By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social
In the 1940s, American mathematicians faced that question. (Enough said “yes” to create the atomic bomb. These can be hard questions, with overwhelming consequences.) Post-9/11/2001, I (as a freshly naturalized American) found myself pondering the same question. Now, as a retiree, my younger American colleagues are likely going to face that question once again.
Forty years ago, in early 1986, the Vice-Chancellor (President) of my university in the UK told me, in no uncertain terms, that I should seek employment elsewhere. My university tenure, he informed me, would not prevent this. He wanted half of the 34 faculty of the mathematics department to leave in a two-year period in order to meet massive cuts mandated by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government. When right-wing governments look at education, they tend to see it as a collection of business, where a major goal is to maximize output and minimize costs. Since there is no “revenue”, the system appears to be inefficient and over staffed.
[Stay with me. I will get to the question in the title. This initial excursion is relevant.]
I had several conversations with a running friend of mine who was the local manager of an international sporting goods manufacturer, and he constantly remarked that my university was overstaffed. The notion that education is a government-provided service to society seemed to elude him completely. He saw the world through a profit-and-loss lens. The students were empty bottles in a dairy production line, and the role of people like me was to fill them up with “education” as quickly and cheaply as possible.
His perception was backed up by his memory of his own education. He really did think his time had been spent absorbing information. I would tell him that feeding “stuff” into students was not how I viewed my job, rather my role was to stimulate and help the students to learn—i.e., the key work had to be done by them—but I don’t think I ever made much of a dent. I never even tried to explain the nature of the research that was, according to my university employment contract, one-third of my daily activities. We remained great friends over many years (until his favorite prime minister effectively kicked me across the Atlantic), but our work-related discussions focused mostly on the running shoes he marketed.
Back to my Vice Chancellor, If I were to stay, he told me, my academic career (progressing well—two years earlier I had been promoted to the prestigious research position of Reader) would be significantly hobbled. He knew that with my academic profile, I would be able to find a position elsewhere. The cuts would be made at the top, where the targets had options. The same process was taking place at a number of other universities, namely the newer universities that had developed a reputation for “radicalism”.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (in particular, though Denmark did pretty well too) were about to mine a scholastic goldmine of talent. One year later, I was heading to Stanford. In career terms, I never looked back. The Vice Chancellor hit his target. My department shrank by 50 percent. Essentially, the most productive faculty all left.
Forty years on, and I once again find myself as an educator at a time of government cuts. Though this time, the nation that took me in when the UK said “Go”, is doing all it can to dismantle not universities, which are largely outside federal control (apart from the government being a major funding source), but K-12 education, something the UK never tried. For just one of a flood of recent news articles on this, see this one from EdWeek.
The one difference for me, is that I am now eight years into retirement from the world of institutional education. So I am watching from the sidelines. There are certainly aspects that remind me of the Thatcher era in the UK. But here there’s a whole different dynamic at play: the governing party – which won a close but decisive clean sweep in the last election – exhibits a visceral contempt for, not just education, but science and healthcare as well. Roughly half of Americans have those views – or at least did so at the time of the last election.
I tried to make some sense of this in my post last May, which referenced the late Bob Moses. A year on, and I am even more convinced that the driving force must be, as Moses pointed out, a cultural divide that goes back to the Civil War. Culture is a hard nut to crack.
I, for one, cannot describe the factors that contribute to a good systemic education that will benefit society, without including words like “diversity”, “equality”, and “inclusive” in my list of goals. Nor can I make sense of objections to key parts of science education, or opposition to the use of proven life-saving medications, including vaccines. Yet a majority of our elected representatives are opposed to them all (or are at least sufficiently agnostic that they go along with their colleagues).
We will face a major challenge if/when a different federal government takes control and seeks to rebuild what has been destroyed. It’s going to take a long time. Our position as a vanguard nation that attracts the best people from around the world will surely take a generation (at least) to re-establish.
Meanwhile, we face a worrying national security problem, with strikingly incompetent leadership having reduced it to a shambles. Part of the solution here will have to involve members of the mathematical community. This is something I have first-hand experience with.
Back in 2001, just a year after I became a US Citizen, the September 11 “Twin Towers” terrorist attack occurred in New York and D.C. The US rapidly initiated a massively-funded research initiative to improve intelligence analysis. I was one of several mathematicians who were invited to join one of a number of multi-year research projects run by defense contractors. The project I was on was funded by the NSA. When that was over, I joined another project for the US Navy, and after that a much shorter, pilot project for the US Army.
I never had security clearance; my work was theoretical and did not require access to active data. But people I worked with had many years' experience in the Intel community, and over time I gained some familiarity with the nature of that world and the people in it. Enough to be shocked at the people currently running those shows. (I chose the word “shows” deliberately.)
This will be the third time in my lifetime that the US has scrambled to make progress fast. The first, stretching from the Manhattan Project to the early days of the Cold War, gave rise to the National Science Foundation and the provision of large sums of cash to develop the mathematics and technologies required to “fight” that war. The second was the post-9/11 initiative I just alluded to. The third will have to focus on the next conflict we will have to come to grips with. That needs to start as soon as possible; for all our sakes.
The situation was nicely summarized by former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, in a recent essay on Substack. The potential conflict he described is awash with the need for the involvement of mathematicians; just as with those two previous national initiatives I mentioned.
If you’re like me, you’d prefer to just “do your math” and stay clear of warfare applications. It’s tempting to say to ourselves that we simply “do our math”; what others do with it is not our concern. But from the moment we go into mathematics, we are engaging in an activity that develops weapons and the systems to utilize them. If our line-in-the-sand is to stay out of the business of developing weapons, we have to stay away from math. Period.
Since the time of Archimedes, mathematics has been a major player in the defense industry. (The math the NSA wanted from me was developed initially as “pure mathematics”—see my book Logic and Information, first published in 2000, then applied to the commercial world (I collaborated with a sociolinguist on that phase), and then, post 9/11 with a former DARPA guy and a university narrative expert in work that is deeply embedded in issues of defense intelligence and modern warfare.
Of course, we each have to decide how to respond when the call comes. But one of the questions I grappled with back in 2001 was this: Saying “no” is not neutral. The work I had done that was thought to have been potentially useful, was going to be used one way or another. Having just become a citizen of the nation that had rescued my career after my home country cast me aside, I felt I owed it whatever contribution I could make. The goal was, after all, can we make a second 9/11 less likely? [For my subsequent Navy and Army projects, the goal was, at heart, “How can we best use the masses of intel we get, to minimize loss of life (our troops and civilians) when fighting terrorists?]
For me, getting involved meant there was a (tiny) chance I could do something that makes a positive difference. Not getting involved would simply tip the scales (an equally tiny amount) in favor of the terrorists. The point is, if we go into mathematics, we are in the business of developing something that can be, and frequently is, weaponized. As Kinzinger’s essay makes clear, as a nation we are about to face that issue again.
To end on a potentially positive note, one good thing that came from my DoD research was the key set of ideas behind my educational technology startup, BrainQuake, which I alluded to in last month’s essay. If there is a change in government, resulting in the restoration of research funding programs that enable us to do a rigorous efficacy study, we can maybe start to market it, and potentially make a real difference. Defense-related projects frequently have a wide range of benefits to society.