Category: Society

The overscheduled maths student

… at Imperial College.

Some say that young people today are overscheduled, but I didn’t realise how bad it had gotten until someone showed me the sample student timetable posted by the maths department at Imperial College. Some highlights:

  1. The student spends up to 6 hours on music practice on some days.
  2. Working on problem sheets starts only at 11 pm, and lasts for an hour, and only on Mondays and Tuesdays (and maybe Wednesdays, when “study time” is planned).
  3. Monday and Tuesday are also the only days on which lunch is planned.
  4. Two hours of “self-help” are planned on Thursdays, perhaps a therapy group to cope with the stress and lack of sleep.

On the weekend (schedule available here) she spends hours on French assignments, but again doesn’t get around to doing her problem sheets until 11 pm on Sunday night. Five straight hours of orchestra rehearsals, though.

student timetable

“Buyer’s market”

When did the values of the market become a substitute for ethical standards? I found myself wondering this in reading this article in Inside Higher Education about a young philosophy PhD who was offered a tenure-track job at Nazareth College in New York, replied with an enthusiastic email attempting to start a negotiation about starting salary, sabbatical, maternity leave, and limited teaching in her first year. Although she made clear that she didn’t expect all of her requests to be possible, the university responded with a brusque retraction of the job offer. Now, the misogyny of philosophy departments is by now well established, but this smackdown of a young colleague who has just been selected as the best available for a job in your department, merely for making some requests, seemed shocking to me. Not to the commenters on the IHE blog, though, who may be supposed to be mainly higher education professionals. Some sample comments:

She has too many requests and this is always a sign that a person is going to be a pain in the *&*%. Her requests on balance are not unreasonable but she is in no position to ask for all of this — it is a buyer’s market. … Lots of great people to choose from so why saddle yourself with someone who is challenged right off the bat.

several substantial requests, the sum of which went beyond the pale for hat-in-hand applicants.

You just spent a semester narrowing hundreds (or more) candidates and arguing for this ONE person… only to have them forward THAT? Not exactly who I want to spend the rest of my career with (not to mention that the person clearly felt they were ‘playing with house money’ and could afford to lose the job offer… someone who REALLY wants the job wouldn’t risk that message).

(To be fair, some comments are supportive of the candidate, and others take on other issues.) What fascinate me in these responses are these references to a “buyer’s market” to which the presumably arrogant candidate should have meekly submitted, with the clear presumption that the logic of the market is proper and just. If you are in a powerful position, where you can take advantage of those unfortunate enough to have qualifications that are in high supply and low demand, then of course you should, and no one could be surprised if you do. It’s an argument that is rarely applied to those who are robbed at knifepoint by those stronger or more ruthless than themselves, but it does show up in certain comments on rape and on international relations. It’s the belief that power creates its own justification.

I am frequently reminded of Nietzsche’s remarks on markets in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science):

Kaufen und verkaufen gilt jetzt als gemein, wie die Kunst des Lesens und Schreibens; Jeder ist jetzt darin eingeübt, selbst wenn er kein Handelsmann ist, und übt sich noch an jedem Tage in dieser Technik: ganz wie ehemals, im Zeitalter der wilderen Menschheit, Jedermann Jäger war und sich Tag für Tag in der Technik der Jagd übte.

Buying and selling are common skills nowadays, like the art of reading and writing: Everyone is accomplished in it, even if he’s not a businessman, and practices every day, just as in earlier times, in the days of primitive man, everyone was a hunter, and practiced that skill every day.

One last point: The largest number of commenters fault the young scholar for her “tone”. Everyone knows, apparently, that you don’t put this sort of thing so baldly in an email, for God’s sake! Obviously they had no choice but to rescind the offer when she attacked them with an EMAIL that clearly laid out what she would like. This is pretty hilarious, given how much philosophers pride themselves on their ruthlessly direct style of academic disputation, with some of them arguing that the would-be philosophers with excessive numbers of X chromosomes can’t hack it.

The meaning of inversion

Probably some clever semiotician has written about this, but the recent bizarre affair of La Quenelle got me to wondering: “When is an inversion not a significant inversion?” Or rather, when does a physical inversion not invert the signification?

The lewd gesture, invented by the French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala (described by The Independent as a “black French comedian”, for some reason)  is described by The Independent thus

An arm with an outstretched finger is pointed at the ground. The other arm is folded across the chest. The hand is placed on the first arm, showing how far up your enemy’s backside you wish to slide your “quenelle”. This hand is sometimes moved suggestively upwards.

