beliefs and science

Jfaber beat me to the topic, and I agree with him, but I want to add my small change.

Some would argue that Dr. Ross was fundamentally dishonest in working on research that he would later disavow, sort of:

And though his dissertation repeatedly described events as occurring tens of millions of years ago, Dr. Ross added, "I did not imply or deny any endorsement of the dates."

So, PZ Myers believes this means faculty should be more selective in admitting students with anti-science beliefs to graduate school. But it seems obvious that absent a total mind-scan, there is no way to determine whether a student is "working within the framework" that he/she fundamentally disagrees with and will later use the cachet of the credential to try and discredit.

I would also submit that Dr. Ross is an exception, in having managed to maintain cognitive dissonance between his young earth creationism and apparently sound paleontology. Most creationists, I reckon, either drop out of science Ph.D. programs or modify their worldview. On balance, admitting students who are eager to learn, but are burdened with contradictory beliefs, probably produces a lot more good than shutting them out. Which, as noted, is not practical anyway. Let a thousand flowers bloom, even if occasionally one turns out to be a prickly pear.

'Cause one kid had it worse than that, 'Cause then there was this boy whose parents made him come directly home right after school

Without comment, we'll start tonight with one of the best image captions of all time:

A grilled cheese sandwich, top, with an image of what some see as the Virgin Mary sold for $28,000 on eBay. Jesus Christ is seen in an oyster shell, a frying pan and a pirogi.

Anyway, form the same fine newspaper, another story on the Academy, this time in relation to religious kooks Young Earth Creationists getting geosciences doctorates. From the article:

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”
...
And, for some, his case raises thorny philosophical and practical questions. May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?

I don't find these questions particularly difficult to answer: no, yes, absolutely not.

Look, a degree is conferred upon a student for completing a specified body of work. Even under that standard, there is a tremendous amount of subjectivity involved, and the last thing we need to do is to add to that a level of psychological study of the candidate's motivations and future plans. If you happen to be a complete whackjob but produce a worthy dissertation, then you have earned a doctorate. Many a physicist was a kook while still in school, and a great many more became so later, but they are all PhD physicists just the same.

In the end, science progresses onward even though many people fail to understand it, even some of those considered within the scientific community. The structure that has been established, though, works remarkably well, and it is dangerous to go tampering with it, especially with regards to religion. For all the happy talk about coexistence between science and religion, they are occasionally orthogonal and frequently contradictory (see, e.g., the argument from Free Will for one example), and science really does do best to avoid any mention of religion in its internal workings. Sure, science has a role in interacting with and sometimes confronting religion, like with matters of homosexuality being genetically determined or making sure that evolution is taught in schools, but these are external interactions between science and society. In other words, religion doesn't have much place during a qualifying exam or dissertation defense: these are scientific rites of passage independent of religion.

A telling quote from the article:

Online information about the DVD identifies Dr. Ross as “pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences” at the University of Rhode Island. It is this use of a secular credential to support creationist views that worries many scientists.

Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a private group on the front line of the battle for the teaching of evolution, said fundamentalists who capitalized on secular credentials “to miseducate the public” were doing a disservice.

Using a credential to miseducate the public is a completely reasonable thing to fear, but it results from those with an agenda taking advantage of people's ignorance, and is used by all sides in the debate. People somehow believe that if you've earned a doctorate in anything, it makes you an expert. I can talk about economics endlessly, but the closest I ever came to an Econ course was when I skimmed through one of my wife's textbooks. Still, if I, a PhD, start talking about free trade, there are people out there who will listen. I'll admit, academics often throw their credentialed weight around in support of liberal causes, and the world is often better for it. In a perfect world, however, audiences would learn to be more skeptical, and try to learn a little bit about an issue for themselves. With regard to global warming, there are numerous Climate Science PhDs who don't believe in its existence, and most of them have been interviewed as experts on FoxNews by now. Said group also makes up a ridiculously small percentage of the total community of climate scientists, the latter of whom clearly have a consensus view that global warming is a severe problem.

Lest I make it seem that Young Earth Creationists in the academy are just swell, I have to admit that I am stunned by the philosophical nonsense being spouted by Dr. Ross. These theories aren't interchangeable "paradigms" that can be switched in and out like CDs in a changer. They make assumptions about the very way in which the world works, with concrete and fundamentally contradictory implications for the planet and the universe. To be honest, most of the classic syntheses of religion and science are basically nonsense. A God who meddles in human affairs has a wacky sense of scale, given that we are just vastly insignificant in the grand scheme, and the level of suffering we go through is simply inexcusable if a higher being cared about us. A god who performed miracles in the past but not today, or miracles just for a select few perhaps, is one with a strange sense of favoritism. If God is mere clockmaker and tinkerer, then he really isn't a moral force, he's something of an engineer or computer programmer. As I mentioned before, it looks like he/she/they/God/Goddesses didn't even grant us free will at all, and we just fool ourselves into thinking we do. If Dr. Ross couldn't deal with these ideas, then he's not much of a scientific philosopher, but he is, and rightly so, a Doctor in the sciences.

