Undue Influence?

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Athene Donald

If the newspapers are to be believed – and that’s a big if – then television has an awful lot to answer for when it comes to which university courses are over-subscribed. In quick succession last week, stories were run in the Independent claiming that the sudden increase in UCAS applications for midwifery courses was down to the BBC Series ‘Call the Midwife’, and in the Telegraph the story ran that the rise in physics applications was down to Brian Cox.  Of course this latter ‘story’ is not new (it’s been running since 2010 at least), but the specific point made this time around was that Manchester applications in particular had gone through the roof, so that the standard offer from the university was now 2  A*’s and an A – higher than the usual Oxbridge requirement. The stories were of course thin on actual hard evidence (as opposed to a few, possibly relevant numbers scattered around) and certainly should be treated with the customary caution, that correlation is not causation.

These stories are in the same vein as the one a number of years ago which said that Silent Witness, back then starring Amanda Burton, had sparked an increase in the number of applications for Forensic Science courses.  These days, following the much publicised closure of the Forensic Science Service, it seems improbable that the long-running programme continues to provoke such enthusiasm for a degree in the subject. Or maybe it’s simply that the novelty value has faded. But it is worth asking whether TV really does provoke waves of fashion in the student population or even, though I’ve not come across explicit stories to this effect, possibly aversion if a programme represents some field too negatively.  If it does have such influence, is this a force for good? However, it seems to me that there are additionally a whole slew of different factors that could be coming into play here, ones that the newspapers simply don’t touch upon.

Relevant factors could include one or more of the following:

  • Midwifery and physical sciences both may appeal to the student of today who faces the fee-payback of tomorrow.  In other words, when financial worries loom large, both physics and midwifery may look like good bets compared with, say, psychology or media studies, about which much has been written (certainly as regards their value and level of difficulty as A level subjects). If these latter subjects are seen as not going to provide a high probability of employment or satisfactory salaries, then maybe people are opting for courses that appear to offer better security.
  • For students who lack decent careers’ advice, as most will due to the winding down of the ability of schools to offer face-to-face provision, then information gleaned from the television may be seized upon as offering insight unobtainable during the normal school day. So perhaps TV should now be seen as filling a gap in information services for 16 year olds, thereby suggesting interesting alternatives for those who have discovered they probably do not have what it takes to sign for a top-flight football team or modelling agency (according to taste), the frequent aspiration of early teen years.
  • In the case of physics, the year-on-year increase in university applications almost certainly started before the ‘Brian Cox effect’ could have kicked in. His first major series, Wonders of the Solar System, was shown in 2010. Numbers of students applying to do physics courses have been going up since about 2007. Manchester may of course now be a particular attraction because that is his own university; but it is also the home of the most recent UK Nobel Prize winners in Physics Andrei Geim and Konstantin  Novoselov for the discovery of graphene. Graphene, and its home in Manchester, is probably in the science news almost as much as Cox, since large dollops of money keep being pointed in Manchester’s direction, so who is to say the attraction of Manchester  physics doesn’t have other roots beyond Brian Cox?

We have, of course, no evidence to help decode any correlation that currently appears to exist. Furthermore, it has been suggested that Cox’s appeal is only for the boys and that his programmes are subtly gendered in the way they are filmed and the framing of the stories.  Although that may be true, the number of girls proceeding to physics degrees, paltry though it is at only about 25% of total applications, has been rising too. Indeed, to counter that argument, using that well known source of fact the Daily Mail, we see that it proclaims that Cox is a sex symbol, which might well counter any negative effects of the actual style of programmes he is presenting. It is undoubtedly the case that the smiling face of Brian Cox, even better when alongside Dara Ó Briain, is seen to sell newspapers, so stories about what he may or may not have achieved are clearly worth publishing from the editor’s point of view. However, we really must take them with a pinch of salt.

Despite that, if TV is actually influencing the university choices of the young, shouldn’t we be trying harder to make sure that we, the scientific community, in turn influence what goes out on TV? It was not obvious ‘Call the Midwife’ was going to be such a hit. Is that down to the cute newborns who feature, or the woman of the moment Miranda Hart? Who knows, although even now focus groups are no doubt studying what the public most like about the programme to help the BBC find the next hit series. I don’t suppose it was foreseen that Brian Cox would be such a success either, but maybe the biologists need to find a successor to David Attenborough fast or they might fear their undergraduate numbers may be about to take a hit.

Can we work with the media to use them to provide good implicit careers’ advice to the teenagers who no longer get it at school? And do we need iconic faces – and/or ex-pop stars – in order to make that strategy work or is the content of the programme sufficient?

