As many of you would know, he was (perhaps unknowingly) referring to the infamous Pascal’s Wager. In my memory – notoriously fallible – of religious education, this was one of the first weapons soldiers for god were issued with. At least, this was true in my battalion. There are common and easy refutations for the wager, such as the simple observation that as much as it is true for god (let us say the Christian one, for the sake of the argument), it is true for the Flying Spaghetti Monster also. So who’s to say that your should not fear his noodly appendage whenever you pray to your false god, Jehovah? Etc. But then, recently (and the link is lost, unfortunately, so apologies for the lack of linkage), I came across a post which asked that we consider the fact that most unknowables, or remote statistical possibilities, may be unpleasant to comprehend, yet not actually merit any impact on our lives.

For example, it is certainly possible that when I leave home tomorrow morning, I may experience some cosmic debris falling on my head, or perhaps some unwelcome amorous advances (for such was foretold in my weekend horoscope, after all). And for the former possibility, given that cosmic debris has actually been observed falling on our heads – or at least in the vicinity of them – it seems a fear grounded in some version of reality. Yet, this possibility makes no difference to my life. It may be that I am complacent in believing that I am safe from such an occurrence, but evidence suggests that it would be a waste of time and mental energy to be concerned about it happening to me. Likewise, I can’t imagine the pay-off for spending time trying to figure out which god is most sensible to try and please. Does one start by determining which one smites the hardest? Or which one has a cooler paradise? God knows. Allegedly. But that doesn’t help me, or you.

Anyway, the believer that this post begins with came to me after the last lecture, and confessed that he was now more than skeptical, but downright distrustful of religious claims in any flavour or colour. But a key remaining concern for him was what difference his conversion would make, particularly in a country like South Africa, which is still so committed to metaphysical beliefs. As I pointed out to him, it’s a long, drawn-out battle, and what keeps me fighting it is that “Six degrees of separation” thing – maybe, someday, someone who one of us has “corrected” will actually be in a position to influence someone who can influence policy, rather than simply influence their friends (or students). We shall see.

If you’re feeling in need of direction, here’s a revealing update on the 10 commandments from Action Skeptics. And, in closing, something that may well make it to a lecture theatre near you, soon (via onegoodmove):

THE MISSION BEHIND THIS PAPER:

IS TO STOP UNIVERSITY MANAGEMENT FROM RUNNING THIS INSTITUTION AS A BUSINESS

TO CREATE A BETTER PEOPLES FRIEND CAMPUS

IS TO IMPLEMENT BETTER WAYS OF COMMUNICATION THAT WILL ENABLE STUDENTS TO UNLEASH THEIR ANGERS AND UNSATISFACTORINESS TO THE MANAGEMENT ON A DAILY BASIS

TO INTRODUCE AN EMAILING SYSTEM FOR LOST AND FOUND STUDENT CARDS AND OTHER PERSONAL BELONGINGS

TO INTRODUCE SUPPLEMENTS AND WINTER/SUMMER TERM(S)

IT IS NOT VISIONARY OR IDEALISTIC INDEPENDENT MINDED FOR AN INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE

I’ll report back after the election results are in, but I’d be willing to put money on him winning a seat on the council…

Even when discussing potentially complicated and interesting topics (political espionage is one current example, the attitudes of powerful male figures to female members of society another), most journalism – when not being sensational – focuses on technical matters such as the law or political protocols. One finds very little philosophising, or broader reflection generally unconstrained by the status quo of public perception. This is not to deny that these more technical (or pragmatic) discussions can be useful, yet they rarely result in a fundamental change to the way in which we perceive the world and our relations with its content, particularly the social relations which consistently give rise to the most problematic aspects of our lives in general.

The sort of intellectual activity I’m not seeing in the newspapers consists in people writing about potentially public – yet largely abstract – issues in a public language. This is not a concept alien to literate societies – one need only look back to 1950 to find a tradition of public philosophy (ending, arguably, with John Dewey). Recently, apart from rare exceptions, philosophy itself has been little concerned with public issues. As Richard Rorty points out:

The older sort of philosophy professor is dying out. The newer type is technically trained, devoted to “cases”, and argumentation – not history, morals, or public issues.

Setting aside moral questions such as journalists’ possible responsibility to contribute to the education of the general public, my claim is that restricting your “analysis” to non-philosophical detailing of events and characters constrains the development of both writer and reader – speaking in technical language (which is the modern marker of erudition), on technical issues makes it difficult for the writer to see beyond those technical issues, and to perhaps reflect and write on other, potentially more interesting or fruitful issues. The reader is then never challenged to do any thinking, and the cycle of stupidity speeds up that little bit more.

It could be responded that individuals may choose to restrict their focus to a narrow technical aspect of law, politics, psychology and even philosophy, and that there is virtue in being a capable specialist. But that is precisely the point – that this sort of individual is a specialist, and nothing more. We have come to confuse the capable specialist (at universities, the academic; in newspapers, the political correspondent) – with the intellectual, yet the category of intellectual is one that should remain an ideal, and be reserved for those who love knowledge in general, then seek to expand and often share their store of knowledge. It is perhaps the case that the general trend towards specialisation hampers this quest for knowledge, in that while you (all of us) are allowed to keep on blabbing about your specialisation, nobody – including you – notices just how stupid you’ve become.

The simple fact is that the majority of student emails are not necessarily rude, but they are typically from students who aren’t doing their jobs. And why is it so readily accepted that they no longer need to do their work? If a student mails you a question they should know the answer to, I’d argue that part of your job as professor is to explicitly tell them that the question is out of order, and that they need to work harder.

