Category: Academia

University politics and administrators.

“Why not teach something more practical?”

by philg

One of the reasons it is worth paying $1 million for a 100-year-old sagging fixer-upper starter home in Cambridge is that you run into interesting people.  At a sandwich shop yesterday I encountered a friend who is a professor of Architecture.  His companion asked what I was teaching this semester.  “Intro circuit theory for sophomore electrical engineering majors,” was my response, “Inductors, resistors, capacitors, transistors, op-amps, feedback, impedance method.”


He was taken aback.  “Why not teach something more practical?”  Like what?  How to build a TV?  “No, I meant something more advanced and specialized, like a graduate seminar.”


I thought about it for awhile and said “Undergrads are fun to be around.  They’re always in a good mood.  For the average person, the likelihood that they’ll be in a bad mood is directly proportional to their age.”  I asked the architecture prof to concur:  “Aren’t your students in a better mood than the average working architect?”  He concurred and said that in fact he has noticed that when he teaches undergrads they are happier than the grad students that he usually teaches.


At first glance you’d expect college students to be unhappy.  They’re adolescents.  They don’t know what they want or what makes them happy.  But on second thought maybe undergrads do have a lot of reasons to be happy.  They don’t have any aches or pains because their bodies are so young.  They don’t have to worry about money because their parents send it to them.  They don’t have to call the plumber or electrician because the university maintains their dorm.  They don’t have to take their car in for service because they don’t have a car.  The last two points free them to read interesting books, watch movies, play video games, indulge in sex and drugs, etc.

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Give Fs to your best customers?

by philg

Here’s a portion of the “to the instructor” blurb of Internet Application Workbook:



The daily cost of attending a top university these days is about the same as the daily rate to stay at the Four Seasons hotel in Boston, living on room-service lobster and Champagne. It is no wonder, then, that the student feels entitled to have a pleasant experience. Suppose that you tell a student that his work is substandard. He may be angry with you for adversely affecting his self-esteem. He may complain to a Dean who will send you email and invite you to a meeting. You’ve upheld the standards of the institution but what favor have you done yourself? Remember that the A students will probably go on to graduate school, get PhDs, and settle into $35,000/year post-docs. The mediocre students are the ones who are likely to rise to high positions in Corporate America and these are the ones from whom you’ll be asking for funding, donations of computer systems, etc. Why alienate paying customers and future executives merely because they aren’t willing to put effort into software engineering?


In teaching with Internet Application Workbook you have a natural opportunity to separate evaluation from teaching. The quality of the user experience and solution engineered by a team is best evaluated by their client and the end-users. If the client responds to the questionnaire in Exercise 3 of the Planning Redux chapter by saying “Our team has solved all of our problems and we love working with them”, what does your opinion matter? Similarly if a usability study shows that test users are able to accomplish tasks quickly and reliably, what does your opinion of the page flow matter? During most of this course we try to act as coaches to help our students achieve high performance as perceived by their clients and end-users. We use every opportunity to arrange for students to get real-world feedback rather than letter grades from us.

The principal area where we must retain the role of evaluator is in looking at a team’s documentation. The main question here is “How easy would it be for a new team of programmers, with access only to what is in the /doc directory on a team’s server, to take over the project?”


America’s most grade-inflated schools tend to be its most expensive, e.g., Harvard.  Assuming a 5 percent annual increase the cost of education at a top school will top $1 million within 40 years.  Are the employee-teachers really going to give Fs to people donating $1 million to the institution?  Is there any way to maintain academic excellence and good relations with our wealthy patrons (the students)?


Suppose that there were a set of standardized problem sets and tests, shared among groups of universities.  A student at School A would have his or her work graded by teachers at Schools B,C, and D.  The relationship between students and staff at School A would therefore be more akin to that of athlete and coach, people working together to achieve great results, never having opposed interests.


This idea might be tough to implement in advanced courses in very rapidly changing fields but should be easy for old standbys such as undergrad physics, chemistry, math, etc.

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Teaching them to become lawyers

by philg

This evening we showed our 6.002 students the Ken Burns PBS documentary Empire of the Air.  This was adapted from a book of the same name by Tom Lewis.  Here are the facts that were related in two hours:


Lee De Forest, who did much to publicize the idea of using radio for broadcast rather than point-to-point communication, claimed credit for other peoples’ inventions and, through good luck and great legal talent, managed to prevail in a decades-long lawsuit against Major Edwin Armstrong, the true inventor of most of the important technologies behind radio broadcasting.  De Forest ridiculed America’s entry into World War I and then became a profiteer.  On the cusp of his 60th birthday, De Forest married Wife #4, a beautiful 21-year-old actress who remained devoted to him until his death at age 88.  As an old man, De Forest wrote a book entitled The Father of Radio and unsuccessfully encouraged his wife to write a book entitled I Married a Genius.


