Tenure is for dreamers

(Photo credit: fmosca)

An online opinion column in the NYTimes has a entry today, "Vocationalism, Academic Freedom, and Tenure," in which Stanley Fish reviews a book titled “The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For,” by Naomi Schaefer Riley.

He describes the key arguments in Riley's book:

The standard rationale for academic freedom is that the business of the academy is to advance knowledge by conducting inquiries the outcomes of which are not known in advance. Since the obligation is to follow the evidence wherever it leads rather than to a “pre-stipulated goal” (a phrase Riley takes from my writings), researchers must be free to go down paths as they suggest themselves and not in obedience to a political program or an ideology. That is why (and again she is quoting me) “the degree of latitude and flexibility” that attends academic freedom is “not granted to the practitioners of other professions.”

But, Riley observes, “a significant portion of [the] additional degrees that colleges have added in the past few decades have been in vocational areas,” and those areas “simply do not engage students in a search for ultimate truths,” but instead have pre-stipulated goals. “Do we need,” she asks, “to guarantee the academic freedom of professors engaged in teaching and studying ‘Transportation and Materials Moving,’ a field in which more than five thousand degrees were awarded in 2006?”

Riley makes the same point about “vocational courses” that have been around for a while. Freshman composition, for example, “does not demand that faculty ask existential questions.” Ditto for courses in “Security and Protective Services,” and “Business Statistics.” These are, she says, “fields of study with fairly definitive answers” and it would be hard to argue that they are “essential to civilization.” Those who teach these and similarly vocational subjects “don’t really need the freedom to ask controversial questions in discussing them.” 

He points out that her work is essentially a two-pronged argument against tenure. On the one hand, in many subjects, the faculty don't need tenure because they are not addressing "controversial" questions or even fundamentally "new" questions. On the other hand, those that are addressing such questions are not doing much that is relevant to society's needs, and are instead engaged primarily in writing convoluted papers on obscure topics. In fact, they're not even fit to teach, and are better off being replaced by non-tenured faculty who are well prepared to teach general courses. In Riley's world, then, there are two kinds of faculty: those that do relevant research, but don't need tenure because their work is not controversy-generating, and those that do irrelevant research, who don't deserve tenure because they serve no useful purpose for society.

So it turns out that the very people who, under traditional definitions and standards, would be protected by academic freedom and tenure, shouldn’t be in colleges and university classrooms in the first place because they are selfishly pursuing their own narrow interests and contributing little to the well-being of either students or society. The entire machinery of tenure is based on the imperative “to say something new,” but, Riley contends, there aren’t very many new things to say, especially in the humanities: “With thousands of PhDs being minted every year, topics are drying up by the minute.”

Wouldn’t it make more sense, Riley asks, to hire broadly educated persons who made no pretense of “advancing knowledge” to teach most of the courses? “Wouldn’t someone who has spent more time on that broad education and less time trying to find some miniscule niche on which to write a dissertation be the better teacher for most of those classes?”

In other words, let’s get rid of the research professors for whom academic freedom and tenure make some sense, at least historically, and have a teaching corps that understands itself to be performing a specific task (the imparting of basic skills to undergraduates) and can be held to account directly when their superiors determine that their performance is inadequate. In short, we need more instructors who don’t merit tenure, and once we have them Riley’s conclusion is inevitable: “There is no reason why tenure shouldn’t be abolished at the vast majority of the four thousand degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States.” There is no reason because every reason usually given in support of tenure and academic freedom has been shown to undermine itself in the course of this quite clever argument.

Fish does not agree with this argument of Riley's. He says that

it demonstrates the practical and political necessity of defining academic work in a way that justifies the resistance to monitoring by external constituencies. 

What Riley shows is that vocation-oriented teaching, teaching beholden to corporations and politically inflected teaching do not square with the picture of academic labor assumed by the institutions of tenure and academic freedom. She says that, given the direction colleges and universities are going in, faculty members have little claim to the protection of doctrines that were fashioned for an academy that holds itself aloof from real world issues, either political or mercantile. 

I say, and have been saying for years, that colleges and universities should stop moving in those directions — toward relevance, bottom-line contributions and social justice — and go back to a future in which academic inquiry is its own justification.

This is certainly an interesting, contrarian, viewpoint, at a time when Deans and Presidents all over are making the case that universities should be more responsive to society's needs, and are soliciting funding for specific research areas.

