I will soon be teaching a math course. Kind of.

Looking back at events from nearly thirty years ago, I am pleasantly surprised at the decisions that I made.  One of those was to walk away from all things math, and I am all the happier.

Math came easily to me; not only did I not have anxieties, I enjoyed learning and doing math.  In school, I routinely did the classwork way ahead of the rest and then used up the remaining time to finish the assigned homework. (Which explains why my mother claims, and rightfully so, that she has never ever seen me do homework or study.)  I understood  the abstraction when in engineering too, though by then I knew for certain that my heart was not in math.

When I switched out of engineering to study the subjects that I wanted to know more about, it was clear that most faculty in the graduate program expected me to put my math and engineering background to use.  The social sciences were getting heavily into math and statistics and those who could play with numbers had an easier time publishing papers, which was all that mattered.

But, I couldn't care.  Because, I could not be convinced that mathematical and statistical modeling would explain the human and social dynamics that I was interested in and, I was even more confident that those models could never predict anything into the future.  Instead, I chose to transition into the methods that have been used for centuries--thinking and writing.  It was a difficult struggle because the years of schooling in India had screwed up my thinking abilities and had not given me any sense of how to write.

I even made fun of the articles in journals.  They were all gobbledygook.  Plenty of data but minutiae. Greek symbols expressing statistical modeling of social issues.  And sentences that rarely made sense.

As if a bunch of laws can explain quite a few things about the human condition.  The crazies who wanted to study the problems that humans and societies face decided to develop models to explain the problems.  And to develop laws and theories.  Madness, I say, madness!

The net result of all that?  I was a loser out of graduate school!  A loser I continue to be.  At least, I am a loser on my own terms, eh! ;)

Despite the losses, I am confident that all it will take is one look around the world in order to understand that developing mathematical and statistical models will do nothing to help us with the problems all around.  Oh well.  Losers don't get to write history! ;)

But, I will soon get to teach math to incoming college freshman students.  Details in another post; stay tuned!

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!

On the failure to understand the urgency of "what is it to be human?"

Last night, I got to watch Prometheus.  The movie is about that question that has dogged us forever: how did we humans get here?

It is by no means a simple question, and the answer(s) we accept then correspondingly influence even the most mundane aspects our lives.  For instance, pork is avoided by Jews and Muslims because of the narrative that is given as the answer to how we got here also tells them to void pork.  The Crusades were fought as a response to the clash of two narratives.  Even the atrocious caste system in India was/is be justified with yet another answer to the question of how we humans got here.

The rapid developments in our scientific understanding and technological capabilities might even make us look like gods to people who lived during the times when those old religious narratives were drafted.  The old movie cliche of a Westerner flicking a lighter and creating fire that impressed the cannibals who were preparing to cook him alive can now be replaced with any of us walking around with a smartphone that can do wonders that are beyond the wildest imaginations of the generations that preceded us.

The tremendous advancements in technology prompts us to further banish to the dark background any systematic inquiry into what it means to be human.  Formal schooling in the humanities and the social sciences are often considered to be wasteful spending.  In doing so, we don't seem to feel the importance, more than ever, of helping students and the general population inquire into and understand what it means to be human.

As much as religious narratives of how we got here provided people with rules on how to behave towards fellow-humans within the religious tribe and fellow-humans of other tribes, our modern day constructs of what it means to be human will then have its implications for our collective public policy responses.  Here in the US, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, spending on wars, education, illegal immigrants, ... all could potentially be viewed differently depending on how we define what it means to be human.  When we routinely rain bombs from drones and kill children and yet pay no attention to it, that action is itself a statement of how some humans are more important than other humans.  When we think it is important to prevent abortions but not important to provide support for children growing up in disadvantaged contexts, those public policies reveal a different interpretation of what it means to be human.  It is the same case with practically every single public policy.

Yet, not only are we neglecting the need to provide students with the ability to conduct such inquiries, we are also seemingly on the drive to further marginalize the humanities and the social sciences.

I was not keen on my undergraduate studies in electrical engineering, and did not care about pursuing that field as a career, because it didn't directly address the question of what it meant to be human and, therefore, how to respond to the human condition.  On top of that, science and technology has contributed--in a big way--to dehumanize humans.

I have always wondered whether the scientists and technologists who work on developing yet another fancy way to kill people, for instance, ever ask themselves whether they are doing good for humanity.  Perhaps they are no different from the lobbyist Nick Naylor in Thank you for smoking.  The libertarian in me does not want to tell others what they can or cannot do, yes.  But, the humanist in me wonders whether all the people, especially the educated ones, whose work generates nothing but harm for fellow-humans, ever clearly articulated for themselves answers to how we got here and what it means to be human.  

Like most atheists, I, too, find the question of how we got here and what it means to be human not only highly fascinating but also extremely challenging.  More so when I don't need any reminders on how mortal I am.  As Susan Jacoby says:

We have our time on this earth, we have to use it in the best possible way, because it is limited.

Within that limited time, wouldn't it be worth it to educate ourselves so that we can think about what it means to be human?

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!

Quote of the day: on why economics is not a science

anyone who sincerely believes that seemingly scientific, positive research in the sciences — especially the social sciences — is invariably free of the researcher’s own predilections is a Panglossian optimist.

That is from a fantastic commentary, with lots of links, by Professor Uwe Reinhardt on the dangers "When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science."
I wonder if those who ranted on because they were upset with an op-ed I wrote understand, to quote Reinhardt:

My advice to students and readers is: When you hear us economists wax eloquent on the virtue of greater efficiency — beware!

"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 ...

Guam tips over, and McCain is not a maverick ...

I think there is something in the water that many politicians are drinking these days.  It is old news that  the internet was described as a series of tubes, or that science itself is routinely debunked.  Now, they are on the social sciences too; Gail Collins summarizes some of the recent developments when she writes:

It’s been a tough time lately for those of us who take social studies seriously.

Examples?

The governor of Virginia has decided to bring slavery into his overview of the history of the Confederacy. Good news, or is this setting the bar a wee bit too low?
...
History took a hit in Texas, where the state Board of Education tried to demote Thomas Jefferson, presumably because of his enthusiasm for separation of church and state. This week, John McCain rewrote his own political biography, telling Newsweek: “I never considered myself a maverick.” And on the geography front, Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia took time during a recent Congressional hearing to express his concern that stationing additional Marines on Guam would make the island “so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

If you remotely thought that the Guam tipping over comment is an exaggeration, well, it is not.  Watch this absolutely surreal pontification by Johnson and, if you are like me, you will wonder how the admiral kept a straight face!