Stardate 20020928.2003

(On Screen): The University of Southern California (USC) has embarked upon a $100 million program to improve its faculty, through a combination of building of new facilities and attempts to hire top-drawer talent.

University officials said on Saturday that the hiring program would boost by 25 percent the full-time faculty at the university's College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, which includes such departments as comparative literature, economics and biology.

I am finding aspects of this announcement rather puzzling. I went to Oregon State University, and like most universities it was divided into several colleges, along subject lines. There was a school of Science (which I attended) and a school of Engineering. Since OSU was the state's cow-college, it had a very large and strong School of Agriculture. There was a school of Liberal Arts. Given its traditional importance in the state, it's hardly surprising that there was a large school of Forestry.

Biology was in the school of Science, with mathematics and physics and chemistry and OSU's world-class oceanography department. Lit and Economics were in Liberal Arts, along with Philosophy and PoliSci.

That doesn't seem to be how it's divided at USC, though. I can't figure out what kind of school within a university has a theme which would justify putting biology and "comparative literature" together. Except, perhaps, for the PE department, what wouldn't fit in there if both of those make sense?

It appears that the "college of letters, arts and sciences" is a garbage can where they dumped everything that didn't fit into one of their 17 "professional schools", which cover architecture, business, cinema-television, engineering, law, medicine, music, theater, and several other specific courses of study (accounting). It seems really quite odd that they have a separate school of engineering but haven't somehow separated science out from such things as "ethnic studies" and "comparative literature". What a strange place it must be that puts mathematics and art history right next to each other.

Later in this article, I read the following:

The money will go for salaries, labs, support staff, moving expenses and housing aid, focusing on "high-profile" candidates for professorships in life sciences, urban studies and globalization, and language and culture.

Higher education officials said USC's move could fuel bidding wars for specialists, particularly in "hot" areas such as genomics, bioengineering and ethnic studies.

And it made me very sad. Have we really reached the point where academia no longer considers itself to have any obligation to actually do useful work? Have we reached the point where "hot" areas are not based on utility? When did physics and "urban studies" come to be given the same kind of respect?

Through most of the 1970's and 1980's, "hot" areas were those which were in demand economically because they were valuable. I guess I'm just too much the pragmatic engineer; it seems to me that a college degree really should be about making a career, not about somehow feeling better about one's self, or learning how to be angry all the time.

Why is "ethnic studies" a hot area? Why, in fact, is it an area at all? Listed among the departments in USC's college of LAS, you have the usual suspects:

Political Science
Physics and Astronomy (grouped together? well, maybe)
Mathematics
Linguistics
Chemistry
Biological sciences, oceanography, molecular biology
Earth Sciences
Economics
Psychobiology
Psychology
Philosophy
Neuroscience

These are the fields which train the research professionals who create and extend the science on which future engineering fields will be based. Putting students into these fields is a long term investment in the future of our nation and our species. (Students in engineering pay off sooner, but you need both, because today's engineers use the knowledge gained by yesterday's scientists.)

Some will wonder why I've included philosophy in that list. All I can say is that if you'd actually studied philosophy in college, you wouldn't wonder about it. I almost changed my major from computer science to philosophy, and if I had graduated it would have been my minor. I first began taking classes in philosophy when I studied logic and set theory which, although taught in the philosophy department, were considered math credits by the School of Science (which meant that they didn't satisfy my requirement for humanities credits, much to my disappointment). At the time it seemed odd to me that they were taught in the philosophy department, but now I think it was exactly right. Philosophy studies the most deep questions there are. It studies epistemology, which tells us how we know what we know and how sure we can be about anything. Philosophy studies the process of thinking, with the intent to learn how to think effectively and clearly so as to arrive at correct conclusions without self deception or mistake. What I found was that philosophers had the same kind of thought processes and mind set as mathematicians, and the philosophy I studied has served me well as an engineer and as a man. In many ways, philosophy is the most basic study there is, and every other field uses its teachings.

Well, most other fields do. Some deliberately abjure it, and declare that everything that philosophy teaches is an aspect of the euro-caucasian capitalist conspiracy to hegemonize the virtuous downtrodden ethnic peoples of the world by making them abandon their legitimate alternate views. It's really a shallow rationalization for the destruction of everything not derived from the legacy of estrodeficient melanodeficient western "civilization". It is eurochauvinism. It is intellectual imperialism. It is insensitive!!!

I would venture to say that on most campuses you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone more likely to be contemptuous of postmodernist literary theory than the professors in the Philosophy department, because they better than anyone understand that pomo theory is no substitute for clear thinking, and that anyone who contends that "logic" is local and cultural is an idiot.

Fortunately, those working on physics and chemistry haven't fallen for that kind of claptrap and they're busy making all sorts of valuable progress which is going to change the world. For instance, molecular biologists have spent the last fifty years trying to understand how DNA works, and though there is much yet to learn, they've come far enough so that their work has already begun to spin off engineering and medical advances. They started slow, but this is the kind of field where progress increases exponentially, and now they're up the curve and progress will be much faster in the future.

The physicists have been making all sorts of progress in materials science. From them we've gotten semiconductors and to such esoteric things as synthetic ceramics which have all kinds of amazing and extremely valuable characteristics. Once the chemists got their hands on quantum theory, they began advancing in leaps and bounds, and modern polymer chemistry is already one of the technological foundations of our civilization. When I was a kid, saying that something was "made out of plastic" was a dismissal, a statement that it was cheap and inferior. You sure don't think that now. Such modern plastics as polycarbonate or Mylar or Kevlar are simply the best materials available of their kind for some applications.

