Academia

Susskind Lectures on General Relativity

Via Dmitry Podolsky, a series of YouTube videos from Stanford encompassing an entire course by Lenny Susskind on general relativity. I didn’t look closely enough to figure out exactly what level the lectures are pitched at, but it looks like a fairly standard advanced-undergrad or beginning-grad introduction to the subject. (For which I could recommend an excellent textbook, if you’re interested.) This is the first lecture; there are more.

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity | Lecture 1

It’s fantastic that Stanford is giving this away. I don’t worry that it will replace the conventional university. The right distinction is not “people who would physically go to the lectures” vs. “people who will just watch the videos”; it’s between “people who can watch the videos” and “people who have no access to lectures like this.” And Susskind is a great lecturer.

Susskind Lectures on General Relativity Read More »

28 Comments

Will the Internet Replace Universities?

Via Brad DeLong, an article by Kevin Carey in the Chronicle of Higher Education starts with the obvious — the internet is killing newspapers as we knew them — and asks whether the same will happen to universities.

Much of what’s happening was predicted in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web burst onto the public consciousness. But people were also saying a lot of retrospectively ludicrous Internet-related things — e.g., that the business cycle had been abolished, and that vast profits could be made selling pet food online. Newspapers emerged from the dot-com bubble relatively unscathed and probably felt pretty good about their future. Now it turns out that the Internet bomb was real — it just had a 15-year fuse.

Universities were also subject to a lot of fevered speculation back then. In 1997 the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, “Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics…. Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable.” Twelve years later, universities are bursting with customers, bigger, and (until recently) richer than ever before.

But universities have their own weak point, their own vulnerable cash cow: lower-division undergraduate education. The math is pretty simple: Multiply an institution’s average net tuition (plus any state subsidies) by the number of students (say, 200) in a freshman lecture course. Subtract whatever the beleaguered adjunct lecturer teaching the course is being paid. I don’t care what kind of confiscatory indirect-cost multiplier you care to add to that equation, the institution is making a lot of money — which is then used to pay for faculty scholarship, graduate education, administrative salaries, the football coach, and other expensive things that cost more than they bring in.

I’m not sure I buy it. Let’s think about what good purposes a college or university might serve. Off the top of my head, I can think of several:

  1. Classroom-based education. Certainly important.
  2. Extracurricular learning. This includes everything from “participating in actual academic research” to “serving on the school newspaper.”
  3. Meeting different kinds of people. Not only do students get exposed to professors, and an academic way of thinking about problems, but they also meet other students, hopefully from a wide variety of backgrounds.
  4. Establishing independence. For many people, going to college is the first time one lives away from home, and begins to establish an identity separate from one’s family.
  5. Belonging to a community. From the university itself to numerous smaller subcultures within, college provides an opportunity to belong. As great as the Teaching Company is, it doesn’t have a basketball team in the Final Four.

Feel free to add your own. We can argue whether online learning can be effective in replacing the first of these — after all, hearing a recorded lecture is not the same as hearing it live. But it would appear very difficult to replace the others. The four years one spends at college are often the most formative (and perhaps the most enjoyable) years of one’s life. It’s not clear, of course, how much people are willing to pay for those other purposes, as important as they may be.

On the other hand, there is a long-established bargain at big research universities that could conceivably come unraveled at the hands of the internet. Namely: it is research and scholarship that attracts the faculty and establishes the academic reputation of a school, but it is teaching that brings in students and tuition dollars. This is not an arrangement based entirely on avarice; the top research schools bring in a lot more money from grants and gifts than they do from student tuitions. But it reflects a deep philosophical split, that might signal an underlying instability: from within academia, the purpose of the university is seen as the production of new scholarship; from outside academia, the purpose of universities is seen as the teaching of students.

In the case of newspapers, the internet made it harder to tightly bundle straightforward news with advertising and sections of the paper any one reader might not be interested in. In the case of universities, will the internet make it harder to bundle teaching and research? Quick, name the largest private university in the U.S. The answer is the University of Phoenix, founded in 1976, where 95% of faculty are part-time and the large majority of teaching happens completely online.

It could happen that more education-providing corporations (one hesitates to call them “universities”) could develop better ways to provide online classroom educations to a large number of students who are interested in the first purpose listed above but are unwilling to pay for the second. If that model catches on, it will cause dramatic upheaval in the economy of traditional universities. And, much as I love the internet, that would be too bad.

