The (Damaging) Power of Silence

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Athene Donald

There are many strategies for dealing with an overfull inbox, not all of which are helpful to the person who sent the email. I have weeks where I feel more or less on top of things and other weeks where too many slip through the cracks. Then I find myself, weeks later, sending an email saying ‘I do apologise for not replying sooner but….’ After that beginning I can try to find some plausible excuse along the lines of the dog ate my homework. However, these days I tend just to say ‘I’m afraid it got lost in my inbox’, which is usually the truth. Along these lines, I was amused to read a decade-old post of mine about constantly living on the edge of chaos, along with all its comments, which was complemented by the next post about the importance of knowing when to say no.

However, there is another way to deal with an overfull inbox, particularly when some of the emails are tricky or embarrassing to answer. That is to do absolutely nothing. Silence. Ignore the email, either as a deliberate strategy or in the hopes that if you don’t reply the whole problem will go away. Although I can’t say I have never used this strategy occasionally (but I hope not often), when someone does this to me in reverse, I find it intensely annoying. There was the time when I wrote to a colleague in Cambridge pointing out that the way he kept patting me on the arm through a dinner wasn’t particularly a problem for me at my advanced age, but might be regarded as totally inappropriate by a student. When no response was received, I felt strongly enough to send it again, to which I eventually received the reply ‘Athene, I got your email the first time.’ That was all. A totally inadequate response, but of course my original email had fallen into the ‘tricky or embarrassing to answer’ category. At least I felt I’d tried, not been complicit in letting bad behaviour go unremarked.

However, there are persistent offenders who simply do not answer when a direct question is addressed to them. If a PhD student asks ‘can I have access to your equipment?’ and you choose not to reply, where does that leave the student (or indeed their supervisor, if it gets escalated to them)? If an administrator tries to convene a meeting to discuss space utilisation, and the key professorial (robber) baron doesn’t acknowledge the email, let alone confirm a possible time to meet, how can space be fairly allocated? In both these cases, there is a power imbalance implicit in the situation, and a senior professor can get a long way by ignoring emails they would prefer not to answer. It is a very difficult situation to resolve, particular when someone is a long-term offender who hogs equipment, space etc but is never prepared to engage in a dialogue. Sadly, I have seen this situation (appropriately modified to any particular departmental situation) more times than I care to recall.

It is, of course, a form of bullying. Bullying by default. In my experience this passive sort of bullying is just as damaging to the local culture as anything else. If someone lower in the food chain tries similar behaviour, there tends to be recourse. If a PhD student silently but implicitly refuses to let another student use equipment, in principle (although in my experience most reluctantly) escalation through their supervisor may resolve the issue. It may not, however, lead to any sort of sanction being applied to the student in question, who then learns they can get away with being obstructive. They may anyhow have learnt this bad behavioural trait from their supervisor.  There is no doubt that students learn ‘acceptable’ behaviour from those around them; badly behaved supervisors can perpetuate a pattern of poor behaviour indefinitely.

To me, silence in these sorts of situation, including email, is a form of passive-aggressive behaviour that can be hugely damaging to an individual and a community. The one-off ‘oops’ moment, the email that slipped through the net inadvertently, the one put off and off because a reply is tricky until ultimately it vanishes from consciousness, that’s one type of failure. (Sadly, I would guess most of us have sometimes fallen into that trap; most certainly I have and usually with deep embarrassment when I realise this has occurred.) But, the repeat offender who thinks this is a good way to get on in the world is destructive to those around them, even if sadly it appears to be a constructive way to get on for the guilty party. It is , however, just one of the multitude of ways that enables a toxic culture to be built up, and one that is extremely difficult to unpick.

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What (and How) Should We Teach our Children?

Posted on February 23, 2024 by Athene Donald

In the world of social media and ChatGPT, a post-Covid world and a world where climate change and war put everything and everyone under new strains and worse, what should our students – at school or university – be taught and (not necessarily quite the same thing) learn? Two recent papers raise these issues, with a looking-to-the-future slant.

“In the past 14 years of Conservative government, the focus of the education system has been on the narrow task of getting children through exams, with little thought as to whether it will adequately prepare children to navigate this transformed world.”…. Half (50%) of Britons think that schools are not preparing students for the world of work. 50% think that schools are failing to prepare children for life in general.”

So says a Labour Together newsletter reporting on a recent polling of parents carried out in December, designed to go along with their new report Broad and Bold: Building a Modern Curriculum. The argument of this report comes firmly down on the side of “learning a broader range of knowledge and skills in different contexts is a better bet for the future. More, in this case, does indeed mean more. Breadth matters…”.

