What does it all mean?

The random readings and the resulting ramblings here are not merely therapeutic.  It is not to merely ease my anxieties about the world and the panic attacks that result.  There is a great deal of practical use too, though they are not always immediate.  It might be years before I find "use" for my rant.

I might as well be channeling a pedestrian and secular interpretation of the famous line from The Bhagavad Gita, in which the god Krishna advises Arjuna to keep doing his duty.  

Krishna tells Arjuna:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।

मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥

(Karmanyevadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana,

Ma Karmaphalaheturbhurma Te Sangostvakarmani)

Through that couplet, Krishna says that we need to carry on with our duties without thinking about the rewards.  He goes one step more by cautioning that we shouldn't be motivated because of the potential fruits of the action, nor be tempted to inaction.

This is absolutely contrary to the incentive-driven world in which we operate, right? 

Over the years, researchers and policymakers have come up with various incentive schemes in order to nudge people towards action.  They even reward elementary school kids if they read books!  At home, parents reward kids for doing household chores.

"Do your damn duty" apparently doesn't work in this modern world in which kids and adults alike ask "what's in it for ME?"

I read, rant, blog, because ... that's is it.  There is no because!

But, yes, the rewards always arrive.  (And so will the layoff notice, I fear!)

In November 2014, in those peaceful and joyous days before the twin pandemic of tRump and Covid, my post began with these lines:

All of man's troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.

I had completely forgotten about those wonderful lines from E.O. Wilson.  Until a couple of days ago.

In an email conversation, I wrote to a colleague:

[You] will also appreciate this from E.O. Wilson, from The Meaning of Human Existence:

All of man's troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.

I continued that email with this:

It is unfortunate that an undergrad education is no longer about helping students understand the bigger picture: Who we are as individuals, as societies; how we came to be who we are; and where we might end up.  That is what a traditional liberal education was about, whatever the major was.  Now, undergrad education is nothing but a transaction: Students pay $$$ and the university issues a piece of paper :(

If students were given an opportunity to inquire into the big picture questions, then they might also think a lot about another observation of Wilson's:

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

The primacy of science

My childhood friend and classmate Vijay, who died three summers ago, was better than me by a whisker in the formal academic subjects in which we earned the marks and ranks.  It didn't show really in the scores because I couldn't care much about marks and ranks.  I had plenty of other things to worry about.

But, there was no comparison between Vijay and me when it came to the arts and humanities.

I couldn't draw even an egg, whereas Vijay could easily draw portraits and animals and .... He could act. He could orate. He knew books and authors. Thankfully, we didn't have tests and exams on those because I would have failed.  And failed miserably.

Vijay was admitted to a prestigious engineering institute, but withdrew from there after two years, and chose a career of journalism and poetry, in which he excelled.

I went to a podunk college for engineering. And then found a path for that really interested me, and which continues to interest me in my mediocre career.

As good as we were in math and science, in our own ways we opted to pursue intellectual and professional interests elsewhere.  Our lives are additions to the examples in a long list of people who try to straddle the divide between science and everything else.

This divide has worried intellectuals and plenty has been said and written on this topic.  I often refer to CP Snow's lecture, not because I want to promote STEM, which is the buzzword for dollars in the academic business.  Snow's lecture I use because I have always worried about the alarmingly low levels of scientific literacy among the public.

But, even more worrisome to me is STEM without the humanities and the social sciences, about which I have blogged a lot.  Here's one from 2018, for example, that was about racist algorithms.  Or, how about this one, also from 2018 in which an essential question was "How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling dictators to being used as tools of oppression and discord?"

It has been a century of a battle that has been rapidly losing to "science."  In this book-review, the author writes about the debate in the late 19th century between Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold:

[According] to Matthew Arnold, who objected that during the previous decade, the science-not-letters movement had progressed from the “morning sunshine of popular favor” to its “meridian radiance.” Arnold, with whom Huxley had picked a fight by invoking him as the personification of literary culture, rose to the defense of letters by arguing that theirs was the quintessentially human task of integration: relating separate forms of knowledge and interpretation—moral, scientific, aesthetic, social—to one another. Science and literature, he urged, must be integral parts of the same larger task of “knowing ourselves and the world.”

The human task of integration.  If only we truly understood and practiced an idea that "Shakespeare and the sciences might be jointly relevant to one project of understanding."

The global pandemic reminds us about the human task of integration:

Covid-19 has presented the world with a couple of powerful ultimatums that are also strikingly relevant to our subject here. The virus has said, essentially, Halt your economies, reconnect science to a whole understanding of yourselves and the world, or die.

What does it mean at the end of the day?

"I applaud your interest in the humanities," I wrote to the student who wanted my take on her interest to pursue a graduate degree in the humanities.

I wish that we had a lot more people interested in understanding the human condition.

I continued in the email:

All of us need to think a lot about: "What constitutes "the good life"? or How meaningful are cultural differences? What is a just society?"  COVID-19 is forcing even those who didn't care about those questions to now think about them as they/we are all stuck at home.

There are plenty of people around the world wondering, for instance, what they were trying to do all this time by working long hours at the expense of spending a few days--even hours--with family and friends.  The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, openly asked what was so important when we were so busy:

Cuomo also spoke poignantly about his mother and the times he promised to have coffee with her but backed out because things came up. “Wrong, wrong. That was more important than anything else,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t miss something until it’s been taken away. And it made me rethink what was important and what I had been missing, and I’d been missing a lot." We’re all busy, he noted. "What does it mean at the end of the day? What were you really busy with, and did it matter?”

