Destiny's Woman

On a recent, long plane flight, I read The Marriage Plot (Jeffrey Eugenides), and found a few sentences of interest. If I were an underliner, I would have underlined these, both on the same page of the novel:

Madeleine worried that there was something paradigmatic in this, that she was destined to go through life being cowed by less capable men.

and

Phyllida's hair was where her power resided.

OK, I stand corrected about hair and power.

The first quote is interesting, in part because of the use of the word "destined". Is Madeleine worried about being cowed by less capable men because she can't do anything about it, or because she won't do anything about it? Either way, she has a sense of foreboding that this might be a feature of her life.

But why would it be a feature of the life of a young woman like this character in the novel -- an intelligent, literature-loving, Ivy-league graduate?

Have any of you ever felt that way, particularly early in your academic career?

I never felt that I was destined to go through life cowed by less capable men, but I did worry that I was destined to have lots of experiences in which I was automatically assumed to be less capable than less capable men, just because I am a woman. And in fact, this has been my destiny.

I have met this destiny, and it was mine, but that was then, this is now.

I got older. Some of the less capable men fell by the wayside, some are still around and doing well. All of this matters less and less to me as I get older and have more freedom and confidence in my work.

Even so, I liked the sentence in the novel because it captures a feeling you can have, particularly when you are young, about how things might go in the future, in part because you do not have super-human confidence in yourself and in part because life is unfair and strange.

Just don't be cowed. You don't have to be cowed. Just say no to being cowed. Or, if you are cowed now and then, OK, that happens, but don't let it be your destiny.

Too Cool For Me

Although the word textbook tends to conjure images of heavy, overpriced, boring paper bricks filled with too many facts for any one person to learn in a reasonable amount of time, textbooks are actually quite varied in their style, tone, content, and even price.

Writers, assigners, and readers of textbooks will always disagree about what should go in a textbook, and some people will argue that textbooks are irrelevant and should not be used, much less required. I am not going to get into the textbook cost-benefit argument here, or the issue of whether/how professors assign textbooks and then (apparently) don't even use them. Those are topics of other posts, past and possibly future.

Today my specific subject is related to the content of textbooks for introductory classes. In the drive to make difficult and (apparently) boring subjects more user-friendly and accessible, some textbooks adopt a rather casual tone and format. Some textbooks I have seen recently reminded me of picture books my daughter liked when she was a lot younger -- those books with pictures of animals or construction equipment or whatever and bits of text scattered about to explain each picture.

So I wonder: Is there such thing as too casual in the context of textbooks, or is a 'fun' textbook a good thing if it helps engage the student in the subject?

There are various stages of casual style in textbooks:

- textbooks written in an entirely formal, classic style, with a casual quotient of zero;

- textbooks that are overall serious and classic in style, but with a few attempts at a lighter tone in text or illustrations. For some books, this lighter tone might be signaled only by a parenthetical expression with a "!" as a further clue that whimsy is being attempted;

- mostly serious, classic textbooks that have some references to popular culture and/or that use casual phrasing or images (such as in an analogy) to explain a concept;

- textbooks in which the casual style is a persistent features; e.g., books with cute chapter titles or section subheadings or some attempts at humor in illustrations;

- and so on, along the spectrum to intensely casual textbooks. It would be interesting to hear of examples of the most casual (interpret the term however you want) college-level textbooks in various fields, and what you think of them.

I am not a big fan of textbooks in which the casual aspects are distracting rather than helpful pedagogical tools. I also think that, in some cases, textbook authors might believe they are being cool by coming up with (apparently) clever chapter titles that read like blog post titles, but I wonder if the intended audience of the textbooks (undergrads in an intro-level course) thinks these are cool.. or pathetic?

And I also wonder: Is it condescending to 'dumb down' a textbook because the assumption is that most students can't (or won't) engage with serious topics, or is it a pedagogical best-practice to reduce jargon and try to capture the attention of as many students as possible?

Surely there is a good balance in there somewhere, such that a textbook is not primarily an impenetrable list of arcane terminology, and yet is not so informal that the pictures and words are an incoherent muddle.

I like textbooks that explain things and that don't focus on vocabulary (jargon) so much that the book seems to exist only to leap from term to term (that students memorize). I am fine with lots of pretty pictures and clever analogies. I am trying to overcome an aversion to 'cute' chapter titles in textbooks.

Part of what is difficult for me is that I know what I would have liked as a student, and I am pretty sure that that is not what most of my students today would like. Those of us become professors and essentially never leave school are not necessarily the best judges of what most of our students will find useful and interesting in a book. And yet.. we teach, and many of us do make decisions about textbooks.

I don't want to use a textbook that I dislike and that I think does a bad job of explaining important topics (who does?), but I also don't want to require a textbook that many of my students will hate and perhaps not read or understand no matter how much I try to integrate textbook-reading into the class. That's what can make the Textbook Decision a challenging one for me.

What Would John Stuart Mill Do?

This is one of the stranger (but not the strangest!*) anecdotes in Higher Education?, a book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus:

"When faculty members do have power, they often use it to resist. When [Colgate University president Rebecca] Chopp tried to enlist faculty to invite students into their homes so they could see professors in another setting, she found few takers. "They have tenure," she said, and sighed, "They do whatever they want."

Drat those tenured professors. There they go again, abusing the power that tenure confers. It would be much, much better if they had to fear for their jobs and felt they had no choice but to allow students into their homes.

Just because some professors work 60 hours a week and might want to keep some separation of home and work, doesn't mean they should be allowed to do this. And who cares what significant others and offspring (and pets!) might think about this? If you're related to a professor, their job is your job. Deal with it.

Haven't we all heard stories of legendary professors whose homes were open to their students at all hours of the day and night? Why can't we all be like that?

If we truly cared about our students, we would want them to come to our homes, gaze at our off-campus lives, and meet our families (and pets!) in situ. That way, we would not intimidate them so much and they would feel more comfortable coming to our office hours.

There are some professors, tenured or not, who enjoy having students routinely visit their homes and be "one of the family". Others want their home to be a respite from work, even if they do quite a bit of work at home.

I really don't see the reluctance of some professors to open their homes to student visits as a convincing argument against tenure or as supporting evidence for how little professors care about their students.


* My vote for the strangest part of the book is the paragraph in which the authors describe a "workingman" who "jumped on a subway track to rescue a child who tripped and fell." The workingman didn't think; he just did it. The authors posit that professors on that same platform would not have jumped on the track to save the child:

"We wonder if, had some professors been on the platform, would they have paused to ponder how John Stuart Mill might have parsed the choices?"

I wonder if that is a sane thing to wonder. Of course the professors would save the child. What better way to combine broader impacts, a synergistic activity, and outreach?

Dear Andrew Hacker?

This is my blog-reply to an e-mail I recently received from Andrew Hacker, one of the authors (with Claudia Dreifus) of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, and What We Can Do About It.

Dear Andrew Hacker,

You're welcome. Praising my ability to correctly spell names is setting the bar a bit low, but it's nice of you to say something positive.

I will now say something nice about your book: I agree with you about many issues. Examples:

There are too many mini-administrators, some (most?) are paid exorbitant salaries, and tuition is too high. I am concerned about the amenities arms-race that makes it a priority to have awesome fitness centers at a time when there is little money to provide adequate classrooms and other teaching facilities. I am troubled that so many "contingent" faculty, such as adjuncts, are paid so little, receive no benefits, and are not treated with respect. I think that post-tenure review should be routinely and consistently used to evaluate tenured professors, with consequences for those who are not doing their jobs well, particularly in teaching. There are outstanding students everywhere, no matter how lacking in 'prestige' the college or university.

