"Based on a true story"

I recently saw "Molly's Game", a pretty entertaining movie that is based on the true story of Molly Bloom, a woman who got into big legal trouble for running high-stakes poker games.  After the movie I got into a discussion about the issues it raises, and I realized that I'd rather treat "based on a true story" as 100% fictional.  Some might attribute this entirely to concerns about accuracy, and certainly that's a factor.  But, honestly, I'd rather not let concerns about factual accuracy get in the way of lessons to be learned from a story.  I'm less interested in whether the real-life Bloom pleaded guilty for the reasons given in the movie, and more interested in the dilemmas faced by the character and the reasons why a person faced with the situation shown in the movie might make the choices that they made.  I'm less interested in whether real-life Bloom's father did everything that his movie counterpart did, and more interested in the timeless lessons of children and parents and pressures and disappointments.

We don't read great literature because we are interested in the real Scottish king who inspired Macbeth, or the details of life in Dickens-era London.  We read it because the slice of life captured has some resonance with us in the present.  We don't read the Epic of Gilgamesh in order to learn about Sumer, we read it to learn about people.  I doubt that events in space unfolded exactly as shown in Apollo 13, but I can enjoy the characters.  "Inherit the Wind" dramatizes a real and important trial, but the oratory raises points that would be of equal importance if the Scopes Trial had never happened.

At best, "inspired by a true story" means that there's a true story that I can go seek out information on if I want, but the movie itself should not be viewed with any goal of learning the story.

A great one has departed, and the system will resist any who try to fill her shoes

Today my wife and I went to a memorial for Dean Joan Schaefer, an old mentor of mine.  By the time I was in college Dean Joan was formally retired, but that which is formally true on paper is rarely a reflection of practice (to return to one of the constant themes of this blog).  As a Dean Emerita she was, officially, still involved in a scholarship fund (which I benefited from), a study-abroad summer program at the University of Cambridge (which I also participated in), and a few other programs. Unofficially, she was a confidante, friend, advisor, mentor, sounding board, and protector for countless students who sought her out or were noticed by her. She was certainly important to me, and in tough times I drew strength from her. Dean Joan remained in those roles formally until 2006, and still went to campus frequently to talk to students for a few more years after that.  Before her retirement, her job title was "Dean of Women", but she transcended that title very quickly, and for essentially her entire career she had an open door for any student who needed her.  She was the mother and grandmother of the Trojan Family.

We still have people like her in lower-level roles, and officially we have people with similar titles (though nowadays they are the Dean of Student Affairs rather than Dean of Students, and certainly not Dean of Women or Dean of Men).  On the official level, the biggest difference between Dean Joan and a Dean of Student Affairs is that a Dean of Student Affairs oversees people who actually have in-depth interaction with students, promulgating policies and managing budgets and mitigating risks.  They might interact with a few students (especially student leaders) but most mentoring is delegated.

In the lower levels, we have many people who have taken on a wide portfolio of mentoring and counseling that goes beyond their official job titles, and we had them even back in the day of Dean Joan.  The difference is that back in the days of Dean Joan we had one person who not only had an open-ended mentoring portfolio, we had her sitting at the same table as many other high-ranking administrators.  Nowadays, the professor or mid-tier Student Affairs administrator or coach or whatever who takes on such a broad portfolio will never sit at the high table.  Nobody who sits at the same table as the upper administrators will have much ground-level interaction with students.  The ground-level stuff is done by people who report to people who report to high-level administrators and explain how their one-on-one interactions are advancing the goals outlined in the latest Five Year Plan Strategic Plan.

At my institution, the closest we get to people who combine a broad ground-level mentoring portfolio with reasonably high-level access (more because of political significance than official flowcharts) are people who run Special Programs, usually aimed at students with identifiable disadvantages, and generally with the goal of helping some identifiable segment succeed in some set of majors.  It's all highly specialized.  This is a poor substitute for a Dean Joan whose official brief is 50% of the student body, and who has a sufficiently expansive role in Student Affairs to concern herself with 100% of the student body, while also reporting at a high level.

At this point you're probably thinking that my objection is something along the lines of "All Students Matter" or "Why do only _they_ get a special program?"  No.  I wholly agree that some people have it harder than others, so while all need attention some need even more.  By all means, have Cultural Centers and Resource Centers and whatever else.

Rather, what I object to is that the personal touch is only valued as a Solution To A Problem.  There's a statistically significant gap, an identifiable disadvantage, so the person who provides the personal touch is valued...provided that they can help improve the numbers, or at least help with PR.  There's no baseline of "College students are people being brought in for a formative experience as they prepare to join the professional classes, so we value those who provide attention, and if some need even more then provide even more."  Rather, they only value those who can provide the attention needed to plug the gaps that cause embarassment; all of the other personal attention is at best taken for granted and at worst treated as inefficiency.  Every valued attention provider is a specialist aimed at a segment, and the greatest value goes to those who help plug a noticeable gap that looks bad for somebody in charge.

I suspect that most (not all) of those whom Dean Joan helped still would have done fine without her, but she helped most to do even more and a few to succeed at all.  We have people who provide similar attention today, but they do it only because they value it, not because the system values it.

What I'm ultimately talking about here is valuing the human connection as such, not just as a fix for embarassing numbers, and valuing it at the highest levels of the academy.  Alas, the technocrats have moved us beyond that.  I don't think it's a coincidence that Dean Joan, concerned with the individual touch at the highest levels, was also such a staunch advocate for the arts and humanities, the areas of study most directly concerned with the problems of the human condition.  What she provided transcended any faddish Best Practice, and USC was blessed to have her sitting at the highest tables.

Higher superstition: Chapters 3 and 4

I've finished the book, but the thoughts I offered when I started haven't really changed.  I basically agree with everything Gross and Levitt wrote about how silly the PoMo critiques of science (and related arguments) are, though I might dissent on a few particulars.  However, this is not the threat that materialized, in the end.  In this and the next post, I will go through a few specific points from the book.

