Relevant History

Bloomington

I've been in Bloomington, Indiana for a conference on visualization and the history and philosophy of science. It's one of those events that brings together my old life as an historian, and my new life as a futurist: on one hand we're mainly talking about how visualizations of scientific communities and social dynamics can be used by historians and philosophers; on the other I suspect that there are cool things I could do with these maps to forecast the future of science.

the official conference picture, via flickr

There's one other think-tank person here, which saves me from being the one non-academic Ph.D. in the room, the scholarly equivalent of Stephen Colbert's one black friend.

There have been some efforts to use scinometric (or "science of science") maps in the history of science, but so far as I know, most of this work has followed fairly conventional historiographic paths: for example, mapping the Darwin or Mersenne correspondence, or asking questions about the growth of scholarly networks. We've not yet used them to something radically new, like using geographical coding to calculate the speed of the transmission of ideas or instruments, or constructing agent-based models of scientific communities and seeing how they evolve over time. But that's why we're here-- to think about how we could create such things, and what benefit they might bring.

I quite like Bloomington, or the few blocks of Bloomington that I've seen.

via flickr

The place is enormous. It has roughly the same number of students as Berkeley, but physically it's much larger. It also takes collegiate Gothic (a somewhat stripped-down, modernized version) to a scale I don't think I've never seen before. If you took Princeton or Bryn Mawr, put it on a balloon, then blew up the balloon to five times its previous size, you'd get the IU campus. Yale and University of Chicago bear some family resemblance to Oxford or Cambridge, thanks to their small scale; IU takes Gothic where it's never gone before.

via flickr

It's also pretty heavily wooded. There are a couple streams that flow through the campus, and they're surrounded by forest and crisscrossed with little footbridges.

campus tuesday night, via flickr

the same location, wednesday afternoon, via flickr

The town has a lot of restaurants, and a lot of foreign food, for a place its size. Tuesday night I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, and last night it was Thai at Siam House. (Both are a serious challenge to dieting!) One local attributed this to the long presence of foreign students at IU, some of whom brought spouses or other relatives who went into the restaurant business. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but for whatever reason, there's good food here.

siam house, via flickr

There's a bit of a restaurant row, small places in old houses. That's cool, as it gives the restaurants a more informal character.

restaurant row, via flickr

There are also rabbits that come out in the evening, which adds one more little (furry and bouncy) note of whimsy to the place.

insouciant bunny, via flickr

A few of my favorite things: What I enjoy about travel, biking, workshops, and cooking

In the last few days I've been doing a lot of stuff: biking, organizing a Memorial Day dinner, preparing for a week-long trip to the East Coast, thinking about the craft and design of workshops. (These are the expert workshops that I organize all over the place.)

In many ways these are very different activities, but I really enjoy them all. I recently realized that despite their differences, they actually share a few qualities.

1) They're active, embodied knowledge.

Obviously bicycling is physical, but cooking is a nice combination of fine motor skill and lifting big heavy things (or in my case, avoiding setting myself on fire); you're always on your feet in a workshop; and travel is pretty physically strenuous, for good and bad reasons. Maybe I'm getting older, I'm less of a couch potato, or my ADD is increasing (and I know these are somewhat mutually exclusive explanations), but I find my patience with sitting for long hours and just reading is decreasing. I can do it, but I'm happier engaging my body. And nothing is better than activities where you're involving your body, but you have to think about what you're doing. (Gregg Zachary had a great piece last year on the rediscovery of the virtues of manual work. I'm part of a movement.)

cycling hunter's point, via flickr

Like Richard Sennett's craftsman (and I really recommend his book), I enjoy things that are physical or tangible, but also engage the mind. Thoughtful action is where it's at.

gestural interface missile command, via flickr

2) There are real deadlines.

My capacity for finishing things that have open-ended deadlines, or fake deadlines ("so we all agree that we'll finish our tasks by next week, right? right?"), is plummeting to near zero. Too much other stuff in my life that absolutely has to get done.

hard deadlines: flames don't wait, via flickr

So hard deadlines are good for me now. Essential even. The workshop starts at exactly this time, the plane leaves at exactly that time, the guests are arriving now. Heard deadlines also put a nice bound on craftwork, by preventing you from tinkering forever with something. A paragraph could always be better, but as Sennett writes, the demands of the trade force craftsmen to accept limits, to do the best job they can within the time they have, and to learn to be satisfied with that. As graphic designers say, "finished is good."

3) They require preparation.

The day of the cookout, I spent hours chopping vegetables, checking marinades, cleaning off platters (you can never have too many platters at a BBQ), locating plates and cups, setting up staging areas for food and drinks, laying out tools, etc. (I noticed, though, that this wasn't tedious, it was pleasant. It was a classic example of what Csíkszentmihályi calls flow.) Likewise, when you travel, you've got to think a lot about what to pack, how to structure your time, how to get among different places, etc.. A bike won't work with a flat tire, nor will a cyclist work if he's dehydrated, so you'd better be prepared for those possibilities. Every ride requires some kind of adjustment: technical climbs mess up gears; thorns flatten tires; I get hungry. Having the resources to deal with those things lets me keep riding.

With workshops, you have to think in advance about everything, and I mean everything: you have to go over the agenda minute-by-minute, think about the flow of the day, tinker with questions and exercises to eliminate ambiguity and focus people, lay out materials, move the furniture around, make sure the caterers know when to appear, etc., etc. (Indeed, there are things that we normally don't think about that I'd like to start experimenting with, like lighting and ambient sound, making some activities more embodied and physical-- sitting is exhausting-- and playing with the day's menu to keep people from getting weighed down by muffins and too much coffee.)

Good preparation doesn't require you to think just about one thing. It requires you to think about a lot of different things, big and small; to think about timing and process; about division of labor; about contingencies and strategies. That's part of what makes it pleasant.

future of science workshop, malaysia, via flickr

But here's the important thing.

Some of that preparation is meant to help you keep things on track, and do things exactly the right way. But most serious preparation isn't about scripting. Rather, its about making it possible for you to adapt to whatever actually happens. I've never had a workshop run exactly the way I imagined it would: more people show up, they turn out to be interested in other things than we'd discussed before, the room isn't laid out the way we expected-- a thousand different things can go akimbo.

I used to think that the point of planning workshops in such great detail was so I'd have more control over them. Wrong. You never have control. You have whatever you have when you get in the room. The point of doing all that planning is to deeply understand the intentionality and philosophy behind the workshop, so you can improvise your way to the same end-point, and you have the tools at hand to do so.

perimeter institute, waterloo, via flickr

[Update: I've realized that this is my complaint about humanities graduate training: it socializes you to believe that you possess skills that are useful only in a very specific future-- namely tenure track jobs in your field-- and train you to believe that you're less qualified to succeed at a different future, and that any other future is a failure.]

If you know that you're going to go off the map-- if events are going to conspire to send you in another direction, and they will-- the best that you can do is have the right gear, and a clear picture of where you want to go.

4) They have serendipity.

The upside of plans not working out the way you expect is that they can work out better. Sometimes the very coolest thing isn't on the map, and the only way to find it is to venture into the unknown.

One of the great pleasures of having a big party is that mixing up friends who don't know each other can have pleasant results for everyone. The best rides are ones that have a brilliant hill and view that you didn't know about. The best trips are the ones that expose you to something you've never seen before, or didn't even know was cool. I fell in love with Budapest not because I'd always wanted to go there, but because it's an amazing, complicated, Old World post-socialist place that I find alternately fascinating and frustrating. I love London because it rewards walking: I know it well enough to be able to navigate by Tube or on foot, but every time I go out in the evening I discover something-- a little square, a park, a row of businesses-- that charms and captivates, and that I'd never heard of.

surprise in the london underground, via flickr

Workshops have serendipity too. Tons of it. You want to build connections between ideas or fields that even experts hadn't seen before, or explore the cross-impact of trends that people normally think about separately. When that works, the results are awesome-- and the amazing thing is, the results are awesome a lot more often than you'd expect. You never know what the outcome of a workshop is going to be-- and if you do, there's really no point in having it in the first place. This doesn't mean that a workshop shouldn't have certain goals or deliverables; far from it. But it's like an evening walk in London: you know where you're going to end up, you know that there are certain landmarks you'll pass, but you don't know what else you're going to see along the way. Your job is to be open to the serendipity, so you can take advantage of it.