I am not sure I agree entirely with either Riley or Fish. Riley's arguments appear shallow and unconvincing: they show little appreciation of the connections between an educator's passion for teaching and his/her practice of free inquiry, and exhibit a similarly limited understanding of the practical reasons why someone working in a vocational field like transportation engineering might still want tenure (in all fairness, I should note that I have not read her book; my comments are based entirely on how her work is portrayed by Fish).

I do find myself more sympathetic to Fish, because of his support for the academic enterprise. Where I part ways with him is his view that colleges and universities should not move towards greater relevance and engagement with society. He has fallen for a false dichotomy. It is not a question of either / or. The academic world spans a wide range of disciplines, with differing objectives and rationales.  We do not need to choose between academic inquiry that is directed towards specific ends, and academic inquiry that is its own justification. We can, and should, support both kinds of academic inquiry. And if tenure is (and I believe it is) useful for faculty in pursuing either of these, whether directly by allowing freedom of expression, or indirectly, as is often the case, by providing them an attractive environment of stable employment that compensates for the relatively low pay they often receive compared to a more monetarily rewarding but less inquiry-oriented job in industry, then it is worth preserving.

What tenure and academic freedom and research funding (both private and public) ultimately buy for us as a society is a large body of dreamers. Some of these dreamers, indeed, spend their lives developing the cure for a disease that affects millions or technologies that bring us together, which is wonderful. Others, however, plod along for years sincerely and wholeheartedly investigating an obscure subject that only a few of their colleagues completely understand or care for. And that should be lauded too. What these dreamers have in common is a deep faith that it is fundamentally worthwhile to seek after knowledge, to learn, to discover, to reshape old ideas into new forms, to seek wisdom, to think, to build, to create, to demonstrate, to read, to deliberate, to reflect, to write.

Their dreams, not necessarily in a flashy or immediately obvious way, but often quite subtly and indirectly, not necessarily in leaps and bounds, but slowly and steadily, not necessarily individually, but as an aggregate collective, sustain and nourish the spirit of humanity. Their dreams inspire curiosity and improve our understanding of matters big and small and obscure and pertinent. Their dreams open up new possibilities. Their dreams expand our horizons, inch by inch, in every possible dimension.

This is neither to say everyone who deserves tenure gets it, nor that everyone who gets tenure deserves it; but to the extent that this is the case, what is called for is a reform of the process by which tenure is granted, not an eradication of the very concept. 

Accepting change

Richard Thieme, a writer, formerly a priest, is a brilliant speaker, whom I had the occasion to see recently at a conference. His website, Thiemeworks, has many interesting pieces of writing by him. Here's a passage from an essay titled "The face we see in the digital mirror", that merits reflection (italics mine):

Think of the common spiritual practice of “journaling,” for example. Journaling began when people like James Boswell participated in the discovery and creation of a different kind of sensibility and self by using pen and paper to bring it into being. Today, bloggers engage in a web of self-discovery that older generations dismiss as shallow, but the collective self they are co-creating is in fact appropriate to the technology. When William Harvey described the circulation of blood, it is a historical fact that no physician over 40 ever accepted his theory. In religious life, too, new revelations are accepted one funeral at a time, but along a much longer timeline. Generations must pass away before the new sun can rise and shine.

In more mundane aspects of our lives, however, this impact cannot be avoided. Aspects of our lives that used to be unthinkably accepted as fixed by tradition, for example, have become modules in a self-generated persona or trajectory for which we are increasingly required to accept responsibility. Teaching children to learn how to learn is more important than teaching children stuff. Teaching children how to assemble themselves in an ongoing way is more important than teaching them how to live in a fixed and rigid way in a context that refuses to remain stable and thereby undermines that very fixity.

We used to be born into a religion, for example, and now we change religions and “shop for churches.” We used to stay married, but more and more people divorce and remarry. We used to choose a vocation and stay with it, but now we expect to have several careers in a lifetime. In every dimension of our lives, that which we took for granted as divinely ordained was in fact determined by an unvarying context for our lives, and it is that very context that our technologies undermine and transform. Then new contents inevitably flow into the new contours generated by a new context.

Love in education

Alisha Coleman-Kiner is the Principal of Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, Tennessee. President Obama gave a commencement speech at her school this year, to recognize the impressive gains it made in graduation rates under her leadership.

She wrote a refreshing and inspiring essay reflecting on her experience, where she argues that " ...before we set high expectations for children, we have to love them."