Did all that really matter?

What matters then?  What is a "good life" to live?

Scientists and lawyers and programmers cannot answer that question. Nobody can. But, at least the humanities can help us think about them and get to our own answers.

But, of course, that is not where we will go to in a year or more, by when we will have figured out how to prevent getting infected by COVID-19.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote in a commentary a few days ago:

The present crisis might indeed make many individuals more aware of the impermanent nature of human life and human achievements. Nevertheless, our modern civilisation as a whole will most probably go in the opposite direction. Reminded of its fragility, it will react by building stronger defences. When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.

I worry that funding for the humanities will be further diminished in the context of the acute economic crisis that will haunt higher education over the next few years. (Click here for a string of my tweets on this topic--the tweets have links to essays.)

But, very few will even care about the loss.  Because, very few are sincerely interested in understanding the human condition.

There is no way to put a positive spin on this reality.  Nor do I engage in putting a spin on anything.

The Rat Trap

Years ago, I wrote a commentary piece that no newspaper wanted to publish.  Maybe in my CV I should have listed the essays that were rejected along with the listing of the published pieces.  I bet that the rejections easily outnumber those that were found fit to be printed!

Anyway, this particular commentary was in the context of the Oscars--the Academy Awards.  The argument that I offered there was this: The Oscars are perhaps the easiest way that we can all understand "market failure."

If the forces of the marketplace were to prevail, then the best picture is the one that earned the most at the box office.  As simple as that.  As this NY Times piece put it more recently, you can rarely have both box office hits and best picture winners at the Oscars.  Rarely ever.  The market, where consumers exercise their preferences, rarely ever picks the best picture.  The market does not always know the best.

I learnt this young--well before I knew anything about the basics of microeconomics--back in the old country.  I loved the movies made by Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Shyam Benegal and ... I didn't watch any of these awesome films in the movie halls because, well, they were never screened there.  The market was saturated with formulaic movies, of which I saw a few too.  These awesome movies that lost out in the marketplace I watched thanks to the government's television channel.  The market, as I later understood in graduate school, knows the price of everything, but never the value of anything.

We need arbiters of quality. Of value. People who know serious shit who can make aesthetic judgments.  Once upon a time, academics were integral to this process.  Not anymore.

In the early 20th century, the critic I.A. Richards already perceived the tension between equality and judgment. “The expert in matters of taste is in an awkward position when he differs from the majority,” he wrote. “He is forced to say in effect, ‘I am better than you. My taste is more refined, my nature more cultured, you will do well to become more like me than you are.’”  By the waning years of the 20th century, professors concluded they needed to reframe their expertise in order to align it with egalitarianism. Therefore, they bend over backward to disguise their syllabi as value-neutral, as simply a means for students to gain cultural or political or historical knowledge. 

We have become wimps. Wusses.  Especially in the postmodernist discourse, we academics have actively pursued the opposite of making aesthetic judgement--we seem to grant every view, every preference, an equal status!  A Marvel comic-book on superheroes is as valuable to humanity as is the Ramayana or Crime and Punishment.

Many professors believe they are trying to contest that intrusion of markets into every sphere of life that goes by the name “neoliberalism.” In my experience, the professors most strident about refusing value judgments are also most committed to resisting neoliberalism. But they can’t have it both ways. 

Indeed.  I am not a huge fan of neoliberalism, nor am I a fierce critic of it either.  Which is also why many of my colleagues view me with suspicion that I am an enemy in disguise.

There’s a basic problem with the capitulation of cultural education to consumer preference. Dogmatic equality tells us: There’s nothing wrong with your taste. If you prefer a steady diet of young adult novels or reality TV shows, so what? No one has the authority to make you feel bad about your desires, to make you think you should want something else.
Such statements sound unobjectionable, even admirable. But if the academy assimilates this view — as it largely has over the past three decades — then a possibility central to humanistic education has been lost. The prospect that you might be transformed, that you might discover new modes of thought, perception, and desire, has been foreclosed.

I am always shocked with the number of students who have ever read any serious piece of literature--in high school literature classes and then in the humanities courses in college.  And then we wonder why the mind has not been opened yet.  Imagine if we had a parallel curriculum in the sciences, where we ... oh well, you get the point, I am sure.

Our work as educators is to show students forms of life and thought that they may not value, and then to help them become the kind of person who does value them. 

In a recent conversation with a guy about my age, I asked him how he became who he is after having grown up in a highly fundamentalist Christian family.  "I came to Eugene and met a whole bunch of people who thought differently," he said.  And then he read Greek and Latin classics in college. Since then, he has charted out for himself who he wanted to be.

David Hume wrote: “Many men, when left to themselves, have but a faint and dubious perception of beauty, who yet are capable of relishing any fine stroke which is pointed out to them.”

I have enormous trust in the arbiters of aesthetics.  I skip movies that Anthony Lane disses, for instance.  I am yet to watch any of the box office champs this past decade.  Yes, dammit, I know better!

Who needs the humanities?

We do.

In an oped a few years ago (I am unable to track down the post here for me to link it) I wrote that we will worry a lot in the future about various technological features that will become a part of our lives.  One of the examples that I mentioned there was genetic editing--designer babies, as we colloquially refer to them.  There are plenty of examples that we can easily think about, in which we need to systematically pause and ask ourselves how the new ways are redefining what it means to be human.

Of course, nobody cares for what I say or write; the story of my life!

