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May

2012

The Age of Innocence - NYTimes.com

Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will. Their job is to flatter and satisfy it. A gigantic polling apparatus has developed to help leaders anticipate and respond to popular whims. Democratic politicians adopt the mind-set of marketing executives. Give the customer what he wants. The customer is always right.

Having lost a sense of their own frailty, many voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements. They become incensed when their leaders are not responsive to their needs. Like any normal set of human beings, they command their politicians to give them benefits without asking them to pay.

www.nytimes.com/...the-age-of-innocence.html

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Democracy Short-Termism Politics Humanities

Sep

2011

Leonardo Reviews Home

Probably no one who reads Leonardo publications needs to be convinced of the centrality of software for modern art, culture, or academia. Yet, outside these circles, I think there is demand for such books as David Berry’s The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. At times, software studies still gets some of the crowd squirming in their seats in academic conferences, and either slightly worried or bemused reactions from representatives of more established academic disciplines. Surely code cannot be read and written like Shakespeare, appreciated the way you do Milton or object of such cult as Austen – or the cinephilic attachment in film studies to certain genres and films? However, despite being a newcomer, software studies may not turn into another media studies, which continuously is ridiculed in the UK by the media (the irony) and politicians as a lesser discipline; software (studies) still has that aura of being closer to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects so adored by current policy makers. Yet, as Berry shows, software studies is a good way of smuggling in (my words, not Berry’s) the good ol’ humanities’ way of critically and inventively investigating philosophical and social contexts in which code is executed and executes the world. This is not to implicitly say that STEM is uninventive, and that arts and humanities are the only experimental disciplines – but it is true that we need a stronger articulation of how we can sustain some of the better heritages of arts and humanities topics.

www.leonardo.info/...berry_parikka.php

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Software Computer Computing Digital Humanities Academia Philosophy

In the midst of the enthusiasm for the epistemologies offered by science or, for instance, the digital humanities --which too is still to me looking for its singular potential-- such books that establish continuums between traditions of philosophy and traditions of writing/reading software are exciting. Berry actually offers digital humanities as one context for this mode of theoretisation. Berry gives a quick intro to some of the background assumptions of digital humanities and visions of it as part of the future post-disciplinary universities where access to knowledge is enabled so that it is “disregarding and bypassing traditional gatekeepers of knowledge in the state, the universities and the market” (20)/ Yet, quite many would be quick to point out that in the midst of P2P enthusiasms, etc., quite a lot of reverse is happening, too, and in the midst of the public funding crisis universities are actually even more now clutching to the IP they own and use as productive force (knowledge, teaching, research). This political economic side to universities in the digital age is not so much addressed by Berry, who, however, is not unfamiliar to political economy of code (as his previous book, Copy Rip Burn, demonstrated).
What Berry wants to propose in the midst of the subchapter on digital humanities is to use Heidegger to think about the current university environment and relations between computation and philosophy. To quote Berry: “I want to argue that there remains a location for the possibility of philosophy to explicitly question the ontological understanding of what the computational is in regard to the positive sciences. Computationality might then be understood as ontotheology, creating new ontological ‘epoch’ as a new historical constellation of intelligibility” (27). This task of assembling philosophy and computation in common key is worthwhile elaborating, indeed, even if it does not extend its critique at some of the digital humanities itself becoming a positive science, and if the place of philosophy itself is being marginalized in current university environment (not only in the UK). A positive evaluation would say that this is the task and possibility of philosophy becoming embedded in Computer Science – but institutionally, we know that it does not work that easily and, instead, university managers looking at profitability are hardly enthusiastic about adding a bit of time consuming Sein und Zeit and Was heißt Denken? to their intro to computing classes.

Sep

2011

Ian Bogost - Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

www.bogost.com/...he_elbow-patched_playg_1.shtml

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Digital Humanities Academia

For starters, the digital humanities more frequently adopt rather than invent their tools. This is a complicated issue, related to the lack product development and deployment experience in general among humanists, and their lack of computational and design abilities in particular. (By contrast, most scholars of physics or biology learn to program computers, whether in FORTRAN or MatLab or with even more advanced and flexible tools.) As a result, digital humanities projects risk letting existing technologies dictate the terms of their work. In some cases, adopting existing technology is appropriate. But in other cases, the technologies themselves make tacit, low-level assumptions that can't be seen in the light of day. While humanists can collaborate or hire staff or otherwise accomplish technical novelty, it's often at a remove, not completely understood by its proponents. The results risk reversing the intended purpose of the humanities as public spies: taking whatever works from the outside world un- or under-questioned.
Furthermore, this process of development creates a vicious circle of conflict and loathing. As lower faculties, humanists often see their work outside the logic of technological improvement or efficiency. As I argued in part 1 of this essay, usefulness should not be anathema to the humanities. But since predictable usefulness is still commonly held in disregard, creating and deploying digital humanities tools explicitly involves servicing an instrumental end. This creates cognitive dissonance, as it causes the lower faculties appear to be act according to the logic of the higher faculties. And that dissonance results in anxiety and conflict.
1 more annotation(s)...
- At a moment when the academy in general and the humanities in particular are the object of massive and wrenching changes, digital humanities emerges as a rare vector for jujitsu, simultaneously serving to position the humanities at the very forefront of certain value-laden agendas--entrepreneurship, openness and public engagement, future-oriented thinking, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, big data, industry tie-ins, and distance or distributed education--while at the same time allowing for various forms of intra-institutional mobility as new courses are approved, new colleagues are hired, new resources are allotted, and old resources are reallocated.

