Author: Matthew

philosopher, iconoclast, technoboy, musician, conjuration battle-mage, dean

What is the Liberal Arts Gateway?

Now that LA Gateway-designated courses are appearing in the course schedule, people are asking: What is the LA Gateway? Here’s the philosophical framework, distilled.

The Liberal Arts Gateway

Aspiration

The Liberal Arts can save civilization by equipping students to thrive in a pluralistic society through deep engagement in our disciplines.

Guiding Values

  • Student centered course designs
  • Equity and inclusion build into all facets of the course, from recruitment to materials and assignments and beyond
  • Responsiveness to downpath stakeholders: What needs will our students face in next course, the degree plan, transfer institution/employer, career, family, community, and ultimately, The Good Life? Have those needs in mind when you build your course.


Five P’s of Intellectual Character 

Build opportunities to practice these verbs into your course, talk about them explicitly, and model them every class period.

  • Persevere: Don’t give up — in this assignment, in this course, in a conversation, in a line of inquiry, in the pursuit of truth, or in the work of saving civilization.
  • Progress: Learn how to gauge progress for yourself — benchmarks, indicators, self-reflection, honesty (with yourself, above all). We stand on the shoulders of giants, but give yourself credit for climbing up there to have a look.
  • Produce meaningful intellectual work — and challenge yourself to do better work every next time.
  • Promote the fruits of your work to others — both as a courageous attempt to say something true and as an invitation to hear others critique your work.
  • Perpetuate these traits, deepen them into habits of mind, and expand them to encompass more and more of your intellectual life.

A few course design suggestions

  • Talk to your colleagues! This philosophical framework keeps us focused on student needs and the student experience, but saving civilization requires encountering the disciplinarity of our disciplines.
  • Organize your course around a theme and meaningful questions
  • Explicitly talk about a toolkit for your discipline
  • Use (real) case studies
  • Include at least one self-reflective assignment (a moment for students to step back and take stock of the transformative experience in your course)

 

Three’s Company

The Apostrophe is English’s most duplicitous punctuation. Does this title mean “three is company” or the company three keeps?

I can look at just about any number and tell you, almost immediately, if it’s divisible by three. How do I do it? It’s not superior brute-force calculation. It’s a number theory trick.

Just add all the digits of the number. If the result is divisible by three, then the number you started with is, too. For instance, the forbidding number 67,392 is divisible by three, because 6 + 7 + 3 + 9 + 2 is 27, which is divisible by three. My ACC office telephone number, 512.223.2630, considered as a number, is not. (But my number without the area code is. Try it for yourself.)

Now we come to the curiosities aspect of this post: Why does this work? Or more importantly, why doesn’t it work for any other number, like 7? It’s easy to show that it doesn’t work for 7: Consider 49, or 63. Both divisible by 7, but the sum of their digits isn’t, so it doesn’t

Here’s one way to explain the magic of 3. Think about any number in base 10. It’s laid out like this: a,bcd, which means:

(a * 1000) + (b * 100) + (c * 10) + d

This is the cornerstone of the decimal system, in which “places” represent powers of 10. But you can also write the number above like this:

a * (999 + 1) + b * (99 +1) + c * (9 + 1) + d

which amounts to this:

(999a + a) + (99b + b) + (9c + c) + d

Now think about this. If 999 is divisible by 3, then 999 times a is too. Same with 99b and 9c. The sum of numbers divisible by 3 is divisible by three (Why?), so 999a + 99b + 9c is divisible by 3. What’s left of our original number? Just this:

a + b + c + d

So if this sum is divisible by 3, then the whole number we started with is divisible by 3. That worked for the number a,bcd, but with a little mathematical induction, we can make it work for every number.

And I’m actually even lazier than summing. When I’m looking for divisibility by 3, I ignore all the digits that are divisible by three, and sum the rest. Consider my phone number again: 512.223.2630: Ignore the 3’s and 6’s and add up the rest: 14. Not.

This consummate laziness is brought to us by number theory: The sum of numbers divisible by 3 is also divisible by 3, so we actually don’t need to know exactly what that sum is to know whether it’s divisible by 3. But I don’t like to think of this as laziness. I call it the Principle of Least Effort, and accomplishing things with the least effort was Nature’s intent when she gave us this big brain.

All of which is to say that any number is divisible by 3 if and only if the sum of its digits is divisible by 3. QED.

While we’re here, what does QED mean? We use it to indicate that a proof or argument ended successfully. It’s an acronym based on the Latin phrase, quod erat demonstrandum, which means “what was to be demonstrated.” This phrase caught on just at the end of the Renaissance and was popularized by people like Galileo and Spinoza.

But this all started with Greek mathematicians and philosophers like Euclid and Archimedes, who were studied by people who wrote in Latin a lot. They wrote the Greek phrase ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι at the end of a chain of reasoning. There’s a slight difference in meaning, though, because a reasonable (but stilted) translation of the Greek phrase is “the thing it was needed to prove.”

QED. Or if you prefer, ΟΕΔ.

Birthday greetings

Today is January 8, my birthday. While it’s customary to receive birthday greetings, this year I’m sending you a greeting. Indulge me.

