Academia

Proposed Closure of the Dianoia Institute at Australian Catholic University

Just a few years ago, Australian Catholic University (ACU) established a new Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. They recruited a number of researchers and made something of a splash, leading to a noticeable leap in ACU’s rankings in philosophy — all the way to second among Catholic universities in the English-speaking world, behind only Notre Dame.

Now, without warning, ACU has announced plans to completely disestablish the institute, along with eliminating 35 other academic positions in other fields. This leaves the faculty, some of which left permanent jobs elsewhere to join the new institute, completely stranded.

I sent the letter below to the Vice-Chancellor of ACU and other interested parties. I hope the ongoing international outcry leads the administration to change its mind.

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Congratulations to Grant and Jason!

Advising graduate students as they make the journey from learners to working scientists is one of the great pleasures and privileges of academic life. Last week featured the Ph.D. thesis defenses of not one, but two students I’ve been working with, Grant Remmen (who was co-advised by Cliff Cheung) and Jason Pollack. It will be tough to see them go — both got great postdocs, Grant accepting a Miller Fellowship at Berkeley, and Jason heading to the University of British Columbia — but it’s all part of the cycle of life.

Jason Pollack (L), Grant Remmen (R), and their proud advisor.

Of course we advisors love all of our students precisely equally, but it’s been a special pleasure to have Jason and Grant around for these past five years. They’ve helped me enormously in many ways, as we worked to establish a research program in the foundations of quantum gravity and the emergence of spacetime. And along the way they tallied up truly impressive publication records (GR, JP). I especially enjoy that they didn’t just write papers with me, but also with other faculty, and with fellow students without involving professors at all.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing how Jason and Grant both continue to progress and grow as theoretical physicists. In the meantime, two more champagne bottles get added to my bookshelf, one for each Ph.D. student — Mark, Eugene, Jennifer, Ignacy, Lotty, Heywood, Chien-Yao, Kim, and now Grant and Jason.

Congrats!

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Youthful Brilliance

A couple of weeks ago I visited the Texas A&M Physics and Engineering Festival. It was a busy trip — I gave a physics colloquium and a philosophy colloquium as well as a public talk — but the highlight for me was an hourlong chat with the Davidson Young Scholars, who had traveled from across the country to attend the festival.

The Davidson Young Scholars program is an innovative effort to help nurture kids who are at the very top of intellectual achievement in their age group. Every age and ability group poses special challenges to educators, and deserves attention and curricula that are adjusted for their individual needs. That includes the most high-achieving ones, who easily become bored and distracted when plopped down in an average classroom. Many of them end up being home-schooled, simply because school systems aren’t equipped to handle them. So the DYS program offers special services, including most importantly a chance to meet other students like themselves, and occasionally go out into the world and get the kind of stimulation that is otherwise hard to find.

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These kids were awesome. I chatted just very briefly, telling them a little about what I do and what it means to be a theoretical physicist, and then we had a free-flowing discussion. At some point I mentioned “wormholes” and it was all over. These folks love wormholes and time travel, and many of them had theories of their own, which they were eager to come to the board and explain to all of us. It was a rollicking, stimulating, delightful experience.

You can see from the board that I ended up talking about Einstein’s equation. Not that I was going to go through all of the mathematical details or provide a careful derivation, but I figured that was something they wouldn’t typically be exposed to by either their schoolwork or popular science, and it would be fun to give them a glimpse of what lies ahead if they study physics. Everyone’s life is improved by a bit of exposure to Einstein’s equation.

The kids are all right. If we old people don’t ruin them, the world will be in good hands.

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Science Career Stories

The Story Collider is a wonderful institution with a simple mission: getting scientists to share stories with a broad audience. Literal, old-fashioned storytelling: standing up in front of a group of people and spinning a tale, typically with a scientific slant but always about real human life. It was founded in 2010 by Ben Lillie and Brian Wecht; I got to know Ben way back when he was a postdoc at Argonne and the University of Chicago, before he switched from academia to the less well-trodden paths of communication and the wrangling of non-profit organizations.