Ian Bogost - Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

On the one hand, humanists want to retain a place in the lower faculties, arguing that their work cannot be probed for predictable value. But then on the other hand, humanists constantly claim to have measurable value propositions. And worse yet, those value propositions are always so vague as to be essentially meaningless: "critical thinking," "lifelong learning," "communication," "cultural perspectives," and so forth. Palumbo-Liu's "solace and aid" is a reasonable candidate for this list as well.

www.bogost.com/..._the_elbow-patched_playg.shtml

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Humanities Academia

Recently, Stanford comparative literature professor David Palumbo-Liu made a case for why the humanities are indispensible. It's one in a long history of such justifications, a task that seems as necessary as ever. Yet, as with so many such justifications, Palumbo-Liu's speaks declaratively. Consider his closing charge—one I saw excerpted frequently and with enthusiasm in the days after he wrote it:

Lowering the bar for the humanities, or even dismissing the humanities as not having anything specific to teach us, is not only abrogating our responsibilities as teachers, but also ignoring the very patent evidence that the humanities are our solace and aid in life, and we need them now more than ever.

That evidence, it turns out, is the continued presence of individuals in humanities courses and degrees, where complex topics get discussed in traditional literary form. The humanities is indispensable, it would seem, because some people still find insight in novels.
Kant makes a distinction between "lower faculties," those oriented toward theoretical reason and "higher faculties," those oriented toward practical reason. The higher faculties serve state and mercantile interests, and they are therefore bound to external ends. By contrast, the lower faculties are autonomous activities, separate from the interests of law or business. Kant's position on this matter influenced Wilhelm von Humboldt's design for the University of Berlin, an institution which in turn influenced the structure of the modern university, with its separation of professional schools and faculties of arts and sciences.
6 more annotation(s)...
- it simultaneously embraces the high faculties' logic of predictable usefulness while also offering relatively weak examples of utility. Worse still, when humanists comport themselves according to the tentatively useful values they espouse, the results tend mostly to service intellectualism anyway ("critical thinking," for example, mostly takes the form of fashionable censure). "Communication" about "culture" tends toward cryptic self-reference and directs itself at insiders alone. Humanism has professionalized, and the interests it serves most often are its own.
- The humanities are not meant to run "off the books" as an elbow-patched playground. Instead, they are meant to represent and nurture a populace in the face of the governmental and organizational interests served by the higher faculties. The humanities are meant to be populist rather than statist. They shouldn't stand "against usefulness," but rather "toward the world."
- humanists bear active disdain for actual humans, whom they often perceive to be ignorant suckers, willing interpellees too far outside the "honorable" inner sanctum of Fishy humanism to be capable of the reflection the humanities claims to offer them. Humanist intellectuals like to think of themselves as secular saviors working tirelessly in the shadows. But too often, they're just vampires who can't remember the warmth of daylight.
- how can one think and reflect on the human condition while assuming either that it must be done apart from those conditions, since to do otherwise would be to be "useful" or "accounted for?" Or, alternately, how can the material for that reflection materialize in isolation from the world in which it exists? The value of the humanities is assumed to be intuitive, unchanging, and hermetic.
  
  The result is the puzzle with which I started: we have something to offer, but only to ourselves or to those who volunteer to join us. To offer something different would either transform the lower into the higher faculties (thus destroying them), or it would offer such a weak and disconnected account of utility so as to reveal its sequestration. It is a Neverland.
- humanists tend to task themselves with the production of others just like themselves ad infinitum. If we're being generous, we might admit that some humanists play the role of saboteurs, injecting skepticism into future professionals before sending them off to serve the higher interests. But only a minority earnestly begin their quest outside, among the public, relying on contemporary matters as compass-bearings for their intellectual work.
- Humanists can be private educators and public spies. But the latter role is far too rare, because humanist intellectuals do not see themselves as practitioners of daily life. Their disparagement comes largely from their own isolation within the institutions that reproduce them, a fate many humanists despise out of one side of their mouths while endorsing it with the other. The humanist corner of the university becomes, in Palmquist's words, "just a safe haven for half-witted thinkers to make a comfortable living."

Jul

2011

Geographic Information Systems Help Scholars See History - NYTimes.com

Advanced technology similar to Google Earth, MapQuest and the GPS systems used in millions of cars has made it possible to recreate a vanished landscape. This new generation of digital maps has given rise to an academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems — software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location — to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused.

www.nytimes.com/...help-scholars-see-history.html

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Humanities Web 2.0 Technology

Jul

2011

News: Call to Defend the Humanities - Inside Higher Ed

www.insidehighered.com/...humanities

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Humanities Academia Education

Many current headlines in academe tell the stories of humanities departments being eliminated at colleges all over the country. The foreign languages have taken hits at many institutions, as have other fields.
Skorton said that, speaking as the president of an institution with far more resources than most in higher education, he did not want to criticize the choices of other presidents. And he said that it was important for colleges to deal with economic difficulties "not just on the revenue side" by raising tuition, but also by making real budget cuts, however difficult that may be at many institutions.
But he said that higher education leaders need to "be thinking broadly about all disciplines" -- not forgetting the humanities -- and then using the bully pulpit on their behalf.