Well we got no class, and we got no principles

A story in The NYTimes just coudn't go by without some commentary:

Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits

The University of Phoenix became the nation’s largest private university by delivering high profits to investors and a solid, albeit low-overhead, education to midcareer workers seeking college degrees.

But its reputation is fraying as prominent educators, students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.

Let's be frank here, you can't see your academic quality "eroded" when it is rather unclear how well you stood within the academy to start with. They aren't ranked by the leading suspects like US News and World Report, and while many of their programs are accredited, several, including the MBA program, are not. In the article in question, the only quote defending the academic quality at UoP comes from their president:

In the interview, Dr. Pepicello shrugged off the bad news. Many top corporations still pay for employees to attend the university, he said, and the exodus of top officials has resulted from a healthy search for new directions. “We are reinventing ourselves,” Dr. Pepicello said.

That's not much of a stirring defense, but it's all you'll find.

Simply put, I doubt anyone has a decent sense of what the academic quality there was then or is now. No outside source was quoted in the article speaking up for the university at all with regard to either past or present. Several students were called upon to provide anecdotes, always a useful source of conclusive information, but all we really learn from them is that one professor hired by UoP seems to be "Doctoring" his CV by including a PhD that he never earned.

From the article, it is hard to conclude that the school has really changed all that much. It is an inexpensive option for working adults to get a college degree, which naturally has a low graduation rate because very few students will finish up within the required six-year timeframe if they finish at all. The quality is like what you'd expect from a distributed commuter/online University: highly inconsistent, with little way to really enforce standards. It is what it is, but I'm not sure if this story really did anyone justice.

Movin' on up, to the east side; we finally got a piece of the pie

For some reason, Michigan is always at the center of the affirmative action debate in the country. In 2003, the Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan's affirmative action framework, while approving the Law School's framework. This past November, voters approved a referendum ending any affirmative action policies enacted by the state government, ironically titled the "Michigan Civil Rights Initiative.

Now, the affirmative action debate is much like the abortion debate. Neither represents an ideal situation, but both are an attempt to forge an acceptable compromise in the real world. It's easy enough to call for them to be eliminated, but it doesn't really begin to solve the underlying problems (unwanted pregnancies and institutional racial discrimination in America) that they were put in place to solve. As far as affirmative action goes, it serves a vital interest for or society to have diverse college and university student bodies. During one's formative years, it's good to meet people different than you, and it makes you a better person. I swear that most of the stupidity present in our day to day lives involves people not being able to empathize with their fellow men sufficiently to act like decent human beings. This is as central to the mission of a college as the actual classes. I don't remember most of the details I once regurgitated for tests, but I certainly remember meeting people and broadening my horizons a bit. Now, the process is being short-circuited by a bunch of whiny white people, which drives me nuts. I swear, nothing in the world is more pathetic than whiny white people. If ever anyone needed to be played a symphony of the world's smallest violins, it is my whiny brethren who feel that after being given every possible advantage a society can give a person, they still need more.

The saddest thing about the whole kerfuffle is that it makes it almost certain that some kids won't get to go to college at all so that others have a better chance to go to the school of their choice (a choice made during their teenage years, no less). As noted by Megan at her place, people place way, way too much emphasis on which school they get into. In physics, for example, there are a few schools that going to for grad school can influence the rest of your entire career (the science-heavy Ivies, MIT, Chicago, Berkeley, Cal Tech, etc.). Simply put, if you want to teach at one of these it helps to have experienced them from the other side. For literally every other career goal in physics, to say nothing of a career in any other field, it doesn't really matter so much. I can't name the similar groups of schools for professions (Law, Business, etc.), but it works pretty much the same way. Notice I'm talking grad school, for chrissakes. I started at a 300-student college and ended up at MIT, after all. Simply put, it doesn't matter which college you start at, because there are so many transitions you'll hit later that it eventually washes out. Life takes so many twists and turns that the place you start from is basically insignificant.

This is why it is absolutely crucial that schools make sure to maximize the number of students who get to go to college, not the number of kids who get their top choice. Having to settle for #2, instead of a top choice, is a couple days worth of moping and then in some cases a lasting grudge (bite me, Harvard). The choice between going to school and not is life-changing. Angry white people, it's called a "safety school". Apply to a couple, and everything else will work out ok, and everyone will get the chance to meet people who look a little different and hopefully not be racist assholes for the rest of their lives.

There are still ways in which the University of Michigan may still be able to salvage affairs. Remember, affirmative action isn't even a particularly graceful way of achieving its goals, and using a different method with the same results shouldn't bother anyone. In fact, Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly points us to a study put out by The Century Foundation. According to him:

The study found that if it's implemented well, (a) income-based affirmative action produces nearly as much racial diversity as race-based affirmative action, (b) it promotes economic diversity as well, and (c) it actually produces higher graduation rates than either a pure merit-based system (test scores and high school GPAs) or a traditional affirmative action program. What's more, it's an approach that most of the public finds inherently fair.