Coleman-Kiner writes that education cannot be separated from other basic needs for children - food, shelter, family happiness. Love, a deep sense of caring, lights the way towards fulfilling all these needs. Education must therefore be built on a foundation of a heartfelt connection between the educators and students. She writes eloquently:

Children cannot eat love, but our love for them directs us to help them find sustenance. Love cannot shelter them, but our love for them directs us to support them by acknowledging the academic challenges that can result from homelessness and, when we can, helping them to secure shelter. Love cannot stand between children and abuse, but it can help them heal.

Success with children who have been cast aside by our society begins with love. Typical reforms may succeed through early adolescence when they depend on technical capacity and behaviorist methods, but by the time children reach adolescence and have fully absorbed the negative messages about their value to the larger society, the only thing that will get through is love. We can try to capture love through lists of characteristics and action steps, but until we delve into the real meaning and value of love in education, we will all be spinning our wheels.

How did I make such massive gains at Booker T. Washington? I loved my children. I hired people who would love my children. And then I did my job.

This essay hits the nail on the head. An educator who does not care deeply for his/her students, and who, avoiding the warm generosity of love, maintains a "professional" detachment at all times, cannot adequately facilitate and support them in their learning, and cannot ultimately inspire them to go beyond that learning.

Ending Ignorance (part 1)

A couple of months ago, I came across an article in the New York Times, titled "A Better Way to Teach Math" lauding a new pedagogical approach called JUMP Math, used so far mostly in Canadian schools, that has proven very successful.

John Mighton, the founder of the successful JUMP math program, has written a couple of books. Interested in finding out more about his experiences and thoughts on education, I read through one of them, called "The End of Ignorance."

Mighton's principal contention is that everyone can do well at any subject, learn anything. This is the refreshing premise behind the JUMP program, that there is no fundamental reason for any student to do poorly in math at any level at school.

You only have to think about this for a second to realize what a shockingly controversial statement this is in our society, where the majority of people do not consider themselves mathematically "talented". As Mighton writes:

As a society, we are living under a vast spell or illusion. We have effectively hypnotized ourselves, but not in a single performance. It has taken twelve or thirteen years of school to put us in a suggestive state so that we all believe more in our limitations than in our potential, and it is difficult for anyone to snap their fingers to break the trance. 

and

Many people are convinced that there is a gene for mathematics. This gene seems to come with an expiry date, though, and most people can remember the year it gave out --- when they had a particularly bad experience with the subject.

People cling stubbornly to the idea that children will excel in a subject only if they are blessed with the right genes in spite of all the evidence from early childhood development that contradicts the notion of inborn abilities.

So what goes wrong? Mighton's analysis is that for successful learning it is crucial to proceed in small steps with incrementally increasing complexity, while maintaining an environment of excitement due to successes, rather than frustration due to failure.

Unfortunately, children do not have  the intellectual fortitude needed to deal with constant failure. Marilyn Burns has said that "success comes from understanding," but one might just as well say that understanding comes from success. Success is not simply a by-product of learning, it is the very foundation of learning. Generally the things that children can do successfully make sense to them, even if they don't completely understand what they are doing. 

(to be continued.)

An Education as Free as Air and Water

We all need heroes, role models. People we admire, whose lives offer us examples of how to lead the good life.

One of mine is Peter Cooper, the great nineteenth century inventor, industrialist, and philanthropist.

Peter Cooper lead an immensely productive life. He was, by turns, a tinkerer, a cabinet-maker, a grocer, the owner of a glue factory and then an iron works, and president of two telegraph companies. He built America's first steam locomotive, called Tom Thumb, which famously ran (but lost, only due to a malfunction before the finish) a race against a horse in 1830. I like the account of that race given by John Latrobe, a lawyer with the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, who was an eyewitness. The locomotive was pulling about three dozen men in a car behind it. Latrobe writes:

... the day was fine, the company in the highest spirits, and some excited gentlemen of the party pulled out memorandum books, and when at the highest speed, which was eighteen miles an hour, wrote their names and some connected sentences, to prove that even at that great velocity it was possible to do so. 

Peter Cooper invented Gelatin (his wife Sarah came up with the name "Jell-O"). He was involved with the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. And, in 1876, at the very young age of eighty-five, he ran, albeit unsuccessfully, for President of the United States as the candidate of the Greenback Party, which advocated moving from the rigid gold-backed monetary policy of the day to a more flexible currency like we have today.

