Academia

My conscious is worse than my unconscious

Michael Bérubé, International Professor of Danger, pimps out his upcoming collection Rhetorical Occasions by reproducing one of its essays as a blog post. The topic is well-known to any member of the professoriate: the academic anxiety dream. You show up to a class you are supposed to teach, but for some reason it’s not on the subject you thought it was going to be on, or you have completely neglected to prepare a lecture, or you have been reassigned to a classroom that looks like a castoff from the set of Brazil.

I was going to leave some smug comment to the effect that I never have such dreams, when it occured to me that I really shouldn’t, on the grounds that such a claim would not actually be “true.” Last quarter my travel schedule was even more hectic than usual; for an extended period I was flying out of Chicago at least once per week, sometimes twice. A couple of times I woke up early in a hotel room on the East Coast and zoomed to the airport, landing at O’Hare in time to make it to campus to teach my noon class. A couple of other times I went the other way, taking the red-eye from the West Coast. All in all quite hectic, and upon reflection I do remember one quite vivid anxiety dream during this period. The usual story: in the dream I kept thinking that I really should get around to the important task of actually preparing my lecture, but put it off, and suddenly there I was in front of the class. In fact, in the real world, it wouldn’t be such a big deal; at least once per term it’s a good idea to depart from the prepared text and have a free discussion about something related to the material but not formally part of the planned curriculum. Those are often the best classes.

However, I do have an unfortunate tendency to actually reproduce the conditions of the standard academic anxiety dream in real life. Not so much by being unprepared, but by sleeping right through some important event. (A habit which I take to be a sign of my innocence and inner peace.) It started as an undergraduate, when I woke up one day to find that I had completely slept through my E+M final. Fortunately, my professor was more worried about me than annoyed, and I made it up without incident. Then in grad school one of my apartment mates aroused me at noon one day after an all-nighter of general relativity and quantum field theory, to ask “Weren’t you supposed to be giving a lunchtime talk today?” Indeed I was, and I managed to run all the way to the department, showing up only twenty minutes late for my own seminar. I’m guessing that it was not the best talk I ever gave, but happily I have no actual recollection of what I said.

These days I am much better; I only sleep through events that are important for other people, like their thesis defenses (sorry about that, Tanya). On the other hand, as Michael says, why shouldn’t we be anxious about getting up in front of a bunch of smart people (youthful and inexperienced or otherwise) and attempting to teach them something? My very first assignment at the UofC was a graduate course on particle physics — something I know a bit about, but am certainly not the world’s expert. This was a useful experience, as I hit on a helpful philosophy right from the start: it’s not the professor explaining the material to the students, it’s the professor and the students engaging with the material together. In that case, it was “us against the particles,” and I think we acquitted ourselves just fine. And never once did I show up for class in my pajamas.

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It's good to hope

From Rate Your Students, via Ernie’s 3D Pancakes:

My classes are large, so I mostly use multiple-choice tests. One day, being one question short of a nice round number, I used this question: “The answer to this question is D. Be sure to mark D on your answer sheet.” The offered choices were: (A) This is the wrong answer. (B) This is the wrong answer. (C) This is the wrong answer. (D) This is the correct answer. Be sure to mark it on your answer sheet. (E) This is the wrong answer.

About 20% of the students got it wrong. One possibility is that they couldn’t read any English. Another is that they didn’t care. But one student had the courage to admit that he always marked B for every answer (true, that’s what he did) in hopes that all the answers were B.

One wonders how these students would have performed on Jim Harrick Jr.’s basketball exam?

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Think like an economist

I learn a lot from reading Brad DeLong or the economically-inclined folks at Crooked Timber, but I get special enjoyment from Marginal Revolution. (I’m actually not being sarcastic for once, in case it’s unclear.) Much like training in physics affects they way you view the physical world, training in economics affects the way you view — well, almost everything. All of life becomes an exercise in maximizing returns and minimizing costs, subject to constraints. Consider for example the Tennis Ball Problem.

How many tennis balls should you play with?

