The Sorting Machine

In my previous post, I discussed Chapter 4 of Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit on the link between meritocracy and credentialism. Today I look at Chapter 6, where Sandel’s goal is discussing “how higher education has become a sorting machine that premises mobility on the basis of merit but entrenches privilege and promotes attitudes toward success corrosive of the commonality democracy requires.” The issue is closely tied to credentialism as a college degree has increasingly become the gatekeeper to higher-paying jobs, social mobility, and has fueled a stress-filled ratrace for everyone, both the haves and the have-nots.

 

Sandel traces this movement to James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard from 1933-1953. (Interestingly, he was trained as a chemist.) At the time, the Ivy League colleges catered mainly to the hereditary upper class, predominantly white and male. Conant thought this problematic, and his “democratic ideal” was to replace these hereditary leaders of society with the meritocratic best and brightest. How did he do so? By devising the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and offering scholarships to talented high school students all over the country. In 1940, he delivered an address titled “Education for a Classless Society”. While Harvard’s student body did not change much during Conant’s tenure as president, his vision is the norm today. Sandel writes:

 

Perhaps most deeply embedded is Conant’s notion of higher education as the primary gateway to opportunity, a source of upward mobility that keeps society fluid by offering all students, whatever their social or economic background, the chance to rise as far as their talents will take them. Drawing on this idea, college presidents ritualistically remind us that excellence and opportunity go hand in hand. The fewer the social and economic barriers to college attendance, the greater the ability of colleges to recruit the most outstanding students and equip them to succeed. As each entering class arrives on campus for first-year orientation, they are lavished with praise for the excellence and diversity, and for the talent and effort that have led to their admission.

 

I cringe when I listen to these orientation speeches; which is why I rarely attend such events. I even missed the one when I went to college – I was overwhelmed by jet lag for a whole week having arrived in the U.S. after over 48 hours of no sleep and spending a lot of time in airplanes and airports in transit. I had very little travel experience growing up, and was dazed and confused. Students at the universities I’ve worked at are quite good on average; and I think they have become more hardworking over time – which I now see is part of the meritocratic ratrace the newest cohorts have been thrust into. Yes, coming to college is a privilege, and yes, these matriculating students have worked hard; but let’s be honest, luck and circumstance play a huge role. It certainly did for me – I’m under no illusion that I’m particularly talented or deserving to have made it to a top-notch liberal arts college. I didn’t even know how well regarded it was, until after I got to grad school. And the reason I was able to attend was a large offer of financial aid. Such colleges at the time were trying to diversify their student body and I was from a little-known country at the time.

 

It’s now clear to the general public, if it wasn’t before, that the present system entrenches privilege. So did the old hereditary system, but a different sort of privilege. The SAT does track with socioeconomic status. The “elite” private institutions still predominantly accept the wealthy and the new social elite; it helps them maintain their top rankings with up-and-comers constantly clawing at their heels. Yes, there is some effort at diversification and there is some social mobility, but it’s small – even compared to Europe where you’d have expected a more entrenched hereditary elite. Pondering all this, Sandel poses an interesting question: “Should colleges and universities take on the role of sorting people based on talent to determine who gets ahead in life?” Here’s his response to that question.

 

There are at least two reasons to doubt that they should. The first concerns the invidious judgments such sorting implies for those who get sorted out, and the damaging consequences for a shared civic life. The second concerns the injury the meritocratic struggle inflicts on those who get sorted in and the risk that the sorting mission becomes so all-consuming that it diverts colleges and universities from their educational mission. In short, turning higher education into a hyper-competitive sorting contest is unhealthy for democracy and education alike.

 

I went through such a sorting system. There was no alternative so I wasn’t conscious that things could be different. Towards the end of primary (elementary) school we took a national exam, which tracked us into different subject specialties. Similar exams throughout secondary school narrowed this further. Since my grades were good, I was tracked into the “science stream”. It never occurred to me that one could make changes and swim against the stream. When I got to college in the United States, encountering the liberal arts idea of not choosing one’s major until sophomore year was a shock. I didn’t know what to do and just kept taking science courses. I wasn’t doing as well in math and biology, and that’s partly how I became a chemistry major. I also found myself enjoying chemistry far more than my other subjects.

 

But the world today is different. Even schoolchildren in my home country have a wider palette of educational choices, globalization and all. Stratification has also increased significantly. Parents fight to get their kids into the good schools. I was assigned the local neighborhood school; which I learned (only much later as an adult) was not one of those good schools. But back then it likely didn’t matter as much as schools were more uniform in quality. Why is it important to go to elite schools and colleges? Even for the very wealthy? After all, you can pass on your wealth to your children without needing the brand name. A Yale president (Kingman Brewster), arguing for need-blind admissions (and thus pivoting towards meritocracy) would “not only enable Yale to attract strong students from modest backgrounds; it would also increase Yale’s appeal to wealthy students, who would be drawn to a college known to accept students based on their merits not their money.” Sandel summarizes the situation we see today.

