Our friend Atul Butte has died at age 55, a great physician and medical researcher who couldn’t be saved by our most advanced medicines and technology. He was always cheerful and curious.
Of his many online lectures, I think this one captures his spirit and enthusiasm well:
He and I were on opposite sides of the “saliva-soaked face rags for the general public will prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission” debate, but it didn’t affect our friendship. Humans, even MD/PhDs, are social animals and it would have been tough for someone in the San Francisco Bay Area to take the “viruses are smarter than humans” position. Atul emphasized persuasion rather than coercion with respect to masks, unusual for an academic and doubly unusual for a University of California academic. (He did advocate coerced COVID vaccination, though, via employer mandates, and then COVID turned out not to be relevant to his own health and longevity.)
This is a sad loss for those of us who worked with Atul in the Boston area and, I’m sure, for the many younger researchers and docs whom he inspired. Also, on this Father’s Day, a terrible loss for his child. To channel Atul’s spirit, though, I guess we can be more optimistic about the future of medicine because of the techniques that Atul developed and taught to others. I’ll try to remember him every time I hear about a medical insight that came out of looking at a big data set.
From Atul’s PhD advisor:
Although Atul was always at the cutting edge of science he had the presence and expansive outlook of the intellectual giants of the previous century. His integrative approach to biomedicine has inspired thousands. But first he loved his family and friends with an enthusiasm that… https://t.co/YdYObFyBQvpic.twitter.com/J1AL1N2I8V
Young Americans hoping to stay elite or join the elites, e.g., via attending an elite university, are forced into behaviors that would have seemed completely unnatural back in the 1970s. A 1970s public school was a cruel bully-filled environment compared to today’s placid “kindness is everything” schools. Teenagers were expected to be solipsistic and certainly not expected to pretend to be committed do-gooders. Today, by contrast, the teenager who hopes to gain admittance to a decent college must feign passion for a social justice cause, helping the “underserved”, etc. Nobody seems to notice that teenagers have enough of their own problems to focus on and that folks who genuinely want to invest time and money in charity tend to be old.
If the Americans who fought World War II were the “Greatest Generation” then surely today’s college students are the “Kindest Generation” and those who attend the most elite schools are the kindest of the kindest. How to explain, then, the enthusiasm for Israel-haterd/Jew-hatred among the kindest of the kind? Here’s a theory from a friend in the Boston area (she’s a 60ish Clinton/Obama Democrat who questions the full Biden/Harris religion):
My theory is that they’re force-fed so much “kindness” that they’re desperate to be mean to someone — and, in reason #100 for antisemitism over the centuries, campus ideology and TikTok gave them the excuse…
I think that she’s on to something. Ivy League (“Queers for Palestine League”) schools demand thousands of young humans every year who are as kind as the kindest Buddhist philosopher. The U.S. doesn’t contain a sufficient size population of ultra-kind 18-year-olds. Therefore, the people admitted to elite schools are mostly those who’ve been great liars and pretenders regarding their kindness levels. They need to take their masks off occasionally (so to speak; of course, the same folks have been very diligent indeed about wearing their COVID-19 masks; #FollowTheScience). They can’t hold an on-campus demonstration to decry crimes committed by undocumented migrants or by Black Americans. They can’t rally against Muslims being reluctant to celebrate the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. What is left? The only acceptable outlets for rage (Two Minutes Hate) are (1) anti-Trump/anti-Republican gatherings, and (2) anti-Israel/anti-Jew gatherings (sometimes layered with a “we don’t hate Jews, only Zionists” gloss).
A Facebook friend and social acquaintance from my Cambridge days, Lisa Randall, penned an article for the Boston Globe about how working class federal taxpayers should be forced to keep feeding a rich university in a rich state:
the Trump administration has done what has seldom been done before: unified the faculty behind a common, unwavering defense of academic freedom and their unrelenting belief in the value of universities, particularly their own.
(Remember that part of “academic freedom” is the freedom to use the peasants’ tax dollars to run racially segregated theaters, e.g., from 2021:
She posted a link to the article on Facebook. One of her friends, apparently a Deplorable, said “Not one penny of my tax$ for a $50B endowment woke factory thanks”. I trotted out my standard line about how it was unclear why Harvard, which officially says that inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems”, would want or accept any federal money. Shouldn’t Harvard want to fund itself via donations from the rich and from state taxes and see federal money spent at universities that are in poorer-than-average states, e.g., in Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi (stats on median household income by state; DC at the very top, of course, and Maskachusetts and New Jersey right underneath due to Medicare/Medicaid buying pharma and the Department of Education subsidizing universities)? I cited this 2016 piece from the Harvard Gazette, which calls itself “the official news website for Harvard University”.