This is very much the line the Royal Society has been taking for a number of years, with its push for a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’. This philosophy, if not this phrase, certainly dates back to their Vision for Science and Mathematics Education project report from 2014 (a report I was associated with), when the overarching vision was described as ‘All young people study mathematics and science up to the age of 18’. The Government has indeed recently made a push for everyone to study maths to 18 although, as has been frequently pointed out, there aren’t the teachers to provide this. However, their concept of the Advanced British Standard, currently out for consultation, doesn’t really amount to significant broadening of education post-16, nor does it address anything that happens before that age. It really isn’t possible to introduce a meaningful post-16 baccalaureate style education without thinking about a child’s learning and progression throughout their school days from first entry. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda. For any Government, let alone one shortly to face a General Election, rethinking the entire education system is a big ask.

Simon Margison, in his lecture this month to the Centre for Global Education, highlighted a different problem within our education, specifically higher education, saying:

“education focused solely on productivity and employability, now dominates policy and public debate in many countries concerned about graduate under-employment…governments more confidently press for the remaking of higher education by pushing the sphere of work back into education and measuring education in vocational economic terms, installing extrinsic job preparation inside the intrinsic core of higher education….The bottom line is that neo-liberal policy does not see higher education as personal formation in knowledge as optimal for productivity and growth.”

So, we face a problem both at school and university, a tension between knowledge and skills, which the appearance of AI on the map, hallucinating or not, brings into sharp focus. Do we teach deep disciplinary knowledge, the memorising and regurgitating of facts in exams that have been standard for decades? Do we assume that is unnecessary because Google and ChatGPT have all the answers and simply teach life-skills such as team working and project management? Clearly that would be unwise. I am reminded of an exchange I had with Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education at the time, regarding careers advice at school, in which he told me that ‘any self-respecting 16 year old can find all they need to know on the web.’ I would have liked to dispute that then (but was swiftly shut up) and I would still dispute it now: the web is great if you know exactly what question to ask and can spot ‘fake news’ when it provides garbage. Otherwise, human intervention – about careers or so much else – is really necessary.

However, it is undoubtedly the case that we need to think harder about the content of our curricula, at school and university, to rebalance how we teach fact versus understanding, all coupled with a good dose of life-skills. Sadly, this debate is too often mired in political dogma as well as the genuinely massive challenge that a rethink would bring. England is a real outlier in terms of the breadth (or more accurately, narrowness) of its post-16 curriculum. The changes to Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence were intended to provide breadth (the Scottish system was anyhow broader than England’s) and, according to the Scottish Government at the time of introduction, ‘provide a holistic, competency-based curriculum for those aged 3-18 years aims to prepare children and young people for the workplace and citizenship in the 21st Century’. Instead, it seems to have led to a decline in standards and a narrowing not broadening of subject-study at the later years. According to a 2023 Nuffield Foundation report there is

“Significant evidence of the existence of a culture of performativity in many schools, encouraging the instrumental selection of content and/or organisation of curriculum provision to maximise attainment in the Senior Phase.”

English politicians can point to this as demonstrating the unwisdom of changing the ‘Gold Standard’ A-level system.

Nevertheless, perverse incentives imposed by any government, as in English league tables of schools, constant harping on about ‘mickey-mouse’ degrees and using salary post-degree as a measure of success, may all be defeating the purpose of educating, as opposed to training, students at both school and university. I have no confidence we are providing the education our future citizens need in science – or languages or even literacy and numeracy – to face the 21st century, but feel the debate is hardly started. It is to be hoped the next Government will take on this challenge. Starting with early years, as Bridget Philipson has made clear would be her own priority if she becomes the next Secretary of State for Education, is no bad thing. If children (many still badly affected by the pandemic) don’t learn the basics at primary school, it is all but impossible for them to thrive thereafter. The more so if they come from a less-than-privileged background. There is a lot of work to be done.

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Hunstanton Sand

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Athene Donald

I’ve just started reading a book called The Spirit of Enquiry by Susannah Gibson, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, an interesting society of which I was once a committee member (as well as a prize-winner). I am struck by the fact that the building where my GP’s surgery now hangs out, was actually purpose-built for the Society, something I had not appreciated before. The room where I’ve sat around waiting for Covid vaccinations was once their Reading Room, at a time when that was quite a novel concept (the College Libraries were only available to current members, and not MA’s still resident in the city, for instance). Having found this a fascinating book, written by someone attached to this University’s History and Philosophy of Science Department, I am pleased to have been invited to the book launch of Gibson’s next book. Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement is due out at the end of this month.