Chapter 3 is about sociological critiques of science.  It's worth noting that, as I also encountered in college, some of the PoMo critics cited by Gross and Levitt were sympathetic to relativity, quantum mechanics, Godel's Theorem, and other 20th century developments that called into question absolutes and guarantees.  Taken on the surface, this is selective endorsement of science and math, though their limited comprehension of the topics calls into question whether their statements can constitute an endorsement.  Still, I'm glad that they concur that this stuff was "in the air" in the 90's, that it wasn't  just a few idiots that I encountered on one campus.

They spend a lot of time on sociologist Stanley Aronowitz.  I won't defend every dumb thing to come out of Aronowitz's mouth, pen, or keyboard, but I am intrigued by his claim that quantum mechanics was shaped by social pressure to abandon the concept of determinism in response to the despondent philosophical mood in Weimar Germany.  I've seen historian Paul Forman make similar claims, and the article was recommended to me by a serious theoretical physicist who respects Forman's work.  So, while I can't state with complete confidence that this claim is correct (I haven't examined enough of the relevant primary sources to pass judgment), it is not a claim to be dismissed.  Yes, the ultimate reason why physicists formulated a non-deterministic theory is that the experimental evidence supported such a theory, but there was clear social pressure on them to go that route, and the after-effects of that cultural moment may partly explain why alternative interpretations (e.g. de Broglie-Bohm) have never gained as much support.  The interpretations offered up in the 1920's were not only non-deterministic, they were sharp rejections of determinism, without a lot of "as far as we can tell..." and "not predicted by any variables known to matter in measurements that we've been able to do..." caveats.

I like how they note that, despite much effort to link Newton to the hegemonic class or culture, he was in fact from a very modest background, and had to rely on the 17th century equivalents of financial aid and work-study at Cambridge.

Chapter 4, on post-modernism, actually made me slightly (ever so slightly) more sympathetic to post-modernism rather than even less sympathetic.  They describe it as a rhetorical game used to tear everything down as a product of a power structure...and I'm kind of OK with the principle (if not always the practice).  I've spent enough time tilting at a technocratic consensus to kind of sympathize.  They describe it as a game for the well-read and verbally adept...and, yeah, I'm good with that :)

But, in all seriousness, while I'm fine with using rhetorical tools to analyze rhetoric and tear down power structures in human affairs, I recognize that "is" statements about the natural world are very different from value-laden "ought" statements about human affairs.  Technocrats deserve some PoMo criticism.  In fact, they deserve a lot of it.  I'm not sure that any student deserves to have a full-length book by Foucault pushed on them as an enforced reading assignment (it would give a double meaning to the title of his book Discipline and Punish) but technocrats certainly deserve to be taken down in essays laden with some PoMo jargon, until they feel properly chastised.  (The modern technocratic classes are very sensitive to having their privilege and hegemony called out.)

The interesting question, to me, is why the PoMo criticisms of science lost momentum.  I think there were a few.  First, Postmodernism is something for humanities professors in tenure-track jobs where they have to publish.  The dismantling of humanities has hurt them.  More importantly, America has moved away from giving prestige to high discourse.  The left has become more and more concerned with credentialing the weakest students, and the right just elected a reality TV star. It's been a long time since the right cared much about the humanities.  Once upon a time there were people on the right exhaulting the Western canon, and while they never cared for PoMo I think they'd at least agree that reading dense essays by French intellectuals is better than reading airy think-pieces.

Also, maybe the ultimate target was never really scientific knowledge, but scientists.  It turns out that scientists are (for good reason) more willing to submit to critiques of the demographics of our profession, our lack of diversity, and our approach to disadvantaged students.  Liberal cultural critiques entered through that route, and that's a route that can be pushed with statistics.  Even if the statistics are bad, they're far more persuasive (at least on the surface) than some literary critic questioning whether chemical bonds are a metaphor for oppression or whatever.

Oh, and after the 1990's George W. Bush won an election and pushed back against environmental regulations.  That mattered.  (A bit more on that in the next post.)

Moral Syndromes and the Two Cultures

Although it's not possible to map perfectly from the Two Cultures of C.P. Snow to the Two Syndromes of Jane Jacobs (if it were then Jacobs' book would have a lower Kolmogorov Complexity, being equivalent to a couple essays by C.P. Snow), I think there are a lot of parallels.  In particular, I am inclined to say that just as the STEM culture maps roughly to the Commercial Syndrome (a point I argued yesterday), the arts and humanities map more or less to the Guardian Syndrome.

At first glance that may seem absurd:  Artists are often great critics of political power, and are often pacifist critics of Guardian activities like war.  Moreover, artists love to defy tradition.  Besides, isn't art often put to Commercial ends, and without the corruption that we see when Guardian and Commercial activities are blended?

The answer to all of those questions is "Of course."  You can't fit all of life into a single, simple framework.  At best, a framework can generate insights to place alongside other analyses.  And though artists are often critics of the establishment, the arts are heavily reliant on patronage.  That needn't be seen as a flaw or indicator of hypocrisy; dissent can be a constructive element of a society, even while existing within it.  Moreover, while an artist of today may break from tradition in many ways, when a person in the future wishes to study that artist it will be necessary to look at the context of this time, to see the artist in the context of the society that he/she was breaking from or critiquing.  The study of the arts and humanities can illuminate the present but it also requires a look backward.  That is not a bad thing, it is actually a source of strength.  The study of arts and humanities is an attempt to learn from tradition, even while challenging it.  If one wishes to learn from the Greeks and Romans one can and should draw on contemporary sources, but one cannot escape the need for primary sources.  That need for connection with the past is a mark of how the arts and humanities fit more closely with the Guardian Syndrome than with the Commercial Syndrome.

At this point some ardent defender of the liberal arts will probably feel a need to say that many people study humanities in college but go on to have great careers in the private sector.  Indeed.  All of teaching, even in STEM, is a heavily Guardian-based activity.  And even armies rely on commercial products.  Identifying a field of study with one Syndrome does not mean that the rest of society must look askance at it.  A healthy society draws heavily upon the best of both Syndromes, and even individuals may have experience in both types of activities.  Simultaneous mixing of activities in one organization is different from partaking of both in the course of a well-lived life.