Will the Internet Replace Universities? Read More »

58 Comments

The Cathedral of Learning

I just got back from Pittsburgh, a city famous for honoring football players along with Fathers of our country. Apparently they recently won some sort of sporting contest, so the citizens were generally in good spirits.

I was visiting to Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, to speak in their annual lecture series. The Center, along with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, help make Pittsburgh one of the world’s leading institutions for studying philosophy of science.

The Center is also a remarkably friendly place, and I had a great time during my visit. The highlight, predictably, was lunch with some of the graduate students, where we got to let our hair down and talk about big ideas concerning time and causality and determinism. (Almost all professional academics start out fascinated by big ideas, but the interest is gradually beaten out of them along the way by the demands of professionalism and career advancement. Grad school is probably the peak combination of background knowledge and willingness to confront the hard problems.) I also got to chat with Adolf Grünbaum, whose declamations concerning the Primordial Existential Question had impressed me a year and a half ago. And I got to meet some fellow bloggers in the flesh — the formidable Cosma Shalizi, who helped me understand how to augment the principle of indifference with conditionalizing over the past hypothesis, and Bryan Roberts of Soul Physics, who was one of the aforementioned grad students.

Cathedral of Learning But if I’m really honest, my favorite part of the trip was probably the building. The Center for the Philosophy of Science is housed in the Cathedral of Learning, a looming structure on the University’s campus — the second-tallest academic building in the world, after one at Moscow State University. Despite my lack of religious sympathies, I love cathedrals — the looming structures, swooping curves, open spaces, all designed to elicit a certain emotional response going far beyond their direct practical purpose. (Not that different from the best casinos in Vegas, really.) And I love learning! So the Cathedral of Learning is pretty much the perfect building.

And it really does work as a building. What everyone points to are the many Nationality Rooms scattered throughout the building — a series of 27 spaces decorated in the style of various different countries, often with the input (and financial assistance) of the respective governments, which work as display pieces but are also functioning classrooms. (I was told that prospective students are sometimes convinced to come to Pittsburgh by a visit to the room corresponding to their personal heritage.) But what I liked was the immense Commons Room (pictured), with impossibly high ceilings, which is just a place where people can sit down and read and talk and think. Such places are very precious, and the world should have a lot more of them.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Cathedral grew out of a vision of Chancellor John Gabbert Bowman in the 1920’s. He insisted that the Commons Room be built on the principles of true Gothic architecture, with self-supporting arches. When told that these things cost money, he replied:

“You cannot build a great University with fraud in it.”

I’m not sure if that’s strictly true, but it’s an honorable principle to strive towards.

The Cathedral of Learning Read More »

8 Comments

Unsolicited Advice, Part Nine: Choosing a Postdoc

Early January, and time for another entry in our unsolicited advice series — this one on choosing a postdoc. For non-academics, a “postdoc” is that lovely several-year period in between getting a Ph.D. and (hopefully) landing a faculty job, during which one establishes some independence and concentrates on doing research to the exclusion of all the other delicious aspects of professordom. And for reasons that have never been fully explained, a lot of postdoc jobs are offered and accepted in December/January/February, even if they don’t start until September. So now is the time to make yet another one of those choices that will dramatically affect the entire rest of your life.

Here, we’re not telling you how to get a postdoc; we’re presuming you already have more than one offer in hand, and need to choose between them. (Yay you!) At some point we should write about applying for postdocs, but that season is largely passed. Note that postdoc situations vary wildly from field to field, and my experience is largely in theoretical physics; there is more advice at Dr. Isis’s place, and I’m sure elsewhere — as usual, leave links in the comments. Free advice on the internet is worth what you pay for it, but if you get a variety of different perspectives a nugget of wisdom might sneak through.

To decide which postdoc position is right for you, it makes sense to think about what your goals are in being a postdoc in the first place. Generally they look something like this:

1) Do some good science.

2) Learn new things and grow as a scientist.

3) Put yourself in a good position to land a faculty job.

The very good news is that these goals are not in conflict! You can do good science while learning new things, and you can do both of those while positioning yourself to apply for faculty jobs. Indeed, you’ll be in much better position (obviously) if you have done some good science. However, it’s possible to do some good science and nevertheless end up in not such a good position.

