Archive for the 'Academia' Category

Memories of a doctorate

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on April 29, 2008
in Academia
. 2 Comments

An excellent piece in the Guardian today by Doron Shultziner on the state of graduate studies in Oxford has brought several sharp, recollective intakes of breath on my part. Shultziner outlines something desperately familiar to anyone who has studied as a graduate at Oxford in the last decade or so (I spent almost eight years there myself, doing my undergraduate degree and then a masters and doctorate): that the systems in place for supervision and for giving graduates a proper training in academic occupations like teaching and research are hugely variable and overstretched, and can leave many feeling profoundly isolated. As Shultziner begins:

About a year ago, two Oxford alumni published a critical review of their experience as graduate students at the University of Oxford. The former recipients of the prestigious Rhodes scholarship described “a frustrating academic experience” in an “outdated academic system” where advisers “spend more time avoiding emails than supervising students” and “where DPhil students struggle to have supervisors read their dissertations before submission, and poor supervision is the rule, not the exception”.

I feel especially torn because my own time in Oxford was, in so many ways, a joy and a privilege. As well as being the grateful recipient of financial support from my college, I found a supervisor and colleagues who helped me explore my field (20th century literature and philosophy) with a remarkable degree of freedom and flexibility. At the same time, the finest aspects of the system inexorably mingled with its worst: the flexibility and emphasis on individual relationships put huge pressure on contemporaries who didn’t get on with their supervisors, or who lacked direction or research experience; the often informal procedures associated with teaching and publishing left many feeling “out of the loop” and disillusioned with academia as a career choice; because everything was so personal and pressured, it could be difficult for those who were unhappy to do anything about their problems, even though structures of support theoretically existed. And there was a great deal of pressure on the notably limited resource of really good (i.e. willing and able to teach) supervisors.

I only rarely found myself hankering for the greater formality of a typical American graduate system during my time at Oxford. But this was not true of many other graduates I knew, who (especially in arts subjects) often seemed to feel confused and abandoned. For some, a high degree of freedom and independence ultimately proved an impetus to originality and self-reliance. But for others, the lingering suspicion that the system simply didn’t care about them enough, or contain enough checks and balances, was crushing. Graduates at Oxford are a privileged lot, and know they are. Most also burn with grateful ambition—a precious resource that no university should allow itself to squander.

Paul Kennedy

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on February 6, 2008
in Academia, History and United States
. 1 Comment

Over the last couple of decades, a number of British historians have been building up formidable reputations in the US. And by taking up positions on contemporary political debates, their names have become well known outside of academic circles; consider Niall Ferguson on empire and intervention, Tony Judt on Israel and antisemitism or Linda Colley on British identity. Paul Kennedy is another; the Newcastle-born diplomatic historian, who has been at Yale since 1983, turned himself into a hate figure for proponents of American power in 1988 with the publication of his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The final chapter, which looked at the prospects for the world’s two cold war superpowers, became infamous for its uncontroversial thesis that the US, following all great civilisations and empires of the past, was entering a period of relative decline and that the challenge for policymakers was to manage this decline.

Last night I saw Professor Kennedy speak at the LSE, where he has just taken up a new chair in international relations. In his lecture—which is well worth hearing; the LSE assures me it will be available as a podcast from its website within the next few days—he looked at the prospects for American power over the coming years, asking us to consider if a country with declining shares of the world’s population (5 per cent) and its GDP (20 per cent) can continue to account for over half the world’s defence expenditure, particularly considering the military challenges it faces from forms of “asymmetrical warfare” (though he considers these threats to come largely from other states rather than terrorist groups) and economic challenges, both in the form of its own massive deficits and the rise of international economic multipolarity.

Yesterday was “super-duper” Tuesday, of course, and Kennedy was inevitably asked who he thought would emerge victorious from the primary campaigns. He wisely chose not to make any specific predictions, warning us only that if we planned to bet on the outcome to do so with our heads and not our hearts. He told the story of how he held an election night party back in 2004. While his Democratic friends were depleting his wine collection by drowning their sorrows as it became increasingly clear that Bush had won, he was consoled by the thought that the £750 he had put on Bush to win at a British bookies, presumably at rather favourable odds, was about to come good.

(The Guardian ran an interview with Professor Kennedy yesterday, to mark his appointment at the LSE. Ignore the irritatingly cod-provocative headline; it’s worth a read.)

Bloom – and Plato – still provoke

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on September 28, 2007
in Academia, Books, Philosophy and What we're reading
. 13 Comments

Back in July, on its 10th birthday, I introduced the Prospect Reading Group to this blog, and wondered out loud why reading groups were treated with such suspicion.

I promised to share our future discussions, but as things would have it, the last meeting on August 30 was a real set-to, and I’ve only had time now to pull together a report. Anything I write will inevitably reflect my own views, but hopefully members of the group – and of course anyone else – will add their comments.