By now the Story Collider has accumulated quite a large number of great tales from scientists young and old, and I encourage you to catch a live show or crawl through their archives. I was able to participate in one about a year ago, where I shared the stage with a number of fascinating scientific storytellers. One of them was one of my mentors and favorite physicists, Alan Guth. Of course he has an advantage at this game in comparison to most other scientists, as he gets to tell the story of how he came up with one of the most influential ideas in modern cosmology: the inflationary universe.

It’s a great story, both for the science and for the personal aspect: Alan was near the end of his third postdoc at the time, and his academic prospects were far from clear. You just need that one brilliant idea to pop up at the right time.

But everyone’s path is different. Here, from a different event, is my young Caltech colleague Chiara Mingarelli, who explains how she ended up studying gravitational waves at the center of the universe.

Finally, it is my blog, so here is the story I told. I basically talked about myself, but I used my (occasionally humorous) interactions with Stephen Hawking as a hook. Never be afraid to hitch a ride on the coattails of someone immensely more successful, I always say.

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We Suck (But We Can Be Better)

One day in grad school, a couple of friends and I were sitting at a table in a hallway in the astronomy building, working on a problem set. The professor who had assigned the problems walked by and noticed what we were doing — which was fine, working together was encouraged. But then he commented, “Hey, I’m confused — you’re all smart guys, so how come the girls have been scoring better than you on the problem sets?” Out loud we mumbled something noncommittal, but I remember thinking, “Maybe they are … also smart?”

This professor was a good-hearted guy, who would have been appalled and defensive at the suggestion that his wry remark perhaps reflected a degree of unconscious bias. Multiply this example by a million, and you get an idea of what it’s like to be a woman trying to succeed in science in a modern university. Not necessarily blatant abuse or discrimination, of the sort faced by Marie Curie or Emmy Noether, but a constant stream of reminders that many of your colleagues think you might not be good enough, that what counts as “confident” for someone else qualifies as “aggressive” or “bitchy” when it comes from you, that your successes are unexpected surprises rather than natural consequences of your talent.

But even today, as we’ve recently been reminded, the obstacles faced by women scientists can still be of the old-fashioned, blatant, every-sensible-person-agrees-it’s-terrible variety. A few months ago we learned that Geoff Marcy, the respected exoplanet researcher at Berkeley, had a long history of sexually harassing students. Yesterday a couple of other cases came to light. U.S. Representative Jackie Speier gave a speech before Congress highlighting the case of Timothy Slater, another astronomer (formerly at the University of Arizona, now at the University of Wyoming) with a track record of harassment. And my own institution, Caltech, has suspended Christian Ott, a professor of theoretical astrophysics, for at least a year, after an investigation concluded that he had harassed students. A full discussion can be found in this article by Azeen Ghorayshi at BuzzFeed, and there are also stories at Science, Nature, and Gizmodo. Caltech president Thomas Rosenbaum and provost Edward Stolper published a memo that (without mentioning names) talked about Caltech’s response to the findings. Enormous credit goes to the students involved, Io Kleiser and Sarah Gossan, who showed great courage and determination in coming forward. (I’m sure they would both much rather be doing science, as would we all.)

No doubt the specifics of these situations will be debated to death. There is a wider context, however. These incidents aren’t isolated; they’re just the ones that happened to come to light recently. And there are issues here that aren’t just about men and women; they’re about what kind of culture we have in academia generally, science in particular, and physics/astronomy especially. Not only did these things happen, but they happened over an extended period of time. They were allowed to happen. Part of that is simply because shit happens; but part is that we don’t place enough value, as working academic scientists, professors, and students, in caring about each other as human beings.

