Category: Education

STEM Scholarships for Young Scholars

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Jim and WirtI’m pleased to announce the availability of the James Davis and Wirt Atmar Memorial Scholarship at New Mexico State University. My wife and I are pleased to provide full scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) who are residents of New Mexico and El Paso County, Texas for the Spring semester of 2015 and beyond.

Dr. James Davis (Jim), my birth father, received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Astrophysics from University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1969. His involvement in gamma ray astronomy led him to take a professorship at New Mexico State in 1973 after post-docs at Oregon State, University of Colorado, and the Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. At NMSU, he met the unusual character Wirt Atmar, Sc.D. 1976, Electrical Engineering and Biology, who was involved in early work on evolutionary simulation and later developed new models for thinking about the evolution of sex as well as species nesting using information theory. When Jim became ill and later succumbed to an unknown kidney disorder following a transplant, Wirt and his wife (Ph.D. biochemistry) became a new family for me and I spent my teen years in an elaborate bohemian world of academic and computer technologies, merged. Wirt passed in 2009 after an unexpected heart attack associated with some other medical problems.

We hope that new and continuing students will benefit from this scholarship (six should be awarded each year initially), and Jim and Wirt’s commitment to science and technology will impact a new generation of students.… Read the rest

The Noble Gases of Social Theory

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elem_inertgas1“Intellectually inert” is an insult that I reserve only for vast elaborations that present little in the way of new knowledge. I use it sparingly and with hesitation. Ross Douthat usually doesn’t rise to that level, though he does tend to be obsessed with vague theories about the breakdown of traditional (read “conservative”) societal mores and the consequences to modern America.

But his recent blog post “Social Liberalism as Class Warfare” is so numbing in his rhetorical elaborations that it was the only phrase that came to mind after slogging my way through it. So what’s the gist of the post?

  1. Maybe rich, smart folks pushed through divorce and abortion because they thought it made them freer.
  2. But poor, not-so-smart folks lacked sufficient self-control to use these tools wisely.
  3. Therefore, the rich, smart folks inadvertently made poor, not-so-smart folks engage in adverse behaviors that tore-up traditional families.
  4. And we get increased income and social inequality as a result.

An alternative argument might be:

  1. Folks kept getting smarter and better educated (everyone).
  2. They wanted to be free of old stuffy traditions.
  3. There were no good, new traditions that took their place, and insufficient touchstones of the “elite” values in the cultural ecosystems of the underclass.
  4. And we get increased income and social inequality as a result.

And here we get to the crux of my suggestion of inertness: it doesn’t matter whether the unintended consequences of iconoclasty differentially impact socioeconomic strata. What matters is what can actually be done about it that is voluntary rather than imposed. After all, that is what the meritocracy of educated folks do in Douthat’s own calculus of assortative mating. And it won’t be that Old Time Religion because of (1) and (2), above.… Read the rest

Trust in What? Counterpoint

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Peter Berkowitz at Hoover Institute argues in Wall Street Journal that higher education is a liberal indoctrinating mechanism. The article centers on a report, available here, that looks at the University of California system.

There is not much new in the report. It repeats the mantra that core courses in Western Civilization are an essential and missing part of many educational curricula. It also rounds up the disturbing result that has been circulated for some time: it is difficult to assess the value of college educations. Quoting the report quoting studies of the efficacy of college:

We observe no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study.

That doesn’t surprise me, but I’m still not altogether certain that critical thinking can actually be taught despite efforts to try to do so in recent decades.  More interesting, though, is the attempt by the authors to try to link this skills deficit to progressive political activism:

If graduates cannot even write short declarative sentences competently, that is not surprising when writing courses neglect writing and focus instead on radical politics. When graduates cannot read and extrapolate from books of any difficulty, that is what one would expect when reading lists so often give them books written at the superficial level of journalism rather than more complex works that would challenge them.

Let’s dissect. What do these imagined writing courses look like? Most low-level writing courses emphasize a variety of writing styles, but has the UC system substituted political activism for actual writing instruction? The report is rather vague about that, instead focusing on descriptions of how the professors made political statements and gave little writing advice, as reported by complaining students on a website.… Read the rest