Anyway, the gesture has been described as anti-semitic, and the above-linked article describes how a footballer has been punished for performing the gesture on the field. How can a gesture be anti-semitic? one wonders. Is this like the joke about the woman who calls the police to complain about the man who whistles bawdy tunes when he walks past her house? Continue reading “The meaning of inversion”

Hackers will be hackers

Guardian reporter Luke Harding has published some background material on the reporting for his new book The Snowden Files. Apparently someone in the security services decided to play with his mind while he was reporting on them. Not only did he and other reporters have laptops stolen (including from a locked hotel safe), not only did both the Guardian offices in London and in Washington, as well as the New York home of their US editor in chief suddenly have sections of pavement being dug up and replaced, but when Harding was texting his wife from Rio de Janeiro

“The CIA sent someone to check me out. Their techniques as clumsy as Russians.” She replied: “Really? WTF?” I added: “God knows where they learn their spycraft.” This exchange may have irritated someone. My iPhone flashed and toggled wildly between two screens; the keyboard froze; I couldn’t type.

And then, while writing the book at home in Hertfordshire,

I was writing a chapter on the NSA’s close, and largely hidden, relationship with Silicon Valley. I wrote that Snowden’s revelations had damaged US tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened. The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.

Over the next few weeks these incidents of remote deletion happened several times. There was no fixed pattern but it tended to occur when I wrote disparagingly of the NSA.

Now, this isn’t the worst abuse of human rights in recorded history. It’s just a prank. But exactly for that reason, it underscores a point I made back at the beginning of l’affaire Snowden: Fear of the techniques the NSA and its confederates have been developing, and in the data they gather, depends not on their being villains with nefarious intentions. It depends on their being careless mortals who have no idea what use their techniques and their data will be put to.

I doubt that there was any senior official who thought that tipping off a Guardian reporter to their real-time computer manipulation capabilities would be a brilliant idea. My guess is, some bored hacker assigned to monitor Harding’s computer got cocky, and decided to show off his electronic muscles. (It’s pretty intimidating, though. Presumably it would be child’s play for them to remotely plant child pornography on the hard drive of someone they’re eager to shut down. At least in the old days, the spies needed to break into your home to plant drugs.)

GCHQ and the NSA can’t exist without hiring hackers, but getting hackers to work on your security problems is like the old lady who swallowed the spider to catch the fly. (She’s dead, of course.) I like hackers, by and large. But I like them as scrappy underdogs. The combination of arrogant macho hacker culture with essentially unlimited resources and military organisation is, to put it bluntly, terrifying. And if the leaders of our security services think they can keep the hackers under control, they’re delusional.

4p per household

According to today’s Times, the NHS has decided to link all the country’s medical data and then sell them off to vaguely specified third parties, including pharmaceutical companies, is being delayed for six months. Not because anything is wrong with the plan, mind you, but because of a failure to “build public confidence”. Most striking in this context was the report on confidence-building measures taken so far, consisting of £1 million spent to send a leaflet “to all households in the UK”. Since there are 26 million households in the UK, that would amount to less than 4p per household to print and deliver the leaflet. Thus I am not surprised that a survey found that most people said they had not seen the information. (I certainly didn’t.)

Is Yahweh a constitutional monarch?

And was King David his prime minister?

I recently commented — as I’m not the first to notice — that an important advantage of having a monarch sitting formally on the throne, but prohibited from doing anything, is that it prevents the people wielding real power, like the prime minister, from putting on regal airs. You wouldn’t think such a silly trick would work, but it seems to.

It occurred to me that the origin of this trick could be seen in the political philosophy of the Hebrew Bible. God is repeatedly referred to as the King of Kings, and he is not at all pleased when Israel insists on having a king of their own. A king? he says. Are you out of your fucking minds? A king will be making war all the time. He’ll tax your grain and livestock. He’ll take your sons for his army and your daughters to serve in his palace. You’ll be slaves. “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” But even then, it’s a very limited sort of kingship, because the real monarch is the King of Kings.

It’s a perfect solution, for keeping kings in their place. Even Queen Elizabeth meddles in affairs of state. What better way to keep the regalia from messing with human politics than to bestow them on a deity who is (depending on your perspective) either too busy to get involved with human trifles, or simply imaginary?

I got to think about this again in reflecting on what I find one of the most fascinating stories in the Hebrew Bible, the story of the prophet Natan and King David. King David, the story goes, seduced Bathsheba, and she became, as the expression goes, with child. The problem was, her husband Uriah was a soldier out on a long-term deployment, so a pregnancy was liable to raise some eyebrows. No problem! He’s the king! He summoned Uriah back from the field, asked him for a report on the status of the front line, and then suggested he take advantage of the opportunity to see his wife. But instead, Uriah slept outside the king’s door.

David said to Uriah, “Have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house?” Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live, and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.”

The king got him drunk, but he maintained his scruples. So the king decided to have him “accidentally” killed in battle. That worked, and David could take up openly with Bathsheba.

