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The problem with combinatorics textbooks
Every now and then I think about writing a graduate textbook in Combinatorics, based on some topics courses I have taught. I scan my extensive lecture notes, think about how much time it would take, and whether there is even a demand for this kind of effort. Five minutes later I would always remember that YOLO, deeply exhale and won’t think about it for a while.
What’s wrong with Combinatorics?
To illustrate the difficulty, let me begin with two quotes which contradict each other in the most illuminating way. First, from the Foreword by Richard Stanley on (his former student) Miklós Bóna’s “A Walk Through Combinatorics” textbook:
The subject of combinatorics is so vast that the author of a textbook faces a difficult decision as to what topics to include. There is no more-or-less canonical corpus as in such other subjects as number theory and complex variable theory. [here]
Second, from the Preface by Kyle Petersen (and Stanley’s academic descendant) in his elegant “Inquiry-Based Enumerative Combinatorics” textbook:
Combinatorics is a very broad subject, so the difficulty in writing about the subject is not what to include, but rather what to exclude. Which hundred problems should we choose? [here]
Now that this is all clear, you can probably insert your own joke about importance of teaching inclusion-exclusion. But I think the issue is a bit deeper than that.
I’ve been thinking about this when updating my “What is Combinatorics” quotation page (see also my old blog post on this). You can see a complete divergence of points of view on how to answer this question. Some make the definition or description to be very broad (sometimes even ridiculously broad), some relatively narrow, some are overly positive, while others are revoltingly negative. And some basically give up and say, in effect “it is what it is”. This may seem puzzling, but if you concentrate on the narrow definitions and ignore the rest, a picture emerges.
Clearly, these people are not talking about the same area. They are talking about sub-areas of Combinatorics that they know well, that they happen to learn or work on, and that they happen to like or dislike. Somebody made a choice what part of Combinatorics to teach them. They made a choice what further parts of Combinatorics to learn. These choices are increasingly country or culture dependent, and became formative in people’s mind. And they project their views of these parts of Combinatorics on the whole field.
So my point is — there is no right answer to “What is Combinatorics?“, in a sense that all these opinions are biased to some degree by personal education and experience. Combinatorics is just too broad of a category to describe. It’s a bit like asking “what is good food?” — the answers would be either broad and bland, or interesting but very culture-specific.
Courses and textbooks
How should one resolve the issue raised above? I think the answer is simple. Stop claiming that Combinatorics, or worse, Discrete Mathematics, is one subject. That’s not true and hasn’t been true for a while. I talked about this in my “Unity of Combinatorics” book review. Combinatorics is comprised of many sub-areas, see the Wikipedia article I discussed here (long ago). Just accept it.
As a consequence, you should never teach a “Combinatorics” course. Never! Especially to graduate students, but to undergraduates as well. Teach courses in any and all of these subjects: Enumerative Combinatorics, Graph Theory, Probabilistic Combinatorics, Discrete Geometry, Algebraic Combinatorics, Arithmetic Combinatorics, etc. Whether introductory or advanced versions of these courses, there is plenty of material for each such course.
Stop using these broad “a little bit about everything” combinatorics textbooks which also tend to be bulky, expensive and shallow. It just doesn’t make sense to teach both the five color theorem and the Catalan numbers (see also here) in the same course. In fact, this is a disservice to both the students and the area. Different students want to know about different aspects of Combinatorics. Thus, if you are teaching the same numbered undergraduate course every semester you can just split it into two or three, and fix different syllabi in advance. The students will sort themselves out and chose courses they are most interested in.
My own teaching
At UCLA, with the help of the Department, we split one Combinatorics course into two titled “Graph Theory” and “Enumerative Combinatorics”. They are broader, in fact, than the titles suggest — see Math 180 and Math 184 here. The former turned out to be quite a bit more popular among many applied math and non-math majors, especially those interested in CS, engineering, data science, etc., but also from social sciences. Math majors tend to know a lot of this material and flock to the latter course. I am not saying you should do the same — this is just an example of what can be done.
I remember going through a long list of undergraduate combinatorics textbooks a few years ago, and found surprisingly little choice for the enumerative/algebraic courses. Of the ones I liked, let me single out Bóna’s “Introduction to Enumerative and Analytic Combinatorics“ and Stanley’s “Algebraic Combinatorics“. We now use both at UCLA. There are also many good Graph Theory course textbooks of all levels, of course.