Before we unpack that, we should say a word about other considerations. You might care about geographic location, or proximity to a loved one, or easy access to jazz or martinis or gambling or whatever your favorite vice may be. (Personally, I can’t decide.) I’m all about the other considerations, and would never tell you to discount them. Life is short, and the years you spend as a postdoc are just as truly years of your life as any other years. However … if you were thinking that it would be worthwhile, at some point in your life, to sacrifice on your other considerations for a bit in order to concentrate on doing the best science you can — now is the time! Of all the hurdles and bottlenecks along an academic career path, the jump from postdoc to faculty is probably the hardest, just in terms of raw probabilities. (There are a lot fewer faculty jobs than there are postdocs looking for them.) At the same time, the transition from the comforting embrace of graduate school, where (at least in principle) you have an advisor looking over you, to the naked Hobbesian individualism of being a postdoc, where your personal initiative counts for everything, can benefit from a certain amount of increased focus. I know, “comforting embrace” isn’t the first phrase that comes to mind when you think of graduate school. But there is more structure there, and a sense of belonging to something bigger. (Often, as a postdoc, the department won’t even list you in any sort of directory.) So, while there’s nothing wrong with taking other considerations seriously, this temporary phase of your academic trajectory is arguably the best time to put those on the back burner while you concentrate on your job, hoping that sacrifice will pay off later. How much you balance those competing considerations is up to you.

(The extent to which personal initiative counts varies wildly from academic field to field; in a big lab, the role of a postdoc may be little different from that of an advanced grad student. For theorists, the role of a postdoc is little different from that of a beginning professor — you are expected to come up with your own ideas and carry them to fruition.)

With all that throat-clearing out of the way, let’s tackle those above goals. First, you want to choose a postdoc position that will help you do good science. This criterion is actually relatively straightforward, but there are some subtleties. Of course it will help if you go to a place that is chock full of good scientists doing the kind of science you would like to be doing yourself. But you still have to ask some of the same kind of questions you asked when choosing a grad school — at the most basic level, would you yourself be able to productively work with these people? Do you like them, are they supportive? What do the other postdocs who are currently there — or even better, were there recently and have moved on — think about the experience?

Here is an excellent little diagnostic. Of the different places you are considering, have a look at some of the papers they have written over the last three years. Now ask yourself: which of those papers would I have been most pleased to be a co-author on? That’s a direct way of separating vague feelings that “this place is good” from “they are doing what I want to do.” But then, to kick it up a notch, look again at those papers, and in particular at the author lists. Are there any postdocs there? Is this the kind of place where the postdocs collaborate frequently and directly with the faculty and each other, or are they more on their own, or have they still collaborating with their old groups from grad school? Different departments have different personalities, but the evidence of how postdocs generally fit in should be easy to gather.

Next, you want to learn and grow as a scientist. This one is a bit trickier. You definitely do want to grow — it’s unlikely that, as a grad student, you did enough different kinds of work that you would be happy to stay confined within those disciplinary boundaries for the rest of your life. Your postdoc years are a great chance to define yourself (see below), so you should think long and hard about how you want to be defined. On the other hand, it is possible to grow too much. If your degree is in string theory, and your first postdoc is in molecular biology, and your second postdoc is in inorganic chemistry, you’re sort of just being incoherent. You’ll have fun along the way — and if that’s your goal, that’s great — but if you are planning on moving to the next level, you want to be broad without losing coherence entirely. You want to challenge yourself with new things, but you want to challenge yourself productively. You certainly don’t want to think of your postdoc as another round of grad school, where you start from scratch. You are now a professional scientist with some established expertise, and you would like to build on that expertise.

But at the same time — and here’s the crucially important part — you don’t want to just repeat yourself. That’s why everyone always tells you to go somewhere else for your postdoc, not to stick around the same place you were a grad student. It sounds like good, solid advice, but when the moment of decision comes, far too many people choose to play it safe, and either stay where they are (if that option is available) or move over to some group with whom they were already collaborating. It’s hard to appreciate until you’ve been around the block a few times, but different departments are truly different in their approach to doing science. One of the absolute best features of the postdoc system (and there are a lot of crappy features) is that you get an invaluable opportunity to be exposed to the idiosyncrasies and habits of mind of a completely different set of senior researchers. That can be a truly eye-opening experience, and you should try as hard as you can to take advantage. Find people with whom you can work and be productive (you want to write papers, not just take classes or sit at the feet of masters), but who will challenge your preconceptions and open your eyes to new ways of thinking about your field.

