The First

I haven't posted any book reviews on this blog, but since this one is relevant to academia, I thought I'd give it a try. Here's my first posting of a review I wrote on goodreads.com.

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The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump by Stanley Fish
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I started my faculty job at UIC in 2012, eight years after Stanley Fish finished his term as dean of my college, and it didn’t take me long to hear about him. I heard about Fish before I knew the name of my (then) current dean, and I never even learned the names of other former deans. Usually, when an administrator becomes so memorable, he must have done something disastrous that nobody can forgive. But as far as I understand, this was not the case with Fish; he was known for making bold and unusual decisions, often controversial but not inept.

Now, twelve years later, I was at a used book sale where I saw a book by someone named Stanley Fish. Seeing that name jogged my memory, and I checked the author’s bio to see if it was the same Stanley Fish — indeed, it was! I had no idea he wrote books (apparently, he wrote many), and I immediately bought the book to see what he had to say.

The book involves the author expounding his ideas on the First Amendment, and it did not disappoint. True to his reputation, Fish takes many controversial positions— including that freedom of speech should not be the central value on college campuses and that the First Amendment should not have included religion — and he even offers the best defense of postmodernism that I’ve seen. (I still don't buy it.)

In the end, this is a fun and thought-provoking book. It reinforced my views on some things, convinced me on some points, and utterly failed to convince me on many others. But unlike most non-fiction, this book delivers something new and unpredictable with each chapter.

The main downside is that the book feels like a rant more than a principled argument spanning the various aspects of the First Amendment. The long title even betrays its lack of coherence. The other downside, of course, is that I think he’s wrong about too much! Still, it was a fun read.

View all my reviews

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.

Janus and Higher Education

In its recent Janus v. AFSCME decision, the Supreme Court struck down public sector union security agreements.  This relates to my professional life because UIC is a public university, and our faculty are unionized.  I also have an interest in constitutional law, and I finally have a "jurisdictional hook" to blog about it.  Moreover, I recently realized that while I often hear from pro-union faculty and various union representatives, I rarely see other perspectives, at least at work.  So, as a union non-member, I thought it might be useful to give some brief thoughts about the issues involved.

a photo I took of the Supreme Court building during a recent visit to D.C.

In Janus v. AFSCME, Janus challenged the constitutionality of charging public sector employees "fair share" agency fees.  In about half of the states (those without "right-to-work" laws), when a workforce became unionized, unions were allowed to negotiate security agreements, which gave them the power to collect agency fees from non-members.  The Supreme Court held that these agreements violate non-members' first amendment rights by forcing them to subsidize political speech they disagree with.  Unions were already not permitted to compel non-members to pay for the portion of their activities that are overtly political, but the Supreme Court ruled that in the public sector, union bargaining is inherently political because the unions negotiate with the government, which impacts public policy. Especially illuminating was one particular exchange from the oral argument, between Mr. Franklin, the Solicitor General of Illinois, and Justice Kennedy:

Mr. Franklin: ... Independent of that, we have an interest at the end of the day in being able to work with a stable, responsible, independent counterparty that's well-resourced enough that it can be a partner with us in the process of not only contract negotiation -­ 

Justice Kennedy: It can be a partner with you in advocating for a greater size workforce, against privatization, against merit promotion, against -- for teacher tenure, for higher wages, for massive government, for increasing bonded indebtedness, for increasing taxes? That's -- that's the interest the state has? 

Whether you buy this argument or not, you only have to look at the budget crisis in Illinois to understand the concern.

