Archive for Academia

59 results.
Jun14

Professional Jobs and Graduate Degrees

by tdaxp on June 14, 2013 at 5:41 am
Posted In: Academia

In earlier posts, I dissed the humanities ghetto and wrote this in particular about International Relations:

The obvious answer is that International Relations does not teach actually useful methods for the disciplined extraction of data. It does not teach critical thinking or logical reasoning. It teaches something that apes these skills, a rhetorical ability that impresses old scholars and does not help society.

International Relations is a non-progressive field where, by and large, it sucks to be young.

Because professors are driven by power, influence, and money, they harvest the few good job openings for those without useful skills into patronage networks, and push others aside.

Stephen J. Mexal, who Jason Heppler pointed me towards, apparently agrees:

SO SHOULD YOU GO to graduate school in the humanities? Yeah, sure, if you really want to. Why not? Just don’t expect it to have a predictable professional outcome. You cannot go to graduate school in the humanities and be placed into a job as a professor, a financial analyst, or as anything else. But graduate school in the humanities has always been this way.

So if you decide to go to grad school, remember that it’s not a place to escape the larger marketplace. You may think you are uninterested in capitalism, but capitalism is interested in you. The years that most students spend in graduate school are also prime years for building a career, and the opportunity costs of graduate school—the resources that could be spent pursuing other things—are steep, and must be taken into consideration.

Graduate school is a lot of fun. I have a PhD. I have many friends with advanced degrees in numerous fields.

3-circles-hedgehog-concept

But protect yourself. Get useful skills that you enjoy using. And get paid for using them.

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Apr30

How Academia Works After the Quantitative Revolution

by tdaxp on April 30, 2013 at 2:44 pm
Posted In: Academia

In 2008, I noted the “quantitative revolution,” which replaced the romantic academia many dream about with a discovery factory:

Both the old Academy and the Leftists, however, are under even more heartless attack from the Quantitative Revolution, the measurement-and-control movement that subjects everything to test-and-reject, measure-and-fund, quantitative certainties.

The romantic academia that lives in our heart is dying or dead. Given a future between the Tyranny of Leftists and the Tyranny of the Quantitative Revolutions, my sympathies go to the quantitativists. They save what can be saved, submitting the universities to Research, Application, and funded Goals.

Last year, I formalized that description of how academia works:

Professors, like most people, respond to the incentives of power, influence, and money.

The institution of tenure reduces uncertainty regarding money, and focuses the incentives on power and influence.

Power in academia comes from the number of bodies a professor has under him. These bodies might be apprentices (graduate students he advises), journeymen (post-docs who have a PhD and work at the lab, or staff researchers), or simple workers (lab technicians, etc).

Influence in academia comes from the extent to which one is successful in influencing one’s peers. This is typically measured in terms of influence scores, which are a product of how often the academic is cited, weighted by how important of a publication he is cited in.

The best route to both power and influence is to earn grant money.

Daniel Allington must read my blog, as he writes the same thing:

Even among successful players of the funding game – and certain digital humanists have been very successful players, of late – one may find disquiet at the game itself, at the disproportionate importance now attached to it, and at the negative impact it is having on the careers of new researchers and (in the long term) on access to the profession as a whole by accelerating the casualization of both teaching and research. The underlying problem – regretted by practically everyone with a genuine love of scholarship – is the ongoing reconstruction of all disciplines on the social model of the natural sciences and the creeping abandonment of ‘autonomy’ (in the sense used by Bourdieu, 1993 [1987]) in the academic field through tacit acceptance of the principle – shared by university administrators, government ministers, and hiring committees alike – that knowledge can and should be valued primarily for its moneymaking potential. In

Allington is particular worried about the “digital humanities” which provides a road out of the ghetto for humanities students. Allington criticizes this as revealing “the corrupting agenda of our paymasters” — apparently he sees nothing wrong with the old boys network that progress-based research replaces.

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Apr26

Should you go to graduate school?

by tdaxp on April 26, 2013 at 1:50 pm and modified on April 26, 2013. at 1:51 pm
Posted In: Academia

Everyone else (Daniel Drezner, Joshua Rothman, Rebecca Schuman, Katie Roiphe, Annemarie, tressiemc, etc) is making pretty obvious points about graduate schools and becoming famous for it.

Here are some actually useful questions to determine if you should go.