He made a fortune, of course, with his many successful endeavors. But what I have always found most admirable about  him is what he proceeded to do with his fortune. In a panegyric account of Peter Cooper titled "The Honest Man" that appeared more than five decades ago in American Heritage magazine,  Peter Lyon writes:

Dimly at first but with increasing clarity, his fellow citizens, and especially the humbler among them, perceived that Cooper earnestly professed, in everything he did, to serve mankind. Hence his inventions; hence even his manufacture of glue. To Cooper the fact that he made money was, if not actually irrelevant, at least not the main goal. Money was a kind of temporary reward for moral behavior, for doing good; the main goal was, as he phrased it, “to give the world an equivalent in some form of useful labor for all that I consumed in it.” His inventions, his commercial enterprises, were not enough. He found time to work in other ways as well: for the Public School Society, which fought to make education compulsory; on New York City’s Common Council, where he had in his charge the project of insuring the city’s water supply; for the Juvenile Asylum, for New York faced then as now the problem of juvenile delinquency; for the New York Sanitary Association; for a free milk dispensary.

Perhaps his most lasting good deed, the one that has had the most impact, was his founding of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1859, popularly known in his time as the Cooper Institute. A place where education could be, in his words, "as free as air and water".

Lyon indicates that Cooper was motivated by the story he had heard many years before, from a visitor to a polytechnic university in France:

“What made the deepest impression on my mind,” Cooper said later, “was … that he found hundreds of young men from all parts of France living on a bare crust of bread in order to get the benefit of those lectures. I then thought how glad I should have been to have found such an institution in the city of New York when I was myself an apprentice … I determined to do what I could to secure to the youth of my native city and country the benefits of such an institution … and throw its doors open at night so that the boys and girls of this city, who had no better opportunity than I had to enjoy means of information, would be enabled to improve and better their condition, fitting them for all the various and useful purposes of life.” 

Since its founding, through its classes and public lectures, this Cooper institute has been a vibrant center of intellectual life in New York City. Barely a year after its founding, on February 27, 1860, the then-presidential-candidate Abraham Lincoln gave a well-received speech in its Great Hall, which he ended with the striking words "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." Talking in part of the widely disseminated photograph shown here, which was taken that very day by the photographer Mathew Brady, he said "Mr. Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president."

Since its founding, many tens of thousands of students have benefited from Peter Cooper's generosity. To this date, Cooper Union offers a first-rate free education in the form of a full tuition scholarship (valued at over $120,000 in today's terms) to every admitted student. With about 900 students pursuing majors in Architecture, Art, and Engineering, it is one of the most selective colleges in the United States (it was recently rated by Newsweek as the #1 most desirable small school in the country, and is routinely identified as being among the very best schools in other popular college rankings).

It was privilege for me to have the opportunity to attend this unique institute as an undergrad. Here I took classes not only in Computer Programming, Thermodynamics, Linear Algebra, Electronics, and Telecommunications, but also in History, Philosophy, Ethics, Poetry, French and Chinese. Here, working with a close-knit group of brilliant classmates, I gained confidence in my abilities by working over a winter break, just for the fun of it, to design and simulate an 8-bit computer from scratch; by writing an AI program that not only played Othello, but also spat out choice Shakespearean curses at the opponent when it was not doing well; and by designing and fabricating a new class of microwave digital gates for my senior group project. It was while wandering its halls, gripped by  the romance and idealism of youth, that I was influenced by faculty who not only challenged their students to work very hard and to value the life of the mind, but also exhorted them to do something meaningful with their lives. And here it was, through many late pre-exam nights in the EE department lounge with friends, learning together by teaching each other, that I discovered my calling. The enduring warmth of this great man's magnanimity afforded me four of the happiest years of my life, and helped me build a strong foundation for the future. I am forever grateful for it.

Peter Cooper has continued to be an inspiration in my life. Motivated by his example, I have sought to give back in my own way. Because the research experiences I had as an undergrad played a big role in my going to graduate school and pursuing a career in academia, each summer I host two to four undergraduate student interns in the lab I direct at USC, giving them a chance to experience what graduate-level research is all about, by working independently or in pairs on a sizable experimental or theoretical project over the course of five to ten weeks.  A good number of them have gone on to do Ph.D.'s at places including Columbia, U. Michigan, MIT, Stanford, UIUC, USC. Six of these, over the years, have been from my alma mater, including one that joined just today. By my reckoning, I have at least a dozen more to go... (even then only symbolically, of course; it is impossible for me to ever completely repay the debt I owe Peter Cooper and the wondrous place that bears his name.)