The Spirit of Enquiry starts off describing what motivated Victorian natural philosophers in Cambridge, led by Adam Sedgwick and John Henslow, to feel such a society was necessary. The latter was a botanist. Indeed, he was Professor of Botany although, late in life, apparently a very delinquent one. The former was Professor of Geology, and spent time walking the cliffs at Hunstanton examining the strata. These are fine cliffs, tending to erosion like so much of the East coast, cliffs I have visited just for the pleasure of visiting the seaside, but also (in my much earlier life) for ornithological ventures in the cold of winter. My most recent interactions with Hunstanton’s beaches are, however, more closely allied to my Physics: Hunstanton sand.

The last lecture course I taught before I retired from the Physics Department was the first year Waves and Quantum Waves. It was an unsatisfactory course in many ways, as I was required to include a great deal of classical optics (stuff such as the Lensmaker’s equation, for instance), when the students wanted to be let loose on the quantum material, which consequently got very squeezed. The syllabus was not of my making. However, in an earlier incarnation of this course, when the classical waves part was taught at a more advanced level (and without the optics material) and there was more time to think deeply about implications of some of the topics, I had a lecture demonstration I loved involving Hunstanton sand. And I know it was Hunstanton sand because it came in the sort of shaker good cooks use to spread flour on the worktop to stop pastry sticking, to which an ancient luggage label was attached reading ‘Hunstanton sand’. Although I doubt this went back to Sedgwick’s time, indeed the Cavendish Laboratory only opened in 1874, it certainly gave the impression of being very venerable. It came along with a heavy brass plate about 30cm wide (probably in reality it was a foot square), an example of a Chladni’s plate.

If you look on the web for what the point of a Chladni’s plate is, you will find all kinds of neat videos demonstrating how it can be used to show a pattern of standing wave nodes by plugging a sand-covered plate into a frequency generator: at appropriate frequencies, when the wavelength is some suitable fraction of the length of the side of the plate, standing waves are set up. It is indeed a beautiful way of revealing complex patterns, building on the mathematics of standing waves in two dimensions (which is what I was teaching). But the demonstration I gave was more arresting and memorable, I think, even if also more risky. With a device to generate a wide range of frequencies, it is easy to dial up the exact frequency you know will give the desired pattern. No risk there at all. But perhaps students remember things that don’t go according to plan rather more than something they can find easily on YouTube. That was at least my motivation in doing things the hard way.

The third item of this ancient lecture demonstration consisted of a bow. It was an utterly appalling bow, if you were a string player, with no tension in the hair remaining after all these years, and no way of increasing it except by manually holding it taut. I suspect it once had been a double bass bow as it was quite short. (As an ex-viola player, upon occasion I took in my own bow to make life easier, given that mine was in rather better shape.) Instead of electrically generating different frequencies to set up the standing waves, the original demonstration design relied on ‘playing’ the plate with the bow.

There were some marks scribed on the plate to indicate where the bow should be placed to get the appropriate resonance, but they were pretty approximate. Consequently, in my experience, it was necessary to move the location of the bow back and forth a little to find the place where the plate ‘sang’ – which it would most pleasingly when I got it right. A beautiful harmonic would be forthcoming, echoing round the lecture theatre (large: I used to lecture to well over one hundred students). More than once I got a spontaneous round of applause when this happened. Every year (at least five I think) bar one, I managed to find the sweet spot. Sometimes, I even risked finding a higher harmonic to show how the sand bounced around until it found the new pattern of nodal lines. It was immensely satisfying – apart from that one year when, try as I might, I never quite got it and the standing wave pattern on the plate was blurred, the true note transformed into a messy noise.

All in all, it was far more satisfactory, for me and, I hope, for the students, than simply playing a video of someone else’s experiment uploaded onto YouTube. Every year, at the end of the lecture, I would try to return my Hunstanton sand to the flour shaker. This was a messy enterprise, but I felt the sanctity of this particular ancient sand in its luggage-labelled container. Who knows who’d made the trip out to Hunstanton to collect it? After the end of the lecture, the kit would be replaced in some wooden cabinet in the Cavendish Museum. I wonder if any of this will survive the move to  the third incarnation of the Cavendish in the soon-to-be-finished (but who knows quite when, building work being what it is) Ray Dolby Centre, otherwise known as Cavendish III. I lectured in the so-called New Cavendish, its second home; the equipment no doubt was first used in the original Cavendish on Free School Lane (a brief history can be found here).

