Academia

AVI linked to an essay on the perverse incentive in academia, pointing to systemic issues(*) surrounding a need for novelty and a lack of verification of claims, with a side order of nihilist "What is truth?"

Drag the camera back for a wider picture.

What's a university for; what does it do?

0. Certify that degree-holders were able to show up on time for a few years and demonstrate a threshold level of intelligence. I will pass over this in silence.
1. Multiple departments will each teach a body of knowledge (or learning, or maybe even culture, you pick) to several different groups:
   • General students, who may or may not ever refer to it again but who are presumed to be better cultured and disciplined people for having learned it.
   • Scholar-specialists who will continue studying or practicing in the field: for example engineers and scientists, doctors, and perhaps writers.
   • Scholar-teachers who will go on to teach in the field, if not actually practice. (Scholars of 15'th century French literature tend not to write much 15'th century French literature.)
2. Provide an environment for scholarship or research, or sometimes even the survival of a discipline. This may be controversial, but it's the way they work now.
   • Survival of a discipline: Consider a rare specialty, such as Tibetan language literature. If the scholar of poetry is in one university and of novels is in another, pity the student who wants to study the language. It's better to consolidate and specialize, and have one university with two and the rest with none. This applies to research specialties as well. Once nuclear physics was extremely common, and a department could have a very lively and effective research team, but as many problems were solved and other fields became more popular, many teams dwindled to the point where they were not effective in transmitting knowledge nor attracting students. So, despite the name, universities have to specialize sometimes.
   • Research in STEM has been very fruitful, and very prestigious. I'll come back to that latter point later. This attracts money and talent, and grows the body of knowledge in those fields that practice it. And while it may not help as much as a winning football team, it reflects well on the university.

OK. That's a bit generic, of course, but it'll do.

What does a university have on offer?

Broadly, it has the humanities and the sciences and some specialized training programs (like law). The training programs themselves seem (from outside) to concentrate on imparting a "body of knowledge."

In mathematics and the hard sciences, you can discover new things. In fact, a master of the field is expected to be able to contribute something new to the body of knowledge. Whether he succeeds later may depend on how hard the problems he sets himself, but his "masterpiece"--a work done to prove his skill, was new work (The PhD dissertation marks the boundary between a journeyman and a master).

A science has a body of knowledge (more than a human can learn in a lifetime, typically), that the teachers pass along, but also a growing part. Maybe the university is involved in the growing, often not--they can't do everything.

At the other end of the spectrum you have a body of knowledge like "Ancient Greek Literature," which is complete and will not grow any more. Teachers transmit this body, and whatever assists (history, references to Persian literature, etc)--and there's not a lot to add. One can tweak a little at the fringes, but there aren't any breakthroughs available unless somebody finds substantial Vedic influence on Sophocles. It is what it is.

FWIW, I checked the UW library system a few years back and found 11,627 titles including the name Shakespeare. Some will be using the name for other purposes (Age of Shakespeare, etc), but a lot is (I looked at the shelves) writing about him--most of which is likely of little use in understanding or appreciating the bard. I mean the word "little" literaly; as in miniscule but not non-zero.

In between you have fields such as English literature, which is a huge and growing body of work. One might hope that scholars would be able to write literary masterworks of their own, but I haven't observed this to be a general rule. Which is a shame, but teaching how to appreciate great works is good.

You also have philosophy, which some have described as a long conversation where, while it may be tough to come up with something truly new, one can join in and make some part of the to and fro your own.

As the linked essay points out, in disciplines (Is that term even appropriate for a field whose research is so undisciplined?) like sociology you find a hunger for novelty that apes the "learning new things" in STEM, but applied to a field where most of the knowledge is ancient(**). Instead of trying to transmit their known bodies of knowledge, these fields imitate the fields where real and verifiable research is the norm.

Many don't seem to understand the purpose of their field.

"Physics envy" seems to underpin a fair bit of the problem. Conservator, curator, custodian: even "Ancient Master"--just don't have the same respect as discoverer. Few want to just say "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance..."