Now, one big difference between Two Cultures and Two Syndromes is that mixing two Syndromes in areas with very tangible stakes for money and power can result in monstrosities (e.g. Marxism and the Mafia).  Mixing Two Cultures in academia, if done properly, can be quite positive.  I respect historians of science, scientists using their tools to help archaeologists or art historians, computational methods applied to linguistics, etc.  Of course, it can also be done to dangerous effect, either through "interdisciplinary" work that lacks a rigorous foundation on either side or through the false ecumenicalism of STEAM.   But then again, academia is (properly) different from the rest of the world, which is not the same as saying that we're completely immune to problems that could plague the rest of the world.

The two cultures on display: Gender studies

In the past few weeks two articles from gender studies have gotten some attention.  The first was not actually from gender studies as such, but was from two people attempting a hoax against the field of gender studies.  Whatever you think of the hoax and what it does or doesn't teach us, it certainly put gender studies in the spotlight.  The second one, "Assembled Bodies: Reconfiguring Quantum Identities" got less attention outside of physics, but is arguably more significant because it was offered sincerely.

I tried reading the second one.  I gather that it is using quantum mechanics as a metaphor for ideas in feminist theory, but I lack the background to put it in context.  It is a very, very dense read, impenetrable to an outsider.  That is not necessarily an unforgivable sin for a scholarly work; much of scientific writing is impenetrable to the non-expert.  However, C.P. Snow offered a partial defense of the impenetrable nature of scientific writing, arguing that science is the more cumulative of our "Two Cultures", and hence it is impossible to make scientific progress (or understand such progress) without understanding a body of existing knowledge.  On the other hand, he also noted that a scientist need not have a detailed knowledge of literature from the distant past, as long as the scientist knows which specific ideas from the past remain valid after replication efforts from the past.  In humanities, conversely, engagement with the primary text is everything, but the nature of innovation is such that new ideas and new works of art and literature can be generated without reference to prior work.  Engagement with a primary text written yesterday can be as intellectually satisfying as engagement with a primary text written in 4,000 years ago.  In light of that, I've argued that social science sits somewhere between humanities and natural science, being akin to natural science in many of its goals and standards, but engaging with human issues like humanities and re-fighting many battles in each generation (not always for ill).

So, where does gender studies sit?

An exhaustive answer to that question would require far more engagement with the field than I can lay claim to, but I can examine the article on "Quantum Identities" and ask where it sits in terms of requiring a reader with cumulative knowledge.  In that respect, gender studies sits quite far along the cumulative end of the spectrum.

I then decided to do comparisons with other fields.  I first picked two very recent articles from two respected psychology journals, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (whose editor seems to be a reasonably productive academic) and Psychological Science (which also seems to have a pretty respectable editorial board).  I can't claim to understand the full context, import, or meaning of the work in either article as well as a psychologist would, but I can certainly get an idea of what they're  trying to do.  They are much easier on the reader than the gender studies article.  I can come away with some idea of what I get and what I'm unsure about and questions beyond "Um, wtf are they saying?"

Of course, I'm a natural scientist, which means I understand statistics and am accustomed to reading experimental articles, and I have done a fair amount of reading of educational literature, which has some overlap with the psychological literature.  Perhaps "harder on this reader than an experimental psychology article" is an unfair standard for me to use in evaluating gender studies.  With that in mind, I googled for "top journals in history" and all of the links sent me to American Historical Review.  I picked an article from a little more than a year ago (since my institution does not have access to the most recent year) with a title that is not particularly interesting to me.   Again, I can read it.  It is accessible.

Gender studies thus seems to make more demands on the reader than many humanities and social science fields.  The exceptions that come most immediately to mind are philosophy (generally considered a humanities field, though formal logic overlaps strongly with mathematics and computer science) and economics (definitely a social science field, but strongly influenced by mathematics).  Given the leaning of gender studies literature towards ideas and experience rather than statistics (that is not meant as a criticism), I think we'd have to situate it in the humanities, while acknowledging areas of interest shared with social science.

It's worth asking is what purpose dense jargon serves.  In the natural sciences it enables us to speak with precision, both so that we can make claims that are testable in quantitative experiments and so that we can reference specific elements from a large body of cumulative knowledge.  In philosophy, my understanding is that the purpose of dense jargon is precision in the drawing of fine distinctions.  It doesn't lend itself to clarity of exposition for the non-expert, but it does lend itself to clarity of distinctions for insiders.

In light of these considerations, my conclusion is that gender studies presents itself in a manner most similar to philosophy.  If other academics wish to critique the field, it would be most reasonable to do so in comparison to philosophy.

The hand-wringer test

I have a casual interest in linguistics--I enjoy browsing an Indo-European dictionary and occasionally tweet about what I learn.  I thus came across this discussion of whether linguistics qualifies as a STEM field.  If the question is whether linguists approach questions in their field with a scientific mindset, or draw upon approaches akin to those in the natural sciences, the answer is an unambiguous yes.  Moreover, if that is enough to qualify a field as STEM then most/all social science fields are either STEM fields or at least have sub-fields that count as STEM.  Linguistics may have elements that are more akin to humanities (qualitative and descriptive analysis of texts and behavior), but it also has social science and even natural science (e.g. neuroscience) components.  It is, a minimum, a good fit for the stated description of STEAM, if not STEM.

However, I mostly approach the definitions of words from a descriptivist perspective, not a prescriptivist perspective.  STEM sits on a pedestal, and the descriptivist's question is not whether linguistics belongs on the pedestal but whether the gatekeepers will recognize its right to stand on the pedestal.  Linguistics may fit the gatekeepers' stated criteria for inclusion in STEM, but people are rarely honest about the criteria that they actually employ to determine admission to a pedestal.  You have to watch their actions, not just listen to their words.  And from my experience in a university where the local culture perceives its moral legitimacy as deriving from our work on bringing students into STEM, social science is only STEM when we're trying to be collegial with social science faculty, or when a social scientist is studying issues of STEM equity and the STEM workforce.