The new Cooper Union building in New York City, built in 2009.

Paper tigers in academia

Yesterday, while flying back from a workshop in the east coast to Los Angeles, I came across a well-written, provocative (and already quite controversial) article in New York Magazine, titled "Paper Tigers", by Wesley Yang. The subtitle is a good summary of the main question the author concerns himself with: "What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?"


There are certainly shortcomings in this essay.  For instance, Wesley Yang doesn't adequately cover the female perspective. And any such broad cultural commentary cannot avoid making sweeping generalizations that do not apply to many Asians in America (though he does acknowledge this himself). 


However, I also found myself in agreement with some key observations that Wesley makes. He talks about something called the "Bamboo Ceiling" that he describes as 

an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership. 

The failure of Asian-Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of the burning social issues of our time. But it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation. If between 15 and 20 percent of every Ivy League class is Asian, and if the Ivy Leagues are incubators for the country’s leaders, it would stand to reason that Asians would make up some corresponding portion of the leadership class.

And yet the numbers tell a different story. According to a recent study, Asian-­Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents. There are nine Asian-American CEOs in the Fortune 500. In specific fields where Asian-Americans are heavily represented, there is a similar asymmetry. A third of all software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, and yet they make up only 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area’s 25 largest companies. At the National Institutes of Health, where 21.5 percent of tenure-track scientists are Asians, only 4.7 percent of the lab or branch directors are, according to a study conducted in 2005. 

Analyzing the situation, Wesley notes that it's not primarily an issue of overt bias, but of unconscious bias due to perceptions.  His view is that these perceptions are shaped by Asian family values.  He argues, provocatively, that the very values that many Asian parents drill into their children: being humble, self-effacing, rule-obeying, trouble-avoiding, and hard-working, which are helpful for getting them in large numbers into top schools and getting excellent grades, may actually create a barrier to entering leadership positions in America: 

Maybe it is simply the case that a traditionally Asian upbringing is the problem. As Allyn points out, in order to be a leader, you must have followers. Associates at Pricewaterhouse­Coopers are initially judged on how well they do the work they are assigned. “You have to be a doer,” as she puts it. They are expected to distinguish themselves with their diligence, at which point they become “super-doers.” But being a leader requires different skill sets. “The traits that got you to where you are won’t necessarily take you to the next level,” says the diversity consultant Jane Hyun, who wrote a book called Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling. To become a leader requires taking personal initiative and thinking about how an organization can work differently. It also requires networking, self-promotion, and self-assertion. It’s racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It’s simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization and “pumping the iron of math” is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.

Wesley Yang talks about an organization called LEAP which runs leadership training programs for Asian and Pacific Americans, and quotes its CEO J.D. Hokoyama: 

Aspiring Asian leaders had to become aware of “the relationship between values, behaviors, and perceptions.” He offered the example of Asians who don’t speak up at meetings. “So let’s say I go to meetings with you and I notice you never say anything. And I ask myself, ‘Hmm, I wonder why you’re not saying anything. Maybe it’s because you don’t know what we’re talking about. That would be a good reason for not saying anything. Or maybe it’s because you’re not even interested in the subject matter. Or maybe you think the conversation is beneath you.’ So here I’m thinking, because you never say anything at meetings, that you’re either dumb, you don’t care, or you’re arrogant. When maybe it’s because you were taught when you were growing up that when the boss is talking, what are you supposed to be doing? Listening.”

This certainly struck a chord with me. I cannot count how many times over the years I have heard faculty colleagues comment negatively on Asian Ph.D. students that keep really quiet in class and in research meetings. Their complaint is that this not only makes it hard to gauge what they are understanding and what they are not, but also feels unfair in an academic environment because they are depriving the group of the benefit of their own ideas. I know of at least one colleague who prefers not to take on quiet Asian students in his group for this reason.


Tigers - pay attention! It's not enough to do well on paper. You have to find your voice and learn to be more participative and assertive. You will be more likely to be perceived to be helpful to others and to have leadership qualities, which will open up more opportunities for you in the future.

Summerhill

Photo from Summerhill Photographers

Summerhill, founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill, is an unusual school that everyone should know about. It provides complete freedom to the children in what, how, and when they learn. It has been a great inspiration to the small number of similar schools around the world.
Quoting from its website:

Today, all over the world, education is moving towards more and more testing, more examinations and more qualifications. It seems to be a modern trend that assessment and qualification define education. 