Academic science — and physics is arguably the worst, though perhaps parts of engineering and computer science are just as bad — engenders a macho, cutthroat, sink-or-swim culture. We valorize scoring well on tests, talking loudly, being cocky and fast, tearing others down, “technical” proficiency, overwork, speaking in jargon, focusing on research to the exclusion of all else. In that kind of environment, when someone who is supposed to be a mentor is actually terrorizing their students and postdocs, there is nowhere for the victims to turn, and heavy penalties when they do. “You think your advisor is asking inappropriate things of you? I guess you’re not cut out for this after all.”

In 1998, Jason Altom, a graduate student in chemistry at Harvard, took his own life. Renowned among his contemporaries as both an extraordinarily talented scientist and a meticulous personality, he left behind a pointed note:

“This event could have been avoided,” the note began. “Professors here have too much power over the lives of their grad students.” The letter recommended adoption of a three-member faculty committee to monitor each graduate student’s progress and “provide protection for graduate students from abusive research advisers. If I had such a committee now I know things would be different.” It was the first time, a columnist for The Crimson observed later, that a suicide note took the form of a policy memo.

Academia will always necessarily be, in some sense, competitive: there are more people who want to be researchers and professors than there will ever be jobs for everyone. Not every student will find an eventual research or teaching position. But none of that implies that it has to be a terrifying, tortuous slog — and indeed there are exceptions. My own memories of graduate school are that it was very hard, pulling a substantial number of all-nighters and struggling with difficult material, but that at the same time it was fun. Fulfilling childhood dreams, learning about the universe! That should be the primary feeling everyone has about their education as a scientist, but too often it’s not.

A big problem is that, when problems like this arise, the natural reaction of people in positions of power is to get defensive. We deny that there is bias, or that it’s a problem, or that we haven’t been treating our students like human beings. We worry too much about the reputations of our institutions and our fields, and not enough about the lives of the people for whom we are responsible. I do it myself — nobody likes having their mistakes pointed out to them, and I’m certainly not an exception. It’s a constant struggle to balance legitimate justifications for your own views and actions against a knee-jerk tendency to defend everything you do (or don’t).

Maybe these recent events will be a wake-up call that provokes departments to take real steps to prevent harassment and improve the lives of students more generally. It’s unfortunate that we need to be shown a particularly egregious example of abuse before being stirred to action, but that’s often what it takes. In philosophy, the case of Colin McGinn has prompted a new dialogue about this kind of problem. In astronomy, President of the AAS Meg Urry has been very outspoken about the need to do better. Let’s see if physics will step up, recognize the problems we have, and take concrete steps to do better.

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So What Do You Do?

Kieran Healy has dusted off and re-posted some very good advice about attending academic conferences. It’s the advice you really need — who to go to dinner with, how not to embarrass yourself when introducing people to each other — rather than boring stuff like how to give a good talk. The spirit of the approach is captured by this quote:

As with teenagers, conference attendees secretly and falsely believe that other groups are having a much better time… Your conference strategies should therefore be geared towards counteracting the tendency to re-live your teenage years.

It’s surprising to realize how much “smart ways to behave at conferences” are really just “smart ways to behave in life.” (Though probably it shouldn’t be that surprising — academics aren’t the special flowers we like to think we are.) This bit of advice in particular struck me as useful:

[If] you worry someone will ask you what you work on, have something to say that’s three sentences long and takes fifteen seconds to get through. Write it down and practice it if you like.

I think every person should do that all the time. As you go through life, there will be multiple occasions on which people ask you “What do you do?” (If you’re in academia or an otherwise creative field, it will be “What are you working on?”) A high percentage of the time, questions like that elicit an awkwardly long pause, or something deflecting like “Oh, you know, lots of things.”