1. Do you want to go?
-> If No, DO NOT GO.
-> If Yes, read on.

2. Are you thinking about being a lawyer, medical doctor, or nurse?
-> If Yes, that’s not what I’m talking about. Read this blog instead.
-> If No, read on.

3. Is the degree you’re thinking of a STEM (Science, TEchnology Engineering, or Math) degree?
-> If Yes, GO. Start filling out applications. You’re done.
-> If No, read on.

4. Can you get a job even if your graduate degree is worthless?
-> If Yes, GO. Start filling out applications. You’re done.
-> If No, DON’T GO.

There, that saved you a lot of time.

The reason this quesitonaire is so short is that this is a good approximation of success.

1) Do something you enjoy, AND
2) Do something you can get paid for doing, AND
3) Do something you are great at

3-circles-hedgehog-concept

(3) will come with practice, which you will have plenty of it’s (1) and (2).

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Feb18

Overqualification and Elite Employers

by tdaxp on February 18, 2013 at 12:04 pm and modified on April 9, 2013. at 11:09 am
Posted In: Academia

What is Overqualification?

Wikipedia defines overqualification as “the state of being skilled or educated beyond what is necessary for a job.” Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article focuses on negative aspects of overqualification, and why employers will deliberately avoid hiring overqualified employees.

Elite Employers May Prefer Hire Overqualified Employees

Employers — especially elite employers — will often intentionally hire overqualified candidates. The phenomenon is entirely overlooked in the PhD article, but is real and related to Thomas P.M. Barnett’s concept of a “cannibalizing agent.” As Barnett wrote in The Pentagon’s New Map

But it is in the security realm where the adjustment will be the hardest and take the longest, because it takes years — even decades — to raise new generations of military leaders and construct new force structures that match the perceived changes in the security environment. Unless, of course, you have a cannibalizing agent already in place, like a Special Operations Command. But cannibalizing agents do not become ascendant unless dramatically new rule sets are recognized as coming to the fore. When those new rule sets are recognized and given credence, we begin to understand…

Overqualified employees are destabilizers, because they are likely to be able to see through existing processes and procedures, introduce instability by lobbying for changes, and create ad hoc processes that more efficiently fulfill dashboard-level Key Performance Indicators.

Thus, elite employers will purposefully choose to hire overqualified employees when the employers believe the following

1) It is important to raise up a home-grown cadre of knowledgeable experts quickly
2) The short-term costs of over-qualification (distruption to internal business processes) are neglibible compared to potential costs
3) The employer has the ability to recognize “new rule sets” as they come to the fore, and thus recognize those overqualified employees who have already successfully been cannibalizing internal processes

A Graduate Student Seeking Elite Employment Misses the Point If He Complains about Overqualification

I saw all of this because of the recent online discussion started by Greg Ferenstein in his Atlantic piece: Former Political Scientist to Congress: Please Defund Political Science and Adam Elkus‘s response, “Relevant to Policy.” Ferenstein’s piece is an anguished good-bye to political science from someone who wanted an elite position, and saw only meaninglessness in his PhD training. As Ferenstein wrote: “After four years of desperately searching in vain for how my degree could make the world a better place, the lack of real-world impact convinced me to leave a Ph.D. program in political science.” Elkus calls parts of Ferentstein’s piece “ridiculous,” but the human pain that Ferenstein feels isn’t. After four years, Ferenstein realized he was being trained to be overqualified. Then he gave up.

Now, Greg Ferenstein certainly is not your typical grad school drop-out. If nothing else, Greg got his gripes published in The Atlantic, indicating some political operative skills. But note that Ferenstein fails the three-prong test for hiring an overqualified employee.

Specifically,

1) Ferenstein was not able to achieve his own goals in graduate school quickly (in that he ran out of time on his own schedule)
2) Ferenstein may be a high-cost employee (as he has demonstrated a preference to drop out when he is overqualified)
3) Ferenstein has not successfully “cannibalized” the graduate school experience by subverting it to his own ends (thus is less likely to do so in the future)

I don’t mean this to be a hit-piece on Ferenstein. I was briefly enrolled in a Political Science graduate program, which I left to earn my PhD in educational Psychology. I then took a position as a junior user researcher at my employer.