As I said in my post about STEAM, the way to figure out if a field is STEM is to do a thought experiment involving students changing majors.  Suppose that two twins, Alice and Bob, start off as electrical engineering majors.  Alice then changes majors to physics, while Bob changes to a social science field.  Which decision would elicit more hand-wringing among the people who worry about the STEM Pipeline?

A tempting rejoinder is that we shouldn't care about the hand-wringers, we should just look at the intellectual rigor of the field, and we'd have to agree that there are plenty of things in linguistics that qualify as science.  I don't deny that, but I would note that (1) there are plenty of people whose work is definitely not science but is nonetheless intellectually rigorous (e.g. good scholars in the humanities) so why is intellectual rigor a sufficient criterion for inclusion in STEM? and (2) if we go down that road then most departments on a university campus would have STEM components (e.g. there's plenty of chemistry in art, plenty of acoustic science and technology in music, plenty of behavioral science in marketing, etc.) and STEM becomes so broad that it papers over the distinctions that make for intellectual diversity.  If STEM is the arbiter of good then everything is STEM and everything is good and everything belongs on campus, but we already agreed that the art and literature and business faculty should work on the same campus as the physicists and biologists and mathematicians, so what was the point of this label again?  Oh, right, STEM is on the pedestal.  Well, maybe instead of putting everything onto the pedestal we should point out how silly the pedestal is, and how ultimately destructive it is to the notion of intellectual diversity.

Anyway, I have a casual hobbyist interest in linguistics, and I certainly respect the rigor and value of the field, but I think that instead of including everything in STEM we should question why inclusion in STEM is considered so valuable.

The lie that my high school teacher told me

In my previous post I blogged about how there's no real mystery to academic achievement, how my teachers told me I'd be on my own in college so I studied accordingly.  Now I want to talk about a lie that they told me:

One of my high school English teachers said that in college you're expected to read books that aren't explicitly assigned.  She said that if a literature professor assigned a novel it was understood that besides reading the assigned novel you should be independently scouring the library for critiques of the novel and background on the writer, so that you could come to class prepared to contribute to the discussion.

I took that to heart.  The summer before my freshman year of college I was given the reading list for the humanities class that I would take that fall.  The class had a pretty long list of classic works, and I decided that I would read the thickest book on that list during the summer, so that when all hell broke loose in fall I would have the worst assignment out of the way.  So I read The Brothers Karamazov.  And then I did one better: I read a biography of Dostoyevsky, because my teacher said that you're supposed to be proactive like that.

Well, in the middle of that first semester we were reading Dostoyevsky (and chemistry was hard as hell and sucking up all my attention, so I was very glad that I was ahead in my humanities class), and during one of the discussions a classmate started offering assertions about the author's life and views and how they related to whatever scene in the novel.  I honestly don't remember what her point was, but I do remember that her assertion about Dostoyevsky's life was 100% wrong (remember, I'd actually read a biography of him, though I don't remember much of it 23 years later), and when I pointed that out the professor and class were rather uninterested.

So much for the idea that you have to be on top of things in college.  Mrs. Sadowsky lied to me!

C. P. Snow: Goldmine

The C. P. Snow anthology that I'm reading includes a long 1970 essay titled "The Case of Leavis and the Serious Case."  The first third of it is about some sort of interpersonal literary dispute that isn't worth parsing.  However, after that he starts discussing the English educational system, and he quickly gets into pay-dirt.  I do not know if his assertions are factually correct, but his analysis and attitude are interesting.

He starts by noting that admissions to the Oxbridge schools had become more meritocratic in the 20th century, but the earlier era had actually produced finer intellectual leading lights.  Whether or not we buy his declension narrative, his other observation is an interesting one:  In the less meritocratic era there were both finer intellects but also more dull-minded party boys of the elite classes.  I've made a similar point before about the effects of competition in simultaneously weeding out most of the dull-minded but also keeping people from showing their true distinction.  De Tocqueville has also offered similar observations; leisure matters for intellectual accomplishment.

That said, Snow does not uncritically embrace the cultivation of excellence; he fully spells out the dangers of educational inequality.  He cites the warnings of a state school official in a low-income area of England, and says that:

...there is no chance of human harmony in England until we pay whatever price we must (not only in money) to avoid the rancour of the educationally neglected.

It would be a mistake to read this solely as a call for access and credentials; below I will quote verbatim some of the fiery things that Snow had to say about excesses of egalitarianism.  But certainly we cannot afford to let an entire class feel neglected.  Indeed, I believe that America's white working class knows on some level that America's educational elites do not truly consider them to be diverse, no matter how poor they might be, and that this bears some connection to the recent election result.  Also, while conferring credentials is not the same as spreading knowledge, ignorance is dangerous; consider the words of The Ghost of Christmas Present:

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.

Even more sobering, Snow (rightly!) admires the achievements of the Soviets in cultivating pockets of intellectual excellence.  One needn't be an apologist for Communism to appreciate Russian contributions to mathematics, theoretical physics, and other fields in the 20th century.  However, any advocate for excellence over access should pause and contemplate what it means that one of the most miserable totalitarian states in history chose to develop excellence over equality, and had the means to do it better than the West.

Regardless of where you come down on those issues, Snow is unsparing in identifying the dangers of egalitarianism in education:

Education cannot become an elaborate masquerade to disguise the fact that some are more gifted than others.  Social justice is not comfortably reconciled to intellectual excellence; as a harsh possibility, it may not be reconcilable at all.  Certainly the extreme of egalitarianism isn't.

And:

I don't care what we call such places [for the very brightest to develop their full potential], nor where we put them.  But, unless we have them, we shall already, within a generation, have made ourselves more stupid than we need to be.

Social justice is a great value, and we shall be judged by how much of it we can achieve.  But we shall also be judged by what we add to the world's mental life: and that depends on what opportunities we can make for our gifted.

Personally, I would take at least as much care of them as we take of potential athletes.

Surely all academics can agree on the last point!

More great quotes:

You can abolish an elite only by not educating at all.

And:

But for all our purposes, human and social as well as narrowly academic, we need a sprinkling of good intelligence to remind us what rigour is.  It would be very easy to become flabby.  Perhaps especially easy in the flux and confusion of the next ten or twenty years.