The responses from her friends opened an interesting window into how academic elites think:
I was called “the dullest knife in the block” for thinking that an article in the Harvard Gazette by a “Harvard Staff Writer” and containing a series intro likely written by an editor was in any way related to an official Harvard position. It was an mere “opinion” piece and represented only the opinion of that one writer. (Which would mean that Harvard officially thinks that inequality is good? Or Harvard doesn’t think inequality is bad?)
Research grants should be allocated by merit and not by geography or wealth. An unstated assumption seemed to be that a Harvard lab couldn’t move if Harvard failed to secure private/state funding to replace the federal funding. Although it is, in fact, common for entire labs to move when a professor moves for whatever reason, the Harvard folks couldn’t imagine anyone leaving Harvard to follow the money. Our neighborhood here in Florida actually is periodically a destination for a moved lab, e.g., this neuroscience lab that moved in 2023 from University of California. Florida State University beat MIT in a competition to host the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in 1990 and the New York Times said FSU was “expected to draw scientists in biology, physics and engineering from all over the world”. Another NYT article said “M.I.T. felt that it deserved the project”. Today, the Chief Scientist down at FSU’s lab is Laura H. Greene while the hidebound MIT magnet lab is run by a white male, Robert Griffin.
A giant-brained Ph.D. participant from California disputed that Michigan was any poorer than Maskachusetts (Wokipedia says that MA median household income is nearly 50 percent higher than in MI). For those who only fly over the Midwest, it’s apparently plausible that the Rust Belt state and its biggest city of Detroit are both in prime fiscal condition.
The idea that the peasants of Michigan would benefit if $2 billion/year in federal money were redirected to, for example, University of Michigan from Harvard was questioned. Nobody but me was able to see that Michigan would be better off it were able to collect state income tax, property tax, and sales tax from the people paid by the $2 billion/year in grants. Nor that when those researchers went out to local retailers that the state would once again be able to collect more tax revenue as the retailers staffed up. (They would probably argue that the move of Citadel from Chicago to Miami didn’t hurt Chicago and didn’t help Miami (the Miami HQ for Citadel is expected to cost “$1 billion-plus” (translation: $2 billion?); imagine the cost for the building permit on this 54-story tower!).)
Here’s the HTML title tag for the Harvard Gazette:
<title>Harvard Gazette – Official news from Harvard University covering innovation in teaching, learning, and research — Harvard Gazette</title>
and here’s how it is rendered by Google when one searches:
Maybe the courts will block Donald Trump’s attempt to redirect the working class’s tax dollars to universities other than Harvard and similar. But if Trump does succeed, I think the elite schools and their elite graduates will be completely blindsided. Even after being told by the U.S. Supreme Court that they’re violating the U.S. Constitution by discriminating on the basis of race (especially against Asians), these schools imagine themselves to have gotten rich by being more virtuous than anyone else. A few fun points from the Boston Globe article…
We wouldn’t understand DNA if the working class didn’t fund Harvard:
The nature of DNA was discovered by an X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, who was doing pure research to understand its molecular structure. Under the current funding crisis, Franklin might well have been laid off before making her groundbreaking discovery that accounts for much of modern medical research.
It is unclear how Rosalind Franklin, a British Jew working in pre-Islamic Britain with funding from a private company (Wokipedia says Turner & Newall), would have been disadvantaged by a change in where U.S. taxpayer money is spent.
The subtitle of the article is an interesting window into how elites think: “What happens when research is fully privatized?” There hasn’t been any proposal from the Trump dictatorship, or indeed anyone in Washington, D.C., to “fully privatize” research funding. The current dictatorship merely wants to take away money from the Queers for Palestine League schools that fail to comply with the dictator’s reading of the U.S. Constitution. Presumably the money taken away from Harvard would then be spent at schools that don’t engage in race discrimination, don’t support Hamas, etc. See, for example, “University of Florida denies appeal of pro-Palestinian student protester’s suspension” and “Protesters handcuffed, arrested at FSU amid nationwide demonstrations against Israel-Hamas War”.
Today is the deadline for accepting college admissions offers. For parents and kids who are disappointed, let’s consider the strategic mistakes that they might have made.