5) They draw out people.

I mean this in two senses. First, they can push you do things you didn't know you could. Good rides challenge you to do things you didn't think you were capable of, or leave you exhausted by happy with your performance.

Second, they open up a space for people to contribute. My wife used the cookout as an opportunity to repot a bunch of flowers in the backyard, dig out and repot some aging bamboo, and do other things on her gardening/home improvement list. Once kids started arriving, my daughter made (or taught the kids how make) balloon swords, which they then played with all evening. I hadn't thought of either of these, but people commented on how nice the backyard looked, and the kids all left exhausted and uninjured. Win.

perimeter institute, waterloo, via flickr

Workshops require both kinds of drawing out. Running a workshop isn't an exercise in controlling other people, but it's a hard task to create a venue in which everyone can think seriously, think differently, and think together.

It's also not about getting a certain result, but about creating the conditions out of which interesting new things will emerge. Of course, workshops have objectives, but as a facilitator, you have to approach them obliquely, and recognize that the actual work and thinking will be done by participants: you're just ("just" isn't quite the right word!) there to help make it happen.

workshop in laxenburg, astria via flickr

6) You can push sometimes, but mainly you have to flow.

You can challenge people, but you can't order them to be innovative. You can try to get guests to mingle or introduce them to each other, but you can't make them be chatty and friendly. You can also push yourself to some degree, but recognize that pushing doesn't get you everything: you can get to the airport on time, but you can't control the weather and need to be able to go with whatever the situation presents.

my son on a happier ride

This morning I got an unexpected lesson on pushing versus flow from my son. We were biking to school, and he has the habit of standing up while pedaling. I can't get him to stop (he's seven, after all), so I was trying to teach him how to do it in a way that maintains his balance. He got frustrated and mad, which made him distracted; and so he took a spill. Bad enough to break the mirror on his bike, add a couple nicks to the brakes or handlebars, and require some ice and band-aids when he got to school. Fortunately nothing on him was broken, and he'll be fine.

As I try to tell the kids, biking is one of those things that demands mindfulness: you have to watch the road, know what gear you're in, know where the cars are, know how tired you are. You can push yourself, but if you lose your concentration-- if you lose the flow-- you're likely to crash. In the course of pushing him, I made him lose what little flow he had.

Still, any spill that doesn't send you to urgent care is a learning opportunity, not an accident. And as a friend of mine wrote after hearing about the crash,

But falling is an essential part of growth. It teaches you where the boundaries are. If you never push hard enough to fall, you will never know if you could grow twice as much or twice as fast-- because you are playing it safe.

So across all these activities-- and maybe across everything you do-- hitting that mix of pushing and flow, planning but staying open to serendipty, and being active is key.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Hourglass, Part 2," from the album Staircase (I give it 4 stars).]

Tabletop

Anthony Grafton on graduate school, and the uncertain nature of big decisions

Nothing in it about penis-shaped helicopters, but this Anthony Grafton piece about going to graduate school is pretty good-- the kind of combination of encouragement about the inherent (if quirky) rewards of academic apprenticeship, combined with some (maybe too gentle) warnings about the downside. I particularly like this little "then-and-now" gem:

In the ’60s, as universities expanded around the country and the world, job offers strewed the desks of bright Ph.D. candidates like autumn leaves in Vallombrosa. [ed: This is the kind of thing that separates writers like Tony from us mere mortals. I have no idea what it means, but I feel more erudite just reading that reference.] One friend of mine opened an envelope that had been buried under detritus on his desk and discovered that he’d been offered a job two years before and never even answered.

Not very likely to happen these days, but my father (who got his Ph.D. in 1970, and his first tenure-track job three of four years before) confirms that yes, that's what it was like back then.

While Tony advises readers that they shouldn't "jump [into grad school] before you find out exactly what lies below," though I wonder if it's really possible to "find out" what it's like, or what it'll do for (or to) you with anything approaching exactitude.

Of course you should talk to lots of people, but for most prospective students that universe will only include current students and faculty. The students who will be alternately glowing about grad school and their prospects, or will try to give you the scary "real" story. The faculty will be pretty useless as advisors about the realities of grad school: life looks very different at the head of the seminar table.

On the face of it, talking to students and faculty is a pretty logical decision, but the problem is this: odds are, you're not going to get a Ph.D. and then be a professor at the kind of university you aspire to attend. Further, while they're helpful about the day-to-day reality of school, graduate students are going to be useless sources about the long-term effects of going to graduate school-- either in economic or career terms, or in psychological terms. At the same time, other people who could be very informative-- people who've been ABD for 15 years; people who finished their Ph.D.s and then went to Wall Street, the World Bank, or think tanks; students who dropped out before their orals-- are much harder to track down.

So there's an inverse relationship between the availability of experts to consult, and the likelihood that their expertise is actually going to be useful in your own life.

When I was an undergrad (I was one of those nerdy kids who went straight from college to grad school-- actually, I started taking graduate classes as a sophomore), I never thought about talking to people who'd almost finished the programs I was looking at but dropped out, or people who didn't become academics. It turns out, of course, that it would have been far more useful for me to talk to Ph.D.s who'd gone into business. But those people aren't as easy to find as the ones in the faculty lounge or TA offices.

This is actually an example of a bigger problem that people and organizations face when thinking about the future: we tend to confine our research to cases that are relatively easy to find, and look only at successes (successful cases, organizations, or people), and not at failures. Getting a handle on that space-- or at least a more realistic appreciation of the likelihood of the unexpected happening-- is one of the toughest things you can do as a forecaster, or parent, or human. After all, success is what we want, and it's easy to understand; failure is what we want to avoid, and people fail for all sorts of unpredictable reasons. Success if what a strategy or good decision or first-rate school can bring you; failure is what'll happen if you don't get those things. We don't think explore the possibility that we could get those things, execute properly, and still not reach our goal; but that happens all the time. Success, we think, is comprehensible and predictable (and not largely determined by the economic state of universities and how expansive faculty hiring is allowed to be in any given season); failure is random, or something that'll happen to other people. But in reality, we're probably going to end up one of those other people. We're better off if we know that in advance.

And if we know that the definition of "failure" is sometimes as arbitrary as the forces that determine whether it happens to us or not. I can testify that it's possible to have an interesting intellectual life without being an academic (though having a library card does help). As Grafton notes,

Even if you don’t finish, or finish and don’t wind up as a professor, the skills you learn in grad school can be of value in a range of other venues. Some of my most successful former students work as scholars, teachers or writers outside the academy. But as you might expect, few follow this path without some bitterness. And no wonder. A fair number of professors treat students who leave the academy, even after experiencing terrible difficulties, as renegades and wash their hands of them. Be prepared.

Be prepared, indeed.

A headline from any time in the last 20 years

Today's New York Times: "Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times."

Hmmm.

"The second failure of academia"

Having spent so much time thinking about young Ph.D.s developing postacademic lives, it never really occurred to me that there would be similar problems of professional marginality at the end of one's career. But Siris makes an argument that the failure of philosophy-- which, one imagines, would be second only to history as a scholarly activity in which age is a virtue rather than a disadvantage-- to find a place for emeritus scholars in the profession represents "the second failure of academia:"

[E]veryone assumes that retirement is and must be the end of the road: that the only reason you'd retire is because you've become dead wood. And no one has recognized that this is a symptom of a profound failure on our part, one almost as profound as the failure to prevent 'adjunctification'.

It is utterly absurd that we have no standard options after retirement for senior philosophers who still want to be actively involved in philosophy. If anything, retirement should standardly be the next stage after tenure, not an exit from the field but another kind of removal of constraints.

Perhaps we get something vaguely like this in how some departments treat emeritus professors; but only vaguely, and only like. We are failing people at the end as we are at the beginning.

But what gets me is that everyone takes it for granted: suggest retirement and it is assumed you are suggesting uselessness -- and, given the way the system's set up, that's a not unreasonable assumption. But it needs to be brought to consciousness that this is a failure that needs to be overcome, not a reasonable feature of the landscape.

