Saturday, June 27, 2020

RESPONSES TO TWO COMMENTS


Opaque asks, “What is the most influential force contributing to the dominance of STEM funding? Is it a historically enacted policy? Is it just the most marketable aspect of any university in today's higher education industry? Who does it appeal to and where do the expected returns come from? Immigrant and middle class families with bourgeoise values hoping their kids will make more money than they did? Or is it an international force of "new money" coming from students overseas hoping to get an American education? Why STEM in particular?”

An interesting series of questions. I am not sure I can answer all of them, but I can offer the following remarks based on my observations over the past 60 years or so. So far as I can see, there are three reasons why the STEM fields command the attention of university administrations. First, the STEM fields bring in outside grant money which, especially when it comes from the federal government, brings with it very large sums of overhead money which then go into the general university coffers. This is, by and large, soft money, which is to say money that can be used in a variety of different ways. The second reason is that there is a constant demand in the corporate world for graduates of the STEM fields. The third reason is that more and more, professors in the STEM fields have monetized their laboratory discoveries by forming companies to profit from them, and universities have been quite successful in compelling the professors to share their profits with their home institutions.

Let me tell you one lovely story about how things work in the other direction on occasion. For a long time, MIT turned out engineers who went on to get good jobs in corporate America. But about 50 years ago, the MIT administration realized it had a problem. Their graduates would do quite well in their new jobs, rising through the ranks, until about 10 years in they ran into a stone wall because when they became eligible to ascend from the engineering specialties to management, their lack of polish acquired in the humanities and social sciences made them less attractive candidates than their counterparts from schools like Harvard or Princeton or Yale. So MIT decided that it would buy itself some humanists and social scientists and require engineering students to spend little time getting culture. Being MIT, when it went looking for an economist it chose Paul Samuelson, and when it went looking for a linguist, it chose Noam Chomsky. I know about this because my first wife, a literary scholar, got a job teaching at MIT. I guess it worked, because to this day, MIT requires its undergraduates to spend little time a outside the laboratory.

Jerry Fresia remarks:  “Republicans have to be thinking...if Trump dropped out and we Repubs nominated a halfway sane "moderate"....Sleepy (I prefer "Creepy") Joe would suddenly be in trouble, given his baggage and his charisma-challenged campaign ability.”

That occurred to me also, but then I reflected, if Trump drops out it will be extremely important to him that whomever the Republicans choose to replace him should fail because if that replacement were to win the election, it would brand Trump as the loser. I will make a little bet: if Trump drops out, claiming that the election is rigged or whatever, he will do whatever he can to take his followers with him, telling them not to vote in a rigged election. If he were to do that, even Joe Biden, with all his faults, would win.

12 comments:

  1. No, if Trump has to drop out, he hopes and prays the Republican candidate will win because he will obviously make a deal with the Republican Party that any Republican president elected will pardon him completely for all his crimes.

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  2. Wrt STEM, shocking news from down under:

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-20/study-arts-and-humanities-government-fees-tertiary-education/12374124

    https://medium.com/@antonyeagle/changes-to-australian-higher-education-funding-an-attack-on-expertise-89b1659e845

    Wrt Trump flight, also discussed here this morning:

    https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Jun27.html#item-1

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  3. Thank you for the response! The MIT story is very resonant. I quit my job as a software engineer at a startup earlier this year, and one of the reasons being that I realized my true passion lies in academia and the humanities. As a first generation Chinese American, it's not a familiar path in my family and community. Had I recognized this sooner, I might've committed to a major in Philosophy and spent more time getting to know the professors whose courses continue to inspire me today. I intend to pursue a PhD, but it is going to be a long, unconventional road. Wish me luck!

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  4. The MIT story reminds me of this old chestnut. In their twenties, people wish to know more about their majors, in their thirties about management, in their forties about business, in their fifties about health, and in their sixties about theology.

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  5. Opaque,


    Best of luck in your new path! That reminds me of the great Robert Frost poem, the Road not Taken. Do you know it? If you don't, I'd wager that you'll like it.

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken

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  6. Opaque,
    Good luck, and it's probably not a bad thing you have your background as a software engineer to fall back on or hold in reserve, so to speak. Though I hope you won't need to use it...

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  7. As R McD notes, there is a push for "STEM" graduates in Australia, too. It's not completely clear how this will work out in practice, because of the (overly) complex formula used for funding students and universities here in Australia, but it's pretty clearly designed to reduce the places in "Art" (i.e., humanities), law, and most social sciences. This seems to fit with the general anti-intellectual, anti-culture approach of the "liberal" government here. They want narrow, technical graduates, and will pursue this, even if it harms the otherwise pretty strong university system.

    With MIT, the philosophy department there was mostly founded by Hilary Putnam. (I'm not sure if Putnam was a Maoist at the time yet or not, but he soon would be if he wasn't yet. Thankfully, he would eventually move on to saner views.) He took Jerry Fodor and Jerald Katz with him - both were very recent grads from Princeton, where he'd taught before - and soon hired John Rawls. Of course, Putnam and Rawls moved to Harvard before long, but by that time, MIT was established as a top philosophy department, and remains so.

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  8. MIT has many excellent non-STEM departments.
    Also, the line about universities make lots of money from professors having to share profits from inventions? Not so much. Somebody studied this some years ago and it turned out that that was true of about 5 universities.

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  9. Opaque - I suspect long and unconventional roads are the most interesting, challenging and productive. Good luck.

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  10. In addition to climbing the corporate ladder, humanities help STEM graduates in another way. Twelve years ago my son graduated from MIT majoring in Chemistry and Biology and in the process took more than required Humanities courses. He still has not gotten a stable academic position, but he is relaxed and worry-free, thanks to the nonSTEM courses.

    Just like our host, I have spent all my fifty earning years in universities. Until about ten years ago, I could publish my Chemistry findings, however trivial, immediately after the work was completed. Now, I have to apply for a patent before sending it to a journal.

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  11. The Salk vaccine was never patented.

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  12. Good point. On the other hand, the right set of prosecutors could do as they did with Agnos: threaten him with serious jail time or resign. Maybe they could even get Pence to fall on his sword, he's such a dim wit anyway. Can't believe top Repubs aren't scheming as we speak.

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