Overqualification Is Endemic to Elite Systems

The overqualification that Ferenstein complains about is not likely to go away. Even if some sort of practical degree (say a Masters of Arts in Government) may be more appropriate to a potential employee’s day to day tasks, and even if the typical value of a PhD is small, elite employers are looking for atypical candidates who are ambitious and have demonstrated overcoming obstacles that are both intensive (require a broad array of skills) and extensive (takes a long time). Elite employers will reward potential employees with cash, influence, or other benefits to generate the needed number of actual employees, which of course leaves many others outside the gates.

There’s much that’s debatable in Ferenstein’s original article, but its heart is a young man’s realization that he has been led for years to be overqualified for the sort of positions that he could actually find. He’s correct in his realization. He just displays an ignorance of why he was lead to such a state.

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Nov02

Cliometrics and Cliodynamics

by tdaxp on November 2, 2012 at 3:40 pm
Posted In: Academia, History

A good friend (and a new PhD student) asked me today what I thought of Cliometrics and Cliodynamics. To answer this, I will briefly define these fields as I understand them, describe their substantive and methodological components, and provide advise for the study of both.

Cliometrics is a form of economic history that relies on statistical analysis and data visualization. One of my favorite books, Nature’s Metropolis, is arguably Cliometric. While the methods are relatively simple (memorably focusing heavy on geovisualization of debt records), the book is a fascinating history of the United States in which the greatest impact of the Civil War was accelerating the development of the agricultural futures markets.

Cliodynamics extends cliometrics to the entire study of history. In other words, it attempts to make history a social science, instead of a school within the humanities. For instance, Chinese historians and Chinese leaders have been deeply influenced by the “dynastic cycle” in which an honest rebel band that promises a better world seizes power, creates havoc, develops excellent leadership capabilities, descends into extracting wealth from the population, puts down rebellions, and eventually falls to an honest rebel band that promises a better world.

A cliodynamist would ask, how would you operationalize that claim? What is the null hypotheses? Where you can find a body of evidence to support or disprove such a claim? What testable predictions would it make? And so on.

All of this sounds fascinating to me.

The methods of cliometrics and cliodynamics seem useful. Not the substance, but the methods.

It strikes me a very useful skill to have is to be able to measure what is happening and what has happened. Questions like, “Will this make money?” “How well-off will this make people?” and “Are they planning to kill us?” all are being asked by data-rich organizations. The cliometric and cliodynamic approaches — which both focus on rigorously giving meaning to large amounts of data — seem like an application of the same focus on measurement as psychometrics and econometrics.

Academia runs on money, prestige, and power. In different proportions so does corporate life. And government. A good way to acquire these things to do enjoy what you do, be the best in the world at it, and make money on it. If it fits your temperament, learning the substantive of cliometrics and cliodynamics seems like a fun way to learn the more useful methods of cliometrics and cliodynamics, which certainly can help you along your path.

There’s a lot of interesting things in the world. There are some useful things in the world. I think the substance of cliometrics and cliodynamics are interesting. I think the methods of both are useful. My advise for someone thinking of studying cliometrics and cliodynamics: How many times in the world do you get to do something both interesting and useful?

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Jun11

How Science and Academia Work

by tdaxp on June 11, 2012 at 6:25 pm and modified on June 11, 2012. at 6:31 pm
Posted In: Academia, Science

Summary

  • Science is not a cartoon
  • Science works by predicting variation
  • Science advances by exploiting human nature
  • Some science experiments have multiple outcome variables and multiple predictors

Science Is Not A Cartoon

The cartoon version of “science” — that definition that teachers who had no idea what they were talking about gave you — runs along these lines:

Science is a method for understanding Truth. To understand Truth, a great scientist thinks deeply, and using the tomes he has read along with his powers of reflection, generates a Theory. Then, with great care, an elaborate contraption is created test the Theory. If the test works, the Hypothesis is Proven, and it becomes a Fact. Otherwise, the Theory is Wrong, and the cycle begins again.

Of course, that’s ridiculous. That’s not science. That’s what children think of as science.

Science Works by Predicting Variation

Here’s a better definition of science:

Science is a method for predicting variation. To better predict variation, scientists construct Theories, which are mental models that allow brute facts to be put in some sort of framework. For instance, the theory of Gravity explains the brute fact of an apple on a tree in one moment, and the same apple on the great in the next, into a narrative. Theories are operationalized using hypotheses, which generate specific predictions. So gravity on Earth can be operationalized as predicting that gravity acts like an acceleration that forces all object to the ground at a rate of 32.2 feet per second per second. Run enough experiments and you will begin to see this simple hypothesis mis-predict events, which will force you to generate other hypotheses. Eventually you will have a set of hypotheses which predict events enough to be useful to you.