Most obviously, a child who fails to identify as Elizabeth Warren’s cousin (i.e., “Native American”), is at a disadvantage. Same deal for Black, Latinx, 2SLGBTQQIA+, etc. These identifications are often matters of personal choice and colleges and universities have made their prejudice against cisgender heterosexual whites and Asians clear so a failure to identify in some kind of preferred category isn’t excusable.
Some more nuanced lessons from the NYU data leak, from a friend in suburban Boston who is numbers-oriented and fed everything into a database management system:
The real comparison is between “cohorts” – basically they lump people into clusters by zip code, background, interests. NYU admissions rate for our [somewhat rich suburban public] high school was effectively 3%. Way lower than their average admission rate.
Moving to a zip code from which few people apply to the schools of interest could help. Moving to a less elite neighborhood within the same metro area, for example, could actually save a huge amount of money as well as enhancing a child’s admissions chances. Evincing an interest in less-popular majors, e.g., classics, could help. (My friend: “It isn’t enough just to say classics – you need Latin courses, participation in known Latin competitions, etc.”)
(Maybe the ultimate hack would be moving into a zip code that is 99% occupied by The Villages or similar kids-forbidden development. It’s virtually guaranteed that zero other kids will apply from that zip code if kids under age 19 aren’t allowed to live in 99% of that zip code.)
From a different friend whose child attends an elite private school in Philadelphia:
One kid got into [Queers for Palestine League] penn last year for deferred admission because of crew and now [the child’s] class has twice as many kids doing rowing than previous class
Let’s check in with Harvard, where they say that they hate inequality and also that they want as much federal money as possible funded to richer-than-average schools in richer-than-average states. (i.e., don’t send the money to universities in poorer-than-average Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi where the result would be increased equality among states) Layla L. Hijjawi, a Crimson editor:
Mahmoud Khalil, for example, is a green card holder — otherwise known as a lawful permanent resident — who has been detained, apparently for pro-Palestine organizing at Columbia University. The Trump administration has linked his actions, which ought to be defended by the First Amendment, to terrorism, claiming he poses a threat to American foreign policy.
One doesn’t even need to organize pro-Palestinian protests to become a target; simply attending one is enough to merit condemnation and threatened deportation, as the case of Yunseo Chung makes clear.
Most egregiously, merely publishing a pro-Palestine opinion piece — as many editors of this very paper have — can apparently result in being snatched off the streets and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for supposedly supporting terrorism like Rumeysa Ozturk, another permanent resident of the U.S.
This is a clear escalation of its attack on pro-Palestine speech on campus. Harvard must not yield in the face of this right-wing pressure. The conciliatory approach of Harvard President Alan M. Garber’s email regarding funding review misses the mark by treating the review as being pursued in good faith, ignoring the obvious insidious and chilling intention of the campaign developing under the guise of preventing antisemitism.
I wouldn’t normally watch a basketball game, but the public school here texted out a message advising us that school uniforms wouldn’t be required today if students wanted to wear Gators or Cougars outfits instead (I would love to see the kid brave enough to wear a Houston shirt!).
Xfinity managed to stage a TV outage in our neighborhood (first time I’d tried to use cable since the Super Bowl), promising to have service restored by tomorrow evening, but I was able to see the end of the game via streaming.
Florida universities are searching for ways to pump more money into sports ahead of a proposed landmark NCAA settlement that would open the door for schools to directly pay athletes — and using state dollars could be on the table.
Florida has long held a bright line against putting tax dollars into college athletics. But that could change soon, as schools here and across the country grapple with revolutionary changes coming to the NCAA.
Athletic programs at Florida universities are by rule meant to be self-funded, paid for by student fees, ticket sales to events, NCAA distributions, sponsorships and donation dollars, among other sources.
A friend whose child recently applied to NYU downloaded the hacker’s ZIP file of liberated data (canonical link; it may be that this has been getting updated with additional redactions) and found his child’s name and other identifiable characteristics.
A dark web user claimed responsibility for briefly hacking New York University’s website Saturday, and replacing it with what appeared to be student test scores and an apparent racial epithet.
Instead of the usual images of college athletes and the Greenwich Village campus, the site featured a black background with green writing showing a message along with charts of what were purported to be SAT and ACT scores and GPAs for students in 2024, divided by race.
“On June 29 2023, racial affirmative action in college admissions was ruled illegal,” the female hacker’s message reads. “Computer N–gy Exploitation (CNE) reveals NYU continued anyway.”