While I didn't know how to articulate such concerns back when I was an undergraduate student, these are the kind of issues that led me to ditch electrical engineering in order to do what I do now.  The disconnect between technology and humanity bothered me, and it still bothers me.  In the contemporary academic world, to argue in favor of inquiring into the humanity is a losing proposition.  And this is in the US--it is way worse in the old country!

Philosophy departments are now an endangered species.  History and English are rapidly shedding their faculty.

While pushing science and technology, we forget that "science and technology aim to assist humans."  Yet, we do not want to understand humanity?  We ignore that "interface between humans and advanced technologies is a frontier where the humanistic perspective is indispensable"?

The author, who chairs the astronomy department at Harvard, writes that "the future belongs to the incorporation of liberal arts into science and technology."

A few contexts immediately come to mind. First and foremost, the study of ethics. There are major ethical questions regarding genetic engineering: Which revisions to the genetic making of humans should be engineered? Should we design the qualities of people that we wish society to have?

Yep.  Recall the oped that I referred to?

Or, how about this from the author:

Another area involves the implications of big data sets: How can we employ the vast information that is collected daily on people, and analyze it for the benefit of psychology and social science? Can we use these data to construct computer-based models that would forecast human behavior to guide policies or political decisions?

Recall all my posts on Facebook and algorithms and big data, thanks to which I even deleted my Facebook account a while ago?

Or, hey this one:

There are also existential questions about the purpose of human life: Will robots and AI replace human labor across the board from construction sites to scientific research? How will future economies adjust to a new reality in which humans have less to do? Will humans take a permanent “vacation”, and if so, what will the meaning of their life be if their dignity is not associated with mandatory labor?

The number of posts where I have worried about robots and what it means to be human!

Yet, inquiring into what it means to be human is not a major part of higher education.  Not even an afterthought.  What a shame!

Money, sex, and entertainment ... today's American university!

In an email to my colleagues, in which I shared with them an informative video, I wrote:

People pushing STEM while systematically marginalizing the humanities and the social sciences need to understand such a big picture, which is what the idea of liberal education is all about.  If any of you want to share this video with the institution's STEM-pushers, feel free; I have long given up on them.

I then wonder why I don't make friends ;)

Apparently there is one set of higher educational institutions where the humanities and the social sciences are alive and well. No, not the Ivy Leagues and other private elites.  There, the best and the brightest are feverishly in the pursuit of fame and fortune via Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

So, where are the humanities and the social sciences prospering?

I’ve only found one large class of schools where humanities enrollments have held steady: historically black colleges and universities.

Apparently most of the rest of us do not care about "crafting a philosophy of life."

 In 1970, seven in 10 students thought it was very important or essential to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life” through education, while about four in 10 (and five in 10 men) put a priority on using it to “make more money.” By the mid-’80s, these ratios had flipped. Of all the statistics on the humanities I’ve seen, I find this one the most depressing: For the past 40 years, the percentage of first-year college students who think highly enough of crafting a life philosophy in the course of their studies to muster the energy to fill out a bubble indicating as much has flatlined below half. It’s little wonder that so few major in the liberal arts in the end.

Across the board, there has been an ever increasing interest, a passion, a commitment, to one part of higher education: Athletics--football, in particular!  No scandal shall ever stop this deep-commitment.

Most of the big-time football schools are public--yes, taxpayer funded--like the U of Alabama, Ohio State U, ... an endless list. Many of them still referred to as land-grant institutions:

Each of these universities is a land-grant institution, established by the Morrill Act of 1862, which was sponsored by Vermont Senator Justin Morrill and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. Their guiding vision was to offer the highest quality of teaching, research, and service to communities across the country. These institutions have given our nation the greatest public-university system in the world.

Good ol' Abe will be shocked at how these institutions that he helped found have now become altars for entertainment, where coaches earn gazillion dollars, and scantily-clad women cheer the men on the field!

Do we have to then wonder how we ended up with this presidency, when even institutions that supposedly are about learning couldn't care a shit about life and truth?

Doctor of humanity

A few years ago, a physician, who is a few years older than me, mentioned during a conversation that his four years of undergraduate studies were a waste, and that he could have directly gone to medical school.  He was especially critical of the general education that he was compelled to take.

I was his house-guest. The protocols required me to stay away from picking a fight with the host.  And that is what I did.

We rarely ask ourselves what makes a good doctor.  Of course, we want them to know the tools of the trade, so to speak.  We want doctors to be knowledgeable, just like we would want any professional to be.  But, is it merely about the technical proficiency?  If so, why should we require the 18-year old coming to college with plans to become a doctor to take philosophy and religion classes, among other such "waste"?

medical students who are exposed to the humanities demonstrate higher levels of positive skills and qualities such as empathy, tolerance for ambiguity, wisdom, emotional appraisal, self-efficacy, and spatial reasoning—all important in being a competent, good doctor.
The same study found that humanities exposure is inversely correlated with negative qualities that can be detrimental to physician well-being, such as intolerance to ambiguity, physical fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and cognitive weariness.
Humanities majors may be more likely to pursue residencies in primary care and psychiatry—both areas where there is tremendous need.
Humanities exposure can arguably benefit patients by making better doctors and it may also be beneficial for the individual physician.

There's quite a bit to being a good doctor, eh!

Humanities exposure can arguably benefit patients by making better doctors and it may also be beneficial for the individual physician.
In this era of increasing dissatisfaction within the medical profession, a doctor also needs the tools to develop and nurture her own humanity so that she can continue her work, healthy in mind and body. Patients deserve a doctor who is thoughtful, professional, compassionate, understanding, humble, collaborative, wise, and knowledgeable. And while there are many factors in the development of a physician, humanities education is one important avenue toward making better doctors.