Turning to my own experience, when I first arrived at UIC, the faculty had just unionized.  And while UIC is not the only public research university with a unionized faculty, I viewed unionization as a worrisome development.  It especially seemed to me that tenure-track faculty at an R1 university should be able to negotiate on their own behalf when the need arises.  My concerns were further reinforced when two years later, a faculty strike almost coincided with our interviewing faculty candidates.  Imagine trying to convince someone to join your department with your colleagues holding "unhappy faculty on strike" signs.  Moreover, I thought it would be detrimental for faculty to have to worry about possible repercussions of teaching during strikes or to face potential political pressure from colleagues to join the union.

a union strike at UIC

As I already mentioned, I never joined the union; but on occasion, various union representatives have tried to get me to join and invariably made the following pitch: "You're going to have to pay the union anyway, so why not sign the membership card and have a say?"  The union wants to keep the majority of the bargaining unit as members in order to avoid facing a credible decertification effort, and thereby wants everyone to join.  And non-members were incentivized to join even if they didn't support the union, so that they could have some say in their contract.  To me, this argument for non-members to join the union seems as objectionable as the impetus will be for members to become "free riders" in the post-Janus world.

So what will happen now that security agreements are struck down? It's hard to predict.  I don't know if it's possible, but I'd like to see a workable middle ground emerge. A compromise, for example, that allows workers to unionize and allows unions to charge, represent, and negotiate on behalf of their members only, while leaving the non-members alone, might be one answer.  I hope there are also other interesting possibilities to consider.  Whatever happens, the status quo is about to change, and I envisage for the better.

Doing My Small Part

I've watched with astonishment as multiple universities descended into insanity in the last couple years.  Both my almae matres were affected: Princeton's president catered to protesters who took over his office, and Yale students who organized protests where a college Master was cursed and yelled at were given "leadership" awards at graduation.  I don't doubt that students, including the ones protesting here, may have legitimate grievances, but these latest movements have been bullying in their tactics and misguided in their demands.  You can read the petition I signed onto in Princeton's case.

Woodrow Wilson (photo from history.com), Princeton's most famous alumnus and a former Princeton president, was one of the targets of the protests at Princeton. Thankfully, he avoided having his name scraped off Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs.

But lately, the descent into madness seems to be accelerating. Charles Murray, who has been unfairly maligned as a eugenicist monster, came to Middlebury to deliver a lecture only to be shouted down and physically attacked, with the offending students barely receiving any punishment. Berkeley hasn't been able to host certain conservative speakers without violence breaking out. And very recently, Brett Weinstein, at Evergreen college has been literally hunted because he didn't think he should be asked to leave campus due to his race, and he is receiving no support from the administration. (Listen to this if you want to see how bad things have gotten.) 

In this post, I won't go into the reasons why I think things have gotten so out of control; I have some ideas, but I'm also dumbfounded.  I will say that these latest incidents are so obviously unacceptable that I figured that most university faculty would be on the side of free expression, but it seems I may be sadly mistaken about this.  Brett Weinstein reported that the vast majority of his colleagues who have spoken out on this issue are actually calling on him to be disciplined, and only one other Evergreen professor is willing to defend him publicly.  The protesters and many faculty even blame Weinstein for going on Fox News as the cause of the chaos that resulted on their campus in the aftermath.

So, as a university professor, I want to do my small part and publicly defend Brett Weinstein.  No group should feel entitled to ask any other group to leave campus, especially based on skin color or ethnicity.  Faculty should be able to express their opposition to such requests and to other bad policies without fear of being labeled racists. To me, it is clear that the organizers of some of these protest movements are the actual racists. And Brett Weinstein should be able to go on Fox News or any other forum to express his dismay at the situation.  Needless to say, I also condemn any efforts to silence Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, or the other people facing illiberal forces on college campuses.

It's time to stand up for free and spirited debate and for respectful discourse and common decency. If universities are to remain centers for inquiry and progress, we cannot afford to give these regressive movements another inch.

Should You Get a Ph.D.?

I am occasionally asked by students whether they should go to grad school to get a Ph.D.  So much has already been written on this subject that I hadn't felt it necessary to put my opinion in writing, nor did I have any concrete advice.  But reading Duncan Watts's excellent recent article on the subject crystalized my thoughts.