Let’s say you had many, many balls and you could open the cans for free and never run out. Opening a new can every four points (four balls fit in a can) would lead to a massive clean-up and carry problem at the end. Furthermore how much help is it having more balls? Once they hit the net you still have to deal with getting another ball into play. In other words, the real trick is to manage your stock well (read: aim for good volleys), not to just to speed up the flow of balls into the court.

Just one ball is not efficient, because when it falls out of play it is probably far from you. The greater the number of balls, the more likely at least one will be close.

Many problems in life, including those of dating, the number of children you should have, and optimal inventory management, resemble the tennis ball problem.

I do not know how to solve the tennis ball problem, but I feel that twelve balls is too many.

Those last two sentences just about sum it up, don’t they?

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Is this a date?

Question of the day: Highly-credentialed academics vs. nervous high-school students — is there a difference? The forums at the Chronicle of Higher Education erupt with excited controversy over whether coffee with a colleague is an innocent intellectual meeting, or rife with illicit romantic subtext. (I think it’s available to non-subscribers; let me know if not.)

Is this a date?
Author: Coffee drinker
Date: 01-18-06 11:32

I have been having great discussions with a man that is interested in the same research of which I am involved. After a flurry of emails, I (innocently, really!) suggested that we get together for coffee, which we are doing tomorrow. Today, I received an email from him telling me to “have a great day.” Nothing else in the email, just that sentiment. Is it possible that this man thinks that “coffee” is a euphemism for ______?

Full disclosure: We are both married.

Confession: He’s attractive.

I’m feeling a little panicky right now.

Men! They are so inscrutable sometimes. Who knows what this cryptic email is supposed to mean? The Chronicle’s readers bravely wade in.

Re: Is this a date?
Author: Prytania
Date: 01-18-06 11:38

It’s possibly innocent and possibly not–depending on how coffee goes. You know the answer to this.

Re: Is this a date?
Author: single gal
Date: 01-18-06 12:11

Yup–everything you described to me sounds EXACTLY like a date–the “have a nice day” e-mail is just the kind of thing men send when they are interested in you. It’s textbook.

I was happy for you up till the final part of the e-mail! Get out now.

just coffee
Author: missing Europe
Date: 01-18-06 12:52

Why can’t you people just go for coffee with someone who is pleasant company? What’s the problem?

What a wet blanket is this “missing Europe” person. Sure, it could just be coffee, but what fun is that?

Is it possible?
Author: brewhaha
Date: 01-18-06 12:54

I’ve been thinking of starting a new topic on a closely related question — IS IT POSSIBLE for people who share peculiar scholarly interests to work together closely without feeling turned on by each other’s company?

By “turn on” I don’t mean necessarily that sexual involvement is inevitable. Hardly. But I’ve noticed of late that a lot of people seem to have intellectual crushes on each other. I’m no exception. I’m wondering if it’s just human nature, then, that spending such time together with a member of the preferred sex makes romantic attraction (of whatever degree) inevitable.

I’m in Coffee Drinker’s shoes constantly — where the male colleague starts showing signs of extra-scholastic interest. For the most part, I keep my husband up to date on these developments and he has so far found them to be exceedingly amusing (maybe it makes him feel more macho that his wife is considered attractive by other men). I’ve also discussed this with a close friend/male colleague who has a similar problem — he says it’s because we both look people in the eye more than others (Americans) do, and so normal humans perceive it as flirting behavior, even though it’s not intended as such.

Coffee Drinker, tread carefully. A few months ago, I had a very bad experience with a senior colleague who apparently thought something was going on between us because of the awesome intellectual rapport of our conversations. (That I shared with my husband a blow-by-blow of each and every conversation didn’t make a difference).

I suppose the question we should try to answer is: WHAT CAN WE SAY OR DO, IN A NON-THREATENING COLLEGIAL WAY, TO NIP THIS IN THE BUD — that is, without coming across as mental (or vainglorious).

Whoa! “brewhaha” ups the ante, suggesting that it’s impossible for colleagues who share intellectual interests to work together without getting turned on. (For the record: brewhaha is not right. It’s perfectly possible to work with members of various genders without getting all distracted. But let’s run with it a bit.)

