Invisible Adjunct

Interesting story that reminds me of a job candidate I was interviewing with another, much younger, colleague of mine. I was in a suit, my colleague in slacks and button up shirt. The candidate directed all his attention (and body language) to me until the end of the conversation, whereupon he asked my colleague how he liked graduate school. Oops. When my colleague said he was a prof, the candidate notably turned all his attention to him. The department rejected him largely for being a jerk.

Also, I find it so funny how these "big name" professors that everyone crows about at conferences are usually the same idiots who think they are so freakin' important that they don't remove their name badges once they leave the conference hotel. As if some taxi driver is going to be impressed by the father of neo-institutional constructivism. Ha! I only hope they are cannon fodder for muggers.

Prof. Lemon
(Who has gained substantial notoreity in his own field, but removes his name badge.)

"I only hope they are cannon fodder for muggers."

Come, now. There is cause for consternation and dismay and yes, even some anger. But, uh, this is too much anger. And since when do muggers use cannons?

But you're right, of course, that one should always remove one's name tag before leaving the hotel.

"And since when do muggers use cannons?"

Hmmmm... apparently I can rule out the notion you've been associated with the University of Chicago. :-)

And as for my anger (hyperbole) problem...well, let's just say I'm not a very refined academic. I've been known as the Howard Stern (sans nudity) of my field. I actually don't need a name badge anymore, and only wear one when I have to get into the book exhibits at conferences (I am so glad they have this security check). I've left many a snooty audience slack-jawed with my presentations and irreverent humor, although I do have short hair and wear expensive suits. Wow! That's a non sequitir.

Sans nudity? But why do things by halves? Go big or go home is my motto.

You are correct: I have no association whatsoever with the University of Chicago. But now you must explain the mugger-cannon reference. Otherwise you are guilty of just the kind of cliquish insiderness of which the Cassuto article complains.

D'oh! Caught in my own web of hyperbole. I was just thinking of the neighborhood that U of Chicago happens to be in -- pretty rough, to say the least. A friend of mine who attended med school there said that he would hear gunshots at least once a week.

OK, I will admit the cannon fodder comment was over the top. Damn, you historians are good.

May I change the subject a bit? (Not that the image of obnoxious senior faculty being crushed by fusillades of antiquated but heavy objects isn't fun to contemplate.)

My own field, philosophy, has by now been almost completely colonized by a pernicious ranking mentality deriving from the crusade of a single person. (Oh, he has allies, but if he hadn't taken up the crusade I doubt anyone else would have.) As a result of his labors, we all now know exactly where we stand in the professional hierarchy.

What can one do in the face of this reality? One can try to counter it directly or just make fun of it. But so far neither has done any good at all, as far as I can tell. (I participated myself in both. My team lost.) Once you have a ranking system up and running, people identify too much with their place in it, and the attendant anxiety -- about where they are or about where they might fall -- begins to define them.

Ok, John, now I get it. A little over the top, yes, but in the next comment Ted admits that "the image of obnoxious senior faculty being crushed by fusillades of antiquated but heavy objects" is fun to comtemplate.

As a senior faculty member myself, I will begin anxiously scanning the skies... :-)

I'm not expressing this well, but if there *is* a difference (and I'm not convinced that there is), it has to do with the fact that the building blocks in science are facts and theoretical explanations and in the humanities they are people and what they said. It's easier to disengage personal ego and monkey-dominance considerations when it is clear that you either have or have not created a Bose-Einstein condensate and validated the theoretical predictions Bose and Einstein made more than seventy years ago, or you have not.

I hereby declare this blog a fusillade-free zone :)

My father is a well-respected academic and I have occasionally gone to lectures hosted by his department. I am not even an amateur in the field, but by being introduced to the lecturer by my father I can completely take over any post-lecture conversation. It certainly isn't me that's being sucked up to. In my defense, I don't do that anymore. No longer feeling insecure and inferior (which un- and under-employment will do to an unhappy young man), I no longer have a need to stick it to junior faculty or the students.

I'm a polymath. I've actually walked out of graduate programs in both physics and social psychology. Perhaps I shouldn't even be posting here. :-) I'm clearly not in the elite. :-)

Things can be very bad in the hard sciences as well.

And don't even talk to me about NASA unless you can handle some real shocks.

Seriously, I think the rise of rigid hierarchies in academia is causing very real long term problems for Western civilization. It's gotten worse in my lifetime.

Having the privilege of attending both a large social science association meeting and a smaller, more hard science association meeting in more or less the same week every year, I can attest to my anecdotal observation of the hierarchy vs. non-hierarchy situation.