 

Selective colleges and universities became irresistibly attractive because they stood at the apex of the merging hierarchy of merit. Prompted by their parents, ambitious, well-off students flooded the gates of prestigious campuses not only because they wanted to study in the company of academically gifted students, but because these colleges conferred the greatest meritocratic prestige. More than a matter of bragging rights, the kudos associated with attending a highly selective college carry over into employment opportunities after graduation. This is not mainly because employers believe students learn more at elite colleges than at less-selective places, but because employers have faith in the sorting function these colleges perform and value the meritocratic honor they bestow.

 

The last phrase is probably the most important – “the meritocratic honor they bestow”, whether truly deserving or not. The brand name has taken a life of its own. Brands were important back in the day; now they’ve become crucial as a sorting function amidst a cacophony of options.

 

I’ve noticed in recent years that a number of our academically most capable students, are choosing to “take a year” (or two) off before medical school or whatever meritocratic ratrace they are entering. They feel burned out, they say, after all that striving. And it wasn’t just in college, but the many years leading up to it. Effort and achievement have dominated their lives for so many years, and to some extent they know what’s coming next – more of the same. Sandel calls all this striving “soul-destroying”. Reading the many examples he provides in The Tyranny of Merit has made me much more sympathetic to my high-performing students, whether they be privileged or not. It’s a tyranny indeed, “the meritocratic imperative – the unrelenting pressure to perform, to achieve, to succeed… Perfectionism is the emblematic meritocratic malady… Success or failure at meeting the demand to achieve comes to define one’s merit and self-worth.”

 

Previously, I tried to focus on the weaker-performing students, to see what I could do to encourage them without piling on more stress. But now I’m realizing that the tyranny is felt by all – even the highest performers academically. I have no answers, as I see myself as a cog in the vast sorting machine that is the modern university. Is there a way out?

Credentialism and Meritocracy

Isn’t meritocracy all about being fair and just? Could meritocracy be a bad thing? Perhaps, argues Michael Sandel in his latest book, The Tyranny of Merit. There is much that is good about meritocracy, and Sandel acknowledges this up front; however his interest is exploring its dark side – in particular its ability to erode the basic functioning of democracy. “What’s become of the common good?” is the book’s subtitle. As a political philosopher, Sandel argues that the intense partisanship we see today in the U.S. and Western Europe has its roots in the rise of meritocratic ideas and ideals on both sides of the divide. In today’s post, I’ll quote several passages from his book.

 

To set the stage (p73): The tyranny of merit… consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary citizens.

 

I’ve previously written about the rise of credentialism. Chapter 4 of Sandel’s book addresses the link to meritocracy head-on: “Credentialism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice”. Obama and Trump, Kavanaugh and Biden, all get skewered as Sandel picks apart their public comments and responses. The underlying root for all this? Credentialism is so pervasive that it is unconsciously used as an all-purpose basis of judgment extending beyond academic certification and into the moral and political realm. Globalization, has exacerbated its tremendous rise, seemingly offering equal opportunities but not necessarily equal outcomes. The oxymoronic situation of increasing opportunity while increasing inequality in higher education, and thus credentialism, is a cornerstone of David Labaree’s book, A Perfect Mess. Sandel offers a similar critique when addressing economic reform embraced by both sides of the political divide.

 

The problem (p89): First, most Americans do not have a college degree… When meritocratic elites tie success and failure so closely to one’s ability to earn a college degree, they implicitly blame those without one for the harsh conditions they encounter in the global economy… Second, by telling workers that their inadequate education is to blame for their troubles, meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism… The credentialist prejudice is a symptom of meritocratic hubris.

 

Isn’t getting more education a good thing? Yes, But. And on the shift towards higher credentialism in government and in leadership, Sandel has this to say about the technocratic shift (p90,99): Having well-educated people run the government is generally desirable provided they possess sound judgment and a sympathetic understanding of working people’s lives – what Aristotle called practical wisdom and civic virtue… But neither of these capacities is developed very well in most universities today, even those with the highest reputations. And recent historical experience suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment, which involves moral character as well as insight, and the ability to… win admission to elite universities. The notion that “the best and the brightest” are better at governing… is a myth born of meritocratic hubris.

