Ferment and Befuddlement

February 6, 2012, 12:01 am

A century ago the general study of language was a humanities discipline. The preparation needed was some experience in Latin and Greek, or modern languages and literatures, and analytical ability. Perhaps a little philosophy. Things are different today. Around my home department in the last week the characteristically diverse talks about language presupposed chunks of algebra, automata theory, biology, computation, ethology, information theory, lexicography, logic, philosophy, psychology, and statistics. The fusion of the cognitive and linguistic sciences is proceeding at an exhilarating rate.

A talk on Monday by Marcin Zajenkowski of the University of Warsaw reported psychological work on whether people really do have more cognitive trouble processing simple first-order quantifiers like all and some than more complex higher-order ones like most. They do, though not always exactly where you would think. But what reflects language processing and how much is just arithmetical ability? Zajenkowski has tried to tease these apart with evidence from clinical studies as well as real-time processing.

On Tuesday a language evolution lab meeting featured a presentation by PhD student James Thomas arguing that a kind of self-domestication played a key role in laying the biological foundations for the eventual emergence of culture and language among humans.

At lunch on Tuesday, my friend Bob Ladd (fully recovered from the disgrace of my revealing his secret shame on Lingua Franca) mulled over some ideas about the theory of phonetics and phonology (I dimly realized that ideas I had heard in a metaphysics lecture by the philosopher Hugh Mellor last Friday were highly relevant). Ladd planned to discuss his ideas later in the week with András Kornai, an applied mathematician at the Hungarian Academic of Sciences who works on language-related topics.

Kornai flew in from Budapest Tuesday night, and talked at length with Ladd on Wednesday about applications of continuous and discrete mathematics in phonetics and phonology. But his talk on Thursday dealt with word meanings. With an information-theoretic argument he showed that 85 to 95 percent of the information content of any text must reside in word meanings rather than grammatical structure. He went on to outline a theory of lexical meanings, occasionally presupposing knowledge of topics in traditional dictionary-making, automata theory, logic, philosophy of language, and algebra. On Friday he gave another talk, in the School of Informatics, about machine analysis of Hungarian, and the design of tools for text analysis and rapid parsing.

In the space of one week as a linguist at Edinburgh I have been called upon to understand at least something about quantification, regression models, phonetic features, bit rates, finite state machines, group theory, programming, and a significant number of other topics, just trying to keep up with the ferment that is the modern language sciences. (It was depressing to see the most influential scholar in linguistics giving a talk last year dissing it all, rejecting the whole modern synthesis, clinging to the 1960s. I wrote about that sad experience here.)

Do I know enough to process all of this ferment? Nowhere even close. My head spins. I am under-equipped in the necessary disciplines and often out of my depth. It is fabulous: If I could understand everything I hear from colleagues and visitors, if I never experienced moments of panic about not being able to keep up, I would be working in the wrong place.

The joy of working in a university, for me, has nothing to do with wearing gowns or drinking sherry in the faculty club or standing at oak-paneled podia in steeply banked lecture theaters imparting vapid maxims to the young the way professors in movies do. It’s about being in the company of people who are smarter than I am.

My foes, grabbing with glee at the low-hanging fruit of this straight-line, will say, “That shouldn’t be difficult to arrange!” Go ahead, mock. But I’m serious. I don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. I don’t want to rank any higher than about tenth. Being in the company of people who outshine me intellectually doesn’t just challenge and improve me, it gives me pleasure.

I wish more students saw things this way. I was very pleased to encounter an undergraduate who had attended Kornai’s talks and had not fully understood them. Excellent! Just how it should be. Befuddlement is nature’s way of telling you that you are learning. You ought to find your university buzzing with ideas that seem intriguing but not (yet) quite within your grasp. If you have all necessary prerequisites and understand everything you hear each week, you cheated yourself. You didn’t pick a good enough college.