Ah, yes, but we need more welders than philosophers, right? Shut down those philosophy departments!

Do unto others ...

Over the years, I have read plenty of trashy, potboiler, fiction.  I have also read a number of serious works of literature. The past few summers even included syllabi that I carefully constructed (FYI: The 2016, and 2015 lists)

Over the years, the potboiler fiction and cheap movies have pretty much disappeared from my radar.  As I have often remarked in this blog, reading great works of literature, and watching movies that are about the human condition, help me with trying to understand the "other," which is pretty much everybody other than me.  In the process, I begin to understand myself too.

I have also blogged often that my intuitive, personal-observation-based, view is that despite the fact that we are more educated than ever before, we are reading less of literature. I routinely poll  students in my classes about a few classics that I expect to appeal to young readers in particular (like Fahrenheit 451) and the response is always discouraging.  For that matter, even my faculty colleagues seem to be unfamiliar and uninterested in some of the great works.  Yet,  these very faculty can be all high and mighty defending the value of the humanities.  WTF, right?

Many humanists have difficulty in presenting their case because they are used to speaking one way among themselves and another way to outsiders. To the public at large, they still make statements about the value of great books, of the noblest things said by the most brilliant minds and of the need to know the Western heritage. Among themselves, such talk is, at best, hopelessly dated. Perhaps one reason literary scholars make an unconvincing case to outsiders is that they do not believe it themselves.
Students often come to college without having any grasp of what reading great works entails. Their AP and other exams test knowledge of facts about literature, not actually understanding it. Classes teach them to hunt for symbols, to judge writers according to current values, or to treat masterpieces as mere documents of their times. The first method makes reading into a form of puzzle solving, the second allows us to compliment ourselves on our advanced views, and the third misses the point that great literature speaks outside the context of its origin. Tolstoy is not great because he tells us about czarist Russia or the Napoleonic wars.

How unfortunate!

Here’s an alternative approach: Why not approach great literature as a source of wisdom that cannot be obtained, or obtained so well, elsewhere?

Exactly!  This is exactly what I have been talking about, and practicing, for years now.

And great writers present ethical questions with a richness and depth that make other treatments look schematic and simplistic.Moreover, great literature, experienced and taught the right way, involves practice in empathy. When we read a great novel, we identify with the heroine. We put ourselves in her place, feel her difficulties from within, regret her bad choices. Momentarily, they become our bad choices. Even when we do not like her, we may wince, suffer, put the book down for a while. The process of identification, feeling and examination of feeling may happen not just once but, in the course of a long novel, thousands of times. No set of doctrines is as important for ethical behavior as this constant practice in ethical thought or that direct sensation, felt over and over again, of being in the other person’s place.
The most important lesson novels teach is not a fact or a message but the skill of empathy and of seeing the world from other points of view. Practiced often enough, that skill can become a habit.

Seriously, isn't it tragic that these are not self-evident, and that the president of Northwestern University and his faculty colleague there have to write a commentary to remind higher education professionals about these?

Empathy does not come easily to us.  We need to learn about it, and experience it over and over.  We learn and experience empathy through the profound works of literature.  I still remember feeling devastated after reading A farewell to arms.  As I noted in a post:

Felt so empty inside when it ended that I had to wait out a couple of days before blogging this.
Hemingway simply sucked everything out of me with the anti-war story where the American protagonist signs up to serve in the medical corps of the Italian army in order to fight the good war, ends up deserting that only to have the military come after him because of his AWOL status as an officer, flees to neutral Switzerland with his British "wife" who is pregnant ... and then Hemingway lets the wife die after a difficult birth of a stillborn child. That is simply too cruel!

Empathy, dear reader, for this fictional character leads to empathy for the real ones in the real world.

What could be more important, for ethical and social understanding, than the ability to grasp what it is like to be someone from a different culture, period, social class, gender, religion or personality type? And one learns why even those broad categories won’t do, because one senses what it is like to be a particular other person. And that, too, is an important lesson: no one experiences the world in quite the same way as anyone else.
If we could more easily put ourselves in the position of others and put on a set of glasses to see the world in their way, we might very well, when those glasses are off, still not share their beliefs. But we will at least understand people better, negotiate with them more effectively, or guess what measures are likely to work. Just as important, we will have enlarged our sense of what it is to be human. No longer imprisoned in our own culture and moment, or mistaking our local and current values for only possible ones, we will recognize our beliefs as one of many possibilities -- not as something inevitable, but as a choice.

Indeed.

What is higher education for?

I have blogged in plenty about how when I was a high school student, an overwhelming majority of students aimed for engineering or medicine.  Even though I never really had any dreams of engineering, I too went that route because I did not know any better as a seventeen year old.

People in India then, and in many developing countries even now, have this obsession with engineering and medicine for very good reasons--they seem to provide a higher probability of jobs and income compared to other routes.  And,  perhaps even a path out of the country should one choose to leave.

As one who has always been interested in understanding the humanity, I schemed and planned to make my exit from engineering and from the country too.  But, the young and idealistic commie in me could have been easily misled into less constructive paths; thankfully, I have never believed in violence.  