Indeed.

There are two other great observations in this essay.  First, Snow noted that university students in all subjects were (in the English system, which is more elitist than the American one) coming to college with improved median skills in math, which would equip them to grapple with the computers and statistics that would be integral to social decisions in the coming decades.  While one could debate the extent to which the educated layman's mathematical knowledge is either useful or adequate for grappling with those matters, his foresight concerning both statistics and information technology was interesting.  There's virtually no matter of human administration today that people don't seek to reduce (not always rightly) to a "data-driven" one.

Finally, Snow identifies a more interesting distinction between the Two Cultures than he had in previous writings:  Scientific culture is cumulative, while the arts and humanities are innovative.  A scientist needn't read much of the original literature from an earlier era to understand a subject; those parts that have survived into current literature will suffice in many ways.  There are, of course, insights to be gained from old literature, but in terms of mastering enough knowledge to work on the subject and contribute, the original literature is at the very least an inefficient path to productivity.

In the arts and humanities, on the other hand, the primary sources are the essence of the subject.  You cannot learn about the Trojan War without reading the Iliad.  Yes, you could read modern archaeological investigations to learn what is currently known about the possibility of an actual war in an actual city called Troy in the approximate time and place where Homer set it, but if you want to learn about the (real or imaginary) war that has captivated the imaginations of countless generations you must read the original.  Likewise, you could learn something about Romeo and Juliet from West Side Story, just as you could learn something about Pyramis and Thisbe from Romeo and Juliet, but in each case you get only an imperfect shadow; there is no substitute for the primary source if you want to learn the story.  Stories may carry influence, but each story is a work in its own right, and what is lost in a subsequent work is not objectively an improvement but simply a case of subjective decisions on what to carry and what to omit.

The cumulative nature of science, the fact that what we carry forward has (hopefully) passed the test of time, is part of its strength.  But if the cumulative development of science is a testament to one aspect of human ingenuity, surely the endless emergence of new artistic and literary works is in its own way a testament to the endless bounty of the human mind.  I am unconvinced that the two cultures need each other for their own advancement (too often that point is made as a form of mushy ecumenicalism) but I am fully convinced that the human mind needs both in order to realize its full potential.

Two Cultures: Where's the other one, dude?

I finished reading C.P. Snow's Two Cultures essay of 1959.  It isn't quite what I was expecting.  I've always heard it described as a lament of the divide between the two sides of academia.  I was thus expecting some sort of essay along the lines of a defense of broad liberal arts education, and I was dreading the platitudes.  Instead, it seems to be more of a critique of the UK's historic emphasis on humanities over the sciences in their elite educational establishments, followed by a comparison of the ways in which the UK, US, and USSR educated people in the 1950's and a discussion of alleged needs for more scientists and engineers in the UK. He's not trying to integrate science and humanities so much as get STEM up on the pedestal.  He might insist that it's a call for equality, but there's precious little discussion of the UK's needs in any area outside STEM, or a comparison of how other countries educate people in subjects besides STEM. In many ways it could be read as an early "STEM crisis" narrative.  However, it's difficult for me to extract much from that for comparative purposes, because I'm mostly only familiar with American "STEM crisis" narratives, not the UK analogues, so I can't really say if this essay is sign of everything happening before and happening again, or a sign of genuine change.

Here are some interesting tidbits that I can take away from it:

First, Snow acknowledges that the Industrial Revolution happened in the UK despite the lack of a first-rate basic science establishment in the 18th century, and without much involvement from college grads.  This is an important thing, one under-appreciated by the STEM crisis hand-wringers.  I made this point before regarding Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon.  I wish he'd considered what this might mean for future economic development.  We academics over-estimate our own importance, and he went from academia to the Ministry of Labour and then a post as a civil service commissioner.

Second, the differences that Snow notes between the US, UK, and USSR systems, regarding their relative levels of specialization, seem to remain true today.  To this day, Russian scientific research institutes often have incredibly narrow names and mandates.  They don't produce mechanical engineers; they produce graduates in computational thermal systems analysis, and structural mechanics, and so forth.

Third, he traces the cultural differences between science and humanities to the fact that the humanities scholars study the human condition, which tends to inflict pessimism, while scientists believe that technical solutions to problems are possible.  On that point I agree with him completely.  I wish he'd said something interesting about how to educate people who integrate those mindsets on some interesting level, not just "OMG, I'm, like, so broad-minded!  Because I see multiple perspectives!"

Fourth, I give Snow credit for recognizing that the production of Einsteins is not the main task of a STEM education program.  He believes that the "alpha plus" types will do fine as long as they're put in some sort of half-decent academic environment.  It's hard to screw up with them.  It's also pretty hard to screw up the "alpha" types.  (He seems to have adopted the language of Huxley's Brave New World here.)  He recognizes that the hard part is training people in the third tier, some of whom will do technical work but many of whom will go on to do managerial or business ("human") work in the technical fields.  I give him credit for recognizing that that's more important than trying to ensure that a system maximizes the output of top talent.  With the top talent you mostly have to get out of the way, and it's only the dilettantes who worry about how The System is allegedly so unfair to would-be Einsteins.  He doesn't have much in the way of practical advice on how to do it, but he gets full points for at least recognizing it.

He has one spectacularly wrong prediction:  He predicted that since human ability is pretty much the same everywhere it's inevitable that the gap between the rich industrialized world and the rest of the world would evaporate by 2000.  While he was right on the even distribution of ability around the world, he under-estimated the systemic, cultural, and institutional factors that are needed to develop successful industrial sectors.  That said, he was at least right that the poor countries would start to compete with rich countries; by 2000 the off-shoring of factories was well underway, and this November we felt the effects of that in the US election.

So, in sum, Snow's "Two Cultures" lecture isn't what it is usually cited for being about, but it contains an interesting bunch of tidbits.  I purchased an edition with several more essays and lecture transcripts, so I'll have more to say about Snow in the coming week.

