Let me just say that any area of scholarship where, in 20-fucking-12, the idea of moving to open-access, online distribution of writing counts as some kind of radicalism deserves everything that's going to happen to it.

But what _kind_ of bootstrap? It's clustered data (raters x schools), which raises interesting technical issues!

"The people who watch over the students are known as invigilators. This is a fantastic word. Apparently it is standard British English. It is not a term unique to Rwanda. Since I am the faculty member whose class was taking the exam, I am listed as the chief invigilator. There is also usually a another faculty member present, known as a secondary invigilator."
I am definitely using this word the next time I give an in-class exam.

"I think he is right about these kids being comfortable with the “formal process” of applying to investment banks etc., but I don’t think he dives deep enough into why this is true. The fact is, the kids who get into Harvard nowadays are, generally speaking, professional test takers. They are moreover dependent on outside metrics for evaluating themselves. If you took away tests and grading systems, these kids would be desperately unhappy, because that’s how they’ve been trained all their lives to think about their self-worth.
"When I was a tutor at one of the undergrad houses at grad school, I was incredibly impressed with the international group of undergrads I was in charge of; their credentials, even at the age of 20, were amazing, and their knowledge and self-possession were stunning. Same with the high school kids I taught at math camp last summer. But one thing I saw time and time again was how much they needed to please some outside authority. It’s like they never decided whether they themselves liked their major or whether it was a good fit- it was instead about whether they’d be successful and whether it would be an impressive path for them. So, external metrics of success.
"Here’s my diagnosis. These kids are vulnerable to Wall Street investment firms and to things like Teach for America because they have application processes at all. But life, normal adult life, doesn’t have an application process. You actually, at some point, need to figure out what you want to do and what makes you happy. You need to take a leap of faith that your native talents and desires will end you up at a reasonable and interesting place.
"Actually you don’t ever have to decide that, you could just keep doing what you think looks good to other people and pleases your parents or friends, without regard to whether it fulfills you at all. That’s kind of what’s happening I think with the 36% of the Princeton undergrads going to finance."

"There's a special place in hell for the perpetrators of this, where I hope the gods of mathematics and reason are devising some exquisite tortures for them—perhaps in the form of endlessly reading Introduction to Statistics and doing the same problem sets over and over through eternity . . ."

"Attention conservation notice: 3200 cranky words on the PhD over-supply "crisis.""

"Literature professors often encounter and complain about the student who arrives in their classes with a professed ‘love of literature’. We sometimes come to see our job as grimly breaking those blithe spirits on the wheel of the hard labor of criticism and dismissing them from our company when they refuse to come into the quarry and break stone." (Why do I like that sentence? The metaphors are horribly mixed.)

Donoho on how to get highly cited. I suspect some of it is not entirely serious, but it's a bit hard to tell.

To think through later.

"After fifteen years of teaching anthropology at a large university, Rebekah Nathan had become baffled by her own students. Their strange behavior—eating meals at their desks, not completing reading assignments, remaining silent through class discussions—made her feel as if she were dealing with a completely foreign culture. So Nathan decided to do what anthropologists do when confused by a different culture: Go live with them. She enrolled as a freshman, moved into the dorm, ate in the dining hall, and took a full load of courses. And she came to understand that being a student is a pretty difficult job, too. Her discoveries about contemporary undergraduate culture are surprising and her observations are invaluable, making My Freshman Year essential reading for students, parents, faculty, and anyone interested in educational policy." --- I'd not dream of DOING this, but I should probably read it.

"let's say that grades are a means of evaluating students...to what end? Are they retrospective (you performed X well in this course)? Predictive (your performance in this course indicates that you will do X well later on in the major)? Classificatory (you are X type of student)? A token of admission (students who do X well may proceed in the major; others, not)? Or, as most likely, some combination of all of the above? By the same token, what do grades tell us about the instructor? Do many As indicate an excellent instructor, an instructor worried about his or her course evaluations*, or someone who can't be bothered?  Do many Fs indicate someone fighting the good fight about standards or someone who, again, can't be bothered?** "

Hear, hear!