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reinking

I think two ideas are illogically confounded here: (a) presenting complex ideas to those who lack relevant knowledge in a way that is not easily understood, and (b) intellectual brilliance. In fact, it might be argued that the latter is the antithesis of the former. A recent personal example illustrates. Last week I attended a lecture by Adam Riess, who won a 2011 Nobel prize in astrophysics for his discovery that the the universe is not only expanding, but that the expansion is accelerating due to “dark energy.” The complexity of his work and his scientific brilliance were clearly evident. But, even though I have no knowledge of physics (I am in the social sciences), I left his talk convinced that I had a basic conceptual understanding of his work and the science involved. His overheads had many common analogies to illustrate his work and were masterfully designed to communicate his basic ideas to the uninformed. I also thought of two relevant quotes, one by Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” and one by a mentor in graduate school: “Say it so your grandmother can understand it.”
johnbarnes

What an absolutely delightful description of the great advantage of befuddlement on the edge of one’s own knowledge: it motivates us to go learn that other stuff we should know. It would be a good thing indeed to infect students with that response to fuddle.
dank48

This reminds me of the story of the rabbinical student who attended three lectures by a famous rabbi. “The first lecture was good; he was so eloquent that I understood most of what he said. The second was even better, and I hope that with enough study I’ll understand it someday. The third was so profound that even the rabbi didn’t understand what he was saying.”

I’m with Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night) in that I’ve tried and failed to understand what Chomsky has written, and it’s merely some consolation that it just isn’t my field. I simply don’t know enough about linguistics to grasp what he’s talking about. Still, history is replete with prominent representatives of the old guard in some discipline or other blowing off the young turks, and as has been pointed out, the new way of looking at things sometimes takes hold only after the adherents of the established orthodoxy retire from the field. And that new way either dies or survives, in which cast it in turn matures, ages, and becomes orthodoxy–and is eventually replaced in turn.

Yet each erstwhile “final word on the subject” contributes something to the long-term understanding of the subject.
tjam49

What a concept: Life as a continual learning
process; education and academic pursuits that have no commencement—announcing the
completion of a student’s learning process, and the inauguration of his/her absolute
readiness to be counted among the ranks of the most brilliant minds in his/her
field of study as a peer, with an implied entitlement eliminating even the
slightest obligation or inclination to entertain the thought that any further
knowledge is necessary—but recognize the constancy of change and embrace it as
naturally as the understanding that physical health and well-being require nutritional
intake for growth, maintenance, and survival.

In my
academic experience so far, I have encountered faculty from both camps; oddly
ironic is the evidence of a direct correlation between my learning outcomes and
the level of openness and acceptance of divergent views, and the encouragement
of debate.

And as to your point regarding the understanding
of what you don’t understand, I believe there is within a mind that is fertile
soil, the potential to grasp the intrinsic meaning of a concept, even though
the linguistic expression of the concept is beyond your intellectual
capabilities at the time. I have experienced this phenomenon in lectures where
I felt totally lost; yet, at an instant during the talk—what I refer to as the
point at which space and time intersected—I was able to see in my mind a
representation of this concept, and from that image work my way back through
the intellectual process to a clear understanding of the relationship of the
word meanings of the original linguistic expression. If that makes sense to you,
then you have more than likely been there as well.

Type your comment here.
tjam49

What a concept: Life as a continual learning
process; education and academic pursuits that have no commencement—announcing the
completion of a student’s learning process, and the inauguration of his/her absolute
readiness to be counted among the ranks of the most brilliant minds in his/her
field of study as a peer, with an implied entitlement eliminating even the
slightest obligation or inclination to entertain the thought that any further
knowledge is necessary—but recognize the constancy of change and embrace it as
naturally as the understanding that physical health and well-being require nutritional
intake for growth, maintenance, and survival.
In my academic experience so far, I have encountered faculty from both camps; oddly
ironic is the evidence of a direct correlation between my learning outcomes and
the level of openness and acceptance of divergent views, and the encouragement
of debate.
And as to your point regarding the understanding
of what you don’t understand, I believe there is within a mind that is fertile
soil, the potential to grasp the intrinsic meaning of a concept, even though
the linguistic expression of the concept is beyond your intellectual
capabilities at the time. I have experienced this phenomenon in lectures where
I felt totally lost; yet, at an instant during the talk—what I refer to as the
point at which space and time intersected—I was able to see in my mind a
representation of this concept, and from that image work my way back through
the intellectual process to a clear understanding of the relationship of the
word meanings of the original linguistic expression. If that makes sense to you,
then you have more than likely been there as well.
Guest

GP: >You ought to find your university buzzing with ideas that seem intriguing but not (yet) quite within your grasp.>>

Certainly that is true for anyone still capable of learning; on the other hand, anyone who suffered through the worst of the pomo crit theory period in an American English department must beg forgiveness for not granting the presumption of intelligibility to whirling gibberish.