Next reading project: The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow

My next reading project will be The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow.  It's a famous critique of the humanities/science divide.   I've heard it referenced many times but never actually read it.  It's often noted ruefully by scientists that you can be considered truly sophisticated.  Chad Orzel has often noted this.  In certain circles, people would look at you funny if you confessed to being unable to grasp history or literature or fine arts, but they would chuckle appreciatively if you said that you never got math or science.  Snow apparently had a lot to say about this.

Of course, one theme of this blog has been the increasing emphasis (in many but certainly not all) elite circles on STEM over other subjects.  At first glance it might seem like disinterest in science is becoming less socially acceptable, and science is no longer a second-class subject in the eyes of "sophisticated" types.  Certainly administrators and politicians are pouring money into STEM.  However, much of this emphasis on STEM is happening in the context of democratizing STEM, of bringing egalitarian impulses to bear on a specialized, technical, difficult subject.  Nobody said that the democratized STEM graduates will be admitted to the fancy cocktail parties.  I don't get to go to many of those myself, but my limited observation of that world suggests that classical music is still more popular than planetarium shows.  Democratizing STEM is how we will fill technician jobs with the more worthy among the masses, and elevate a precious few to elite research positions, so that the elite world can be legitimized by its ostensible openness.  That doesn't mean the opera will be replaced by public lectures on science by Neal de Grasse Tyson.  Science popularizers will be invited to go to receptions and schmooze the donors in private banquet halls with violin music after their lecture to the public; the public science lecture will NOT be the treat for the donors.

So, in a strange way, although this is allegedly the moment of STEM's ascendancy, I think that democratizing it will ironically reinforce its tradesman-like status, not elevate it.  I will be curious to read Snow and see what he has to say about it.

Final thoughts on _They're Not Dumb, They're Different_: The policy consensus side

In her conclusions (pages 83-86), Sheila Tobias starts off going in a promising direction:  She briefly questions the forecasts of a shortage of scientists.  These questions are so juicy, so refreshing, that for a moment I was taken to the present!  (Where a few people--just a few, mind you--are starting to question that narrative.)  I felt like maybe I'm reading something from the here and now, not the 1990's.  But after acknowledging that we can't be certain, she moves on to make recommendations rooted in the consensus assumption of a 1990's science education researcher.  I shall quote the bottom of page 86:

The first step is a moral and strategic imperative: no college student should be permitted to say "no" to science without a struggle.

I cannot imagine anyone in a modern university calling for such an overbearing push to get more students  into humanities.  I cannot imagine majoring in humanities being declared a "moral imperative."  The STEM pedestal is an astounding thing.

Anyway, Tobias goes on to recommend the formation of an industry of advisers, mentors, recruiters, and STEM education and pipeline professionals who will devote all of their efforts to trying to get more students into and through science programs.  To a large extent the National Science Foundation has done as she recommended more than a generation ago.  There is indeed an industry of such people, largely funded by NSF.  She wasn't the only person urging this, and such an industry was already present in some form then, but we see how the elite chatter of a generation ago to some extent does shape the enterprises of today.  John Maynard Keynes was right about "practical men" being "slaves of some defunct economist."  Even as we hear rumblings against the notion of a "STEM crisis", tremendous numbers of well-funded people proclaim their desire to seek "data-driven best practices" to solve a crisis whose existence was proclaimed as gospel a generation ago.

90's flashback: _They're Not Dumb, They're Different_ by Sheila Tobias

My next reading project is They're Not Dumb, They're Different by Sheila Tobias.  Whatever else I might ultimately come to dislike about this book, it's 94 pages.  Too many people turn out 200-300 page books because they think that they need to, but Tobias doesn't do that.  Kudos to her.

This book was written in 1990, and while I've only read the introduction I can say that it definitely feels like a trip back to the 90's and old ideas about STEM shortages. You can almost hear Kurt Cobain singing Heart-Shaped Box.  You can almost feel the political and racial tension in the air as people are glued to their TV for the latest twists in the OJ case. It's easy to remember an era when X-Files was on TV and the Clinton Administration was rocked by sex scandals.

In the intro, Tobias motivates her work by talking about the country's shortage of science talent, and the need to recruit more people into science.  She mentions a longitudinal study that started with 750,000 high school students who declared a possible interest in science in the 1970's, and after more than a decade of follow-through a bit less than 10,000 of them have gotten PhDs in STEM.  In my opinion, 1.3% of a potentially interested cohort getting a PhD in science is hardly a problem; it might actually be over-production. But it's presented as evidence of a problem.

More tellingly, she notes that 61,000 of them started graduate study in STEM, even though "only" 9,700 of them got a PhD.  This is a lesson in how narratives are made when people start from the assumption of a moral crisis in need of resolution.  If 61,000 people enrolled in PhD programs and only 9,700 of them got a PhD I would agree that there's a problem.  I might not classify it as a problem of under-production, but I would agree that there is a problem of inefficiently identifying and channeling talent.  There's no reason for so many people to invest prime years in a hard endeavor that so few will finish.  But who said that they all entered graduate school in pursuit of a PhD?  The gold standard for an engineer in industry is an MS (and many have great careers with just a BS, or even a BS and MBA).  And who said that the gold standard for retention in STEM is completion of a PhD?  Can't a person have a career doing economically and socially significant things in science and engineering without a PhD?

The fact that Tobias opens with these dubiously status quo assumptions, these cultural artifacts of a long-standing consensus, does not mean that there will be nothing of value in what follows.  But it does mean that when I read it I detect a certain voice in the author's writing.  It's like reading an old novel written in the musty language of an earlier era; you know you're reading something of a particular place and time and class.  It's a narrative that sounded so seductive when I was young and dumb, something that never should have made sense yet somehow did even in an era where the SoCal aerospace industry was being completely restructured (and mostly downsized) while the IT industry was taking shape.  A narrative of a strange era that is past.  Oh, people still tell this narrative, but now it's a narrative that faces challengers, because the internet exists and every disgruntled postdoc and adjunct out there can take to social media.