We disagree, however, about the role of research in universities and colleges, and a few other issues (e.g., tenure). Comments from readers on yesterday's post have done a great job of addressing the researchers-as-teachers issue, including the role of graduate education in a university, so I will not focus much on that specific topic. Instead, I will explain why I did not like your book.

I did not like your book because it is little more than a string of unsupported anecdotes that justify your contempt for professors and your belief that most professors care little about teaching, don't even try to teach well, and try to teach as little as possible. Where are the data that support this?

In recent years, I have seen the teaching evaluations (student and peer evaluations) of every professor in my department and every faculty member being evaluated for tenure and promotion at a higher-level administrative unit in my university. The quality of teaching is very good, with only rare instances of poor teaching, even for the tenured professors. There is likely no general correlation between teaching skill and research success (on this we seem to agree), but I stand by my statement that teaching and research are not mutually exclusive, and are activities that can enhance each other.

I strongly believe that universities can do more to improve undergraduate teaching, and I see a strong positive trend in this direction, even as faculty are under increasing pressure to bring in more grants, publish more papers, and obtain more patents. Through my participation in searches at my own and at other universities, I have seen an emphasis on hiring faculty who will excel at both teaching and research.

In your e-mail to me, you mentioned that, as a social scientist and a journalist, you and your co-author need "evidence". When I read Higher Education?, I was hoping to see evidence for your conclusions and hypotheses. Instead, I saw anecdotes, such as one might find in a blog.

For example, your book starts with the story of a candidate who, in his interview for a faculty position, makes it clear that he is not interested in teaching and is only interested in research. The fact that he was not hired indicates to me that the system worked well, yet you used this anecdote to illustrate your hypothesis that professors don't care about teaching and try to do as little of it as possible.

Another reason I didn't like your book is because you distort facts to suit your purpose of showing how dysfunctional professors are. For example, you do not think that professors work very much. To show that faculty are overpaid slackers, you define "the basic academic workload" as "the number of hours when professors have to be at stated places at specified times." In your scheme, this includes only classroom teaching and posted office hours, and therefore professors at some universities make >$800/hour.

You have anticipated objections. In fact, you wrote that you "..can already hear anguished cries from the faculty club", and so you acknowledge that professors "..do something outside their classroom and office hours." Unfortunately, you are cynical about this something: "But the great bulk of it is less real than contrived: committees, department meetings, faculty senates, and yes, what they call their research.."

What exactly is your definition of "real"?

Yes, indeed, I do spend a lot of time on those other, possibly unreal somethings, in addition to what I call my research, including advising graduate students. You might think some of the committees are stupid (I do too) and that research should be a hobby for long weekends and summers (did you talk to any professors who run labs?), but you should count these hours in your calculations of how much professors make per hour.

Similarly, what is your evidence for your contention that professors don't work as much as they say they do? This seems to be it: "A story is told of a classroom where all the students were busy scribbling as the professor droned on. All, that is, but one, a young woman in the back row, who wrote down nary a word. How so? She had with her the notes that her mother had taken for that class during her own student days." That's the evidence? A possibly apocryphal story?

Another example: At one of the universities you visited, very few of the undergraduates you met had been to a professor's office "to discuss materials from a class". At another (Harvard), a student told you that it was "intimidating" to speak to professors, so students avoid going to speak with professors in their offices. And your point was what? As a professor and a scientist, I know better than to take what students say at face value. I need evidence that it is the fault of professors that students don't come to office hours for help when needed.

There are lots of other "interesting" ideas in your book: engineering is "vocational training", sabbaticals are "sojourns in Tuscany", mathematicians don't need tenure because what they do is not controversial.. the list goes on. I could also mention inconsistencies:

• big football programs are bad, but 3 of your 10 favorite schools are Mississippi, Notre Dame, and ASU;
• tenure forces universities to keep low-functioning professors, but tenure is a "feeble shield" that doesn't actually protect tenured professors from being fired;
• research doesn't enhance teaching because, for example "The information with which a mathematics research project deals is usually inaccessible to undergraduates." (ergo.. the same must be true for all academic disciplines?)

In the end, the book fails in its central thesis about how research is harming US colleges and universities because the authors do not objectively weigh the positive and negative effects of research on undergraduates. There are no data, there are no anecdotes, there are no interviews with undergraduates who have done research, either with an individual professor or as part of a larger research group. There is nothing in the book about the rise of Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs or about how principal investigators on grants are encouraged (by funding agencies) to include undergraduates in grant proposals to enhance the "broader impacts" of research.

Participating in a small research project as an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college changed my life and led me to an interesting and fulfilling career (despite the fact that I have never spent a sabbatical in Tuscany). Working with a professor who was a leading researcher in his field inspired me more than all my classes combined.

You do not have to take this anecdote at face value, especially not from an anonymous blogger, but I feel that you are attacking, perhaps from ignorance, one of the greatest strengths of our higher education system.

Sincerely,

FSP

Novel Retraction

No, this is not about yet another retraction of a Journal article related to someone's irreproducible results involving high-stakes biomedical research. It is about yet another novel that has a character who makes paranoid statements about feminists as she is thinking about her own life. As I was reading a novel recently, I found myself wishing that novels could have Errata, or retractions, or second-thoughts; that an author could realize "Oh no, those things I had that character say and think are really stupid in a way I did not intend" and then fix the problem. That would be a novel retraction.

Here are some excerpts from The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver; I don't know if these thoughts reflect the beliefs of the author, Lionel Shriver, or only her main female character (Irina), but I hope it is the latter:

Irina assumed that Jude was prideful in that wearing feminist way about the fact that she'd not taken her husband's surname.

She [Irina] didn't care if feminists would have maintained that she didn't need a man.

She [Germaine Greer] was that rare animal, a feminist with a sense of humor..

Older, she [Irina] was wiser to the woes that could fall abruptly from the sky like weather, and all that feminist brouhaha aside, a woman was safer -- plain safer -- when she made a survival pact with a male of the species.

Thus over Ramsey's protests she demurred from taking his surname, not from feminist zeal but because she could not afford it; the appellation Irina Acton would make official the very vanishing act at which she was already getting too much practice.

One gets the impression that this Irina character has an imaginary little feminist sitting on her shoulder, criticizing her every decision (no doubt in an unpleasant, shrieking voice).

I am sure that there are wearing, humorless feminists wandering around out there somewhere, hating all men and despising women who take their husband's name, but do I really need to say that those descriptions are not applicable to most people who would call themselves feminists? Perhaps the author only used statements like the ones above to illustrate the insecure mindset of her main character; if so, this was effective.

Whether or not the anti-feminist statements are part of the fictional world of the book or also represent the beliefs of the author, the question is: Do spurious anti-feminist statements like the above examples ruin a work of fiction for me, the reader?

The three most recent examples that I have discussed in this blog are Solar (I McEwan), The Perfect Reader (M Pouncey), and The Post-Birthday World (L Shriver); one by a male author, two by female authors. There are parts of Solar that I liked, and I can't say I hated the book, but there were quite a few things about it that I disliked. I hated The Perfect Reader entirely. And I didn't really like The Post-Birthday World (I liked Shriver's other books more). So, maybe..