If society were to treat any other group of people the way it treats its children, it would be considered a violation of human rights. But for most of the world's children this is the normal expectation from parents, school and the society in which we live. 

Today many educationalists and families are becoming uneasy with this restrictive environment. They are beginning to look for alternative answers to mainstream schooling. 

One of these answers is democratic or ‘free' schooling. There are many models of democratic schools in all corners of the globe, from Israel to Japan, from New Zealand and Thailand to the United States. 

The oldest and most famous of these schools is Summerhill, on the east coast of England.

Here are a few videos about this school:

• Imagine a school... 
• Summerhill 
• Who is scared of Summerhill 

It really is still ahead of its time. 

Motivation and the Ph.D.

Recently, a couple of my colleagues sent around the following three articles to the faculty mailing list:

• Reform the PhD system or close it down (in Nature)
• Education: The PhD factory (in Nature)
• The disposable academic: why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (in The Economist)

These are all criticisms of the modern Ph.D. system. The authors make two key points in common:

• Ph.D.'s take too long.
• There are few jobs for Ph.D.'s that relate to their research training.

On the face of it, it is hard to disagree with these articles, but there's more to the Ph.D. than these points would suggest. I'll limit my thoughts to the Ph.D. in engineering, which is what I'm most familiar with. The situation is quite different from field to field. While the duration of the Ph.D. is very long in the humanities (routinely taking 10-12 years), it is much shorter in many domains of engineering (4-6 years is the norm).

Nearly all engineering Ph.D.'s do get a job after graduation, but the quality and research-orientation of those jobs shows high variance. I recognize that a good number of the students who did their Ph.D. under my guidance are now in jobs they were sufficiently qualified to do after their masters (perhaps even undergrad!) Not only is there a great paucity of tenure-track academic positions, there are also relatively few industrial research jobs these days, as many companies have laid off their internal groups doing basic "blue skies" research. In my own area of communication networks, aside from a few examples like Microsoft Research and Qualcomm, it's hard to find a large industrial research group in the U.S. (There are more opportunities in the rest of the world, though, for students willing to move to places like China or India). 

Nevertheless, I think there is something deeply valuable about the Ph.D. process, that is not accounted for in the discussion in these articles. It is (or, at least, should be) a far more autonomous learning process than the undergrad or masters degrees because of the focus on independent research. Students are challenged to develop their critical thinking abilities and gain confidence in their ability to reason from first principles. By going in depth, they reach the very boundaries of knowledge, and in many cases for the first time in their lives, help contribute something new to human knowledge. And some students even find a way to balance this depth with  breadth acquired by attending a wide range of talks and courses in fields outside their main focus area. Despite its length, I think a Ph.D. in a high quality engineering program is not a waste of time. 

With respect to jobs, I would like to think that even those of my students who are now in engineering jobs that didn't absolutely need a Ph.D., find that they are better equipped in some ways because of their Ph.D. experience. As for the paucity of academic and research positions, there is a different perspective on this: that the resulting competition may be a good thing. One of the comments posted online by Igor Litvinyuk (who I found to be a faculty member in Physics at Kansas State) on the Nature article "Reform the PhD system" is worth re-posting here in full, as it offers a sharp rebuttal (I should note, however, that I don't share this market-based view entirely): 

Fierce competition for academic positions is the only way to maintain excellence in academia. That's why academia needs more qualified Ph.D.-holding candidates than there are vacancies. Otherwise every Ph.D. graduate would be guaranteed a tenure-track position. It seems like that is what most of the authors and commentators here advocate. But society's interest in having its investments in research to be put into most efficient use by the most qualified people surely makes some extra spending to maintain competition and sustain excellence worthwhile. The populist goal of matching every Ph.D. candidate with a well-compensated satisfying permanent job in academia may seem humane and desirable, but it is not necessarily in the best interest of society as a whole. There is an obvious contradiction in most of the articles here: they claim that Ph.D. overproduction as an established fact, while at the same time stating that unemployment level among Ph.D. holders is lowest of all educational levels. 

So earning a Ph.D. clearly improves everyone's employment prospects. How does it square with the argument that many of those positions do not require a degree and resources are wasted on training people for them? Even if that argument had some merit, those extra costs have to be compared with advantages the society gains from having an excellent merit-based academic research system. Some measure of frustration and disappointment among the less successful contestants who chose to participate in this competitive system is unavoidable and is not unreasonable price to pay. Is it really all that different from other walks of life where competition is the norm, i.e. sports, literature or show business? After all nobody forces people to enter those Ph.D. programs, do they?

