This has been my first year on the Putnam committee: the committee that selects the problems for the William Lowell Putnam undergraduate competition. The committee consists of 3 members appointed for a 3-year term each (each year, one person’s term ends and another one is appointed in his place) and a fourth person, Loren Larson, who is a “permanent” secretary of the committee. To start with, each committee member proposes some number of problems (normally, at least 10). The problem sets and solutions are then circulated and discussed, and eventually the committee meets in person to decide on the final selection. This is all done in strict confidence and well in advance of the actual competition.

I have never written the Putnam. I wrote the Math Olympiad back in the days and qualified for the International Math Olympiad in my last year of high school, but Putnam is not available in Europe. I’m not sure that I would have been interested anyway. I wanted to study the “serious” mathematics: the big theories, the heady generalizations, the grand visions. Olympiads and competitions faded into the distant background and pretty much stayed there until last year.

I did point out my Putnam virginity when I was approached about joining the committee, and was told that Putnam does try to engage from time to time people who are not normally on the circuit, if only to have a larger pool of potential ideas. Of course, the advantage of having people on the committee who are on the Putnam circuit is that they know what’s expected, what works and what doesn’t, what has already been used and shouldn’t be recycled, and so on. Last year’s other two committee members – Mark Krusemeyer and Bjorn Poonen – are Putnam veterans, and of course Bjorn is a four-time Putnam fellow. Mark’s term ends this year; I don’t know yet who will be joining us this January.

Well, you could call it a steep learning curve. Putnam problems are expected to be hard in a particular way: they should require ingenuity and insight, but not the knowledge of any advanced material beyond the first or occasionally second year of undergraduate studies, and there should be a short solution so that, in principle, an infinitely clever person could solve all 12 problems in the allotted 6 hours. (In reality, that doesn’t happen very often, and I’ve heard that it generates considerable attention when someone comes too close.) The problems are divided into two groups of six – A1-A6 for the morning session and B1-B6 for the afternoon session – and there is a gradation of the level of difficulty within each group. A1 is often the hardest to come up with – it should be the easiest of the bunch, but should still require some clever insight and have a certain kind of appeal. The difficulty (for the competitor, not for us) then increases with each group, with A6 and B6 the hardest problems on the exam. There are also various subtle differences between the A-problems and B-problems; this is something that I would not have been aware of if another committee member hadn’t pointed it out to me. For example, a B1 could involve some basic college-level material (e.g. derivatives or matrices), but this would not be acceptable in an A1, which should be completely elementary.

The competition is taking place in two weeks, so you’ll know soon enough what problems we ended up selecting. Meanwhile, it might entertain you to see a few of my duds: problems I proposed that were rejected for various reasons. They will not be appearing on the actual exam and I’m not likely to propose variants of them in the future. The solutions are under the cut, along with an explanation of why each problem is a dud.

1. A ball is shot out of a corner of a square-shaped billiard table at an angle to the edge . The ball travels in a straight line without losing speed; whenever it hits one of the walls of the table, it bounces off it so that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. Find all values of such that the ball will hit one of the corners after bouncing off the walls exactly 2009 times.
2. Are there integer numbers such that ?
3. Given , determine the largest integer with the property that any points on a circle must determine at least obtuse angles .

Solution to 1. Introduce a coordinate system so that , , , . Now “straighten out” the trajectory of the ball using the reflection principle: follow the trajectory of the ball until it first hits a wall. Once that happens, instead of drawing the next segment inside the square draw the symmetric reflection of it with respect to the wall that was hit, and continue similarly. The straightened trajectory is a half-line in the first quadrant, starting at the origin, at an angle to the $x$-axis. The desired outcome is equivalent to the line meeting its first lattice point after crossing exactly 2009 “walls” or , for integer. Then must be one of the points (2010,1), (2009,2),…, (1,2010). This yields the possible values of :

It remains to check whether any of these values must be excluded on the grounds that the line segment from (0,0) to contains another integer point, say with . If that were so, we would have

In particular, divides , hence must have a nontrivial common divisor with 2011. But 2011 is prime, so that , a contradiction. Hence all 2010 values of as above yield the desired outcome.

Why it’s a dud: This is an example of a problem whose difficulty depends very strongly on knowing a certain “trick” or technique – in this case, the reflection principle. The committee aims to avoid this type of questions. It doesn’t help that the trick is an old one.

Solution to 2. Rewrite the sum as , where $c_k$ is the number of pairs such that . We count the number of such pairs: for each there are choices of and choices of , so that . In particular, all are even. But then the above sum must also be even, in particular it cannot be 31415926535.