But, in fact, I really don't think the occasional anti-feminist elements were central to my dislike of these books. The "feminists hate men", "feminists are humorless" etc. statements and caricatures certainly didn't help me like the books, but I would probably feel the same if a novel also involved repulsive stereotypes of scientists. Oh wait, Solar had that too.

I am trying to think of a recent novel that contains overt "anti-feminist" statements or characters, but that is an interesting, thought-provoking, well-written work of fiction. I don't mean "anti-feminist" in the sense of having a plot line about a woman who doesn't have a career and/or who is a 40 year old "girl" who loves to shop (I don't consider either of those anti-feminist). I mean "anti-feminist" in the sense of the excerpts above. I am sure there must be some, but my memory fails me right now. Any suggestions?

Group Highlights

One weird thing about reading books on an e-reader is that you can see what other people have chosen to underline when they were reading the same book on other e-readers. You can even see how many people have underlined a particular sentence.

I have found that I can easily guess which sentences will be underlined by following this one simple rule:

The underlined sentences will be the most general, trite, "philosophical" statements.

Here is an active learning exercise for my readers. Which sentence(s) below would you predict will/should be underlined?

The old man stared at the lobster on his plate, wondering what the lobster was thinking when he (she?) clambered into the slatted wooden trap. Did all lobsters eventually end up in a trap? Did any lobster ever die a natural death? And he wondered: Was death somehow more natural than life? Even as we lose our grip on the tissue of life, like the sunset, the inevitable, beautiful, tragic sunset loses its grip on the horizon, we are all lobsters. How strange that the sunset today was the color of the dead lobster on his plate.

Did you guess the "Even as we lose our grip.." sentence ± the question before it? A+++++ for you! Any other sentence: underline FAIL.

I have never been a very diligent or systematic underliner, or even a highlighter, and I seem to have missed out on some important lesson about What To Highlight.

When I was in college, I took a literature course that surveyed the Great Works, from the dawn of time to the recent past. I had read many of these Great Works before I got to college, but I had read them in isolation. I took the class because I wanted to learn about these books from Great Scholars. What I mostly learned was that there was symbolism lurking in the prose, unbeknownst to me when I read these works on my own.

I also noticed that my classmates arrived in class each day with heavily highlighted and annotated books, and they further annotated the books as the professor pointed out key passages. I tried to do this, but I was never very good at it. I tended to underline sentences that I liked for aesthetic reasons, missing profound statements about life and death and war and peace and lobsters.

Armed with a new realization about the utility of highlighting, a friend and I decided to annotate the paperback collection of used and abandoned Great Books that resided in a study room in our college residence. Hoping that some future undergraduate who took this same course would read these particular books, we decided to make up strange and unlikely annotations, in the further hope that these hypothetical future readers would be entertained, or, I admit, confused.

For example, we would underline a sentence like this one from War and Peace -- "Prince Vassily always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating his part in an old play." -- and write something in the margin like "IMPORTANT seagull imagery!"

I was reminded of this juvenile impulse recently as I was reading yet another e-book that had yet another trite phrase underlined. I felt the urge to do some subversive underlining of text that apparently had no particular significance, just on the off chance that it would make someone wonder what they were missing.

So far I have suppressed that urge, and I may yet become a sincere underliner, as I sometimes find marking text useful for later reference if I am going to use a snippet in a blog post.

For example, I was recently struck by two things on one page of the novel The Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey (Note: This is most definitely not a recommendation that anyone read this book).

One, not (yet) underlined bit of text -- but a possible candidate for underlining were I to keep track of the Stupidest Sentences In This Book -- is: "Manu-script. Funny the feminists hadn't had their way with that one yet."

Another, underlined by someone (not me): "How one knew and recognized handwriting, as one knew and recognized a voice in the distance, or on the other end of the phone. These details of person-hood we learned and memorized, as if access to that information meant we knew and understood one another. We felt a sense of ownership of such things."

Too bad the author doesn't have a sense of ownership of complete sentences. Or feminism.

And this: "But the death of a parent is a loss of self. A loss of history. Who else really remembers your childhood but your parents?"

Wow.

In the book, My Hollywood by Mona Simpson, were I to underline text, I would go for this bit, when the woman narrator muses about her struggles to have a career as a composer/musician and a wife/mother: "You can be both! my mother had said. But my mother was mentally ill."

For some reason that I can't begin to understand, 23 people have underlined this text in Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart: "And that's what immortality means to me, Joshie. It means selfishness. My generation's belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think." Am I missing something?

But, just as my cynicism was deepening about all these anonymous highlighting people, I found some text that has been highlighted by 23 people (the same ones??), perhaps just because it is beautiful text: "The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete."

Nice.

Latest Grievance

In a recent post, I sought recommendations for academic novels that I had not yet read. Someone suggested Elinor Lipman's My Latest Grievance, which I had not read, but now I have read it and I found it very entertaining on a recent trip. Thank you for the suggestion, anonymous commenter.

Much about the academic setting in the book was unfamiliar to me -- a small "inferior" college that has housemothers or houseparents in the (all-female) dorms, a scandal-prone new president with a suicidal wife and a "rude and fast" daughter etc., but I was interested in the main character, a teen-aged girl whose parents are both professors at the college.

At times, this girl is not very sympathetic to her parents. She describes her father as an "unappetizing specimen" who is also "one of those daft-looking professors".

Her mother is unfashionable, and an intellectual snob. The daughter delights in playing with their minds, subtly revealing their hypocrisies and inconsistencies, disconcerting and manipulating her parents. She is devious, and entertaining.

And she longs to have a more normal family and live a more normal life, although, at the same time, she likes being the center of attention (a kid growing up on a college campus where her parents are both professors and houseparents in a dorm) and having an unusual life.

I read some passages of the book to my daughter, the only child of two professors. She nodded and smiled at some of the descriptions of the eccentric parents who are rather intense about their work. She could also relate to the fact that, in the end, the fictional daughter appreciates her little family unit, their peculiar habits and traditions, and even her unfashionable parents. (In the novel, stylish people do not come off so well).

Recently, my daughter and I were talking about various things, and she said "Sometimes I think that I am the only thing keeping you two from spending all of your waking hours working." She concluded that she is therefore good for us.

I informed her that she was exaggerating a bit about how much we work when she is not around, like when she is away at summer camp, but I agreed that she is definitely good for us.

We have a lot of fun together, so she knows that she is not an annoying obstacle hindering us from doing what we'd rather be doing. Mostly she seems amused by her parents -- lucky for us -- and says that she thinks it is great that we have jobs that are perfectly suited for us. And, since she is a teen, she now typically adds something like "especially since it's hard to think of anything else you guys would be good at".*

Perhaps one day she will write an academic novel about being the only child of two Science Professor parents. The non-"hard" sciences are rather well represented in this genre, and part of the fun the daughter in the Lipman novel has in lampooning her parents relates to the fact that they are professors of psychology (the dad) and sociology (the mom). Of course, since Physical Science Professors are so cool, any lampooning of particular science professory characteristics will have to be highly fictionalized.

* The other day, while our car was stopped at a red light near campus, four pedestrians crossed in the crosswalk in front of our car. My daughter gazed at them for a moment and said "Those guys make Dad look really cool."**

** They were obviously engineers.

Great Crazies

Most of the novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell, takes place circa 1800. One of the characters, a doctor named Marinus, studied medicine in Uppsala, where he became a "disciple of the celebrated Professor Linnaeus".