 

So much for Plato’s philosopher-kings. Sandel provides multiple examples of the shift to technocratic language in public discourse – Obama provides a rich trove, but there are others. The evolving usage of the word “smart” was an example I had not noticed, but I will now be paying close attention to. Sandel notes that forty years ago (and more), this almost always referred to persons. But starting with George H. W. Bush, “smart” became the adjective of choice for cars, freeways, weapons, schools, and more. Clinton, Bush the Younger, and Obama, successively increased this trend. Now we hear “smart” growth, policy, investments, projects, reforms, regulations. In concert, the word “stupid” or “dumb” also increased in usage, as a contrast to “smart”. No longer is something “the right thing to do” but “the smart thing to do”.

 

To those of us in higher education (and he would include himself), Sandel has a warning: One of the casualties of meritocracy’s triumph may be the loss of broad public support for higher education. Once widely seen as an engine of opportunity, the university has become, at least for some, a symbol of credentialist privilege and meritocratic hubris. The rhetoric of rising, with its single-minded focus on education as the answer to inequality, is partly to blame. Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a condition of dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect of democratic life.

 

The final statistic that Sandel provides in Chapter 4 is mind-boggling. It’s on global warming and climate change. The partisan gap is much greater among those with college degrees! What!? The gap is 30 percent for those with a high school education or less (57% of Republicans, 27% of Democrats, believe global warming is generally exaggerated). For those with a college degree, the gap is 59 percent (74% of Republicans, 15% of Democrats). So much for more education. Sandel writes (p111): It is a mistake to assume that the more people know about science, the more likely they are to converge on measure to combat climate change. The technocrat’s belief that, if only we could agree on the facts, we could then have a reasoned debate about policy, misconceives the project of political persuasion.

 

Can the tyranny of meritocracy be tempered, or perhaps reversed? After all, education in itself is not a bad thing. The problem is the ease of the slippery slope to associating success with one’s own hard work and merit, and then generalizing the principle to others. Even the have-nots have bought into the argument seeing themselves as the left-behind and not trusting the technocratic-biased government (in favor of market solutions in a global world) to look out for them, regardless of the rhetoric. As a cog in this meritocratic system who is well-credentialed, Sandel’s narrative is both bleak and humbling. I’m honestly at a loss of what to do, but hopefully there is some light at the end of the tunnel as I’m only halfway through his book.

Wide Margins

Among the many tidbits I learned from Judith Flanders’ book A Place for Everything was the evolving use of marginal abbreviations. These are annotations that readers (and sometimes writers or publishers) would put in to help them cross-reference material with other related things. They were in the margins! You sometimes see such marginalia in used books, or you may have written some in books you were reading. I am personally not an annotator, and I’m usually annoyed when I find them in library books (my main source of reading material), but they can be occasionally helpful. Harry Potter readers will recall how he utilized marginalia in his second-hand Potions textbook for both good and ill in Half-Blood Prince.

 

According to Flanders, there was even a brief surge of books (in medieval times) printed with wider margins – more space for readers to annotate! I suppose that double-spacing the lines of text performs similarly; hence I might ask my students to turn in their lab or research reports double-spaced to ease my red-inked annotations of their work. And nowadays professors typically tell their students not to exceed one-inch margins in their submitted papers. In contrast, research grant agencies tell professors not to shrink one-inch margins. There’s trying to get away with too little, and trying to get away with too much.

 

Since I made the decision not to use a textbook for my quantum chemistry course next semester, I am planning to have prepared worksheets for every class meeting. I already do this for my statistical thermodynamics course (the other half of P-Chem), which consists of (1) some printed text usually for definitions and context, (2) the occasional figure/graph, and (3) blank space for students to write in mathematical work. I’ve use one-inch margins simply because that’s the default setting of my word processor, but I wonder whether I should consider wider margins.

 

In my stat therm class, the students still do a lot of writing. That’s because it evolved from an earlier incarnation where I wrote out “full” lecture notes on the board usually surrounding fully-worked mathematical examples (derivations or problems-to-solve). Over time, more has gone into the “printed” worksheets and I might partially work through a derivation or problem on the board. I found this helped as class sizes increased and I started to encounter a wider range of students with very different comfort levels utilizing math in P-Chem (even though all students have taken the math and physics prerequisites). The last several years, I’ve started to embed pre-class assignments/questions and directly tie each homework problem to what we’re doing in class that day.