While academic success is measured by your output (what you publish) rather than by your input (what you learn), people “trained” (odd word) in the humanities will participate less and less in the important academic discourse. The number of individuals able to keep pace with the blooming, buzzing cauldron of new ideas in linguistics is (I submit without proof) diminishing by the decade.Since “English” is still the default source of common knowledge across disciplines, this (unsubstantiated) widening gap between the intellectual haves and have nots bodes ill for the future of higher education. imho
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

I enjoyed the article about the Chomsky talk. Particularly the grant to Željko Bošković “On the Traditional Noun Phrase: Comparing Languages With and Without Articles”. This gave me and my wife a good laugh. We live in Central Europe and both have ELT experience, mostly with German speakers but with a scattering of people from the neighbouring slavic-language countries. Their innocent bafflement about what to use articles for is often touching, and it’s nice to see that one intrepid character is determined to get to the bottom of the matter

jffoster

I too will be interested in the results of the ‘With and without Articles’. Perhaps it will help me understand why prescriptivists in the Ukraine (yes, the Ukraine {or Ukrainia } who don’t have a definite article in their language insist on telling English speakers when we should use and not use ours.

http://historyinthecity.blogspot.com/ Michelle Moravec

nor of course do we all wear tweed coats. Liked the message, not so much the medium. Your graphic on the other hand … awesome Maybe profs should stage a kiss in a giant love-fest of higher education
gharbisonne

One thing we conservatives abhor is shoddy partisan propaganda masquerading as scholarship. So, for example, I’d be inclined to ‘attack’ Ms. Potter for claiming loyalty oaths were a conservative creation. New York’s, the first I can find, and still on the books, was enacted during the Governorship of Herb Lehman, in 1934; Lehman was a supporter of FDR and Al Smith. Angela Davis was fired by the U Cal Board of Regents, rehired by a judges order, and then fired again for calling the BoR thugs and murderers.

And why conservatives are responsible for the actions of the Ohio National Guard, or Governor Jim Rhodes, a man who opposed Barry Goldwater in 1964, is a true mystery.

Tenured_Radical

One of the things we tenured radicals abhor is conservatives who claim to be in charge of all the facts when, actually, y’all are dabblers in the practice of history.

Seriously, you want to claim the anti-tax, pro-business Jim Rhodes as a liberal just because he opposed Barry Goldwater? The Jim Rhodes who said of the Kent State students protesting the illegal expansion of an illegal war: “They’re worse than the Brownshirts, and the Communist element, and also the Night Riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” The entire Republican establishment opposed Goldwater. Read it dood.

And Lehman didn’t “invent” the loyalty oath: it has a long tradition in colonial North America and United States history. Perhaps the first American loyalty oath was required by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1760 as a requirement for civil and educational employment. Confederates required loyalty oaths in Tennessee by 1861, and I’m guessing they weren’t liberals either. Loyalty oaths required of faculty during the Cold War were imposed by McCarthy, McCarren, and the state level committees they inspired.

gharbisonne

Of course, I never said, despite Ms. Potter’s deceptive use of quotes, that Lehman “invented”loyalty oaths. But her example of an early loyalty oath, while not actually relevant to US higher education, make my case for me. Pennsylvania’s loyalty oath (which was more a disloyalty oath, actually, and was drafted in 1776, not 1760) was designed to exclude Tories and moderate Whigs, and was a creation of the Radicals. See H.E. Seyler. ‘Pennsylvania’s first loyalty oath’ History of Education Journal, 3, 114-126 (1952)

‘Read it dood’, and then you direct me to Wikipedia? Really?

Jim Rhodes was noted for his massive expansion of Ohio’s public higher education system; so much for a war on professors. He was by most lights a liberal Republican. He didn’t like student radicals; but then, almost no establishment politicians, left or right, did.