So if nobody forces people to enter Ph.D. programs, and many of them don't get research-oriented jobs, why do they enter them? And what influences where they end up after the Ph.D.? Over the years, having observed and interacted with many Ph.D. applicants and students in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at USC, I have made the following observations:

• For many students from international universities (at USC, we get many applicants from Asian countries such as China, India, Iran, South Korea), doing a Ph.D. in the U.S. is primarily a ticket to the U.S. job market in high-tech areas. For most of these students, there is no motivation to stay in academia. They also see relatively little significance in the distinction between a creative research-oriented position, and a regular development/programming position in industry. They are often quite happy at the end of their Ph.D. to land a salaried industry job, regardless of its research content, because it pays well, is relatively stress-free, and guarantees a happy and stable  future in the U.S.
  
  
• Many students who come straight from undergrad or an MS with little prior exposure to a non-academic setting, might be academically strong, but are still unmotivated and unclear about why they are doing a Ph.D. It's where the conveyor-belt of life has brought them, precisely because they were good at school: having been good at school, they specialized in science and mathematics in high school; having been good at high school, they went to engineering school; having been good at engineering school they applied to grad school, so here they are. All their life the schooling system has controlled their destiny and pointed them towards a Ph.D. They get here, and go through the Ph.D. trying to do their best at it. At the end of it though, feeling at least a little burned out by having faithfully followed the system all these years,  all they want to do is finally, finally, enter the "real world" in the form of any decent job that they can land (research-oriented or not).
  
  
• Students who have had prior industry experience and then come for a Ph.D., particularly from within the U.S., are generally more motivated to seek research positions after the Ph.D., than students in the above category. They appreciate and value the intellectual autonomy afforded by a research position as compared to a non-research position.
  
  
• The bar for academic positions is extremely high. Students need to demonstrate not only a rich publication record, but also should have worked on cutting edge topics, should be outspoken, and should have good networking skills to have interacted with faculty and researchers at other places who can refer/recommend them. For this reason, generally only those Ph.D. students that are extremely motivated to go after a tenure-track position from the very beginning figure out how to get them. (Paradoxically, though, given my previous two observations, a good number of those that go on to tenure track faculty positions have never been in industry.)
  
  
• In engineering, another interesting, albeit relatively smaller, category of Ph.D. students are those that go on to found or work at small startup companies. Here again, with their focus on stability and their concerns about visa issues, I rarely see international students venture in this direction. In some cases, this category consists of students following their entrepreneurial faculty advisors; in many others, it's an expression of the great self-confidence and independence needed to be an entrepreneur. I would argue the Ph.D. is helpful for these students by exposing them to the possible opportunities for a high tech start-up.

My observations suggest that the kinds of jobs that Ph.D. students in engineering seek and find after their graduation (and to some extent, even the richness of their experience in graduate school) are very much a function of their individual motivation when they enter the Ph.D. program. This, in turn, depends on several factors, including (1) whether they have had prior exposure to an industry job before coming for the Ph.D., (2) whether they are international students, and (3) their risk-orientation. It would be nice to see these hypotheses investigated  more systematically through quantitative surveys. 

Preserving the Innovator's DNA

An article in the Wall Street Journal by Peter Sims, titled "The Montessori Mafia," provides further evidence of the benefits of early childhood education that focuses on freedom by giving more names of creatively successful Montessori-educated people (See also my earlier post "How to Make it Big"):

...the Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia: Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, videogame pioneer Will Wright, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, not to mention Julia Child and rapper Sean “P.Diddy” Combs.

Sims points to a study which suggests that these are not isolated examples:

The Montessori Mafia showed up in an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think. Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products. 

“A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity,” Mr. Gregersen said. “To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).” 

I dug around for more information on this study. It was in fact conducted by three researchers, Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen from Harvard, and published under the title "The Innovator's DNA" in Harvard Business Review, December 2009. Their study concludes that there are five key "discovery skills" characteristic of creative executives:

• Associating: Making connections between different concepts
• Observing: Paying attention to learn what works, and how
• Experimenting: Trying out new things, dealing with failure
• Questioning: Expressing curiosity
• Networking: Seeking out interesting people to learn from

These are very the much the traits I seek in my graduate students, and I have learned from experience that they are extremely rare! This is surprising because these are things, in fact, that all small children do naturally (until they are "schooled" out of these behaviors by a lifetime of highly structured education). Gregersen says exactly this in an article about their study posted online at INSEAD Knowledge: 

Gregersen says the five discovery skills may seem ‘intuitive’ but when it comes to the actual practice, “doing them is counterintuitive.” That’s because the adult world in which we live “does not value these actions.”