I say this because of a recent post by Diane Ravitch (who was recently fired from the Brookings Institution), criticizing a Gates Foundation grant to measure attentiveness through measurement of human the electrical system.

If you know what science is, and how it works, your immediate thoughts should be.

Scientists desire to predict variation in educational outcomes. These scientists doubtless have Theories of education, which are mental models that allow brute facts to be put in some sort of framework. These theories are probably operationalized using hypotheses, which have generated specific predictions. There probably is error in the these predictions, which are leading to follow-up hypothesis. These scientists must think by adding information on attentiveness measured through the electrical system, they can reduce error, and predict educational outcomes better.

If you know nothing about science, such as Diane Ravitch, your reaction differs, you’ll write a nonsensical post with only one declarative sentence: “Shades of Brave New World.”

Science Advances By Exploiting Human Nature

Now, given that, try to understand the study, as the historian Mark Safranski did, in this way:

 

Let’s start from the assumption that this GSR bracelet study is actually a scientific study without hidden agendas.

But before the end of his first sentence, Mark (who unlike Diane, is attempting to seriously engage in this issue) is already lost on irrelevant tangents.

Why would science be free of “hidden agendas”? Why would scientists be some cold automatons driven by computer programs with no feelings, emotions, hopes dreams, or goals? Science advances through Academia. This is done by rewarding professors for obeying the interests of peer-reviewed grant funding agencies.:

Professors, like most people, respond to the incentives of power, influence, and money.

The institution of tenure reduces uncertainty regarding money, and focuses the incentives on power and influence.

Power in academia comes from the number of bodies a professor has under him. These bodies might be apprentices (graduate students he advises), journeymen (post-docs who have a PhD and work at the lab, or staff researchers), or simple workers (lab technicians, etc).

Influence in academia comes from the extent to which one is successful in influencing one’s peers. This is typically measured in terms of influence scores, which are a product of how often the academic is cited, weighted by how important of a publication he is cited in.

The best route to both power and influence is to earn grant money. For example, consider a professor who receives grant money from a federal agency. Some of this money goes to equipment, but the majority goes to employing several graduate students to work on this large project. Likewise, with this funding, he and his team will be writing numerous articles using the latest techniques on very large data sets, and can be expected to quickly become influential in that area. Because these graduate students have him both as an employer and as an academic adviser, when they graduate with their own doctorates, they will be experts at creating ways to detect bad standardized tests (after all, it’s what they’ve been doing for years), in a few years his influence on their careers will be apparent, and they will likewise go about working on similar problems — citing him and each other as they go along.

Believing that science is free of hidden agendas is like believing that politics is free of hidden agendas: that belief is an idea that completely ignores the reality that science, like politics, takes place among human beings.

Some Science Experiments Have Multiple Outcome Variables and Multiple Predictors

Following that, Mark gives a fair summary of the research proposal, before stumbling on a subtle but important point::

Is a normal classroom setting (say 20 to low 30′s of students) recording arousal during a 40-50 minute lesson with different student and teacher behaviors a good experimental setting where variables are identified, isolated and controlled? No. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands of variables in this environment and the researchers need to separate all the “noise” from the moment of learning. To say nothing about interruptions coming from outside the classroom (ex. fire drill, students entering, leaving, PA announcements) skewing the GSR readings.
Is it a reasonable assumption that the ideal teacher state of arousal for instructing students is the same or should even correlate with student arousal levels? No. This would seem to be a separate hypothesis to be investigated.

Given that the important parts of this post are that science works through iterative experiments to predict variation, and that the social enterprise of science depends on scientists responding to incentives, I hesitate to include the following point, but Mark’s comments bring it up.

Implicit in Mark’s comment is the idea of predicting a dependent variable from an independent one, or to put it another way, basic algebra in the format.

y = mx +b

With y as the predicted variable, x as the predictor, m and b as the intercept.  Students and trainee researchers sometimes used this exact form (which they would have learned as children in elementary algebra), because this form, the simplest of all scientific forms, is also the most advanced most laymen or reporters actually grasp.

More advanced research — the kind that has hundreds to thousands of participants — uses the almost identical form.