My days of undergraduate lecturing are over. I’m sure, just as I participated in the translation of delivery style from blackboard and chalk, to writing on an overhead projector, to prepared overheads, to powerpoint which may, for all I know, be superseded by a further electronic transformation, I fear too many demonstrations will be called up from the web. I loved my old-fashioned experiment, even as I also used more modern approaches too. The latter is certainly more likely to be fail-safe. So, happy memories of Hunstanton sand.

 

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Transferable Skills and Career Paths

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Athene Donald

I am honoured to have been invited to give the Gareth Roberts Lecture in Durham next month (in the Physics Department), following a long line of distinguished speakers. To be honest, I did not know that he had been associated with Durham because, by the time I was aware of all he was doing in the Higher Education space, Roberts was Vice Chancellor at Sheffield. I think I only came across him in person a couple of times, once at a lecture in Sheffield, once when he was reviewing the Research Assessment Exercise (REF’s predecessor) after the 2001 exercise, although why I was personally presenting evidence to that review I can no longer recall. However, for many – postgraduate students in particular – it is the 2001 review known as SET for Success that is probably most pertinent, even to this day.

Sir Gareth was an example of someone who had moved between academia and industry (and back again) with great success, picking up an FRS, a knighthood and many other accolades along the way. He demonstrates that ‘porosity’ between sectors is possible, something that soon-to-be-retiring CEO of UKRI Ottoline Leyser has often talked about. In the current system, it may still be possible, but it certainly isn’t particularly easy. There are some schemes designed to facilitate the exchange of personnel and ideas between industry and academia, with the Royal Society (for instance) running both Industry Fellowships and Entrepreneurs in Residence schemes. However, particularly in the pure sciences – less so in engineering and computing – such mobility between sectors is neither easy nor common.

Roberts recognized in his report that lack of mobility was a drawback for the health of the system (and the economy), but also that postgraduates’ education was often falling short on a variety of points. I would highlight the following, which I feel sure will still resonate today with many students and staff.

  • low stipends, when seen against the option of entering employment and reducing the substantial debt that many students will have built up during their first degree;
  • concern from students that they are likely to take more than three years to complete their PhD, while generally, funding is only available for three years; and
  • inadequate training – particularly in the more transferable skills – available during the PhD programme. As a consequence, many employers do not initially pay those with PhDs any more than they would a new graduate, viewing the training (particularly in transferable skills) that PhD students receive as inadequate preparation for careers in business R&D.

Issues about money most certainly won’t have changed for the better, and the duration of a PhD has only increased, although at least there is some recognition of that fact in the length of time for which many funders provide a stipend. The last bullet point I’ve pulled out is the one I’ll be considering at more length in my lecture: what beyond their lab/computational/analytical skills training (according to what is directly relevant to their thesis) do students get exposed to and what additionally might they need in their future careers, wherever they end up? What options are there if someone wants to get involved with activities that may not be completely aligned with their thesis research, both now and once their PhD is completed?

Following the SET for Success Review, a new pot of money was established, colloquially known as Roberts’ money. It was supplied to universities to enable them to provide a new sort of training in transferable skills. In Cambridge additionally, I know some of this money went to creating posts in the Careers Service for advisers specifically to help the PhD population, with separate posts created for the physical and life sciences so that there was a fair degree of specialisation in those who held the posts. Whatever a PhD supervisor may think and even, all too frequently, say, there is a world beyond academia where scientific training is crucial. Even a world beyond industry. With an aspiration that the Civil Service reach 50% of its Fast Streamers from the STEM disciplines (a number apparently already exceeded in its 2023 hires, though it will take a long time for those sorts of numbers to permeate the entire system), there is one route to a career outside the obvious.

There is no doubt, more members of the Civil Service who are numerate and confident about handling data would be likely to benefit us all, when you think about the decisions that need to be made on a daily basis.  Policy-makers who had the confidence to use data to inform decisions and not, as I fear may happen and as one former politician and Civil Service employee once told me, expecting policy-makers to search for data to back up an already-decided policy. That’s just one example of a career outside academia. There are plenty of other jobs in a wide range of sectors that neither a supervisor nor a student may immediately think about as the student reaches the end of their PhD (patent law, journalism, the creative industries, thinktanks…..to name but a few).