Posted in Careers, Education | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Culture, Class and Quakers

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Athene Donald

Last week Melvyn Bragg ran a special series of In Our Time discussing the meaning of culture in both the past and present.  Because of the timing of the programme I rarely listen to it, although it’s great for listening to as a podcast on trains, but on this occasion I took especial care because the second episode in this series of five was trailed to feature EB Tylor (1832-1917). His name is probably not widely known in the scientific (in the modern sense of the word) community. However he was my great great great uncle, if I’ve counted correctly, although his name rarely featured in my childhood. Indeed, I don’t think I’d ever taken his existence in until I was an adult. Nevertheless he was no slouch. He is, according to Britannica Online Encyclopedia, ‘regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology’.

So, it being the holidays and with more time than usual on my hands, the Melvyn Bragg programme prompted me to do a bit of Googling to see what I could learn about the man. There is quite a lot out there; if I went to my University Library I am sure I could dig up a lot more, but that’s not really the point. Looking into his life and background, and then listening to In Our Time, caused me to join a lot of dots – some of them probably incorrectly since I am a rank amateur genealogist, historian and anthropologist – but let me spell out some of the connections. I’ll split this long post up into two, starting with the personal (which any reader can obviously jump over) and then moving on to the ‘cultural’ aspects.

Part I: Personal

First of all I should state I would be ineligible to take part in BBC’s Who do you think you are? because I actually do know a fair bit about some branches of my family, going back quite a long way. This makes it the odder that I have imbibed so little about this particular part of the family. It so happens that as an FRS, I am expected to provide a brief autobiography for their library to help them when it comes to writing up my life for their series of Biographies when I die (sorry to be morbid). They try to prompt you with questions they’d like answers to, one of which is ‘are there any FRS’s in the family?’ to which I had answered ‘no’. My mother had tried to convince me that – in a different part of the family – my great, great grandfather Francis Boott had been an FRS, but the Royal Society records prove her wrong. He was simply the US-born Secretary to the Linnean Society back in 1832-9 and the first use of ether as an anaesthetic in Britain (for a dental procedure) was in his house at 24 Gower Street on 19 December 1846 (so says Wikipedia and I assume they know).

So how did no one seem to know that Sir Edward Burnett Tylor was an FRS? Why is one branch of my family’s genealogy so much better known than another? No doubt that is typical of families, reflecting who remembers what, and who cares about such things and transmits the information down the years (or, in other instances, takes care about thoroughly labelling the photographs).

Another question that the Royal Society wanted an answer to was ‘were there scientist in the family?’ Now you can see that if you were a Darwin/Huxley/Barlow tribe member, you could fill a page or two with details of previous eminent scientists to whom you are related, but I wasn’t entirely sure that EB Tylor counted as a scientist, although I did dutifully mention him (and great great grandpapa Boott). But researching the web for stuff about EB Tylor, I found mention of a certain Alfred Tylor (1824-1884), the older brother of EB, described as a geologist and brassfounder (a goodly combination). Digging around a bit further and it is clear that this guy is certainly another of my great great grandfathers  – his son is described as the ‘engineer and Egyptologist’  JJ Tylor and this man’s portrait most certainly adorned my childhood home, along with some of his own paintings of Egypt and some goodies he had brought back from Egyptian tombs (don’t worry; the British Museum knows about these, but what we have are only second rate spares apparently). So, I am directly descended from a geologist – and indeed an engineer. Again, why did no one ever mention these facts when I started heading off in a scientific direction?

I feel almost cheated that for decades I have believed I was the only scientist in the family; the Tylor’s (EB apart) were always described to me as being of a legal disposition, including a judge and a barrister to my certain knowledge. Now of course I have no idea if Alfred Tylor’s contributions to glaciology are still regarded as useful. These included introducing the word ‘pluvial’ to describe the time when huge rivers filled English valleys (he apparently wrote to Darwin attempting to get him on side with this use, although it isn’t clear that he ever received a reply; on the other hand, the Darwin Correspondence project shows that Darwin certainly exchanged a number of letters with EB Tylor). Alfred Tylor was obviously only an ‘amateur’ geologist, in the sense that his day-job was running the family firm, the brassfoundry, but of course being an ‘amateur’ was practically the norm in those days when few scientists got paid.

So, at the end of my  brief exploration I can confirm that, if I go far enough back in my family tree, there was at least one ‘scientist’ and at least one FRS, and I never knew that before the Bragg programme kick-started my researching.

