The n-Category Café

Given the state of things for the past years, the precedent has been established, at least that Mathematics isn’t important. I liked the approach of establishing a fund that would help insulate USQ from the administration - it seems ultimately that is what is needed. It isn’t the complete fix, but I argue such a step is part of the fix.

However, I’m not looking to cause trouble, or derail the focus from USQ and the sate of math in Australia. I’m disappointed to see this state of affairs.

All the best,
cvj

“contemplation of Justice, Beauty and the Good”? Here an exercise from a mathematical inclined ruler.

This sounds like reasons why one ought to like mathematics, in the same way that I feel I ought to like being in the countryside because it’s natural and gives one a sense of being at one with nature and so on, and yet I’ve now admitted to myself that (at least currently) I don’t really like the countryside. Given that AFAICS governments are not particularly concerned with what reputable universities provide courses in, providing they’re viable in terms of students applying and not obviously taking the liquid waste product, there’s a more direct question: what’s the most seductive/addictive facet of mathematics? This may not be the most “exciting” thing in the perspective of an older person but something students can identify with. Eg, students often choose to study psychology based on the idea of understanding the complications and mystery of human beings when the things that get academic psychologists excited are generally lower-level things.

Incidentally, there’s a comment somewhere on the site from John Baez where he says he first got interested in physics/maths as the secret of how to control the world, yet I would suspect that now he uses his maths skills to control the world quite rarely. (I can’t find it via search: all the keywords I think ought to bring it up don’t.) Indeed even experimental physicists don’t really use their knowledge to control the real-world (that’s engineers), but it’s a very understandable motivation for getting into the subject. So it needs to be borne in mind that the reasons that lead people into maths aren’t necessarily the ones that keep them there.

This is one of the reasons instruction of the young is relatively easy to justify (even though many are obviously dissatisfied with the availability of it). The difficulty is with someone like me, who has already proven himself not to be Grothendieck or Gauss!

Dear Minhyong and others,

In discussing the USQ situation, it is important to remember the following realities regarding mathematics and statistics, and university eduation more generally, in Australia:

There is a shortage of mathematically trained professionals, and an extreme shortage of statistically trained professionals. (These shortages are documented in some of the materials linked to from Terry Tao’s blog. The various reports/task forces etc. documenting them included representatives from Australian industry, not just academia. In the online petition, one can similarly find such comments from people involved in Australian industry.)

These shortages are having a substantial affect on those (many) aspects of Australian economic life that rely on maths and stats. There is also a resulting severe shortage of competently trained maths teachers. (Somewhat comparable to the situation in the US, is my impression.)

Essentially all tertiary education in Australia is funded by the Federal government. Through this funding, the government can set priorities in education, for example. Recently, the government (in fact, both the previous conservative government and the recently elected labor government) have increased funding for maths and stats in Universities, in recognition of the grave shortages mentioned above. However, because of the details of the funding process (the money is paid to universities based on the number of students they have enrolled in various subjects), this money goes to University administrations as a lump-sum – it is up to the administration to decide where to actually allocate it. (If one reads Terry Tao’s editorial, and other material on his web-site, one will find that in the case of USQ, mathematics seems to be attracting more than its fair share of funding; the administration simply wants to spend that money elsewhere.)

Unlike the US, Australia does not have a tradition of people travelling away for university education. Essentially all students attend a local university. Thus, when a regional university like USQ cuts its maths/stats/physics/chem majors, this effectively prevents the majority of students in the region from studying these majors.

In addition to a general teacher shortage, it is always more difficult to recruit teachers to isolated rural areas, such as that serviced by USQ. The most natural source of teachers in such areas are locals who choose teaching as a career. Thus if USQ carries out its planned cuts, it will kill one of the major sources of well-trained math/science teachers in the region it serves.

In light of all this, I hope that you can appreciate why the USQ decision is causing such outrage among those of us with connections to Australia. They are working *against* a bipartisanly agreed-upon plan to shore up maths/stats training in light of a nationwide severe shortage, and in particular, their plan will greatly exacerbate the local aspects of this shortage in the areas of rural Queensland that they service.

While the USQ administrators have lamented that they do not have enough adequately trained students entering to justify trying to teach them maths/stats, their decision will only strengthen the negative feedback loop that has lead to this situation, by making it a certainty that there will be a lack of skilled maths teachers in the area for the foreseeable future.

Given that they are a federally funded entity that is devoted to education, their decision to exacerbate, rather than work to relieve, the nationally identified crisis in the education of mathematicians/statisticians, is genuinely startling. Onewould expect that administrators in a publicly funded university system would have a greater sense of civic duty.

I do appreciate Minhyong’s point about the necessity of being humble about the absolute necessity of one’s research, and respectful of the positions of others. However, the USQ situation is *not* a (somewhat more typical) case of a battle between various departments in a cash-strapped university for limited resources. It issomething much more extreme, which will essentially destroy higher education in maths, stats, and the physical sciences in an entire region of rural Australia.

The comparison that has been made by some with the Rochester situation in the 90s is not unreasonable, but it seems to me that the situation at USQ is more dangerous. If Rochester had gone ahead and eliminated its maths department, this would have destroyed its reputation as a University, but (it seems to me) quite probably wouldn’t have dragged down a whole region of the US with it, since the US has so many universities, colleges, etc., and students travel all over the country for higher education.

On the other hand, Australia has only about forty universities in the whole country. Combined with the local nature of Australian university education, this means that if one of them gives up on teaching an entire discipline, it will not only have an impact on the university and its reputation, it will have a serious nation-wide impact. As already mentioned, if USQ goes ahead with its cuts, the residents of a large rural region will have no access to a solid university-level education in maths and stats.

This is something to be outraged by.