Goldwater was opposed by liberal and moderate east coast Republicans, but backed by the conservative intelligentsia. Potter is evidently unaware the parties in 1964 were not divided along ideological lines the way they are today.

I may be a dabbler in history. Ms. Potter, despite her title, seems unwilling to get her toes wet at all.

racmonti

And if he were alive today, Goldwater would be called a “severe liberal” or “severe slut” by today’s Republican standard-bearers.

captain_chronicle

It’s true that the right often throws barbs at academe but if you pay attention to detail within these occurences, most of these attacks are at “far-left loons” as O’Reilly typically calls them. When I was in the Army, we used to say that we are a microcosm of the society culturally – similar cultural makeup and worldviews as the larger society that it belongs to – just a smaller subset of it. I wonder if we can say the same overall for all of high education? By the very nature of intellectual curiosity, I would think that higher ed corps of faculty is not a Mini-Me of our society. Left or right, academia is full of people with a natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge, in a concentration more significant than the general society.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1600660751 Robert Oscar Lopez

Claire,

I admit I am a New Historicist literary critic, not a historian like you, so I won’t quibble over your historical record. I will quibble rather with your narrative style.

Let’s retire “War On” as a trope. The cliché is threadbare, and insulting when there are actual wars being led by a Democrat Commander-in-Chief (Burkean though he is) who has escalated the use of drones and opened new theaters of engagement in a half-dozen countries. No more war on women, war on gays, war on [Fill in the Blank]. War, like rape, makes for poor metaphors and degraded discourse.

You need to reread Foucault and warn yourself about false unities of discourse. Buckley, Reagan, corporatized campuses, budget cuts, adjunct labor, and football stadiums are not all part of a coherent “conservative” movement. It’s straining terminology to the point of mangling words to hang all these pet peeves on a mythical right-wing bogeymen. Administrators have made many of the dirty decisions to undermine education, and the vast majority of those folks are Democrats.

In fact, only about 5-8% of professors and administrators in higher ed are conservative. Higher ed’s screw-ups belong to liberals, radicals, and especially the Democrat Party. Don’t project.

Bush increased education spending a great deal. He has been criticized for overseeing easy loans for both housing and higher education. Under him the number of Latinos with college degrees doubled. Decide what you want, or at least what you want to bash. Are you most outraged by Bush’s profligate generosity for loans (for isn’t he a Republican?) or by his supposed miserly placation of the uppermost 1%?

Jerry Brown is a Democrat governor in California who has devastated the Cal State system beyond anything Schwarzeneggar did. Harvard, swimming in liberals, has its fingerprints all over the financial crisis (go watch Inside Job about Columbia too), and is, lest we forget, an elitist medieval patriarchy going back to 1636, spawned from the inquisitions of early modern religious pedagogy.

This blog brings up some good points but we need to move past finger-pointing and food fights. The radical thing is getting very, very, very old. I’ll concede that the conservative thing is also getting very, very, very old. No more phantoms — deal with the problems and avoid distractions.

Best,
Bobby

physioprof

There is no such thing as the “Democrat Party”, except in the foul lying narratives of destructive creeps like you.

JackDanielsBlack

Weak, CP. Not up to your usual standards of invective. Are you mellowing out, or just getting old?

kahlilchaarperez

If you do not see an actual genealogy of reactionary attacks against higher education from the Republican right then you are either blind, or just trolling. Or perhaps both.

Anyhow, I doubt that Professor Potter would summarily exclude Democrats from the narrative she presents here; many neoliberal technocrats who identify with the Democratic Party are of course to blame for shaping the corporate university model that is taking over.

jiminnc

Some good thoughts at http://changinguniversities.blogspot.com/2012/04/meeting-at-white-house-state-tax.html
“I suggested to the [Obama] administration that they add to their new College Scorecard statistics on how much of a university’s budget is spent on direct instructional costs and what percentage of their student credit hours are taught by full-time faculty. If universities had to report on these factors, they would need to commit more attention and funding to their core mission.”
http://mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey Jon Awbrey