As I’ve said before, education has largely become commiditised. Knowledge is mostly treated as a product, and professors are employees of the supermarket. Discussions around students mailing professors have not as yet made the connection between these phenomena, and they have not bothered to wonder why it’s acceptable, or even encouraged, for professors to assist their students in becoming lazier and increasingly detached from investing something of themselves in their own educations.

On a related note, I’m going to post a few examples of emails I’ve received from students in the new “Rants” category, for those of you who don’t experience the joys of receiving them yourselves.

Whether or not humans are equal, should vote democratically, have rights or have a god, some of these sorts of beliefs can undoubtedly conduce to harmonious societal living. But they can equally conduce to chaos and disorder – and typically do in those instances where they are believed to be literally “true” rather than true in some sort of pragmatist fashion. My questioning their literal truth uses these beliefs merely as a springboard to discuss our relationship with what we call knowledge – the beliefs themselves are chosen mainly for the blind allegiance so many students have to them.

This approach tends to elicit two responses (not counting the response of apathy or unresponsiveness). Some dislike me for being some version of an athiestic rabble-rouser, spreading poisonous and anti-something-or-other nonsense. And the other camp comes to me after lectures, asking some pointed question like:

Student: What’s your opinion on religious beliefs?

Me (reluctantly, because I fear the ensuing argument): My opinion on religious beliefs is that they are usually irrational and potentially dangerous.

But instead of the expected offense, and then argument, they smile and say “Me too” before walking away. And this sort of student is nearly as worrying as the first group – they’ve merely found a “sympathiser”, and will walk away with their belief strengthened, and their need to think about that belief lessened. And I’ll want to call them back and play devil’s advocate – or in this case, god’s advocate – until I remember how incredibly difficult that is, and resist the urge.

1. The Dean of my Faculty has been asked to step down to make way for an affirmative action appointment. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not opposed to wanting to fill senior posts in this way, so long as merit is still the primary constraint on appointments. But this University struggles to find lecturers in AA demographic groups because the private sector pays qualified candidates double (or more) the salary we can, and one would suspect that this gap would only increase when talking about someone eligible (and willing) to be Dean. So you have to worry about the search being futile, and then about someone far less suitable than the current Dean (who wants to stay) being appointed.

2. I’ve been here for around 15 years. In all that time, a constant noise has been that the Faculty Handbooks are an element of our legal contract with the students – they spell out what the students are meant to do to be eligible to write their exams in each course, for example. But as of this year, these handbooks are only going to be distributed to 1st-year students, with senior students having access only through the University website.

Now, I’m no lawyer, but I would imagine that if something is to count as a legal contract with a student, you have to do all you can to make sure they have access to the terms of that contract, and have read these terms? And surely your registration forms for senior students should include a mention that handbooks will no longer be available in printed form, and ask you to affirm that you are aware of the existence of these handbooks on the web? The reason they are not available to all students is, by the way, to save on printing costs.

3. A new piece of software, Peoplesoft, is replacing Heritage as our student administration backbone as of this year. To start with, we’ll only be using this software for limited purposes, but within 3 years we hope to finally have online registration enabled, etc. But this software change means that all sorts of functionality everyone is quite used to has been replaced with something foreign, and this should surely imply an effective and prompt communication stream around what we need to do to be ready to use this new functionality.

But no. While some administrators received such emails, academics did not, and at this University, academics are forced into doing plenty of admin (for reasons I’ll avoid discussing now). So here we are, not having done the requisite training, nor signed the requisite forms, with our students arriving next week. In my case, many hundreds of students, who will all somehow have to manually be allocated to tutorial groups.

Sorry, there’s a customer at the door. More later.

But while the failure rate was predicatably high (yes, I finished my marking an hour or so ago), they did do better than expected. And I can share the following hypothesis with you: When you limit a student’s ability to waffle, she tends to be more coherent.

Now this may not seem particularly insightful to you, but bear in mind that most people have inflated opinions regarding their coherence and verbal elegance. This can lead them to over-elaborate, using 10 times as many words than are in fact necessary. In doing so, they go down side-alleys, and soon aren’t really answering the essay or exam question at all.

For this exam (which, as discussed earlier, was more a way of taking their temperatures rather than fully examining them, I gave explicit instructions for the students to write short (600 word or so) essays. And this did seem to result in some focus – with the safety blanket of “saying whatever the hell I can remember about topic X” ripped away, the students instead typically at least stayed on message. They did of course misremember various key theoretical points, but usually at least wrote something I could follow, which was a pleasant (and unexpected) surprise.

The students wrote their supplementary exams earlier this week. This concept may be unfamiliar to many readers, so a brief explanation would tell you that students who “achive” “achieve” (because the misspelt word would have been true to my theme) between 45% and 49% for the course are entitiled to another try at the exam, on the grounds that they may not have displayed their true potential on the day.

Years of experience in marking exams has shown me that they typically displayed more than their potential, ie. that they tend to do worse in these supplementary exams. Part of this obviously has to do with the fact that 2 months of holiday-making has passed since they last considered the subject material, but mostly, I don’t believe many of them would ever pass, no matter how many times they tried.

And that is why this is the worst bunch to mark. Usually, you’ll have a small proportion of answers that impress with their lucidity, insight, and sometimes even wit. But with a pile of supplementary exams, you’re lucky to to find something consistently intelligible. Then, once you’ve finished with them, you step out into the world and try to resist the urge to throttle the first person who walks into view.

As I remarked to 2Slack yesterday, given that teaching only starts in mid-February, one wonders just how negative I’ll be about the tertiary education system by that time, if the pessimism is already so acute…