How many fields are like this? Most of them, I'll bet. And it reflects our somewhat schizophrenic attitudes towards age, experience, and work: we alternately talk about experience and skill being the most valuable things an organization can have, but at the same time sometimes imagine real innovation only coming from twentysomethings who sleep under their desks. Even in academia, some fields-- mathematics and theoretical physics, for example-- assume that the really brilliant work is done by the young, and if you don't have a major discovery by the time you're 30, you never will.

This idea struck a chord for personal reasons. My father just retired from his professorship at the Colorado School of Mines, to take advantage of some new professional opportunities, and to give himself more time to work on writing projects. His impulse to see retirement not as a chance to kick back, but to do the work he really wants, is hardly unusual. And I expect if I ever get to that age, I'll approach retirement the same way. Assuming retirement, or something like it, still exists.

Actually, Theodore Roszak makes a really good point in his book The Longevity Revolution (who I visited a few years ago, and whose work I talk about) that the concept of retirement as a period of time that you could do something with is a very modern invention. It used to be that you were likely to die within a few years of retirement (assuming you made it that far), and for part of that time were likely to be an invalid. In contrast, now people regularly face years or decades of life in retirement, and fewer and fewer of them are content with the idea of just running out the clock in Florida (and more and more can't afford it anyway). So if academia is behind the curve in recognizing post-retirement as a productive time, that's probably not a surprise-- though anything that wastes talent is always a shame.

[Via Sympoze, which itself looks like an interesting data-point.]

Breakfast theory

One of my favorite cartoons ever: Jeff Reid's 1989 cartoon, "Breakfast Theory: A Morning Methodology."

via flickr

Quote of the day

Thomas Benton, writing on (really warning against) graduate school:

It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning.

Well, academics ARE kind of theoretical

Love this!

Professor forgets to attend his own sell-out lecture about duty

A highly respected literary and academic figure failed to attend a talk he was due to give for a literature festival, after getting confused over the date.

Professor of philosophy Anthony Grayling, of Birkbeck College, University of London, had arranged to speak about his latest book, The Choice of Hercules.

His talk was part of Richmond’s 17th annual literature festival.

The book reflects on the challenges of duty versus pleasure.  

]Seen on Not Exactly Rocket Science]

Frank Rich on the best and the brightest

Frank Rich's New York Times piece cautioning that "the brightest are not always the best" is very good.

IN 1992, David Halberstam wrote a new introduction for the 20th-anniversary edition of “The Best and the Brightest,” his classic history of the hubristic J.F.K. team that would ultimately mire America in Vietnam. He noted that the book’s title had entered the language, but not quite as he had hoped. “It is often misused,” he wrote, “failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.”...

The stewards of the Vietnam fiasco had pedigrees uncannily reminiscent of some major Obama appointees. McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, was, as Halberstam put it, “a legend in his time at Groton, the brightest boy at Yale, dean of Harvard College at a precocious age.” His deputy, Walt Rostow, “had always been a prodigy, always the youngest to do something,” whether at Yale, M.I.T. or as a Rhodes scholar. Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, was the youngest and highest paid Harvard Business School assistant professor of his era before making a mark as a World War II Army analyst, and, at age 44, becoming the first non-Ford to lead the Ford Motor Company.

The rest is history that would destroy the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and inflict grave national wounds that only now are healing.

For those of us who come out of this kind of world, or at least have been influenced by and wanted to emulate these kinds of people, it's a nice little reminder that brains-- or the particular forms of intelligence that are bred in the hothouses of academia and think-tanks-- aren't everything.

I've been thinking about this for a while, because I've recently become aware of how formative the experience of graduate school was for me (or perhaps I've allowed it to become), and how much I've had to unlearn-- and still am unlearning-- some of the habits that I developed there and as a young academic.

In my current incarnation (as a mortgage owner, to say nothing of someone who lives at the interface of marketplaces and ideas), the contempt for money that I learned as a young professor-to-be is definitely a maladaptation. It's good to not be motivated primarily by money (unless you're in a job like banking, where that makes sense), but it's always bad to be careless about it, or to be uncomfortable talking about it-- something that as a consultant you can NEVER get away with. (Academic contempt for money is also to some degree a product of two other things: the fact that you're likely never to see much of it anyway, and that once you're tenured, you never really have to worry about it again. Your income is not large but extremely secure.)

Likewise, the assumption that that you have to rewrite things a dozen times, worry over them for months, and get as much of your argument exactly right before you can let someone else see it, is definitely not attuned to the way the rest of the world works. The tiniest fraction of ideas are meant to be timeless; a slightly larger sliver might last for years; but the fact is, most ideas are perishable goods, that need to be churned out, circulated, and monetized before times change. (Actually, a lot of scientific and scholarly ideas are like this, too.) Timely goodness is better than obsolete excellence.

I think of myself as living mainly in my own mind: aside from the family and friends, most of my conversations take place with books and words. This has tended to translate into a mild (or maybe not so mild) disregard for the world. But recently I realized that I need to be hyper-effective in the world to be effective in my own world. The demands of the everyday don't go way; instead of ignoring them, you need to be able to deal with them with ruthless efficiency, so you have time and bandwidth for what really matters.

It makes me appreciate Sam Rayburn's words in an anecdote Halberstam tells in The Best and the Brightest:

Johnson, after his first Kennedy cabinet meeting, raved to his mentor, the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, about all the president’s brilliant men. “You may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” Rayburn responded, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”

Carnegie Foundation

Up at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching this evening, for the opening of a conference on tinkering. It looks like it's going to be a really fascinating event. There are lots of cool people, it's a wonderful subject, and the venue is really nice.

via flickr

I hope to be able to liveblog and Twitter the conference, but I'm not sure what the rules are. Will find out tomorrow.

conference, DIY, Stanford University, tinkering

Great and infuriating article about adjunct hiring practices

In the Chronicle:

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, long criticized for its workplace policies, is a “more-honest employer” of part-time workers than colleges that employ thousands of adjunct faculty members. That was the harsh message delivered to a group of college human-resources officials here on Monday by one of their own: Angelo-Gene Monaco, associate vice president for human resources and employee relations at the University of Akron....

“We helped create a highly educated part of the working poor, and it’s starting to get attention from outsiders,” he said, noting that unions are trying to organize part-timers, and lawmakers in nearly a dozen states are examining the issue.... “We rely on them for a very important function, and we assume that they will continue to accept mistreatment in return.”

academia

Greetings from "A Turn to Ontology in STS"

Well, I made it. I may fall asleep, since my body thinks it's 2 a.m., but at least I'll fall asleep at the conference, rather than some random place in England.

via flickr

I got here about an hour late-- not only did the bus take a little while, but I was dropped off about 10 minutes' walk from SBS-- but I got checked in, dropped my bag, and came to the lecture hall. Of course, in classic 19th century fashion, the doors to the lecture hall are at the front, so if you're late everyone can see you. (There are doors in the back, but the young lady who was doing registration didn't tell me how to get to those doors. I think she was punishing me.) So everyone knows I'm here. Not that more than a handful of people might recognize me, of course....

via flickr

Walking up High Street, I went past a vast number of teenagers with their parents, all holding maps or slender catalogs. Is a summer school session starting? Or is this what Oxford is like all summer?

via flickr

conference, England, Oxford University, Said Business School, STS

This pretty much sums up graduate school

From Sorry I Missed Your Party.

university

The culture conundrum

Terry Eagleton has a piece on Raymond Williams and the challenge of culture in the 21st century:

"Culture is ordinary," [Raymond] Williams wrote in a pioneering essay, and his own life was a case in point. He saw his transition from Black Mountains to Cambridge spires as in no sense untypical. Right to the end, he regarded the politically conscious rural community in which he was reared, with its neighbourliness and cooperative spirit, as far more of a genuine culture than the Cambridge in which he held a professorial chair and that he once acidly described as "one of the rudest places on earth". Working-class Britain may not have produced its quota of Miltons and Jane Austens; but in Williams's view it had given birth to a culture that was at least as valuable: the dearly won institutions of the labour, union and cooperative movements....

The real sense in which culture since Williams's death has become more ordinary has little to do with Dante or Mozart. One of Williams's key moves was to insist that culture meant not just eminent works of art, but a whole way of life in common; and culture in this sense - language, inheritance, identity, religion - has become important enough to kill for. Dante and Mozart may be elitist, but they have never blown the limbs off small children....

Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilisation has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilisation was dredged out of its murky depths.... Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state.

These days the conflict between civilisation and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism.

There's also this great line: "In a rare moment of disillusion, he told me that the difference between teaching adults and students in the 1950s was like 'teaching doctors' daughters rather than doctors' sons'."

Tags: culture, history, criticism

Another line on my c.v.: Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School, Oxford University

I don't think this was a very well-kept secret, but now it's official: in addition to my day job, and my work on the end of cyberspace book, I'm now officially an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. It's a two-year appointment, which runs through the spring of 2010 (through Hilary Term, for those of you keeping track across the pond). I don't teach any courses, but I do work with students, and am on call to do things with SBS groups visiting Silicon Valley.

via flickr

The appointment was initially approved in March, but they only got me up on the Web site this week. Such is the pace of things there. (And as one friend said, "My god, your picture on the SBS website is so Californian!" It was taken in the garden of Howard Rheingold's house. You don't get more California than that.)

I've still got my affiliation with Stanford, and thank heavens for that: having access to the Stanford library has been critical to my continued viability as a thinker. But I've got a couple executive MBAs I'm working with at Oxford, and have had a good time collaborating with people at the James Martin Institute. And in the last few years I've been to more conferences there than Stanford.

Strange to have closer intellectual ties to a university in England than to one three miles away, but such is life these days. Or my life, anyway.

Needless to say, this is a real thrill. Not because it represents some prospective return to academia, but because it's an interesting hybrid position. SBS is one of several business schools that are real intellectual hot-houses these days. Some of the best B-schools are no longer places that just train people to crank out exotic formulas or spout jargon, but are seriously thinking about what it will mean to do business in this century. Oxford the added virtue of having the James Martin Institute, which in the next few years will-- if it has any sense at all-- become the global epicenter for serious futures work. So this is a good time to get connected to this little world.

I've already promised several people that I won't start speaking like a character out of P. G. Wodehouse, as tempting as that would be.

[To the tune of Drew Barrymore & Hugh Grant, "Way Back Into Love [Demo Version]," from the album "Music & Lyrics".]

Technorati Tags: academia, Oxford University, postacademic

Something to remember when I go to Germany this summer

Using the title "Dr." if you have a doctorate from the U.S. can get you into trouble:

Americans with PhDs beware: Telling people in Germany that you're a doctor could land you in jail.

At least seven U.S. citizens working as researchers in Germany have faced criminal probes in recent months for using the title "Dr." on their business cards, Web sites and resumes. They all hold doctoral degrees from elite universities back home.

Under a little-known Nazi-era law, only people who earn PhDs or medical degrees in Germany are allowed to use "Dr." as a courtesy title.

The law was modified in 2001 to extend the privilege to degree-holders from any country in the European Union. But docs from the United States and anywhere else outside Europe are still forbidden to use the honorific. Violators can face a year behind bars.

[To the tune of Blue Öyster Cult, "Godzilla," from the album "Don't Fear the Reaper: The Best of Blue Öyster Cult".]

Technorati Tags: academia, Germany

At Kinokuniya Bookstore this evening

Taken during my walk down Orchard Road, where I was joined by every other person in Singapore.

via flickr

[To the tune of Mono, "Lost Snow," from the album "Ex Plex, Los Angeles, September 24, 2005".]

Technorati Tags: books, Singapore

Reconnect

I've gotten a slew of Facebook and LinkedIn requests these last few days, from people I've not been in touch with for a while. These come now and then, but what's unusual right now is how many of them are from people I haven't been in touch with for a long time.

This past weekend I got a friend request on Facebook from a high school classmate who I haven't seen since graduation, more than 25 years ago. He's now a pastor, and from what I hear a pretty good one.

I also reconnected with one of my high school music teachers. This is someone I haven't spoken to in a couple decades, but she was one of my favorite teachers. It turns out that she was also of the most influential. I've not sung in any organized venue since college, but I think singing gave me a valuable familiarity with public performance and an awareness (in a good way) of the craft and artifice of self-presentation.

This is not an impact either of us could have predicted, and it illustrates two things.

The first is that education is rarely wasted... but its doesn't always pay off where you expect. When my children were babies and waking up in the middle of the night, I was getting very little sustained sleep, and often thought to myself, this is like studying for my orals. I didn't read all that Joseph Ben-David, Margaret Rossiter and Andy Pickering in order to be more effective at baby-wrangling; but it turns out that the experience of having to plow through vast amounts of stuff, and not having enough hours to both read and sleep, paid off in unexpected ways. Nor did I study STS to become a futurist; but the value of STS as a conceptual toolkit and way of thinking is pretty self-evident to my colleagues.

The second is that if it's hard for us to predict how what we learn will pay off, it's almost impossible for our teachers to know. For me, one of the hardest things about teaching was the sense that I didn't know-- indeed, couldn't know-- what kind of impact I was having on my students, or would have on them. It might be that the enthusiastic ones would never find a use for anything I taught them, or that the smart but slightly jaded one would have a career-defining moment that turned on something she learned in class. All of that was unknowable to me, and I would have to take on faith that, after all was said and done, my impact would be more positive than negative (or maybe neutral was the worst you could reasonably expect-- a history teacher is going to have a hard time ruining anyone's life).

Of course, there are a few students you hear about, and if you're old enough you might merit some kind of formal recognition, which is an occasion for people to come and say nice things about you. But those kinds of events are pretty scripted, and come pretty late in one's professional life.

I wonder, though, if in the future teachers will find it a little easier to know how their former students are doing, and what kind of effect they might have had on them. My wife, who teaches eighth graders, is connected to some of her former students through Facebook; and while they may not talk regularly, those weak ties are easier to maintain than my connections to my teachers, and it's probably a little harder for them to decay to the point of being useless. (After a couple moves, I found that not only had I shed myself of things I wanted to get rid of, I'd also inadvertently thrown out things like address books, old letters, and the like. So much for going home again.) I suspect that in the future these links may make it easier for teachers to have a sense of how they've affected students. Which would be nice for everyone.

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "March of Gibbles Army," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: education, henrico, memory

Quote of the day: on academic promotion

From Structured Procrastination:

[Upon] promotion to Full Professor... the golden era begins.... The various committees that agreed to tenure and promotion, probably grudgingly, have ceased to remember the details. People just know you are a Full Professor and have been for a while. By this time, with a little luck, your hair is grey and you look distinguished or at least old. At this point, everyone assumes that you must have done something quite important, although they can't quite remember what. Once you realize that you will never again have your work crawled over by various committees charged with evaluating your basic worth as a human being, it becomes more fun. Bliss.

The trick, then, is to get a job based on work you haven't done, and stick around until the details of what you did are forgotten. That's when the true rewards of academia set in.

[To the tune of Elton John, "Bennie and the Jets," from the album "Greatest Hits".]

Technorati Tags: academia, humor, postacademic

Reprints!

Got a pleasant surprise today: a package of reprints for my latest article, a piece on "The Industrialization of Vision in Victorian Astronomy" in Bildwelten des Wissens. It's always nice to get these. I'll have to send them off to various academic friends, for whom the ritual of receiving reprints holds some cultural meaning.

The article is one I wrote a while ago, but never quite got around to publishing; so when the chance came last year to contribute to this issue, I figured, why not make good use of it? I'm not doing much work on Victorian science now, but still it's a subject that never ceases to be interesting.

And in an ironic twist, last night I was up late answering queries from an editor who's working on a piece of mine on mobility and the end of cyberspace. My old and new intellectual lives overlapping.... Though actually I think that's not quite correct: you don't really have old and new intellectual lives, unless you completely change fields and go from, say, string theory to eschatology; you just mobilize your interests and intellectual skills around different subjects.

[To the tune of Ben Folds & William Shatner, "In Love," from the album "Fear of Pop, Vol. 1".]

Technorati Tags: academia, history of science, postacademic

Academic productivity

Lifehacker points to a blog with a title that seems more oxymornic than "relevant history:" Academic Productivity. It's really pretty good.

[To the tune of Johann Sebastian Bach, "Toccata & Fugue in D minor BMV 565," from the album "Bach: Famous Works".]