Thanks for this report. Cited at PolicyMic —

• http://www.policymic.com/newsroll/list
berkeleyprof

Attacks on education also come from the libertarians, who do not profile fully left or right. The Minerva Project, an “on-line elite alternative to universities” is a good example of the forces we face:
1. It will isolate students from the intellectual action that can occur in an ideal setting with an educator, and offer information as the equivalent of education.
2. Money that, in an earlier age, would have gone to making our leading institutions better is instead, like the $25-million for MInerva, being used to fund likely-to-fail start-ups or lobby against taxes that can support schools.
http://who-will-kiss-the-pig.blogspot.com Richard Grayson

My diary for June 1990 shows me reading a bestselling right-wing screed called “ProfScam” by one Charles Sykes. I note that it is “a scathing attack on the professoriate and their ’7½-hour workweek.’”
snipekiller

Regarding: “Churchill is an example that obscures the daily struggles on university
and college campuses that are fiscal, not directly political, in nature,
and that also fall heavily on conservative faculty. Most of the
professoriat does not falsely claim to be Native American, and that the
vast majority of us are not so eager to publish that we re-edit the work of other people and blame it on the wife.”

–It seems that you accept the premise pursued by conservative
activists, that Churchill was rightfully fired by the University of
Colorado. Repeating the claim that he is not a Native American is
repeating the attack on Churchill’s credibility, leveled at him by
conservative critics at the time. As for his works, if you bother to look at the
books he has written or edited, you’d know quite a few of them are
either co-written or simply edited by him.

The claim that he was being
pursued by the academy and conservative critics for his words after 9/11
(which Waldman himself condemns in his Prospect article) is the one
that almost never got a fair hearing, and which the admin that fired him
would never have acknowledged. Acknowledgment of this would make them seem
foolish of course, and biased. Multiple other professors made much the
same claims about 9/11 shortly afterwards, including MIT Linguistics
Prof Noam Chomsky in his book, and UT Journalism Prof Robert Jensen in the Houston Chronicle. The UC
administration seems to have played politics with their staff, whereas
MIT and UT did not, despite similar conservative calls around the
country to police speech.

I find it highly questionable that you have chosen to repeat the
conservative attacks as fact, despite the fact that the students and
readers of Churchill, as well as many following the case in the media
could not find reason to fault Churchill to the tune of his job. You are
basically backing up the UC administration’s determinations, which were
influenced by conservative pressure and threats to defame the school.
Churchill may have been a convenient target for FOX News, but that
doesn’t mean they were right about him.

Tenured_Radical

I agree that Churchill was targeted because of what he said after 9/11, which was entirely within his first amendment rights to say. I also think he was vulnerable to an investigation because of dishonesty and misrepresentation. I am quite sure that the things I repeated are true: they were whispered about for years by younger academics in his fields and on the left who did not want to be targeted by *him* in reprisal. Just because conservatives say something does not automatically mean they are incorrect, and Churchill was not popular among many who might have been his political allies because of self representations that were dishonest,and several instances in which it was well known that he had represented the work of others as his own. Would a similarly dishonest person who was not in a politically charged field have been fired? Perhaps not, but that strikes me as a claim that doesn’t reflect well on progressives.

snipekiller

Thank you for your reply, I appreciate it. I was not aware of the status of his claims within academe, as they were made after I had left the university. The only picture I have had of that controversy were the newspapers and TV reports, his statements, as well as the extended essay he wrote expressing his views on 9/11 as ‘chickens coming home to roost.’ The things said about his Native American status seemed more character attack than relevant to the investigation into academic plagiarism, and is probably the biggest reason I posted on it here.
As to the rest of your post, I have to say you are absolutely right about the continued attack on academe. I have been following Michael Berube, Cary Nelson, Marc Bousqet and Benjamin Ginsberg for some time on these developments, and concur that there are definitely campaigns to organize for a better situation. Now if they could only be better publicized…

jefftylerpmp

While I agree in general with the main premise, I have to wonder if faculty, as a profession, haven’t contributed to this perception. The examples of Ward Churchill and others seem to reinforce a perception, even if not valid.
bigtwin

Academic history has been on the decline for decades, primarily because of this false binary that the discipline has created between ”professional” history versus “popular” history.
fruupp

That’s what VPs are for, and Biden–insurance industry shill, Iraq warmonger, Alito fan-boy, unswerving acolyte of Israel, and a guy who’s never worked a day in his adult life–didn’t disappoint.
Tenured_Radical

Actually that’s not true that Weiner writes about only one destroyed career– that may be the one you know about who is in the book, because he became a rallying point for pro-gun activists, but there are others. Read it: could cheer you up.