Re: Is this a date?
Author: ExPat in UK
Date: 01-18-06 13:46

Coffee drinker wrote:

> Today, I
> received an email from him telling me to “have a great day.”
> Nothing else in the email, just that sentiment. Is it possible
> that this man thinks that “coffee” is a euphemism for ______?

I’m totally confused… just where and when has ‘have a great day’ turned into ‘I want to suck your toes’

Finally, someone had the courage to put all of our thoughts into concrete imagery. Thanks for that, ExPat.

Re: Is this a date?
Author: single guy
Date: 01-18-06 14:16

“Yup–everything you described to me sounds EXACTLY like a date–the “have a nice day” e-mail is just the kind of thing men send when they are interested in you. It’s textbook.”

“single gal” knows men! she’s right–men don’t email women wishing them a good day if they have no interest. plus, you invited him for coffee–to a man (and we’re notoriously bad at reading signals) this says “ding, ding, ding, she likes me (in some way.)”

I so don’t believe that “single guy” is a single guy. Regardless, there is some truth there. It’s not so much that men are bad at reading signals — they just read them whether they are there or not.

Re: What?
Author: Varying degrees
Date: 01-18-06 14:47

It’s kinda fun to have these innocent meetings and conversations with the sexual tension bubbling beneath the surface. It’s a bit naughty while being completely innocent. The forbidden fruit is tempting. It’s nice to look at it, hold it, smell it, squeeze it, but oh no, I don’t dare taste it…oh but it would be so delicious. Alas, I cannot….

Well, we should stop here, as this is a family-friendly blog. There’s much more. Suffice it to say that “Coffee drinker,” while perhaps confused, hasn’t lost all perspective.

Re: What?
Author: Coffee drinker
Date: 01-18-06 14:49

Prytania wrote:

>
> She’s totally titillated by this experience but has no one to
> share it with for the obvious reasons.
>
> You know you are, OP. No judgements here.

Yeah, well, maybe. But not enough to shave my legs before I meet him.

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Education and expectations

Lauren at Feministe talks about being a single teenage mom, getting through college, and becoming a teacher herself. You should read it.

When I was student teaching this past semester, battling my Basic students’ resistance to the educational process, I finally asked my students why some of them hadn’t opted for that alternative school from which I secretly graduated. It was a more organic layout, just a few hours a day, individual work toward short-term goals. For those who needed a more structured day, it wasn’t an option. But the rest of them. The rest of them considered it a cop-out. This surprised me. I figured that many of them would be attracted to an easy way out with the same ends as attending eight hours of high school a day. I wondered what they would think of me if I dropped the teacherly facade and was honest about my high school experience.

At one point I raised the risk level and revealed that I had been no model student in high school, that I thought many of them had what it takes to get through a four-year college, especially if I could do so. They laughed at me, accusing me of being some goody-two-shoes that had no idea about the difficulties of their lives. I didn’t tell them about the teenage pregnancy, or the criminal record, or the drugs, or the stay in juvenile hall, or the two trips to rehab, the years in AA. Sure, I don’t know the poverty, but I do know the expectations of failure. What I did say was that I was not a model student, that I had a past that was comparable to their present, and that I was within weeks of my degree. You can do it, I said. Trust me.

A while ago Mark posted about the fact that physicists come from quite diverse backgrounds, but a supportive environment is a common thread. Like Mark, I didn’t grow up in a high-powered intellectual environment, although it was basically middle-class; most of my family worked for U.S. Steel, my father was the first person in his family to get a college degree (my mother never did), and my parents divorced before I entered first grade. Graduated from a large public high school, got through college and grad school on fellowships. But I did receive support from all over, which is crucial to believing enough in yourself to ever try something as impractical as becoming a professor of theoretical physics.

My friends at Project Exploration specialize in taking underprivileged children and turning them on to learning by getting them interested in science. Roughly speaking, none of the kids who work with them would have expected to attend college, and all of them eventually do. One of the stories I’ve heard Gabe Lyon tell is the reaction of a group of inner-city kids to taking a long train ride out to Montana to dig for dinosaurs. All sorts of things to be excited about — train, dinosaurs, field trip. But here’s what they can’t get over: stars in the sky! Not something their familiar with from their everyday lives in Chicago.