Why it’s a dud: This was supposed to be a candidate for an A1 or B1, but might be too easy even for that (there are several other short solutions in addition to the above). It was also judged only moderately clever and attractive. We ended up finding something more inspired.

Solution to 3. If , easy examples (2 points, an equilateral triangle and a square) show that . Assume therefore that and let . We will first find the smallest possible number of the obtuse angles with fixed, then sum over and divide by 2 (because each angle was counted twice). Let for short, and let be the point antipodal to on the circle. We will say that points lie on the same side of if they lie on the same arc between and . Note that it is to our advantage to have whenever possible, because then there are no obtuse angles involving both and .

Case 1: is even. Let , , and assume that . There is a one-to-one correspondence between the obtuse angles and the (unordered) pairs of points on the same side of . Let and denote the numbers of points on each side of . Suppose that both and are at least 2, then the number of such pairs is

This is minimized when , and the minimum value is . If on the other hand or , the number of pairs is at least which is since . Thus , and this number is indeed attained for each if form a regular -gon. It follows that for even,

Case 2: is odd. Let , . Assume that , and let and be the numbers of points on each side of . Suppose that both and are at least 2, then the number of same-side pairs is

Given the constraint that is integer, this is minimized when or , with minimum value . As in case 1, we check that if or are at most 1, then the number of pairs is at least which is since . Thus .

Note, however, that if is odd then there is at least one point such that . For that point, the number of same-side pairs is

which is minimized when , with minimum value . (As before, we can check that the cases and are not minimal.)

It follows that

and this is attained when the first points form a regular -gon and the last one is placed arbitrarily.

Why it’s a dud: It would have to be an A5 or higher, given the length of the solution. (There is no short one as far as we know; the solutions that we came up with are all lengthy and can be difficult to write up.) However, it does not really require the kind of ingenuity that this group of problems is expected to call for. You shouldn’t be able to solve an A5 by following your nose. Here, though, once you get going, the procedure is fairly straightforward.

If you’re female and you’re reading this, stop whatever else you’re doing for a moment and go read these three posts at Women in Wetlands, now also on my blogroll. (Found in the comments here.) They offer sensible and practical advice on how to respond to situations such as this one:

Imagine you are in a meeting among colleagues, post-docs, support staff, and clients. You are part of a group who has received a $1.2 million grant from BP (British Petroleum) to do environmental impact assessments at some of their drill sites. You have just given an overview of your research project (to assess the effects of oil exploration activities on wetlands in Kookamoonga, BP’s newest drill site). When you finish and look to the group for some positive feedback, a senior male scientist (known for being loud and opinionated) states that:

“The research proposed by Mary involves a large amount of fieldwork in a VERY remote location, and in my opinion is too difficult for a woman to lead or conduct. I think it would be best assigned to Bob (his protege’) to head up; maybe Mary can be responsible for the sample processing and data analysis back here at BIU.”

What do you do?

I’ve been in some variant of every single one of these situations, including the one just described, and I wish I had been better prepared to deal with them.

It’s tempting to think of the Senior Male Scientist as some old guy that you don’t know well and never talk to anyway. In real life, though, it could be your friend or mentor, someone you trust, someone whose opinions you value. He might not say explicitly that a woman can’t lead – he’ll just suggest a male candidate to replace you – and, mind you, it’s not sexist at all, he just wants the best possible person to direct the project, and in any case this is a matter of professional judgement and you should not be so sensitive about it.

The beauty of the responses suggested in the WiW posts is that they’re civil enough to be used on a friend and that they let you make the statement you need to make without getting dragged into unnecessary discussions. There’s no point in analyzing the Senior Male Scientist’s possible intentions. You just need to respond to the words you’ve heard.

There’s another reason to avoid protracted discussions of this sort: verbal sparring can only get you so far. I’ve seen enough situations where Dr. X was universally praised by colleagues for his excellent arguments and professional demeanor in the debate with Dr. Y, it was just so very unfortunate that the department would have to side with Dr. Y anyway. The debate would be a spectator sport, as opposed to something that could actually affect the outcome of the case. The lesson for you is that, instead of spending your time debating Senior Male Scientists with regard to their choice of wording, it could be more worthwhile to figure out why exactly the department sided with Dr. Y and how this might be applicable in your case. (That could be money, prestige, any number of things.) Making good headway in that direction is far more likely to convince Senior Male Scientists that they should take you seriously.

