journalists, artists, museum directors and even the odd academic.

Diversity drives creativity, but in higher education diversity seems to be a dirty word. The Government and managers seem to impose more and more uniformity. Its effect is stultifying. The move, for example, to make the format of all courses, lectures, tutorials and departmental websites identical destroys creativity. As every first-year psychology student learns, positive reinforcement is so much more effective than the alternative.

Ideas are often in short supply, and people go to great lengths to generate them. Charles Darwin's technique was to take several circuits around his Sandwalk - the small area of woodland at the end of his garden at Down.

This solitary thinking time allowed Darwin's imagination to run free and his ideas to sort themselves out: he swore by it. Some researchers still need time on their own to generate ideas, but research is increasingly a co-operative venture. Interacting with others is a great way to generate ideas, and this is why we go to conferences. But even when we do so we usually remain safely in the comfort zone, complacently inside our own discipline.

What was so wonderful about Pinc was that it took us into a diversity of new areas, and you could almost feel new synapses being built. The essence of the meeting was epitomised by the Dutch traffic engineer who described how he had made cycling safer. He scrapped conventional bike lanes and instead encouraged cyclists to use the full width of their lane. It was dangerous at first, but the result was a sharp reduction in motorists'

speed and far fewer accidents.

I came away from this meeting greatly enthused and with a stronger conviction than ever that we should fight uniformity and the mediocrity it engenders. My head was buzzing from the extraordinary juxtaposition of ideas and the experience has inspired my teaching, my research and the way I organise conferences. We should feed our imaginations and those of students by organising and attending a few more meetings such as this. If we (I say "we", but I mean those who guide higher education) want to create creative people, then we need creative people to guide the process.

Tim Birkhead is professor of behavioural ecology at Sheffield University.