That is, to me, part of what academia should be about. It's not a cushy place for professors to go and die, it's about actually studying and thinking and trying to push the bounds of human knowledge in hopes of learning stuff which turns out to be useful, as well as working to help train the next generation of great minds.

Thus says the engineer, who is perhaps a bit too tied to pragmatic utility. Still, the value of the work in those fields is undeniable even to those not as enchanted by pragmatic utility as I am, and every top-bracket student who studies them is an asset to this nation and our species.

Grouped right along with those at USC's school of LAS, you also have the following:

African American Studies
American Studies and Ethnicity
Asian American Studies
Chicano/Latino Studies
Gender Studies

Perhaps these are important things. Perhaps they deserve study, though it's not at all clear that it couldn't be better served by merging all these together. But the pragmatic engineer asks: what will the graduates in these programs do once they leave school which is as important as helping to figure out how genes work, or helping to improve our knowledge of the structure of the earth (earth sciences) or to improve the way that we make collective decisions (political science and economics), or analyze how the immune system works, or study electron movement in doped semiconducting crystals?

What are they actually studying in those schools? Are they engaged in long term research projects?

It's certainly not the case that everyone involved in these programs is drinking the pomo koolaid. I would never claim that. But even for those who have not, I'm having a hard time figuring out just what good any of these things are.

Why, for example, aren't they all part of the Anthropology department, or perhaps the Sociology department? What are they doing which is distinct, besides being visible?

It strikes me as a waste, and it makes me brood. Our human capital is the most important asset we have. It is what has made this country what it is. We have the largest economy in the world and a disproportionately large amount of the world's best scientists and engineers who are working to keep us advancing. It's made us wealthy and powerful and helped keep us free. Engineers know better than anyone else that people are not interchangeable, and that one top-bracket mind, one single person, can be the difference between success and failure on an engineering project. We can't afford to waste our best minds on drivel.

I commented once on the fact that I used to work in a group which was as ethnically mixed as even the most staunch liberal could have hoped, except for the fact that we had no black men at all. We had H1-B's and green cards and citizens. We had men and women. We had white Americans, white Canadians, white South Africans, Czechs, Russians. We had Pakistani Muslims, Arab Muslims, Indian Hindus. We had Chinese from the mainland, Chinese from Hong Kong, Chinese from Taiwan, Chinese who were born in the US and didn't speak a word of Chinese. We had a Sikh who wore a turban. (His parents emigrated to Canada; he grew up in Toronto.) We had some people whose ethnic background was extremely complicated, true children of the world. We had gays and straights. (Two of our women managers lived together.) We had the best minds we could hire, but none of them were black men.

It wasn't because of any discrimination by us, it was because no black men sent us applications. We were desperate to hire good engineers, and didn't give a damn what they looked like, or where they came from, as long as they could contribute and make us glad we'd hired them. That was all we cared about. But you can't hire what doesn't exist.

I find myself worrying about all the top bracket black minds which are being wasted. They aren't studying engineering. They aren't studying science. You go into those programs and you'll see whites and Chinese and Indians but no blacks and damned few latinos. What are they studying? A lot of them are over in the "Black Studies" or "Latino Studies" department. What are they learning there? What will they do when they leave college? Will we as a nation be glad that they studied those things? Will they make the kind of contribution that the students in science and engineering make?

I don't think so. And perhaps that is part of why I think that these kinds of departments shouldn't really exist. I'm sure that this is a more-than-controversial concept, and that I'm going to get an earful in my mailbox about "empowerment", but it seems to me that these should not be separate disciplines. They ought to be in the sociology department and they should not collectively have anything like the kind of staffs that they do, nor the kind of visibility they do, and in particular they should not have as many students as they do.

It may be that there is good work going on in those departments. But I cannot believe that there is anything like as much as we would get if those professorial seats and money were invested in more practical subjects. And I emphatically believe that those departments are a waste of good students, who would not only benefit this nation more but also benefit themselves more if they actually studied something that helped them get ahead in life with a real career.

What I fear is that these departments are actually the last and greatest bastion of tokenism in this nation. For universities, the existence of a large and prestigious "African American Studies" program is a badge, something to be worn on the sleeve. They are trophies, ways of being holier-than-thou, ways of proving how open-minded and liberal and unbigoted the institution is. Millions of dollars are spent each year on programs like this primarily so that the university can say that it has one.

Millions of dollars are wasted each year on programs like this, primarily so the university can say it has one. Taking the national collective academic might of all the minority-studies and gender-studies departments, what have they actually done that was worthwhile? Among the very few significant intellectual achievements I have heard of that they have actually made a contribution to has been the development and spread of postmodernist literary theory, which I consider substantially harmful.

Another major contribution of African American studies programs specifically has been the intellectually-bankrupt concept which became known as "Afrocentrism", the contention that essentially all the important philosophical and scientific and mathematical concepts of the ancient world that we ordinarily credit to the Greeks and Romans were actually developed in Africa and stolen by the Europeans who then tried to claim that they invented them. Usually this centers on trying to prove that it all came from Egypt.

Conspicuous by its absence is any acknowledgement by Afrocentrists that the ancient Egyptians, and almost everyone else in ancient Africa who lived north of the Sahara Desert, whatever they may have been racially were not Negroes. The implication in these texts is invariably that Whitey actually stole everything from "Us", where "Us" is people descended from ancestors coming from sub-Saharan Africa. Through the trick of using "African" to mean two different and contradictory things simultaneously ("Negro" and "Everything on