We are so screwed.

The author of this essay "The Promise of Intellectual Joy" was accused of "white supremacist rhetoric" and subsequently fired.  For an essay that cites Hofstadter extensively and proclaims that every child can and should feel the thrill of intellectual challenge.

We are so screwed.

Why I am what I am

I went to a decent high school.  Not fancy, not lousy.  Science labs were OK but we weren't putting out national science fair competitors.  Most kids weren't poor but most weren't upper-middle-class either.  Not particularly disadvantaged but not a lot of affluent kids either.  Pretty much in the middle.  Which is fine.  We had college-prep classes but we also had a lot of vocational classes.  It was a decent school in the middle of the class hierarchy.  I was more privileged than a lot of the US but less privileged than a lot of the people I later met in college.

One thing that was repeatedly driven home to me by my teachers was that we would be on our own in college, and that there would be no hand-holding.  It was repeatedly said that we would have to figure it out, that they wouldn't patiently explain to us how much we should be reading and reminding us to study and reminding us to do our homework and turn it in on time.  It would be hard and we would be on our own.  This was repeatedly said to me and my middle-class friends.

And, to a large extent, that was true.  College was a bit more structured and supportive than my high school teachers made it sound, but only a bit.  Ultimately, it was on me.  I accepted that from day one, and it felt utterly unsurprising to me that I was doing well because I studied all the time.  It felt utterly unsurprising when friends and dorm-mates who studied less didn't do as well.  It's the natural order of the world.  Likewise, in grad school I felt a bit more burned out, a bit more interested in my own life, and I didn't do as well as I did in college.  I still got through, but I was not on top, and that was no surprise to me because I didn't put as much in.  Then I became a professor and buckled down more and published more and got decent student evaluations because I put in a ton of prep and none of this seemed at all surprising to me.

So you can imagine how strange it seems to me when people keep saying that we need to do more for students who don't know how to study, how to take notes, how to manage their time, etc.  It baffles me that we are supposed to be responsible for their success.  Why would we be?  Why would it be my problem that people who never put much effort into mastering freshman material are now doing poorly with advanced material?  Why is it my duty to fix this?  It's not like I could actually do anything about it (you only get the benefit of years of effort by putting in years of effort--there are no secret tricks), so why is it my responsibility?

Likewise, it seems strange to me when people say that it's so unfair that we attach weight to grades and test scores.  I got into a college with people who were way above me in the class hierarchy, people whose parents had more money and more degrees, people who had attended prep schools and magnet schools.  I was there because I had done at least as well as they had done on the SAT (among other things).  I got better grades than them in college.  I out-studied them, out-performed them in the academic arena, and moved ahead academically.  Isn't that how it's supposed to be?

I've spent more than two years reading and blogging about the cultural currents that underlie the notions that seem so strange to me, but I'll be honest:  To this day there's still a part of me that thinks "Well, duh, I studied my ass off because my teachers all told me that that's what I'd have to do to succeed in college.  What else were you expecting?"

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Well, here I am, blogging late at night/early in the morning after a shocking election.  I have no interest in dissecting partisan politics here, only intellectual politics.

In the 1990's, an interregnum between the Cold War and War on Terror, academics drew knives on each other for the "Science Wars."  We got to hear from a certain type of humanities student that science is just, like, a Western hegemonic patriarchal cultural construct.  That all ended when Bush The Lesser took office, and all academics agreed that global warming is objective scientific fact.

In recent years we have been going at each other in higher ed over a somewhat different set of issues, but I suspect that we'll come together again.  Most academics will be on the same page about Trump, and there will be a degree of internal unity that we haven't previously enjoyed.  Even many academics of rather conservative views on certain issues (e.g. me) feel that Trump is illiberal, uninformed, and reckless.

What are the things that we will declare a truce on?  Well, we have been talking a lot about unconscious bias and invisible advantages, the subtle things.  But we are now confronted with a large number of people supporting a man who spouted undisguised, clearly visible, not-at-all subtle bias.  The problem we face is not good people who are slightly biased in spite of good intentions, but something much more blatant.

That's the part where I ask for people to give less emphasis to something that I disagree with.  Here's where I give less emphasis to something:

I've been going after the anti-intellectualism of progressive education.  I'm still opposed to it, and I will still pursue the path that I believe is most intellectually appropriate.  But anti-intellectualism manifests in many ways and in many aspects of American life.  Progressive educators cannot be my only targets.

Next book: _Between the Devil and the Dragon_ by Eric Hoffer

The next book that I'm going to read and blog is Between the Devil and the Dragon by Eric Hoffer.  Hoffer was an interesting man:  Self-educated, he wrote numerous books and essays on social and political topics, the most famous being The True Believer (a book on fanatics and mass movements, which I read nearly 10 years ago).  However, while he was a well-respected writer and social critic, he mostly worked in manual labor, living on skid row and then as a wandering laborer for many years before getting a job as a longshoreman in San Francisco (which he did for 27 years).  The True Believer is a book that I very much enjoyed, being nominally about fanatics and movements but in truth being a wide-ranging exploration of human nature and societies.  The current book is a collection of essays and other works, and The True Believer is in this compendium.  I probably won't re-read it, but I probably will read the rest of it.