Part II: Anthropology, culture and class

The Tylor family were Quakers. This is relevant because it meant that they were barred from entering Oxford or Cambridge at the time, and consequently both brothers left school at 16 and any further education was done informally. EB Tylor seems to have fallen into anthropology purely by chance, having been sent to the US because he appeared to be consumptive. There he fell in with a fellow Quaker, Henry Christy, who was heading for Mexico and they set off together. Christy was more of an archaeologist but their travels inspired and informed EB’s interests. About 5 years later he published his first book Anahuac; or, Mexico and the Mexicans Ancient and Modern (1861), which as yet was still not particularly anthropological. That came later in his seminal book Primitive Culture (1871) and it was this book that gave him pride of place in the Melvyn Bragg programme.

What did Tylor mean by ‘culture’? – just about everything! But for other people at the time the generally accepted meaning was pretty narrow. I have written previously about the arguments between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley; these took place at around the time Primitive Culture was published. Arnold was in large part the subject of the first programme in the Melvyn Bragg series, in which his book Culture and Anarchy was discussed. For Arnold, culture referred almost exclusively to literature and philosophy. Huxley disagreed, because he felt science belonged in there, for instance stating in 1880:

From the time that the first suggestion to introduce physical science into ordinary education was timidly whispered, until now, the advocates of scientific education have met with opposition of two kinds. On the one hand, they have been pooh-poohed by the men of business who pride themselves on being the representatives of practicality; while, on the other hand, they have been excommunicated by the classical scholars, in their capacity of Levites in charge of the ark of culture and monopolists of liberal education.

But as this quote makes clear, much of this debate was centred on what a cultured gentleman should gather from his education. Tylor changed the context and meaning radically when he introduced the idea that customs and beliefs belonged to culture just as much as literature and philosophy. His whole thesis was that there was an appropriate, essentially evolutionary approach to societies. ‘Savages’ were just at the beginning of this process (and ‘barbarians’ in the middle) but he deemed them equally able to reach the heights of civilisation in principle.

This was not attractive to people like Arnold, who saw culture as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ conducive to ‘to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’ (from Culture and Anarchy) – sentiments that have strong theological overtones, as well as indicating the goal should be a state of human perfection rather than a more mechanical/scientific sense of simply knowing.  Tylor was much more in agreement with Huxley than with Arnold, and his introduction of a much broader meaning of culture changed the dynamics of the debate and, by implication, what an appropriate education should include.

Neither Huxley nor Tylor were ‘university men’ and that, I suspect, is highly relevant to this debate. Indeed, I was very struck by a statement I found in a somewhat undigested write-up of Tylor’s life on the Pitt Rivers Museum website, which quoted Edmund Leach as saying

despite the honors accorded to Tylor in his old age, anthropology remained a non-subject. Tylor was not a gentleman.

I assume he could not be regarded as a gentleman because he came from a manufacturing background (that brassfoundry) and hadn’t attended Oxford or Cambridge (although he became the first Oxford professor of Anthropology and also was awarded an Honorary Degree by the University). Leach was writing about the effect of class on social anthropology, so his qualification of ‘not being a gentleman’ is perhaps less pejorative than it sounds; I don’t think it meant he was a cad! Class, I think, is equally relevant to the ideas of culture and to the place of science (in its broadest sense and so including anthropology) within it. For a public school boy like Arnold, who was of course the son of Rugby’s famous and reforming headmaster Thomas Arnold, young gentleman studied the Classics and that was indeed, in his view ‘the best that had been thought and said’. Science was more the preserve of the Mechanics Institutes ie for the ‘rude mechanics’ of the lower classes whom he would no doubt have encouraged to better themselves, but whom it would have been natural for him to consider would ever remain outside the purlieus of the truly civilised and ‘cultured’ male society he moved in.

Returning to the Melvyn Bragg programmes, Paul Nurse took a rather similar line in the 3rd of the series, by implying the 20th century Snow-Leavis debate (very similar to the Arnold-Huxley disagreement, although conducted in much less polite terms; indeed, one could almost say ungentlemanly terms) belonged in an Oxbridge SCR rather than the real world. Nevertheless, it most certainly spilled out far beyond such a closeted ivory tower. For Nurse, also outside the Oxbridge firmament and identifying himself on the programme as coming from the artisan class, the arguments seemed artificial and didn’t make much real sense. Of course by the 20th century, culture (1, 2 or however many ‘cultures’ one wants to identify) had taken on other meanings again. Leavis may have chosen to make his rebuttal in large part a personal attack on Snow, but more broadly speaking there was undoubtedly a different split from simply classics/humanities versus science, but – for instance – also intellectual versus mass culture. (I use my terms here rather loosely as I am not a cultural historian, so I expect to be pulled up.)