Technorati Tags: academia, productivity, work

Finished the Budapest paper

Late last night I finished up an article for an edited volume of proceedings based on the Budapest conference I attended in October. Now it's on to an article on media technology, materiality, and meeting facilitation. Though I'm going to consciously avoid using too many "M"s in any sentence.

More on solitude and scholarship

Geeky Mom recently gave a talk about blogging her dissertation. Go check out her presentation:

| View | Upload your own

Elsewhere, she writes about the problems of isolation in scholarship that echo things I noticed at AHA:

Although I consider part of what I do scholarship, I don't think many others would consider me a scholar. I'm not sure I want to be a scholar, at least not as it's currently conceived--the isolated individual hunched over books (or maybe more contemporarily, the screen)....

Here's what I learned, or what I'm chewing on right now. The real work of scholarship takes place in isolation and through individual work. From that isolated position, isolated works get created and those works are read only a few people. There are exceptions to this, of course, and the sciences are much more collaborative than other disciplines, although they also are at greater risk of being scooped than humanities faculty, for example. In my work field, instructional technology, much of the thinking and work that looks like scholarship happens online, via blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. And that's one of the things that draws me to the field. I like thinking out loud with others. I feel more comfortable moving the thinking and scholarship that happens online within the ed tech community into formal publication than I would going from online to formal within rhetoric and composition field.

Partly, of course, it's because I've lost touch with that scholarly community and what I know of it from reading and contact I've had with people in the field, it's both going in directions that interest me and in directions that really don't interest me. Honestly, I think to some extent, I'm skeptical of scholarship in many (most) fields. I find some of it very valuable, but the way that scholarship is produced and the reasons it's produced (for the sake of getting tenure and promotion, maybe to forward the field, maybe to say something new) tend to make it less valuable to me personally.

The assumption that "the real work of scholarship takes place in isolation and through individual work" is one that many humanists, and a fair number of social scientists would recognize; certainly for historians it's the default. We may have colloquia and seminars and dissertation reading groups, but the core of historical work-- the work in the archives, and especially the work of writing-- is done alone.

In contrast, my work at the Institute is, at its best, effervescently collaborative. One of our most important research tools is the expert workshop, which is what it sounds like, but is actually more fun. We write just about all our important stuff using Google Docs, sitting around in a space, talking through suggested revisions in real time, batting opening lines and transitions back and forth. (For someone who spends so much time reading, the opportunity to do it in a fundamentally new way is really refreshing.)

Today, working on things like the end of cyberspace book is pleasant a break from that ultra-social routine, a chance to step inside the venerable courts for a few hours. (Not that we should completely abandon older ways of working. The ability to make creative use of solitude is something that psychologists have recognized is quite valuable; and good work often requires moving between collaborative and contemplative modes.)

I'm not sure I'd be happy going back to a life in which I was mainly working by myself. But I'm also curious how long a life like that-- one lived, in its most essential parts, alone-- will be available to professors of history and literature and the like. Already they're mild anachronisms on campus: for most departments, I'm willing to bet, collaboration-- or at least joint authorship, and a lot of work in which your research projects plug clearly into someone else's research agenda-- is the rule rather than the exception. (It would be interesting to compare the number of jointly-authored articles in leading history journals to the number in, say, economics and sociology.) The infrastructure for more intimately collaborative forms of historical research and writing are emerging, at least for a few specialties. Will it be very long before the students in first-year methods classes all have to work together on joint projects, and before people who become accustomed to working with others don't feel that that capability makes them different from scholars?

Technorati Tags: academia, blogging, collaboration, postacademic, university

The utility of STS demonstrated yet again

Thomas Van der Waal has a great post about "the elements in the social software stack." In addition to having some great advice, and offering a nice clear way to think about social software, the following bit jumped out at me:

It was through reading Jyri Engeström's blog post about "Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality" that I came to have familiarity with Karin Knorr Cetina's object-centered sociality. It was through the repeated mentioning of this Knorr Cetina concept by Rashmi Sinha in her presentations and from personal conversations with Rashmi that the ideas deep value sunk in (it is a concept central to Rashmi and Jon Boutelle's product SlideShare).

Interaction designers have long been reading anthropology-- Chris Espinoza once told me that when they were designing the first Mac interface, he and the other designers had copies of George Lakoff's work on metaphor in the office-- and I've been aware for a while of more academic interface design types being familiar with STS and history of technology. But it's good to see that people who are actually doing serious products-- Jaiku, SlideShare, etc.-- are using it, too.

[To the tune of Cocteau Twins, "Pur," from the album "Four-Calendar Cafe".]

Technorati Tags: postacademic, social software, STS

Life of the mind slides

I've posted the slides from my AHA talk on SlideShare. The talk is something of a sequel to my "Journeyman: Getting Into and Out of Academe" essay, which coincidentally I wrote ten years ago.

| View | Upload your own

Unfortunately, SlideShare has a pretty limited range of fonts, and doesn't handle comments, so I've had to work around both of those a bit. However, it's still comprehensible. I think. If you just click on the slides here, you won't get the transcript of the talk, which I've pasted into the comments on the SlideShare site (and also can be read after the jump; so I recommend clicking through and looking at the talk there.

When you're looking at the first slide, look underneath the slide and click on the tab that says "Comments on Slide 1"; you'll see the comment for that slide, and as you advance, you'll see the comment for each later slide.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Vienna, Pt. 1," from the album "Vienna Concert".]

Technorati Tags: American Historical Association, conference, history, history of science, postacademic, work

The decline of the public intellectual, revisited

20 years ago, Russell Jacoby published The Last Intellectuals, on the rise and fall of the public intellectual in 20th-century America. He has an op-ed piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that reviews the book, public (or at least academic) reaction to it, and how the argument has stood up.

The piece is worth reading, if only because it nicely lays out his argument:

I offered a generational explanation for what I saw as the eclipse of younger intellectuals. Why in 1987 had the same intellectuals dominated for more than 20 years, with few new faces among them? Why was it that the Daniel Bells or Gore Vidals or Kenneth Galbraiths seemed to lack successors? Professionalization and academization appeared to be the reason. Younger intellectuals were retreating into specialized and cloistered environments.

Earlier 20th-century thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson kept the university and its apparatus at arm's length. Indeed, they often disdained it. They oriented themselves toward an educated public, and, as a result, they developed a straightforward prose and gained a nonprofessional audience. As his reputation grew, Wilson printed up a postcard that he sent to those who requested his services. On it he checked the appropriate box: Edmund Wilson does not write articles or books on order; he does not write forewords or introductions, does not give interviews or appear on television, and does not participate in symposia.

Later intellectual generations, including, paradoxically, the rebellious 60s cohort, do give interviews; do write articles on demand; and most evidently do participate in symposia. They grew up in a much-expanded campus universe and never left its safety. Younger intellectuals became professors who geared their work toward their colleagues and specialized journals. If this generation — my generation! — advanced into postmodernism, post-Marxism, and postcolonialism, where the Daniel Bells and Lewis Mumfords never trod, it did so by surrendering a public profile.

The book is still well worth reading, I think.

[To the tune of Bill Evans Trio, "What Is This Thing Called Love?," from the album "Portrait in Jazz".]

I'll bet historians are the last ones to get into this, too

For years there's been anecdotal evidence, and a couple surveys, suggesting growing use of drugs like Ritalin and Provigil by undergraduates looking to get an edge over the competition. Now, some faculty are starting to claim that professors who study the brain have started doing it, too:

While caffeine reigns as the supreme drug of the professoriate, some university faculty members have started popping "smart" pills to enhance their mental energy and ability to work long hours, according to two University of Cambridge scientists.

In a commentary published in the journal Nature last month, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir revealed the results of their informal survey of a handful of colleagues who study drugs that help people perform better mentally....

But brain boosting raises hackles in some parts of academe. "It smells to me a lot like taking steroids for physical prowess," said Barbara Prudhomme White, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire, who has studied the abuse of Ritalin by college students. After recent revelations about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball, she sees parallels between athletes and assistant professors. "You're expected to publish and teach, and the stakes are high. So young professors have to work their tails off to get that golden nugget of tenure."

