the university in 20 years 2

•2 April 2018 • 5 Comments

The world is a wise thing and I need to become a better listener to what the world is whispering in my ears and shouting in my face.

I wrote yesterday a few words, no more than an abstract of an introduction really, about the university in 20 years.  No sooner had I written than TED emailed me the link to a talk by Erica Stone.  She talks about open access but much more than that.  She talked about researchers engaging with local media, sharing their results and using them to improve their local communities.

And I will admit, as much as I enjoyed her talk, that it hit something in me that I’ve been thinking about for a long time now, and it raises a question.

I am a pure mathematician, a geometer, working in a relatively small corner of the pure mathematical universe, which is itself just a part of the larger and wider mathematical universe.  So how would I explain my research to my next door neighbors and the people I work with?

I have one answer, which I don’t find particularly satisfactory I have to admit.  I can explain non-Euclidean geometry, which is the area I work in, and I can explain why non-Euclidean geometry is relevant to the world around us, but by using work done by others.  Not using the work I’ve done myself.  (But don’t worry – I won’t do that here.)

I think perhaps I’m suffering from the academic equivalent of the mid-life crisis, the need to do something different to leaven all of the same that I’m doing from one day to the next.  Or perhaps I need to view it as being the opportunity to start a new part of my journey.

Because I can keep doing the research I’m doing, writing the papers I write for the small audiences that will read them.  But I can do more than that.  I can start actively asking the question, how does this all affect the world around me, rather than waiting for something to find me.

I seem to be starting lots of quests at the moment, but I think they’re all tied together.  How I work as a academic mathematician.  How universities work.  How education works.  The connections might be loose at the moment, but we’ll see what we can do to bring them together a bit more tightly.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life, mathematics

the university in 20 years

•1 April 2018 • 1 Comment

I’ve just read The Enemy Within by Mark Leach of WONKHE, and I found it a fascinating read.  As with all things, not everyone will agree with all that’s written, but he does touch on some of the political issues currently facing universities in the UK.

But more than just these current political issues, higher education in general, not only in the UK, is facing a number of issues.  The open access debate continues to rumble on, about ensuring that publicly funded research, or research in general, should be made available to all.

And while it is clear that the impact of technology on the education of students at all levels will be massive, it is not yet clear how universities will adapt and how the mission of universities will change over time.

I read what things I can get my hands on, from articles at WONKHE and HEPI, to things I acquire via Twitter and colleagues and elsewhere, and I occasionally speculate on my own on various small aspects of this general question, including the hither and the thither and the yon.

There seems to be a general consensus developing, of the university as the engine of local growth, integrated with education and business in its area, and for me this is a much more attractive idea of a university than the recently traditional view of university as ivory tower.

And for me, the question then becomes, how do we get there from here.  Like the math questions that I ponder when I have the time, I find the detail of this question fascinating, and like other questions, there isn’t a quick answer.

Rather, I think, there’s a process of change that we as universities need to undertake.  We need to take our facility for critical reflection that we are so readily able to turn on our work, the work of colleagues around the world and even our students, and turn it on ourselves.  Because I’m confident we can find answers that work for us, and even amidst everything, we can reshape ourselves into the universities we need to become.

I don’t know what shapes universities will have taken in 20 years time, but I am curious to find out and I’m looking forward to being part of the process of getting there from here.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

a quest to understand how we might best learn 1

•24 March 2018 • 4 Comments

I have been teaching in higher education for just about 30 years, starting during my time as a graduate student. I like to think that I have become over those years a reasonable teacher. My students enjoy my classes, by all reports, and I feel comfortable in front of a group of students.

I have had some small amount of training in teaching over those years, and I’ve also developed and delivered some bits of training for my colleagues. But for all of my experience, accumulated over time, I have come to realize that I have a gap in my knowledge. And I want to bridge this gap.

Bridging this gap is going to be a quest of sorts, and it is not one that I’m going to be able to undertake on my own. Nor it is a quest I should undertake on my own. It will be a slow going quest, because I’ll have to learn about and explore areas of human knowledge that are significantly beyond what my personal area of expertise. But then, this is the sort of quest that I enjoy. And it’s never too late to start the quest.

How it is that people learn?

We are creatures of flesh, our minds running vaguely like software on the physical structure of our brains. There is a conversation to be had as part of this whole investigation about memes and the role of memes in the evolution of the brain. There is a conversation to be had about how our brains and society have evolved in tandem with one another. There is a conversation to be had about the physical environment in which our distant ancestors evolved.

But in all the time I’ve been teaching, I’ve not yet been involved in a conversation about how our physical infrastructure affects how we learn, and this is what I wish to understand. And it has come to seem very strange to me that we don’t have a greater appreciation of how we learn. How can we teach effectively if we don’t understand how we learn.

