The price of teaching

I have always been wary of evaluating faculty members based on the amount of money they bring in. One of the casualties of American academic science in the latter half of the twentieth century was that it commodified research, and money became a much bigger part of the equation. Research groups started to bear a striking resemblance to corporate outfits. Undoubtedly there were benefits to this practice since it brought in valuable funding, but it also tended to put a price on the generation of knowledge, which seems inherently wrong.

Now it seems that Texas A & M is thinking of turning this kind of valuation into official policy. As Chemical & Engineering News reports, TAMU is planning to rate its faculty based on their "net worth". This would be calculated based on the faculty member's salary, the funding that he or she can generate, and teaching (how on earth are they going to financially evaluate that?)

Sorry, but I think this is hogwash, and others seem to agree with me. The "worth" of faculty members goes way beyond the funding they can procure. There may be professors who bring in modest amounts of money but who inspire generations of students through their teaching, who significantly contribute to the public perception of science through science communication, and who generally contribute to the academic environment in a department simply through their passion and strong advocacy of science. Even from the point of view of research, there are faculty members who publish relatively less, do research on the cheap, and yet steer their respective fields in new directions simply by generating interesting ideas. Very few of these qualities lend themselves to spreadsheet analysis.

In fact, I will go a step further. If a faculty member does little more than inspire generations of students to pursue careers in science research, education and policy, there is no metric that can financially measure the worth of such contributions. Simply put, such contributions may well be priceless. That should easily satisfy Texas A & M's criteria for high-value "assets".

Can natural sciences be taught without recourse to evolution?

That's the question for a discussion over the American Philosophical Society museum website. I think the answer to the question would have to be no. Now of course that does not mean it's technically impossibly; after all before Darwin natural sciences were taught without recourse to evolution. But evolution ties together all the threads like nothing else, and to teach the natural sciences without it would be to present disparate facts without really connecting them together. It would be like presenting someone with a map of a city without a single road in it.

In fact natural sciences were largely taught to us without recourse to evolution during our high school and college days. Remember those reams of facts about the anatomy of obscure animals that we had to memorize. If it wasn't the hydra it was the mouse. If not the mouse then the paramecium. I can never resent my biology teachers enough for not connecting all these animals and their features through the lens of evolution. What a world of difference it would have made if the beauty of the unity of life would have been made evident by citing the evolutionary relationships between all these exotic creatures.

In fact "Evolution" was nothing more than a set of two clumsy textbook chapters that got many of the details wrong and left countless other facts wanting. Granted, some of the teachers at least had good intentions, but they just didn't get it. Teaching biology without constantly referring to evolution is like asking someone to learn about a world without using language. Would you teach physics without recourse to mathematics? Then you should not teach biology without recourse to evolution, at least not in the twenty first century.

THIS IS HOW SCIENCE SHOULD BE TAUGHT

The Viki Weisskopf way

From Jeremy Bernstein's review of noted physicist Victor Weisskopf's 1991 memoir. Bernstein first took a class from the utterly brilliant and impenetrable Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger at Harvard. After a couple of days of withstanding the barrage, Bernstein decided to attend Victor Weisskopf's class at MIT. The result is endearingly described:

My visits to Viki's class in quantum mechanics at MIT were, in every way, a culture shock. The class and the classroom were both huge—at least a hundred students. Weisskopf was also huge, at least he was tall compared to the diminutive Schwinger. I do not think he wore a jacket, or if he did, it must have been rumpled. Schwinger was what we used to call a spiffy dresser.

Weisskopf's first remark on entering the classroom, was "Boys [there were no women in the class], I just had a wonderful night!" There were raucous catcalls of "Yeah Viki!" along with assorted outbursts of applause. When things had quieted down Weisskopf said, "No, no it's not what you think. Last night, for the first time, I really understood the Born approximation." This was a reference to an important approximation method in quantum mechanics that had been invented in the late 1920s by the German physicist Max Born, with whom Weisskopf studied in Göttingen. Weisskopf then proceeded to derive the principal formulas of the Born approximation, using notes that looked as if they had been written on the back of an envelope. Along the way, he got nearly every factor of two and pi wrong. At each of these mistakes there would be a general outcry from the class; at the end of the process, a correct formula emerged, along with the sense, perhaps illusory, that we were participating in a scientific discovery rather than an intellectual entertainment. Weisskopf also had wonderful insights into what each term in the formula meant for understanding physics. We were, in short, in the hands of a master teacher

The trick in any class is not to let the students know how much you know (the Schwinger technique) but to let them know how much you, and indeed everyone else, do not know.