Jun

2011

Don't dumb me down | Science | The Guardian

Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? Like a proper little Darwin, I've been collecting specimens, making careful observations, and now I'm ready to present my theory.

It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science. This week we take the gloves off and do some serious typing.

www.guardian.co.uk/...badscience.research

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Science Journalism Communication Latour Statistics Humanities

Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories.
these stories are invariably written by the science correspondents, and hotly followed, to universal jubilation, with comment pieces, by humanities graduates, on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are.
20 more annotation(s)...
- A close relative of the wacky story is the paradoxical health story. Every Christmas and Easter, regular as clockwork, you can read that chocolate is good for you (www.badscience.net/?p=67), just like red wine is, and with the same monotonous regularity
- At the other end of the spectrum, scare stories are - of course - a stalwart of media science. Based on minimal evidence and expanded with poor understanding of its significance, they help perform the most crucial function for the media, which is selling you, the reader, to their advertisers. The MMR disaster was a fantasy entirely of the media's making (www.badscience.net/?p=23), which failed to go away. In fact the Daily Mail is still publishing hysterical anti-immunisation stories, including one calling the pneumococcus vaccine a "triple jab", presumably because they misunderstood that the meningitis, pneumonia, and septicaemia it protects against are all caused by the same pneumococcus bacteria (www.badscience.net/?p=118).
- people periodically come up to me and say, isn't it funny how that Wakefield MMR paper turned out to be Bad Science after all? And I say: no. The paper always was and still remains a perfectly good small case series report, but it was systematically misrepresented as being more than that, by media that are incapable of interpreting and reporting scientific data.
- Once journalists get their teeth into what they think is a scare story, trivial increases in risk are presented, often out of context, but always using one single way of expressing risk, the "relative risk increase", that makes the danger appear disproportionately large (www.badscience.net/?p=8).
- he media obsession with "new breakthroughs": a more subtly destructive category of science story. It's quite understandable that newspapers should feel it's their job to write about new stuff. But in the aggregate, these stories sell the idea that science, and indeed the whole empirical world view, is only about tenuous, new, hotly-contested data
- Articles about robustly-supported emerging themes and ideas would be more stimulating, of course, than most single experimental results, and these themes are, most people would agree, the real developments in science. But they emerge over months and several bits of evidence, not single rejiggable press releases. Often, a front page science story will emerge from a press release alone, and the formal academic paper may never appear, or appear much later, and then not even show what the press reports claimed it would (www.badscience.net/?p=159).
- there was an interesting essay in the journal PLoS Medicine, about how most brand new research findings will turn out to be false (www.tinyurl.com/ceq33). It predictably generated a small flurry of ecstatic pieces from humanities graduates in the media, along the lines of science is made-up, self-aggrandising, hegemony-maintaining, transient fad nonsense; and this is the perfect example of the parody hypothesis that we'll see later. Scientists know how to read a paper. That's what they do for a living: read papers, pick them apart, pull out what's good and bad.
- Scientists never said that tenuous small new findings were important headline news - journalists did.
- there is no useful information in most science stories. A piece in the Independent on Sunday from January 11 2004 suggested that mail-order Viagra is a rip-off because it does not contain the "correct form" of the drug. I don't use the stuff, but there were 1,147 words in that piece. Just tell me: was it a different salt, a different preparation, a different isomer, a related molecule, a completely different drug? No idea. No room for that one bit of information.
- Remember all those stories about the danger of mobile phones? I was on holiday at the time, and not looking things up obsessively on PubMed; but off in the sunshine I must have read 15 newspaper articles on the subject. Not one told me what the experiment flagging up the danger was. What was the exposure, the measured outcome, was it human or animal data? Figures? Anything? Nothing. I've never bothered to look it up for myself, and so I'm still as much in the dark as you.
- Because papers think you won't understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science.
- Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages.
- Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.
- science journalists somehow don't understand the difference between the evidence and the hypothesis. The Times's health editor Nigel Hawkes recently covered an experiment which showed that having younger siblings was associated with a lower incidence of multiple sclerosis. MS is caused by the immune system turning on the body. "This is more likely to happen if a child at a key stage of development is not exposed to infections from younger siblings, says the study." That's what Hawkes said. Wrong! That's the "Hygiene Hypothesis", that's not what the study showed: the study just found that having younger siblings seemed to be somewhat protective against MS: it didn't say, couldn't say, what the mechanism was, like whether it happened through greater exposure to infections. He confused evidence with hypothesis (www.badscience.net/?p=112), and he is a "science communicator".
- how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned." And if they want balance, you'll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were "divided" over the safety of MMR). One scientist will "reveal" something, and then another will "challenge" it
- The danger of authority figure coverage, in the absence of real evidence, is that it leaves the field wide open for questionable authority figures to waltz in. Gillian McKeith, Andrew Wakefield, Kevin Warwick and the rest can all get a whole lot further, in an environment where their authority is taken as read, because their reasoning and evidence is rarely publicly examined.
- it also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists' parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, "hard to understand".
- This misrepresentation of science is a direct descendant of the reaction, in the Romantic movement, against the birth of science and empiricism more than 200 years ago; it's exactly the same paranoid fantasy as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, only not as well written. We say descendant, but of course, the humanities haven't really moved forward at all, except to invent cultural relativism, which exists largely as a pooh-pooh reaction against science. And humanities graduates in the media, who suspect themselves to be intellectuals, desperately need to reinforce the idea that science is nonsense: because they've denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of western thought for 200 years, and secretly, deep down, they're angry with themselves over that.
- had a good spirited row with an eminent science journalist, who kept telling me that scientists needed to face up to the fact that they had to get better at communicating to a lay audience. She is a humanities graduate. "Since you describe yourself as a science communicator," I would invariably say, to the sound of derisory laughter: "isn't that your job?" But no, for there is a popular and grand idea about, that scientific ignorance is a useful tool: if even they can understand it, they think to themselves, the reader will. What kind of a communicator does that make you?
- Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they'll be the ones interested in reading the stuff - people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it's edited by a whole team of people who don't understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given "science communication" chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they've got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.