So here, succinctly, is my advice:

Enroll in a Ph.D. program only if you think you'll enjoy graduate school.  Don't enroll just because you think a Ph.D. will help you in your future career.  In other words, don't go to graduate school as a means to an end.

Note: my advice is meant for US students seeking a Ph.D. in the sciences.  It probably applies more broadly.

Yale's computer science building, Arthur K. Watson Hall, where I spent a lot of time in grad school.  Image from here.

My advice may seem obvious, but it's not.  For instance, this would be bad advice for students considering an M.D. -- almost nobody enjoys medical school, but I think few graduates regret having gone.

But there are three main reasons why this is the right advice for grad school.

1. In Ph.D. programs, unlike in many of the professional schools, you're supposed to be doing pretty much what your professors do -- research.  Sure you have to take some classes and get paid less, but chances are if you don't enjoy grad school, you won't enjoy a research career either.  (Going to grad school to pursue a finance career or something unrelated later is doing it the hard way.)
2. Jobs in research, and especially in academia, are scarce, and going to grad school just because you might like a research job later is a very unsafe bet.  So, going to grad school only makes sense if you'd enjoy the research career, and also if you'd enjoy the experience anyway if a research career doesn't work out.  Four to six years of your life is a long time to be miserable.
3. Grad school, unlike professional school, has no end-date.  You finish when you've done enough.  And it's hard to do enough if you're not enjoying the work.  Forcing yourself to sit through anatomy is one thing; forcing yourself to be creative is quite another.

Also, notice that my advice is an "only if."  So even if you might enjoy grad school, you should explore other possibilities.  Research is incredibly rewarding, but also has downsides which need to be considered.

That being said, I don't mean to be negative.  I'm very happy I went to grad school -- I had a great time there and am lucky to keep on getting to do research.  So, if you want to get a Ph.D., go for it.  Just remember to enjoy the journey.

UIC's MCS Program Seeking Graduate Students

As I'd posted before, UIC has two departments interested in computer science.  We have a computer science department in the engineering school.  And the math department in the school of liberal arts and sciences, where I have an appointment, has a smaller program in "mathematical computer science" (MCS).

The MCS program is more focused on the mathematical aspects of computing and less on systems, databases, etc.  It is similar to the ACO programs at CMU and Georgia Tech.

We recently updated our website, where you can learn more about the program and the affiliated faculty.  More importantly, if you're a student looking to get a Ph.D. in a mathematical area of computing, consider applying to our program -- we're looking for strong applicants.

a screenshot of the new MCS website

Diamond Forever

Recently, the academic community started to fight back against traditional academic publishers, who earn large profits without any longer providing many clear services.  The internet has been a great tool for taking care of such inefficiencies, and it's quickly disrupting the publishing market as well.

Having thought a bit about these issues myself, I wanted to summarize my views of some of the various publishing models (as described by Tim Gowers) under consideration, as well as the pros and cons of each.  It's possible, even likely, that I am missing something, so feel free to point it out in the comments.

The Systems

closed-access

screenshot, after I tried to access a paper from nature.com

system: Researchers send manuscripts to publishers. Publishers have volunteer editorial boards consisting of researchers who decide whether to accept/reject manuscripts. Accepted manuscripts are published but cannot be accessed without a paid subscription to the given journal. Authors lose most (or all) rights to their own work.

who wins: publishers, by charging for access

who loses: university libraries and therefore scientists who pay for it with overhead; the public, who doesn't get access to the research their taxes likely funded; authors, who cannot easily have their research read and used.

opinion: This system made some sense before the internet era, where there were few other good ways to disseminate research. The publishers used to have to work hard for their profits by doing serious formatting/printing/publishing work. With the internet, all of this is now done by the authors, and the closed-access system no longer makes sense.

green-access

from Springer's "self archiving policy"

system: Same as closed-access, except that authors are allowed to put their accepted manuscripts on their websites and onto online repositories such as the arXiv.