It is perhaps inevitable that within the English system (Scotland would of course have been different), class is inherently so central to such a debate. Class also tied in with religious beliefs, and these of course also had strong implications for university education because non-conformists were banned from Oxford and Cambridge Universities until 1854 and 1856 respectively. So, when discussing the meaning of culture, it is unsurprising that a Quaker– Tylor – might have taken a different position from an Anglican – Arnold –  quite apart from the Quaker having visited and considered non-Christian societies and so gained a very different perspective on many fronts.

The Melvyn Bragg programmes were very stimulating. As will be obvious, I learned a lot on several different fronts and it makes me look at the Victorian and 20th century debates on culture with fresh eyes. The fact that I managed to glean so much so rapidly from the web about my own personal antecedents is just a very pleasant extra.

Posted in Education, Science Culture, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Is Removal of the Gender Pay Gap a Utilitarian Dream?

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Athene Donald

Last month the University of Cambridge published its latest Equal Pay Review, something it is now doing biennially (rather than annually) since things don’t change that drastically year on year. As in previous years, if you look at the average or median salaries for men and women there are substantial differences, reflecting the tendency towards grade segregation. However what, to my mind, matters far more are the differences within the grades; here the gap is much smaller – although certainly not negligible. Nevertheless, even our local newspaper couldn’t make a particularly horrendous story out of the statistics.

We can and must do better, but actions in place are bringing the gender gap down year on year; we have clear action plans and this year introduced a couple of new recommendations which we hope will continue to improve the situation. These include a programme of support for returners (piloted this year in the Physical Sciences) and a specific charge upon Boards of Electors and Appointments Committees to ensure that any pool of candidates is appropriately diverse, through new guidelines/recommendations. Time will tell if this makes a substantial difference, but nothing is going to change things overnight, albeit the direction of travel is right.

However, amongst my Christmas reading I came across a couple of papers in the social sciences which highlight issues indicating it may be unable to achieve parity by institutional actions alone. The first of these papers involved Cambridge and Canadian researchers looking in more detail at gender segregation in 30 industrialised nations around the world (the full paper can be found here and a brief analysis on the University of Cambridge website here).

What this paper shows is that grade segregation in itself is by no means the whole story about the gender pay gap.  For instance, Scandinavian countries, which rank very highly on measures of gender equality, actually have very substantial job segregation and any such segregation implicitly indicates that occupational choice for both men and women is constrained to some degree.  The findings demonstrate that an egalitarian society is not necessarily incompatible with job segregation. A corollary of the findings in the paper is that the greater the degree of segregation – implying that women are in less direct competition with men – the greater the degree of seniority women on average reach and so the gender pay gap may actually be reduced by the segregation.  However I am not entirely convinced that this amounts to a healthy situation for anyone.  The authors also point out that where there is substantial segregation, the women typically occupy the more ‘attractive’ roles such as non-manual ones with a concomitant reduced risk of injury and death, again demonstrating that segregation in itself is not all negative.

The second paper is even more concerning to those who want strict parity, because it suggests the substantial role societal expectations play on both men and women, in colouring how women progress. This paper also has a ‘lay summary’, this time in the Economist. Carried out in the US, the study looked at the relative earning power within couples. Where the woman in a couple was likely to earn more than the man (based on demographics) she was more likely to leave the workforce completely or work at a lower level than might have been anticipated in order, it would seem, to fulfil the cultural norm that the man earns more than the woman.  The Economist states dryly ‘That’s bad news for the Economy.’

The findings also suggested that where couples did exhibit ‘role reversal’ (in other words the woman was earning more than the man), they were likely to state that their relationship was less happy than a ‘normal’ couple or that it actually ended in divorce. It didn’t seem to matter whether the woman earned just a little more than her husband or a lot, the outcome was the same. This obviously suggests that the purely utilitarian, rational arguments (in other words those which economists traditionally apply) fail because of our psychological responses and internal beliefs. As part of a role reversal couple myself, whose marriage has so far happily survived for 36 years, I can attest that role reversal is undoubtedly societally unpleasant for the male, but also we are ‘proof’ that it doesn’t inevitably lead to rapid divorce!

At the risk of using a sociological term inappropriately, this appears to me to be another form of ‘choicism’, where women will take a course of action – in this case restricting their salary and career aspirations – in order to comply with a cultural norm, whether they consciously know they are doing this or not. This may indeed contribute to the decisions of some of the women who become the ‘stay-at-home-mom’, justifying their decisions to themselves and the world that this is what they really want to do, a topic I wrote about at more length before.