The poll was not meant to be a comprehensive study, said Ms. Morein-Zamir, a research associate at Cambridge. Rather, the essay, "Professor's Little Helper," was intended to provoke a public discussion of whether society in general, and universities in particular, should regulate the use of available compounds and medications that might be developed in the future. "If a drug helps you be more alert but also make better decisions, how does society feel about that?" she asked.

The essay, published in Nature, is a rewardingly geeky piece that includes a long discussion of how these drugs work, and what dangers exist in their use.

Technorati Tags: brain, drugs, university

Passion, collaboration, and isolation in graduate school

One of the sessions I went to yesterday at the AHA was on cultivating and maintaining passion in graduate school. It was a roundtable discussion with several professors who are or have been graduate department heads (meaning they were responsible for their department's graduate programs, as opposed to its undergraduate courses), and was attended mainly by graduate students themselves.

A lot of the discussion was around fairly practical things that good programs do to promote a sense of cohesion and community among graduate students.

• Having office space for graduate students, and providing support for dissertation groups.
• Having graduate students actually engage in research before the dissertation: we've moved away from original research papers, and do more historiographic reviews, shorter writing assignments, etc..
• Having weekly colloquia. These can be events with outside speakers, but there are also times when grad students present on their research, or faculty talk about their projects.
• Remove extraneous requirements, and refocus only on the stuff that really matters for graduate training, rather than making the students jump through hoops.

Many of these recommendations are aimed at two things: creating spaces in which students can pick up the informal or tacit knowledge that constitutes a lot of professional practice and identity; and illustrating that the life of an historian is a public, collective thing, not just something that's lived privately.

To some degree, it also serves to offset the fact that the practice of doing archival research and writing history is a much more solitary and isolating activity. You can share dissertation chapters and that kind of thing, but really, when you're writing, you're alone.

Now, this is quite different from most professional schools, and even the way graduate training works in most of the sciences: there, collaboration and group work are the norm. So I asked a question: would you consider creating a course for first- or second-year graduate students where they do group projects-- where they collaborate on a significant piece of research?

Some of the panelists reacted as if I'd just drunk a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and belched the "Star Spangled Banner." One of them said it was "a really weird idea," which I actually thought usefully revealed how different historical scholarship is from other kinds of scholarship. (Update: Actually, he said "wild," not "weird." My mistake!) Fortunately, Anthony Grafton stepped in and saved me with a riff from Carl Schorske's autobiography about how he and his fellow graduate students took to forming "cells" while at Harvard in the 1930s. (Someone who's not an historian, and doesn't know about Schorske's towering reputation in the profession, may not appreciate just how precisely this was the right response to keep the subject from being dismissed completely, but trust me-- it was perfectly pitched.)

But it is an interesting contrast: in many graduate schools, group work is course work. Business schools love group projects, in no small part because they assume that their graduates are going to be working in groups. But more fundamentally, all knowledge-production has a collective quality to it, and it's just a question how far down into the mechanics of scholarship or research those collaborations go. Historians today are unusual in that collaborative research and writing is not the norm, and I suspect that in the long run that's a structural weakness, and in the short run that creates psychic burdens that we all have to bear. To put it in the language of economics, the isolating quality of scholarly practice creates an externality that the profession itself doesn't have to account for.

One final thought. One way for a program to measure the "passion gap," and to know if it's doing a good job of giving students a strong identity as scholars, is to look at what its non-academic Ph.D.s do. My graduate program turned out a number of people who aren't professors, but still converted their dissertations into books, and have crafted scholarly identities for themselves. Looking back on it, I credit an intense socialization process that taught us how to be scholars, not just how to do scholarship.

Technorati Tags: academia, American Historical Association, collaboration, history, postacademic, travel, university, washington DC

At AHA

I'm at the American Historical Association conference in Washington DC this weekend. Heather and I are using it as a way to get a little vacation from the kids, and to give talks. We're both on a panel on post-academic careers, organized by friend of mine who I knew when I was at Berkeley-- and who later beat me for a job at Montana State.

I haven't been to AHA in about 15 years, and the last time I attended it was in Washington DC. History of science has its own set of conferences, which are smaller and a lot more intimate, and I usually went to those. AHA is kind of so large, it's a great place place to hook up with friends from school or people in your speciality, but that size makes it hard to meet anybody new, or the have those serendipitous encounters that are so valuable in social networking events.

When I first got here, for a couple hours I kept looking at people and thinking, I think I recognize them. Then I had another realization: it's not that I recognized 80% of the members of the American Historical Association, it's that We all look the same. The dress code (tweed or other woolens for people with jobs, suits for young job-seekers), the ubiquity of backpacks, the predominance of beards and glasses, and a few other things, and a certain look of abstraction or otherwordliness, all combine to generate a certain Look. I wonder if I could still pass.

Not to sound snide or critical: this is a look I sported for years, and see whenever I go home. But it's illuminating to look in on a group you were once so deeply a part of.

[To the tune of Bombay Dub Orchestra, "Feel (Thievery Corporation Remix)," from the album "Bombay Dub Orchestra".]

Technorati Tags: academia, American Historical Association, conference, history, travel, washington DC

Leaving for DC, I hope

My wife and I are going to the American Historical Association annual meeting tomorrow night-- actually, tonight. Or at least I hope I'm going: I just noticed that my name on the ticket is "ALEXS PANGPHD," which I suspect might get me into trouble when I check in at the airport.

I called United Airlines, and they say that since I booked the flight through the AHA's official travel agent, I have to call them to get my name changed. Though you would think that a travel agency that deals with a professional scholarly association would know better than to make "Ph.D." part of a traveler's surname. Let's hope I can either get this fixed, or it's not really a problem.

To make things even better, our nonstop from SFO to DC has been changed, and we're now booked on a flight that goes through Chicago.

Presumably this is because of bad weather, but being re-routed through O'Hare when there are storms is not a development I really welcome....

Stephen Wolfram on entrepreneurship, uncertainty, and postacademic lives

I came upon the Waggle Labs blog today*, and saw a quote by Stephen Wolfram that struck me as touching on postacademic life, and one of the challenges of making the transition from an academic career to another career:

A lot of what goes into starting companies is turning nothing into something. Starting with a blank slate, and just inventing all kinds of stuff.

You’ll never know if it’s ultimately correct. You just have to use your judgement, make decisions, and move on.

To some people, that’s pretty scary. Not to have any answers to look up in the back of the book.

As a brilliant mathematician, entrepreneur, and author, Wolfram is someone well worth listening to on this subject. Having now spent more of my professional life outside of academia than inside-- or rather, since I've still got an academic affiliation, more of my of my life being paid by corporations or nonprofits than educational institutions-- it strikes me that one of the defining characteristics of academic careers is the amazing, and in many ways reassuring, clarity of their career structures.

[To the tune of Ike & Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High," from the album "Soul Sisters".]

Technorati Tags: academia, postacademic

"Corporate life and the life of the mind"

In a couple weeks my wife and I are going to the AHA conference, and speaking in a session on careers for historians. We're examples of a once-exotic species, history Ph.D.s who don't work in academia but still do things as historians.

In the course of thinking about my talk, I came across a talk I gave at Princeton in 1999 on the subject, and thought I'd repost it.

Brainstorm

I spent a little time tonight reading through Brainstorm, the Chronicle of Higher Education group blog-- or aggregated site, or something. Its tag line is "Lives of the Mind," and naturally I was curious to see who they include as living "lives of the mind."

Four current professors (two English professors, a painter, and an education professor), two professors-turned-administrators, and one policy wonk/journalist.

Are these the only kinds of people who live "lives of the mind?" I don't think so. In a service economy, and in particular an economy whose most aggressive players are fairly obsessed with innovation and creativity, the notion that the life of the mind is something that's lived only in educational institutions is anachronistic.

And for advanced graduate students and young Ph.D.s, it sends the wrong message-- that the life of the mind is lived in here, not out there in the world. It's not nearly as bad as the one sent by a history department in the early days of the Web, when its page of recent alumni listed only graduates who'd gotten tenure-track jobs. My own experience certainly is that I use a lot of my training in my work; and while maintaining an independent intellectual life isn't easy-- I sleep less than I'd like, and my video game skills would be mad keen (or the house would be cleaner, or I'd insist on feeding my family a more balanced diet) if I didn't carve out time for writing-- it is possible.

