Looking Back on 2023

It's time to look back on another year. Russia's invasion of Ukraine loomed large over 2022, but for me this year was overshadowed even more so by the October 7th massacre in Israel.

• Immediately after the brutal attack on civilians orchestrated by Hamas from Gaza, protests started against Israel (yes, against Israel, not against the perpetrators) and against the Jews generally. College campuses were at the forefront of this trend, where chants like "from the river to the sea" and "globalize the intifada" broke out en masse. One would think that universities that have been disciplining members of their communities for microaggressions would have at least been able to condemn such hateful demonstrations, but they suddenly found their "deep commitment" to free speech when it came to calls for the annihilation of Jews. Their hypocrisy on this matter was nicely exposed by the congressional testimony of the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn. UPenn's president Liz Magill's smirking answers were so disastrous that she had to resign shortly afterwards.

Hamas supporters at Columbia University

• The controversy didn't end there. The hypocrisy at Harvard was especially glaring because Harvard is both the country's most famous university and simultaneously manages to come in dead last in FIRE's free speech rankings. The president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has a record of persecuting academics whose political views she disagrees with. Her conservative critics found this an opportune moment to surface allegations of plagiarism against her, and subsequent investigations revealed evidence of dozens of instances of plagiarism -- she even plagiarized some of the acknowledgments in her Ph.D. thesis! For now, Harvard continues to stand by her, pretending she's merely responsible for some instances of "duplicative language." But every passing minute that she remains at its helm continues to expose Harvard's double standards. If she's fired, it will be a blow to the DEI system that she helped build up and from which she seems to have very much benefited, and if she's retained, it will be a blow to Harvard's reputation for academic seriousness. I call this a win-win for us critics of universities that have so clearly lost their way.

• Moving on to happier matters, Saeed Hajizadeh finished his Ph.D. at UIC this year. He works mainly in the field of mathematical optimization, and he is currently working for Roosevelt University as a visiting faculty member. Saeed was technically my student, and I did follow his research progress, but his area was sufficiently far from mine that his primary (unofficial) advisors were Haihao Lu (at UChicago) and Benjamin Grimmer (at JHU).  Congrats to Saeed!

Saeed and myself after his defense

• After ALT 2023, I was elected to chair the Steering Committee of ALT. It's a conference I've long been involved with in various roles, and I'm gratified to be able to continue to work to improve it. I also will have a paper in ALT 2024 (in case you think the SC chair gets special treatment, my other submission was rejected!), so it will be nice to be able to attend the conference for two separate reasons.

• I was the main organizer on the special session on machine learning and logic (in Spring 2023) at the IDEAL institute.  It was an exciting semester, with many events, and you can read more about them in these articles. My research also directly benefitted, as this paper came about as a result of a particularly stimulating problem session.

• On a personal note, I did a pretty exciting thing and competed in the kettlebell sport world championships in the long cycle event this year.  I've been doing kettlebell seriously for several years now, and this year I (barely) made the US National team -- this involved traveling to USKSL Nationals and qualifying. Not only did I get to go to IUKL worlds in Uzbekistan, I am also very happy with how the competition went for me, as I set my personal best there by quite a margin.

me lifting at IUKL worlds in Khiva, Uzbekistan

• Finally, my discussion of 2023 wouldn't be complete without again mentioning large neural network-based language models. At the end of last year, ChatGPT impressed us all.  In 2023, it has become a regular part of many people's workflow.  I also occasionally use it for work: for giving me ideas for exam questions, catching grammar mistakes, and helping me code when I need to create a simple program.  This trend seems destined to continue into 2024 and beyond, as is its impact on society. But where it's ultimately headed, we really don't know despite some confident predictions.

With wishes for a happy and peaceful 2024.

Good Riddance to a Bad Policy

Since this is an academic blog and I am a university professor, I ought not to forgo commenting on the large legal bombshell that just dropped on American higher education.  I am, of course, referring to the ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina et al.

Admissions offices: Harvard's (left) and UNC's (right)

I summarized my views on Twitter, and I'll repeat them here:

I think this decision ending "affirmative action" is basically right on the law. In my view, explicit racial considerations clearly violate Title VII. Affirmative action admissions policies also, at the very least in the case of public institutions, clearly violate the 14th Amendment.

The Supreme Court went a bit further and said that for both types of institutions, explicit consideration of race violates the 14th amendment. That seems to imply that even in the unlikely case Title VII were to be repealed, affirmative action would remain illegal everywhere. Practically, however, the result is the same as under my reading because Title VII is here to stay. Explicit consideration of race will no longer be allowed in college admissions. 

As an aside, I actually wouldn't mind trying a system where public schools were bound by race-neutral measures, but private schools were allowed more flexibility -- not just with Title VII but with other laws too. That was of course never going to happen and can't happen for even more reasons now. 

Of course, many schools will still try to achieve a target racial balance by getting rid of the SATs and other objective measures that may catch them discriminating.  They may even pull out of rankings to try to hide the hit to their reputations. But elite institutions can only do so much of that without losing many good students to their competitors and therefore their prestige over time.

In the end we should strive to judge people as individuals, on their merits and perhaps their hardships. These considerations may of course may correlate with race, but blindly using race as a factor creates many more problems than it fixes.  So I think this ruling is a big step in the right direction and am hopeful that a fairer system will emerge.