My reasons for pick this up are two-fold.  First, obviously, Hoffer was an insightful person with a broad and deep knowledge of history and penetrating observations about people.  My second reason is petty, and perhaps one that Hoffer would not approve of.  I came across the following quote from a collection of aphorisms that Hoffer had published:

In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

This presumes a false dichotomy, while exemplifying a classic style of progressive American anti-intellectualism.  The quote was offered up in a comment thread that had turned to the fashionable psychological concepts and the nature of success.  Its popularity seems to arise from an embrace of a false dichotomy that Hoffer would probably not endorse:  If one spends enough time as a learner, one will eventually become quite learned.  One can be learned and keep on learning, a point that Hoffer would probably grant.  The learned ones who are in the most trouble are the ones who have become comfortable and lazy.

Anyway, I was most bothered that an anti-intellectual dichotomy would come from a writer that I so deeply respect, so I googled the quote, found the source, and then raced to the library to find the context.  Alas, the context is a book of short aphorisms, which is to say that there was no context because the aphorisms were offered independently rather under some thematic organization.  So I looked around the shelf for other books by Hoffer, and found that Between the Devil and the Dragon also has quite a bit to say about intellectuals and the spirit of the modern era.  I'm hoping that I'll find in Hoffer's writings the nuance that was lacking in this invocation of Hoffer for an anti-intellectual point.

Now, of course, Hoffer himself was not a traditional intellectual.  We can debate whether or not the word "intellectual" should be applied to him at all (he apparently eschewed it), but there's no denying that he was a great learner, he had learned a lot, and he offered up quite insightful and informed writings.  What label you wish to apply above and beyond those basic facts is basically a semantic issue.  He was certainly not credentialed in the way of those who typically get called "intellectuals" but he certainly could match many an intellectual for depth and breadth of knowledge, mastery of language, and subtlety of thought.  So, while it would be a mistake to cite a wise longshoreman if I'm looking to defend credentialed intellectuals (or at least credentialed and self-styled "intellectuals") I think it is quite proper to look to Hoffer if I want to speak up for the value of deep thought over superficial fads.

Let's find out if he agrees with me.

Anti-Intellectuals want high school to never end

This morning's Chronicle has an interview with a UCLA professor who believes that admissions processes for academic programs need to pay less attention to academic measures.  There are lots of understandable motives for that: Academic measures aren't perfect, and we all know This One Guy who totally out-performed people with a better track record coming in.  Of course, no measure is perfect, policy designed around "This One Guy" will actually help fewer people than policy based on statistics (running counter to his stated sympathies for the masses), and while it's true that college is very different in form from the SAT/ACT the correlations should not be dismissed easily.

But there's another thing here, besides the arguments about predictive power and fairness:  As noted in the comments, a selective college is a place where the kids who always did really well in high school can suddenly find themselves in classes that are actually hard, and with classmates who are smarter than them.  UCLA and Berkeley currently function as those sorts of places.  There's some value in that.  If you open up UCLA and Berkeley to a wider cross-section of 18 year-olds, you might achieve certain types of fairness goals, but you'll also have to teach the classes at a level where a wider cross-section of students can succeed.  Yes, yes, some of the new additions will outperform expectations, and for those who out-perform you won't need to lower the level of anything.  But the definition of a statistical expectation is that those who out-perform will be balanced by those who under-perform, and you'll have to choose between either failing them or accommodating them.

If the only conversation is a normative one about whether to fail or accommodate the students who aren't at the top, well, I guess the question answers itself.  But if you expand the conversation, you'll note that we still have these top academic achievers in the classroom.  If you don't accommodate them they will be in the same spot that they were in during high school.  They will remain the smartest kids in the room, and that will have its own effects going forward.  Even from a 100% anti-intellectual standpoint, wouldn't you want those kids taken down a notch?  That won't happen when the classes are being taught in such a way as to ensure the success of their less-accomplished classmates.  Similarly, kids who might have been closer to the top in a less selective school will be only middling at UCLA or Berkeley.  There's no real need to weep over that, but please ponder the implications of a world where nobody's self-perceptions change after high school.