The discussion focused on a nonfiction/fiction pair: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, and Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow, which reportedly used Bloom as inspiration for the main character. In the scrum over Bloom, Bellow’s novel ended up receiving a good deal less attention.

Bloom is now dead but his arguments, first published in book form in 1987, are still part of a continuing debate. Even in our relatively homogenous reading group (professional, well-educated and international) there were strong and differing responses. Many members found his book pleasantly challenging: especially the last third, about the deficiencies of modern university life. But the unfamiliarity of the material to most members of the group could be seen as proof of his main argument, that people in the west lack knowledge of their own culture’s intellectual traditions.

Bloom’s answer is to insist that all university students be acquainted with Plato, and the broad narrative of Western philosophical thought, if the best of its values are to survive. Here, our group may have offered proof for another Bloom argument, that people are not only unfamiliar with the heritage, but also unsympathetic to it: some group members joined wider critics in finding him guilty of elitism, irrelevance or neo-conservatism.

I am not in that camp, and I don’t remember finding the book hard to read (another charge) although I see that I left unmarked the entire first section, where he vents ‘grumpy old man’ prejudices about modern life. But despite its faults I find it prescient: why else do we seem to have so little to say now in defence of western values, except that we are ‘free’ to wear skimpy clothing? (I know, I know, there’s more to it than that, but I am making a point).

I would add that the main reason why Bloom is associated with the right is that, at the time he wrote the book, the left had vacated the space where ‘values’ and western intellectual heritage could be reinterpreted in a positive light. In fact, since then, it has arguably re-entered that space, but that is the topic of another blog, or article, or book.

Academic spats revisited: one, two, many

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 14, 2007
in Academia and Psychology
. 1 Comment

One of Terry Pratchett’s neatest jokes in the Discworld novels concerns the troll (big creatures made of rock) system of counting, which entails only the words “one,” “two,” “many” and “lots”—a fact often cited by troll-haters as evidence of their stupidity. What the mockers don’t know is that troll numbers in fact follow a perfectly sensible quaternary system which begins “one, two, many-one, many-two, many-many, many-many-one…”

It’s a gag with a real world parallel: the Amazonian tribe known as the Pirahã, who lack the ability to quantify precisely any group of objects greater than two. And their language, as we’ve discussed in both the magazine and this blog, lies at the heart of a huge debate in modern linguistics, in which nothing less than Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar and the fundamental question of how language and thought relate are at stake.

In his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, the noted language and cognition researcher Steven Pinker has now weighed into the debate; and he offers—in my opinion—a brilliantly lucid exposition of just what it means when a remote hunter-gathering tribe cannot subtract three from six.

To conclude that the lack of precise number thoughts among the Pirahã is caused by their lack of precise number words is, Pinker argues, to make “a dubious leap from correlation to causation.” Instead, he points out, we need to realise that the idea of counting is very different to the idea of number:

It’s tempting to equate a use of the number five with the ability to count five things, but they are very different accomplishment. Counting is an algorithm, like long division or the use of logarithmic tables—in this case an algorithm for assessing the exact numerosity of a set of objects.

Thus, Pinker concludes, the fact that these hunter-gatherers have not developed a counting technique is no more a proof that language dictates thought than the fact that they have not developed a technique for building self-supporting stone arches. Indeed, the existence or non-existence of particular words in a particular language is not itself the crucial factor in whether a technique can be used by its speakers:

…the counting algorithm we teach preschoolers, like the more complex mental arithmetic we teach school-age children, co-opts words in the language. But it is not part of the language, like subject-verb agreement, nor does it come for free with the language… The prerequisite for exact number concepts beyond “two” is a counting algorithm, not a language with number words.

Responses will no doubt be pouring in already from those in the language-determines-thought camp. In the politest possible terms, I’m sure.

The Prospect Reading Group is 10

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on July 23, 2007
in Academia, Arts and culture, Books and British politics
. 2 Comments

What is it about reading groups? Never done anything to hurt anyone, but still a regular target for insult. Columnists sneer at an imagined coffee klatsch of middle-aged women, while authors veer between gratitude and suspicion. Earlier this year, Zadie Smith described the reading group as the enemy of the individual reader, a delivery mechanism for a conformist culture of ‘system reading’.

Contrary evidence doesn’t seem to dent the prejudice. A study by Jenny Hartley showed that reading groups vary enormously in make-up, reading habits and method. In a recent article updating her findings, she reported that nearly half of all groups in the UK are now mixed, not women-only, and their choices are highly unpredictable – some three-quarters of all books chosen by groups in her survey were read by only one group.

On the plus side, fans cite reading groups as proof of a flourishing literary culture, like the festivals name-checked by Gordon Brown. But they might also be a sign of failure: a cultish effort to seek out small numbers of like-minded people, in an otherwise uninterested environment. It is certainly a sign of fragmentation: with so many different titles out there, how else can one find a group of people who have all read the same thing?

