Category — Ben Greenman

A vague new academic discipline creates a bonafide new-media star.

When Jack Arkush was a child, he would sometimes accompany his father downtown, where William Arkush was a mid-level advertising executive for the Kenner Agency. “He worked on campaigns for sporting goods, for eyewear,” Arkush says. “General-interest stuff that didn’t interest me.”

What interested the younger Arkush, as it turned out, were the elevators in his father’s office building. “The first time he took me to work, we walked into the lobby, and there were two elevators waiting,” Arkush says. “We stepped into one. As the doors closed, I saw people filing into the one across the way. We started to rise first, but when we got to the twentieth floor, where he worked, the people who took that other elevator were already there.”

Most people would accept that outcome with equanimity, if not indifference. Jack Arkush was different. He felt it as an injustice. “It didn’t bother me that we didn’t get to the twentieth floor first,” he said. “It bothered me that I didn’t understand exactly why we didn’t get there first.”

Today, Arkush—a portly, bearded man of fifty-eight—doesn’t have that problem. He works on the second floor of the Haber Building on the central campus of Watson University, and he takes the stairs. The building is named for Albert Haber, an engineer whose achievements in solid mechanics included patenting several viscoelastic materials for use in aerospace. “Haber would have hated what I do,” says Arkush. “He probably would have asked for my office to be removed from his building.” Arkush laughs. For the last fifteen years, he has been the head of the university’s tiny but influential Conceptual Engineering Department. “Other scientists can point to their products and their solutions,” he said. “I have only problems and questions.”

Conceptual Engineering is not recognized by many university-level science departments: or rather, while it is recognized by nearly everyone in science, it is rarely recognized as a formal discipline. Conceptual Engineering is, in the broadest of terms, the process by which difficult and sometimes paradoxical circumstances are communicated between scientists in different fields. “You could also call it ’shooting the shit’,” says Arkush, laughing. But after he stops laughing, he stands and walks to the other corner of his office, to a desk occupied by a slim middle-aged woman named Diane Paranzino. “For more than forty years, I’ve been preoccupied with that elevator problem in my father’s office building,” he says. “From time to time, I have brought it up with friends, and nearly everyone is interested, on some level. Nearly everyone thinks they can explain a part of it to me. And nearly everyone wants to.”

[Read more →]