Soon after the events of 9/11, and with incidents thereafter, it was interesting to see that many of the agents of destruction had been well educated and, yes, with a technology background.  That set of issues is the context for this essay, which begins with:

In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad hoped to kill dozens of pedestrians when he parked his Nissan Pathfinder near Times Square, loaded with improvised bombs. Four months earlier, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight carrying 289 passengers by igniting explosives sewn into his underwear. Last year, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire on two military facilities in Tennessee, killing five soldiers.
Like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Azahari Husin, and Mohamed Atta, these men sought to commit acts of terror in the name of Islam.
But all six also shared something else. They had studied engineering.
Researchers have long noticed that an oddly large number of jihadists have engineering backgrounds. 

To which we need to also add Osama bin Laden, who graduated with a degree in civil engineering.  (His fellow brain, Zawahiri, was a medical graduate--a surgeon.)  It does not mean that engineering breeds terrorists.  It is simply a reflection of the fact that many of the thinking young in developing countries study engineering.    

My interest in this post is not to explore terrorism, but about one of the threads in that essay:

Donna M. Riley, a professor in the department of engineering education at Virginia Tech, thinks that traditional programs not only attract certain kinds of minds but also reinforce positivist patterns of thinking. General-education courses are intended to broaden students’ perspectives, but those requirements are increasingly being narrowed. And she worries that the less exposure that nascent engineers have to the humanities and social sciences, the less they will be able to appreciate other people’s perspectives. As it is, she says, "engineers spend almost all their time with the same set of epistemological rules."
Gambetta and Hertog describe how traditional engineering programs might inadvertently spur the kind of loss of significance that Kruglanski describes. "Engineering curricula anywhere are a giant showcase of Western technological achievements," they write. In developing countries, such triumphalism carries an edge of humiliation: "They throw the economic backwardness of local societies into sharp relief."

The engineering program that I did was no different from programs at other colleges back then (which is the case even now)--we had no contextualization of engineering against the background of the humanities and the social sciences.  There was not even one course that made us think about what we could contribute to society through engineering.  It was simply engineering for the sake of engineering, which then threw "the economic backwardness of local societies into sharp relief."  To most engineering students this backwardness becomes an incentive for their own material progress.  But, for me, this contrast was unbearable.  I had to understand the reasons for the relative backwardness.  I needed to understand the world.

Contemporary engineering education in the United States is also increasingly about engineering for the sake of engineering, which has serious social implications of a different kind:

Engineering curricula in the United States may unintentionally close minds, too, according to a 2014 study by Erin A. Cech, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University. Cech, who earned undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and sociology, analyzed survey responses by 326 students in four engineering programs. Between their freshman year and graduation, their self-reported answers showed drops in measures of public-mindedness, including a commitment to professional and ethical responsibilities and a social consciousness.
The discipline’s culture and curricula emphasize "an ideology of depoliticization," she argues, which treats nontechnical factors as irrelevant to the work of "real" engineering. The notion of meritocracy also runs through the discipline, she writes, but this ideal tends to accept existing social structures and relationships as inherently fair. "Engineering education," Cech writes, "fosters a culture of disengagement that defines public welfare concerns as tangential to what it means to practice engineering."

Meritocracy run amok is the story of contemporary Silicon Valley.  Public welfare?  Social consciousness?

If only higher education could help us think about issues that are much bigger, and more important, than our selves!

The question is more important than the answer

As much as I was effortlessly earning the high grades in math and science--high marks, as it was referred to in the old country--I knew even during my high school days that my career would not be in anything related to science and technology. I knew there was something missing, but I did not know what it was.

Decades have passed since those angst-filled days and months of what I wanted to do.  I am now one of the lucky few on this planet who does what truly interests me and I get paid for it!  Yet, I doubt that I could have clearly articulated in a couple of sentences like the following from Alan Lightman:

At any moment in time, every scientist is working on, or attempting to work on, a well-posed problem, a question with a definite answer. We scientists are taught from an early stage of our apprenticeship not to waste time on questions that do not have clear and definite answers.
But artists and humanists often don’t care what the answer is because definite answers don’t exist to all interesting and important questions. Ideas in a novel or emotion in a symphony are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. … For many artists and humanists, the question is more important than the answer.

 It is that wonderful ambiguity of life, of humanity, of this world, that has always fascinated me.  Even in this fascination, I am not at all keen about the answer. Instead, I just want to be breathe and drink and eat this ambiguity.

No wonder then that even with the courses I teach, I seem to always force students to think about the possible multiple interpretations. I even tell them sometimes not to expect a definitive answer from me.  I suppose my pedagogical goal, if I were to think about it that way, is that if I can help students understand that life itself is all about dealing with ambiguity, then they will know how to deal with specific instances whatever they might be.

So, yes, the questions themselves are immensely more exciting than to figure out what the answers are because, after all, the answers are what we end up trusting to be the answers.  We love somebody more than we do any other person because ...?  We love a certain music more than other types of music because ...?  Or the god we prefer. Or the place we prefer. There is simply no single answer, right?  You come up with your own answers, fully aware that you chose one answer out of a gazillion.  How fascinating!

More from Lightman:

We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.” We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing.

My greatest concern and worry, from my pedagogical perspective, is that despite the high levels of literacy that humanity has achieved, there appears to be a decreasing interest in exploring and understanding and discussing the ambiguity that life is.   The humanities, as we refer to them in the academic world, are increasingly marginalized, in favor of intellectual inquiries that drive towards definitive answers.  And then the academics themselves are making the situation even worse by offering courses that have very little, if any, for students to contemplate on, writes the ever blunt Heather Mac Donald:

Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. ...
Today’s professoriate claims to be interested in “difference,” or, to use an even more up-to-date term, “alterity.” But this is a fraud. The contemporary academic seeks only to confirm his own worldview and the political imperatives of the moment in whatever he studies. 