Those of you who know that I’m a closet number theorist won’t be surprised at the observation that the number 108, the month and day of my birth, is the product of the first two primes each raised to the power of itself:

108 = 2^2*3^3

The fact that the fifth-grade me was enchanted by this discovery should tell you something about me. I’m still enchanted by the secret lives of numbers, by the way.

A birthday can be a moment of reflection, a sort of “state of life” self-assessment. I’m not one to waste heartbeats on regrets — there’s far too much to be done! — but I don’t mind investing a few heartbeats in gratitude.

I’m grateful for the many, many people who have made my life richer by sharing their excellences with me, and I’m grateful for all the people I don’t know who nevertheless enrich our lives through their work and inspiration and dreams. And failures. In my best moments, I cherish failure as a trusted friend — the kind who loves you enough not to lie.

I’m especially grateful for all the people who disagreed with me in matters large and small. I’ve grown far more with you in my life than I would have without you. You encouraged me to take a larger view and helped me see the smallness in my own perspective. Idolatry isn’t pretty, no matter where you find it (or how comfortable it may seem).

Nature distributes her gifts unevenly, and I am grateful for the gift of a temperament that is too naive to be afraid to try new things. As an early teen, Heinlein introduced me to Lazarus Long, who taught me that specialization is for insects — a sentiment that would make me an appropriate epitaph. Lazarus also taught me that one lifetime is not nearly enough. Later, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would teach me that if one lifetime is enough, then there’s no one to blame but myself.

I’m grateful for the privilege of serving ACC as a philosopher, trouble-maker, department chair, dean of humanities and communications, and defender of the liberal arts. I’m grateful for the meandering path that led me to this point — even when I felt lost, and especially when I was lost. I feel a little like Odysseus — but not nearly as sad about being far from home.

Collaborate and Celebrate

Today is a day to celebrate for our Communication Studies department! As a result of efforts to integrate SPCH1315 with workforce program requirements, we have a “combined” course so students can take either SPCH1315 or COMG1009.

Even better, we just registered our very first workforce student!

This is a great example of the way we can serve student pathways when we think outside the academic box.

Thanks to Theresa and the CommS gang!

LAHC Convocation 2019: The Liberal Arts Gateway

or

How to save civilization

A title like this prompts us to consider the end of civilization. I recently had a professor tell me that if his section were canceled, it would be the coming of the End of Civilization. My response was that I’d like to offer the section again in the 12-week session, thereby postponing the End of Civilization by a few weeks.

That’s not the End I have in mind.

Rather, I want to talk about the end of civilization in that other sense: end as telos, as in teleology. As in, What is civilization for?

Continue reading “LAHC Convocation 2019: The Liberal Arts Gateway”

Leaving Innsbruck

I first heard Heinrich Isaak’s choral piece, Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen, in a Renaissance music history course as an undergrad at Southwestern University. The piece (with the tune in the tenor voice) made me cry. I seem to recall telling my classmates that it was the saddest melody ever written.

Walking to Innsbruck Altstadt

Isaak lived from 1450 to 1517, which is roughly from Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press to Luther’s 95 Theses. Not too much is known about Isaak’s life, but we do have at least some of his music, and we have scattered references to his career, here and there. Isaak was so prolific, and so popular and influential in German-speaking lands, that a later writer even called him “Henricus Isaak Germanus.”

Continue reading “Leaving Innsbruck”

A philosopher’s path

What do you tell yourself?

This past academic year, I faced a personal challenge, and in view of this challenge, a friend and colleague asked me a very interesting question: What do you tell yourself about all this? Walking the centuries-old Philosophenweg up the Heiligenberg in Heidelberg, I found myself thinking about this question again.

The Philosopher’s Walk, which you can’t actually see, across the Neckar, Heidelberg
Continue reading “A philosopher’s path”

Education in the Shadows

If you teach at a community college, please take a moment to read this open letter to a composition teacher by Elaine Maimon, president of Governors State University.

Now let’s talk. This past Monday, I taught Plato’s Republic VII for the Free Minds Program. If you aren’t familiar with it, VII is where Plato gives us one of the most famous moments in all of Western philosophy, the Allegory of the Cave. As expected, I helped my students navigate technical issues, like what the various elements in “the story” correspond to, allegory-wise. But there was a moment in that exploration in which students started to see Plato’s point: Education is not about filling an empty but otherwise receptive container, but about “turning around,” the transformation of the student. The icing on the cake, so to speak, was when I wrote the word education on the board, and broke down the etymology: both “to train or mold” and “to lead out.”

Continue reading “Education in the Shadows”

Expectations: a moral tale

When I was training as a psychotherapist, my supervisor (an M.D. psychoanalyst) told me an interesting tale: Researchers had a group of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists review histories and perform diagnostic interviews for every member of the first-year class at a famous medical school. They rendered a diagnosis, where appropriate, and noted the prognosis. Researchers followed these students for 15 or 20 years, to see how accurate the evaluations had been. The result? Guess!

The prognoses were uniformly pessimistic. The students were better adjusted than expected, both as a group (meaning, the percentage of correct diagnoses and prognoses was lower than assessed) but also individually (meaning, severity of dysfunction was generally lower). In other words, both the group and the individual people turned out better than expected, over all.

Continue reading “Expectations: a moral tale”