Which is not to say that you should not argue with Senior Male Scientists. You absolutely should, if only because having a good response will make you feel in control of the situation and that’s good for your morale, or because these things do make a difference in the long run. But short responses work better than long ones, and don’t give the Senior Male Scientist an opening to bring up the ever looming topic of your sensitivity if you can help it. That’s of course easier said than done. I haven’t always been good at it. I wish I had read posts such as these many years ago and taken some time to practice the responses in question. Then again – if you can’t come up with a good response, keep in mind that it’s only words…

I grew up in a socialist country.

I’m reminded of it every time I hear that public health care is socialist, or that financial regulation is socialist, or that regulating the auto industry is socialist, or that taxation is “spreading the wealth” and therefore socialist. I don’t get the impression that this refers to the “socialism” of the Scandinavian variety. More likely, it refers to the Soviet Union and its then-satellite countries – exactly where I was born.

I suppose I should recognize those various socialist things – oppose them, even – as marks of the failed system that I grew up with. But I don’t. Instead, I try to find a way to explain life under socialism to someone who doesn’t know it and I come up short every time. It’s not just explaining why apples are not like oranges. It’s explaining why apples are not like hockey and oranges are not like patio furniture.

Yes, we did have more political repression and government regulation. Yes, we had censorship, rationing and fewer consumer articles. People understand that. But then you mention to someone the high prevalence of tooth decay, and they respond, “sure, I bet you didn’t have fluoridated water”, and then you don’t know if you’ll be able to answer that without going on about it for half an hour, so you smile, say that it was actually a little bit more complicated, and change the subject.

Take for example taxation. Do you think it’s socialist? If so, you’ll be interested to know that neither my parents nor I had ever filed a personal tax return before I left Poland at the age of 23. Taxation as it is known in the Western world was almost nonexistent in socialist countries. Just think about it. Most of the economy was state-owned, so why would the state try to tax something it owns to begin with? The public sector employees – the vast majority of the population – did not pay taxes, either. Poland allowed a small private sector: family-owned small farms, produce stands, private medical and dental offices, handcraft, and so on. I think those businesses were taxed. Of course, the private sector was intended to be only temporary and was expected to disappear once the transition to socialism was fully completed. There were no sales taxes. We did have some incidental taxes, for example on inheritance. That’s about it.

Is “spreading the wealth” socialist? Where I grew up, there was no wealth to be spread. The Eastern European socialist countries were, for the most part, poor as a church mouse. Poland’s economy was devastated in WWII, rebuilt less than optimally, then drained and mismanaged throughout the socialist years. What we had was empty shops, shortages of food and sanitary products, run-down crowded apartments with frequent power and water outages. Everyone had a flashlight and a supply of candles at home because the power might go out at any time. The outages could last the whole day or more, so it was common practice to keep pots, buckets and bathtubs filled with water whenever utility work was scheduled. Did you know that in a water outage you can still flush a toilet by pouring water from a bucket directly into the bowl? Well, now you do.

Speaking of accommodation, here’s a recent photo of my undergraduate dorm.

Back then, of course, we didn’t have satellite dishes. What you should imagine instead is plastic and mesh grocery bags hanging out from almost every window, with preserve jars and plastic-wrapped food packages clearly visible. There were only a few shared refrigerators in a dorm housing about 500 students, so most of us kept our food fresh by hanging it out the window whenever it was cold enough outside. The jars, plastic bags and aluminum foil protected the food from the rain and dirt. Most of the packaging would be washed and reused.

After graduating with a Master’s degree, I worked as a junior researcher in the math department and lived in the building that you can see here in the back.

I was initially assigned to a shared bedroom; once my roommate moved out, I applied for a single bedroom and got it. Each bedroom had a sink, but the kitchens and bathrooms were communal as in the dorm, one on each floor. There were families with children living there. If you had one child, your family was entitled to one bedroom. If you had two children, you were entitled to two bedrooms, not necessarily on the same floor. People lived like that for decades, and so would I if I had not left. The expected waiting period for public housing was 20 years or more and a junior researcher’s salary did not pay for a decent private rental apartment in a large city.

You think that’s bad? According to one report, a census of a major factory’s workers in 1957 showed that only 1% of families had hot running water at home, less than 50% of families had cold running water, and 75% did not have a toilet in the building. Does this begin to answer the question about the teeth?

As for the shortages of food and other articles, there was a whole culture around it in the 1980s. You’d walk into a grocery store and the shelves would be completely empty – or else there would be long rows of canola oil and vinegar bottles on display, because that’s all there was in stock. Many articles were rationed at various times, including sugar, meat and meat products, milk, butter, flour and other selected grain products, alcohol, chocolate, cigarettes, soap, laundry detergent, toilet paper, gasoline, and more. This does not cover all articles that were subject to shortages – products such as coffee and oranges were also hard to get, but they were not rationed because they were not considered essential enough. (Yes, I know. Coffee is essential.)