In the SS meeting, quite a few "names" are referred to (by some of su) as Momma Duck because they have a queue of grad students parading after them. They are incredibly hierarchy conscious. It is worse than that poem "The Cabots speak only to the Lodges and the Lodges speak only to God." Even being introduced to one by another name brings only condescension unless you happen to be a new member of a "prestigious" institution.

At the HS meeting, the "names" seek out new people with new ideas and encourage them. I may only be in this area because some years ago one of the biggest saw me standing by myself around lunch time and asked if he could join me for lunch to "pick my brain." He did so in a gentle and jovial manner and later helped me get established to the extent that I now am (I'll probably never be a name.) This is more often than not the case. Our luncheons are designed to facilitate mixing of folks unknown to one another. Get togethers after the sessions tend to be of the "who wants to go get a drink and shoot the shit?" types where the most common element is to ask the newest comers, "what are you studying/thinking about, and how is it coming?" Books, articles, chapters, and research relationships have come from these gatherings.

I can't imagine anything similar happening at the SS meetings (no matter how hard some of us try).

I agree with Prof. DeLong -- the difficulty of proof leads to hierarchy, I think.

Well, I'm neither a professor nor in the soft sciences (graduating as I did from an engineering school, with a Master's), but I had a thought.

Would it be instructive to compare Cassuto's depiction of the way the physics scandal was treated to the way the Bellesiles (for instance) scandal was treated? Or more precisely, to compare the way journalists were treated in each case.

The only immediate objection I can think of to that comparison is that the Bellesiles fiasco hinged on hard data and objective fact; if that has much bearing on the situation, perhaps someone more acquainted with dirty laundry in the humanities can find some fairly representative instance to compare instead.

As a young physicist I would say that while there is a clear institutional hierarchy in our field, social hierarchies are quickly forgotten when a physics point is being discussed. When better data or a better explanation of the data is offered, everyone pays attention regardless of the speaker's laurel collection. A young genius is especially welcome. The occasional exception to this rule is within a large group of students and postdocs working under a famous Name; some professors can be obtuse.

But note that your corollary does seem to hold in physics. Poor research from established Names is often benignly ignored rather than attacked, which is not true for the up-and-comers who need to be tested (could be a genius, after all!). Also note that this description is of American institutions and international results may vary.

why shouldnt muggers use cannons? using one will maximize their profits from mugging. second, there are no fusillades of cannons, but rather fusillades from cannons. third, i wonder how much of this is actually a sort of physics envy? i would imagine that when your field is really just your opinion then the need to put down people who might challenge your ideas is greater than it would be in one of the hard sciences, where your opinion must be grounded in the observable facts of nature.

The hard sciences often require collaboration, the humanities positively discourage it. Question answered.

By the way nothing, and I mean nothing, can compare to the rudeness and arrogance of the law school community. Law professors are by far the rudest, most obnoxious bunch I've associated with.

I say this as both an historian (Ph.D.) and lawywer teaching in an interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate program.

It's interesting to hear from some scientists.

Akaky: There's no question that Cassuto is envious of the physicists. But it's not a mean-spirited sort of envy; he is expressing the wish that humanists could more like the physicists, ie, less attached to social hierarchies.

"i would imagine that when your field is really just your opinion then the need to put down people who might challenge your ideas is greater than it would be in one of the hard sciences, where your opinion must be grounded in the observable facts of nature."

What I write and teach in my field (history) is not just my opinion. There is narrative, but the narrative is based on fact. Much of it is probably a different sort of fact that the one scientists deal with. You could argue that it's ultimately based on what people say: ie, what people in the past said happened, how and what they recorded about what happened, and why. But though there is a good deal of room for interpretation, historians don't just make stuff up.

As a graduate student in both physics and engineering I got to see both fields (hey, switching from the Ph.D. in physics to EE more than doubled my starting salary coming out of school), and with a father who's a prof of psychology I think I can make general comments comparing them.

Hard sciences have their own social cliques, but being a member or connected to one doesn't have quite the same impact as it does in the "softer" sciences. Being connected to a respected professor will get you an easier pass on publishing, and in the cases of controversy will tend to give you more credibility, but when hard data is discussed and presented you still have to pass muster. The danger to the "respected name" you're attached to is pretty severe if you've been sloppy in your work when you're questioned. Usually when a "neme" paper turns out to be substandard nobody mentions it, but nobody forgets it either.

My guess is what the reporter was seeing was an attempt by the others in the department to distance themselves from the fraud. They have to maintain their reputations, so by being open about it they can survive with some reputation. Given where they were, there's a very strong engineering culture there and the engineering culture is even more confrontational than the hard sciences. Engineers who present results generally have the typical paper views with about the same level of review as is found in physics, but in business they have "design reviews" which are terrifying to academics and those not used to them. Design reviews tend to be very brutal, but they also tend to be brutal in a questioning and directed way at improving the result being presented. Even the most respected people in a department have to fully defend their work, especially if it is something new. And everybody comes out of the design review with many things to do, check and reinvestigate.