Finally we have the money goal: you’d like to put yourself in good position to land a faculty job. (That’s what we’re assuming, anyway; if not, standard disclaimers apply.) Of course this is as much art as science, and there’s a tremendous amount of noise in the system — but you control what you can.

With that in mind, recall that our advice for being a good grad student was to “Be the kind of grad student that people would like to hire as a postdoc.” Guess what? As a postdoc, you will strive to be the kind of postdoc that people would like to hire as an assistant professor. And what kind is that? If you’re honest with yourself, you can probably hit upon the right answer by contemplating the kind of applicant you would be most likely to hire, if you were already a faculty member sitting on a hiring committee. The basic rule is that you’re not going to get hired as a faculty member by being talented and smart; you’re going to be hired because the department sees that you are doing awesome things. When people hire postdocs, the applicants are still charmingly unformed as mature scientists, and their letters of recommendation will often weigh more than their lists of publications. But when it comes to hiring a faculty member, it’s rarely done purely on promise — they want to see that you’ve done something.

So when you’re choosing which postdoc to take, choose the one that maximizes your chances of actually doing something. Writing papers, and (more importantly) writing good papers. And (most importantly) by “good” we do not mean “technically competent.” We mean interesting, even to people outside your immediate circle of friends. Papers you would want to read, even if you hadn’t written them. Those are the kinds of papers you want to be writing as a grad student.

The need to write interesting papers should be obvious, but sometimes it gets lost in the excitement. Writing papers as a grad student can be like having sex as a teenager — you’re amazed that it’s happening at all, and not so concerned with excelling. But at some point, as you mature, it becomes important to do it well. It is deadly, as a postdoc, to fall into the trap of writing papers just because you can write them. Like it or not, there are many people like you competing for a scarce resource in the form of faculty jobs. You have to distinguish yourself. If you are working within any field where there is a nontrivial chance of getting hired as a faculty member, there will certainly be other people writing papers in the same field. What is it that will make your papers better?

And it’s not only good papers — it’s papers that define who you are. That’s a question you will literally be asked when you are applying for faculty jobs — what are you really? What do you do? And the appropriate answer has to be well-defined (like it or not) in terms that are comprehensible to a faculty hiring committee. “I work on models of dark energy” is a bit narrow; “I am a theoretical physicist” is a bit broad; “I work on field theory and particle physics applied to cosmology” is about right. (You can always, and in fact should, continue to broaden your scope all throughout your career.) But you can’t just proclaim it; your list of publications has to proclaim it for you. You won’t want to work on the same thing over and over again, but you do want the work you do to tell a coherent story. Each paper is a dot on a map of possible problems one could be thinking about, and you want your set of dots to form a sensible picture. A postdoc period is a good time to fill in what you might think of as gaps in your toolbox, if you will excuse a terribly mixed metaphor. Become the scientist you would want to hire.

Figure all that out, and then choose the postdoc position that will maximize your chance of writing the papers that make it happen. Easier said than done, I know. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be any fun, would it?

Unsolicited Advice, Part Nine: Choosing a Postdoc Read More »

20 Comments

The Best Jobs in the World

JobsRated.com has taken a look at their URL, and decided that they should rate the best jobs in the world. (Methodology here; thanks to Diana Brodie for the pointer.) Obviously crazy, of course. I mean, Mathematician? Biologist? Philosopher? Dude, get serious.

1. Mathematician
Applies mathematical theories and formulas to teach or solve problems in a business, educational, or industrial climate.

2. Actuary
Interprets statistics to determine probabilities of accidents, sickness, and death, and loss of property from theft and natural disasters.

3. Statistician
Tabulates, analyzes, and interprets the numeric results of experiments and surveys.

4. Biologist
Studies the relationship of plants and animals to their environment.

5. Software Engineer
Researches, designs, develops and maintains software systems along with hardware development for medical, scientific, and industrial purposes.

6. Computer Systems Analyst
Plans and develops computer systems for businesses and scientific institutions.

7. Historian
Analyzes and records historical information from a specific era or according to a particular area of expertise.