Gregersen’s advice? Start acting like a child again: “Not 100 per cent of the time, that would be absurd. We’re adults and we have to run businesses. But 20 per cent, 25 per cent of our time, act like a four-year-old again,” Gregersen told INSEAD Knowledge. “Because all these skills are what four-year-olds do. They ask thousands of questions: ‘Why?’ ‘Why not?’ This and that. They’re always asking those questions … They observe intensely and they’ll talk to just about anybody.” 

“These are the things that we all did as four-year-olds. We all did this stuff. And if we happened to attend a Montessori-type school like many innovative entrepreneurs did, then we still might be doing this stuff. But most school and corporate systems consistently say: ‘Don’t do it, stop doing it’ … and we lose our innate creative capacity.”

The connection is really quite simple. If we expect our workforce to be creative and innovative, their education has to allow them a lot of opportunities and freedom to exercise these skills.

The problem with standards

Alfie Kohn has written widely about freedom in education and unconditional parenting.

Here's an article by him on the danger of standardizing education: "Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests".

Kohn argues that in all the concern about testing in schools, we may lose sight of the point that the very existence of uniformized standards is a threat to learning.

He writes:

We have heard the phrase "standardized testing" so often that we may have become inured to the significance of that first word. To what extent do we really want our students to receive a standardized education? At a national conference last fall, a consultant announced with apparent satisfaction that now, thanks to standards-based reform, "for the first time in my experience, people on a grade level, in a subject area, or teaching a course at a high school are [feeling] a responsibility to all have the same destination." That she did not even feel it necessary to defend this goal says something about the current acceptance of a one-size-fits-all model of education. 

Once again, the problem is not just with the construction of the tests, but with the uniformity of the standards. Wanting to make sure that students in low-income communities don't receive a second-rate education is a laudable objective. Wanting to make sure that all students in your state receive the same education, such that they are treated as interchangeable recipients of knowledge, is a very different matter. Even more troubling are grade-by-grade standards. Here, the prescribers are not just saying, "We expect students to know the following stuff by the time they're in 8th grade," but "We expect them to learn all the items on this list in 5th grade, all the items on that list in 6th grade," and so on. Apart from the negative effects on learning, this rigidity about both the timing of the instruction and its content creates failures unnecessarily by trying to force all children to learn at the same pace.

Reading this leads me to some introspection. Each time I give a mid-term or final exam in any of my classes, am I not treating all students in my class similarly as "interchangeable recipients of knowledge"? Is it not what I do whenever I "follow" a standard syllabus or adopt a textbook? The moment we package a set of facts or tools or approaches into the rigid curriculum for a class, we enter a danger zone, that should be navigated with a great deal of care.

We should be leery of all attempts to ensure that everyone "knows" the same things about the subject, because they generally imply a naive view of knowledge as an objective collection of facts and methods. But the veneer of objectiveness obtained, for instance, by the adoption of a standard textbook, masks the sheer subjectivity of the process of putting together a class.

Consider the new course I have been developing at USC on wireless networks. It is  informed entirely by my own readings and research, and is not how the course is taught anywhere else. Say I were to write a textbook based on my course notes, and it were to be adopted as the textbook for a class in another university some day. The view of the students on the subject is then shaped in a peculiar fashion (perhaps irreparably) after my tastes. Somewhere an employer will glance at a student's transcript, and noticing that he/she has taken a course on "wireless networks" and gotten an 'A' on the subject, will assume that he/she "knows" something useful about the field. Yet this knowledge, as *all* knowledge that can be acquired in or outside a classroom, is fundamentally subjective because its very roots were subjective, shaped and colored as they were by my experiences.

While my arguments about the subjectivity of knowledge may seem particularly compelling in the context of emerging new subjects, I argue that the situation is fundamentally no different even for "ossified" old subjects. Here decades of textbook writing may seem to have lead to a consensus about the "core" body of knowledge in the field, but the converged point of view is very much a function of how the original texts were written and organized.

The only saving grace about the college environment, in contrast to the more rigid standardized curricula in schools, is the far greater freedom students have in selecting their program of study.