The customer is always right

Some chemists have decided that if students are showing up in organic chemistry without good preparation in general chemistry, the problem is NOT that the introductory chemistry course (i.e. the prerequisite) needs to be improved, but that the people teaching organic chemistry need to re-calibrate to make the class accessible to people with weak preparation.  How much do you want to bet that they would offer as a rationale "We need to teach chemistry to more people so we can be internationally competitive"?  Well, I'm sure that if we just start teaching more science classes in a manner that's accessible to the poorly-prepared then we'll become much more competitive internationally.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Childhood

Yesterday I was hanging out with some friends and their 5 year-old.  The kid wanted to watch a cartoon, so we put on Magic School Bus, a show from the mid-90's about a group of kids and their teacher who go on adventures in a magic school bus, learning about science along the way.  The show is excellent in many respects:  The content is factually accurate (obviously no real school bus could turn into a submarine that can survive in lava, but the stuff they learn about volcanoes is accurate), the group of kids is diverse by multiple measures, the science teacher is a female role model, and it seems like a fun way to learn about science.

So what is bugging me about this show?  They repeatedly made fun of the class bookworm, Dorothy Ann.  Yes, I can appreciate a message of "Go out there and explore and experiment", and I concur that in real science the answers aren't typically found in books, but it seems like this point could have been delivered without repeatedly making fun of the kid who really likes to read.  I almost felt like I was having lunch with my colleagues!

What I find fascinating about this is not that somebody somewhere out there felt like making fun of the kid who reads (that's life in America) but that this message made its way past a group of people who obviously put a lot of work into vetting the show for positive messages.  They were (rightly!) fastidious about making sure that kids had a diverse cast of role models to encourage them to explore STEM, but in all of this vetting for positive messages nobody thought "Hey, maybe we should go easy with mocking the bookworm."  This tells you much about American culture.  Hofstadter was right.

Erika Christakis, the Yale faculty member who attracted massive protests for a very nuanced email on hard questions of speech and offense, has decided to leave the classroom.  Do read her email; it would be hard for any reasonable reader to find anything "unsafe" in what she wrote.  A reasonable person might take issue with some of her conclusions or prescriptions, or even her equivocations, but there is absolutely nothing threatening about what she wrote.  It is deeply ironic that the protesters who claimed to feel so unsafe decided to confront Dr. Christakis' husband (also a Yale faculty member and also a faculty Master in the same residential college as her) instead of her.  They may claim to be modern and progressive and egalitarian, but when a woman spoke out of line they demanded that her husband correct her.

I'm old enough to remember a time when it was the conservatives who were demanding that kids shut up and stop saying offensive things. Well, the kids made one big mistake: They actually listened to their elders. And in the process they became their elders. So now we have the lefty kids running around saying that they feel unsafe when somebody says something about being cautious about going after people for their costumes.

The only good news is that the lefty kids are still offending their conservative elders. Personally, I'd prefer that they did it with rap music and heavy metal and graphic music videos, but I'm to the right of the median academic, so I guess that offending me with this babyish "safe space" talk is half of the point. I do find it strange, though, that the stances that put me to the right of the median academic are also the stances that are most in line with the ACLU. I'm also old enough to remember when "card-carrying member of the ACLU" was a slur used by none other than a member of the Bush dynasty.

The hour is very, very late

I'll step away from blogging about books that I'm reading, and instead blog about an article.  Today in the Chronicle they published a press release (dolled up to look like journalism) about a company called zyBooks.  They apparently produce interactive online activities and presentations.  I think that such things are fine in many contexts, and can be a useful component of many sorts of classes.  So far, so good.

What bothers me is that the thrust of the sales pitch is not simply "These are great activities that make people think."  Rather, the thrust is that students don't like books, don't like lots of text, and so we should adapt.  It is one thing to believe that reading and activities are both important parts of a college-level science class.  I believe that such a stance is referred to as "common sense" or even "consensus."  It is quite another thing to disparage text and reading.  It is a sign of just how deeply-rooted the anti-intellectualism really is.

What's funny about this is that the physics profession already tried replacing a "wall of text" with graphics and activities. Introductory textbooks don't have a whole lot of plain text.  Instead, there are lots of sidebars with definitions and questions and color pictures and diagrams, and lots of section breaks and examples and checkpoints.  This style is commonly mocked for its sensory overload, and few students seem enamored of it.  Honestly, I can't blame them for not reading.  I've had students tell me how much they like Moore's Six Ideas-Unit R (which I use to teach relativity) or Eisberg and Resnick's Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles (which I use to teach sophomore-level quantum physics).  Both books have a certain amount of diagrams, and Moore definitely has more bells and whistles than Eisberg, but they have far more text than the standard freshman books (and I've never had a student praise the freshman books).  My own experience is consistent with the student feedback: I can't say that my standard freshman books made much of an impression on me, but Feynman, Landau, and Purcell (all of which had far more text) certainly did.

The rot runs deep and the hour is late.  Reading is openly disparaged in marketing to faculty.  I know a person who has openly published articles bragging about how his general education class (ostensibly in a "science and society" category) requires no reading and is graded entirely on multiple-choice questions.  (It is only the thinnest pretext of civility that keeps me from naming names.)

I don't know what will happen next, but I think I'll take a break and read a book.