8. Sociologist
Studies human behavior by examining the interaction of social groups and institutions.

9. Industrial Designer
Designs and develops manufactured products.

10. Accountant
Prepares and analyzes financial reports to assist managers in business, industry and government.

11. Economist
Studies and analyzes the effects of resources such as land, labor, and raw materials, on costs and their relation to industry and government.

12. Philosopher
Studies questions concerning the nature of intellectual concepts, and attempts to construct rational theories concerning our understanding of the world around us.

13. Physicist
Researches and develops theories concerning the physical forces of nature.

14. Parole Officer
Monitors, counsels, and reports on the progress of individuals who have been released from correctional institutions to serve parole.

15. Meteorologist
Studies the physical characteristics, motions and processes of the earth’s atmosphere.

16. Medical Laboratory Technician
Conducts routine laboratory tests and analyses used in the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disease.

17. Paralegal Assistant
Assists attorneys in preparation of legal documents; collection of depositions and affidavits; and investigation, research and analysis of legal issues.

18. Computer Programmer
Organizes and lists the instructions for computers to process data and solve problems in logical order.

19. Motion Picture Editor
Supervises the filming and editing of motion pictures for entertainment, business, and educational purposes.

20. Astronomer
Uses principles of physics and mathematics to understand the workings of the universe.

The real lesson, of course, is that it’s awesome to be a professor. Or a parole officer. Whichever.

And here are the worst jobs, of course:

1. Lumberjack
Fells, cuts, and transports timber to be processed into lumber, paper, and other wood products.

2. Dairy Farmer
Directs and takes part in activities involved in the raising of cattle for milk production.

3. Taxi Driver
Operates a taxi cab over the streets and roads of a municipality, picking up and dropping off passengers by request.

4. Seaman
May perform any number of tasks involved in the operation of ships, boats, barges, or dredges.

5. Emergency Medical Technician
Attends to situations which demand immediate medical attention, such as automobile accidents, heart attacks, and gunshot wounds.

6. Roofer
Installs roofs on new buildings, performs repairs on old roofs, and re-roofs old buildings.

7. Garbage Collector
Collects refuse on a designated municipal route, and transports trash to disposal plants or landfill areas.

8. Welder
Joins or repairs metal surfaces through the application of heat.

9. Roustabout
Performs routine physical labor and maintenance on oil rigs and pipelines, both on and off shore.

10. Ironworker
Raises the steel framework of buildings, bridges, and other structures.

Interestingly, dangerous and low-paying jobs involving a great deal of manual labor seem to come in below the glamorous and largely sedentary lifestyle of a typical academic. Although opinions differ; my brother is an EMT, and he couldn’t be happier with the job.

The Best Jobs in the World Read More »

55 Comments

Hollywood and Vine, California and Lake

The e-Astronomer (Andy Lawrence) visited Caltech last week, but I missed his talks since I was traveling myself. He posits an interesting comparison between young hopefuls in academia and The Industry — hanging around, trying to get noticed in notoriously competitive milieus:

Caltech is famous for being a tad competitive shall we say. I got entertained at lunch by various grad students and postdocs. They seemed relaxed, but with a pushy edge. At that stage, young scientists are desperate to get noticed, and are simultaneously confident and insecure – will the world decide you are a genius or a dullard?

The next morning I was doing LA tourism with my family. I found myself on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine St, staring at the sidewalk-stars and trying hard to absorb the vibrations of Hollywood history. In the glory days, this was the spot where starry-eyed hopefuls would hang around, drinking coffee very very slowly, just waiting to be spotted and carried off to stardom.

In some significant ways, trying to make a career in artistic fields (movies, theater, art, music) is very similar to academia. Most obviously, the number of people who would like to have such jobs is much larger than the number of jobs. And that means competition, like it or not. Occasionally you will hear the claim that we should be producing fewer Ph.D.s, since there aren’t anywhere near enough jobs for everyone who graduates. This is just a clumsy attempt to hide the problem by re-arranging the bottleneck to before grad school rather than after. We certainly need to be absolutely honest about job prospects — they are always bad, no matter what specialty one chooses! But there is no way around the fact that somewhere along the line, most people who would like to be employed as professional scientists or scholars more generally are going to be disappointed.