I can speculate on one reason for this, and it goes into an even deeper question. This deeper question is the extent to which we as individual human beings understand how our own brains work. Because I’m convinced, from what little I know about psychology, that most people have no clear idea of why we do the things we do. Our brains do an extremely effective job of hiding their inner workings from us.

But this is speculation, and uninformed speculation at that. And so part of the quest will be, just what do we know and how might we use that to help us be better teachers. And to be better people.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life, mathematics

beware, there be spoilers: Player Piano

•25 February 2018 • Leave a Comment

OK, so perhaps I’m being a bit overly cautious, warning of the possibility of spoilers for a book first published in 1952.  But I don’t know whether you’re planning on reading it, and it’s quite an enjoyable read.  My reading plan for the year 2018 is to read (among other things, it’s an extensive plan) the complete works of Kurt Vonnegut, and Player Piano is his first novel.  I should say, this is not intended as a book review but rather, I would like to use Player Piano as a bit of a stepping off point.

Interestingly enough, it’s not hard to view Player Piano as smack in the middle of science fiction genre-land.  A brief summary for those who haven’t read it (yet): After a war following World War II, much production in the US has been automated, and the machines and their decisions are beginning to take over in ways that many people find uncomfortable.

People lose their jobs if they are found unworthy by the machines, and are then become part of the great unwashed, provided with the necessities of life except for value.  Their skills are recorded on tape and punch cards, and then the people are cast aside.  And this is the foundation of the rebellion, into which the not entirely intrepid Dr Paul Proteus gets drawn.

What I found most interesting is how this book fits into a growing body of work on the dangers of the machine world.  I would have loved to spend an evening in a bar with Mr Vonnegut, discussing the basic thesis of his book and its relationship to what’s happening now, though now much more quickly and much more extensively.

There is a fundamental difference between what is happening now and what happened in Player Piano.  There, the machines were not aware and they were operating under the rules we gave them, and we still had an understanding of these rules.  At no point did the machines make a decision that was incomprehensible to the characters in the novel, however much they might have disagreed with that decision.

Now, though, expert systems and deep machine learning allow computers to develop their own algorithms, and we sometimes don’t have any idea of what is going on inside these algorithms.  In fact, we will at some point come to a point where the level of complexity and information required for those algorithms will be beyond the capability of the human brain to handle full stop.  And this is beginning to worry some people.

Our stories are becoming full of machines that run amok or otherwise behave in ways we don’t understand, following an internal logic that’s foreign to us their creators.  And this I think is going to make for a very interesting future indeed.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

zen and the art of administration

•28 January 2018 • 2 Comments

I am not a scholar of Buddhism in general or of zen in particular.  I’ve done some reading over the years, dipping in hither and thither, but nothing systematic.  I like Stephen Batchelor‘s interpretation and much of my thinking on zen has also influenced by the connections between zen and martial arts, which isn’t surprising after having studied and practiced aikido for some 20 years.

Legend has it that Ueshiba Morehei O’Sensei, the founder of aikido, had no time for zen.  I will admit that this gives room for the nagging question in the back of my mind, a small quiet but nonetheless persistent question, of whether I’ll be able to do O’Sensei’s aikido without having O’Sensei’s view of the world.

But then the louder, more realistic and somewhat more reasonable, voice comes in and says, you’ll never be able to do O’Sensei’s aikido anyway, given y’all’s different paths through life, and so don’t sweat it; just do the best you can.

And this is a very zen attitude, as I have come rightly or wrongly to understand zen.  It goes back to the old adage, which I read somewhere but for which I didn’t note the source: there’s no point in worrying about the things over which you have no control.  And there’s no point in worrying about the things over which you have some control. As Yoda says, Try not.  Do.  Or do not.  There is no try.

But what does all of this have to do with being an administrator?  One of the basic tenets that I take from Buddhism is that the world is as the world is, whether I pay attention to it or not.  I have the choice of recognizing the world as it is or not, but the world abides and doesn’t care or notice the choice I’ve made.

So part of being an administrator is keeping an eye on and being aware of everything.  This is hard to do and is impossible to do alone, and this realization has played a large part in how I’ve tried to develop and structure my approach to administration.  I have always tried to view myself and to act as one part of a much larger team.  After all, the more eyes we have surveying the horizon, the more of the horizon we can see.

And this brings up another aspect of this line of thought, which is that of contingency.  I’m aware that contingency is a word that has multiple related meanings, but the meaning I’m using here is one thing depending on another.

Large organizations are complex.  One change hither may well cause or require a change thither.  A butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the organization, and sometime later there might arise a small storm elsewhere in the organization.

And so any change, however local, needs to be considered with an eye towards its contingent effects elsewhere.  The conservative view would be, make then no changes, but I don’t see this as a reasonable view to take.  One reason is that the external environment, the rest of the world, is constantly changing and so the contingencies will always reach far far beyonds the bounds of the organization and it’s impossible to ignore these external changes.