 

There are a lot of nitty-gritty details in the integral calculus employed in quantum that students can easily miss (subscripts, superscripts, Greek symbols) and I’m wondering if I should have more of the equations and derivations printed in the worksheets. I could accompany this with wide margins and other white space so that students can annotate more. This may shift how students “put together” their notes not just in class, but also when struggling through problem sets, and preparing for exams. Although the numbers are still small, I am also starting to see more students use tablets to take notes in class, and I’d like to adjust my worksheets appropriately for direct electronic use. (Most students in my stat therm class print out the worksheets and bring them to class.) An important support I might need to provide is teaching students how to annotate well.

 

I hadn’t thought about the advantages and uses of wide margins until reading A Place for Everything. If successful, perhaps I will bring about a revival of useful marginalia in my P-Chem classes! Could it teach students to be more inventive like the previous owner of Harry Potter's textbook? You’ll be seeing more on this as I work my way through the process starting this summer as I prep and through the fall semester when I actually teach the course.

Alphabet Soup

We’re so used to alphabetical lists that its underlying organizational ideas are all but invisible. But it was not so for most of human history since the invention of writing. The ubiquity of alphabetization is a rather modern phenomenon – the twists and turns of its history are well-document in Judith Flanders’ book A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. 

 

There are many interesting factoids. For example, Seoul 1998 was the first time countries marched out on opening night not according to the Western “Romanized” alphabetical order. (Prior to this, host countries that didn't use a similar alphabet followed the A to Z sequence just for that event anyway.) This confused media around the world televising the events live because they didn’t know when to cut to commercial breaks without missing the entrance of their home country! I also learned that glossaries first appeared in alphabetical order in 8^th century monasteries, and that the first Western encyclopedia was compiled by Isidore of Seville in the 6^th century.

 

I loved reading encyclopedias as a kid whenever I could get my hands on them! A one-stop place to learn about all the important things one should know – what could be better? Honestly, I don’t remember how they were organized, but after reading Flanders’ book I find myself paying more attention to the organizational aspects of… well, everything! The information explosion we’re experiencing today is not new. It’s an old problem – I’ve briefly blogged about this after reading a different book. Flanders discusses this problem, focusing on the organizational aspects, for example in how the popularity of encyclopedias evolved historically. Chapter 8 (“H is for History”) begins with a quote by C.S. Lewis, very appropriate to Flanders’ book.

 

Mediaeval man was not a dreamer… He was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted a “place for everything and everything in its place.” Distinction, definition, and tabulation were his delight… There was nothing mediaeval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions, I suspect they would have most admired the card index.

 

Flanders narrates that interesting invention in the next chapter (“I” is for Index Cards) but I won’t dwell on it here, other than to say I use index cards as a low-tech way to administer my five-minute pop quizzes at the beginning of class. You’ll have to read her book for the interesting backstory of the index card. Today’s post will focus on how the meaning of information has changed as organizing it took center stage. The information explosion was aided by the invention of the printing press and the availability of (accessible and affordable) paper. The metal letters of the Gutenberg press were stored in cases, not alphabetically but by usage frequency.

 

But breaking words down into separate physical tangible objects is a profound shift in how one thinks about information. Meaning is lost when semantics has been transformed into syntax. It’s a reductionist approach. For utilitarian purposes, of course, but sometimes we forget what we’ve stripped out in the process of reductionism. I’m reminded of an old C.S. Lewis essay (“The Language of Religion”) that compares three ways of using language: Ordinary, Scientific, Poetic. It’s a marvelous essay that I won’t pretend to understand, but there’s a haunting part I will quote.

 

Now it seems to me a mistake to think that our experience in general can be communicated by precise and literal language and that there is a special class of experiences (say, emotions) which cannot. The truth seems to me the opposite: there is a special region of experiences which can be communicated without poetic language, namely, its ‘common measurable features’, but most experience cannot. To be incommunicable by Scientific language is, so far as I can judge, the normal state of experience. All our sensuous experience is in this condition, though this is somewhat veiled from us by the fact that much of it is very common and therefore everyone will understand our references to it at a hint. But if you have to describe to a doctor any unusual sensation, you will soon be driven to use of the same (essential) nature as Asia’s enchanted boat [from Prometheus Unbound, a poem by Shelley]. An army doctor who suspected you of malingering would soon reduce you to halting and contradictory statements; but if by chance you had not been malingering he would have cut himself off from all knowledge of what might have turned out an interesting case.

 

For context, the entire essay is worth reading. The polemic is, in my possibly ignorant opinion, directed mainly at how theology has evolved to incorporate more Scientific language, thereby making it more abstract, obtuse, and likely impoverished. I wonder if we scientists do the same thing. I’ve been pondering the notion of reducing semantics to syntax in how to think about chemical information. Our methods thus far have been utilitarian, but likely impoverished, and in trying to define what distinguishes life from non-life, we may have stripped out what’s most important. I have a few dense academic books on my desk to tackle this summer on that topic.