who wins: publishers, by charging for access; researchers who put their papers online

who loses: basically same as closed-access, except for the authors who put their papers online

opinion: This is the system most journals are now on, or at least they usually don't go after scientists who keep their papers online. This is strictly better than closed-access, but doesn't go far enough. Too many scientists do not put their papers on their websites or arXiv. There is still no guarantee that science will be public, as it should be.

gold-access

a screenshot of the new gold-access math journal

system: Researchers send manuscripts to publishers. Publishers have volunteer editorial boards consisting of researchers who decide whether to accept/reject manuscripts. Authors of accepted manuscripts pay to have their work published but published manuscripts are freely accessible to everyone online.

who wins: the public, who can access research for free. the publishers, who still get paid (but not as much)

who loses: the authors, who have to pay (usually large sums) to have their work published. universities, which might need to subsidize the fees. quality (see below).

opinion: I think adopting this system would be a mistake. First, scientists are the ones doing the work, the editing, and the main contributions -- it seems unfair to make them pay as well. Researchers without grants or university support would have to use their personal funds. Moreover, I think this would seriously impact paper quality.  In this system, journals would make money by accepting more papers as opposed to getting more readers, and some authors may have incentives to pad their CVs. I cannot see how this wouldn't go wrong.

diamond-access

the journal of machine learning research, image from their website

system: Researchers send manuscripts to publishers. Publishers have volunteer editorial boards consisting of researchers who decide whether to accept/reject manuscripts. Authors of accepted manuscripts have their work published for free and published manuscripts are freely accessible to everyone online.

who wins: scientists, who can publish for free and have their papers read. the public, who can access research freely. universities, who do not have to pay for journal access. research quality.

who loses: publishers, who cannot any longer charge for anything

opinion: This is the best of all worlds. Everyone seems to win, and research quality especially wins because nobody makes a profit from publishing bad results.  The only problem is that the publishers lose, and why would anyone run a journal without making a profit?

A Solution

Diamond-access is the best system for everyone, except for the publishers.  However, publishers need incentives to run a journal, which they wouldn't have in a diamond access system.  Now, becoming a publisher would involve operating at a loss.  So who should take the hit?

One obvious solution is for universities to publish (or pay for publishing) journals.  They would make a sacrifice in maintaining the journals for free, but what would they win? Quite a lot actually.  Were we do switch to this system, university libraries would no longer have to pay subscription fees to journals, and the university professors wouldn't have to pay to have their work published.  And the quality of publications wouldn't suffer.   Some of this cost could even be handled by overhead.

Yale's library (from wiki), where I not once went to do research during my Ph.D.

But what is the cost of running a diamond access publication?  Well, it turns out to be very small.  With pdfs online, there's really no need to publish paper proceedings.  I don't think I've ever gone to a library to find an article on paper -- pretty much nobody does these days.  So, all you need to do is register a domain and pay for some maintenance and hosting.  The rest of the work is done by volunteers.  Looking at the financial statement (of which I learned from Google+) of the Journal of Computational Geometry, it could take as little as $10 per year.  Heck, we don't really need universities to pay for it.

Yes, it really costs very little to run a journal these days if you do it right.  There's no need for readers, or authors, to pay huge sums to middle-men.

To Boldly Research

In science, at least in computer science, in order for your research to have impact, you roughly have to do one of two things.

1. Solve a known open problem that people care about.
2. Solve a problem you made up and convince others that it’s interesting / important / impactful.

Often, a paper will do a combination of the two. Of course these aren’t the only ways to have impact – you might find a shorter proof of a known theorem, find a connection between fields others haven’t, etc. But discovering something interesting that nobody else has is a common theme.

So research requires some confidence, if not arrogance, to attempt. Successful researchers clearly need to find this confidence, and it’s not something that comes immediately. So I thought it might be helpful, especially to beginning graduate students (assuming any are reading), for me to spell out why I think succeeding in research is not as hopeless as it might first seem.