I fear that these established norms are going to be very hard to eradicate, which in turn implies – if this study is applicable around the world – that the gender pay gap is not going to disappear in a hurry. It may be that institutions such as my own university can only go so far in successfully eradicating pay differentials by the introduction of new policies, if some women are actually self-selecting not to aim as high as their intrinsic skills might support and suggest. No doubt some readers will feel in essence let the women do what they want, why make an issue out of it, but if, deep down, this is not the choice that women would make if society were different  we should make an issue out of it. It is perhaps unsurprising that the US study shows that where a woman’s mother-in-law had herself worked, women were more likely to be the higher earning member of a couple. So maybe in another generation or two, when more and more mother-in-laws have themselves worked, these cultural norms will be modified. And perhaps only then will the gender pay gap really disappear. Not a comforting thought.

 

Posted in Equality | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Classifying Group Leaders

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Athene Donald

It’s the season for lists: best photos of the year, best quotes, best-dressed (even worst-dressed) celebs, momentous moments – you name it, there’s probably a list for it somewhere on the web. Since I’ve just covered the other seasonal topic of New Year’s resolutions over at the Guardian’s  Occam’s Corner, I shall add my own list to the multitude out there: a list of species of group leaders.

My last post discussed a charismatic, but also autocratic leader in the form of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. He could get away with being autocratic because he was inspirational – and also right about what he wanted his team to do far more often than he was wrong. But this cannot be said of many group leaders, some of whom should probably never have been left in charge of a dead parrot, let alone a group of nervous PhD students. At a recent consultation event for researchers carried out in Cambridge, the lack of interpersonal skills and interest in developing the careers of those in their care of some of attendees’ line managers was much talked about.

As with my previous identification guides to academic species (professors, committee chairs and members of university and grant-giving committees), what follows represent distorted amalgamations of individuals I have known, heard about or allowed my fevered imagination to construct. Consequently, any similarities to academics, alive or dead, are purely fortuitous. Nevertheless, I suspect you may recognize some strands of colleagues of your own in what follows. I will, for neutrality’s sake, assign a Chair to each of these individuals, but their failings are as likely to apply to the early career group leader as the grizzled greybeard (or grey-haired for those who lack beards) variety.

Professor Tickbox has read all the material from the HR department, knows what is expected of them in terms of careers’ advice/appraisal and goes through the required motions. Once a year each timid – or even more confident – student or postdoc will get their 5 minute interview at which the requisite forms are produced, whisked through and signed off without a chance for reflection or genuine dialogue. The braver individuals may attempt to spin this interview out by introducing a few questions starting off ‘Would it be possible…’ or perhaps ‘I understand it would be helpful if….’ but is unlikely to get further before a brusqe response stops the flow: ‘I think you’ll find I’ve dealt with all your questions; do take a copy of this form away with you’ and the poor unfortunate will be ushered sharply out of the room as the next victim enters. This is a professor who believes in form over substance.

Professor Oversolicitous If you have read Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, you will recognize this person is a kindred spirit to Miss Shaw. This is the kind of person who will say (as Miss Shaw does say in the book) ‘I can’t think why she shouldn’t have told me. My students always come to me with their troubles.’

Well, maybe yes, but often the group secretary is thought to be a better ear for student’s troubles than their supervisor, and sharing a regular pint of beer down the pub and letting hair down on both sides may well only lead to trouble later on. At times when some forcefulness is required, something along the line of ‘you promised me that draft by last week. You won’t be able to go to that conference in Hawaii if you don’t produce it within the next 24 hours’, the fact that boozy evenings have been shared may weaken a professor’s stance. Taking an interest in a student’s life beyond the lab is totally reasonable to build up a well-rounded picture of the individual and be able to provide support, but becoming a confidante may be less desirable and less likely to provide the right stimulus to hard work. Striking the right balance is probably one of the harder challenges for a newly-established group leader as they move onwards and upwards from merely being a group member to running their own group.

Professor Hand-holding has something of a similar bent. This is the person who breathes down a student’s neck every time they attempt a new experiment, sometimes fairly literally at the bench, although they have nothing useful in the way of experience, expertise or wisdom to offer. In fact, all such actions do is to make the hand shake at crucial moments so that the powder spills or the precious sample floats away in the water bath. Students have to profit by their own mistakes of course, but doing so when someone else is watching and (it is to be feared) internally criticising under the disguise of ‘helping’ is counter-productive. Professor Hand-holding merely conveys a complete lack of trust and their actions convey a claustrophobic miasma of failure. This course of action is of course quite different from requesting to see a repeat of some unexpected or critical result after success has crowned the first attempts at a new experiment. That can be considered merely appropriate caution and checking on experimental reproducibility on the part of the professor.