Still, the ways in which the academic pipeline differs from the road to Hollywood superstardom are equally significant — and we have it much better than young actors. Even though the numbers are discouraging, we do have a highly structured system, in which training is taken seriously and — equally importantly — there is a fairly clear point past which one recognizes that the chances for success are extremely slim. Unlike a struggling actor who hangs around doing local theater and occasional commercials, perpetually hoping for that big break, the up-or-out nature of academia tends to let you know with relative clarity that it’s time to look elsewhere. Really, it’s more like professional sports than it’s like Hollywood — we have a structured minor-league/intercollegiate-sports system, with explicit coaching and well-known paths to advancement.

Indeed, one could argue that in recent years the relentless up-or-out pressure has gotten soft, as more people take multiple postdocs and linger on for a while. (Or, in fields where they are common, adjunct professors and lecturers, which is generally a much worse gig.) From the point of view of the universities that are choosing new faculty members, years of postdoctoral experience provide a lot of data on which to base hiring decisions, which one could at least argue helps the meritocratic case. It’s no fun to be stuck in postdocs for years and years, but nor is it fun to be told that you have passed your sell-by date, no more jobs for you.

So to all those grad students hanging around in the lounge, trying to say clever things to impress the visiting speaker — it could be worse! You could be hanging around soda shops, hoping to be discovered by wandering tenured professors.

Hollywood and Vine, California and Lake Read More »

39 Comments

Unsolicited Advice VII: Should I Have a Web Page?

It’s September, and a young person’s fancy naturally turns to applying to grad school/postdocs/faculty jobs. And in this day and age, questions inevitably arise: Are they going to google me? What will they find? Followed immediately by: Should I have my own web page (if I don’t already)? And what should be on it?

Roughly speaking, as you climb up the academic ladder, the scrutiny one undergoes becomes increasingly close. If you are in high school and applying to colleges, I would be extremely surprised if any admissions committee googled you — there are just too many of you, frankly. Mostly this also holds for undergrads applying to grad school. At least, that’s the situation among theorists; for experimentalists, who might be joining a specific lab on day one, the number might be smaller and the individual attention correspondingly greater. By the time you apply for faculty jobs, the numbers are very small, and nobody gets an offer without being poked and prodded in person, and having their CV examined under a microscope. In that case, the web page is (almost) beside the point, as they’ve seen you up close and personal.

It’s for postdoc applications, then, that the googling question becomes most relevant. Remember that most research groups have relatively few postdocs, so they take the selection process very seriously — mistakes can be costly. But in many cases the decision-making timescale is sufficiently short that they don’t have the luxury of seeing each candidate in person. So I would say: yes, at many places where you apply for postdocs, they will be googling you to glean information that might not show up on a formal application. That is especially true if you’re applying to individual professors or groups (rather than wider-ranging fellowships), and also if the relevant decision-makers are younger.

So: if they do google you, what will they find? You can see how it might make sense to put up your own web page: that way you have some influence over their first impressions of you. There is a systematic issue, of course, that some names are more easily googleable than others, but we won’t address that here. If you do have a web page, you can simply include the URL in your CV, so they will have it in front of them.

If you do decide to have a web page, what should it look like? There is an overarching principle at work here: the Web is World-Wide. That is, everything you put on your page can be viewed (ordinarily) by everyone. You can’t put stuff up that “is only meant for your friends,” and then be surprised when it is examined by prospective employers. If you have pictures or stories that are in any way private — keep them private!

Unsolicited Advice VII: Should I Have a Web Page? Read More »

20 Comments

Academics and Religions

The Volokh Conspiracy is ruminating over why so many academics are hostile to some religions rather than others. Todd Zywicki cites data:

According to a study by the Institute of Jewish and Community Research, 53% of professors have an unfavorable view of Evangelical Christians but only 3% have an unfavorable view of Jews. A summary of the study is here. 33% have unfavorable views of Mormons. Muslims, Atheists, and Catholics all score in double-digits.

He goes on to express his astonishment…

It is almost impossible to imagine any identifiable group of Americans today who would hold such a reflexively negative view of other groups of Americans. I can’t imagine that any degree of racial bigotry by any group toward any other group would even approximate this degree of bigotry and prejudice.

Until, of course, his commenters point out an inconvenient fact: this “prejudice” pales next to that against atheists.

Co-blogger Ilya Somin then chimes in with a theory — it’s all just bias against conservatives.