Jacob de Zoet remarks that his uncle thought Linnaeus "one of the great men of our age".

Marinus replies:

"Great men are greatly complex beings. It's true that Linnaean taxonomy underlies botany, but he also taught also that swallows hibernate under lakes; that twelve-foot giants thump about Patagonia; and that the Hottentots are monorchids, possessing a single testicle. They have two. I looked."

Also according to Marinus, Linnaeus did not like disagreement (".. dissenters were heretics whose careers must be crushed.")

Yet Marinus recognizes that Linnaeus greatly influenced his career, and in particular his decision to eschew professorships and spend most of the rest of his life on a Dutch trading station in Nagasaki harbor. Marinus decides not to pursue a career as a professor because "professorships kill philosophers", a lesson he learned from Linneaus, although it is a lesson "of which he himself [Linnaeus] was unaware".

I don't know if any of that is based in fact or if Mitchell had it in for Linnaeus, but there are two interesting general issues here:

Some extremely smart people may be extremely good at one thing, and maybe only for a time, but other than that, they are crazy and/or wrong about most things.

That's a stereotype, but most of us have probably listened to a talk by a Great Name in our field, or had a conversation with one (or been advised by one..) and come away from the experience amazed that such a nutcase had ever done such important work. Few people are brilliant at everything for an entire career.

Does that detract from their (former) greatness? No, but sometimes I wish that some of the great crazies didn't keep getting invited to give talks, as if their new big ideas must be brilliant because their old big ideas were. Perhaps that is cynical and short-sighted of me. Some of the Great Ideas are not appreciated when first proposed and are thought to be wrong and crazy by those too narrow to understand. Yes, but.. the (perhaps fictional) depiction of Linnaeus does resonate.

Some mentors are actually anti-mentors, convincing their mentees (likely unintentionally) to do anything else but be like their supposed mentor.

Even if we are not one of the Great Ones but merely Pretty Good at what we do, and even if we are entirely well-meaning and do not attempt to crush dissenters (including students), a common response to those encountering us will always be "I don't want to be like you".

We are all anti-mentors in some way -- because we work long hours, because we are intense about obscure topics, because we are boring about obscure topics, because our jobs are stressful, and so on. There are many reasons why even we ordinary, non-Linnaean professors might inspire people to move to the other side of the world and take up a non-academic career, no matter what the century and no matter how benign (we think) we are.

I have never believed that the only route to happiness and success for my advisees is if they follow a career exactly like mine, but at the same time, it used to bother me a bit when someone was very explicit about saying "I do not want to be like you", especially if their reasons are unrelated to reality. Later, I realized that there isn't much difference between saying "I think I would find a different kind of career more rewarding" and "I would hate your life". Nowadays, such statements, no matter how directly stated, elicit only a "OK, whatever" from me.

No Academic Magic

The novel, That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo, has a rather disturbing portrait of an academic couple who spend years wallowing in bitterness because they ended up with faculty positions at a large state university in the Midwest instead of at a more prestigious private university on their beloved East Coast. If an Ivy League faculty position was not possible, they would have settled for a small elite private college on the East Coast. But it was not to be.

Betrayed. That was how they felt. Why go to Cornell, to Yale, if Indiana was your reward?

Of course the novel is a bit over-the-top in a Russoesque way, and this grotesque couple are supposed to inspire contempt. They are also apparently lousy parents, although that's kind of complicated.

In real life, a possible reaction to this faculty couple's situation of getting jobs together at a good university, especially at a time when faculty couples were more rare than they are today, is: Great! They got jobs in the same place! Lucky!

In fact, at one point they both had separate offers at small private East Coast colleges, but not together, and they decide to stay together, at least at the time of their other job offers. Is that a touching portrait of choosing love over career? Maybe this acrimonious couple is more complex than the way they are portrayed in the book, primarily by their son?

It's interesting that this fictional couple initially tries to make the best of it in Indiana. They

..hunker down and .. dove into teaching and research and committee work, hoping to bolster their vitae so that when the academic winds changed they'd be ready.

That's kind of commendable, despite the unsavory aspects of constantly striving to leave a place they view as inferior.

Ultimately, though, these characters are loathsome. Part of what makes them so bitter is that the academic winds never do change for them, although they work extremely hard and even reinvent themselves. One of the more offensive parts of this parody of academics is when the woman in the academic couple delves into gender-studies and semi-pretends to be a lesbian because she thinks it is in the interest of her career to do so, gender-studies apparently consisting mostly of lesbians. According to the main character (the son of the bitter couple), academic lesbians are "a grim, angry, humorless lot", although he meets some fun ones at a wedding.

I am a big Russo fan, but there is much to dislike in this portrayal of academics, and women of all sorts.

The absolute worst book I have read this summer, bar none (academic or not), is Commencement. It seems like it has been a while since I read a good novel involving a college campus or academic people (faculty, students, or staff). It has been particularly long since I read one with academic characters who were likable, despite the fact that academia is populated with very likable people (says me).

Has anyone read any recent academic novels (even if academia is not the focal point) that they would recommend? Perhaps the one that has come closest to being entertaining in my recent reads is Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz, although I soon wearied of the soliloquies by the beleaguered, misunderstood, and emotionally stunted (Ivy League) admissions officer.

I have one more trip before the start of the academic year, and would welcome suggestions for another book to bring along in addition to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, one of my all-time absolute favorite authors whose new book I have been looking forward to reading as an end-of-summer treat.

Solar Flare

The main character and narrator of the novel Solar by Ian McEwan is Michael Beard, a repulsive Nobel Prize- winning physicist who had the stereotypical experience of a flash of brilliance as a young physicist, soon after which he intellectually burned out. Beard drifts into being involved in developing green technology (wind, solar), but he's not too interested in it until he steals the ideas of a postdoc who was having an affair with Beard's 5th wife (an affair she initiated in revenge for her husband's many affairs) but who dies in an accident in Beard's home when he trips over a polar bear skin rug, whose dangers were foreshadowed, soon after Beard returns from a bizarre trip to the Arctic, where he (Beard) encountered an angry polar bear. Is everyone with me so far?

That's just one small part of the book, most of which consists of tale after tale of excess: eating, drinking, lying, stealing, womanizing. It is not a pleasant book, but it is not entirely without its charms. If you can get past the absurd plot and the revolting characters, it's possible to enjoy some of the writing.

Except for one part, which, for me, was even worse than the Polar Bear of Doom scenes:

In the part of the book I particularly loathed, Beard agrees to head up a government committee charged with promoting physics in schools and attracting more students and teachers to physics. He doesn't give the committee much thought when he agrees to be part of it. The committee consists of three physics professors, various school teachers and headmasters, and a professor of "science studies".

At the first meeting, everyone on the committee introduces themselves, and Beard is curious to hear from the professor of science studies because the field is a "novelty" to him. The professor begins by noting that "..she was the only woman in the room and that the committee reflected one of the very problems it might want to address."

Fair enough. Good point. The committee is sympathetic to this. I was sympathetic to this.

The science studies professor, however, goes on to explain a recent research project in which she studied a genetics lab that was trying to isolate a particular gene in lions.

"Her purpose was to demonstrate that this gene, or any gene, was, in the strongest sense, socially constructed. Without the various "entexting" tools the scientists used.. the gene could not be said to exist... The gene was not an objective entity.. It was manufactured by their [the scientists'] hypotheses, their creativity, and their instrumentation.."

