OK, this Dean Dad fella substituting for Dr. B got me a little sniffy with his first post (telling little kids easy lies about heaven is a pet peeve. Dead is gone, sugarcoating it is the first step to a life of delusions), but his latest is much more interesting and sparked some cranky comments—is it just me, or are the trolls on a hair-trigger everywhere lately?
Anyway, it’s a good snarl.
It’s not unusual for downsized or early-retired professionals to show up asking for faculty positions, thinking that we’ll be tripping all over ourselves for the opportunity to bask in their reflected glory. They present themselves as willing to take one for the greater good by settling for a job I spent years in poverty to prepare for, and felt damn lucky to get. In the few occasions in which folks like that have been hired, when I’ve been around to see it, they’ve ranged from acceptably average to constant-pain-in-the-neck. They’ve never excelled, or even risen above average. They don’t want to; as far as they’re concerned, they paid their dues in ‘the real world,’ and they’re coasting across the finish line by teaching. No, thanks.
I have never been on the administrative side of academia where those kinds of decisions are made, but I’ve met a few people that match that description. They think because they had successful careers and rose to bank president or regional manager of a department store or whatever, all commendable accomplishments and good on you, etc., that they now have exactly the right stuff to inspire and train college students. Nuh-uh. Stay away. If you ask me, they are exactly the wrong people to bring in to the university.
We already have a perception problem, with the increasing commodification of college degrees and the narrow b-school mentality that says the measure of the worth of an education is in how well it profits the students after graduation…where profit is measured only in how many more pennies the person will earn. People who have found happiness in the prosperity of the upper middle class tend to be superficial and uninteresting. Give me instead beach bums and street poets and activists who’ve found something of worth in the unconventional, and that’s where you’ll find deeper inspiration for students. Unfortunately, they’re also not the kind to collar college administrators and inspire them with tales of fat donations.
Oh, and do look at the comments. I’ve also noticed that those people who are most proud of their bourgeois accomplishments can be awfully thin-skinned when others are unimpressed with the size of their money-pile and the hard work they put into acquiring it.
Hey, while I certainly agree with you that it is tiresome to hear people measure themselves by their incomes, I’m not sure a reverse-snobbery that claims “People who have found happiness in the prosperity of the upper middle class tend to be superficial and uninteresting” is much better. Through various hobbies I’ve met people from all sorts of income levels and I haven’t seen much of any correlation between people’s income and how interesting I find them.
Sure, but my point isn’t that rich people can’t be interesting, but if they’re interesting it’s not because they’re rich.
I think you’re overgeneralizing here. For instance, a lot of good can come from having software engineering courses taught by people with industry experience. There are simply a lot of principles that don’t seem very important when you’re working alone on a class project that suddenly make sense when you’re working on a large scale system involving numerous developers of varying ability and fuzzy requirements.
There are courses in computer science that are best taught by academic researchers–algorithms and complexity theory come to mind. But I’ve had courses in more practical elements of computer science such as databases and object-oriented design taught by people who have never had to apply any of it, and these have been dominated by insufficiently motivated toy exercises and the enumeration of disconnected principles. I would much rather learn this kind of material from someone who had experience applying it.
Granted, having retire bankers teach Plato isn’t going to be a big win, but specific kinds of experience actually can aid in teaching specific disciplines.
One of the math professors at my college came to us from industry. His advanced degree is in engineering rather than in mathematics. As the California aerospace industry contracted, he decided to seek an academic position. First, however, he enrolled in a transitional program at a state university that equipped him with some of the pedagogical tools he would need in the classroom. As a result, today he is an effective instructor whose industry background provides his students with an added dimension (the personal perspective of the needs of a professional).
He did not come to us with the expectation that we would fall all over ourselves in gratitude that he would deign to seek employment at our school. Of course, it might have been different had he swaggered over to us with wheelbarrows full of money in his bank account (but then he wouldn’t have needed the job, would he?). Still, I’m pleased to report that we have in the ranks of our math department at least one downsized professional who is happy in his academic position and is a demonstrable asset rather than a pain in the fundament.
Perhaps, but my observation of my own former-professional Computer Science teacher is that he uses his experience in industry to justify completely schizophrenic grading standards and draconian deadlines, which may be good preparation for surviving in the professional world but makes learning anything useful that much more difficult (I have not, to date, asked him how many people he knows of who learned to swim by being dropped from a low-flying aircraft in the middle of Lake Michigan). That and the exercises mostly consist of trying to replicate the functionality of programs he’s written…to the point where if you add idiot-proofing measures where he didn’t think to you get marked down for not adhering to “specifications.”