[To the tune of Percy Sledge, "When A Man Loves A Woman," from the album "The Very Best Of 60's Gold, vol. 1".]

Technorati Tags: postacademic

Quote of the day

[H]is attitudes to academic life were thereafter always ambivalent. Part of him contrasted his own long working days and sometimes precarious existence as a freelancers with the apparently secure and seemingly less stressful world of his academic friends (though he also noticed the pressures of academic inexorably increasing in recent years). He sought the company and friendship of independent scholars and of dealers and booksellers (some of whom were very big players in the corporate world). But another part of him idealistically longed for the fellowship and community of the republic of letters, and envied those of us who were more centrally part of it than he felt himself to be. (Vincent Gillespie's memorial serious address on Jeremy John Griffiths, in A.S.G. Edwards, Gillespie and Ralph Hanna, eds., The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths (British Library, 2000), p. 3)

[To the tune of Chris Botti featuring Sting, "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?," from the album "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life? - Single".]

Technorati Tags: academia, postacademic

Quote of the day

Reading is useless, vain and silly when no writing is involved. (Jeremias Drexel, Aurifodina artium et scientiarum omnium, 1638)

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested. (Francis Bacon in his Essay "Of Studies," 1612).

Technorati Tags: reading

Words to live by

Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513.

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus...

De principatibus, of course, is his masterwork The Prince.

Depressing article on "decline of the tenure track"

The New York Times has an article noting that "decline of the tenure track raises concerns." No kidding.

Professors with tenure or who are on a tenure track are now a distinct minority on the country’s campuses, as the ranks of part-time instructors and professors hired on a contract have swelled, according to federal figures analyzed by the American Association of University Professors....

The shift from a tenured faculty results from financial pressures, administrators’ desire for more flexibility in hiring, firing and changing course offerings, and the growth of community colleges and regional public universities focused on teaching basics and preparing students for jobs.

It has become so extreme, however, that some universities are pulling back, concerned about the effect on educational quality....

Three decades ago, adjuncts — both part-timers and full-timers not on a tenure track — represented only 43 percent of professors, according to the professors association, which has studied data reported to the federal Education Department. Currently, the association says, they account for nearly 70 percent of professors at colleges and universities, both public and private.

One of the more darkly amusing parts of the article comes at the end, when a former department head and a provost at Florida International come up with different figures for the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty in the psychology department. It's one of those small moments that reveals a lot: academia is a system in which those in charge are justifying the use of adjuncts on the grounds of clear-eyed economic rationality, and they can't even accurately count how many tenure-track positions there are in a single department. This should not be hard.

It's always struck me that the rise of adjuncts is not about economics-- about the rational distribution of limited resources to achieve the best results-- than it is about mere budgets-- the avoidance of overspending.

For one thing, the use of adjuncts has tended to start with those kinds of courses where demand is strongest and most predictable: introductory surveys. If the addiction to adjuncts really reflected a desire to create a more flexible and responsive labor market, then we'd have seen a system in which the most secure professorships would be tied to teaching-- particularly to the largest and most important classes-- and the transient laborers would be the researchers. Research lines ebb and flow, last year's hot topic is this year's non-entity (is nanotechnology in the house!), but Econ 101 is forever.

Instead, academic labor markets behave as if there's an eternal, pressing demand for new insights on obscure subjects, but you can't know from one semester to the next whether students will need to take Introduction to Classical Physics.

Doubtless it's pure coincidence that the blossoming of the adjunct market tracks with the rise of superstar faculty, the global equivalent of what the French called "turboprofs," the professor who teaches in the provinces but refuses to move out of Paris (and who can blame them). Perhaps the most spectacular example is Niall Ferguson, who has faculty appointments at Harvard, Oxford, and the Hoover Institution. The guy is astonishingly prolific, and some of his work is pretty brilliant, but I have to wonder: would anyone be less productive with, say, only two professorships? Or just one? (Or maybe I've got it backwards: maybe the wonder is that people like William McNeill, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Peter Gay were prolific despite spending most of their careers at one place.)

Another thing that lets universities drive down wages is that many of the laborers themselves aren't very flexible, for two reasons. First, something like a third of academics are married to other academics, making hiring decisions incredibly complicated, and making it harder for one party to throw in the towel and go to acupuncture school. Second, Ph.D.s (in the humanities and most of the social sciences, anyway) have a paradoxical combination of high job standards and reduced expectations about their employability: too many think that having a Ph.D. renders them unqualified for non-academic jobs, and that such jobs are kind of, well, beneath them. So they're willing to take increasingly marginal jobs within academia, rather than see how their skills transfer. In a more rational market, a string of lecturing gigs that pay $40K would be less attractive than a non-academic job that pays more; but this isn't a very rational market.

Technorati Tags: university

This is why I'm going to AHA to talk about postacademic careers

From Ph.D. Comics:

Technorati Tags: academia, humor, postacademic

How to live

Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes his dual life as trader and philosopher, in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:

These were the days when it was extremely common for traders to break phones when they lost money. Some resorted to destroying chairs, tables, or whatever would make noise.... Who would want to leave such an environment? Compare it to lunches in a drab university cafeteria with gentle-mannered professors discussing the latest departmental intrigue. So I stayed in the quant and trading  businesses (I'm still there), but organized myself to do minimal but intense (and entertaining) work, focus only on the most technical aspects, never attend business "meetings," avoid the company of "achievers" and people in suits who don't read books, and take a sabbatical ear for every three on average to fill up gaps in my scientific and philosophical culture. To slowly distill my single idea, I wanted to become a flaneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafes, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe any explanation to anybody. I wanted to be left alone in order to build, small steps at a time, an entire system of thought based on my Black Swan idea.  (The Black Swan, p. 21)

Maybe it's just me, but I think this is a great vision. Taleb was at Wharton when I was at Penn; had I known that there are people who think about business this way-- as something you want to be successful at, but not at the expense of thinking about Big Ideas-- I would have thought quite differently about the business school, and the world of commerce generally.

[To the tune of Bryan Ferry, "The Right Stuff," from the album "Bête Noire".]

Technorati Tags: Black Swan, postacademic, reading

Off to Berlin

My article on the industrialization of visualization in 19th century astronomy, that is, not me. I hope the editors think well of it. It's a shorter piece, but that's what the journal publishes.

I still need to root around to see if I have any pictures I can run with the piece.

The article is actually one I started ten years ago, but set aside to write a couple other things; but in the intervening years, there have been a number of articles on photography, drawing, and observing practices in Victorian science, so I was able to fill in a couple gaps, and send it off. It's a relatively short piece. We'll see.

Now back to other things, most particularly the end of cyberspace.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," from the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".]

Technorati Tags: astronomy, history of science, science, visualization

Back to works

We're on UAL 931, heading back to San Francisco. Dinner has been served, curtains are drawn, overhead lights turned off-- though it's only early evening London time and we're flying in sunlight all the way to California-- so it's time to put on the noise-cancelling headphones and take stock.

The big thing on my persona plate is a piece for a German history of science volume on visualization in science. I'm adapting a chapter from my eclipses book, which means cutting it down by about 70%, and maybe working in some new stuff (if there's any room at all) drawing comparisons between 19th century challenges in fieldwork and representation (in particular the issues around reproducing delicate images for publication) and current issues in simulation or computer visualization. There probably won't be room for the latter.

I'm also supposed to audition for a little column in an Asian culture magazine. I'll throw together something based on a couple posts to my kids' blog, but I think I've got too much on my plate to do a regular gig.

At work, there's more going on than I really want to think about at the moment, but I can get it all together.

Technorati Tags: history of science, postacademic, travel, work

The Victorians live on, it seems

In my previous incarnation as an historian of Victorian science, I was drawn to the people I wrote about for two reasons: the best of them were intellectual omnivores; and they had incredible work habits. Both of these are traits I admire and aspire to, but never quite make my own.