Overall, I think the data confirm my theory that most academics are not hostile to religion as such, but merely to those religious groups that they perceive (for the most part correctly) as politically conservative.

The study Todd cites shows that 53% of academics have an “unfavorable” view of Evangelical Christians and 33% say the same of Mormons. By contrast, only 13% have an unfavorable view of Catholics and 3% towards Jews. As Todd points out, Evangelical Christians and and Mormons are generally seen as politically conservative, while Jews tend to be liberal, and Catholics somewhere in between. Todd may well be right that academics’ views of Evangelicals and Mormons are based on stereotypes rather than personal experience. However, the stereotype that these groups tend to be politically conservative is actually correct.

I have a different theory. What if academics had an unfavorable view of evangelicals and Mormons, and a generally favorable view of Catholics and Jews, because of how those groups view academia? Crazy, I know, but bear with me here. Catholicism and Judaism, whatever their other faults, have long traditions of valuing learning and scholarship, while Mormonism and evangelical Christianity … not so much. (Those are wild generalizations, of course, but the trends are clear.) Perhaps these unfavorable views are not actually prejudices at all, but informed opinions based on empirically verifiable realities?

Just a theory.

Academics and Religions Read More »

77 Comments

Giggling Uncontrollably

Paul Krugman puts into anecdote form what many of us frequently feel:

So, you get through grad school. You do research that gets lot of citations. You get tenure. You branch out into policy work, and into writing for a broader audience. You try to play a role in the important economic debates. And finally, you really hit the big time — you’re debating the economy on Larry King, with who knows how many people watching.

And then Larry King wraps it up: “Tomorrow, we’ll talk about psychic kids.”

I was still giggling uncontrollably ten minutes after I left the studio.

(Via Dynamics of Cats. We also serve who link and laugh.)

Giggling Uncontrollably Read More »

10 Comments

Guest Post: Joel Corbo on Graduate School and Teaching

Today’s episode of lazy-bloggers-solicit-guests-to-fill-in features Joel Corbo, a graduate student in physics at Berkeley. Joel and friends were disappointed by some features of the graduate-school experience, and (unusually) decided to actually do something about it — they founded the Compass Project, which supports excellence in science education, especially for women and minorities.

————————————————

My name is Joel Corbo, I’m a physics Ph.D. student, and I’m a little frustrated.

My trajectory through the US educational system has been a great one. I have parents who care deeply about me and my future and who believe in the value of a strong education. Because they cared, I went to an elementary school that laid a good foundation and allowed me to attend a high school that was more academically rigorous than many colleges (both of these schools were private, although the latter was also free). I also majored in physics at MIT.

My story may sound typical, at least in certain circles, but there are a few more details to add to the story. My dad is a recent immigrant without a high school education who worked as a maintenance man in the NYC Housing Projects, and my mom is the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants and a lucky survivor of the NYC public school system. I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college. Statistically speaking, I shouldn’t have succeeded — but I did.

Looking back at my education, it’s obvious to me that a huge factor contributing to my success was the presence of people in my life who believed in me and supported me: my parents, my teachers, and my peers. Even at MIT, which is primarily recognized for the quality of its research (and rightly so), I found a physics department that openly cared about undergraduate education, where teaching was valued and done well and which fostered a community of undergrads who learned from and supported each other.

So, why the frustration? My relatively rosy view of physics education was shaken up not long after starting grad school at UC Berkeley (By the way, I don’t want to single out Berkeley as particularly flawed, as I’m sure its problems are shared by virtually every physics department in the US to one extent or another. However, I can only write about what I know and this is where I am). Back in the cocoon of the MIT undergrad experience, I came to believe that physics was awesome for two main reasons: (1) because it answers deep, fundamental questions about how the world works and (2) because it is a community driven, collaborative exercise that thrives on the effective sharing of knowledge among its practitioners. In my mind, grad school would build upon these dual pillars of awesomeness and help me become (1) a great researcher and (2) a great teacher.

The jury is still out on the great researcher thing, but it turns out that, in principle, grad school has precisely zero to do with becoming a good teacher. Oh, you can TA a class here and there, as long as that doesn’t get in the way of what grad school is “really” all about. The unfortunate thing is that the lack of value assigned to teaching seems very systemic, to the point of being embedded in the culture; perhaps this attitude appears to benefit physics in the short-term by weeding out all but the most “serious” students, but in the long run it does nothing but damage.