And your rendition of how Bellisles left Emory is wanting too. I don’t want to rehearse it here, but if readers want to know a more full version of what happened, and the events that prompted Bellisles’ resignation, they should read Weiner’s essay about it.
http://twitter.com/ManuginOBilly Manugin O’Billy

The problem is that Weiner is not a reliable narrator. His book is overtly biased by his politics. I would recommend Peter Hoffer’s “Past Imperfect” for a more balanced take.
Tenured_Radical

Well, I guess there aren’t enough conservative professors ’cause y’all just run home crying instead of coming out swinging.

I mean, seriously! It’s as if folks cut and post this narrative from blog to blog. What is so traumatizing about a teacher spouting politics that it would drive you away from learning entirely?

BTW, community colleges are full of unionized radical-ass adjuncts.
RetroGal

Who the hell wants conservative professors? Did you read my comments? Apparently not. But I’ll repeat it for you: “If it was an overwhelming conservative agenda in universities, I’d feel the same way.” There. That any clearer? I want professors who don’t shove their agenda – conservative OR liberal – down my throat. That’s not their job and I refuse to pay thousands of dollars to hear their drivel. And I can learn just fine by myself, thank you very much – it’s called books.

BTW, community colleges are cheaper and they provide a real-world education, something not many who graduate from an ivory tower institution can say – and I speak from experience.
Tenured_Radical

Well if it’s your experience, we should all be guided by it. Do learn alone — without interference, guidance, help or criticism from anyone else. Consider patterning your life on that model and write us back to let us now how it works out.
RetroGal

Since I can’t reply to your comment below (on purpose?), I’ll reply here.

I find your refusal to address my points about politics in universities quite telling. And I also find it incredibly short-sighted of you to think that I can’t learn by myself using academic journals, peer reviews, lectures, and the like. Wow. I’m not a nitwit. How do you think people continue to learn outside of universities AFTER they’ve received their degrees? The same way, I imagine.

And I love the jab about patterning my life on that model. I wouldn’t expect anything less than a comment like this from ye of the ivory tower mentality. To lower yourself and make this “personal” is quite the attitude, and if it is this type of criticism, guidance, help, or interference that I am missing out on by not learning in the hallowed halls of higher education, then I’m thankful beyond thankful for “missing out.”
Tenured_Radical

“Since I can’t reply to your comment below (on purpose?), I’ll reply here.”

As you can see, the software put your response in just the right place below: after x-number of relies it won’t show you a reply button. There’s no pinko plot to silence you. But I do think you’ve got a little anger/paranoia problem. Srsly, go on and learn by yourself — who’s stopping you? And why ask my opinion or anyone else’s about it?
RetroGal

Annnnnnnd, once again, no real substantial thought in your comment. Amusing. Care to address the politics in academia as opposed to whether or not I have an anger problem? Let’s turn it personal once again. Unbelievable. And yes, I admit to being a bit angry that I paid good money to listen to professor(s) try and sway me to their side of the political aisle. Then again, I was young and stupid and apparently didn’t realize that this was the name of the game. And I don’t recall asking for YOUR opinion or anyone else’s on my choice of learning. You’re sidestepping the issue. So I guess if you want to respond, you can, but I don’t expect it to be any better than your other responses – if you want to resort to personal attacks (saying, “I think you’ve got an anger problem” puts my comments into the “crazy loon that doesn’t need to be taken seriously” department) then fine. Play your games. I am willing to have a debate on how liberal and conservative agendas in academia are definitely at play.
Tenured_Radical

“I am willing to have a debate on how liberal and conservative agendas in academia are definitely at play.”

Yes, but not here: this post did not address such a debate. Perhaps a future post will, however, and you are invited to return at that time and participate in it.
Tenured_Radical

To readers: his comment above has been flagged for removal. We await its expungement.