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(*) I know, but here the "systemic" adjective really does apply.

(**) and widespread--so much that one wonders about the value-added of a degree

Is somebody playing pranks?

At Rice University: AfroChemistry

When I was in high school I remember reading of Russian course on Soviet Mathematics, where the focus was on the victory of the proletariat and not on theorems. I thought the notion obscene. I still do. I hope somebody with a sense of the absurd is playing pranks. If not, I have to question the integrity of those running their chemistry department. A scientist needs some smarts, but without integrity that's worthless.

Discovering that your peers (and you) were wrong

3 Things I Got Wrong About Patriarchy.

"Patriarchy" is a curse word. Extremes are obviously bad. Are flexible patriarchies also supposed to be evil? I missed the memo.

One drop rule

Grad student apologized and resigned as TA "after falsely claiming to be a person of color."

“I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove,” Vitolo-Haddad wrote in an apology posted Sunday on the blogging platform Medium. “I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them.”

In a second apology posted Tuesday, Vitolo-Haddad wrote that when asked if they identify as Black on three separate occasions, they did not say no.

She says she really identifies as Southern Italian/Sicilian. But "I repeated things I heard growing up from my family that I now know to be lies. I am so sorry. I take full responsibility for spreading these lies and am deeply sorry."

Clearly being black in the USA is such a burden that people have been falling over themselves to be labeled black so that they can accrue the social or job opportunities that g o with that. (Jessica Krug...Rachel Dolezal...a whole town

The Teaching Assistant's Association has announce that it will "allow people to provide more feedback about candidates, both in public forums and through anonymous mechanisms." So if someone claims to be black or hispanic (or white), some anonymous poison-pen letter can derail their position (she was co-president). This sounds familiar--a rumor that X had a black ancestor, however remote, might ruin a white man's chances a century ago.

You might argue that turn-about's fair play, or that the idea was stupid then and it is stupid now.

But about those "benefits" from being considered black (or hispanic, or whatever): I notice that the three people who got caught are all women. Granted, the statistics are low, so add in the Guardian story about the town in Ohio, and notice that the only men cited currently "identify as white."

Maybe there are social benefits to being a young black woman that aren't available to a young black man. Or maybe women are more willing to reshape their identities. (Fair or not, women have had to adjust more than men--moving to her husband's tribe; winding up war captive; whatever.) Or perhaps those benefits are only present in certain environments (she is in "Journalism and Mass Communication"). Or maybe it's just poor statistics.

Universities

In between student debt changing the financial calculus and covid cutting into attendence, prospective students may need to look at universities with a different, and more frugal eye. That's going to hurt. I looked at online learning before, but I think I want to try again from a different direction. AVI recently wondered about what universities would do with the diversity staff in their current financial stress.

I suspect they'd help the bottom line and provide a much better campus climate for everyone if universities fired everybody with "diversity" or "equity" in their job title. I don't think you learn a lot from picking scabs, especially when you just assume the scabs are there without asking. And I judge that there's quite a bit of unity to be found in working together to learn.

I don't think the universities will, though. A bureaucracy is like plaque--it just keeps building up while things rot underneath.

Nor do I think they'll generally get a good handle on online-learning--figuring out how to add enough value to merit the student $$$. I think a lot of universities will break before they adapt.

They provide some things we want, so whatever replaces them (assuming we don't crash so far that nothing does) should provide those same things. Some of the things a university does are easily adapted for remote students. Some don't really need anything like a university at all.