Apr

2011

The Default Major - Skating Through B-School - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...edl-17business-t.html

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Education Business University Humanities

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.
Brand-name programs — the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, and a few dozen others — are full of students pulling 70-hour weeks, if only to impress the elite finance and consulting firms they aspire to join. But get much below BusinessWeek’s top 50, and you’ll hear pervasive anxiety about student apathy, especially in “soft” fields like management and marketing, which account for the majority of business majors.
13 more annotation(s)...
- a Ford Foundation report warned that too many undergraduate business students chose their majors “by default.” Business programs also attract more than their share of students who approach college in purely instrumental terms, as a plausible path to a job, not out of curiosity about, say, Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm.
- Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it.
- And finally, with large student-faculty ratios and no lab equipment, business has historically been cheaper to operate than most departments. Cynics say many colleges are content.
- IN “Academically Adrift,” Dr. Arum and Dr. Roksa looked at the performance of students at 24 colleges and universities. At the beginning of freshman year and end of sophomore year, students in the study took the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a national essay test that assesses students’ writing and reasoning skills. During those first two years of college, business students’ scores improved less than any other group’s. Communication, education and social-work majors had slightly better gains; humanities, social science, and science and engineering students saw much stronger improvement.
- What accounts for those gaps? Dr. Arum and Dr. Roksa point to sheer time on task. Gains on the C.L.A. closely parallel the amount of time students reported spending on homework. Another explanation is the heavy prevalence of group assignments in business courses: the more time students spent studying in groups, the weaker their gains in the kinds of skills the C.L.A. measures.
- Donald R. Bacon, a business professor at the University of Denver, studied group projects at his institution and found a perverse dynamic: the groups that functioned most smoothly were often the ones where the least learning occurred. That’s because students divided up the tasks in ways they felt comfortable with. The math whiz would do the statistical work, the English minor drafted the analysis. And then there’s the most common complaint about groups: some shoulder all the work, the rest do nothing.
- “I understand that teamwork is important, but in my opinion they need to do more to deal with the problem of slackers,” says Justin Triplett, a 2010 Radford graduate who is completing his first year in Radford’s M.B.A. program. From his perch as a teaching assistant, he estimates that a third of students in the business school don’t engage with their schoolwork. At Radford, seniors in business invest on average 3.64 hours a week preparing for class, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement.
- “We’ve got students who don’t read, and grow up not reading,” he says. “There are too many other things competing for their time. The frequency and quantity of drinking keeps getting higher.
- If one measures success by income, Radford’s graduates fare decently. In a typical year, 65 percent had jobs three months after graduation, with a mean starting salary just above $40,000. On average nationally, business students enter the work force with higher starting salaries than humanities and social science majors. By mid-career, however, some of those liberal arts majors, including political science and philosophy majors, have closed the gap.
- For a career-oriented major, management strikes many business educators as too theoretical and amorphous — a potpourri of psychology, economics, game theory, ethics and international relations.
  Walk down the hall from Ms. Berry’s classroom to Ohio’s equity-management club, which is dominated by finance majors, and you’ll hear complaints that management courses are irrelevant to the real world. One recent class asked groups to write short papers on the theories of leadership exemplified in the movie “Apollo 13.”
- Ohio’s business dean, Hugh Sherman, says that some of the most important learning in his program happens outside the classroom. The equity-management club oversees more than a million dollars of university investments. The business school’s best marketing students are invited to join a sales team that competes nationally. Both clubs engage students for many hours each week, with no course credit involved. Dr. Sherman concedes, however, that some students go through his business school without such experiences. In particular, it has been hard to devise projects for management majors. Partly for that reason, Ohio’s business school has begun to strongly encourage management students to double-major in a field with more currency in the job market, like finance or information systems.
- Some believe it is a mistake to fetishize job preparation and the “rigor” of fields like accounting and finance. Those departments might demand more hours from their students, but they don’t necessarily provide well-rounded educations, says Henry Mintzberg, a professor at McGill University in Montreal who is a dogged critic of traditional business programs. He says it is a “travesty” to offer vocational fields like finance or marketing to 18-year-olds. Instead, he supports a humanistic, multidisciplinary model of management education. The diversity of topics reflected on Adrianna Berry’s cheat sheet is a feature, not a bug, he says.
- A coming report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching praises 10 American colleges of business as models for integrating the liberal arts and practical training.