Similarly, for graduate courses, make sure you make the subject relatively narrow and clearly defined. Like a topics class, except accessible to beginning graduate students. Low entry barrier is an advantage Combinatorics has over other areas, so use it. To give examples from my own teaching, see unedited notes from my graduate courses:
Combinatorics of posets (Fall 2020)
Combinatorics and Probability on groups (Spring 2020)
Algebraic Combinatorics (Winter 2019)
Discrete and Polyhedral Geometry (Fall 2018) This is based on my book. See also videos of selected topics (in Russian).
Combinatorics of Integer Sequences (Fall 2016)
Combinatorics of Words (Fall 2014)
Tilings (Winter 2013, lecture-by-lecture refs only)
In summary
In my experience, the more specific you make the combinatorics course the more interesting it is to the students. Don’t be afraid that the course would appear be too narrow or too advanced. That’s a stigma from the past. You create a good course and the students will quickly figure it out. They do have their own FB and other chat groups, and spread the news much faster than you could imagine…
Unfortunately, there is often no good textbook to cover what you want. So you might have to work a little harder harder to scout the material from papers, monographs, etc. In the internet era this is easier than ever. In fact, many extensive lecture notes are already available on the web. Eventually, all the appropriate textbooks will be written. As I mentioned before, this is one of the very few silver linings of the pandemic…
P.S. (July 8, 2021) I should have mentioned that in addition to “a little bit about everything” textbooks, there are also “a lot about everything” doorstopper size volumes. I sort of don’t think of them as textbooks at all, more like mixtures of a reference guide, encyclopedia and teacher’s manual. Since even the thought of teaching from such books overwhelms the senses, I don’t expect them to be widely adopted.
Having said that, these voluminous textbooks can be incredibly valuable to both the students and the instructor as a source of interesting supplementary material. Let me single out an excellent recent “Combinatorial Mathematics” by Doug West written in the same clear and concise style as his earlier “Introduction to Graph Theory“. Priced modestly (for 991 pages), I recommend it as “further reading” for all combinatorics courses, even though I strongly disagree with the second sentence of the Preface, per my earlier blog post.
What if math dies?
Over the years I’ve heard a lot about the apparent complete uselessness and inapplicability of modern mathematics, about how I should always look for applications since without them all I am doing is a pointless intellectual pursuit, blah, blah, blah. I had strangers on the plane telling me this (without prompting), first dates (never to become second dates) wondering if “any formulas changed over the last 100 years, and if not what’s the point“, relatives asking me if I ever “invented a new theorem“, etc.
For whatever reason, everyone always has an opinion about math. Having never been accused of excessive politeness I would always abruptly change the subject or punt by saying that the point is “money in my Wells Fargo account“. I don’t even have a Wells Fargo account (and wouldn’t want one), but what’s a small lie when you are telling a big lie, right?
Eventually, you do develop a thicker skin, I suppose. You learn to excuse your friends as well meaning but uneducated, journalists as maliciously ignorant, and strangers as bitter over some old math learning experience (which they also feel obliged to inform you about). However, you do expect some understanding and respect from fellow academics. “Never compare fields” Gian-Carlo Rota teaches, and it’s a good advice you expect sensible people to adhere. Which brings me to this:
The worst idea I’ve heard in a while
In a recent interview with Glenn Loury, a controversial UPenn law professor Amy Wax proposed to reduce current mathematics graduate programs to one tenth or one fifteenth of their current size (start at 54.30, see also partial transcript). Now, I get it. He is a proud member of the “intellectual dark web“, while she apparently hates liberal education establishment and wants to rant about it. And for some reason math got lumped into this discussion. To be precise, Loury provoked Wax without offering his views, but she was happy to opine in response. I will not quote the discussion in full, but the following single sentence is revealing and worth addressing:
If we got rid of ninety percent of the math Ph.D. programs, would we really be worse off in any material respect? I think that’s a serious question.
She followed this up with “I am not advocating of getting rid of a hundred percent of them.” Uhm, thanks, I guess…
The inanity of it all
One is tempted to close ranks and ridicule this by appealing to authority or common sense. In fact, just about everyone — from Hilbert to Gowers — commented on the importance of mathematics both as an intellectual endeavor and the source of applications. In the US, we have about 1500-2000 new math Ph.D.’s every year, and according to the AMS survey, nearly all of them find jobs within a year (over 50% in academia, some in the industry, some abroad).
In fact, our math Ph.D. programs are the envy of the world. For example, of the top 20 schools worldwide between 12 and 15 are occupied by leading US programs depending on the ranking (see e.g. here or there for recent examples, or more elsewhere). Think about it: math requires no capital investment or infrastructure at all, so with the advent of personal computing, internet and the arXiv, there are little or no entry barriers to the field. Any university in the world can compete with the US schools, yet we are still on the top of the rankings. It is bewildering then, why would you even want to kill these super successful Ph.D. programs?