I recall one student who angrily asked me, back when I was the director of the Honors Program, why he had to read some dead people's philosophical works from centuries ago, and why we compel students to take such courses.  Contemporary higher education legitimizes such grievances from students, who are the customers who bring in the money, and then offers courses where students can supposedly understand the ambiguity that life is by watching contemporary movies!

Heather Mac Donald puts it well:

We have bestowed on the faculty the best job in the world: freed from the pressures of economic competition, professors are actually paid to spend their days wandering among the most sublime creations of mankind. All we ask of them in return is that they sell their wares to ignorant undergraduates. Every fall, insistent voices should rise from the faculty lounges and academic departments saying: here is greatness, and this is your best opportunity to absorb it. Here is Aeschylus, whose hypnotic choruses bear witness to dark forces more unsettling than you can yet fathom. Here is Mark Twain, Hapsburg Vienna, and the Saint Matthew Passion. Here is the drama of Western civilization, out of whose constantly battling ideas there emerged unprecedented individual freedom and unimagined scientific progress.
Instead, the professoriate is tongue-tied when it comes to promoting the wonders of its patrimony. These privileged cowards can’t even summon the guts to prescribe the course work that every student must complete in order to be considered educated. Need it be said? Students don’t know anything. That’s why they’re in college, and they certainly don’t know enough to select courses that will give them the rudiments of culture. The transcripts that result from the professoriate’s abdication of its intellectual responsibility are not a pretty sight, featuring as many movie and video courses as a student can stuff into each semester. 

Her clearly articulated sentences, and the reference to Mark Twain, remind me about this that I read earlier today:

As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Maybe I should end this post, which is already way too long, with another set of wonderfully chosen right words, which together further drive home the point about the ambiguity of life. Here is a poem by Oregon's own William Stafford, whose birth centenary was the front page story of our local paper:

The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

A winter evening in my part of the world

Who am I?

"Are you an organ donor?" she asked as a part of the intake processing at the doctor's office.

"Yes, of course."

But then I could not let go of that softball that was simply asking for trouble.

"Wait, did you say 'organ donor' or 'Oregon donor'?"

Haha!

Indeed, I have identified myself as an organ donor for quite some years now.  Well, as in they can harvest whatever they want when I am dying, or after my death. Not now, please!

As much as I am at ease with organ donation, I have never been sure how that fits into an overall understanding of what it is to be human.  I am not a mere sum total of my organs. We are all more than the mere sum of the parts.  If organs and even blood are treated nearly like how parts are replaced in a car, then are we really ok with such a conceptualization of humans with interchangeable components?

What if there are others who differ from such a take on organs and blood?  What if their understanding of what it is to be human means, for instance, even refusing blood transfusion?

While I have always been convinced about my atheistic framework and the carbon and nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen and everything else that wonderfully come together to create a human body, there remains that emotional side of me that feels such a description to be prosaic.

Yes, intellectually I get it that there is a great deal of poetry in this.  The aesthetics of it all that Richard Feynman so clearly and beautifully presented:

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

The flower is also a metaphor here--Feynman's thoughts on the flower can equally be applied to the human.  There are organs and cells and the complicated actions and a beauty.  Intellectually, I get it.  I don't have any problems with that formulation at all.  But, ...

In many contexts, without getting onto any soapbox, I routinely tell students that as we move forward, it will become more and more important to develop an understanding of what it means to be human.  I remind them that it is all the more important to take courses in the humanities and the social sciences.  But then they, too, are consistent with others who find life to be better if they did not pay any attention to what I have to say!

I have always had enormous sympathies for those who protest abortion, or stem cell research, or fertility treatments.  While the protesters might not always phrase their concerns as their struggles with what it means to be human, that is essentially what they are fighting about.  Of course, it is farcical when the protests become delusional about the scientific understanding.  But, deep down, it is a struggle about articulating an understanding of what it is to be human.  I suspect that most of us have our own concerns and worries on this issue, and I so wish that we could talk about our respective formulations without becoming unhinged and, even worse, resorting to attacking the person.

The story of humans on this planet has also been one of constantly modifying the narratives we have had on what it means to be human.  I wonder what our ancestors in Africa thought about about this soon after they invented language to think and communicate.  Whatever their version was, well, we have a completely different take on that question.  Our answers will continue to change into the future as we struggle to discover the answer.

My only disappointment is that I will never get to know the answer.

What does it mean to be human?

The introductory class that I am teaching this term made me wonder and question, yet again, what exactly higher education is about.  

I have noticed over the past couple of years that students get a lot more focused when we discuss the economic rationale behind why anything that can be outsourced will be outsourced, and why activities that can be automated will be automated.  It is understandable--students immediately see the link between the concepts and their own lives and futures.

From the back row, a student’s hand went up.  "If robots do our work, then what happens to finding our purpose in life through work?  What about human interactions?"  Her voice seemed laden with emotions.

When it comes to such questions on what it means to be human, students know what my answer will be.  With a smile, I remind them that those questions are beyond the scope of the course in economic geography, and that I hope they would  take courses in the humanities and the social sciences to understand such important issues.

Technological advancements, which are difficult to keep up with anymore, will raise challenging questions on what it means to be human.  Even now, most public policy questions that we are grappling with are all variations of that very question.  The examples are endless and include abortion, healthcare, social security, unemployment benefits, and war. Technological advancements will only further muddy the issues.