 

But let’s get back to Flanders’ book. She chronicles how many of the ‘learned’ in 17^th century Europe were coming up with their own methods to keep track of what they had read so they could find it when needed. Yes, many slips of paper are involved. But how should one then organize those slips? The famous Malpighi would glue tiny labels to his notebooks, a forerunner of the post-it note. The not-so-famous but strange Harrison Ark was furniture built with the purpose of helping you store and retrieve, a forerunner to the filing cabinet with tabbed hanging folders perhaps? It was even rumored that Leibniz, co-inventor of calculus, but also a librarian of famed classification skills, owned such an Ark.

 

As written materials became commonplace in the so-called Middle Ages, the weight of educational training began to shift from memorization to organization. This shift required search tools and the index was born. (I wonder how many of my students still use the index at the back of their textbooks.) These began as “commonplace” books where as a part of learning you made your own notes to organize the information you had learned. (If only students did this today!) The philosopher John Locke’s alphabetical method of organization increased in popularity, but there was a backlash among the literati who “balked at the notion of one entry following another without any structure or order other than the happenstance of the sequence of the alphabet”.

 

Locke’s fellow philosopher, Francis Bacon, planned to “capture all the learning in the world” thus fueling a rush of encyclopedia-mania. These were organized in various ways, depending on how one classified knowledge. Is one classification better than another? That’s unclear. Perhaps it depends on one’s perspective or purpose; whereas the “use of alphabetical order… marks a transition in worldview”: that there isn’t one privileged point of view or hierarchy. And for this, we have to thank the philosopher Pierre Bayle who was keeping track of errors in an encyclopedia, and created his own “critique” alphabetically. There’s a certain efficiency to being able to find things in a “neutral” alphabetic system without having to understand the idiosyncratic choices of any topical classification system. The atomization of knowledge was now in full swing.

 

Flanders juxtaposes two interesting works, a play and a book. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1592) “told the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for universal knowledge, contained in a single magic book that included everything that it was possible to know… an encyclopedia. Thomas Peacock’s Headlong Hall (1816) satirized a character named “Mr. Panscope, the chemical, botanical, geological, astronomical, [long list]… who hard run through the circle of the sciences, and understood them all equally well; that is, not at all.” And not too long after, the famous scientist Helmholtz (1873) “remarked proudly on the splendors of the mechanical utility of catalogs, lexicons, registers, indexes, digests… which has freed mankind from its reliance on memory, something he saw as an unquestioned good.”

 

Memory has been supplanted by resources for looking things up. Today we have the World Wide Web. You don’t even need savvy. Just type in what you’re looking for, and thousands of answers and resources await you. And for the less savory, there’s also the companion Dark Web. No longer is there a single path to knowledge. Choose your own knowledge adventure! As an educator, it may sound like I’m mocking this approach; I think that while knowledge may now be at anyone’s fingertips, understanding and wisdom are not so easily acquired. I teach chemistry; it’s difficult and abstract – and my students would agree. They could try to learn it on their own, but few have the gumption to do so. I’m not sure I would have – and I’m grateful to good teachers who helped me learn it and love it.

 

I worry about the atomization of knowledge even as my general field, the natural sciences, has made tremendous progress through its reductionist lens. The way I look at the world is tinted, both as a scientist and as an educator. Flanders’ book reminds me of the importance of enlarging my scope, and I’ve tried to read more widely and broadly. And how do I organize what I’m learning? I’m not sure I do this well at all – but my “commonplace book” is this blog – a cyborgian offload of my general thoughts. Thanks to the search function, I’ve not had to work to organize it in some fashion. It’s an alphabet soup broth, perhaps a sign of incoherence and swirl, in need of some stronger organizing principles.

Nobody's Business

I would not have guessed that a book “following the money” in the university would have the odd title, Like Nobody’s Business. The author is Andrew Comrie, who has served as a professor and administrator at multiple institutions of different flavors. Comrie previously thought of having the book’s title be Seeing the Elephant, but I think the final choice was more apt, after reading his book. The subtitle? “An Insider’s Guide to how U.S. University Finances Really Work”

 

Very importantly at the outset, Comrie clearly states: “Budgets don’t make decisions. People do.” Keep that in mind whenever anything related to budgets and finances come up in any context.