The typical diet was heavily dependent on meat. That was the tradition and there weren’t many alternatives to choose from. And meat was in very short supply. People would often start lining up many hours before the butcher’s shop would open, bringing blankets and tea in thermoses, waiting for the delivery that might or might not come. Queuing up at the butcher’s could be a full-time job, sometimes a paid one, as there were people who got paid to line up on behalf of others who couldn’t miss work.

But here’s something about rationing that you might not know. You may remember that the origins of the Solidarity trade union go back to the nation-wide strikes in the summer of 1980 and an agreement between the government and the striking workers signed at the Gdansk shipyard. (See here for its full text in Polish.) The Gdansk workers had presented the government with a list of 21 demands. Number one was the right to form independent (of the government) trade unions – this led to the creation and legalization of Solidarity. Number 13 on the same list was meat rationing, which indeed was introduced in February 1981. The rationing system was expanded to cover other products later on, except for sugar which had already been rationed since 1976.

Yes, you’ve read this right. Walesa and the reform movement demanded meat rationing. Of course they also demanded an increase in supply, see items 10 and 11 on the list. But since everyone could see that the supply would not meet the demand any time soon, the rationing would introduce an element of fairness to the process.

When I think of socialism, I also think of people who defended it. I don’t mean in official media, and I don’t mean government or party officials. They were my kin and my friends’ kin. They defended socialism in our private conversations, not because they were worried about getting reported by a family member – that did not happen much in my days – but because they genuinely believed that its advantages outweighed the disadvantages. They would cite public education, public health care, almost universal employment, the elimination of the most extreme poverty. If that came at the expense of political freedom, so be it.

They were, of course, skipping over the same point that many Americans are missing right now: it is possible to have public health care without political repression and low living standards for everyone. That has been demonstrated in many countries including Canada. It wasn’t necessarily an option for Poland, stuck between a rock and a hard place, devastated by the war and strong-armed by the Soviet Union. We couldn’t have it all.

But there’s no reason why America couldn’t.

Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip:

This got me a bit puzzled: why would a comment on this post link to a BBC documentary on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing?

Given that I don’t know as much about the history of mathematics as I probably should, and that I was too tired late last night to do anything more intellectually challenging, I ended up clicking through and watching all 10 parts of the documentary.

The mathematics involved – Cantor’s hierarchy of different-sized infinities, Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics and entropy, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem – is described remarkably well. An expert might quibble about how some of the explanations are ambiguous and imprecise, especially where it concerns Gödel’s work, but that’s a relatively small price to pay for being able to communicate the excitement, audacity and impact of mathematical ideas to a lay audience. The images and animations are, for the most part, well done and helpful. Several mathematicians and scientists (including Roger Penrose) were interviewed for the documentary, and I am guessing that experts were consulted quite extensively about the mathematical content.

That’s only one part of it, though. The movie chooses to focus on Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel and Turing not only for their groundbreaking contributions to mathematics, but also for the mental anguish and personal tragedy in their lives. Boltzmann and Turing committed suicide, Cantor and Gödel suffered from mental illness and were hospitalized for it, and Gödel ended up starving himself to death. Now, I understand that these are undisputed historical facts. I also understand that troubled characters make for a more interesting movie. But I’m tired of watching the media portray mathematicians as socially challenged and mentally unstable, not to mention poorly dressed. You’d never know that it is quite possible for a great mathematician to be a well adjusted and fully functional human being, to have a long, happy and accomplished life, or to face and overcome adversity without developing a mental illness.

This particular documentary goes further, pointing to links between the content of the mathematical work of the four men and their mental anguish. The connection is for the most part made in terms of parallels, similarities, associations and juxtapositions rather than actual implications. To its credit, the documentary does not state anywhere that Cantor’s consideration of the multiple infinities drove him insane. Instead, a major theme of the documentary emerges slowly: the struggle between determinism and chaos, the inevitability of uncertainty and our reluctance to accept it, be it in mathematics, in politics or in our personal lives.

While this is a valid general philosophical point, it troubles me that the viewer is likely to come away with the impression that these men’s minds were damaged by their mathematical ideas. That would be wrong. Turing’s mathematics had nothing to do with his suicide. He was in perfectly good mental health until the courts declared him otherwise for being gay and subjected him to barbaric “treatments”. Cantor may have been disturbed by the philosophical implications of his work, but it is just as likely that having to face hostility and personal attacks for many years took a toll on him. The same could be said of Boltzmann. The text of the documentary is perfectly clear on that. Unfortunately, its general tone lingers much longer.