The damage done to grad students is fairly obvious. First of all, if they are not provided with encouragement and avenues to become better teachers, then they won’t improve their teaching skills as well as they could have. If you happen to believe that an essential part of being a physicist is the ability to pass physics on to future generations of students, to inspire them to follow in the footsteps of their intellectual ancestors, then it is hard to justify allowing people to graduate with PhDs who have not demonstrated the ability to do just that. Of course, this happens all the time.

Secondly, there are always some grad students, including me, who have a deep interest in teaching (I remember deciding in high school that the only way to know if I really understood something was to try teaching it to someone else — so I can genuinely say that education has been on my mind for a long time). When people with such a passion are met with disinterest or even disdain by the people they want to emulate (successful physicists), the blow to their motivation can be severe. After all, who wants to stick around when their interests and talents aren’t valued or supported? I’ve heard it implied (and sometimes even said outright) that such students aren’t “serious enough” about physics and therefore aren’t worth keeping around, but without a crystal ball, who can really say which student will end up making important contributions to the field?

Let’s put the grad students aside for now (didn’t we just talk about that?), and spend some time looking at how undergrads are damaged by this attitude. Teaching is the single most fundamental service an academic department provides to undergraduates, and if, on average, a department is not interested in teaching well, the implication is that it’s not interested in serving undergrads in any way. But serving undergrads is vital to the survival of an academic discipline, because some of those undergrads are that discipline’s future experts. As I stated above, I was fortunate enough to attend schools that did serve their students well, but I can talk about the opposite through my observations as a TA.

Many students arrive at their undergraduate institution with a substantial number of long-held academic “bad habits”, especially in the sciences. High school has managed to convince many students that physics is a dogmatic, memorization-centered subject. As a result, they don’t have the skills necessary to solve real physics problems, because all that they have learned to do is to pattern-match and to plug-and-chug. Still, popular science books and NOVA specials have kept them interested enough that many intend to pursue the physical sciences as undergrads. Once they get to college, however, their passion for physics is quickly squelched by a number of factors:

  1. Because they don’t have the skills necessary to problem-solve, model-build, and generally think like physicists, these students actually don’t know how to effectively learn physics as it is typically presented in a large lecture-based class. This doesn’t mean that these students are stupid, or somehow not worth teaching. It simply means that there are things they need to be taught other than “the material” in order to help them become better learners. Unfortunately, many of them come away feeling like they don’t have what it takes to be physicists (as though there is some intrinsic “physicsness” that they are lacking) and so they leave the field.
  2. The typical introductory physics sequence, at least at Berkeley, is very isolating for potential physics majors. The vast majority of people in those classes are engineering students who are there because their departments require that they take physics; they have largely no interest in physics for its own sake. This makes it very difficult for potential physics majors to identify each other — they are like needles in an apathetic haystack. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that even the physics department cannot identify these potential majors. So, these students end up isolated from the department, from upperclassmen physics majors, and from each other – that is to say, from the physics community – for the three semesters it takes them to get through introductory physics. However, an important part of the excitement of physics is the collaboration with peers, the shared goal of building knowledge through interaction and discussion and asking “What if”. Without that, it’s incredibly difficult to paint physics as an interesting field, to really sell the idea of being physicists to these students beyond the level that NOVA can, and so they leave the field.
  3. The problems of interaction and perceived lack of “physicsness” are magnified for a certain set of students: women and underrepresented minorities. At this point, so much has been said about the lack of women and minorities in all levels of physics due to the “leaky pipeline” that I don’t have much to add to the subject. For this discussion, the important point to note is that in addition to the issues that their well-represented peers also face, they have to face majoring in a field where they don’t see people like themselves. They arrive at the seemingly logical but erroneous conclusion that success in physics is unattainable unless you are a white male, and so they leave the field.

So, here are three of many reasons why undergrads might leave the field of physics – notice that none of these reasons have anything to do with these students’ ability to be good physicists. If the physics community wants to recruit the best minds into its ranks, it stands to reason that these impediments must be removed, but not enough people seem interested in doing so. Hence, my frustration.

[More below the fold…] …

Guest Post: Joel Corbo on Graduate School and Teaching Read More »

87 Comments
Scroll to Top