Feb

2011

'There Is No Values-Free Form Of Education,' Says U.S. Philosopher - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2011

www.rferl.org/...2315794.html

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Education Value Democracy Humanities

from the earliest years, education should be based primarily on exploration, understanding in depth, and the development of logical, critical thinking. Such an emphasis, she says, not only produces a citizenry capable of recognizing and rooting out political jingoism and intolerance. It also produces people capable of questioning authority and perceived wisdom in ways that enhance innovation and economic competitiveness. Nussbaum warns against a narrow educational focus on technical competence.
a successful, long-term democracy depends on a citizenry with certain qualities that can be fostered by education.
16 more annotation(s)...
- The first is the capacity we associate in the Western tradition with Socrates, but it certainly appears in all traditions -- that is, the ability to think critically about proposals that are brought your way, to analyze an argument, to distinguish a good argument from a bad argument. And just in general, to lead what Socrates called “the examined life.” Now that’s, of course, important because we know that people are very prone to go along with authority, with fashion, with peer pressure. And this kind of critical enlivened citizenry is the only thing that can keep democracy vital.
- it can be trained from very early in a child’s education. There’re ways that you can get quite young children to recognize what’s a good argument and what’s a bad argument. And as children grow older, it can be done in a more and more sophisticated form until by the time they’re undergraduates in universities they would be studying Plato’s dialogues for example and really looking at those tricky arguments and trying to figure out how to think.
  
  And this is important not just for the individual thinking about society, but it’s important for the way people talk to each other. In all too many public discussions people just throw out slogans and they throw out insults. And what democracy needs is listening. And respect. And so when people learn how to analyze an argument, then they look at what the other person’s saying differently. And they try to take it apart, and they think: “Well, do I share some of those views and where do I differ here?” and so on. And this really does produce a much more deliberative, respectful style of public interaction.
- The second [quality] is what I call “the ability to think as a citizen of the whole world.” We’re all narrow and this is again something that we get from our animal heritage. Most non-human animals just think about the group. But, of course, in this world we need to think, first of all, our whole nation -- its many different groups, minority and majority. And then we need to think outside the nation, about how problems involving, let’s say, the environment or global economy and so on need cooperative resolution that brings together people from many different nations.
- That’s complicated and it requires learning a lot of history, and it means learning not just to parrot some facts about history but to think critically about how to assess historical evidence. It means learning how to think about the global economy. And then I think particularly important in this era, it means learning something about the major world religions. Learning complicated, nonstereotypical accounts of those religions because there’s so much fear that’s circulating around in every country that’s based usually on just inadequate stereotypes of what Muslims are or whatever. So knowledge can at least begin to address that.
- the third thing, which I think goes very closely with the other two, is what I call “the narrative imagination,” which is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person to have some understanding of how the world looks from that point of view. And to really have that kind of educated sympathy with the lives of others.
  
  Now again this is something we come into the world with. Psychologists have now found that babies less than a year old are able to take up the perspective of another person and do things, see things from that perspective. But it’s very narrow and usually people learn how to think about what their parents are thinking and maybe other family members but we need to extend that and develop it, and learn how the world looks from the point of view of minorities in our own culture, people outside our culture, and so on.
- since we can’t go to all the places that we need to understand -- it’s accomplished by reading narratives, reading literature, drama, participating through the arts in the thought processes of another culture. So literature and the arts are the major ways we would develop and extend that capacity.
- For many years, the leading model of development ... used by economists and international agencies measuring welfare was simply that for a country to develop means to increase [its] gross domestic product per capita. Now, in recent years, there has been a backlash to that because people feel that it just doesn’t ask enough about what goods are really doing for people, what can people really do and be.
- so since 1990s the United Nations’ development program has produced annually what’s called a “Human Development Report” that looks at things like access to education, access to health care. In other words, a much richer menu of human chances and opportunities that people have. And at the theoretical end I’ve worked for about 20 years now with economist Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for economics. And we’ve developed this as account of -- so for us what it is for a country to do better is to enhance the set of capabilities meaning substantial opportunities that people have to lead meaningful, fruitful lives. And then I go on to focus on a certain core group of those capabilities that I think ought to be protected by constitutional law in every country.
- Life; health; bodily integrity; the development of senses, imagination, and thought; the development of practical reason; opportunities to have meaningful affiliations both friendly and political with other people; the ability to have emotional health -- not to be in other words dominated by overwhelming fear and so on; the ability to have a productive relationship with the environment and the world of nature; the ability to play and have leisure time, which is something that I think people don’t think enough about; and then, finally, control over one’s material and social environment, some measure of control. Now of course, each of these is very abstract, and I specify them further. Although I also think that each country needs to finally specify them with its own particular circumstances in view.
- when kids learn in a classroom that just makes them sit in a chair, well, they can take in something in their heads, but it doesn’t make them competent at negotiating in the world. And so starting, at least, with Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, people thought: “Well, if we really want people to be independent citizens in a democracy that means that we can’t have whole classes of people who don’t know how to do anything, who are just simply sitting there waiting to be waited on in practical matters.” And so the idea that children should participate in their practical environment came out of the initial democratizing tendencies that went running through the 18th century.
- even countries who absolutely do not want that kind of engaged citizenry see that for the success of business these abilities are pretty important. Both Singapore and China have conducted mass education reforms over the last five years because they realized that their business cultures don’t have enough imagination and they also don’t have enough critical thinking, because you can have awfully corrupt business culture if no one is willing to say the unpleasant word or make a criticism.
- So they have striven to introduce more critical thinking and more imagination into their curricula. But, of course, for them, they want to cordon it off -- they want to do it in the science classroom, in the business classroom, but not in the politics classroom. Well, we’ll see -- can they do that? Can they segment it that way? I think democratic thinking is awfully hard to segment as current events in the Middle East are showing us. It does have the tendency to spread.
- so maybe the people in Singapore and China will not like the end result of what they tried to do or maybe the reform will just fail, which is equally likely -- I mean the educational reform.
- if you really don’t want democracy, this is not the education for you. It had its origins in the ancient Athenian democracy which was a very, very strong participatory democracy and it is most at home in really true democracy, where our whole goal is to get each and every person involved and to get them thinking about things. So, of course, if politicians have ambivalence about that goal they may well not want this kind of education.
- when we bring up children in the family or in the school, we are always engineering. I mean, there is no values-free form of education in the world. Even an education that just teaches you a list of facts has values built into it. Namely, it gives a negative value to imagination and to the critical faculties and a very high value to a kind of rote, technical competence. So, you can't avoid shaping children.
- ncreasingly the child should be in control and should become free. And that's what the critical thinking is all about -- it's about promoting freedom as the child goes on. So, the end product should be an adult who is really thinking for him- or herself about the direction of society. But you don't get freedom just by saying, "Oh, you are free." Progressive educators that simply stopped teaching found out very quickly that that didn't produce freedom. Even some of the very extreme forms of progressive school where children were just allowed to say every day what it was they wanted to learn, they found that didn't give the child the kind of mastery of self and of the world that you really need to be a free person.