Our responses to each and every one of the public policy issues depend on our own constructs of what it means to be human, and what it means to belong to a society and to a country.  Above all, what it means to be one of the more than seven billion humans on this wonderful planet.

One would imagine that education, especially at a level beyond high school, would prepare adults for such inquiries.  Unfortunately, that is rarely the case, for at least two important reasons.

The first is the simplistic formulation that higher education is about economic betterment.  Hence, for instance, all the rah-rah for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and professional-sounding majors.  This is flawed for a number of reasons, especially when we think about the fact that these jobs are subject to those same outsourcing and automation dynamics. I should note in this context that my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering.

The second reason that students do not get to systematically think about these questions is because colleges and universities have practically abandoned those in their curricular offerings.  On their part, students typically treat the humanities and social science requirements of a liberal education to be nothing more than items on a checklist to be completed on their way to getting the diploma.  In order to attract the uninterested students, academia has gone after making courses “attractive” to them. My favorite, of the ones I have come across in the news, is a course on Lady Gaga.  It will require quite some effort on a student's part to use that course as a vehicle to understand what it means to be human!

The result is that I doubt whether students will really have enough structured opportunities to think through the kind of important questions that the student raised.  If this is how we "educate" students and prepare them for the rest of their lives that begin with Commencement, then what have we really accomplished?

So, you want to do a PhD in what? Humanities? NO!

Well, equally applicable for many, many fields ...

More on the ponzi scheme, er, graduate school!

Even if students did want to know, job-placement information would be hard to get. Most academic departments in the arts and sciences at universities nationwide don't share those data with students, because they don't keep close track of their Ph.D. graduates. Since prospective students don't demand it, departments don't collect it. And in this vacuum, some departments say they are reluctant to be the first to put their records out there, because they don't know how they would compare. The National Research Council wanted to use job-placement data in its latest rankings of doctoral programs but abandoned the idea when it realized universities didn't have the numbers.
...
"Program by program, the placement data provided over the last couple of years have been pretty pathetic," says Peter Conn, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a former interim provost there. "It is not in the graduate faculty's interest to advertise the very, very mediocre results we have been having in Ph.D. programs, particularly as opposed to professional schools. Faculty like teaching graduate students more than they like teaching undergraduates, and graduate students provide them with participants for their seminar classes."

That sentence about faculty preferring to teach graduate students more than undergrads is one hell of an understatement in the report from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  That preference, and a "status" that goes with grad programs, is also why even our university has grad programs in a few fields.  It is a shame that we continue with such schemes :(

And how about this:

Even academic departments that are ahead of the curve in providing information do not always disclose everything that prospective students might want to know. Because it doesn't want to embarrass anyone, Michigan's English department does not publish information about graduates who don't get jobs. And, like most academic departments, it doesn't say how many students drop out before earning their Ph.D.'s.

Ah, yes, higher education is all about the pursuit of truth!

"A bleak market" for prospective academics

Consider the following summary of the employment prospects for recent PhDs, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, looking for academic jobs:

1. There are hardly any full-time, tenure-track jobs out there for humanities Ph.D.s (not to mention those in other disciplines)
2. Loads of new graduates are champing at the bit to try their hand on the academic job market
3. Competition for faculty job openings is at an all-time high, and part-time gigs are often just as competitive
4. Publications, even single-authored books, offer no guarantee of entry-level, tenure-track employment
5. Faculty salaries suck

Responding to such a market scenario, one would then expect:

1. Departments would dramatically reduce their intake of graduate students
2. Students would stop applying in huge numbers to graduate programs in these fields.

In the real world, apparently neither one happens.

Do the departments have any kind of a caveat emptor statement at least to warn prospective students?

I checked with the so-called flagship university in our system.  The History Department has nothing of that sorts.  Perhaps in the Geography program, you say?  Nope.  How about Philosophy?  Yes, there is even a placement success table, but it does have misleading information.  For instance, the Philosophy Department boasts of having placed students even at Yale; it turns out that the one and only listing for placement at Yale was as an instructor there.  Not any tenure-track placement.  Philosophers, too, not caring much for truth?

Oh well ...

Liberal education under (economic) attack ...

My undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, but since then my academic life has been tilting far away from "applied science" with immense practical utility to the fascinating liberal arts, whose utility is not immediately calculable.

So, I can truly appreciate the news that liberal education might go through a serious transformation as a result of this Great Recession.   Newsweek has gone one step more (or maybe a few steps?) and titled the article ..."The Death of Liberal Arts" ... Well, the usage of "death" is probably hasty, and reminds me of Mark Twain's quip on reports of his death having been exaggerated.

But, yes, there will be immense consequences for the liberal arts.  For a while now I have blogged about the crisis in the humanities , higher education, and the falling value of the college degree.  If any of my colleagues were willing to listen to me (editor: there are colleagues who talk to you? hmmm!) I have bugged them about how we need to be on the leading edge to reform liberal education from within.  But, as I often joke around, even my dog never listened to me, so why should people, eh! :)
 
Over at the Chronicle, debates and discussions have picked up quite some pace over the state of the Humanities--including in the recent issue.  And, yes, I have blogged about many of them, too, including the essays by Thomas Benton ... This essay by Benton set off quite a raging debate ...  Martha Nussbaum jumped in with her own take on how liberal education is not elitist.

