#295 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Thursday March 10)
A potpourri today…
ANTI-RACISM HIRING REQUIREMENT
A while back, I wrote about San Diego State requiring a demonstration of commitment to anti-racism for people applying for a position in the Physics department. Perhaps I was too judgmental in singling out this one requirement (among others). Renee Marlin-Bennett, a Professor at Johns Hopkins presents the following argument:
“The list of qualifications from San Diego State is nothing more than normal good pedagogy and it is obviously boilerplate that the University is using across the campus to encourage hiring faculty who are willing to teach *all* their students. I imagine SDSU has a fairly high proportion of underrepresented minority students, so this is important. And because you might ask: Yes, there is a history of professors discouraging some kinds of people from some kinds of majors because the student just isn’t the right kind of person to succeed in that field, says the prof. And STEM profs have often been guilty of this.
It is reasonable for hiring committees to signal that the University wants to put an end to that kind of discrimination and to actively seek job candidates who are willing to teach all the students. This is not about the quality of physics (you can be a great physicist and a jerk). This is about the quality of teaching (you cannot be both a great teacher and a jerk).”
This really isn’t about philosophical fealty. It is about the everyday experiences of our students and colleagues. As my husband [a physics professor] says, our science is better when we don’t discourage excellent minds housed in bodies that don’t look like our pre-conceived notions of who a physicist is. That’s why he cares about his women students and about his under-represented minority (URM) students. Creating as welcoming an atmosphere for URM and female faculty as for white faculty is also a high priority goal for him. This is not about being woke and disadvantaging white students. It’s about a University trying to deal with implicit bias by signaling loud and clear that it values its URM students.”
ONE MORE “WALKED INTO A BAR” GRAMMAR PUN…
From Peter Bain, “A split infinitive walks into a bar, planning to heavily drink.”
SUCCESS COMES AT A YOUNG AGE
From Mark Farrell:
“I've often thought and said to younger people [that] greatness usually happens before 40. However, the examples I think of are generally before 30-years-old. This includes Einstein (writing on relativity when he was about 26-years-old), and as you'd guess, people from the entertainment industry like Joplin, Hendrix, The Beatles, Brian Wilson, and so many comedians, TV, and radio personalities. Just before The Beatles broke up, the oldest among them was just 28-years-old, yet in the 6 or so years they composed their most ground-breaking works; they were just kids.”
BOOK TIME
Brad Mindlin suggests The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. “A very (very) blunt book about expectations, little things, priorities. So far it is pretty good.” I was put off by its title but the New York Times suggests I should give it a try: “It’s inspiration for the Irony Generation. Striving for happiness all the time, he says, and comparing our state to others, is precisely the reason we’re not happy. And social media exacerbates this current malaise. If you feel terrible “for even five minutes, you’re bombarded with 350 images of people totally happy and having amazing . . . lives, and it’s impossible to not feel like there’s something wrong with you.” The author suggests that negative emotions are a call to action. In his words, “To deny one’s negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems.” Sounds like Camus might like this book.
I just read for a book club The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. This story of a not-very-religious German Jew who has been “outed” in the early days of the Nazi regime is particularly poignant and prescient, in that it was written in the 1930s and was only recently discovered. The language is simple but evocative, tracing the protagonist from one train station to the next, searching for a way out, as he discovers the betrayals and ostracism coming from his newfound vulnerability. From the New York Review of Books: "Stunning . . . clairvoyant . . . Boschwitz’s novel pulsates with fine, understated descriptions . . . One comes away marveling not only at Boschwitz’s craftsmanship but at what can only be called his human spirit . . . The Passenger resembles a message in a bottle: cautionary, despairing, a literary warning."
Have a great day,
Glenn