It makes sense. In your mind, “what you do” or “what you’re working on” is this incredibly rich, diverse, tightly interconnected set of things, and here is someone you don’t know asking you to instantly distill it down to a pithy phrase. Outrageous! And what’s worse, if you actually give a substantive answer, you’ll inevitably be leaving something out. You think, “Well I could mention this one thing that I’m mostly thinking about, but it’s not really representative of what I’m usually doing, so maybe I should mention this other thing…”

It’s not really a good look. Think about your own feelings when you ask someone what they do, and they respond with “Oh, I don’t know” or “Oh, lots of things.” Really? You don’t know what you do? Are you a spy whose memories are wiped at the conclusion of each mission? I’m sure you do many things, but perhaps picking out one would provide me with more useful information? At a conference in particular, it’s not the best first impression.

It’s important to come to terms with the fact that there are no perfect answers to the whatdoyoudo/whatareyouworkingon kinds of questions — and yet, we should have answers ready. Ones that are confident, short, and convey just a bit of the necessary flavor, so that more detail can emerge over the course of further conversation, which after all is the point of these well-meaning interrogations. This is especially true if you’re going to academic meetings, but it holds for life more generally. As adults, we should be better at these everyday skills than we were as teenagers.

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A Personal Narrative

I was very pleased to learn that I’m among this year’s recipients of a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Fellowships are mid-career awards, meant “to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color, or creed.” This year 173 Fellowships were awarded, chosen from 3,100 applications. About half of the winners are in the creative arts, and the majority of those remaining are in the humanities and social sciences, leaving eighteen slots for natural scientists. Only two physicists were chosen, so it’s up to Philip Phillips and me to uphold the honor of our discipline.

The Guggenheim application includes a “Career Narrative” as well as a separate research proposal. I don’t like to share my research proposals around, mostly because I’m a theoretical physicist and what I actually end up doing rarely bears much resemblance to what I had previously planned to do. But I thought I could post my career narrative, if only on the chance that it might be useful to future fellowship applicants (or young students embarking on their own research careers). Be warned that it’s more personal than most things I write on the blog here, not to mention that it’s beastly long. Also, keep in mind that the purpose of the document was to convince people to give me money — as such, it falls pretty heavily on the side of grandiosity and self-justification. Be assured that in real life I remain meek and humble.

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Norms for Respectful Classroom/Seminar Discussion

David Chalmers is compiling a useful set of guidelines for respectful, constructive, and inclusive philosophical discussion. It makes sense to concentrate on a single field, like philosophy, since customs often vary wildly from one discipline to the other — but there’s really nothing specifically “philosophical” about the list, it could easily be adopted in just about any classroom or seminar environment I can think of. (Online, alas, is another story.)

What immediately strikes me are (1) how nominally unobjectionable all the suggestions are, and (2) how so many of them are routinely violated even in situations that wouldn’t strike us as relatively civil and respectful. Here are some cherry-picked examples from the list:

  • Don’t interrupt.
  • Don’t present objections as flat dismissals (leave open the possibility that there’s a response).
  • Don’t dominate the discussion (partial exception for the speaker here!).
  • Unless you’re speaker, existing questioner, or chair, don’t speak without being called on (limited exceptions for occasional jokes and other very brief interjections, not to be abused).
  • The chair should attempt to balance the discussion among participants, prioritizing those who have not spoken before.
  • Prioritize junior people in calling on questions (modified version: don’t prioritize senior people).

Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t strive to be as respectful as David’s lists suggests — just that we don’t even try, really. How many times have you been in a seminar in which a senior person in the audience interrupted and dominated discussion? I can imagine someone defending that kind of environment, on the grounds that it leads to more fun and feisty give-and-take, and perhaps even a more rapid convergence to the truth. I can testify that I was once at a small workshop — moderated by David Chalmers — where the “hand-and-finger system” was employed, according to which you raise a hand to ask a new question, and a finger to ask a follow-up to someone else’s question, and the chair keeps a list of who is next in the queue. Highly structured, but it actually worked quite well, carving out some space for everyone’s questions to be treated equally, regardless of their natural degree of assertiveness or their social status within the room. (If you’ve ever been at a “Russian” physics seminar, imagine exactly the opposite of that.) I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to judge whether enforcing these norms more actively would create a more hospitable academic environment overall.