Now everyone, including me, thinks she is a blathering idiot, as intended by McEwan. When the science studies professor is done speaking, one of the physicists asks "Do you honestly believe that what you don't know about doesn't exist?"

Beard, as chairman, doesn't want to waste time arguing about whether genes are real or not, so he ends the discussion, and moves along to other items on the agenda, noting vaguely that they will have time to discuss these issues in subsequent meetings.

Later that day, the committee holds a press conference to a group of bored reporters. Tedious questions are asked; tedious answers are given. The committee's aims are worthy; there's nothing newsworthy about it.

But then: "a woman from a midmarket tabloid" asks about the underrepresentation of women in physics. Beard says that the committee will be looking into this to see if there were new ways to address the issue.

All would be well if he had stopped there. But of course he doesn't stop there. He keeps talking.

"He [Beard] believed there were no longer any institutional barriers or prejudices.. And then, because he was boring himself, he added that it might have to be accepted one day that a ceiling had been reached.. It was at least conceivable that they [women] would always remain in a minority.. There might always be more men than women who wanted to work in physics.."

He then goes on to explain that the brains of men and women are different, and that it's not about superiority, merely that there are innate differences in cognitive ability and interests. Boys are better at problem-solving etc.

Does some of this sound familiar?

Anyway, the reporters at the press conference are not particularly energized by these claims, but the professor of science studies is. She expresses her violent revulsion of what Beard has just said, then announces her resignation from the committee. She walks out. The reporters perk up and follow her out.

This is just the start of Beard's trouble with the "women and physics" issue, especially once journalists unearth his long troubled history with women (the many wives, the many affairs). And then it gets worse for him when he participates in a debate about the issue. He is the only Scientist in the debate.

Beard repeats what he said at the press conference; the cognitive differences between men and women etc. He is irritated. He wonders aloud if gravity is also a social construct, and he is booed.

A woman in the audience who rails about Beard's "hegemonic arrogance" speaks in "stern, headmistressy tones". The academic who debates him has "a red and blue frock, with a twittering voice to match". After the debate, Beard thinks he has done OK, considering how boring the twittery woman was.

But things soon go awry, and the plot gets even more farcical. Beard's career is (temporarily) destroyed by hysterical women who, helped considerably by the media, portray him as a sexist Nazi elite hegemonic unfeeling white male. Or something.

Other than a few glimmers here and there in the novel, when the reader might sort of feel some sympathy for Beard because he is, at times, cynical in an amusing way, this is one of the few episodes in which he is portrayed sympathetically. He blunders into this crisis unwittingly. It's true that he is a serial philanderer, but he is not sexist. He was only saying things that were true and scientific, backed up by research. He is just a simple scientist, and is a victim of these crazy women who don't understand science.

There are many good reasons why Beard's career as an administrator should have been destroyed, so it is ironic that he is brought down by these events, which, we are supposed to believe, aren't even his fault. The novel is otherwise a relentless, over-the-top depiction of a repulsive person who continually outdoes himself in disgusting behavior. Yet Beard becomes a sort of martyr-scientist, a well-meaning white male scientist attacked by people who have no understanding of Science but who are interested in demonizing men, concocting hysteria, and ignoring the undeniable fact that men and women are different.

I have read several reviews of this book, but none of the ones I read mentioned this particular episode. Some focused on the polar bear theme, and many rave about how well the author did with the "science" aspects of the novel (climate science, physics). Some reviewers, who seem to recognize that the book is a strange collection of disgusting anecdotes, resort to the rather desperate opinion that the book is so bad, it's actually brilliant. Overall, I would say that reviews are mixed but positive; e.g., Solar is not McEwan's best, but compared to what other authors can come up with, at least the ones who are still alive, it's awesome. And so on.

I think the book is a mess. Even so, despite the despicable parody about stupid women who don't understand science and the general unpleasantness of the plot and characters, I seldom regret reading a book, even ones I hate, this one included.

One-way Traffic?

One of the committees I was on this year recently consumed quite a lot of my time, and involved a marathon session in which a group of faculty from all over the university got together and discussed other faculty. I (mostly) enjoyed the wide-ranging debates and glimpses of academic life in other disciplines. I had particularly intriguing discussions with an art historian and a psychologist, and felt overall that my time on this committee was well-spent.

This was my first time on this committee, which I agreed to join in part because I had always found this committee's methods a bit mysterious and I wanted to know how it worked.

Here are some miscellaneous observations about this committee experience:

1. My generally optimistic view of academics was confirmed. There were a lot of nice people on this large committee. These were faculty who devoted quite a lot of time to tasks intended to help other faculty, and in particular early-career faculty. I would say that the committee is moderately powerful -- not as powerful as a P&T Committee but more powerful than most policy committees. Yet these faculty were not in it for the power or for settling scores or whatever other cynical reasons people might imaging would impel professors to take on a time-consuming committee assignment.

2. When evaluating other faculty, the Liberal Arts Professors (LAPs) and Fine Arts Professors (FAPs) were harder on their colleagues than they were on the scientists, engineers, or social scientists. In fact, the LAPs and FAPs were harder on their colleagues than the scientists etc. were on anyone.

I certainly am not going to make a sweeping conclusion about this based on one experience with a particular set of individuals. Nevertheless, I found this phenomenon quite interesting. Warning: I am about to muse about this one anecdotal event despite the small sample size and lack of a control group, statistical analysis, IRB permission, and coffee.

Hypothesis: The LAPs and FAPs were not comfortable being highly critical about research topics far outside their expertise, so they tended to give the benefit of the doubt to science and engineering faculty. They were more critical of fellow professors, even highly successful ones, because they felt that they had a more solid basis from which to be critical.

The converse was not true -- science-technology-engineering-math (STEM) and social science faculty showed no particular propensity to be more critical of any particular discipline than another. Does this mean that we STEM etc. faculty are nicer? Or are we so egotistical that we think we know something about everything? Or is it because we are not intimidated by the non-scientific research in the same way that the LAPs and FAPs are intimidated by more quantitative fields?

These last questions remind me of a part of the novel Solar (by Ian McEwan), about which I will write more tomorrow. The main character is a loutish Nobel Prize-winning physicist. As a university student, he seduced a young woman by intensely studying up on Milton, her major intellectual interest. He read Milton, he read criticism of Milton, and within a short amount of time he could converse as an apparent expert, impressing her greatly and winning her heart. This woman became the first of his 5 wives.

The successful seduction of this woman by pretending to know and care about Milton..

".. was a turning point in his development, for he knew that no third-year arts person, however, bright, could have passed himself off after a week's study among the undergraduate mathematicians and physicists who were Beard's colleagues. The traffic was one-way.. The reading was a slog, but he encountered nothing that could remotely be construed as an intellectual challenge, nothing on the scale of difficultly he encountered daily in his course."

Once the physicist has this realization, he feels "intellectually free". Remarkably, although McEwan lets many more obnoxious thoughts and actions pass with no subsequent enlightening experiences to alter the physicist's perception of himself and others, this particular episode is later put into humbling context: many years after the seduction-by-Milton event, the physicist tells the story to a professor of English, who says:

".. you've missed the point. If you had seduced ninety girls with ninety poets, one a week in a course of three academic years, and remembered them all at the end -- the poets, I mean -- and synthesized your reading into some kind of aesthetic overview, then you would have earned yourself a degree in English literature. But don't pretend that it's easy."