Yes, we are at those metaphorical crossroads.  I am glad that the Newsweek essay ends on a constructive note:

regardless of where students chose to go to school, they still need to get good grades, network, and complete goal-specific internships. "If you don't know that in advance and you major in philosophy, you're in major trouble," says Ceniza-Levine. "You can be Harvard philosophy major, but you'd better have worked at a bank during the summer."
While the tradition of the liberal-arts education may be on the wane nationwide, the most elite schools, such as Harvard, Swarthmore, Middlebury, and Williams, remain committed to its ideal. These top schools are not tweaking their curriculums to add any pre-professional undergraduate programs. Thanks to their hefty endowments, they don't have to. As the economy rebounds, their students, ironically, may be in the best spot. While studying the humanities has become unfashionable and seemingly impractical, the liberal arts also teaches students to think big thoughts—big enough to see beyond specific college majors and adapt to the broader job market.

May we live in interesting times, indeed.

Stay away from grad programs in the humanities ... and social sciences too

As always, Thomas Benton (William Pannapacker) has wise words to offer in his Chronicle column:

I can only identify a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities:

• You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.
• You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.
• You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.
• You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.

Those are the only people who can safely undertake doctoral education in the humanities. Everyone else who does so is taking an enormous personal risk, the full consequences of which they cannot assess because they do not understand how the academic-labor system works and will not listen to people who try to tell them.

Here are some more posts from the past related to graduate school--yes, very discouraging, I know :(

The season changes: Autumn

The moon was sinking over the hills, the air was crystal clear, the wind was cool, and the songs of the insects among the autumn grasses would by themselves have brought tears.

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (1010). While a lady in attendance at the Japanese court, Murasaki wrote what is widely considered to be the first novel. The work was unusual for its time, not only because it was written by a woman, but also because it was written in Japanese (Chinese was the lingua franca of the Japanese court) and in prose. The beauty of nature is a prominent theme of the story, which recounts the life of Genji, a handsome courtier, and the women he loved.

 More here on The Violins of Autumn
HT

Faculty life and work :-) Critical times ....

I bet this piece in the Chronicle will draw rapid fire. I loved it; of course, eh! The contrarian that I am!!! Here are a few excerpts:

[C]are about students. And I mean really care. Talk to them like human beings. Give them your best. Be well prepared for and coherent in class. Write letters of recommendation for them. If you do all of that, you're standing head and shoulders above most tenured professors, at least most of the ones I know. Students are your clients, your bread and butter. Many tenured literature professors may say, "How can you claim to care about students if you're teaching eight classes or so a semester?" Well, surgeons and lawyers achieve excellence in their professions by doing a lot of work in their field. It's the same thing for English teachers. You get better at what you do a lot of. ....

[R]emember that literary studies is ultimately a derivative and service-oriented discipline. Fiction writers and poets perform the real work. Always have, always will. Literary studies is not similar to computer science or physics, where people teaching in their subject areas actually "do" the content. Occasionally, of course, people in English departments produce scholarly works approaching the status of art itself. I can think of three or four people in the humanities in the last 40 years who produced that kind of work: Paul Fussell, William Gass, Russell Jacoby, and James Kincaid. Those stylists are the true descendants of people like H.L. Mencken, who realized that criticism can be art. But that's four out of hundreds of thousands of people. Most of the rest of the work is taxonomy and politically driven commentary — pretty derivative stuff. The work of literary studies is teaching writing skills and other people's books. If you really want to innovate, don't read continental philosophy for hours on end and produce incomprehensible articles. Fire up the word processor and create your own fictional vision of the world. ....

BTW, did you read the NY Times piece on the humanities? Here is an excerpt from that one:

“Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.

With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. Technology executives, researchers and business leaders argue that producing enough trained engineers and scientists is essential to America’s economic vitality, national defense and health care. Some of the staunchest humanities advocates, however, admit that they have failed to make their case effectively.

This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, “what it means to be a human being.

Do the "humanities" serve any purpose at all?

Yes they do.
But, if taught and learnt with a certain approach. Certainly not the way we torture students with the humanities now. If I were an undergrad, I would hate taking anything in the humanities! Why? Because, the focus has shifted from helping students comprehend the world and understanding their own individuality and individual place in this world, to some horribly rotten dumbed down version of doctoral topics so that professors can then pretend to be ultra-smart in the eyes of students. No wonder then students are left wondering why there is a focus on some strange abstraction and theory when all they want is to "get the gen.ed. out of the way." So, that is what we have at the end of the undergrad experience: that the humanities are to most students something to endure if they want to get a college degree.

That is not how it ought to be. I found so much of valuable insights into what it means to be human from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Dickens, Narayan, Saroyan, Maugham, ..... I am so glad I read them and reflected on them on my own time and not in a choking classroom environment. The Grand Inquisitor by itself was a profound experience. I am willing to bet that most humanities departments rarely guide students towards the Grand Inquisitor.

The trigger for these thoughts came while reading this essay in Wilson Quarterly. In it, I liked this part the best (I don't agreee with everything in that essay):
[Many] of those who speak for the humanities, especially within the organized scholarly disciplines (history, English, and the like), have not quite acknowledged the nature of the problem. The humanities reached unprecedented heights of prestige and funding in the post–World War II era. But their advocates can only dream of such status today. Now the humanities have become the Ottoman Empire of the academy, a sprawling, incoherent, and steadily declining congeries of disparate communities, each formed around one or another credal principle of ideology and identity, and each with its own complement of local sultans, khedives, and potentates. And the empire steadily erodes, as colleges and universities eliminate such core humanities departments as classics (or, at the University of Southern California, German), and enrollment figures for humanities courses continue to fall or stagnate.