At the beginning of the documentary, the narrator says that the stories of the four mathematicians “have an important message for us today”. He then goes on to develop his points about certainty – in life and mathematics – and the impossibility thereof. He concludes by asking: have we grown up enough to accept uncertainty? Or will we “pledge blind allegiance to yet another certainty”? That was an exact quote, and in case you weren’t sure what this was about, it is paired up with 9/11-suggestive images. In case you still didn’t get it, the last time the documentary had mentioned “certainty” in a political context involved Hitler and the Nazi Germany. That, I thought, feels tacked-on and takes the extrapolation a bit too far. A weak ending to an otherwise good documentary.

… to Willard S. Boyle, the Canadian physicist who shares this year’s Nobel prize in physics with George E. Smith and Charles C. Kao.

The Canadian inventor of technology that led to the birth of digital photography won a Nobel Prize Tuesday. But physicist Willard Boyle had to move to the United States to do his cutting-edge work.

Dr. Boyle, who won the award with former colleague George Smith, warned that managers need to give scientists leeway to come up with the kinds of transformative inventions that are too often stifled by paperwork and red tape.

What scientists face today is “almost disgraceful … The bureaucrats want to get a hold of the money and ask for business plans. Now do you think that George Smith and I ever wrote a business plan? Not at all,” Dr. Boyle, now 85 and retired, told a reporter Tuesday. “You don’t have time to do that kind of baloney.” [...]

News of the prize comes as scholars in Canada and around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the tendency of governments to wade into research by putting strings on funding. In Canada, moves by the federal government to fund projects directly rather than through arms-length granting councils have come under fire by the academic community, as have restrictions on some money given to the councils.

For recent examples of that, see here or here:

Each Strategic Research Network will receive $5 million over five years through NSERC. They were selected through a peer-reviewed competition and support the research priorities areas identified in the Government of Canada’s Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy.

Click through the first link above if you want to see what the nine networks are. I’m more interested in the list of priority areas:

For the 2009 competition, preliminary applications will only be accepted in three target areas (Advanced Communications and Management of Information, Healthy Environment and Ecosystems, and Sustainable Energy Systems), which have an increased competition budget due to additional earmarked funds received by NSERC.

Would Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith have qualified? Well, they could fall under “Advanced Communications and Management of Information”, if they were doing their work today. But they did it 40 years ago. That’s right. Digital photography may be relatively new, but Boyle and Smith first came up with their idea back in 1969, almost 20 years before I saw a Commodore 64 for the first time. Boyle retired in 1979. Would it have been a “priority area” back then? At Bell Labs, it didn’t have to be. That’s the point.

I’m sure that the strategic networks are doing excellent work. But what the rest of us need is, in Dr. Boyle’s words, “a chance to do the things [we] want to do.”

Thank you, Dr. Boyle, for speaking for us.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on gay marriage: “Not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept in the final analysis.”

An offensive and uninformed rant from The Globe And Mail:

“My colleagues do everything they can to get out of teaching,” says Rod Clifton, who works in the faculty of education at the University of Manitoba. “They’d rather not have the students around, because they’d rather do research and stand around and sip sherry.”

Canadian universities now have about 800,000 undergraduates. But as enrolment soared, teaching loads – with the help of strong faculty unions – went down. In Mr. Clifton’s department, for example, the teaching load is six hours a week for one semester of 13 weeks, and nine hours a week for another 13 weeks. That adds up to 195 hours spread over just 26 weeks a year – less, if someone has administrative duties. Of course there’s prep time and marking and so on. But it’s still not much.

Let’s start with the teaching workload. In my department at UBC, we are expected to spend 40% of our time on research, 40% on teaching, and 20% on administrative work. That would translate to 2 full working days out of a 5-day business week spent on teaching. Our normal teaching load is 3 courses per year. They’re generally not distributed uniformly throughout the year, but if they were, we’d teach 1 course in each of the three 4-month semesters. Each course has 3 lecture hours per week, plus the required 3 office hours per week, more if students ask for additional appointments. Ms. Wente dismisses the “prep time and marking and so on” as “not much”, but I would say that for each lecture hour there are at least 3-4 additional hours spent on class preparation, selection of homework assignments, preparation of midterms, providing instruction to the TA’s, marking, answering email from students, maintaining a course web page, and other such. That adds up to 16-20 hours per week – somewhat more than the two 8-hour days.