But we can’t ignore these external changes or the need for internal changes in response to each other and to the external changes.  And so all we can do is to think through the contingent results of these changes and to shape ourselves as best we can in the face of them.

I’m sure that these ideas have been explored by others, and if you’re reading this and have come across these or similar ideas before, I’d be interested in sources.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

the shining city on the hill and the great white whale

•13 January 2018 • 2 Comments

I suspect that my memory is a bit suspect on this, which given the time that’s passed wouldn’t surprise me, but I have the memory from an AP English class in high school that the shining city on the hill is a reference from Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, an allegory with the subtlety of a 2×4 upside the head. The shining city on the hill was the goal towards which the hero Pilgrim was journeying along the Straight and Narrow Path, through the Slough of Despond and the other stops along his journey.

The shining city on the hill has become a not uncommon reference, one that I’ve used on more than one occasion, as the end point that we might not reach in our efforts. But while we might not reach the shining city, we need to have a goal towards which to work. Towards which to strive. Towards which to direct our efforts, rather than bouncing around in some administrative Brownian motion, bouncing randomly from one thing to another, which can happen in large and complicated organizations.

The great white whale is of course Moby Dick. I remember taking a literature class as a university student from a Professor who felt that Moby Dick was one of the great American novels and indeed one of the great novels in absolute terms. I’ve read Moby Dick a few times now; I try and reread it every few years, and it is one that I enjoy more each time I read it. Ahab’s obsession towards finding and killing Moby Dick still resonates, being quoted by no less an illuminary than Khan Noonien Singh

So why have I brought together the shining city on the hill with the great white whale? I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on the objectives towards which large institutions direct their effort and their energy. And I think there’s a central question that we always need to address. Are we moving towards the shining city on the hall, moving towards the heavenly destination in which all things will be better, or are we at sea, bound by our irrational obsession to find and kill the great white whale that in the end we cannot do more than lose our ship to.

Change is a complicated thing, and the decisions we need to make in that process of change are complicated decisions, often and necessarily based on partial information. We rarely have the luxury of making decisions based on perfect or complete information and we do the best we can. But I do think we can and must continue to reflect on the goals of the institution and to keep evaluating that basic decision, is our goal the shining city on the hill or is our goal the great white whale.

Posted in Uncategorized

the old reading project and the new

•8 December 2017 • 1 Comment

On 1 January 2017, I set myself a challenge. I would read the Sir Richard Burton translation of the Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. My original plan was to read one Night per day, and finish in (roughly) 3 years. But I got slightly more ambitious, cranked my pace up to four Nights per day sometime during the spring, and I finished the tale of Ma’aruf and Dayla, the last of the Tales, yesterday during a morning coffee break.

It’s been an interesting journey. I’ve had a physical copy of Sir Richard’s translation on my shelf for 20 years or so, 3 hardback volumes with very small type and very thin pages. And it’s interesting that reading it on the Kindle made it a much easier read. I carry my machine with me all the time, but I would not have been able to easily carry the bricks of the physical volumes. And sometimes, my best reading time was lunchtime or coffee, not the morning when I first woke to greet the day and not the evening, the night, when I was tired and sleep was regretfully more attractive than even reading.

I smiled when I came across Sinbad and the 7 voyages of a man never happy to be sitting at home. I remember Jinn and Ifrit freed from sealed stoppered bottles and rings. I remember caves of treasures but SPOILER ALERT it wasn’t Aladdin or Ala Al’din who found the cave and the Jinn to satisfy all his desires. Rather it was Ma’aruf who found the cave of treasure and the Jinn sealed into the ring while plowing a field.

There were long fascinating stories in the middle, like the many Tales of the battles of Gharib, and all in all, I’m happy I made the effort. The question is, what reading comes next.

I have always viewed the buying of book, the owning of books and the reading of books to be related but separate pleasures, and I have a lot of unread books on the shelves. Next though, perhaps I’ll tackle the source of one of my favourite quotes in these troubled times: Long is the way and hard that leads from darkness into light, which is a paraphrase but I think a reasonable paraphrase for most situations.

Posted in Uncategorized

the power of Hofstadter’s principle

•27 November 2017 • 4 Comments

Those who know me, know that I am a fan of Hofstadter’s principle, also know as Hofstadter’s law, which states that the task at hand will always take longer than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s principle.

Part of the power of Hofstadter’s principle is its self referential nature.  Part of its power is the way it feeds on itself, and I want to take a moment to reflect on that.  If we were to phrase the principle as saying, the task at hand will always take twice as long as you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s principle, then twice becomes four times, four times becomes eight times, and very very soon, every task takes infinite time.