And don’t get me started on the Microsoft fanboyism and deliberate obfuscation on the relationship of software prices and piracy. He’s apparently under the impression that developers are nice, warm people who want to give us software for only $10-15 dollars and would if it weren’t for all them mean ol’ pirate poopyheads (which anyone who understands the most basic principles of capitalism can see is ridiculous; companies will charge what they think they can get, and always have). He has also said (almost verbatim; I am not making this up) “yes it’s a vicious cycle, but it’s their [the pirates’] fault” (a vicious cycle for which responsibility can be assigned to one party is a logical impossibility unless the other party or parties’ actions are genuinely and completely deterministic).
PZ:
I agree with that. But not all street poets are interesting, and if they are, it’s not because they’re poor.
I gave up on my academic ambitions after pondering the thought of 300 other people applying for the handful of junior faculty positions that might be out there. For years now, I’ve been engaged in the less quixotic task of accumulating wealth to provide for my retirement and my progeny. I don’t feel any special pride here, since it’s actually easier and less risky just to settle down and make money than to try to succeed as a professor anywhere. But I’m also insulted by any suggestion that this makes me superficial or uninteresting.
Speaking of superficial and uninteresting…
Suceeding by accepting society’s standards does not automatically make one an interesting person. Nor does rejecting society’s standards. Pointless, mindless bias towards the “unconventional” is possibly the most tedious convention of all.
Azkyroth:
Yeah, some professors who come from industry are total duds. I just meant that the experience can provide additional perspective, and that certain courses cannot be taught effectively by someone without practical experience.
What might actually work better is to have a professor who does some consulting on the side or has had an industry sabbatical.
Eh, he seems to be an adequately averate teacher in terms of students’ actual learning, aside from encouraging students to mindlessly adhere to predefined standards and avoid improving anything, but he’s certainly nothing special and a real pain in the ass to take classes under.
Absolutely.
A few commenters here seem to be interpreting this to mean that prosperity leads to being superficial and uninteresting. Pay attention to this part of the sentence: “… have found happiness in the prosperity … .” PZ’s absolutely right — someone satisfied by mere prosperity is going to be pretty shallow, more devoted to the apparatus of prosperity than in an individualistic approach to the world’s mysteries.
As for:
I’m not so sure. Yes, it can be stimulating and even mind-expanding to learn from someone who has taken a very different path in life than ones own. But having spent a significant amount of time with poets and activists, I have to report that their approach to life, however different, is often as bounded as any yuppie’s. There is much to be learned from the exposure, but you’ll find an equal measure of self-obsession and circular thinking in either camp.
Quick reality check:
A high percentage of rich people are greedy, self-possessed fools.
The vast majority of people want to be rich.
A high percentage of people who aren’t rich are also greedy, self-possessed fools.
The lesson? We should avoid the temptation to yield to stupidity merely to forward our own prejudices. (And I’m still looking at you, Myers.)
I was reminded of a New Yorker article from Oct. 2005, titled “Getting In”, about the Ivy Leagues and how they’ve selected an admissions process which doesn’t correlate to intellectual achievement, per se, but rather the financial fruits of success. My favorite part of the article was about how the Ivy’s wanted to avoid being a University of Chicago:
Indeed. Endowments from lab rats and writers and activists don’t typically measure up…
I’m a regular reader of Dr. B as well – the take I had from it, and I think that DD tried to bring out in the comments, is upset more at the sense of entitlement and “everybody can teach” and that it’s somehow slumming it to take on a class or two. There are people who work for several years of college and beyond solely to be prepared to teach, then spend all of their careers doing so, only to have retired (usually wealthy) people tell them “Hey, I’ll grace you with my presence and dazzle you with my superior real-world knowledge and help you poor schmucks out some, and isn’t that grand of me?”
I think that’s the attitude he’s railing against, not wealth per se.
I have some experience interviewing and hiring for my science department at a public high school in California. And I have seen the “second-career” candidates who seem to act as if they are doing us a favor by applying for our job, based on the fact that they have used science in their jobs. It’s a little better at the high school level because of the credentialing requirements: most people who aren’t serious about learning the skills required to be an effective teacher don’t finish the credentialing program. But we still get our share of ex-research scientists and yes, Ph.D. college professors who do not appear to have the first idea about teaching to high school students.
On the other hand, one of our best teachers is an ex-engineer who switched careers for reasons of personal fulfillment. He came at his new career with a sense of humility and a willingness and desire to learn the skills of teaching. He did not come in with the attitude that “I’m going to show these lowly teachers everything I know.” A recognition of excellent teaching as a unique skill set is becoming less common these days, it seems.