Anyway, the focus of this book will be her "Second Tier" study.  The premise is that science and engineering only select for people who will stick with it through numerous hurdles, rather than recruiting.  (We shall ignore the fact that since Sputnik there have been numerous efforts to sell science and engineering to kids, numerous earnest people standing in front of students and telling them that STEM Is Our Future and we desperately need them, numerous Official Reports On The Need To Recruit and subsequent curricular redesign efforts in k-12 and beyond.)  So, Tobias recruits smart people who have been successful in other fields but never gave any thought to science, and asks them to audit college math and science classes, to provide a field study of one tribe by another.

Sociologically I agree that it's an interesting concept on its own, and certainly worthwhile for a science educator who wants to engage in introspection and take in some outside critiques.  I can read it with that goal in mind.

What I can't do is read it as a study that must a priori be relevant to solving systemic problems in my field, and not just because I reject the narrative of a STEM shortage.  Working in the trenches of college-level science education, the problem that I face is not an abundance of empty seats while students flock to other fields.  Rather, I live in a world where the classroom is filled with ill-prepared students, the cultural mindset of my peers and superiors is that it would be unjust to tell them to consider another field, and scholars in the humanities and social sciences are scared that their disciplines will be axed for the ascendant STEM fields.  In this world, our biggest challenge is not to win over the bright kids who chose to major in literature or accounting, but rather to help the ill-prepared kid who harbors a dream of rocket science, and either make them into a rocket scientist or gently guide them to another path.

We can still learn something from the observations of genuine outsiders, just as we can learn something from any number of experiences and observations.  There may be serendipitous insight in here, and if so, great!  But I don't think that I can feasibly or realistically approach this book as one whose design promises solutions to the practical problems immediately in front of me.  The design of the study means that any such solutions will emerge by lucky happenstance, not by careful targeting.  I can learn new things to add to my general mental toolkit, but my inner Bayesian assigns a low prior probability to the notion that this book has direct solutions to my problems.

Also, I can read this book as a cultural artifact, as an example of what people actually believed in the early 1990's, an era when the Cold War was won, our greatest geopolitical problems were (allegedly) solved, a tech boom was building in the aftermath of a recession, the House of Clinton was ascending after a Bush presidency, and the music on the radio was good.  The elite consensus that places STEM on a pedestal is a source of never-ending frustration for me, and this book is a time capsule that might help me understand it.  Mind you, STEM mania predates this book by several decades, but in order for a consensus to survive it must adapt, and this book might tell me something about the current incarnation of STEM mania.

With all that said, let's see what outsiders have to say when they observe a science class.

The false ecumenicalism of STEAM

There's an editorial that I half-agree with in the latest issue of Scientific American, and like many things that get at half of an issue it's almost as dangerous as simply ignoring the issue.  The editors make the completely valid point that our society need more than just people who are trained in natural science and engineering, that we also need people who study the humanities and social sciences.  I agree completely, as you might gather from the fact that most of the books I've blogged about here are written by people who aren't trained in math, natural science, or engineering, and are primarily about non-technical issues.  I denounce the short-sightedness of politicians who want to focus our higher education system primarily on STEM.  Partly because (as I've said before) putting STEM on a pedestal is actually quite bad for STEM* and partly because the rest of society (i.e. the world beyond the walls of the science buildings on campus) also needs more than STEM.

The editors of SciAm get that society needs more than STEM, but they can't help but couch this need in terms of the economic competitiveness of high-tech industries:

The need to teach both music theory and string theory is a necessity for the U.S. economy to continue as the preeminent leader in technological innovation. The unparalleled dynamism of Silicon Valley and Hollywood requires intimate ties that unite what scientist and novelist C. P. Snow called the “two cultures” of the arts and sciences.

Steve Jobs, who reigned for decades as a tech hero, was neither a coder nor a hardware engineer. He stood out among the tech elite because he brought an artistic sensibility to the redesign of clunky mobile phones and desktop computers. Jobs once declared: “It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough—that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” 

A seeming link between innovation and the liberal arts now intrigues countries where broad-based education is less prevalent. In most of the world, university curricula still emphasize learning skills oriented toward a specific profession or trade. The ebullience of the U.S. economy, which boasted in 2014 the highest percentage of high-tech outfits among all its public companies—has spurred countries such as Singapore to create schools fashioned after the U.S. liberal arts model.  

My problem with this is that it still has STEM on the pedestal:  There's nothing about the value of the humanities and social sciences** in their own right, only their significance for high-tech industries. Personally, my reason for reading and blogging about so many books on history, social issues, and so forth is that I want to understand people, not that people often work in STEM.  Teaching is an activity in which one can benefit from knowledge of history, psychology, etc. irrespective of what discipline one is in.  The value of humanities and social science for my work can thus be measured by how much my work involves people, not by how much humanities and social science help STEM.  More importantly, the value of humanities and social science should be measured according to more than just the extent to which they matter for my work (or anyone's "work", as opposed to the rest of life).

Now, in academia I can sense a backlash starting to stir against the current STEM craze.  However concerned I might be about how this pedestal will affect STEM, I can hardly expect sympathy from people who aren't in STEM.  The pedestal might have its downsides, but not being on the pedestal has even more downsides.  Consequently, some administrative types now talk about "STEAM", which stands for "Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics."  Nobody is entirely sure whether the "Arts" only include visual and performing arts, or also the liberal arts*** more broadly.  I'm less interested in definitions listed in some particular document and more interested in usage. When I hear administrators talking about the "A" in "STEAM" I've heard several different points, some of which could be roughly summed up as:

1. "Designing technology requires attention to aesthetics."  This is a completely valid point that has been known for millenia, hence the field known as "architecture."
2. "Designing technology requires attention to human factors more broadly."  Again, a completely valid point.
3. "Scientists can learn a lot about their field from historians and philosophers of science and technology."  This is a point with which I also agree completely, and it informs much of my blogging here.  Indeed, I strongly encourage students to make connections between their major and their general education by taking classes on the history of science.
4. "Solving workforce issues in the sciences requires the involvement of people who have considered the cultural factors and problems of inequality that affect the pipeline of talent."  While I might dissent from some of the most common narratives offered in regard to these topics, I completely agree that these are important areas for inquiry.  I would like to see more and broader inquiry on these issues.