Professor Arrogant When it comes to seeking advice from Professor Arrogant (who may also masquerade as Professor AlphaMale, without meaning to imply that such a role can only be occupied by men), the inexperienced researcher may well suffer extreme anxiety, unless they can match like for like in such a conversation – unfortunately in itself a risky strategy. The trouble is these Professors have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew, what it is to be uncertain about their own abilities or career paths. They cannot comprehend anything other than an academic career as being an acceptable destination and attempts to ask about alternatives, even trying to get experience of alternatives, lead to sneers and snide remarks about ‘waste’. These are the ones students should fear, as they will get nothing constructive from such a conversation, merely a feeling of inferiority.

Of course, the brilliant favoured son or daughter, for whom great things are envisaged, may get something helpful out of such a conversation. Perhaps they will be given advice as to whose lab to move on to next to further career aspirations, or a helping hand in obtaining a conference presentation at some important meeting. But the fact that one member of the group may be so favoured, only makes the lot of the remainder more bitter and miserable. It is best to try to establish the credentials of such a professor before ever signing up for the team, unless your own arrogance appears to match theirs.

Professor Blind is perhaps the commonest of all group leaders. Nothing wrong with them, but little that is right either. They potter on – or even steam ahead if they are successful – without ever really noticing the fate of their team. The group members are simply there to deliver results, ideally reliably and on a regular basis. They aren’t perceived as individuals with characters of their own, so much as pairs of hands with few needs beyond the requirement of obtaining a PhD ultimately (does it really matter so much when? Probably not to this professor.). Talking through future career directions with each person probably simply never crosses their mind, although they may well consider the timing of writing papers because that redounds to their own benefit. However, there is always the possibility, that if a brave soul accosts them to ask advice they can be pinned down sufficiently to give the matter due consideration. Their experience may not prove very helpful – what do they know of the world beyond academia? – but there is no malice aforethought in their actions. They are simply simple souls who have never attended any sort of people-management course, who think that the ability to read papers 24/7 and obtain funding is all that is required to make them a good group leader.

There are many worthy, sometimes even inspirational, leaders out there. The trouble is that individuals are not chosen for senior posts on the basis of their leadership skills to any large extent. The ability to raise money, yes. The ability to get the most out of young lives entrusted to their care is much less obviously assessed or valued at the appointment stage. Universities should worry more about this, if not at appointment certainly swiftly thereafter when the new group leader is (or should be) being mentored, instead of leaving things to chance. Meanwhile junior researchers suffer, too often ending up having to take pot luck when it comes to seeking advice and ducking the more outrageous actions (or inaction) that is their daily fare.

Posted in Academia, Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

Charisma throughout a Convoluted Career

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Athene Donald

One of the joys of Christmas is having the time to reduce the number of unread books on one’s mental ‘to do’ list by a handful, although this is a good intention sometimes challenged by the gain of a few more wonderful books as presents. These holidays represent, finally, a few days when the email deluge lessens and the guilt over failing to read the paper one has promised to referee by a month ago/the paper from a collaborator/ voluminous committee papers (hurrah! no committees for a week or two) and all those other documents you’d prefer to ignore is weakened because – you hope  – no one will be reading their emails to see if you’ve done the task.

I’m afraid my personal reading style may not be approved of by all: given the chance I will read several books in parallel so that I can always pick up the one that suits my mood. I can even choose my medium, if I feel so inclined, as I switch between paper and Kindle. My diet may consist of a post-prandial lightweight volume to be read in tandem with a meatier one designed to stretch my mental powers when feeling alert and enthusiastic, both lightly seasoned with a biography or two plus a Victorian classic to give me that comfort/feel-good factor reminding me how glad I am to be alive a century-and-a-half later and not subject to diphtheria, the work-house or deprived of the vote and ability to earn an income.

Amongst my reading fare this Christmas I have, for the first time I suspect, read a biography of someone I’ve not only met but had the opportunity to interact with over a number of years, even to know a bit. If it wasn’t for the fact I didn’t believe in heroic science I could even identify this biographee as a hero, an identity the style of writing tends to reinforce. The book is the life-story of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (about whom I have written a little before), Nobel Prize winner in 1991 and a founder – if not the founder – of the field of soft matter in which I work. This book (Pierre-Gilles de Gennes: a Life in Science) was written by a French journalist, Laurence Plévert, based on many conversations with de Gennes in the couple of years preceding his death in 2007, as well as with many of his friends and colleagues.