At my Uni, there is a professor who worked for years for big corporations in the paper industry. I don’t know about other people, but for him the varied experience of both profession in industry and research & teaching has made him a major asset to the college. His classes are not boring, either, to say the least. The ability to take real world experience and apply it to classroom learning is very important, whether a professor of science or any other degree. It is the very thing that brings ones level of teaching above the rest, at least in my experience.
As an engineering student, I’ll say that my field is one where industry experience can be a very strong asset. However, I’ve only seen it well done from youngish (under 50) profs who left industry specifically because they wanted to teach at a uni level. The older once-pros who retired and then hit the school really did seem to suffer from an entitlement complex that turned me off.
I’m still an undergrad now, but have ambitions of PhDs, research, and teaching. I may feel even more hostile then to ex-pro slummers than I do now. Then again, I may mellow.
I currently live in a college town and most of my interactions are with artists, musicians, activists, street poets and other assorted bohemians. Back when I had a Real Job, I would often rub shoulders with the rich and successful, and as a boy, I grew up around the dirt-poorest white trash you’ll ever find. It’s been my experience all three groups – and most others, I’d wager – if taken collectively, ain’t worth the oil it’d take to boil ’em in Hell. It’s individuals that make the heart sing…but that’s all neither here nor there.
I majored in journalism in college (minored in philosophy and sociology, so I’m completely worthless now), and it was the school’s policy that all the professors had to work for a specific amount of time (I wanna say a year, but it’s been ten for me) in the professional world. They could go a specific amount of semesters without, if they so chosed, but they always had to put in some time at the salt mills. Some got around it by writing books and hosting summer classes for high school kids, but even then, if you taught Reporting for more than x amount of semesters, you had to spend some time sitting through endless city commission meetings for some rinky-dink local rag.
Personally, I think it had a beneficial effect. For instance, one the guys who taught Editing – helluva cool dude otherwise – fought like hell to stay in the classroom. In fact, he wormed his way out of having to do “real work” for almost seven years. End result was he taught us layout and paste-up using paper and broadsheets, which no newspaper does. Now, as someone who’s seen the inside of more than one small-town, nickle-and-dime weekly, learning how to paste copy by hand is certainly useful, but the Professor didn’t get into computer layout until deep in specialization. In other words, only editing majors learned modern editing techniques – which means computers, basically – so a whole lot of my fellow classmates lacked that particular weapon in their journalistic arsenal.
Granted, I don’t know how this would play out in other fields, but I do think it’s nice to have the balance if it can be done. I never noticed any sort of specific assholery from those who spent a great deal of time in the pro world, but then again, journalism isn’t like computer science. ‘Course, this was all before the pundit explosion of the late ’90s, which pretty much obliterated what little integrity one carried when one called oneself a “journalist” (and part of the reason I’m no longer one, but that’s neither here nor there).
idlemind:
Point taken. I guess I wasn’t reading carefully. I’ve occasionally commented that if I were to die with no distinction but having accumulated a lot of money, that would be about as interesting as if I had accumulated the world’s largest ball of string in my garage. Actually, the string would be a little more interesting, since I’d be in a more elite crowd than the McMillionaires. That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in getting wealthy, but it’s a means to an end–some level of security, mostly–and I’m not consumed by it.
Could be worse, you could have a retired banker as your school President. Talk. About. Disaster. The man didn’t even have a BA and he was running a graduate school (when his regime finally ended after six years, I’m convinced he still had no clue what a school actually does).
In fairness, we did gain accreditation during his tenure, which was why the board hired him (the two primary concerns of the accrediting body being the fast turnover of presidents and running any sort of deficit). But it was not pretty.
Not to reverse the thin skin issue, but having been in the IT universe, and been on the interviewing side. We almost never hired anyone with a masters in CS and never anyone with the Ph.D. in CS as they almost universally were unable to program, design or develop anything in the real IT world.
On the other hand when I tutored Java ( a language I almost don’t know) I was constantly ‘teaching’ whenever I was on campus. And even the Java Professor noted that I had better attendance (of my assigned group) than his own class.
But this may be a Computer Science issue more than an general academic issue as CS has evolved so quickly that textbooks and information get propagated to the universities after their utilization in the real world.
(I still have an argument about un-computability with Turing)
One of the worst teachers I have ever had, met this issue very well. Computer science is a very fluid field, and this teacher was 5 years out of the industry. He was teaching from a text book that was 15 years old. For instance, very few people were on the internet 15 years ago. That’ll give you an idea on how out-dated what he was teaching was!