Here's my list

Credential You

1. Generic:
   1. IQ: You have above some threshold level of intelligence. This could be easily replaced with a test suite, but that's politically and sometimes legally impossible right now. (Remote=easy/impossible)
   2. Perseverance: You are able to persevere through a 4-year plan. A job history might be able to do that for you also, unless you were unlucky with job situations. (Remote=irrelevant)
   3. Getting along with others: You are able to put up with people (some of them quite strange) for 4 years without resorting to homicide. This too might be inferred from a job history. (Remote=irrelevant)
2. Specific:
   1. Body of knowledge: You absorbed, however temporarily, a specified body of knowledge. In some cases you could substitute a suite of tests, but those aren't always easy to design--imagine trying to prove by a test that you are skilled in Turkish literature. You really need experts to examine you. (Remote=possible--pay an expert to examine you and personally certify you; cheaper than 4 years of college.)
   2. Able to do work in your field. This is related to the above criterion, but is more demanding. Think of the internship after med school, or an engineering student's portfolio. A job history can do this too--often better. But getting hired in an advanced field in the first place isn't easy. (Remote=possible, with work/study)
   3. Able to contribute orginal work in your field. You've passed the apprenticeship as a researcher. Or, if this school is like Juliard, you can play music people will pay to listen to. An autodidact can demonstrate this--in theory. In practice, it isn't easy to get into the journals without somebody vouching for you--like employing you at a known research institution. (Remote=difficult)

Teach You

People learn in different ways, of course.

1. Talk at you. They use lectures, live or recorded. For these you don't need a university as much as you once did. (Remote=easy)
2. Read. Some things are harder to come by outside the university, but at least in theory you could get these elsewhere. (Remote=easy)
3. Show. Labs and some kinds of lectures (e.g. math) involve demonstrations. These could be recorded, of course. (Remote=easy)
4. Do. Labs, language classes, some kinds of physical training demand that you do them yourself. Equipment and guidance aren't free--the university is the go-to place. (Remote=impossible)
5. Discuss.
   • You question the teacher during a lecture or demo--"I don't understand X" There's no substitute for live; questions submitted and replied to the next day aren't a good substitute. (Remote=impossible for a group, possible for one on one)
   • The teacher questions you during a lecture. It is really easy to think you understand, and the best time to check and correct is right then. In person, a good teacher can sometimes spot the students who aren't quite getting it. Remotely it's not so easy. (Remote=difficult)
   • You question other students. In STEM there's generally a right answer, but in most of the other liberal arts--What is "justice," Socrates? There's something different about being physically with someone that multiplies the opportunities to talk. Phone or video-phone feel more distant. (Remote=difficult)
   • Other students question you. Can you defend what you think--without resorting to "my felt reality" solipsism? That can be a great education in itself. (Remote=difficult)
   • "The Grand Tour" of meeting other people and ideas and customs that are not always congenial. It can give a good lesson in what's common and what divides us. Most of us, by default, stick to the congenial. (Remote=possible, if you take advice)
   • Late night bull sessions. They're mostly nonsense, but who's keeping score? And it's practice thinking. (Remote=possible)

Connect You

1. Make acquaintances that will be important professionally. The Ivies are renowned for this--making sure the proper people know each other may be their main function. (Are frats like the Odd Fellows?) (Remote=possible)
2. Find a spouse. There are few other places that bring so many of your cohort together for long enough. A concert doesn't last long; classes do. (Remote=impossible; you're on your own)
3. Find friends. You can probably do this most places--in fact other places might be better, in that they mingle ages more than a college does, and there's a poverty in only having friends of one age. (Remote=impossible; you're on your own)
4. Bond you to the school so they can put the touch on you for alumni donations. I'm a cynical one sometimes. (Remote=impossible)

Labs can't be done online. Discussion, and one on on interaction with the teacher, don't seem to be done very well by most online schools, if early reports are any guide. But scheduling 1:1 teacher time should be possible, albeit expensive. I wonder how the language classes are doing.

A lot of the credentialing can be done elsewhere, or replaced with job history, or replaced by hiring specialists.

The social part would be hard to replace, since many of the older connecting institutions aren't popular anymore. (Bowling Alone?) Reviving the secular ones depends on fashion, not fiat.

Different at the U

UW Chancellor Blank sent around an email about "Addressing Racial Inequities on Campus." Since I gather this is a public document I assume I can quote freely.