That’s our workload during the 13 weeks of the semester when classes are in session. Obviously, there’s additional work to be done before classes start. Even if we teach a well established course with more or less fixed syllabus, we still have to review and update it, choose a textbook, set up the now-mandatory course web page, fix the schedule and the marking scheme. If we design a new course or overhaul an existing one substantially, that’s of course much more work. And, in case Ms. Wente forgot, the 13 weeks of classes are normally followed by final exams, which we prepare, proctor, and then mark. We hold office hours during the exam period, and we may also have to prepare deferred exams for students who missed their finals, mark them, review marked final exams with students who wish to see them, and so on.

Let’s allow three 8-hour days for course preparation before the semester starts and seven 8-hour days for the work involved in administering and marking the final exams. This is a conservative estimate. It assumes that we are simply updating an existing syllabus rather than designing a new one, and that there are no problems with unqualified or unreliable teaching assistants, such as when one of my TA’s submitted incorrectly calculated term grades for one of my large calculus classes and I only realized at the last moment that everything would need to be recalculated. Another one didn’t show up for his paid assignment of helping me proctor the exam for the same class. But I digress. In any case, we’re now up to the equivalent of at least 18 weeks of spending two 8-hour days on teaching each semester. A 4-month semester has 17.5 weeks.

The actual distribution of our teaching time may vary. For example, if we do not teach summer courses, we don’t hold office hours in the summer. Advanced graduate courses don’t always have a final exam, but then class preparation can take 5-6 hours for each lecture hour (and yes, that has happened to me). But I have not yet mentioned the supervision of graduate students. In many departments, including mine, this is a de facto requirement for tenure, promotion and salary increases. There are considerable variations in the workload involved. Some students are very independent, others require a more hands-on approach with weekly meetings and detailed directions. However, even the least possible workload – reasonably regular meetings, reading and reviewing the student’s thesis and possible journal articles, arranging the financial support and doing the administrative work of “processing” the students through the system – is not small. Then there are undergraduate research projects, competitions, and other such. Any way you want to count it, our teaching certainly adds up to at least 40% of a full-time job.

(It may well add up to less than 40% of our actual workload, though. Most research-active faculty spend significantly more than 16 hours per week on research. The additional research time is subtracted from our off-work time, not from teaching.)

And that’s the teaching load of the research faculty at UBC. Our colleagues at many universities and departments have substantially higher teaching loads, as do adjunct and “seasonal” faculty. Teaching 5 or 6 courses per year, usually coupled with substantial administrative workload, is a full-time job all by itself.

That established, let’s move on to “standing around and sipping sherry”. Actually, if you believe Ms. Wente, we’re even worse than that:

But the full professors whom they [the sessional instructors] subsidize have a very pleasant life. They can make $125,000 a year, with a good pension and six months off each year to do as they please. Their duties include sharing their research at conferences in Italy or Mexico, whose popularity hasn’t waned despite the advent of the Internet.

Most graduate students in our department have an annual income of 20-25K through the 4-6 years of study. If you pursue an academic career in mathematics, your first few years after Ph.D. will likely be spent in postdoc positions, with a salary of 40-50K per year. Tenure-track assistant professor positions at a large research university in Canada might come with a starting salary of 70-80K, depending on (among other things) how many years you’d clocked in at the postdoc level. Your salary will then increase gradually, thanks to career progress, merit increases, and possibly retention increases. It will take a while, though, before you reach the level that Wente is talking about. At UBC, it might be about 15 years after Ph.D., assuming that your research and, yes, teaching are good enough to warrant a merit increase every year.

Six months off? To do as we please? By my calculation above, our normal teaching load requires the equivalent of 2 days per week, year round. Research, likewise. If we don’t teach in the summer, then our teaching load is higher during the school year, which means that we have less time for research. Which means that we catch up on research throughout most of the summer. With careful planning, and some overtime work before and after, we may be able to take an actual 2-3 week vacation. You bet that we need it.

Now, the conferences. The last one I attended was in Bellaterra, Spain (near Barcelona), and I combined that with a research visit to Madrid. I did have some time for sightseeing, on evenings and holidays, although on workdays I did have to – surprise – show up for work. But let me also mention my last three work-related trips before that. In early April I travelled to Northfield, Minnesota, for a meeting of the Putnam committee (that’s actually teaching-related, so there you go). In mid-April I attended a conference in Fayetteville, Arkansas. In the end of April I travelled to East Lansing, Michigan, for a research visit at the Michigan State University. I don’t suppose that any of these would be particularly noteworthy to the Globe and Mail. (Fayetteville was quite nice. I didn’t get to see the Clinton house, though – it was closed by the time the lectures ended.)