You'd never be able to do something like an engineering design review in a "softer" science setting. The participants would go into shock and get very defensive.

The social hierarchies can be accompanied by a caste system.

I used to be a data analyst working for a behaviorial research group. One day, one of the more senior researchers asked me to come work for her. This was seen as 'poaching'. I decided I didn't want the job.

Shortly thereafter, another scientist - who's office was 30 feet from mine - asked to speak with me for the first and last time. I told her that I didn't want the job, since it was a lateral transfer and I liked what I was doing better. Then she said:
"Did anyone pressure you?"
No.
"Did anyone tell you that you shouldn't do this, or that it would be bad for your career?"
No.
Then the money quote:
"Hm. We sometimes forget that programmers are capable of making independent decisions."
I replied "Yes - we're almost like regular people, that way."

The sarcasm escaped her, and I was dismissed.

I've been a business school prof for about 15 years and have observed a similar pattern. The economists (which also includes most finance and some accounting folks) tend to be rather sweet-natured and bumbling. The strategy and organizational behavior profs (or at least the successful ones) tend in my experience to be arrogant, hierarchical, and a lot less fun at parties. While econ is hardly a hard science, no one doubts it is closer to a science than other b-school areas. And there is a neat twist. Economists are often attacked by OB types as having a narrow and unflattering view of human nature. True, but it is not a bad portrayal of most of the folks making the attacks!!

I am the child of a PhD in Philosophy (who ended up without a career due primarily to NOT playing the game...), yet my area of expertise is definitely the 'hard' sciences (I joked with my friends in college about "escaping the science building").

My experience defintely concurs with this. Even in the worst cases, in the hard sciences, if you are wrong, sooner or later someone tries to understand your work and reads the details, and you are disproven, no matter how big a name you are (Einstein, for example, was once proven wrong). On the flip side, if you are right, eventually, someone tries to disprove your work or find the flaw in it and can't, and they go to someone else who goes to someone else... eventually, you are listened to.

Without provable rightness, "Big Name" and hierachy is all you've got. Especially when proven wrongness (which is usually possible) doesn't seem to make a dent.

invisible, i know that historians dont just make it up, that there must be some sort of documentation for a historical conclusion. what makes history fun is that while no can doubt that an event occurred if you show your proofs, arguing about what the event meant, if it meant anything at all is one of the great things about history [my god, i've committed tautology, and in public, no less!] and this is why history is not one of the hard sciences. we can all argue about what the significance of sherman's march to the sea was and is, or whether or not the American strategic bombing was effective during WW2, but E=mc2 is going to mean the same thing today, tomorrow, and the next day.

I hear you. I didn't mean to suggest that history is a hard science, just wanted to make the point that it's not about simply giving one's opinion.

Well, I'm only a former academic, a failed physicist and, finally a conservative lawyer. But, I should think that the reason for Cassuto’s distinction between the “soft” and “hard” sciences is obvious: objective verification. Status (schooling, current position, etc.) is far less important in physics and other hard sciences because all are subject to a heavy dose of objective verification (known outside academia as “truth”). One can publish a paper claiming to discover the key to cold fusion, but unless the process is independently reproducible, it’s irrelevant. By contrast, my impression of the social sciences is one cannot simply “disprove” a paper claiming that poverty in America can be explained by a neo-Marxist power structure designed to impoverish women, immigrants, and people of color. Rather, the paper’s author would more likely be rewarded with tenure at a school (first, second or third-rate) precisely because such a topic isn’t subject of rigorous proof, therefore minimizing buyer’s remorse in tenure outcomes.

Perhaps once upon a time—in the long-gone golden age—social sciences papers could be judged objectively. But, once complex observer-dependant perspectives replaced conventional historigraphical narratives, objectivity vanished. So did my interest in reading such work, as a non-specialist. But the more important casualty was truth.

"Rather, the paper’s author would more likely be rewarded with tenure at a school (first, second or third-rate) precisely because such a topic isn’t subject of rigorous proof, therefore minimizing buyer’s remorse in tenure outcomes."

Hmm...So if I start writing papers from a neo-Marxist perspective, does this mean I will get a tenure-track job?...

"But the more important casualty was truth."

But if we accept the distinction between hard and soft sciences based on objective verification, doesn't this imply that there never was "objective truth" in the social sciences? -- better and worse research design, yes, and more or less convincing interpretation of the data, but never the kind of verification that takes place in the lab.

Anyway, as Cassuto suggests, there are significant differences in peer review between scientists and humanists: the humanists are a lot "softer," looser, fuzzier -- which makes status hierarchies more relevant.