Jan

2011

BBC News - A Point of View: Justifying culture

Arts subjects are being cut because those who teach them are not saying why they matter, says Alain de Botton.

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-12136511

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Humanities Academia University Education Culture Rationality

academics in the humanities have failed to explain why what they do should matter so much. They've failed to explain to the government, but this really only means "us" - the public at large.
They have allowed themselves to be offended by the very need to justify their relevance, speaking only in dangerously vague terms about the value of culture in helping people to "think" or they have counted on having just enough respect left not to have to spell out why they should exist at all, other than because what they do is just so important.
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- if they couldn't say in clear terms why they still mattered, then an impatient, harried government might just decide that they didn't really, and a bored, stressed, stoical wider public wouldn't bother to raise a hand in protest.
- the way culture is currently taught in universities is a travesty of its real potential, and that the government cuts are an understandable, if not at all nice, consequence of the failure of current teaching methods and goals.
- My personal view of what the humanities are for is simple - they should help us to live. We should look to culture as a repository of useful and consoling ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues. We should look to novels and historical narratives to impart moral instruction and edification, to great paintings for suggestions about value, to philosophy to probe our anxieties and offer consolations.
- It should be the job of a university education to tease out the therapeutic and illuminative aspects of culture, so that we can emerge from a period of study as slightly less disturbed, selfish, unempathetic and blinkered human beings, who can be of greater benefit not only to the economy, but also to our friends, our children and our spouses.
- These well-meaning, mid-Victorians wanted to use humanistic culture to replace scripture. They wanted universities to become our new churches, places that would teach us how to live, but without dogma or superstition.
- Though it was at first hoped by men like Arnold and Mill that universities might be our new churches, these centres of learning have never offered what churches invariably focus on - guidance. It is a basic tenet of contemporary scholarship that no academic should connect works of culture to individual sorrows.
- Whatever the rhetoric of graduation ceremonies and the ambitious tone of prospectuses, there seems a strange and regrettable truth to confront about the workings of the modern university, that the institution has precious little interest in teaching us any emotional or ethical life skills - how to love our neighbours, clear human confusion, diminish human misery and leave the world better and happier than we found it.
- To judge by what they do rather than what they airily declaim, universities are in the business of turning out a majority of tightly focused professionals (accountants, lawyers, physicians, engineers) and a minority of culturally well-informed, but ethically confused arts graduates aptly panicked about how they might remuneratively occupy the rest of their lives.
- We have implicitly charged our higher-education system with a dual and possibly contradictory mission, to teach us how to make a living and to teach us how to live. And we have left the second of these two aims recklessly vague and unattended.
- Universities may well be teaching the right books but they too often fail to ask direct questions of them, declining to advance sufficiently vulgar, neo-religious enquiries because they are embarrassed to admit the true nature of our inner needs. They are fatefully in love with ambiguity, they trust in the absurd modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience.