And yes, three separate plane trips in one month can be quite exhausting. We do not fly first class – we are subject to the same exact indignities as any other traveller on a budget. The food can be abhorrent. As for the comforts of a typical hotel, here’s David Foster Wallace reporting for the Rolling Stone:

Rolling Stone, who is in no way cut out to be a road journalist, invokes the soul-killing anonymity of chain hotels, the rooms’ terrible transient sameness: the ubiquitous floral design of the bedspreads, the multiple low-watt lamps, the pallid art-work bolted to the wall, the whisper of ventilation, the sad shag carpet, the smell of alien cleansers, the Kleenex dispensed from the wall, the automated wakeup call, the lightproof curtains, the windows that do not open-ever. RS asks whether it could possibly be coincidence that over half of all indoor suicides take place in chain hotels. Jim and Frank say they get the idea. RS references the terrible oxymoron of “hotel guest.” Hell could easily be a chain hotel.

The chain hotels that he is referring to are “Marriott, Courtyard by Marriott, Hampton Inn, Hilton, Signature Inn, Radisson, Holiday Inn, Embassy Suites, etc.” – the high end of our range. I wonder what Wallace would have had to say about bunking in student dorms.

Most of the time, I would have indeed preferred to stay at home and use teleconferencing or the Internet if that was a viable alternative. Unfortunately, it isn’t, for various reasons. For instance, good teleconferencing equipment – the sort where the remote participants actually get to interact, as opposed to simply watching a videotaped lecture – is very expensive and most universities don’t have it. This is not to say that we don’t use the Internet for networking and collaboration. We certainly do. Indeed, thanks to email, file sharing and so on, we’re able to continue a collaboration started at a conference long after said conference has ended. More bang for the ever-vanishing buck.

Back to the Globe and Mail:

Of course some research, especially in the sciences and medicine, matters a great deal to the advancement of society. But a vast amount of it – especially in the humanities and social sciences – does not. Richard Vedder, a leading U.S. critic, has argued that the higher education system has pawned off the responsibility of educating students “in favour of pursuing a whole lot of self-interested research (which the majority of undergraduates are not involved in) that for the most part, doesn’t matter.”

I’m planning a separate post on the general usefulness of research, or rather on the alleged lack thereof, so I’ll mostly leave this paragraph alone for the time being. Mostly. Because I do have to point out that it is a gratuitous insult to pretty much everyone in the humanities and social sciences, based solely on their general area of expertise.

But, wait. Ms. Wente can be more specific if necessary.

Take my old stomping ground, English Lit. When last I looked, nobody was clamouring for another book on Moby-Dick. Yet as demand goes down, supply goes up.

Bad example, that. As I recall, this book was a major bestseller about 10 years ago. Sure, it’s not “on” Moby Dick, but, well. I’m also guessing that it relies on a good deal of that useless humanities scholarship. Turns out that quite a few people were in fact interested. I would recommend it very highly if you haven’t read it already.

The Globe and Mail, on the other hand? Less so.

That’s what I thought when I read the articles linked below, even though gender is never mentioned explicitly. Instead, there seems to be an implicit assumption that everyone involved is male. (Presumably white, too – but that would be a story for someone else to write.)

First, there’s this stunning book review by Scott McLemee, linked also at Crooked Timber:

The most powerful figures in this system [Italian academic promotions], says Gambetta, tend to be the least intellectually distinguished. They do little research, publish rarely, and at best are derivative of “some foreign author on whose fame they hope to ride…. Also, and this is what is the most intriguing, they do not try to hide their weakness. One has the impression that they almost flaunt it in personal contacts.”

[...] Gambetta argues that the cheerful incompetence of the baroni is akin to the mafioso’s way of signaling that he can be “trusted” within his narrowly predatory limits.

“Being incompetent and displaying it,” he writes, “conveys the message I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else. In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one’s own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity…. In the Italian academic world, the kakistrocrats are those who best assure others by displaying, through lack of competence and lack of interest in research, that they will comply with the pacts.”

Also, this from the comments at CT:

I experienced this in a past position, and reached the same analysis as Gambetta. My attempts to signal that I would leave if I didn’t get better treatment were exactly the wrong ones to send. The people who won the battles were those signalling “I can never go anywhere else, so I will fight to the death to get my way here”.

I’d be interested to know how many of those incompetent-and-proud-of-it academics are female. Because, at least over here on this side of the Atlantic, somehow I don’t see a lot of female professors (or lawyers, or businesswomen) showing off their weaknesses on purpose.