Conversation with Kristina suggests an alternative hypothesis: going to a Big Name school raises your income in every profession; students have a target income level, and would rather do something socially redeeming/fun if it doesn't cost them too much; therefore students who go to Big Name schools don't earn more, on average, but might have a broader range of jobs.  Testable... Anyway, there are obviously big problems of self-selection and self-regulation involved here.

Hear, hear, hear.

Note that the English exam is also a general-knowledge and acculturation test.

"Q: Do I have to kill the snake?
A: University guidelines state that you have to "defeat" the snake. There are many ways to accomplish this. Lots of students choose to wrestle the snake. Some construct decoys and elaborate traps to confuse and then ensnare the snake. One student brought a flute and played a song to lull the snake to sleep. Then he threw the snake out a window."
--- It would be a Bad Thing for me to send this to the graduate students, wouldn't it?

"The bit that is most striking is the 'papers with 1,328 different co-authors.' My inner Diego Gambetta ... suggests that this may in part be a signalling phenomenon. If you are doing research in a field where someone has convincingly demonstrated that the emperor has no clothes, you want to signal as convincingly as possible that you (in contrast to those losers down the hall/in the department across the river/the country/wherever) have results that really stand up. One obvious way to do this is to get the little boy who pointed out the emperor's sartorial shortcomings to co-author a paper with you. Hence, I suspect, lots and lots of people who are eager to co-author something with Ioannidis (and plausibly, many, many more than he might be comfortable co-authoring with).... (NB that I am not suggesting that Iannidis was motivated by such an opportunity; I would be startled and amazed if he had been)."

"A selection of book titles and covers so boring they're interesting." --- A non-trivial fraction of them are the kind of books I read.

" 'Why should academia be any different from every other profession?' Maybe because academia pays a lot less than many other professions? Does Taylor have any suggestions as to what alternative benefit we should offer candidates in order to make an academic job worth their while? Does he really think that, absent tenure, our board of trustees would tell our chancellor, 'Hire the best people you can find and pay them whatever is required?' Right now, tenure is what universities have instead of money. I don’t see a lot of money coming our way soon. So I think we’d better hold on to tenure."

But, but, but, Pandora was never _in_ the box!  ETA: Andy was making a joke which went over my head.

Awww.

Thank God, I do not teach in the UK.

Gauss, writing letters for Riemann and Dedekind!!!

Anthony Grafton on the state and value of the academic humanities in the US; nominally a review of Menand's new book, which Grafton describes as astonishing (and not in a good way). Some truly fine bits of writing in here.

"The American university is under attack from two directions .... On the one hand, outside pressure groups have staged massive challenges to academic freedom, beginning in the 1960s with attacks on faculty who took stands against the Vietnam War ... more recently with well-funded campaigns against Middle Eastern Studies scholars. Connecting these dots ... distinct pattern of concerted efforts to undermine the legitimacy of forms of scholarly study deemed to threaten the status quo. At the same time ... erosion of university budgets and the encroachment of private-sector influence and business-friendly priorities into academic life. From the dwindling numbers of full-time faculty to the collapse of library budgets ... a system increasingly beholden to corporate America and starved of the resources it needs to educate the new generation of citizens." - From the co-author of _Mrs. Chiang's Szechuan Cookbook_ (and the standard history of McCarthyism)

Not a group of tags I ever expected to have occasion to type.

Of course, now I will be very tempted to send this to all the graduate students whose committees I'm on.

Reading this makes me feel like I should go make an offering in memory of Vannevar Bush and the other founders of the American research system, that we are spared such self-destructve idiocy.

Memo to self: write that essay on how complex systems:physics::cultural studies:literature.

"Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You've taught Kant for twenty years, but now you're team-teaching a new course on “Ethics and the Internet.” The personality theorist retired and wasn't replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the "Sexual Identity" course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don't share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom."