 

The book covers a wide range of topics: budget sizes and models, revenue sources, expenditures, and dives into the major “parts” of the university: human resources, academic affairs, student affairs, research, facilities, athletics, public service, and fundraising. While Comrie discusses and cites work done by others, he has also pulled together data from IPEDS covering 1174 institutions and divvies them up into four main categories based on Carnegie classifications: R1, R2, R3-M3, baccalaureate. Each of these is also divided into public and private institutions (primarily because the revenue streams have differences).

 

As someone who spent some time in college administration (but thankfully not during Covid!) I’m accustomed to the lingo and terminology. Having seen the inner workings, I’m also not surprised at the broad conclusions. However, since my professional career has been at liberal arts colleges focusing on undergraduates, I have less experience with what goes on at research institutions, so I found it enlightening to see what is similar and what is different. I also enjoy Comrie’s fact-of-the-matter style of writing that’s very accessible to the academic who may not have much administrative experience. He’s careful with details, but doesn’t bog you down. I found his discussion insightful, and he does a nice job moving from data to take-away messages.

 

Comrie asks and answers the common questions: Do out-of-state students subsidize in-state students at public institutions? Why do higher education costs rise so much? What are the amounts and trends in student loans? What are the types of support staff and their salaries? Is administrative bloat a myth? What is RCM or activity-based budgeting? Do the humanities cross-subsidize STEM fields? How do we account for faculty time and workload distribution? Why do students drop out and what proportion is retained? Why do universities lose money on research? Does the university have a rainy-day fund? Why isn’t parking free? Does athletics (success) benefit the university’s bottom line? How do university endowments work? Do university rankings have a financial impact?

 

If you read higher education news regularly, you’ve likely heard answers to these questions. But if you would like nuanced answers backed up by data, I highly recommend Comrie’s analysis. I didn’t know as much about university athletics, deferred maintenance, and some of the nitty-gritty details of endowments, so I learned a number of new things. But I also learned that many of the “answers” to these questions require a qualified “but”. And there are good reasons – some of them because of complexity, some of them because the university is a strange beast, and some of them remain murky because the university benefits (to some extent) in being opaque.

 

This last point – the university’s opaqueness – coupled with its garbage can model, are both a strength and a weakness of the messy university systems that exists in the U.S., as detailed by David Labaree. While Comrie’s data helps categorize institutions into bins for broader trends, each college or university has its own idiosyncratic local situation and history. Sometimes the university does seem like it’s nobody’s business. Organized anarchy, Labaree would call it. Sometimes when you poke your nose into it, you wish you didn’t know how the sausage was made. As Cypher says to Neo in The Matrix: “Why, oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?”

Atomism and Energetism

Besides reading Chemistry: The Impure Science, as mentioned in my previous post, I’m also working my way through another philosophical treatise, Aristotle’s Revenge by Edward Feser. Both books are making me ponder my chemistry teaching, which is something I enjoy thinking about.

 

In reading about the nineteenth century debates between the atomists and the energeticists (each label likely used pejoratively by the opposing camp), I was struck by similarities to how we divide our General Chemistry curriculum into its two semesters. With the rise in popularity of “Atoms First” arrangements in textbooks, we focus on “microscopic” (more accurately nanoscopic) molecular structure in the first semester, and turn our attention to “macroscopic” energy considerations of thermodynamics and equilibria in the second semester.

 

But we chemists are practical folks and to learn chemistry we need to talk about the macro and microworlds together! Hence, while we focus on the micro in the first semester, we introduce the concept of the mole; we balance chemical equations and do stoichiometric calculations; energy makes its appearance in the interaction of light and matter with photons and electronic structure; we discuss trends in the periodic table (introducing ionization energies); we discuss phases of matter and draw phase diagrams; and when we focus on gases we introduce the macroscopic properties of pressure and temperature. In the second semester focusing on the macro, thermochemistry and enthalpy changes are connected to making and breaking chemical bonds; kinetics envisions molecular-level collisions; we get into molecular nitty-gritty discussing entropy; and molecular pictures abound throughout equilibria and electrochemistry.

 

I’d like to think that chemistry has survived the overly-reductionist program at the forefront of mathematical physics. Yes, on the one hand we try to explain macro chemical phenomena in terms of nano molecular interactions. But on the other hand, we’re eager to develop tricks to make new macroscopic materials based on some guesswork and theory of the microscopic which we don’t quite understand as messiness increases very quickly. Yes, there’s rational design, but we still employ the alchemist’s approach of trial and error – there’s no substitute for doing the experiments with actual stuff, not just on the computer. We do analysis, yet synthesis is our goal; but synthesis is not the exact opposite of analysis, we chemists aim to create new things! We’re often classified as “pure” scientists, but we’re also artists and engineers and share much in common operation.