Nobody pops out of the womb in possession of a complete skill set appropriate to tackling life’s challenges. A lot of kids in our country grow up in environments where looking at the stars, literally and figuratively, is not encouraged. Here’s hoping we find new ways to convince them that they can do it.

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Unsolicited advice, 1: How to get into graduate school

Your humble bloggers here at Cosmic Variance have spent quite a bit of accumulated time in academic and research settings — in fact, my guess is that none of us have spent an entire year away from such a setting since the age of about six or so. That’s a lot of accumulated wisdom right there, and it’s about time we started sharing it. Since it’s that time of year when applications are being sent off to graduate schools, I thought I would start off by letting everyone in on the secret to how to get accepted everywhere you apply. Of course I can only speak for physics/astronomy departments, but the basic lessons should be widely applicable. [Update: see also Choosing a Graduate School and How to Be a Good Graduate Student.]

So, here goes: have great grades, perfect GRE scores, significant research experience, and off-scale letters of recommendation. Any questions?

If, perhaps, it’s a bit too late to put that plan into action, here are some personal answers to questions that come up during the process. Co-bloggers (and anyone else) are free to chime in with their own take on these complicated issues. Keep in mind that every person is different, as is every grad school — in fact, specific schools might behave quite differently from year to year as different people serve on the admissions committee. Don’t sink your sense of self-worth into how you do on these applications; there’s a strong random component in the decisions, and there are a very large number of good schools where you can have a fun and successful graduate career.

  • What do graduate school admissions committees look at?
    Everything. Keep in mind that, unlike being admitted to college (undergrad), at the grad school level the admissions are done by individual departments, with committees comprised of faculty members with different kinds of expertise, and often students as well. They’ll look at your whole application, and in my experience they really take the responsibility seriously, poring over a huge number of applications to make some hard decisions. Still, it’s well-known that careful examination of a thick file of papers is no substitute for five minutes of talking to someone, which schools usually don’t have the luxury of doing, so decisions are always somewhat fickle.
  • Even my personal essay?
    Well, okay. I wouldn’t sweat the personal essay; in my experience it doesn’t have too much impact. Let’s put it this way: an incredibly good essay could help you, but a bad essay won’t do too much harm (unless it’s really bad). To a good approximation, all these essays sound alike after a while; it’s quite difficult to be original and inspiring in that format.
  • Are GRE scores important?
    Yes. At least, in the following sense: while bad GRE’s won’t kill your chances, good GRE’s make it much easier to admit you. (We’re speaking of the Physics GRE, of course; the general tests are completely irrelevant.) It stands to reason: given two applicants from similar schools with similar grades and interests, there’s no reason for a department to choose the student with lower GRE scores. At the same time, you can certainly overcome sub-par GRE’s by being outstanding in other areas; this is particularly true for students who want to do experiment. I know at Chicago that we let in students with quite a range of scores.
  • What about research experience?
    Research can be a big help, although it’s by no means absolutely necessary. These days it seems that more and more undergrads are doing research, to the point where it begins to look unusual when people haven’t done any. There is some danger that people think you must want to keep on doing the kind of research that you did as an undergrad, although I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Mostly it shows some initiative and passion for the field. It can be very difficult to do theoretical research as an undergrad, but that’s okay; even if you eventually want to be a string theorist, it’s still great experience to do some experimental work as an undergrad (in fact, perhaps it’s especially useful).
  • How do I get good letters of recommendation?
    It’s more important to have letters from people who know you well than from people who are well-known themselves. One of the best side benefits of doing research is that you can get your supervisor (who hopefully has interacted with you quite a bit) to write letters for you. It’s really hard to write a good letter for a student who you only know because they took one class from you a year or two ago. Over the course of your undergrad career, you should find some way to strike up a personal relationship with one or more faculty members, if only to sit in their office now and then and ask some physics questions. Then they can write a much more personal and effective letter. Of course, if you are just a bad person who annoys everyone, it would be just as well to stay hidden. (Kidding!)
  • Is it true that the standards are different for theorists and experimenters?
    Typically, yes, although it might be different from place to place. Because a lot of undergrads haven’t been exposed to a wide range of physics research, a large number of them want to be Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking or Ed Witten. Which is great, since we need more people like that. But even more, we need really good experimenters. Generally the ratio of applicants to available slots is appreciably larger for theorists than for experimenters, and schools do take this into account. Also, of course, the standards are a little different: GRE’s count more for prospective theorists, and research experience counts more for prospective experimenters. And let’s be honest: many schools will accept more prospective theorists than they can possible find advisors for, in the hopes of steering them into experiment once they arrive.
  • So should I claim to be interested in experiment, even if I’m not?
    No. Think about it: given that schools already tend to accept more students who want to do theory than they can take care of, what are your chances of getting a good advisor if you sneak into a department under false pretenses and have to compete with others who came in with better preparation? It makes much more sense to go someplace where they really want you for who you are, and work hard to flourish once you get there.
  • Do I need to know exactly what I will specialize in?
    Not really, although in certain circumstances it can help. Professors like to know that someone is interested in their own area of research, and might push a little harder to accept someone whose interest overlaps with their work; on the other hand, most people understand that you don’t know everything after three and a half years of being an undergraduate, and it can take time to choose a specialization. In particular, at most American physics departments (unlike other countries and some other disciplines), it is generally not expected that you need to know ahead of time who your advisor will be when you arrive, or which “group” you will work in.
  • Should I contact faculty members individually if I’m interested in their research?
    That depends, mostly on whether the person you are contemplating contacting is desperate for more grad students, or is overwhelmed with too many requests as it is. In popular areas (ahem, like theoretical particle physics, string theory, and cosmology), there are generally more applicants than departments have advisors for. In that case, most people who receive random emails from undergraduates will just urge them to wait for the admissions process to take its course; remember that it’s a zero-sum game, and for everyone who gets in there’s someone else who doesn’t, and it would be a little unfair to penalize those applicants who didn’t contact faculty members personally. On the other hand, if you have reason to believe that someone you’re interested in working with is trying to get more students, or if you think your case is somehow unique and requires a bit of attention, feel free to email the appropriate faculty member with a polite inquiry. The worst that can happen is that you get a brush-off; I can’t imagine it would actually hurt your chances.
  • Is my life over if I don’t get into my top grad school?
    Yes. Well, only if you let it be. The truth is, how you do in grad school and beyond (including how you do on the postdoc and faculty job market) depends much more on you than it does on where you go to school. In the next episode of “unsolicited advice,” we’ll think about how to actually choose where to go, including how to get the most out of visiting different schools.