Before I embarked on the book I had read the review by Tom McLeish (originally published in Physics World, but openly available here). His summary says

The author has identified some deep-lying themes, but somehow they never quite lead to a biography greater than the sum of its parts.

so I expected to find it a rather dry account of his life. In fact, on the contrary, I found it illuminating the man I had known, drawing out strands of which I had perhaps been only subliminally aware and it provoked quite a lot of reflection on quite why he had so much impact on so many individuals, myself included.

What follows is not a book review – there are several out there including Tom’s – but a personal consideration of this impact,factoring in the fact I have openly disavowed the heroic ideal of a scientist.  It is worth noting that de Gennes background was of French aristocracy coupled with a half-English mother who was a strong Protestant with high academic expectations (or more accurately, demands) of her son. His teenage years had the fairly foul backdrop of occupied France, but nothing seems to have dimmed his love of learning.  His breadth of interests was substantial and, although ultimately a theoretical physicist, he had carried out sufficient experimental work to have a full appreciation of experimentalists and always worked closely with them.

What I had really not appreciated until I read the book, was how deep-rooted his feelings about interdisciplinarity were, the importance of physicists working not only with chemists but also biologists. He himself very deliberately set out to study a substantial amount of biology during the 2 years of intense study which (still) comprise the ‘classes préparatoires’, the pre-requisite for entering one of the Grandes Écoles in Paris, before he was admitted to ENS (École National Supérieure). Downstream, one consequence of this was that he was also responsible for driving through the requirement for all students to study the three experimental sciences at ESPCI when he became its Director in 1976 (I discussed this breadth of education here).  However, it meant he was very familiar with the challenges of interdisciplinary working and funding – something I have highlighted here and here on my own blog in the context of the current UK climate – but he was describing a much earlier era.  For instance writing to the director of biology at the CNRS in 1978 he said:

The Orsay [submolecular biophysics} team currently depends on Committee 19 (macromolecular physical chemistry, but is somewhat marginal to the interests of that committee….This is a shocking situation, which illustrates how hard it is for biophysics to survive, with the lack of recognition within CNRS.

These are sentiments that many of my colleagues would appreciate are still applicable in many funding situations.

I was very aware that de Gennes was personally extremely encouraging about the work I did on starch during the 1990s. Visiting him in Paris at a time when some of my colleagues at the Cavendish were still being decidedly sniffy about the work I did on food physics, he and his long-standing (if part-time) partner and collaborator Françoise Brochard (he had two very public families, one with his wife Annie and one with Françoise) took me out to lunch. He tried to reassure me that I was doing important work by trying to get to grips with the interplay between starch granule structure and the biochemical pathways by which it was laid down, which could be looked at by studying different mutants. His encouragement, his seal of approval for moving away from conventional physics, meant a lot to me, but at the time I did not realise with quite what personal commitment he spoke, as opposed to simply being encouraging to a promising junior.

His own research path was indubitably as unconventional as his personal life. Having started off by making a name for himself in the field of superconductors (on which he wrote his first book), he reached a point where he felt he had done all he, as a theorist, could at the time and consciously switched fields to liquid crystals in the late 1960s, after a brief but largely unsuccessful foray into the field of polymers. His group at Orsay substantially switched with him (famously they tended to publish as ‘the Orsay liquid crystal group’ rather than under individual names, an idea pushed by de Gennes although it wasn’t always helpful for the career development of members of his team). Much of the mechanistic understanding of how liquid crystal displays work arises from this work, summed up in the book  he published on the topic in 1974. When I started working on liquid crystalline polymers in 1983 this was one of my bibles, although much of the analysis was hard to carry over to the longer chain versions of such molecules.

But, not content with making an abrupt change in research direction once, he did it again when he switched to working on polymers a second time. This time he stopped trying to work on the problems with the normal exactitude that French tradition expects and developed the approaches now known as scaling laws (encapsulated in his third book ‘Scaling Concepts in Polymer Physics’, published in 1979), which allowed him to relate physical properties, such as diffusion coefficients, to the length of polymer chains without having regard to what happens to each individual monomer, let alone each atom. He likened his approaches to Impressionist art, in that he was seeking a broad-brush approach, something that would probably be termed coarse-grained in the modern parlance.

The book was written when he was at Cornell University as Professor-at-large.  This was a time when I too was at Cornell, albeit I was in an Engineering Department not Physics and hadn’t yet started working on polymers. But, I did hear him speak there in about 1980 – by which time I was just getting to grips with polymer physics – and my over-riding impression was ‘what a hideous man’, a strange reaction, but I suspect his science went over my head at the time. When back at the Cavendish after 1983, I read this book many times, trying to get to grips with the subtleties of what are often rather heuristic arguments. I did not find the way he thought easy to follow, and I was always defeated – as an experimentalist – when I wanted to know not just the scaling, but what the prefactors ought to be. But, struggle though I might, I could nevertheless appreciate the elegance and power of what he did.