On my university committee, I don't think any of the STEM or social sciences faculty shared this fictional physicist's view that the liberal arts are "easy". I saw no evidence that we underestimated the LA or FA research, or thought "I could do that with little or no effort" (because it's so easy).

One of the great things about these all-university committees is that diverse faculty are sitting in a room together. It's difficult to feel (too) skeptical about the rigor of another discipline when faculty from that discipline are sitting across a table from you, making interesting and persuasive contributions to the discussion. The LA and FA professors did need to explain some things to us scientists about the culture of their disciplines -- Why did so many LAPs, for example, seem to have determined the outcome of their research before they started the project? -- but I detected no contempt for "unscientific" research. And whenever we were faced with a research project that seemed truly bizarre, no matter what the topic, we all tended to agree about it.

I don't know why the LA and FA faculty were so harsh on their colleagues. I do know, however, that despite this tendency, the committee overall had no trouble reaching consensus on what what we thought were the best of the best of the faculty/research documents we were examining, no matter what the discipline, so in the end, I don't think the LAPs and FAPs were at a disadvantage by having sharks for colleagues.

Academic Vampires

Yesterday I mentioned the recent novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein (and some of its reviews) as an example of a recent contribution to the academic satire genre. In fact, with its long discourses on faith and religious principles, the book attempts to be more than a satire. Although I enjoyed many aspects of the book, ultimately I found it annoying because of its heavy-handed caricatures and self-conscious cleverness.

Also, although it is a novel containing many strange and unlikable characters, the intelligent female characters in the book are particularly unpleasant. There is a beautiful and brilliant female superstar professor character who excels at "fanging" her intellectual opponents, but she is widely loathed, loses her faculty position at Princeton because she gets an outside offer at an inferior institution (an entirely unbelievable scenario), and ultimately reveals herself to be insecure and petty, leaving the man who loves her (coincidentally, the "boyish" hero of the novel) because he gets an offer from Harvard. Explaining why she is leaving, she says:

..the fact that you have acquired more prestige than I have, when my work is so much more important, is not something I can tolerate. I can't degrade myself by being regarded as your female companion, the pretty young woman at the inferior institution who will be patronized by the Harvard elite. To be with you is to have everything that is wrong with academia constantly rubbed in my face.

And off she goes. Is it refreshing that a woman refuses to be the 'trailing' spouse (or significant other) or disturbing that she is so insecure she can't be in a relationship with someone at a "better" university? In fact, the smart female characters (all ex-wives or ex-girlfriends of the boyishly charming main character who, as it turns out, finds fame and success without even trying) are all deeply unlikeable, self-absorbed, and eccentric. The ultra-thin French poetess doesn't fare much better than the insecure vampire professor (i.e., the one who "fangs" people), and the self-absorbed anthropologist, albeit a bit more likable, is extremely bizarre (after retiring from Berkeley -- code for weird, I suppose -- her new research goal is to achieve immortality).

I concluded that a main theme of the book is that if we try too hard to be successful as intellectuals, we will lose, and we will deserve to lose because we will have destroyed other people to further our own success. Furthermore, those who try too hard to be successful in academia may do so by being aggressive back-stabbers and/or control freaks. It's better to drift along, feeling confused much of the time, because then somehow, without really trying, we may end up with fame, money, and a faculty position at Harvard! What a strange book: an anti-intellectual novel that shows off the intellect of the author.

Absurdity of Current Academic Thinking?

Longtime FSP readers know that I am interested in how academia is depicted in literature and other artistic venues, and that I have a particular interest in academic satire in novels. Although I generally disapprove of attempts to make academia and academics seem like bizarre, megalomaniacal control freaks who are entirely disconnected from the "real" world, I am not incapable of enjoying a good academic satire (hence my fondness of the novel Straight Man, by Richard Russo).

I even like the Indigo Girls' song, "Closer to Fine", despite this horrific set of anti-academic lyrics:

I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee.
He never did marry, or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance
He said he could see through me.
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper And I was free.

Give me a break.

Anyway, I was curious to read the recent novel "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" (Rebecca Goldstein), described in some reviews as a brilliant new example in the academic satire genre.

Washington Post (Ron Charles): The field of academic satire is crowded with such classics as "Lucky Jim" and "Straight Man," but "36 Arguments" sports so many spot-on episodes of cerebral pomposity that you've got to place this novel among the very funniest ever written.

New York Times (Janet Maslin): When Cass witnesses a PowerPoint presentation featuring “brain scans of sophomores, neuroimaged in the throes of moral deliberation over whether they should, in theory, toss a hapless fat man onto the tracks in order to use his bulk to save five other men from an oncoming trolley,” this book occupies its ideal vantage point: close to the absurdity of current academic thinking yet just far enough away to laugh.

Cerebral pomposity? The absurdity of current academic thinking? Did these reviewers also spend their college years prostrate to bearded, Rasputin-loving higher minds?

Certainly there are pompous intellectuals in academia, and some research topics and methods seem quite absurd, but these are not the kinds of things I enjoy seeing parodied in novels and pilloried in reviews.

For me, the most clever and entertaining academic novels are the ones that show the absurdity of the weird-but-mundane rituals of academic life (professor-student interactions, faculty meetings, budgets, tenure) and that are a bit more subtle in their portrayal of classic personalities in academe.

Therefore, I am not particularly impressed by bizarre and disturbing characters such as the "Extreme Distinguished Professor" in 36 Arguments, and am much more entertained by a depiction of strangely recognizable people embroiled in the bizarre and disturbing rituals of a faculty search (as in Straight Man).

eReading

A few weeks before my last birthday, my husband said to me "There's something I want to get you for your birthday, but I think I need to ask you a question about it first" and I said "I'd like the global wireless version". And then I laughed because I could tell I'd guessed right.

So I have a Kindle now. I thought I would primarily use it when traveling so that I didn't have to carry around so many books and worry that I'd be stuck somewhere without a good book to read. I have had some traumatic experiences related to not having an adequate supply of (good) books on trips.

For example, there was the time when my daughter was a baby and, by coincidence, every book I brought with me on a trip somehow involved a young child either dying or being orphaned. There was an even earlier time when I ran out of books while backpacking alone through Europe and the only English book I could find was Shogun, which was so awful that I ripped out each page after I read it and threw the book away, piece by piece, as I made my way through the former Yugoslavia. And there was this harrowing experience (skip to last paragraph for relevant info). There have been other such experiences, despite fervent attempts to avoid them.

For trips that involve long flights, my personal formula is to bring 5-6 paperback books for each week of professional travel, and more if there will be leisure time. I also bring along an issue of The New York Review of Books because the interesting content/gram ratio is very high. If I really like a book, I will also bring it home, so some books make the entire trip with me. On multi-week trips, I can sometimes acquire books during the trip, but on some trips I just end hauling around a lot of books.

But not anymore. I still need 1-2 physical books for the times when electronic devices must be stowed during takeoff and landing and in case the Kindle needs recharging at an inconvenient time, but otherwise I have all the books I need in the Kindle.

I miss the beauty of real books and the the variety of fonts and book designs. And I miss having a physical sense for how long a book is. The Kindle method of reporting the % of each book read is deeply unsatisfying. However, I find the Kindle pages very easy to read and navigate, and clicking to turn the page can be extremely handy when you have a large cat pinning down one your arms.