Of course I am biased. I started a reading group 10 years ago, before they became fashionable. The group, drawn from readers of Prospect, is still going strong. Why did I start it? Because I read a lot, and enjoy discussing what I am reading with other people. The views of others bring fresh insights, and the effort of communicating makes me distill my own thinking. Why has it continued? Because other people feel the same way. Why do I bother to counter these attacks? Because the activity they are describing is unrecognisable.

In a reading group, we remain individual readers. We read on our own, and bring our thoughts to the discussion. It seems odd to assume that discussion equals conformity. There is some collectivity, which is not the same thing: we have certainly developed a collective memory, saved for posterity in monthly email reports. I hope eventually to put all 10 years of our reports in the public domain, to see if others find them interesting. An outside observer may even be able to find an implicit ‘system’ in our response, though I would say our group has resisted any totalising theories.

If there is anything that unifies our response, it is not critical theory but a form of poetics. Our group includes several writers and editors who are interested in how literature is made, from the maker’s point of view. One suspects that a more general audience is interested in this too, hence the success of commentaries like John Mullan’s Guardian book club series. But this only works when the audience is taken seriously. John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel, for example, makes a cynical (mis)calculation that it can get away with sheer waffle, because it is not for a ‘professional’ audience. Zadie Smith herself, who is including her essays on writing in a forthcoming collection, will find an enthusiastic market among reading group members – or may do so, if she can cut out the insults.

What does ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ mean in this context? As a professional wordsmith I believe there is a distinction, but also notice an interesting trend. In the Web 2.0 world of user-generated content, the task of selecting and evaluating content simply moves downwards, from supposedly elitist gatekeepers to the ordinary punter. In response, the ordinary punter has started to train for the task, and become a little more professional. Hence the interest in university writing courses and degrees in vocational media subjects. Hence also the move in our reading group from vague talk of what people ‘like’ (or not), to more disciplined discussions about the choices writers make. In other words, we are looking ‘at’ the work, not just ‘through’ it, as Richard Lanham puts it in The Attention Economy.

Prospect has not yet made too much of its ‘offline community’ of readers: this blog is a start. From the end of August, I shall be posting regular notes about our discussions. At the next meeting, we will be looking at Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, reportedly based on Bloom. I hope to see you here again.

• Read about the Bloom discussion here

• Read the October discussion here, on Measuring the World

RIP Richard Rorty

Published
by
Susha
on June 10, 2007
in Academia, In the news and Philosophy
. 1 Comment

The American analytical philosopher, Richard Rorty died on Friday.

In April 2003, Prospect published a portrait of him by Simon Blackburn.

Academic spat-watch 1: the war on Universal Grammar

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 1, 2007
in Academia
. 0 Comments

It seems that Philip Oltermann’s recent report for Prospect on a debate currently rocking the world of linguistics only hinted at how few toys are left in several academic prams.

On one side, we have the American anthropologist Daniel Everett, who after decades of working with an Amazonian tribe known as the Pirahã published in 2005 a study claiming that their language defied Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar. On the other hand, we have three distinguished Chomskyites—Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues—leaping to their guru’s defence. And it’s all getting rather messy. First, there came the trio’s 2007 response to Everett, which delicately suggested in its conclusion that:

Almost all the various grammatical properties discussed by Everett appear to be attested in other languages, and stand in no detectable law-governed relation to culture. In addition, as we conducted this investigation, we also repeatedly encountered respects in which Everett’s description of the facts are were at unacknowledged odds with previous research, both grammatical and cultural… we consider it particularly unfortunate that so much attention has been diverted… to the non-challenge launched by Everett.

Then came Everett’s somewhat less delicate response to this response. Its criticisms, he concluded, embodied:

…the utterly predictable, wearying, and rhetorically fudging tactic that is typical of Chomsky and his followers that there just is no alternative to his proposals.

He continued:

One can only wonder why, if NPR [Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues] are so interested in Pirahã, they have made no effort to do field research there of their own. Rather, they have limited their efforts to bibliographic research… This raises the question of how any discipline could produce the kind of eyeballing, armchair linguistics that NPR engage in… NPR fails to propose experiments or research to test my claims, but merely uses the library. This can only lead to the kind of pseudo-research that we see in this paper. On the other hand, this does not explain the more egregious attacks on my character at the end of NPR. I am only going to say about this that NPR has made an enormous effort to discredit my linguistics research and, for some reason, to also insinuate – again from contrived and decontextualized examples, that I have a prejudiced view of the Pirahãs. This is a sociological problem that I take up in greater detail in Everett (in preparation b).

Well, quite. We wait with bated breath for the great man—not normally short of an opinion or two—to settle the matter himself.

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