One bullet point is "Enrollment and Recruitment. We must continue efforts to increase the diversity of campus by expanding enrollment and employment among underrepresented groups."

The very next bullet point is "Campus History. Understanding our past is important to changing our future. ... A central part of this project involves confronting and discussing the history of racism and other forms of exclusion/marginalization on campus."

Imagine how much more enticing a campus will be to prospective black engineers when one of the main topics of discussion is how racist the campus has been.

And students will have to take an orientation explaining "culture, identity, and difference." I assume that eventually the faculty and staff will have to take it too. To appreciate the full absurdity of this, remember that UW-Madison is a reasearch university, and recruits students and faculty from all over the world. Wet-behind-the-ears students may not have experienced much "difference," but I guarantee the faculty and staff have.

I'm not tenure bound, so this isn't going to bother me, but do I need to explain what can happen to research groups? "This past spring each Divisional Committee added new language to tenure guidelines that recognizes the importance of community engaged scholarship and scholarly activities in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion as noteworthy endeavors to be considered as part of tenure and promotion." Virtue signalling is cheap, and quite a bit easier than research.

Granted, outreach is a good thing, and not that easy. The people I know will keep doing the same things (which reach diverse groups of students already, albeit the subset of students who are already curious about science), and modify the bookkeeping to keep track of ethnicity counts instead of just the total number of students.

I don't see 95% of the University students or staff. All I know about frats is what I read in the papers (and am thereby misinformed) and from conversations with a scientist who used to be in a frat. If you told me they were hotbeds of racism, I'd be surprised (and dubious), but couldn't contradict you.

What I have seen at the U is about as free of racism as you can get. If you can do the work, you're in: no matter whether your ancestry was from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, China, Japan, Mexico... We've had very few blacks (one Nigerian), but nobody seemed to be walking on eggshells. If there's anything structural that stops blacks from being physicists, it isn't in the physics department. It's in high school, or if my intermittent elementary school demos are any guide, quite a bit earlier.

I get it that being the only one "of your kind" can be very uncomfortable. You stand out; you're not in any of the families/groups/cliques; you can't read people--and some of those people may not like you because of what you are and you have no idea which. In my case, I also couldn't always understand the language: I never did acquire skill with Liberian English and learned about 3 words of the tribal languages.

What was liberating for me in those environments was clear expectations. In a defined environment, your family didn't matter, what mattered was whether you could kick the ball into the goal (not well, it turned out), or whatever the matter at hand was. Outside of school, in purely social environments, I was at sea. To be clear, that was and often still is the case in any purely social environment. introvert

Insofar as the university is about education, it is easy enough to make clear expections in clearly defined environments in which students can find a way to learn. Punctuality and lab courtesy and course expectations are pretty simple to define.

If the student is there for an apprenticeship, it gets more complicated, but I still think we can spell out expectations. "Research is a social activity. You are expected to have lunch with your fellow-students at least twice a month. If somebody in your group is uncomfortable discussing some subject, don't bring it up again." etc

If the student is there to make contacts (and maybe look for a spouse), thing get more complicated.

If the student is there for the modern Grand Tour, it almost seems redundant to try to teach diversity; you would hope the experiences would be enough by themselves. (If not, why bother with the U?)

I don't want to worry about "the student experience." That form of entertainment seems to be a big selling point for universities, though.

Uncertainty

The news circulated today that the UW System's security group proposed (deadline for comments was also today) that there be an annual inventory of software assets and IT hardware assets, including such things as IP addresses and associated MAC addresses. Not that all of our network hardware has a MAC address: in particular the readout boards that are currently buried in ice at the South Pole. I can sort of see a relevance, though "university-owned" software is kind of ambiguous. For example, security wants to know if you're running a vulnerable version of apache (I think they all are, but for some versions the vulnerabilities are known.). It constitutes a possible weakness for everything on that subnet.