Shorter Chad: go to the tortoise, thou hustler, and consider its ways.

This really looks very bad. (And: a journal refusing to share referee reports with someone listed on the MS. as an author? WTF?)

They seem to miss what is the most obvious incentive to focus on research: publications are valuable in the academic _job-market_; they create prestige and reputation; they are verifiable and observable to potential employers at another school (or even to tenure committees at the same school) in ways that teaching quality is not; and of course there is an arms race.

Edited to add: Also, a Ph.D. is a near-requirement for a faculty job, and getting one is a long, underpaid apprenticeship in _producing research_. Those who complete a doctorate have, whether by selection or by treatment or both, a really remarkably great commitment to research.

This is how English and string theory got so weird.

Stephen Quake explains the facts of scientific life. As someone who is horribly unsuccessful with grants himself, I really sympathize. But on the other hand I'm often on panels reviewing grant applications, typically ones which are really looking for something which sounds both new and not-crazy. (I think "this is too ambitious" is best translated, in blunter terms, as "we don't see the evidence that _you_ can do it".) There is a type I/type II trade-off which is inescapable, but also an institutional incentive to favor type II errors, since the loss of projects you don't fund and never happen is much less visible than the waste of projects you do fund and go nowhere.

(And please don't talk to me about the private sector as an alternative. It never funds basic research, except when it has an enlightened and secure monopoly, insulated from shareholder pressure, like Bell Labs in the golden age; research goes to the wall as soon as any of that is threatened.)

"One thing I've learned from the current episode is not to automatically trust that the most well-known economists in the field have done due diligence before speaking out on an issue, even when that issue is of great public importance, or even to trust that they've thought very hard about the problems they are speaking to. I used to think that, for the most part, the name brands in the field would live up to their reputations, that they would think hard about problems before speaking out in public, that they would provide clarity and insight, but they haven't. In fact, in many cases they have undermined their reputations and confused the issues. "

More piling on vs. Stanley Fish. I'd add that when European universities began in the middle ages, the three big subjects were law, medicine, and theology, and the last was not about rapturous contemplation but producing higher officials for the Church.

"exquisite modls finely carved from bones of walras"!

"An example of a scholarly investigation of a topic or figure which finds that the conventional representation of such is in fact exhaustive and accurate."

"BEING A GUIDE FOR THE YOUNG ACADEMIC POLITICIAN"

What is a university for? More specifically what is a _professor_ for?

File under: people who do not grasp the meaning of the term "controlled experiment". See also: "ecological fallacy", "massive confounding".

Update: I gave in: http://bactra.org/weblog/592.html

Co-integration of time series: a case study

To use the next time I give a "how to get a job like mine" talk

This is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard. Clearly it is going to spread and take root like poison ivy.

Some good points, but surprisingly bad history (Chinese printing didn't take off, "The Web began as a means of communication among physicists in 1981"!) from a professional historian. Not material to the mostly-sound recommendations.

"the stories of decline in intellectual or scholarly standards that are profoundly anti-intellectual or unscholarly in their content and claims."

What _should_ the humanities be good for?

Brad explains the facts of life.

I like the passing mention of "UC Sunnydale".

Despite occasionally reading minnesota review, I had no idea it was being edited out of here.

"If you really mean it, however, you have to seriously leave room for, even encourage, someone to answer the question, 'Should we pursue social justice or be socially responsible' by saying, 'No'."

On the one hand, on specific points of ancient history Lefkowitz seemed (& seems) to me to be right. But _her_ work was also politicized...

Bruce S. in fine form. Interviewer, maybe not so much. "An educated citizen is not a friction-free technocratic philistine myrmidon with an ISO rating. Those guys exist, don't get me wrong, but they bear the relationship to education that the Ron Paul c

Not a lot of actual evidence of a trend towards more philosophy majors. But good for them even so...