The biography spells out just how much he disliked the rigorous French tradition of theoretical physics, with its narrow concentration on mechanistically solving problems rather than actually thinking about how to approach and solve them. But equally he disliked the French system of patronage and the emphasis placed (and, I suspect sometimes is still placed) on where someone’s first degree/PhD comes from. In 2004 he wrote

The universities are run by a council on which the biggest labs are the best represented. Their objective is self-perpetuation rather than scientific renewal, so, for example, they recruit their own students, students who did their PhD’s through the laboratory rather than outside candidates. The result is you get the same research topics over and over again, however obsolete. This system is killing university research.

[Aside: Some might feel that applies to the UK’s Golden Triangle too, but I believe they would be wrong now, although it may have been accurate in the past. In my experience over the past decade or so, my own department has rarely hired an internal candidate, with many of our recent posts going to individuals from various European countries. ]

After the award of the 1991 Nobel Prize massively increased his public visibility, de Gennes became more ‘political’, engaging with ministers in an attempt to change those parts of the system he most disliked and to get the best deal for science. He was not afraid to be outspoken. Although he far from always got his way, he was certainly listened to, not to mention lauded. Which takes me onto my final theme of ‘heroes’.

As I have said before, I do not think it is helpful to consider science as a heroic endeavour done by lone individuals. De Gennes most certainly always surrounded himself by a team, particularly of experimentalists who he hoped would prove (or disprove) his latest theory. He worked best by bouncing ideas off others, talking problems through and being stimulated by conversations during chance encounters to provoke him to delve into yet another rich seam of problems.  However, I don’t think it is inconsistent to think of individuals acting as personal heroes, if that is the word you prefer to use instead of mentor, role-model or inspiration. I have previously stated that for me de Gennes – along with his Cambridge friend and my senior colleague Sir Sam Edwards – was very much a role model and mentor for me personally, although I would be slightly chary to describe him as my hero.

I know I owe him many a debt of gratitude. He was always enthusiastic and encouraging to me when he passed through Cambridge, as he did quite regularly and, as I mentioned above, invited me to talk at the College de France where he worked. Beyond that, rumour has it that the year I applied for promotion to Professor (in 1998) the Faculty Board made what sounds like an extraordinary decision: that all candidates had to have a reference written by a Nobel Prize winner, something I have never heard of happening in any other year and certainly not something that would (or could) happen now. I wasn’t told of this until after I knew I had indeed been promoted (this was a time when there were still only a handful of promotions made across the entire university each year in Cambridge), and I was duly grateful that in my own case there was a Nobel Prize winner who would have known me sufficiently well to write a meaningful letter. I also knew that this was purely fortuitous. Others would have fared much worse; it was simply something of a lottery and I was fortunate.

This meant that by the time I had sufficient seniority to be of some use to him, I felt something of an obligation to agree to his requests. Three times he asked me to take on a job for him: the first was when he was in the process of setting up a new journal in soft matter (EPJE, launched in 2000) and he rang me up out of the blue and asked me to be one of the first editor-in-chiefs. Having always kept away from serious editorial responsibilities, I nevertheless didn’t feel I could say no, although I did stick to my inviolate resolution of not agreeing to anything major on the phone. I spent at least a weekend considering my decision. Secondly, within a very short space of time in 2002 he asked me to be on the panel that selected his successor as ESPCI’s Director and to serve on the jury for the first L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science panel in materials science (the 2003 round of laureates). Again I said yes to both these invitations, resulting in some extremely pleasant trips to Paris. I felt it was the least I could do for this amazing man.

As a biography I would strongly recommend this book, even if soft matter is not your discipline and you know little about the field – or indeed French academic life. The book makes a good job of making de Gennes’ science intelligible to the non-expert and puts the French system into context. Tom McLeish’s book review was entitled ‘Soft Matter’s charismatic pioneer’. Whether that was Tom’s heading or a sub-editor’s, I think it accurately describes de Gennes. He was charismatic, because he was full of energy, charm and enthusiasm. When talking to you in his fluent English, you felt that he was simply focussing all his attention on you, on what you were saying in the moment, even if other matters of great importance must also have been lurking in his mind. I was undoubtedly charmed and warmed by him. Not a hero, but certainly a charismatic inspiration. I feel the book made him come to life for me, reminding me of many of his obvious attributes and fleshing out those parts of his character of which I had little inkling.

 

 

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