I still read physical books because some of the books I like to read are not well represented on Kindle, especially in the obscure (to Americans) international fiction category. But I use the Kindle for non-travel reading far more than I expected.

Mostly I read Literary Fiction on my Kindle, but I am contemplating branching out into non-fiction; in fact, I just put the new book by Rebecca Skloot on my Kindle.

As I write, there are 41,454 books listed in the Science category of the Kindle webpage. This is more than are available in Arts & Entertainment (34,360), Business & Investing (35,468), and Sports (a paltry 5,841). In fact, Science is the biggest non-fiction category.

My excitement at this factoid was somewhat diminished when I realized that many of the Science books are actually "science" books; for example, Freakonomics, Omnivore's Dilemma, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and some of those books you are supposed to read when you are pregnant but that mostly just freak you out. If you search on these books by name, you never find out that they are classified as Science, but if you search on Science as a category, there they are.

I'm OK with including these "science" books as Science books. I'm not a purist about what constitutes Science and what doesn't. Science is everywhere, we can't live without it, and I think it's a good thing if many non-technical books are classified as Science in recognition (even if for mercenary reasons) that science is part of everything. As long as we don't take the broad definition of Science too far, I'm all for it.

Major Confusion

Last week I mentioned the novel, A Gate at the Stairs, which I mostly very much enjoyed, mostly because of the interesting writing (and not so much because of some of the strange characters, like a faux-Brazilian). Although the book is not an academic novel in the classic sense, there is much in it that is of interest to those who like to read fictional portrayals of academic culture.

The author, Lorrie Moore, is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the setting of much of the novel is a not-very-disguised Madison. The aspects of the novel that involve a parody of academia are therefore likely written quite deliberately.

In this novel, academia has a central role in that there is a stark juxtaposition of "real life" as separate from "academic life", the topic of the last couple of posts in this blog. The main character learns a lot about the world and people and life during the course of the novel, but none of this learning occurs in the classroom. If you read reviews of the novel, you commonly find statements like: "Life is more of an education than anything Tassie [the main character] is studying in college." No kidding.

At the same time, Tassie's brain is “..on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir". She's an intellectual, but of the free-range sort, as the courses she is taking are bizarre. This brings me to my next point:

The main character, who is 20 years old and has presumably declared a major of some sort, takes a truly weird set of classes. She seems to be reading Chaucer and Plath on her own because her courses are:

Brit Lit from 1830 to 1930, Intro to Sufism, Intro to Wine Tasting, Soundtracks to War Movies, Dating Rocks, and a cross-listed humanities/physical education course called The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis.

Some of the strange classes seem to be intended to satisfy some of the graduate requirements of the university. And she ends up in the Sufism class because another course was full by the time she registered. Fair enough, but it's still a strange set of classes. I have lately been poring over many undergraduate transcripts, and not a one comes anywhere near this level of randomness, not even for a term.

When Tassie describes her courses to her father, leaving out only the pelvic class, which might shock him, he is most taken aback by the one science class, Dating Rocks ("The Sufism did not throw him"), perhaps because of its stupid name.

We learn the most about Intro to Sufism, which is taught by an Irish "Ottomanist" with an arm in a sling and no shortage of self confidence ("I know more about this topic than anyone in this department") but a shortage of something else ("I also know more about teaching while high than anyone else in this department"). It is the only class Tassie likes ("Except for the Sufism.. classes marched along forgettably").

At least she learns to make connections between her classes, sort of, and Science provides the key: "In Geology we were learning about the effects of warmth and cold, which at bottom I began to see was what all my courses were about."

Warmth and cold.. isn't that what nearly everything is about, ultimately? Life/death, love/hate, global warming/global cooling, wealth/poverty, cats..

Ms Pilgrim

Not long ago, whilst traveling, I read The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. I didn't read it for any particular seasonal reason, but by coincidence I read it close to the US Thanksgiving holiday (today).

Towards the end of the book, after telling numerous stories of the relentless and often violent struggles among many different people of many different origins and faiths, Vowell visits a historical site in Rhode Island and contemplates a plaque that contains the names of men who signed a pledge related to the founding of the little proto-state. One of the names on the plaque is that of the husband of Anne Hutchinson, who was herself left off the plaque despite her having been pivotal in the founding of Rhode Island.

Vowell disapproves of this omission, as she similarly disapproves of Boston Puritan hero-person John Winthrop's distaste for having to argue with a mere female, just before he exiles Hutchinson and her family to Rhode Island. Vowell contemplates the unfairness of Hutchinson's gender having kept her from "pursuing her calling".

She does this contemplating in part in a "women's healing garden" near the park/plaque commemorating the men who signed the pledge. She admits that the words "women's healing garden" give her a feeling of "feminist dread". I kind of agree with her general point about women's healing gardens, if not her choice of words, but then Vowell continues with this:

A potential male magazine subscriber is given the choice of one title, "Mr.", but a female magazine subscriber is given three choices, thereby requiring a woman to inform perfect strangers in the mailroom at Newsweek or Conde Naste exactly what kind of woman she is. She is either male property (Mrs.), wannabee male property (Miss), or man-hating harpy (Ms.).

Well, I don't really like the Miss/Mrs/Ms thing either, and I am of course aware of the association of Ms with feminism, but do many women really equate Ms with "man-hating harpy" in the same way that they equate feminism with man-hatred (as has been much discussed lately, here and elsewhere)? As in, they'd even rather use Miss than Ms because of what they think (or fear) Ms might imply?

And how much does our choice of title indicate "exactly what kind of woman" we are? Perhaps quite a lot, though we may disagree about the connotations of "Ms".

There was an interesting piece in The New York Times a month or so ago detailing the history of Ms and tracing its origin back over 100 years ago to a need for a respectful way to address women of unknown marital status. That's all it is and that's all it needs to be.

So what's the problem? Do we need to start all over with a 4th mode of address for people who fear the meaning of Ms? I think (hope) not.

Ms is clever: it is short, it is convenient, and it refers in a simple way to someone who is female. It is very useful for women like me who are married but who aren't Mrs Husbandname.

When I fill out a form, I leave those Miss/Mrs/Ms check boxes blank whenever possible. I don't really see the point of selecting a preferred mode of address in most of the circumstances in which the information is requested. Do I need mail to be addressed to me by anything other than my name? Sometimes this means I am assigned Mr by default, but in many cases it just means that I get things addressed to me as firstname lastname.

I select Dr (if available) in cases in which I may have to interact with a real person. I discovered the utility of the Dr title years ago in the specific context of interacting with airline and medical personnel. I have found that it increases the chances that I will be treated in a polite and respectful way, although I think that it is unfortunate that the title makes as much difference as it does.

But: If I have to choose among Miss/Mrs/Ms, I definitely choose Ms, even if doing so implies that I am a mythological creature who snatches food from men being punished by Zeus. In this particular case, I am willing to take that risk.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Ayn Rand Beach Story

A few weeks ago, I was stunned by the interest in my casual mention of having an Ayn Rand Beach Story. Mostly I used the phrase in a previous post because I liked how it looked, but I do in fact have an Ayn Rand Beach Story.

It's still (barely) August and I was recently at the scene of the Ayn Rand Beach Story incident, so it's time for the story. My apologies if the actual event is anti-climactic.

I don't remember exactly how old I was when this happened, but I was likely between the ages of 15 and 17. One summer day, I was sitting on a beach near my family's house, alone, reading Atlas Shrugged.