Problem solved! One could hardly imagine anyone criticising Rameses for accidentally on purpose bringing about the death of one of his subjects; nor Nebuchadnezzar; nor Louis XIV, for that matter. The story is set up so that the death is a soldier’s death in battle. The only crime was in David’s intention.

But then comes the prophet Natan and announces God’s anathema (to be punished by the death of their firstborn child — when I read the story as a child, I of course thought, why is the child being punished for this?). Actually, he gets David to condemn himself, by presenting his deed as an anonymous case of a wealthy man who stole the little that his neighbour had.

I’ve always been amazed that people 2500 years ago were able to formulate the principle that everyone, even a king, even the most majestic of holy priest kings, must respect the basic rights and dignity of other human beings. And a king who violates this principle is no better than a common thief.

But what never occurred to me before is to think that part of the trick was to declare the absent god to be the real king, and the king on earth to be just another servant. It took another couple of millennia for the West to instrumentalise this lesson.

The Tory idea of education

David Cameron and his Bullingdon circle have education policies borrowed from the Wizard of Oz: Like the Scarecrow, the British public doesn’t need brains, it needs diplomas (see below). And why not? No one they know learned anything they needed to know at university except how to run away from trouble. The value of three years in Oxford for them was that they spent three years in Oxford, and that they were there together with other similarly situated scions of privileges. This is why they see nothing but prejudice in top universities’ reticence to admit the products of second-rate British comprehensive schools. They seem genuinely mystified by the notion that there could be any objective preparation that these children are lacking, preventing the top universities from admitting them to the charmed circle to which all good things flow.

Anyway, their new education initiative is to get more children learning about computer programming, dubbed the Year of Code. The director of the programme, one Lottie Dexter, explained in a recent interview, “You can pick up [learning to code] in a day.” Alas, her busy job didn’t leave her a day free to do it herself, so she knows nothing about programming, and she says she’s planning to space out this day of learning over a full year — minus the month that’s already gone. It’s not just that she lacks anything so crass as expertise in either programming or teaching; or that she couldn’t answer a question about what “code” is; or that her main qualification seems to be her excellent connections to the Conservative Party elite. Even for a non-expert her idea of what’s involved in teaching people this complicated skill are laughably vague: All about “getting people thinking about it now” and “by September they’ll be really excited”, and by the end she’s babbling about computer code as an international language fostering understanding between peoples.

Lottie Dexter explaining how to code reminded me of Monty Python explaining how to rid the world of disease.

 

 

The domestic elephant

I’ve long been bemused by the function of the elephant in the popular phrase “the elephant in the living room”. When it was invented by the recovery movement — I think in the 1980’s — it clearly was supposed to be both a shocking and ridiculous image. Families, it was saying, often deal with huge and obvious problems, such as addiction or abuse, by developing elaborate mechanisms for ignoring the very existence of the problem, that to an outsider seem both confounding and absurd. It’s as though you had an elephant in your living room, but acted as though you could pretend it wasn’t there.

The weird thing about the later career of the expression is that it has come to be an everyday expression — “That’s the elephant in the living room, isn’t it?” — as though it were perfectly ordinary to have such a thing; indeed, as though every living room has its elephants. I thought of this when I encountered an early use of elephants in the domestic setting, but with a different thrust. In Dominic Sandbrook’s history of Britain in the late 1970’s, Seasons in the Sun, there is a quote from Labour’s Welsh Secretary John Morris, acknowledging defeat in the devolution referendum:

If you see an elephant on your doorstep, you know what it is.

(The second episode of the new season of the BBC’s Sherlock made excellent comic use of the phrase, playing on its strange ubiquity. Giving a wedding toast to Watson, Sherlock reels off a list of some of their cases, concluding with “And then there’s the elephant in the living room.” For a moment it sounds like he’s switching modes, from the CV to something more personal, but then we have a split-second flashback to the detective encountering a real elephant in a real living room, and you remember that “The Elephant in the Living Room” does sound kind of like the title of a Conan Doyle story.)

“Institutions of Higher Perspiration”

“They don’t want to turn the universities into sweatshops. They’ll be institutions of higher perspiration.”

That was my conclusion about the trajectory to which our managerial overlords aspire, as I was trying to convince a colleague that he should support the UCU, the British academics union, and its escalating strike action. I walked the picket lines for the first time on Thursday, during our two-hour strike. There were about 20 of us there, and only a few were senior academics, which is somewhat disheartening. There were almost as many reporters as strikers, so I got to talk to    all of them. Their questions were interesting:

  1. Why do you think you deserve more pay, in this time of wage restraint? Other workers aren’t getting raises. I think they should join unions and demand higher wages too. It’s not a law of nature that we have “wage restraint” for everyone but the CEOs and fat-cat bankers. It’s a reflection of political decisions and power imbalance, and the effect of words like “time of wage restraint”. Continue reading ““Institutions of Higher Perspiration””