Y = MX + B

That is, more advanced research uses matrix algebra to allow for multiple outcomes, multiple predictors, multiple slopes, and multiple intercepts.

Conclusion

If you can put together more than one declarative sentence in a comment talking about a scientific study that leads to implications you are uncomfortable with, you have a firmer grasp of the scientific method than Diane Ravitch.

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Jul24

Review of “The Great American University,” by Jonathan R. Cole

by tdaxp on July 24, 2011 at 10:18 am
Posted In: Academia, Bookosphere, History, Science

The Great American University is a book about the origins of the American research university system. The book is written for those with interest in the direction and future of research universities, and those who are curious how they differ from ‘regular’ colleges and universities.

The American research university emerged in the late 19th century, and was inspired by the experience of American students who studied in Europe as well as American philanthropists and political leaders with affection for British civilization. The returning students had seen the success of the German research universities, and the manner in which a Professor working with graduate students could lead to streams of new research. American leaders, aspiring to be more like the British leaders of the anglosphere, admired the distributed system of autonomous colleges and semi-autonomous departments that characterized Oxford and Cambridge. The combination of German tactics and British strategy proved successful, and the rise of the American research university began.

Much is made of the collapse of German universities as a result of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. While Cole acknowledges the brain drain duringg the 1930s and 1940s, Cole argues that the drain began the war and has continued since. While the collapse of the German research university was accelerated by the Nazis, in Cole’s opinion it was largely a result of the rise of America combined with the rise of socialist/anticompetitive politics in German post-1945 that sickened, then killed, the German system.

Following the Second World War science boom, the federal government accelerated the rise of the American research universities. From the Second World War to the Vietnam War, physics was a favorite area for funding. From this we received many new physical inventions, such as a transistor. After the Vietnam War, medicine is a favorite area for funding. Now we have great medical breakthroughs.

Professors at both research universities and “regular” universities have the familiar mix of teaching responsibilities, research universities, and community service. At a regular university the primary focus is to educate a new generation of workers and local business leaders. At a research university, on the other hand, the purpose of these three activities is the training and mentorship of a new generation of active researchers. (In the modern economy, however, a good argument can be made that some forms of research make for very good jobs and industries.)

Some of the book is spent on enemies of the research university system. Cole accurately describes creationists, some social conservatives, speech and “hate” codes, and political apparatchiks as enemies of the research university. Some readers might find the glowing references to Barack Obama to be annoying, but anyone who has read The Post-American World (by Fareed Zakaria) or Great Powers (by The Great American University, and recommend it to anyone curious about American higher education.

3 Comments
Jan02

Mapping Science

by tdaxp on January 2, 2011 at 10:17 am
Posted In: Academia, Science, Vanity

A new map of science is out, and interesting to me, it shows Computer Science as most connected with mathematics, engineering, and social sciences.

This fits my experience. My PhD is in educational psychology, which is a social science. My masters degree is in Computer Science. My co-chair was an applied statistician, and my wife is an engineer.

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Feb23

Academic Badness

by tdaxp on February 23, 2010 at 6:20 am and modified on February 23, 2010. at 4:16 pm
Posted In: Academia

Amy Bishop, besides gunning down her fellow faculty, is also accused of killing her brother, not updating her research plan, has an IQ of 180, protected by her sex and class, a geek, and arrogant.

Clearly, killing your co-workers is not a way to win friends!

So far, no one has accused her of being a cheater, a plagiarist, or stupid.

She taught in the best academic environment in the world, one where the form of production is structured conversation.

And she threw that away by murder.

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Dec29

Multiculturalism v. Free Speech

by tdaxp on December 29, 2008 at 5:19 pm and modified on December 29, 2008. at 5:25 pm
Posted In: Academia

I don’t think anyone in an academic institution would be surprised to hear that leftist/multiculturalists are an organized, imminent, and active threat to free speech in higher education. IUPUI’s discipline (without a hearing) against a student for reading Notre Dame v. The Klan is an extreme example of this trend (h/t Weekly Standard):

The IUPUI AAO seems to have been renamed the IUPUI OEO, but unfortunately it appears to still exist in some form. More on this scandal is available from Reason.

I would be interested in knowing more about this case. In particular, the allegation that the instigator of this scandal is now the Assistant Director of IUPUI OEO is disturbing, to say the least.

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