This is utterly brilliant. While residual racism makes it easy to take away a program aimed at minorities, justifying it based on economic grounds doesn't have the same taint in today's culture. The argument in favor is very, very easy. The richer the students, the more money spent on their elementary and secondary education. We can eliminate economic-based college admission policies, but we could also pool all property-tax supported education dollars, and redistribute them equally to all school districts in a state I don't think that many suburban school districts really want to make that trade. Hopefully, Michigan comes up with a solution like this. Given their track record, I feel pretty optimistic that they will.

And it don't work out so fine, on this side of the white lines

Ok, that's a baseball reference, but we'll ignore that for now. For the moment, it's about time I mention my ridiculous addiction to sports. I watch freaking timber sports and curling when they're on tv, and I haven't yet touched on football even though college has one game left and the NFL playoffs begin in two days.

Like it or not, sports are a huge industry in America, and in many ways they represent a bizarre combination of progressive values (Jackie Robinson is rightfully considered a civil rights legend) and knee-jerk conservatism. In the latter category, we'll include the biggest evil of sports, the fleecing of taxpayer dollars for stadium construction by greedy owners when the money would be better used on public services, as well as the relatively overt racism contained in Native American-themed team names (Redskins), logos (Cleveland Indians), and mascots (our very own Chief Illiniwek and his supposedly dignified "Indian" halftime dance). Why do we put up with these blatantly racist symbols? Because it's tradition, I'm often told. look, slavery was a tradition, as was segregation, as was keeping Jews under quotas at universities, as was any number of other things. A wrongheaded tradition is not justified because it is longstanding; all that it indicates is that sometimes people are way too slow to change.

Besides the larger team-specific issues, it is useful to see how college football plays a role in University life across the nation. At UIUC, as with most Division 1 schools, football/basketball are the dominant non-academic social activities in town. Faculty may not in all cases pay so much attention, but there is an Illini poster in every administrative office in the building, and a huge percentage of both the student body and city population live and die with the team. It's a good thing people are so devoted, in a sense, because athletics programs cost universities a tremendous amount of money. From an article in CFO Magazine:

According to an analysis by the Indianapolis Star newspaper of the 2004-05 budgets of 164 public universities, just 9 percent of these Division I schools had athletic departments that were able to support themselves. The rest received a total of more than $1 billion in student fees, general school funds, and other subsidies.

Without the financial assistance, the average school would have lost $5.7 million, according to the Star.

"Except for a handful, they are all losing money," confirms Daniel Fulks, a professor of accounting at Transylvania University in Kentucky. Fulks, who analyzes athletic budgets for the NCAA, adds that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is getting wider. Many have-nots are trying to keep up, he says, but are destined to fail. "It's not so much difficult as it is impossible," says Fulks. "I call these schools 'the pretenders.'"

Athletics aren't some sort of fringe benefit of a college town, they are a choice to spend valuable resources on entertainment rather than academic endeavors. It can easily be debated if this makes sense or not, but the fact that universities make sacrifices for their sports teams is a vitally important missing piece of the national discussion. Let's just say that when Stony Brook announced a move from Division 3 to Division 1 (small athletics programs to larger ones) at a time when the nationally ranked Physics Department was facing a multi-year hiring freeze back in the late 90's, very few of us really agreed with the administration that the increased publicity would really make our degrees more valuable. Let's compare shall we, Nobel Prize winner on the faculty vs. a football team that has trouble beating Central Connecticut State on a regular basis: which is better for the students?

A clear example of the ridiculous scope of collegiate budgets is the hiring of football coach Nick Saban by the university of Alabama, a contract that will run $32 million over 8 years, going up to $35 million depending on bowl performance. Such a contract is big (very comparable to what the NFL pays), but not out of line with what big universities pay. The problem seems to be, in part, that many universities across the country see themselves as natural powerhouses (offhand list: USC, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Notre Dame, Virginia Tech, Florida State, Florida, Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Tennesee, LSU), but there are only ten premier bowl spots out there, along with a bunch of minor bowls that only bring in a fraction of the attention. Thus, many universities pay huge amounts hoping to shoot the moon, only to come up short by millions of dollars at the end of the year, having often compromised their ethical guidelines regarding students when it came to recruiting, class attendance, and treating them as amateurs. There's a running joke I have: when people unfamiliar with college football ask me if the players are paid, I generally answer "Not as much as in the NFL", which may be more true in reality than the official answer, "no". Even sadder is that many college athletes really do blow off college, including the ones with no hope of a pro career. Let's face it, maybe one or two of the Illini from this year's crop will make the NFL, if that; I can't believe 98% of the team was intensely focused on academics during their time here. The rest probably wasted the best free ride they are going to get for the rest of their lives.More later on whether college athletes should be paid officially, rather than under the table.

For the meanwhile though, I should note that for all its problems, college football can be among the most exciting sports to watch in the known world. See the end of the Boise State cinderella upset for the most recent example, featuring a hook-and-lateral on 4th and 18 to tie the game in regulation, and a Statue of Liberty Play (?!?) to win it in overtime. It was amazing to watch.

Ohio State by 17, BTW, 34-17 over Florida for the championship.