Actually this episode was not completely unsolicited; thanks to Philip Tanedo for suggesting we share some of our invaluable insight. See, sometimes we really do listen.

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Spacetime and black holes

As I type, the students in my Spacetime and Black Holes class are putting the finishing touches on their final exams. Unlike Clifford, I prefer to give take-home finals rather than in-class ones. Not a strong conviction, really; it’s just easier to think of interesting problems that can be worked out over a couple of hours than ones that can be done in half an hour or so. Here’s the final (pdf), if you’d like to take a whack at it. The colorful problem 4 was suggested by Ishai Ben-Dov, the TA; the terse calculational ones were mine.

This is one of my favorite classes to teach, and this quarter the group was especially lively and fun. It’s an undergraduate introduction to general relativity, using Jim Hartle’s book. (It’s okay, Jim uses my book when he teaches the graduate course.) GR is not a part of the undergrad curriculum at most places in the U.S., believe it or not. (There are plenty of grad schools that don’t offer it, and almost none where it is a requirement.) Here in the World Year of Physics, it’s astonishing that the huge majority of physics majors will get their bachelor’s degrees without knowing what a black hole is.

We didn’t have an undergrad GR course at Chicago until a few years ago, when I started it. To nobody’s surprise, it’s become quite popular. Each of the three times I’ve taught it, we’ve had over 40 students; this in a department with maybe 20-30 physics majors graduating each year. At one point I proposed an undergraduate course in classical field theory, which would have been a nice complement to the GR course. It would have covered Lagrangian field theory, symmetries and Noether’s theorem, four-vector fields, gauge invariance, elementary Lie groups, nonabelian symmetries, spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism, topological defects. If we were ambitious, perhaps fermions and the Dirac equation. But this was judged to be excessively vulgar (you shouldn’t teach classical field theory without teaching quantum field theory), so it was never offered.