What I do see on a regular basis is men who mess up repeatedly and aren’t particularly embarrassed about it, even if “flaunting it” might be too strong a word. I wouldn’t know what signals, if any, they might be sending to other men. The message I get is: they can afford to do that. In due course they will still get promoted as scheduled, then picked to chair this committee here or hold that prestigious position there, as surely as pierogis float to the top of the pot when they’re cooked. That’s just the way it goes. Nothing to see there, move along. Women, on the other hand…

As for communicating readiness for battle? If you’re female, the default assumption is that you won’t really put up a fight. That’s obviously not limited to women – the commenter quoted above is male – but I’d say that in our case such presumptions are made much more often. They’re also harder to change. I don’t know of any successful career woman who has managed to turn that around just by signalling something or other – without actually getting into fights and developing a reputation for it. That can be a long and unpleasant process (think Hillary Clinton). By the time we’re done with the “she’s so cute when she’s angry” stage, and the “she’s an angry bitch and I’m not negotiating with her” stage, and the “she’s mentally unstable and should be on Prosac” stage, much water has passed under the bridge. Time has been wasted. Opportunities have been lost. And that’s just to get to what men can usually assume as their starting point.

On to the second article, Politics for Deans by Dan L. King. The author adapts LBJ’s political strategies to an academic setting:

Johnson notes that LBJ would use up White House liquor having nightcaps with the leaders and key members of BOTH parties, and that these leaders and key members would take home cufflinks, watches, signed photos, and perhaps even a pledge to come raise money for their next election. The key here is the courting of support with “leaders and key members.” Academic Dean’s Political Strategy #8: Devote some time regularly to interacting with department chairs and chairs of key committees/groups in a setting other than formal meetings. Invite them to your office for refreshments on a regular basis. [...]

LBJ didn’t miss an opportunity to connect personally. [...] Academic Dean’s Political Strategy #9: First, figure out the extent to which individual faculty are comfortable with your familiarity of their personal life; make a note of this in your file (see the first item on this list), then make sure you use the information to demonstrate your sincere interest in each person with whom you work.

Can you see why this might be gender dependent? I mean, how about the male dean inviting female faculty for nightcaps in his office? Right. Probably doesn’t happen much. But we don’t even need to go there. The fact is, all of the “personal connection” strategies on the list are easy to implement when everyone is of the same gender, but much more tricky otherwise. In private, men tend to socialize with their male colleagues. Women will likely get invited to the after-seminar dinner, but probably not to the private barbecue on Saturday night, and we certainly won’t be spending the long weekend at a male colleague’s cottage out of town. We can of course socialize with other women, but that doesn’t necessarily amount to the same thing, at least not in those science departments that have only a few women on their faculty. Some have only one or two.

But that’s just one side of it. The other side, less obvious but possibly more important, is: just how much exactly do women benefit from “connecting personally”? It is too often assumed without questioning that developing personal connections with colleagues improves the working climate and leads to harmony and general happiness. In my experience, what developing personal connections does is that it brings the professional relationships closer to what a personal relationship might be. Whether that is necessarily an improvement is another story. And that’s where gender comes in.

In a perfect world, all personal relationships would be free of traditional prejudices and unconscious biases, therefore they would be a fine model for professional interactions.

That’s not where we are, though. I have been blessed with some truly wonderful friends who are men, but I also would like my co-workers to remember that I’m their colleague and not a personal acquaintance. Here’s a couple of reasons.

Gender bias is more pervasive than we like to think. You don’t need to be hostile or unfriendly to women to be biased. You might instead believe, genuinely and wholeheartedly, that a woman is most satisfied and fulfilled as a housewife. Or that we are naturally inclined to follow someone else’s lead, leaving it to men to decide about all those complicated matters of politics and such. (Don’t you worry your little head about it, darlin’.) Perhaps you’re perfectly comfortable with having women around as colleagues, you just see them as supporting players rather than the main actors, because that’s more natural. Perhaps you assume that we get so much satisfaction out of helping men succeed that we don’t mind when our contributions go uncredited, our own success and achievement being less important. It’s bias, and it hurts us.

Thanks to feminism and political correctness, such things are less likely to be said openly at work. But who says that you can’t offer a little bit of personal advice to a friend? Or do what you consider to be a favour? (It would certainly explain some of the friendly but wrong advice I have had, and some of the liberties that were taken with me, over the course of my career.) And who says that you can’t have a discussion with friends at your own house about how women are genetically less predisposed to be top mathematicians, your female colleagues are too pushy, and Hillary is the Wicked Witch of the East or some other such? Sure you can. You have every right. I just don’t want to be invited to that.

Yes, I did enjoy my vacation.