 

Much of metaphysical philosophy of nature focuses on ‘ultimate reality’, whatever that means. It’s a physicist-reductionist view (although not all physicists are reductionists). Is water H₂O? Is temperature molecular motion? Can we explain everything as the motion of atoms through the void? Feser, as a neo-Aristotelian, would argue no. Rather he revives the Aristotelian ideas of potentiality and actuality to reframe such questions and break the seeming dichotomy behind the static monism of Parmenides and its dynamic counterpart advanced by Heraclitus.

 

Two ideas from the Aristotelian school dovetail with the categories of atomism and energetism. These are substantial form and prime matter. In anything that’s ‘real’ both aspects must be present. I don’t exactly understand how they work together, but maybe that’s the point – these are abstractions and a simplistic attempt to strictly limit oneself to discovering just the efficient cause (to use another Aristotelian idea) is bound to fail. Prime matter, being protean in nature, is associated with aspects of energetism. Atomism on the other hand seems largely associated with substantial form, but more in the idea of what an Element represents rather than our physicist picture of an Atom.

 

This last conundrum is one thing that’s always bothered me whenever I teach first-semester general chemistry. The definition of Element has always been nebulous (much like the definition of energy). I use it operationally, rather than try to discuss its essence, in class. After a while students get the operational idea and think of it as a label, although I wonder if deep down they’re uncomfortable with what it really means. Water is elemental in a sense that we designate it a “pure substance” as opposed to a “mixture”. But it’s non-elemental when we designate it as a “compound” composed of one or more “elements” – and now I’m using the word element in more than one sense making things even more confusing. In the second semester, we define reference states as “pure elements in their standard states”. At this point, my students take this in stride because they treat element as a label, H for hydrogen, O for oxygen, and so on.

 

The alchemists used the term “mixt” which sometimes corresponds to our definition of “compound” and sometimes to our definition of “homogeneous mixture”. We think of the two differently, and further distinguish it from “heterogeneous mixture” – and then try to parse a distinction between “physical” and “chemical” separations using these crude categories. These definitions are in every standard college chemical textbook. I don’t spend much time on them. I understand why they’re useful as a scaffold to help students categorize the many things we’re going to be throwing at them throughout their year in general chemistry. But deep down I feel ambivalent about this terminology. And because chemical bonding is one of my areas of chemical expertise, I see problems down the road with these categorizations. Are we indeed carving nature at its joints? As the practical chemist, though, I press on – knowing that we see nature “through a glass darkly” and perhaps that’s one of the exciting things about being a scientist, a philosopher of nature.

 

P.S. Reading philosophy of chemistry has motivated me to adapt my Potions Project to my General Chemistry classes next semester. Time will tell if the potential will actualize!

The Chemistry Laboratory

This week I’m enjoying reading Chemistry: The Impure Science by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and John Simon. It’s about the philosophy of chemistry and the unique place that chemistry occupies within the natural sciences. Naturally, it takes a historical slant, and traces the evolution of chemical theory and practices. Today’s blog post focuses on Chapters 4 and 5 (“The Space of the Laboratory” and “Proof in the Laboratory”). 

 

What is the laboratory? You can guess that it involves hard work, evinced by the word ‘labor’. The practice of the alchemists in their labors foreshadowed what chemists today do in labs. In fact, the lab ‘practice’ of the alchemists has been adopted by all the experimental sciences. Old paintings of alchemists show dark rooms mirroring the obscure secretive practice of the alchemists. I’m glad that today we work in bright well-ventilated labs, although the chemistry lab has few windows because fume hoods take up much of wall real-estate.

 

The chemistry lab however differs from the physics or biology lab in many respects. Quoting the authors: “Material is brought into the laboratory to be manipulated and changed into something else.” The essence of chemistry is transformation, be it through synthesis or analysis, the two main operational modes in lab. (Modern instrumentation now allows for ‘non-destructive’ analysis.) The authors also make a nice connection between chemical transformation and knowledge transformation (learning!) as a result of the experiments performed.

 

The lab occupies an interesting isolated artificial space that I had not quite considered until prompted by the authors: “In order to achieve this kind of control over material transformation, the laboratory has to be a closed, well-delimited space protected from the haphazard, complex circulation of materials and processes that characterize the natural world. Indeed, this is the very meaning of a laboratory, a characteristic paradox that has led to so much productive work in science studies over recent decades. The laboratory is a place deliberately isolated from the rest of the world, and so has little in common with it. Yet, it is a place intended to generate truths about the natural world… Chemists deliberately isolate themselves from natural phenomena to better understand nature.”