Lots of people think in the following chain, especially regarding solving known open problems: 1) Famous researcher X attempted this problem and didn’t get anywhere. 2) They’re clearly better / more experienced than I am. 3) Hence, I won’t be able to solve it.

The worst part of thinking this way is that it’s self-fulfilling – if you never make a serious attempt at a problem believing you can solve it, you probably never will. The second worst part is that this reasoning is flawed.

Lets assume that experienced researcher X attempted (but failed to solve) the problem you’re working on; it doesn’t mean that you can’t. There are a couple reasons for this.

1. Famous researcher X is probably working on lots of problems and doesn’t have nearly as much time to devote to your problem as you do. By seriously applying yourself, you might succeed where X hasn’t.
2. The process of doing research is partly random. You might just have an idea that X hadn’t.
3. Some advances may have come out since X seriously attempted your problem. The average graduate student can solve lots of problems Gauss couldn’t solve, and it’s because science has made progress since then. This type of reasoning holds true on much smaller time scales.

There are also things you can do to increase the chances of being successful, or at least I’ve found that these things have helped me.

1. Work on a problem that you’re actually excited about. This will make it much easier to put in the work needed to be successful. If research feels more like work than fun, then you might be doing it wrong.
2. Find a problem that you think you have a chance in tackling. You should be able to feel in your gut if the problem “feels right.” Many problems are indeed too hard to attempt for beginning researchers.
3. Don’t forget you have access to experienced person Y (your advisor) who might give you some insight that experienced person X didn’t have.

Of course I am also still a relatively young researcher, and getting research confidence is an ongoing process -- I still find working on hard open problems (rightfully) daunting. But if you can fool yourself into thinking you can succeed, even where others have failed, you might just turn out to be right.

Pay it Backward

I just finished writing peer reviews for an academic conference. The peer review system is the established method of quality control for scientific publications. When work is submitted for publication to an academic journal, experts judge it for correctness, importance, clarity, etc. It is then published or rejected. In computer science, conference publications, which are at least as important as journal publications, also go through the review process.

The question for this post is: how much peer reviewing ought one (researcher) do?

One easy answer is that you can't do more than you're asked to do. So if you're not being asked to review papers, no need to feel guilty! But when can you start to feel like you're doing too much reviewing? How much is the ideal amount?

The average paper gets reviewed by about 4 people, so it's not hard to compute what your "fair share" of reviewing should be. For each paper you submit, whether it is ultimately accepted or not, add to a running total: 4 divided by the number of coauthors on the paper. This sum, perhaps rounded up and say taken yearly, would be your fair share.

But just like taxes are progressive, so is reviewing load. We cannot expect a someone submitting his first paper to review 4 papers in payment. This person isn't yet known in the community and won't be asked to peer review, and either way he wouldn't yet be considered an "expert" in the field. To make up for this, more senior people have to do more reviewing -- it's only fair. Every established scientist had to submit her first paper without having "payed" for it upfront.

Only the situation is even more lopsided. Scientists need to make up for more than the reviewing burden they've placed on others when they were getting started. Research is very bottom heavy; for instance lots of graduate students leave research right after (or even before) finishing their Ph.D.s. These graduate students (at least in computer science) usually submit some publications, but don't review nearly their "fair share." So those who remain in research need to compensate, and they should -- research is their game.

Of course we have to take into account that very senior people do other forms of service that the rest of the researchers benefit from like chairing conferences, editing journals, and serving on committees. This should perhaps reduce their reviewing load.

My feeling is that in computer science a good time for the amount of reviewing you do to become as large as the amount of reviewing you ask of others is when you're a post-doc. You've stayed past graduate school, and you've become an expert in something -- time to pay your dues.

This year I've done at least as much reviewing as I've "used," but that's how it should be. It's not always the most pleasant work, but I realize it needs to be done. And if I'm lucky enough to stay in research, I expect my reviewing load to continue to increase.

Not the worst price to pay for having a job you love.