Now, I have projects that seem to be taking infinite time to complete, but that is merely a subjective illusion that comes from how I feel the passage of time.  We as humans have a very poor relationship with infinity, but that’s a story for another time.

But every iteration taking a bit longer than the previous iteration, this is something we can hold in our heads.

One reason I like Hofstadter’s principle is that it can be so easily recast for the situation in which we find ourselves.  The task at hand will always be harder than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s principle.  And the task at hand will always be more complicated than you think, even when you take into Hofstadter’s principle.

In this, Hofstadter’s principle is akin to Parkinson’s Law, which (loosely) states that work will expand to fill the available time.  I think the two, Hofstadter’s principle and Parkinson’s law, march hand in hand, and together they have a significant impact on the way in which we work.  The way in which I work.

And so I find myself engaged in constant combat, against the self referential nature of Hofstadter’s principle, and against the expansionist principle of Parkinson’s law.  My daily hope is that awareness of Hofstadter and Parkinson will be part of my toolkit in, if not defeating them, at least moderating their effects.

Posted in bizarre and random things

the truth I find in an old story

•20 November 2017 • 2 Comments

In Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, story 14 of 101 Zen Stories, Paul Rips relates the story of an old monk and a young monk going down a road during a storm. They come across a well dressed young woman unable to cross a muddy intersection. The old monk picks up the young woman and carries her across to the dry road on the other side of the intersection. The monks continue down the road until the young monk, troubled by what had just happened, reminds the old monk that monks in their order do not touch women and how could he break the rules so blithely. The old monk then says, ‘I left the girl there. Are you still carrying her?’

This is one of my favourite (very) short stories and one that I come back to time and again. Because I know that I have a tendency to carry things beyond when they can reasonably be carried. For instance, I am a maker of lists, and some of the items on my lists have acquired tenure, they’ve been on my lists so long. They have acquired almost an untouchability, saying to me, how dare you try and remove me from your list. I have been here so long that I have become an indelible, unremoveable item on your list.

This comes back to the previous entry in these musings of mine, of how to get stuck into the large things. The comment made by Jacey Bedford, friend and colleague, is the old adage that the only way to eat the elephant is one bite at a time. (And apologies to elephants, who have been in the news recently for much less worthy reasons.)

It’s an interesting thing, this comfort we develop sometimes in carrying the same thing for a long time. For such a long time indeed that the act of carrying itself becomes almost a comfort. That the thing we are carrying becomes a comfort blanket, a favourite stuffed bear, and this can make it hard to set it down on the side of the road and walk away.

But this is a common thread in Zen, that we are sometimes, often, the source of our own discomfort, because of our own tendency to carry the source of our discomfort with us. For me, I am beginning to think that one among the many things I carry is this comfort that arises from procrastination. That the fact that something remains on my list is somehow a good thing, a comfortable thing.

And so now, I bid adieu and go back to the list, the new things and the old things, and we will address one of each this evening. And perhaps, if I am strong and able, I will carry on with so attacking my list, the new things and the old things. It is an impossible dream that someday the list is empty, but at this point my sincere wish is that I can look on my list, and all of the things staring back at me are new untenured things.

Posted in Uncategorized

time leaks

•18 November 2017 • 3 Comments

In poker terms, a leak is an aspect of one’s play that leads to less than optimal results in the game.  Always playing one’s favorite hand is a classic example of a leak, or playing certain hands in exactly the same way.

This idea of the leak is a much broader idea, somewhere between the poker leak and the more literal definition of leak, and one that I spend a lot of time thinking about.  This is the time leak.

I sometimes get to the end of the day, I look back and I wonder, where did the day go.  Where did my time go today.  During the work week, I spend a lot of time in meetings, and this is just part of the role I currently have.  Some meetings are reasonable or valuable uses of time, though it must be said that this is not true of all meetings.

This I suppose is a variant of Parkinson’s Law where meetings expand to fill the scheduled time.   I am partially responsible for this, as some of the meetings are mine, though not entirely.

But other days, and these other days often includes weekends, I don’t have the excuse of meetings.  I don’t have the time I spend teaching, which is often the high point of my working day.

I wake up in the mornings and I have a clear list of what I want to accomplish over the course of the day.  It is always an ambitious list, and I sometimes make good progress against my list.  But not always.

But there is something I have come to recognize how much I struggle with.  There are some large projects which have been on the list for too long, and I am not good at making day by day progress on these large projects.

And this is now my task, to segment these large projects and to develop the habit of clearing the daily list.

Habits are hard to form. They require cultivation and curation, and it is very easy to begin a project like this tomorrow.  There is an old quote, I’m not sure of the original source, that tomorrow is the greatest labor saving device known to humankind.  It’s not true, but it is always easy to believe it today.

So I need to become something of a plumber, seeking out and sealing the time leaks in my own internal plumbing.  We’ll see how it goes.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life, poker and other games, writing ephemera

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