My friend and his computer-oriented son played around with the data and found an interesting pattern… kids from their local high school were in the database as having applied early with certain SAT scores and GPA. The database showed that they were rejected (perhaps for being white, since their qualifications were above the medians for admitted precious Black applicants). In conversations at school, the kids claimed higher SAT/GPA numbers than they reported to NYU and the kids didn’t mention having applied to NYU (i.e., they kept their rejections secret).
What does it take to be accepted? My friend and his son found a good athlete from a Maskachusetts public high school. His (weighted GPA) was 4.15 and his SAT score was 1550. He’s the wrong kind of Brown (Indian), apparently, and was rejected.
The data download arrives as CSV files, but don’t try opening in Excel. The files are around 3 GB in size:
Whatever the test scores of the carefully-curated-by-skin-color NYU admittees. they can all be on the #RightSideOfHistory (link) with the NYU Queer Union:
There is one thing that students and faculty at Columbia say that they hate more than than the state of Israel: inequality. The flip side is that there is one thing that students and faculty at Columbia love more than the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad: equality. Columbia has accumulated $15 billion in profits (its endowment) and, therefore, is near the top of the top 1% of the richest colleges in the U.S. (list; there are about 4,000 colleges and universities total in the U.S).
One would think thank these inequality-haters would be delighted that the Trump administration had decided to redirect money from their rich school, thus freeing up funds to be distributed to comparatively poor schools. Yet instead we learn that folks at Columbia are upset. Example video: “Columbia University staff, students aren’t pleased with $400M cut in funds”.
“The AAUP is actively working with our members across the nation in preparation to resist these draconian policies that severely undermine the academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression that are fundamental to higher education,” the statement from [union leader Todd] Wolfson reads.
An elite academic is truly free only if he/she/ze/they is receiving an unconditional paycheck from working class taxpayers? In a now-deleted tweet, a Columbia grad student wrote that her F31 grant was worth only $100,000 per year in salary and tuition and that this was “pennies”, serenely unaware at the time that quite a few taxpayers would consider $100,000/year to be actual money. (the BLS says that median wage in Q4 2024 for a full-time worker was $1,185/week = $61,620/year)
(Same question about Californians. They say that they hate inequality and then they complain that California purportedly pays more in federal taxes than it receives in federal spending. (Much if not most of this is due, I think, to Californians paying into Social Security and Medicare while working in California and then receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits in retirement after moving to other states.) Californians want money extracted from taxpayers in Mississippi for their gold-plated high-speed rail system, for example, when that is completely inconsistent with their philosophy of promoting equality.)
Another question about Columbia… most of the academics I know who get federal money said that they would leave the U.S. in the event of a second Nakba (Trump victory). Nearly all should be living in Canada or Europe by now. Why are there enough of these folks still at Columbia to soak up so much federal money?
Separately, how is the noble enricher Mahmoud Khalil doing?
the Inequality sub-department within Sociology at Columbia (14 taxpayer-funded faculty getting paid far above the median wage in the U.S. so that they can write articles about how it is bad if people get paid far above the median wage)
A friend who taught computer nerdism in Hong Kong before joining our lab at MIT used to try to intensify the pain and suffering of graduate students by remind us that the Chinese had an expression “Poor as a Professor, Dumb as a PhD”.
In an age where an average OpenAI employee earns $1 million/year and a receptionist at an NVIDIA branch office likely gets considerably more, UCLA is hiring mathematics professors for “$78,200 – $101,400 annually.” In case the original URL gets memory-holed, here are some screen shots:
Google’s AI says “The average home price near UCLA in Westwood, Los Angeles is around $1.3–1.6 million, depending on the source. The median sale price per square foot is around $857–$859.” The same AI says that a 30-year mortgage on a small house near UCLA will cost about $90,000 per year (i.e., roughly 100 percent of what UCLA is offering to pay the proud Ph.D. in mathematics.
Let’s dive into some of the specifics to figure out what a successful applicant looks like. In theory, California government employers aren’t supposed to sort applicants by skin color (the hated-by-progressives Proposition 209 from 1996). Let’s look at some of the language:
We strongly encourage applications from individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and other individuals who are underrepresented in the field, across color, creed, race, ethnic and national origin, physical ability, gender and sexual identity, or any other legally protected basis.
If they don’t discriminate by skin color in hiring then where’s the “strong encouragement” for those who have a favored skin color?
Donald Trump is trying to eradicate DEI from federally-funded universities such as UCLA. Instead, UCLA will have “EDI”:
Statement of contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion that includes previous and planned efforts that advance EDI through formal and/or informal mentoring, especially of Latina students
Are they trying to put together a “Hot Latinas” calendar for their nerd departments?