The real trick with GR, of course, is covering the necessary mathematical background without completely losing the physical applications. Jim’s book does this by covering the geodesic equation (motion of free particles) and the Schwarzschild solution (the gravitational field around a spherical body) without worrying about tensors, covariant derivatives, the curvature tensor, or Einstein’s equation. It’s like doing Coulomb’s law for electrostatics before doing Maxwell’s equations — in other words, completely respectable. Personally, after studing Schwarzschild orbits and black holes, I zoom through the Riemann tensor and Einstein’s equation, just so they don’t think they’re missing anything.

And when the students pick up the final to spend the next 24 hours thinking about general relativity, I try to remind them: “Three months ago, you didn’t even know what any of these words meant.”

Update: replaced a nearly-unreadable pdf file for the exam with a much cleaner one.

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We are not alone

Brian Leiter points to a short essay by John Perry about his colleagues in philosophy, and excerpts this scene:

[A] thought about this wonderful and interesting group of people, my philosophical colleagues. I have a very distinct memory of arriving at the Eastern Meetings of the American Philosophical Association some years back, when they were held at a hotel in Baltimore. The meetings began just after a National Football League playoff game had been played in that city, and the previous occupants of the hotel seemed to be mainly people connected with this game. Since I was flying from the west coast, and had to attend some meeting or other in the early afternoon of the first day, I arrived the night before most of the other participants. I was able to watch the amazing transformation that took place as the football crowd checked out and the philosophy crowd checked in. The NFL people were large, some very large, most quite good-looking, confident, well-dressed, big-tipping, successful-looking folk; the epitome of what Americans should be, I suppose, according to the dominant ethos. We philosophers were mostly average-sized, mostly clearly identifiable as shabby pedagogues, clutching our luggage to avoid falling into unnecessary tipping situations. We included many bearded men— some elegant, some scruffy— all sorts of interesting intellectual looking women; none of the philosophers, not even the big ones and the beautiful ones, were likely to be mistaken for the football players, cheerleaders, sportscasters and others who were checking out. The looks from the hotel staff members, who clearly sensed that they were in for a few days of less expansive tipping and more modest bar-tabs, were a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The talk, as philosophers recognized each other and struck up conversations, was unlike anything that ever had been or would be heard in that hotel lobby: whether there are alternative concrete possible worlds; whether there is anything in Heidegger not better said already by Husserl; whether animals should be eaten; not to mention topics that aroused truly deep passions, mostly related to proper names.

What a wonderful group of people, I thought, and how wonderful, and lucky, that the world has managed to find a niche for us. Even if philosophy had no real intellectual content at all — was as silly as astrology or numerology certainly are, or as I suspect, in dark moments, that certain other parts of the university are— it would still be wonderful that it existed, simply to keep these people occupied. Especially me. What would I be doing without this wonderful institution? Helping people in some small town in Nebraska with their taxes and small legal problems, I suppose, and probably not doing it very well.

It would take very little to apply this to physicists (or scientists, or academics more generally) as well as philosophers. We tend not to bring up Heidegger, but we do argue about alternative possible worlds all the time.

More importantly, it’s the second paragraph that hits home. How fortunate we are to live in a time and place where society is sufficiently robust and diverse as to put aside a bit of its resources in order to foster a tiny group of people whose professional duty it is to think deeply about the secrets of the universe. I am reminded of the dedication page in the most poetic general relativity textbook ever written, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler:

We dedicate this book
To our fellow citizens
Who, for love of truth,
Take from their own wants
By taxes and gifts,
And now and then send forth
One of themselves
As dedicated servant,
To forward the search
Into the mysteries and marvelous simplicities
Of this strange and beautiful Universe,
Our home.

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It's not the blog

Nobody has ever accused me of being shy about talking to journalists. Not that I’m any sort of attention hound, mind you; I just consider it part of my civic duty to explain science blah blah blah. But in the last couple of days I’ve been fielding phone calls about a somewhat stickier topic.