Dec

2010

Genome Biology | Full text | A Faustian bargain

genomebiology.com/138

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Education Humanities Political Economy

on October 1st, you announced that the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. You gave several reasons for your decision, including that 'there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs.' Of course, your decision was also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure - in fact, you stated that this decision might not have been necessary had the state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed your university to set its own tuition rates. Finally, you asserted that the humanities were a drain on the institution financially, as opposed to the sciences, which bring in money in the form of grants and contracts.
I'm sure that relatively few students take classes in these subjects nowadays, just as you say. There wouldn't have been many in my day, either, if universities hadn't required students to take a distribution of courses in many different parts of the academy: humanities, social sciences, the fine arts, the physical and natural sciences, and to attain minimal proficiency in at least one foreign language. You see, the reason that humanities classes have low enrollment is not because students these days are clamoring for more relevant courses; it's because administrators like you, and spineless faculty, have stopped setting distribution requirements and started allowing students to choose their own academic programs - something I feel is a complete abrogation of the duty of university faculty as teachers and mentors. You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of courses.
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- in Dostoyevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In the parable, Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He performs several miracles but is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor visits Him in his cell to tell Him that the Church no longer needs Him. The main portion of the text is the Inquisitor explaining why. The Inquisitor says that Jesus rejected the three temptations of Satan in the desert in favor of freedom, but he believes that Jesus has misjudged human nature.
- the vast majority of humanity cannot handle freedom. In giving humans the freedom to choose, Christ has doomed humanity to a life of suffering.
- I'm sure the budgetary problems you have to deal with are serious. They certainly are at Brandeis University, where I work. And we, too, faced critical strategic decisions because our income was no longer enough to meet our expenses. But we eschewed your draconian - and authoritarian - solution, and a team of faculty, with input from all parts of the university, came up with a plan to do more with fewer resources. I'm not saying that all the specifics of our solution would fit your institution, but the process sure would have. You did call a town meeting, but it was to discuss your plan, not let the university craft its own. And you called that meeting for Friday afternoon on October 1st, when few of your students or faculty would be around to attend. In your defense, you called the timing 'unfortunate', but pleaded that there was a 'limited availability of appropriate large venue options.' I find that rather surprising. If the President of Brandeis needed a lecture hall on short notice, he would get one. I guess you don't have much clout at your university.
- As for the argument that the humanities don't pay their own way, well, I guess that's true, but it seems to me that there's a fallacy in assuming that a university should be run like a business. I'm not saying it shouldn't be managed prudently, but the notion that every part of it needs to be self-supporting is simply at variance with what a university is all about.
- You seem to value entrepreneurial programs and practical subjects that might generate intellectual property more than you do 'old-fashioned' courses of study. But universities aren't just about discovering and capitalizing on new knowledge; they are also about preserving knowledge from being lost over time, and that requires a financial investment.
- what seems to be archaic today can become vital in the future. I'll give you two examples of that. The first is the science of virology, which in the 1970s was dying out because people felt that infectious diseases were no longer a serious health problem in the developed world and other subjects, such as molecular biology, were much sexier. Then, in the early 1990s, a little problem called AIDS became the world's number 1 health concern. The virus that causes AIDS was first isolated and characterized at the National Institutes of Health in the USA and the Institute Pasteur in France, because these were among the few institutions that still had thriving virology programs. My second example you will probably be more familiar with. Middle Eastern Studies, including the study of foreign languages such as Arabic and Persian, was hardly a hot subject on most campuses in the 1990s. Then came September 11, 2001. Suddenly we realized that we needed a lot more people who understood something about that part of the world, especially its Muslim culture. Those universities that had preserved their Middle Eastern Studies departments, even in the face of declining enrollment, suddenly became very important places. Those that hadn't - well, I'm sure you get the picture.
- one of your arguments is that not every place should try to do everything. Let other institutions have great programs in classics or theater arts, you say; we will focus on preparing students for jobs in the real world. Well, I hope I've just shown you that the real world is pretty fickle about what it wants. The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today's backwater is often tomorrow's hot field. And interdisciplinary research, which is all the rage these days, is only possible if people aren't too narrowly trained. If none of that convinces you, then I'm willing to let you turn your institution into a place that focuses on the practical, but only if you stop calling it a university and yourself the President of one. You see, the word 'university' derives from the Latin 'universitas', meaning 'the whole'. You can't be a university without having a thriving humanities program. You will need to call SUNY Albany a trade school, or perhaps a vocational college, but not a university. Not anymore.
- I started out as a classics major. I'm now Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry. Of all the courses I took in college and graduate school, the ones that have benefited me the most in my career as a scientist are the courses in classics, art history, sociology, and English literature. These courses didn't just give me a much better appreciation for my own culture; they taught me how to think, to analyze, and to write clearly. None of my sciences courses did any of that.

Rationally Speaking: The sorry state of higher education

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...state-of-higher-education.html

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Education Plagiarism Humanities Political Economy