There are many skills the modern PhD student needs to master, which fall into the transferable skills bucket: management (of projects, people and resources) is a key one that one hopes at least postdocs and freshly independent researchers are being exposed to, but probably not students. I am struck by the breadth of training the Royal Society now offers its research fellows, such as the course  in ‘Innovation and the Business of Science’, but also in handling the media, public engagement and communicating your research more generally. Relevant to what I said about the Civil Service, there is additionally a science policy primer, to help researchers understand the nature and process of policy-making. All good stuff that it seems likely Roberts would have approved of.

As I write my talk for Durham, I will have these different aspects in mind, linking Roberts, the relevant recommendations from SET for Success and my own wandering career trajectory and personal experiences.

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New Year, New You

Posted on January 14, 2024 by Athene Donald

We all know New Year’s resolutions tend to last no longer than the first week or two, but it does no harm to reflect at this time of year what might improve body and soul as well as output and all the other drivers of an academic’s life. I am conscious, as full-time (formal) retirement beckons at the end of this academic year when I step down as Master of Churchill College, that I need to be sure I stay fit and active. One of the consequences of the pandemic from my perspective, is the loss of casual exercise in the form of cycling between meetings. Far fewer meetings, held outside the College but within the University, at least of the ones I still attend, are now held in person. This means the need for me to cycle in and out of the city centre once or twice a day is much lessened. Likewise, many of the meetings I used to attend in person in London are now hybrid, if not totally via Zoom/Teams and so I cycle across Cambridge to the railway station comparatively rarely. I never used to think anything about my cycling habits, but reflection tells me I no longer get anything like as much casual but necessary cycling exercise as I used to. This cannot be good for me. In the summer, an evening walk simply for the sake of it may be pleasant; much less so when evenings are dark, cold and – of late – so often simply wet and uninviting.

So, I need to take much more care to exercise deliberately in some shape or form or I will find, when I finally have time on my hands, I don’t have the energy or strength to get out and about. Later life is tedious in this respect (and anyone can check on Wikipedia how many years I have now accumulated in my life), as things one took for granted no longer seem quite so straightforward. One of these days I shall squat down to lock my bicycle to the rack at ground level and find I need the help of a passing stranger to get me back on my feet, which would be embarrassing. So, exercises to ensure my leg muscles are as strong as possible are part of my new year’s resolutions, and something I hope I will have the motivation to keep up with.

However, more generally, I think I just have to concentrate on getting away from the screen. One good thing about going to London is that it provides an excuse not only to cycle to the station, but also – time permitting – to walk across London. Typically, my meetings are at the Royal Society, so that facilitates a good 45-50 minute walk from Kings Cross, healthy if one ignores the pollution levels on most of the streets I need to go along. It must be better than being squeezed into an underground train, particularly with the high levels of respiratory infections present currently, Covid, ‘flu and more (and yes, I do still wear a mask on the tube, and have been shouted at for so doing). However, there is no doubt that on some of the recent days, attempting to do this walk would only mean I ended up looking drowned and less professional than I might like upon arrival.

I attended a London meeting this week at which one of the attendees, slim and accused always of eating, admitted he walked ten miles a day. That is an aspiration few of us probably have in mind, but it clearly worked for him. Most of us in academia are probably fixedly starting at a screen, or a test-tube or an equation for far too much of our days, and equally too much for our well-being. It is hard to make sufficient allowance for our health. Personally, I am no believer in gyms, because I prefer to exercise in private. Back in the days when I would run/jog regularly, before my Achilles tendon forced me to give up, I never chose company for my runs. The pleasure – particularly back when I was a postdoc in Ithaca and the scenery was delightful even if the climate less so – came from being able to watch the changing seasons and just take it all in.

The pandemic meant every local walk was walked to excess. The opening up of the new site at Eddington (North West Cambridge, as it was initially and unimaginatively known) during my tenure at the College did provide new routes, some of which are pleasantly, if only relatively, ‘rural’, offering rabbits, foxes, kestrels etc to admire from time to time. By now, however, I’ve been that way far too often. Just as moving into the College in 2014 gave me a new viewpoint and routes, with the prospect of returning to my own house in the autumn I will have different opportunities, including along the Cam, for a gentle afternoon’s walk, even if they’re the same ones that used to be so familiar. If I can keep up my New Year’s resolutions, maybe I’ll even be up for longer walks and I should certainly have more time in which to undertake them.

It is a strange feeling to be considering full retirement, not something I’m looking forward to. Everyone assures me that ‘something will turn up’, Micawber style, to keep me busy, but equally I am told forcefully not to take the first thing that comes along. In a year’s time, who knows what I’ll be doing or where my centre of gravity will be, but I hope I will still be working hard at not letting old age overtake me and my muscles.

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