 

I’m a computational chemist, so my ‘lab’ exists in an even more artificial environment than the ‘wet’ labs of my experimentalist colleagues. This reductionist approach to studying nature employed by the sciences has yielded many insights, although it consistently fails when attempting to dissect complex systems. Biology, in its own right, is quite distinct from physics in its methodological approaches. Chemistry occupies an interesting interdisciplinary yet distinct space between the two, and in my biased opinion, is the most interesting of the three!

 

For chemistry, laboratory work was also the way you proved something. Lavoisier’s famous experiments in 1785 to ‘decompose’ water (an Aristotelian element) into hydrogen and oxygen (known as ‘inflammable air’ and ‘dephlogisticated air’ respectively), and then recompose them back into water, were actually quite complicated given the equipment back then and the deep-seated conviction of the audience to Aristotelian principles. How do you prove things you can’t see with the naked eye? You have to use measuring instruments and your audience has to believe that you aren’t trying to hoodwink them with other means. There’s a reason why glassware is made of transparent glass, although that’s not the only reason.

 

Lavoisier’s experiment also illustrates three important characteristics of ‘chemical proof’. Quoting the authors: “First, chemists materialize the abstract processes of analysis and synthesis in terms of chemical operations and observable phenomena, an approach that distinguishes chemistry from geometry… practical manipulations as the ultimate proof of veracity. [Second, ]… every step of Lavoisier’s demonstrated is loaded with theory… the fundamental principles such as the conservation of matter… there are no such thing as theory-independent facts… Third, the demonstration by analysis and synthesis mobilized not only theory, but also abstraction… to have the demonstration function, Lavoisier needed to insist on the purity of the raw materials he used, as well as the abstract universal nature of the products. The natural history of these elements and compounds was deemed irrelevant… [paradoxically] this very materialization of Lavoisier’s chemistry… involved a complementary idealization of the material bodies that he put in play.”

 

These ideas of abstraction and theory-laden facts are very interesting to me as an instructor. What distinguishes the novice from the expert is that the latter has a seemingly invisible scaffolding of concepts, theories, models, and other abstractions. As a chess-master easily recognizes significant positions on the chessboard, so the chemist in me quickly recognizes chemical structures and chemical equations beyond lines, letters, and symbols. How do I help my students build this scaffolding one step at a time, taking into account the invisible basis of atoms and molecules, while connecting it to macroscopic phenomena, and abstract principles represented by symbols? That’s both the challenge and joy of teaching chemistry!

 

The utility of expert ability has taken interesting turns in the history of science. Gabriel-Francois Venel, who wrote an article on “chymistry” (or perhaps it should be ‘chemystery’!) in 1753 for the Encyclopedie, “defends the chemists’ right to cultivate their own epistemological style… While the chemist’s language might well be difficult, dense and obscure, this is precisely because it reflects their unique empirical experience of the world, an experience that is drawn both from the science and the chemical arts.” Yes, chemistry is as much art as it is science, and in my opinion, sits comfortably with the liberal arts. There’s an equally strong emphasis on what you actually sense (sights and smells) to abstractions in your mind of what’s going on. I think it’s neat that our sense of smell allows us the direct detection of tiny invisible molecules! Too often we rely on sight as our primary sense.

 

I close with the authors’ discussion on “Seeing at a Glance”. This is the expert’s ability, to combine “several senses at once in the process of developing an intrinsic and non-verbal form of knowledge characteristic of the skilled artisan… this ability of seeing at a glance is not innate. Instead, it is learned through a lifetime of practical experience that breeds practical instincts or intuitions… [for example] a technician specialized in ultrasound techniques has no problem picking out the heart and legs of a foetus where the uninitiated just sees a play of light and shadows.”

 

Venel uses ‘artist’ in two senses: “as artisan… who by continued application, has trained… [in] a series of techniques that serve as tools in his trade” but also as a “creative genius”, one who cannot easily describe his or her own process of eliciting the tacit knowledge within. I can’t remember how I learned the chemistry that I understand today. I know that in my first two years of high-school chemistry, I didn’t understand anything. Somewhere along the way, something clicked, but I can’t break down that process analytically for myself. It’s likely different for different individuals. However, here’s the rub. This “seeing at a glance” expertise is increasingly supplanted by modern instrumentation in the lab. We can’t just trust our senses, we have to measure something carefully and accurately using the appropriate device to be sure. And increasingly, we are asking machines imbued with artificial intelligence to do this analysis.

 

And yet, none of the appropriate experiments can be conceived and designed without the tacit knowledge of the expert. Otherwise, Garbage In, Garbage Out. The chemical laboratory might look different today than in previous eras, but the abstract principles behind its operations are perhaps not so different.