However, do you notice that in each case the "Arts" (however construed) are examined only in regard to how they interact with STEM?  That's fine if the specific topic on the table is whether to include some non-STEM people in a STEM-focused endeavor, but not if the topic on the table is the purpose and future direction of a comprehensive university.  The STEAM buzzword could probably be invoked to justify hiring an art historian who emphasizes architecture, an English professor who is an expert on teaching technical writing, or an ethnic studies professor who studies equity issues in STEM.  However, I'm not sure that it could be invoked to justify hiring a historian who studies the cultural history of China, an English professor who's interested in 18th century American poetry, or an ethnic studies scholar who's interested in representations of ethnicity in cinema.  These people might fit under the Arts (at least in the sense of Liberal Arts) but I doubt that they would fit under any but the most bland (and thus pointless) definitions of STEAM.  STEAM is false ecumenicalism, a way of offering University Strategic Initiatives that are nominally inclusive of disciplines beyond STEM while still measuring those disciplines by the yardstick of STEM.  As long as the paramount yardstick of academic inquiry and teaching is relevance to STEM the Academy is going to suffer.
____________

*In a society that is democratic in the way described by de Tocqueville, those academic fields that are deemed most important will have an obligation to take in the huddled masses, however unprepared and untalented they may be.  This may provide some benefit for members of the masses as individuals, at least initially, but it tends to impede the pursuit of excellence, and eventually the phenomenon of credential inflation will rear its head, to the detriment of all, but disproportionately hurting the least privileged.

**Whether or not the social sciences are included in STEM depends on whether the "S" in STEM is implicitly "NS" (Natural Science).  I personally exclude the social sciences from STEM, not because I disrespect the intellectual rigor of those fields but because I eschew linguistic prescriptivism in favor of looking at how people actually use words.  To wit, consider the following thought experiment:  We have two students, both of whom start off majoring in chemistry.  One of them then switches majors to physics, while the other switches majors to economics.  Would a typical "STEM crisis" hand-wringer react to both with equal nonchalance, saying "They're still in STEM", or would they evince more concern over the new economics major than the new physics major?

***We could also ask which disciplines get counted as "liberal arts", or the extent to which the liberal arts overlap STEM, but let's set that aside for now.

The Math Myth, Chapter 6: Has he never heard a "STEM vs. Humanities" debate?

The core argument of this book seems to be that found in Chapters 1-4:  That the "STEM shortage" is a myth, and that people over-state the need for advanced math even in a lot of STEM jobs.  There's a lot to be said about that, and about the distinction between numeracy and advanced math.  Those subjects deserve their own series of posts, so I'll delay those.  For now, I just want to address something in Chapter 6:

In Chapter 6, I think Hacker is trying too hard.  He starts by going after a common argument:  That learning math is good for your overall intellect, and in some way unique to math, some way that other disciplines don't possess.  I will agree with him that mathematical thinking is simply one way of thinking and not THE way of thinking.  However, when he tries to claim that nobody makes a similar argument for humanities, he goes too far.  Has he never read any of the numerous essays on how studying humanities makes you a broad-minded critical thinker, unlike those nasty, narrow STEM disciplines?  There's a lot to be valued in humanities and social science, but let's not pretend that they don't get in on the "We're the REAL smart people" game.

On the other hand, I like his point about how mathematics, unlike some academic disciplines, can thrive even under despotic regimes.  I don't consider that a BAD thing about math--I think it's great that there are some wonderful, beautiful areas of inquiry that even tyrants do not try to eradicate.  But it also tells us something about how unthreatening many areas of STEM are for those in power.  We might do well to ask ourselves why that is.

STEM vs. humanities, round 2^1,000

There's an interesting article in the Chronicle on the humanities, philology, and the respective roles of science and humanities in the modern era.  I will excerpt some choice quotes here.

1) On the emphasis on the present over the past:

No textual culture in human history has been so indifferent to its own past, and this indifference strongly suggests that, though we continue to tweet and "text" and share memes, we are moving into a post-textual era. For those who continue to write academic theses, it’s surely the case that there are more dissertations published per year on Buffy the Vampire Slayer than on Baudelaire. If you set out to work on Babylonian calendars or something else that is truly primordial, you are bound to be seen as something of an eccentric. You will be seen, that is, just as your nonacademic family members see you, as someone "into some pretty obscure stuff." Humanists, then, are growing nearly as presentist, as clueless about historical legacies, as oblivious of origins, as everyone else.

2) On the relative prominence of science and humanities:

Today we see humanists attempting to get in on the action of the scientists down the hall, which is to say to mount the gravy train of grant-seeking that favors work purporting to be of scientific relevance. Thus marginal philosophers specializing in phenomenology will attempt to show that phenomenology is relevant to neuroscience, and scholars who work on the Scientific Revolution will claim that their research is necessary to understand developments in biotech. The sad irony is that not too long ago the cachet flowed in the opposite direction: Scientists went to considerable lengths to show that what they were doing was relevant to the people we think of today as humanists.

I don't entirely agree with this.  In academic circles, humanities fields do continue to enjoy a certain prominence for being more "intellectual" than science.  However, intellectualism now enjoys less prominence.  Just last week I lamented that too many physics majors don't read physics books or articles that weren't assigned. At least one colleague thought I was crazy to lament this.  Note that some of my colleagues also dismiss the importance of "book smarts."

3) I think he wants to reinvent archaeology:

All of which brings me to my humble proposal to restructure the academy and solve the two-cultures problem: Create a single, unified, scientific discipline dedicated to accounting for the state of the world by reconstructing the past using whatever means available — texts, stone tools, burial mounds, tree rings, sediment deposits, fossils, cosmic background radiation. This discipline can be housed in the "faculty of history," and mechanisms should be put in place to ensure that textual scholars do not retreat into their own little world, as if the sort of traces they study had nothing to do with the other sorts.

As is so often the case, this article is better at diagnosing problems than  it is at proposing solutions.  If solutions were easy then the world would have no problems.