Life as a Physicist

Well… I used to think it Washington was the worst. It still is, but California is doing is best to take the crown. I’m talking about the budget of course.

Washington state legislature cut support for University of Washington 26%. That would have been the end of UW as I know it – and I guess the state legislature knew it too. To prevent that they allowed us to raise tuition on undergraduates by 30% over the course of two years (30%!!!). Which we will do. This is old news now – the reality came down at the end of April. Final budgets are being drawn up and they are every bit as bad as we were worried at the time. But the institution will survive.

Most states escaped such dramatic changes. I think only Nevada was going to be hurt as badly as we were. California was bad when I wrote that post – about 10%. What I didn’t realize was the 10% depended on a bunch of initiatives being passed that would raise various taxes. Apparently the complete political establishment (and a lot of people I know, including me) fooled themselves into thinking this was going to pass. Ops! I think the only budget related initiative that passed was one making sure the legislature didn’t give themselves a raise!

The upshot is going to be nasty. Berkeley’s chancellor just laid it on the line:

…the campus now facing a budget shortfall of around $145 million — "a shocking number," he said, more than twice the size of the deficit expected just six weeks ago…

…Birgeneau said all campus units will be asked to cut their budgets by an average of 20 percent over two years, instead of the 8 percent cuts expected as recently as mid-May. Staff who survive these contractions — and, the chancellor emphasized, "there will be eliminations of staff positions" — will see their paychecks shrink.

"We can all collectively expect wage reductions in the neighborhood of 8 percent," reported Birgeneau, adding that the formula could include some combination of furloughs and actual pay cuts.

Wow – 8% pay cut? That sucks. I’ve got a lot of friends in the Ca system. If only UW had some extra cash I’d say we should be off hunting there!! Too bad we will also have a multi-year hiring freeze.

To be fair, the Ca budget isn’t final yet. And it could be some of this is a warning shot at the legislature. But if it is anything like the Washington legislature, all the Ca university system will get back is a big ***ger.

I read this in an article on ars technica. First the setting:

When San Jose State University student Kyle Brady published the source code of his completed homework assignments after finishing a computer science class, his professor vigorously objected. The professor insisted that publication of the source code constituted a violation of the school’s academic integrity policy because it would enable future students to cheat. Brady stood his ground as the confrontation escalated to the school’s judicial affairs office, which sided with the student and affirmed that professors at the university cannot prohibit students from posting source code.

And second, the thing that made me decide to write this post:

Cory Doctorow shared his thoughts about the issue on Thursday in a blog post on BoingBoing. Doctorow suggests that assignments are ultimately more valuable to the students when the work that they produce can have broader purpose than merely fulfilling academic requirements. He also rightly points out that peer review of source code and studying existing implementations are both common practices in the real world of professional software development.

These are both compelling points and they illustrate how traditional academic sensibilities can be detrimental to the intellectual development of students.

Give me a break. This has nothing to do with any high end ideals. It has to do with work. In lower division courses there are only so many types of homework problems you can write without making something really complex, and in upper division courses creating a good problem that is hard, solvable, and interesting takes an immense amount of time. The professor of the course just wants to be able to re-use the homework problems – and cut/pasting the answer from the web is something he/she wants to make as hard as possible.

I wrote a bunch of problems for my graduate course this last year – they took a lot of work – I spent hours on them. I’d very much like to be able to reuse them – or reuse the core of the problem. If the solutions were widely available then that means I have that much more work I need to do next year.

I think, on its own, the answer to the question about a student posting their source code is clear: they should be allowed to do it. But the issue isn’t black and white when you get right down to it – that solution is a product of both the students and the professor’s sweat. Finally, actually saying that you can’t post code is totally unenforceable in this day and age (e.g. RIAA). There is also the basic fact that a student that decides to cheat is only cheating themselves… boy, that sounds kind-a lame, doesn’t it?

I don’t have an opinion in this particular instance. But I think the overly simplistic view that is taken is a bit sensationalist. Cory Doctorow wrote a much more nuanced bit:

But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience — especially now, with universities ratcheting up their tuition fees and trying to justify an education that can put students into debt for the majority of their working lives. Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension.

I disagree. It isn’t just about convenience of the profs – it is about having a good course for the next student. It is about the professor learning what worked to teach the students this time and refining it next time – these things have to be factored in. Both the students and the professors, it seems to me, have a shared responsibility here.

Though a bit later on he seems to go off the rails (no pun intended):

I’ve always thought it was miserable that we take the supposed best and brightest in society, charge them up to $60,000 a year in fees, then put them to work for four years on producing busywork that no one — not them, not their profs, not other scholars — actually wants to read.

Well, gee. When you start learning something you have to start with the basics. You can’t start with Quantum physics – you need to understand a bit about mechanics, E&M, and other things – after all, quantum had better devolve to those in the macroscopic world! You can start out students on cutting edge research – we all do it when we take on undergraduate researchers – but they have to learn the basics too. It is, sadly, a fact of life. If you don’t know how to start a program, how can you learn how to write cool code!?!?

BTW, if you read down, you can find a response from the student involved in this case.