Last week Daniel Drezner found out that he was denied tenure. For those of you who don’t know (and shame on you), Dan is a political scientist who has an informative and entertaining blog about international relations, monetary policy, things like that. He is also at the University of Chicago. The connection is that I have an informative and entertaining blog (yes, I mean this one, although at the time it was my previous one), and I am also at the University of Chicago, and I was also denied tenure. (Indeed, Dan has ruined one of my claims to fame, being the source of the only Google hit for “blogger denied tenure.”) Two points, as you know, determine a line, and there’s been a lot of conclusion-jumping going on: bloggers can’t get tenure, the UofC is biased against bloggers, etc. Stories have appeared in Inside Higher Ed as well as the New York Sun.

Blaming the UofC is just silly; anyone who thinks that there is some philosophical connection between the physics and political science departments doesn’t know how academia works very well. The blogging question is more interesting. I don’t have any real interest in hashing out the details of my own tenure case, but there’s a legitimate question for younger academics about whether or not blogging is a bad idea for your career. (We’ll put aside the obvious point that blogging under your own name and saying insulting things about your senior colleagues, or providing graphic details of your sex life, might be a bad idea, to concentrate on more academically-themed blogging.)

There’s a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is “No, it’s not blogging that prevents you from getting tenure; it’s because some people in your department (or the dean, or whatever) didn’t think that your research was good enough.” The blog was not a hot topic of discussion in my case, and I’m pretty sure that many of my colleagues don’t even know what a blog is, much less have a negative opinion of mine.

The longer answer must deal with the issue of why someone doesn’t think your research was good enough. (You might wonder whether teaching and various other forms of service are also relevant; at a top-tier research university like Chicago, the answer is simply “no,” and if anyone says differently they’re not being honest.) I think my own research was both solid and influential, and Dan’s looks pretty good from the perspective of a complete outsider; certainly neither of us had simply sat around for six years. But these are judgment calls, and a lot goes into that judgment. Like it or not, if you are very visibly spending a great deal of time doing things other than research, people might begin to wonder how devoted you are to the enterprise. To first order it doesn’t really matter whether that time is spent blogging or playing the banjo; some folks will think that you could have been spending that time doing research. (At second order it does matter; some people, smaller in number but undoubtedly there, feel resentful and jealous when one of their colleagues attains a certain public profile on the basis of outreach rather than research.) Of course nobody will ever say that they voted against giving tenure to someone because that person spent too much time on public outreach, or put too much effort into their teaching. But getting a reputation at being really good at that stuff could in principle make it harder to have your research accomplishments recognized — or not. It’s just impossible to tell, without access to powerful mind-reading rays that one can train on the brains of the senior faculty.

Blogging may very well be a contributor to this image of not being perfectly devoted — although, given the lack of familiarity with blogs on the part of most senior faculty, it’s very unlikely to be playing a major role. But even then it’s not blogging per se, it’s the decision to make an effort to communicate with the public. Blogging is just a technology, not a fundamentally new activity. It’s part of connecting to a wider audience, in ways that can be either serious or frivolous. Also, blogging may very well have a positive effect. It gets your name out there, and we can’t completely ignore the fact that some people (even senior faculty) really do appreciate the attempt to bring wider recognition to your academic discipline. It’s probably a wash, overall, although the positive or negative aspects could be important in certain individual cases.

Of course, it goes without saying that I personally think that connecting to a wider audience is an integral part of being a professor, not just a diverting sidelight. I don’t think that each individual academic must spend a lot of time on it (there are certain professors I would just as soon keep away from the public), but the field as a whole needs to take it seriously. Blogging is in an early stage of development, but it’s becoming a powerful tool indeed. As Michael Berube says, eventually the radical newness of blogging will evolve into familiarity. Then having a blog will be exactly as deleterious or advantagous to one’s career prospects as appearing on TV or writing op-eds for the New York Times — no more, no less. Some will embrace it with enthusiasm, and some will look down their noses at it. Hopefully, we embracers will march cheerfully forward, and use the new technology to make some sort of real difference.

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So much to blog, so little time

Things I would talk about at greater length and erudition if I were a man of independent means, rather than someone who supposedly works for a living. Also, today is my birthday; instructions on how to honor this auspicious occasion appear at the end of the post.

First, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber has an eloquent article about academic blogging in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas.” The final paragraph sums it up:

Both group blogs and the many hundreds of individual academic blogs that have been created in the last three years are pioneering something new and exciting. They’re the seeds of a collective conversation, which draws together different disciplines (sometimes through vigorous argument, sometimes through friendly interaction), which doesn’t reproduce traditional academic distinctions of privilege and rank, and which connects academic debates to a broader arena of public discussion. It’s not entirely surprising that academic blogs have provoked some fear and hostility; they represent a serious challenge to well-established patterns of behavior in the academy. Some academics view them as an unbecoming occupation for junior (and senior) scholars; in the words of Alex Halavais of the State University of New York at Buffalo, they seem “threatening to those who are established in academia, to financial interests, and to … well, decorum.” Not exactly dignified; a little undisciplined; carnivalesque. Sometimes signal, sometimes noise. But exactly because of this, they provide a kind of space for the exuberant debate of ideas, for connecting scholarship to the outside world, which we haven’t had for a long while. We should embrace them wholeheartedly.

This business about certain academics viewing blogs as an unbecoming occupation is more true that I’d like to admit (although it is far from universal). And it extends to all kinds of pretentions to public-intellectual engagement, not just our daily interventions on the internets. Which is why it’s important to emphasize that true scholarship entails two tasks, both equally crucial: discovering new things about the world, and letting people know what it is we have discovered. The first is called “research,” while the second is sufficiently undervalued that we don’t even have a good name for it. Part of it is “education,” part is “outreach,” part is engaging in public debate. But whatever you want to call it, it is just as important as research itself. You might say that, without research, there wouldn’t be anything to outreach about. True, but if we never told anyone what we had learned, there wouldn’t be any reason to do research, at least not in intellectually-driven fields like cosmology and history and literary criticism. It’s like asking whether, in baseball, the bat or the ball is more important. Without either, the whole thing becomes kind of pointless.

Next, Abhay Parekh at 3quarksdaily asks what it is that makes people disbelieve in evolution. He points the finger of blame at the “decent with random modification” part of natural selection:

My explanation is simply this: Human beings have a strong visceral reaction to disbelieve any theory which injects uncertainty or chance into their world view. They will cling to some other “explanation” of the facts which does not depend on chance until provided with absolutely incontrovertible proof to the contrary.

I’m sure that’s part of it, although I suspect the truth is a complicated mess that varies from person to person. Others chime in: Lindsay at Majikthise thinks it’s about disenchantment and an absence of meaning in purely naturalistic theories of the universe; Amanda at Pandagon chalks it up to a need to feel superior to other species; PZ at Pharyngula points to the psychological drive to be part of something bigger. I think all of these are likely part of it, and would add another ingredient to the cocktail: resentment at being told what to think by arrogant elites. When people use “local choice” as an excuse to allow school boards to decide to teach all sorts of nonsense, defenders of evolution generally treat it as simply a tactic to further their religious agenda. For the Discovery Institute et al. that is no doubt correct; but for people on the streets who are speaking at the school board meetings, I suspect a lot of it it really is about local choice. They don’t like to be told by some mutiple-degreed Ivy League east-coast intellectual types that they should think this and not that. There is a particularly American cast to this kind of resentment, which helps explain why this poor country is so much more backward about these issues than our peers in Europe.

Finally, speaking of Lindsay, she has recently embarked on quite an adventure: inspired by the experience of reporting on-location in the aftermath of Katrina, she’s quit her regular job to become a full-time stringer. But she needs some help at the early stages, so this week she’s asking for donations in turn for by-request blogging! This sort of bottom-up structure is alien to us here at Cosmic Variance, where we figure we’ll write about what we think is best and you’ll like it, or learn to. But it’s an interesting experiment. And while you have your PayPal account handy, you could drop by to Shakespeare’s Sister, who was recently hit by a double whammy when she was laid off from her job and had her property taxes increased by 100%. She’s one of the most passionate and articulate bloggers we have, and if you like what you read there, don’t be shy about dropping off a couple of bucks.

That would make me a good birthday present.

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