David also suggests some related resources:

Any other suggestions? Comments are open, and you don’t have to wait to be called on.

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Troublesome Speech and the UIUC Boycott

Self-indulgently long post below. Short version: Steven Salaita, an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech who had been offered and accepted a faculty job at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, had his offer rescinded when the administration discovered that he had posted inflammatory tweets about Israel, such as “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised? #Gaza.” Many professors in a number of disciplines, without necessarily agreeing with Salaita’s statements, believe strongly that academic norms give him the right to say them without putting his employment in jeopardy, and have organized a boycott of UIUC in response. Alan Sokal of NYU is supporting the boycott, and has written a petition meant specifically for science and engineering faculty, who are welcome to sign if they agree.

Everyone agrees that “free speech” is a good thing. We live in a society where individual differences are supposed to be respected, and we profess admiration for the free market of ideas, where competing claims are discussed and subjected to reasonable critique. (Thinking here of the normative claim that free speech is a good thing, not legalistic issues surrounding the First Amendment and government restrictions.) We also tend to agree that such freedom is not absolute; you don’t have the right to come into my house (or the comment section of my blog) and force me to listen to your new crackpot theory of physics. A newspaper doesn’t have an obligation to print something just because you wrote it. Biology conferences don’t feel any need to give time to young-Earth creationists. In a classroom, teachers don’t have to sit quietly if a student wants to spew blatantly racist invective (and likewise for students while teachers do so).

So there is a line to be drawn, and figuring out where to draw it isn’t an easy task. It’s not hard to defend people’s right to say things we agree with; the hard part is defending speech we disagree with. And some speech, in certain circumstances, really isn’t worth defending — organizations have the right to get rid of employees who are (for example) consistently personally abusive to their fellow workers. The hard part — and it honestly is difficult — is to distinguish between “speech that I disagree with but is worth defending” and “speech that is truly over the line.”

To complicate matters, people who disagree often become — how to put this delicately? — emotional and polemical rather than dispassionate and reasonable. People are very people-ish that way. Consequently, we are often called upon to defend speech that we not only disagree with, but whose tone and connotation we find off-putting or even offensive. Those who would squelch disagreeable speech therefore have an easy out: “I might not agree with what they said, but what I really can’t countenance is the way they said it.” If we really buy the argument that ideas should be free and rational discourse between competing viewpoints is an effective method of discovering truth and wisdom, we have to be especially willing to defend speech that is couched in downright objectionable terms.

As an academic and writer, in close cases I will almost always fall on the side of defending speech even if I disagree with it (or how it is said). Recently several different cases have illustrated just how tricky this is — but in each case I think that the people in question have been unfairly punished for things they have said. …

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Effective Field Theory MOOC from MIT

Faithful readers are well aware of the importance of effective field theory in modern physics. EFT provides, in a nutshell, the best way we have to think about the fundamental dynamics of the universe, from the physics underlying everyday life to structure formation in the universe.

And now you can learn about the real thing! MIT is one of the many colleges and universities that is doing a great job putting top-quality lecture courses online, such as the introduction to quantum mechanics I recently mentioned. (See the comments of that post for other goodies.) Now they’ve announced a course at a decidedly non-introductory level: a graduate course in effective field theory, taught by Caltech alumn Iain Stewart. This is the real enchilada, the same stuff a second-year grad student in particle theory at MIT would be struggling with. If you want to learn how to really think about naturalness, or a good way of organizing what we learn from experiments at the LHC, this would be a great place to start. (Assuming you already know the basics of quantum field theory.)

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Classes start Sept. 16. I would love to take it myself, but I have other things on my plate at the moment — anyone who does take it, chime in and let us know how it goes.

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