As a creative person in a corporate environment, I couldn’t help but laugh a bit. I can tell you that I’ve met people that seem to fit this description, and they’re just as insufferable when they are still employed by a corporation. They’re the kind of person that assumes that because they are good at making money for their company that their personal aesthetic taste is superior as well. It’s laughable at best, and bad for business at worst.
Part of the problem in computer science programs that I’ve seen is that they are computer science programs and not technological in character. This was the perennial complaint of students in the undergraduate program at McGill when I was there. McGill has now set up software engineering programs to fill that void. Whether these are properly technological I don’t know, but it seems to be a good idea (at least) to me. It would be in such programs where students could expect to encounter more of those with industry experience. I might add also that the undergraduate course I did in “file systems and databases” was explicitly divided into (applied) science vs. technology.
usagi: Let me get this straight – you went to a university which was run by a guy without even any experience as a student at one? That sounds crazy. (Already at the places I’ve been at people complain that the administration loses touch with what goes on in the classroom and laboratory …)
(Off topic reply) Branedy: You do (re: Turing? There’s actually a minor movement of semidubiousness that has begun to seriously examine what is called either superTuring computation or hypercomputation, etc. One crucial finding is that many textbooks make subtle errors in presenting the uncomputability results that makes them appear slightly stronger than they are. The other of note is that most text books mangle the history of the field, but that shouldn’t be so surprising.
Branedy:
Probably showing my “thin skin” here, but this merits a response.
I know lots of excellent software engineers with masters degrees, though it is not a prerequisite for excellence by any means. PhDs are more of a rarity in industry (I’m one) but your generalization is absurd. Google hires plenty of PhDs–with good reason, because they are trying to do things that have never been done before. When you get beyond routine applications of standard OO design patterns, you need someone who can apply original insight and advanced theory to solve hard problems. Not all such people have PhDs, but there is often a correlation between an ability to find original solutions and the tendency to pursue a graduate education. A PhD doesn’t give you the ability, but people who have it may pursue PhDs. I also know software engineers who quit industry to go back to grad school precisely because they wanted to gain a deeper understanding of computer science.
I’m not sure what you mean by the “real IT world.” Obviously, there are areas in which practical experience is the key to success, but when developing novel methods, an ability to think clearly and deeply is more important than “real” skills, which are entirely teachable to those so inclined.
There are CS PhDs who don’t really want to do software engineering and probably do look like idiots, unable to download some open source package, find the right JDBC driver, figure out that they are probably going to need to tunnel through the firewall, and so on. There are others who can do that and more. I don’t claim that your experience is entirely inaccurate, just that you’re working with too small a sample to draw any conclusions.
Keith Douglas:
I’m not really sure what errors you mean. Clearly many problems are incomputible for a Turing-equivalent computer limited to performing discrete operations and terminating in finite time, the halting problem being the most famous. The notion of recursive (computable in finite time) and recursively enumerable languages (e.g. the set of halting TM programs) is rigorously proven and covered reasonably well in many texts.
BTW, this should also not discourage anyone from writing compiler tools that try to analyze halting behavior, since it is computable for a robust subset of computer programs that people actually write. Except in rare cases, you probably don’t want to implement an algorithm that cannot be shown at least to halt. If computability theory is misleading, it may be because of the emphasis on worst cases instead of typical cases.
Personally, I think that complexity is a more interesting topic. Lots of things are computable using some variation of dovetailing, but that’s just entirely uninteresting. You can “solve” any bounded optimization problem by enumerating all possible solutions, but this kind of solution is worthless on existing computers.
The original quote refers to “downsized or early-retired professionals”, who are a subset of people who have been in industry and now want to move into teaching. A higher proportion of this subset will have left their industry job involuntarily and without having done well enough to be able to give up full-time paid employment. In some cases, their attitude as described will in fact be a cover for a sense of failure, rather than a genuine sense of superiority.
PaulC: What I had in mind is the halting problem (for Turing machines) is often presented with the crucial assumption that the putative DoesHalt? function is itself another program omitted. If it is a non-Turing “device” of some kind (e.g. a Siegelman network) the argument fails. What such a thing could actually be is another story (the subject of some research by myself, actually), and of course such a thing has its own halting problem, and so on up the hierarchy. And I agree with the partial halt checker – I think the next stage in computation will be realizing more and more that heuristics rather than algorithms in the mathematics sense are necessary. (This is what Penrose could not see in the debate over AI, as it happens.)
As for computational complexity, you’re right from the perspective of most people. Examining critically the assumptions and matters there is a very important field too.