This search is part of a cluster hire with faculty positions in the departments of Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics and Astronomy who will support UCLA’s goals to achieve federal designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution as early as 2025. … Faculty hired through this search are expected to maintain an active affiliation with the Chicano Studies Research Center and to have a track record or demonstrated commitment to mentoring and encouraging the success of U.S.-based Latinx and first-generation scholars. Since the Latina population is particularly under-represented in physical sciences nationwide, the Department of Mathematics and the Division of Physical Sciences are especially interested in candidates with potential to serve as outstanding mentors to Latina students.
Maybe I could be considered, despite my lack of a math Ph.D., because I consistently use the term “Latinx”:
the Office of the Chancellor and the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost have sponsored this search in order to recruit exceptional scholars whose teaching, scholarship and/or mentoring has strong ties to Latinx experiences in the United States.
The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
Circling back to the economics… as prestigious as some of these institutions are, how is a math professor earning $78,200/year in his/her/zir/their 30s ever going to be able to afford a family unless he/she/ze/they chooses a job at a school in a part of the country with a lower cost of living? It’s tough to have two children in a studio apartment shared with another adult.
Our mole inside Queers-for-Palestine Brown University signed up for Linear Algebra and was sentenced to read “Mathematical Microaggressions” by a past president of the Mathematical Association of America, Francis Edward Su. He/she/ze/they starts off by relating his/her/zir/their own personal trauma:
Here are some example microaggressions in the math world:
Turning tricks is somehow bad:
Math will be improved with more diversity:
Here’s the organization’s current “Executive Director” (“president” wasn’t a sufficiently august title?):
They’re so certain that diversity improves mathematics that they hired one of the world’s whitest white guys to be their leader?
On March 16, 2021 a man killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, and injured one man in a shooting spree in Atlanta, Georgia. This violence has renewed broader calls to support our Asian and Asian American communities. The specifics of this tragic incident remind us that there are multiple layers of identity-based marginalization and hate related to gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. One solidarity movement with the victims of the hate crime is #StopAsianHate. This is not a response to last Tuesday’s events, but to a broader arc of increased hate crime since the COVID-19 pandemic started.
In 2019, MAA launched the Inclusivity Award in recognition of the importance of its core value of Inclusivity and building a healthy, vibrant mathematical community where all are welcome and encouraged to flourish. The 2021 award winner is William (Bill) Hawkins, Jr.
UnderDr. Hawkins’s leadership, the SUMMA Office created an archival record of American PhDs in mathematics and mathematics education who are members of minority groups, initiated the Minority Chairs Breakfast annually, established the Tensor-SUMMA projects “to encourage the pursuit and enjoyment of mathematics by students who are members of groups historically underrepresented in the field of mathematics,” organized panels at JMM on issues that affected minority institutions or populations, published a poster on African and African-American Pioneers in Mathematics, and provided guidance to those who wanted to establish an intervention project.
“I am delighted to be able to recognize my friend and colleague, Bill Hawkins, with the 2021 Inclusivity Award,” said MAA Executive Director, Michael Pearson. “It has been my privilege to work with, and learn from, Bill during my tenure at MAA.”
Circling back to Clouseau, let’s hope that he can learn some linear algebra from YouTube while the Brown faculty teaches him about microaggressions (a $91,676/year experience for 2024-5).
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Feb. 14 to withhold federal funding from schools — including public colleges and universities — requiring COVID-19 vaccines for attendance.
The article then provides a partial list of the righteous:
Oberlin College requires that all students, faculty and staff attending or working at Oberlin receive a full COVID-19 vaccine, unless an individual has an approved medical or religious exemption.
The above list may not be complete. Tufts in Maskachusetts isn’t listed, for example, but it does require medical, dental, PA, etc. students to receive the Sacrament of Fauci plus a Booster of Faucism. (They’re still following the Science as revealed by Dr. Fauci, the CDC, and Prof. Dr. Joe Biden, M.D., Ph.D. in which the COVID-19 “vaccine” prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2?) Does the Trump executive order come with an exemption for medical/dental schools or will Tufts have to choose between saving lives/its sacred principles and the sweet cash that flows out of Washington, D.C.?
After saying that nothing is more precious than human lives and the COVID-19 vaccine is essential, how does a college or university reverse course and explain that it no longer cares about saving lives? Will they defrost Claudine Gay so that she can explain that it is all about the context?