Recently, while reading an article by Nigel Thirft about the impact of information technologies on our perception of space and bodies (part of my slow but steady work on the end of cyberspace), I came across a very intriguing reference to Raymond Tallis' book The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Naturally, I looked him up, and found a Guardian profile from 2006:

If there were a statue of the Unknown Polymath it should look like Raymond Tallis: rangy, bearded, wide-eyed with disciplined wonder. For 30 years he has been rising at five in the morning to write for two hours before going off to work as a doctor. He has been a GP, a research scientist, and a professor of gerontology, one of Britain's leading experts, who has published more than 70 scientific papers and co-edited a 1,500-page standard textbook of gerontological medicine. But in the solitary hours of the early morning he has also been a distinguished literary critic, poet and philosopher who has written a radio play about the death of Wittgenstein.

Clearly, people who can get up very early in the morning have an advantage over the rest of us. Working at night, it seems, isn't the same. (Of course, most evenings I consider myself productive if I make the kids' lunches and do some e-mail.)

[To the tune of Plush, "No Education," from the album "Fed".]

Technorati Tags: academia, end of cyberspace, postacademic, reading

Visiting the library

This afternoon I stopped into Shields Library, where I spent a lot of my two years here.

via flickr

Near the entrance was this poster. I like the concept of "extreme research." It's what futurists do.

via flickr

I managed to find a couple books I'd meant to track down for a while. Mainly, though, it was good to be back among my people.

via flickr

Technorati Tags: Davis, library, UC Davis, university

Views of the Death Star

Where I had my office for two years.

via flickr

I actually liked it a lot, unlike some people. Yes, the metal cladding isn't, shall we say, entirely appropriate for summers in Davis. But I liked its scale, and the variety of the space.

via flickr

And I don't know if I was the very first person to call it "the Death Star," but I was certainly pretty early on that bus.

Technorati Tags: Davis, UC Davis, university

A handy guide to manipulating science

Jonathan Chait piece in The New Republic on the work of economist Alan Reynolds, and his efforts to challenge claims that income disparity between rich and poor has increased. Chait argues that there's a clear strategic pattern between his work, the rhetorical battles of the intelligence design movement, and global warming skeptics. Reynolds' role is to get "newspapers treat the question as a matter of dispute rather than a settled fact."

If this sounds like the conservative stance on global warming or evolution, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Like those two issues, the existence of rising inequality is beyond dispute among academics who study it.... [T]he ambition of the conservative counterestablishment in these areas is not to overturn the scholarly consensus but simply to make the topic appear so complicated that laypeople and the press don't know what to believe.

But whether the missing data would make inequality look worse or better is really beside the point. Reynolds's role is merely to point out that the data is imperfect. The skeptic challenging the expert consensus must be fluent enough in the language of the experts to nibble away at their data. (The evolution skeptic can find holes in the fossil record; the global-warming skeptic can find periods of global cooling.) But he need not--indeed, he must not--be fluent enough to assimilate all the data himself into a coherent alternative explanation. His point is that the truth is unknowable.

Introducing ideology into a debate is one of the think-tank hack's strongest weapons. It demystifies a complicated issue, moving it from the realm of science into the realm of politics. The think-tank hack confesses he has his biases but then claims that his opponents in academia or government do, too. Evolution is the secularist science establishment's campaign to discredit religion; global warming is being pushed by regulators who would gain enormous power from new pollution controls; et cetera.

Since the goal is not winning these debates but merely achieving symmetry, the hack's most effective technique can be taking the accusation that would seem to apply to him and hurling it at his opponents. "The politically correct yet factually incorrect claim that the top 1 [percent] earns 16 [percent] of personal income appears to fill a psychological rather than logical need," Reynolds writes in the [Wall Street] Journal. "Some economists seem ready and willing to supply whatever is demanded." So, while you might think Reynolds is a hack mining the data for results that would conform to his political preferences, he has already made the same charge against the other side. Who can tell who's right?

Essentially, this comes down to a few basic moves:

1. Cast whatever doubt you can about the level of certainty your opponents' views deserve. If you have to take what insiders regard as normal technical disagreements and turn them into proof that "the science is still unclear," so be it.
2. Encourage the press to generate the appearance of a controversy.
3. Argue that since there's a controversy, prudence demands 1) waiting for more solid science before making a final decisions, or 2) letting people make up their own minds.

This is the intellectual equivalent of guerilla warfare. You don't have to win. If you can not lose decisively, you can claim a moral victory. If you can keep the battle going, you increase the odds that the other wide will give up.

Technorati Tags: STS

Economics, the new literary theory

When I was in graduate school in the late 1980s, literary theory was just taking off as the Cool Thing To Do. The New York Times reports that "the future of economics isn't so dismal":

[E]conomists have been acting a lot like intellectual imperialists in the last decade or so. They have been using their tools — mainly the analysis of enormous piles of data to tease out cause and effect — to examine everything from politics to French wine vintages....

I did an informal poll of about 20 senior economists around the country and asked a single question: who are the young (untenured) economists doing work that is both highly respected among experts and relevant to the rest of us? Who, in other words, is the future of economics?

Thirteen names came up more than once, and I’m sure a scientific survey would have produced a longer list. As it is, though, the list is incredibly diverse.

I love this detail:

[T]he least diverse aspect of the list of 13... may be the way that its members have chosen their mates. Six of them are married to another person in the group.

[To the tune of Marshall Crenshaw, "Whenever You're on My Mind," from the album "Field Day".]

Technorati Tags: academia, economics, university

A resolution for 2007

To add to "lose 50 pounds" and "finish The End of Cyberspace," my two big resolutions for this year: stop accepting requests to referee papers. Just. Say. No.

My wife is working on her book tonight (and with a February deadline, that's definitely a good thing), while I'm taking an hour or two and writing up a reader's report of an article someone sent me this summer. I meant to finish the review sooner, really I did.

Reviewing a paper is one of those things that you always think won't be much work, but then turns out to be a problem: either it is more work than you expect, or you get to be the sand in the gears of scholarly publishing and some poor soul's professional advancement by having the piece sit on your desk for a lot longer than you mean.

Then you pile other stuff on top of it, because it's been there so long, it makes you feel guilty to even see it. You you can't throw it away. That would be... irresponsible.

I've also got to put a moratorium on giving talks. I've got four talks in the next six months, in Ithaca, Austin, Mountain View, and Finland (one of these things is not like the other), and another that I already had to back out of because of a scheduling conflict. I think for my sake, and to preserve the already delicate sanity of conference organizers, I'd better not accept any more, no matter how much the false idols of vanity and frequent flyer miles call.

What a thesis defense is really like

Maybe it's more an illustration of the deeper truth of what it's like, rather than a literal picture.

[Thanks Ethan!]

[To the tune of 2Pac, Dr. Dre & Roger Troutman, "California Love (Remix)," from the album "All Eyez on Me".]

Things I miss, and don't miss, about academia

First, what I miss: the kinds of conversational bits relayed by Dean Dad and his readers (the comments are amazingly funny). A sample:

Male student #1 - "I'm not going in there today, that A.H. expects you to read the assignment before class."
Female student #1 -"Yeah, he's such a sh*%, told me to stop talking on my cellphone during class because it distracts everyone else - screw them I paid my tuition."
Male student #2 - "Hey, just go to ratemprofessors.com and give he a bad rating - that will even things up."

And what I don't miss: the kerfluffle over Reading Lolita in Tehran, started by Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi's attacks on author Azar Nafisi.

Essentially, Dabashi is playing Edward Said to Nafisi's V. S. Naipaul, accusing her of advancing the Orientalist Project (TM) and producing a book in the service of "the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war waged against the phantasmagoric Arab/Muslim male potency that has just castrated the two totem poles of U.S. empire in New York." (Ah, the stringent clarity of academic prose.) But Slate's Gideon Lewis-Krauss contends:

The truth is that Dabashi's skepticism about the merit of Nafisi's much-admired book isn't entirely off the mark. The book's failure, however, is not political—as Dabashi insists—but literary....

Rather than reading Nafisi's well-intentioned book, however, as a mostly inoffensive and well-marketed literary trifle—he is, after all, a professor of literature—Dabashi insists on seeing it as political perfidy....

In the end, Dabashi must conspire with Nafisi to make the book more important that it is: The besieged Nafisi gets to preserve her fantasy that removing her veil to read Austen in her home was not only therapeutically powerful but politically noble, and Dabashi gets to preserve his fantasy that criticizing Nafisi makes him a usefully engaged intellectual.

Ah, the examined life....