I'm not quite so sure about the hardware. Why do they care where it is? Property control might care, of course, but this was supposed to be related to cybersecurity. I suppose they've made common cause for a gigantic Database Of Everything the Universities lay claim to. (Fortunately I haven't heard them claim that "Our people are our greatest assets." So no inventory stickers for me. Yet.)

Property management no doubt would love to have everything documented down to the last chassis screw in the last drawer, and as long as it is our time they're spending they probably don't care about expense. Sure there are some sticky-fingered sorts: students who make a grab for something unattended, custodial who snarf a laptop (not realizing that it was being monitored and that its disappearance from the network could be pinpointed to a time the custodian was there!), and staff who regard equipment and office supplies as perks of the job. But we don't have anything like the loss levels of Walmart or stores in San Francisco. In our group I think we lose more to breakage than "misappropriation."

How much are you willing to spend to identify the residuum of losses? I strongly suspect there's an inverse relationship between cost and "loss uncertainty"--probably worse than linearly inverse, since there could be loss or wastage in the inventorying process too. On a national scale, nobody doubts that there's some welfare fraud, but the cost of trying to reduce it to 0 is probably orders of magnitude higher than the loss. (Send out investigators to verify every applicant?)

Hmm. (Cost of monitoring) * (Uncertainty in inventory) >= constant ?

It's probably not universal enough--the constant would depend on the industry. For UW it's probably small, for the military large (and really large in wartime), for aid to Ukraine or Puerto Rico pretty high too. For Walmart, in between.

Imposter Syndrome

Talk about Imposter Syndrome is making the rounds. The journal club addressed it recently, on a day I was absent. Since they're about to look at mental illness and stress among grad students, I thought I should try to catch up, and went to the workshop on I.S. at the conference last Thursday.

Thumbnail: You feel as though you have your position or fame purely due to luck, and worry that you will be found out and humiliated.

Wikipedia suggests that people started talking about this in the late 70's, but that the effect (not a mental illness) is quite common.

It has been estimated that nearly 70 percent of individuals will experience signs and symptoms of impostor phenomenon at least once in their life. This can be a result of a new setting, academic or professional. Research shows that impostor phenomenon is not uncommon for students when entering a new academic environment. Feelings of insecurity can come as a result to an unknown, new environment. This can lead to lower self-confidence and belief in their own abilities.

Wikipedia also says this especially impacts "women of color" in academia, and attributes this to "hideous forms of racism and sexism." That hypothesis isn't necessary (and anecdotal observations contradict it). The effect was predicted long before. Although "affirmative action" goes by many different names these days, it still exists, and the recipient cannot be sure that the thumb was not on the scales--"Hello self-doubt!"

My observations are mostly of grad students and post-docs and engineers and scientists and profs. By this level, there's no question that the student has intellectual horsepower. Maybe there was a thumb on the scales early on, but that won't carry you far. I haven't met a mediocre student yet on any of the teams I've been on. Some are sharp, and some are super-sharp, but they all "belong here." OK, I lie, there was one student who could not seem to follow instructions. I'm pretty sure the student was clever, but something about taking notes and asking questions and re-organizing the analysis seemed to be outside this student's world.

They don't always feel that that they belong. I empathisize. Been there, done that.

Being a perfectionist, or feeling as though you have to be Superman, having lots of other people's expectations on your shoulders, or being in a new environment can help bring this on. Those all seem to be obvious contributors.

Two other things strike me as very important.

1. When your job is to solve abstract problems, you quickly find out that there are two kinds of problems. Problems you have solved already are easy, almost trivial. If you think of them at all you probably grudge the time you spent on blind alleys for something so obvious. You pay them no more mind than you do the light traffic on your way to work. Problems you have not solved yet are hard. They occupy your mind they way the heavy traffic does. There's a sampling bias: you see things you can't do, and ignore things you can.
   

   Since nobody is a super-polymath (despite your ambition), you have colleagues who have solved some of the problems you haven't. Therefore they are smart and you are dumb. If you can't solve the kinds of problems they can, why are you here?
   