Edwin Armstrong worked hard and labored through formal electrical engineering training at Columbia University, the very sort of EE torture that our students are getting in 6.002.  Armstrong developed the circuits that enable using a vacuum tube as a radio transmitter and the superhet receiver, which together made it practical to transmit music and voice over AM radio, rather than Morse code.  A staunch patriot, Armstrong donated a royalty-free license to all of his patents to the U.S. government for use in World War II and served in that war by designing communications systems including that used during the invasion of Normandy in 1944.  Armstrong developed frequency modulation (FM), which was suppressed by David Sarnoff at RCA because it would threaten revenues from his AM radio monopoly and the emerging television.  RCA eventually was forced to use FM for the federally mandated NTSC television system but they refused to pay Armstrong royalties on his patents.  Armstrong committed suicide while embroiled in lawsuits attempting to force RCA to stop infringing.


David Sarnoff had no formal technical training.  Through ruthless business dealings and manipulation of the federal government managed to create and sustain a magnificently profitable enterprise that included the RCA radio and TV manufacturing company and the NBC radio and TV networks.  Though Armstrong’s widow eventually made him pay up a bit for his flagrant infringement of the frequency modulation patents, Sarnoff sailed unscathed through a sea of lives that he wrecked.  He died an old and rich man.


The only people in the drama who made millions without taking tremendous risks, working very hard, and occasionally going bankrupt, were … the lawyers in the patent and regulatory disputes.


What are our students to make of all this?  It can’t be that working hard as an MIT electrical engineering student and contributing useful innovations to society will be rewarded.  If you’re walking your dog in the Harvard Law School Yard four years from now and you run into our 6.002 alumni, tell them “hi” from me.


[The video also made one wonder for whom public television programs are made.  Despite having two hours the show did not attempt to explain even the simplest physics or engineering behind radio or any of the inventions that were the subject of the disputes chronicled.  The biographical and historical information was narrated so slowly that it could have been sped up 3X without approaching the speed of dialog on the Simpsons, which most people seem to have no trouble following.  It seems as though public TV is designed for people whose minds are not quick enough to handle the quick pace and intellectual challenge of commercial TV shows.]

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Why do Colleges Build Dormitories? And teach half-time?

by philg

The one thing that everyone who has studied college education can agree on is that students learn more when they work in groups.  Yet colleges don’t build infrastructure to support this.  A university will spend hundreds of $millions on dormitories, i.e., places for students to drink beer and sleep together.  Why is there is no budget for cubicle farms where students in the same major could do their homework together, asking for help from the person at the next desk and, if necessary, raising their hands for help from roving teaching assistants?


Another paradox of college life is the brevity of the calendar.  In a country where less than 3 percent of the population works on the farm, we’ve preserved a long summer break so that Junior can go home and help bring in the harvest.  The result is that parents, already reeling from the cost of 4 years of tuition, also have to figure out how they’re going to support Junior during Winter Break ski trips, Spring Break beach trips, and the long summer break in an economy where jobs are scarce.


Would it not make more sense for colleges to get out of the housing business and into the group-work business?  Let students come to campus at 9:00 am and stay until 9:00 pm, working with other students.  Then let them sleep at night wherever they want to.  If a college has infinite money, there’s nothing wrong with building dorms but if funds are scarce why not spend it on things that are directly relevant for learning?


Would it not make more sense for colleges to be in session for 45-50 weeks per year?  A student would be able to get a bachelor’s degree in 2.5 years and join the workforce, i.e., get off the parental payroll.


The answer to these apparently obvious questions seems to be “it depends”.  Mostly it depends on how rich the students’ parents are.  At a school for the ruling class, e.g., Harvard or Yale, it really doesn’t matter how effective the pedagogy is.  If Biff doesn’t learn calculus his daddy can still buy him a seat in Congress.   What Biff really needs to do is meet other members of the ruling class even if they are from different majors  The dormitory is the ideal environment for this mixing.


Similarly a school targeted to children of the ruling class need not worry about the parents’ ability to support Muffy for 4 years.  Much more important is that Muffy have plenty of time off to take the Grand Tour of Europe, hop the family fractional jet for the December trip to St. Barts, spend a summer interning in Cousin (Senator) Bob’s office.


A suboptimality arises when schools whose parents aren’t rich ape the policies of the traditional schools, all of which were established in an age when only the privileged went to college.


Prediction:  the coming decades will see the rise of new colleges with more intensive academic programs, more shared workspaces for undergraduates, and no dorms.

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