two disconcerting articles crossed my computer screen, both highlighting the increasingly sorry state of higher education, though from very different perspectives. The first is “Ed Dante’s” (actually a pseudonym) piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled The Shadow Scholar. The second is Gregory Petsko’s A Faustian Bargain, published of all places in Genome Biology.
There is much to be learned by educators in the Shadow Scholar piece, except the moral that “Dante” would like us to take from it. The anonymous author writes:
“Pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work? Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.
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- The point is that plagiarism and cheating happen for a variety of reasons, one of which is the existence of people like Mr. Dante and his company, who set up a business that is clearly unethical and should be illegal. So, pointing fingers at him and his ilk is perfectly reasonable. Yes, there obviously is a “market” for cheating in higher education, and there are complex reasons for it, but he is in a position similar to that of the drug dealer who insists that he is simply providing the commodity to satisfy society’s demand. Much too easy of a way out, and one that doesn’t fly in the case of drug dealers, and shouldn’t fly in the case of ghost cheaters.
- As a teacher at the City University of New York, I am constantly aware of the possibility that my students might cheat on their tests. I do take some elementary precautionary steps
- Still, my job is not that of the policeman. My students are adults who theoretically are there to learn. If they don’t value that learning and prefer to pay someone else to fake it, so be it, ultimately it is they who lose in the most fundamental sense of the term. Just like drug addicts, to return to my earlier metaphor. And just as in that other case, it is enablers like Mr. Dante who simply can’t duck the moral blame.
- n open letter to the president of SUNY-Albany, penned by molecular biologist Gregory Petsko. The SUNY-Albany president has recently announced the closing — for budgetary reasons — of the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts at his university.
- Petsko begins by taking on one of the alleged reasons why SUNY-Albany is slashing the humanities: low enrollment. He correctly points out that the problem can be solved overnight at the stroke of a pen: stop abdicating your responsibilities as educators and actually put constraints on what your students have to take in order to graduate. Make courses in English literature, foreign languages, philosophy and critical thinking, the arts and so on, mandatory or one of a small number of options that the students must consider in order to graduate.
- But, you might say, that’s cheating the market! Students clearly don’t want to take those courses, and a business should cater to its customers. That type of reasoning is among the most pernicious and idiotic I’ve ever heard. Students are not clients (if anything, their parents, who usually pay the tuition, are), they are not shopping for a new bag or pair of shoes. They do not know what is best for them educationally, that’s why they go to college to begin with. If you are not convinced about how absurd the students-as-clients argument is, consider an analogy: does anyone with functioning brain cells argue that since patients in a hospital pay a bill, they should be dictating how the brain surgeon operates? I didn’t think so.
- Petsko then tackles the second lame excuse given by the president of SUNY-Albany (and common among the upper administration of plenty of public universities): I can’t do otherwise because of the legislature’s draconian cuts. Except that university budgets are simply too complicated for there not to be any other option. I know this first hand, I’m on a special committee at my own college looking at how to creatively deal with budget cuts handed down to us from the very same (admittedly small minded and dysfunctional) New York state legislature that has prompted SUNY-Albany’s action. As Petsko points out, the president there didn’t even think of involving the faculty and staff in a broad discussion of how to deal with the crisis, he simply announced the cuts on a Friday afternoon and then ran for cover. An example of very poor leadership to say the least, and downright hypocrisy considering all the talk that the same administrator has been dishing out about the university “community.”
- Finally, there is the argument that the humanities don’t pay for their own way, unlike (some of) the sciences (some of the time). That is indubitably true, but irrelevant. Universities are not businesses, they are places of higher learning. Yes, of course they need to deal with budgets, fund raising and all the rest. But the financial and administrative side has one goal and one goal only: to provide the best education to the students who attend that university.
- That education simply must include the sciences, philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as more technical or pragmatic offerings such as medicine, business and law. Why? Because that’s the kind of liberal education that makes for an informed and intelligent citizenry, without which our democracy is but empty talk, and our lives nothing but slavery to the marketplace.
- Maybe this is not how education works in the US. I thought that general (or compulsory) education (ie. up to high school) is designed to make sure that citizens in a democratic country can perform their civil duties. A balanced and well-rounded education, which includes a healthy mixture of science and humanities, is indeed very important for this purpose. However, college-level education is for personal growth and therefore the person must have a large say about what kind of classes he or she chooses to take. I am disturbed by Massimo's hospital analogy. Students are not ill. They don't go to college to be cured, or to be good citizens. They go to college to learn things that *they* want to learn. Patients are passive. Students are not.
  
  I agree that students typically do not know what kind of education is good for them. But who does?
- students do have a saying in their education. They pick their major, and there are electives. But I object to the idea that they can customize their major any way they want. That assumes they know what the best education for them is, they don't. That's the point of education.
- The students are in your class to get a good grade, any learning that takes place is purely incidental. Those good grades will look good on their transcript and might convince a future employer that they are smart and thus are worth paying more.
- I don't know what the dollar to GPA exchange rate is these days, but I don't doubt that there is one.
- Just how many of your students do you think will remember the extensive complex jargon of philosophy more than a couple of months after they leave your classroom?
- and our lives nothing but slavery to the marketplace.
  
  We are there. Welcome. Where have you been all this time? In a capitalistic/plutocratic society money is power (and free speech too according to the supreme court). Money means a larger/better house/car/clothing/vacation than your neighbor and consequently better mating opportunities. You can mostly blame the women for that one I think just like the peacock's tail.
- If a student of surgery fails to learn they might maim, kill or cripple someone. If an engineer of airplanes fails to learn they might design a faulty aircraft that fails and kills people. If a student of chemistry fails to learn they might design a faulty drug with unintended and unfortunate side effects, but what exactly would be the harm if a student of philosophy fails to learn Aristotle had to say about elements or Plato had to say about perfect forms? These things are so divorced from people's everyday activities as to be rendered all but meaningless.
- human knowledge grows by leaps and bounds every day, but human brain capacity does not, so the portion of human knowledge you can personally hold gets smaller by the minute. Learn (and remember) as much as you can as fast as you can and you will still lose ground. You certainly have your work cut out for you emphasizing the importance of Thales in the Age of Twitter and whatever follows it next year.