   I'm not sure this translates so well into careers in which problems with physical dimensions have to be solved over and over (you have to kill another deer every couple of weeks if you want to keep eating). But in academia it can be pretty dramatic.

2. The other thing that jumps out at me is that you regard yourself and your worthiness entirely on the basis of accomplishment--not relationship. And, only on the basis of accomplishment in this particular environment.
   

   I am a son, brother, husband, and a father, and a Christian (another relationship). If they decide tomorrow that my work is unacceptable and escort me out of the building, that'll hurt, but it isn't the entirety of who I am. Looking around the room at the journal club, I see plenty of grad students who know more astrophysics than I do, but it doesn't phase me the way it once would have.
   

I'm not sure how to translate these into effective ways to help people. Recognizing the sampling bias is one thing, internalizing that observation is another. And it isn't terribly helpful to say "cultivate relationships and skills outside your work." Doing that, especially for a time-crunched grad student, isn't always easy.

Of the things mentioned in wikipedia, having mentor seems most likely to be helpful (preferably not your advisor!). Understanding the whys may help, and regular reminders probably would too.

I figured that the folks who hired me decided I was OK, and I would do my best. If they miscalculated, that was their hard luck.

My thesis advisor Lee Holloway tried to set his students a good example by asking the elementary questions at seminars. "What do you mean by X?"

Hiring bias

A study hit the news a few days ago claiming that in STEM, if a candidate was a woman she had a 2:1 advantage over a man in the probability of being hired. The direction of bias matches what a blurbs for job openings suggest; and there seems to be pressure to overcome alleged biases by hiring more women--if various statements from university committees are anything to go by. I get no pressure--an advantage of a low-level position. I was on only one hiring committee in all the years so far at UW, and of the 5 candidates that time the winner stood out--there wasn't a lot of judgment call involved. He worked out pretty well, too.

This doesn't match the preferred narrative, which is one of Ed Yong's hobbyhorses, so he triumphantly linked to a couple of reports that refuted the study, like this one which features gems like "The researchers’ own biases lead them to believe that women and men belong to two discrete groups (making genderqueer and transgender scientists invisible).". It is quite true that the final selection is based on different criteria than the test study, but it is also true that Harvard does not interview all the applicants. Or even most. If their hiring committee tells you they read CV from all 3000 applicants for a job, remind them what happens in the 8'th circle. The pre-selection biases matter, and that is where the original study really matters.

Without a trace of irony

The African Studies weekly memo contains this. I added the emphasis.

CFP: Journal of Women's History - Reproduction, Sex, and Power. Reproduction, sexuality, and bodies have been key sites for state and religious intervention and control, for defining gender, class, race, and sexual identity and for establishing hierarchies and inequalities. They have also been of central significance to individuals and to organized feminist movements. Although today some may think of "sex" and "reproduction" as unrelated topics and fields of research, historically they have been closely intertwined. This issue seeks to spotlight the centrality of reproduction, sex, and power to women's history and to demonstrate the ways in which power has been made, played, and fought over and through reproduction and sex. Indeed, histories of nations and empire, foreign policy and law, religion and popular culture are not free of these seemingly private experiences. Precisely how power has worked through reproduction and sex varies in time and place; this special issue will illuminate the points of similarity, divergence, and convergence, the moments when these areas of personal experience become politically powerful and sites of collective action. The range of possible topics is broadly defined, including, for instance, obstetrics and gynecology, midwifery, technologies, practitioners, birth control, adoption, sexual practices, sexual identity and parenting, health and sex education. Research essays from all time periods, geographical regions, and methodological and theoretical stances on the themes of this issue are welcomed. Submission deadline is September 1, 2008. Manuscripts should be no more than 10,000 words with notes. Please consult the JWH website for submission guidelines: http://www.press.jhu/journals/journal_of_women's_history/guidelines.html .

The guiding philosophy seems to be that you must abstract your study further and further until it is completely abstracted from reality.