I was not reading Ayn Rand because of some teenage Ayn Rand phase. I was working my way through the somewhat meager but not-too-bad collection of literature in my town's public library. I'd already consumed much of the available pre-20th century literature, including Russian literature (which I'd enjoyed, so big books did not dismay me), and was then reading my way through the collection of 20th century American novels. Inevitably, I got to Ayn Rand without really knowing much about her or her philosophy.

I was reading Atlas Shrugged at a very small beach, with only a few clusters of other humans, mostly older people who occasionally arose from their beach chairs to put their toes in the water.

As one of these people -- a man -- was leaving the beach, he stopped by where I was sitting and asked: Have you gotten to The Speech yet?

I did not know what he was talking about, so I figured that either I had not gotten to The Speech yet or that The Speech was not very memorable.

I replied: No, not yet.

I don't remember if we conversed further, however briefly, but I have always felt vaguely embarrassed about the interaction. My fear is that he asked me what I thought of the book so far.

If he did, my reply was likely not very positive. I might have mentioned something about how I thought it was a bit overwrought or that the characters were kind of one-dimensional. I might not have been very articulate.

In any case, he walked on.

His companion, a woman, then came over to me and said: Do you know who he is?

No, I did not know.

She informed me: He (nodding in the direction of the man) was her (nodding at my book) best friend.

She left.

That was it, a small incident, but one that had a profound effect on me, namely that, to this day, I am totally paranoid when I read a book in public. In fact, when I was reading a book on that very beach recently, I checked to see where the author was residing now and was somewhat unnerved to learn that the author had moved from Malaysia to the US, vastly increasing the chance that the author, her relatives, or friends could be on that very beach at that moment watching me read that book, which I didn't particularly like.

On that little beach long ago, when asked what I thought of the book I was reading, I don't think I would have changed my answer to a more glowing one had I known that he was her best friend, but ever since, when asked by random strangers about a book I am reading, I always wonder if they have a hidden agenda.

Raving Frauds (and Cats)

In The Elegance of the Hedgehog (by Muriel Barbery), a book I read this summer, one of the narrators is a 12 year old girl who writes:

My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raving fraud. All you need to do is watch her with the cats. She's vaguely aware of their decorative potential, and yet she insists on talking to them as if they were people, which she would never do with a lamp or an Etruscan statue.

Ouch. I don't quote Flaubert at every dinner, but I do converse with my cats.

The mother in the story has previously been introduced to us in this way:

Well, my mother isn't exactly a genius, but she is educated. She has a PhD in literature. She writes her dinner invitations without mistakes and spends her time bombarding us with literary references.

Ouch again. Those sentences are a concise reminder that having a PhD doesn't mean you are a genius or that people will necessarily be impressed with an advanced degree.

Maybe someday my daughter will write a memoir that will include something like this:

Well, my mother isn't exactly a genius, but she is educated. She has a PhD in Science. She writes her Facebook status updates without mistakes and spends her time ranting about how all fruits and vegetables are organic and nothing is 'chemical free'.

Summer Reading

Way back when, nearly 3 years ago, one of my first (perhaps even the very first) poll I did as FSP was to find out the favorite academic novels of my readers, who at that time numbered few.

Despite the low voter turn-out, the majority vote-getter was also my personal favorite, Straight Man. I was thinking about Straight Man the other day as I walked across campus with a colleague and I used the phrase "a goose a day", a literary allusion instantly recognizable by other SM fans such as my colleague.

Although not on my original list, another favorite of mine is White Noise (DeLillo), which is only partly an academic novel. I suppose this means I tend toward the absurdist sub-genre of academic novels.

I found this old (2000) list online when searching with the keywords "academic novels". There are 42 novels in the main part of the list. Another long list is here, and it's interesting to examine the differences in the lists (e.g. one contains Bellow, one does not). A recent but shorter list is here, but this includes some novels that I personally would not classify as academic novels.

In my professor-centric world, an academic novel is about faculty ± administrators and not "a chronicle of college sports, fraternities, drinking, coeds, and sex" (I am Charlotte Simmons, T Wolfe; a novel I read and kind of loathed). Those types of novels need another name, e.g. collegiate novel, or something like that.

I was thinking about the general topic of academic novels because I was looking for some books to read and was looking through the lists in the links above. And then I wondered: Why do I want to read an academic novel during the summer? Why do I want to read an academic novel at all? What is it that I like about (some of) them?

I don't know why I like (certain) academic novels so much. In general, my reading preferences tend toward international literary fiction, so in most other respects I am not inclined to 'read about myself' in my leisure reading. There is something very satisfying, however, about reading a really good parody of a faculty meeting or faculty-administrator interactions, even in the summer.

Instead of a poll today, I have a general question related to academic novels:

If you are an academic, do you like this genre of novel or is academia the last thing you want to read about in your leisure reading? Can academic readers be classified according to whether they love a scary-funny parody of a faculty meeting or whether reading about faculty meetings (however fictionalized) is a kind of torture?

A Wall Between Me & You

And take all your friends with you, or at least as many as you can; purge the city of your presence; you will deliver me from a great fear when there is a wall between you and me. Cicero - Oration Against Cataline


I don't know why, but those lines have stuck in my head since high school Latin class. I use them today to introduce the latest literary and media attempt to portray scientists as a different, pitiful, unfashionable type of human. In this case, the culprit is Walter Kirn, whose writing I have from time to time found of interest. But no more.

I am no Cicero, but Walter should leave, and take his friend, the NY Times book reviewer Janet Maslin, with him. Here is why:

Regarding undergraduate science students during his student days as an English major at Princeton, Kirn wrote in his recently published memoirs (which I have not read and know of only from today's NYT review):

Somehow, someday, they'd reproduce, but that phase was not yet upon them, blessedly. For now they were free to decline communication and dress in pants that didn't reach their shoes.

Ha ha. So clever. And not believable. His contemptuous tone as he repeats this stereotype is much more unappealing than the image of those dopey science students with their unfashionable pants and their unwillingness to speak.

Compounding the idiocy is this introductory line in Maslin's review:

About science students, with the fine-tuned accuracy that makes much of this account so enjoyable, he notes: (see above)

Fine-tuned accuracy? I wasn't an English major, but is that a synonym for contemptuous?

What is the evidence for accuracy? Show me the data. I want photographs, names, confessions. Kirn's description doesn't fit my impression of the science students I knew from Princeton or anywhere at that time. I want proof that "science students" at Princeton, circa early 1980s, were unable to speak, were identifiable by the vast distance between their pant cuffs and shoes, and .. whatever the first part of Kirn's sentence is supposed to mean -- that science students had no romantic experiences or that they weren't yet making or having babies as undergraduates? I think I started hating this author when I got to the word "blessedly".

No, it's not really important that someone has written that they thought science students were dorky in the early 1980's, though perhaps we are becoming inured to memoirists making up random things for dramatic effect.

What bothers me is the us-and-them attitude and the contempt. It reminds me of the ignorant writings of Mrs. Mortimer, the 19th century British 'travel' writer who wrote emphatically about people she had never met and places she had never been. It turns out that everyone who wasn't like her was strange and contemptible.

For example, on the topic of German women, Mrs. Mortimer (according to The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, by Todd Pruzan), she wrote:

..they are not fond of reading useful books. When they read, it is novels about people who have never lived. It would be better to read nothing than such books.

It sounds like Mrs. Mortimer would have approved of Kirn's memoir.