More infrastructurally, if there are drastic cuts to the Ph.D. programs in the US, who would be the people that can be hired to teach mathematics by the thousands of colleges whose students want to be math majors? The number of the US math majors is already over 40,000 a year and keep growing at over 5% a year driven in part by the higher salary offerings and lifetime income (over that of other majors). Don’t you think that the existing healthy supply and demand in the market for college math educators already determined the number of math Ph.D.’s we need to produce?
Well, apparently Wax doesn’t need convincing in the importance of math. “I am the last person to denigrate pure mathematics. It is a glory of mankind…” She just doesn’t want people doing new research. Or something. As in “enough already.” Think about it and transfer this thought to other areas. Say — no new music is necessary — Bach and Drake said it all. Or — no new art is necessary — Monet and Warhol were so prolific, museums don’t really have space for new works. Right…
Economics matters
Let’s ask a different question: why would you want to close Ph.D. programs when they actually make money? Take UCLA. We are a service department, which makes a lot of money from teaching all kinds of undergraduate math courses + research grants both federal, state and industrial. Annually, we graduate over 600 students with different types of math/stat majors, which constitutes about 1.6% of national output, the most of all universities.
Let’s say our budget is $25 mil (I don’t recall the figures), all paid for. That would be out of UCLA budget of $7.5 billion of which less than 7% are state contributions. Now compare these with football stadiums costs which are heavily subsidized and run into hundreds of millions of dollars. If you had to cut the budget, is math where you start?
Can’t we just ignore these people?
Well, yes we can. I am super happy to dismiss hurried paid-by-the-word know-nothing journalists or some anonymous YouTube comments. But Amy Wax is neither. She is smart and very accomplished: summa cum laude from Yale, M.D. cum laude from Harvard Medical School, J.D. from Columbia Law School where she was an editor of Columbia Law Review, argued 15 cases in the US Supreme Court, is a named professor at UPenn Law School, has dozens of published research papers in welfare, labor and family law and economics. Yep.
One can then argue — she knows a lot of other stuff, but nothing about math. She is clearly controversial, and others don’t say anything of that nature, so who cares. That sounds right, but so what? Being known as controversial is like license to tell “the truth”… er… what they really think. Which can include silly things based on no research into our word. This means there are numerous other people who probably also think that way but are wise enough or polite enough not to say it. We need to fight this perception!
And yes, sometimes these people get into positions of power and decide to implement the changes. Two cases are worth mentioning: the University of Rochester failed attempt to close its math Ph.D. program, and the Brown University fiasco. The latter is well explained in the “Mathematical Apocrypha Redux” (see the relevant section here) by the inimitable Steven Krantz. Rating-wise, this was a disaster for Brown — just read the Krantz’s description.
The Rochester story is rather well documented and is a good case of study for those feeling too comfortable. Start with this Notices article, proceed to NY Times, then to protest description, and this followup in the Notices again. Good news, right? Well, I know for a fact that other administrators are also making occasional (largely unsuccessful) moves to do this, but I can’t name them, I am afraid.
Predictable apocalypse
Let’s take Amy Wax’s proposal seriously, and play out what would happen if 90-93% of US graduate programs in mathematics are closed on January 1, 2020. By law. Say, the US Congress votes to deny all federal funds to universities if they maintain a math Ph.D. program, except for the top 15 out of about 180 graduate programs according to US News. Let’s ignore the legal issues this poses. Just note that there are various recent and older precedents of federal government interfering with state and private schools (sometimes for a good cause).
Let’s just try to quickly game out what would happen. As with any post-apocalyptic fiction, I will not provide any proofs or reasoning. But it’s all “reality based”, as two such events did happened to mathematicians in the last century, one of them deeply affecting me: the German “academic reforms” in late 1930s (see e.g. here or there), and the Russian exodus in early 1990s (see e.g. here or there, or there). Another personally familiar story is an implosion of mathematics at Bell Labs in late 1990s. Although notable, it’s on a much smaller scale and to my knowledge has not been written about (see the discussion here, part 6).
First, there will be huge exodus of distinguished mathematics faculty from school outside of the 15 schools. These include members of the National Academy of Sciences, numerous ICM speakers, other award winners, etc. Some will move overseas (Canada, Europe, Japan, China, etc.), some will retire, some leave academia. Some will simply stop doing research given the lack of mathematical activity at the department and no reward for doing research.
Second, outside of top 15, graduate programs in other subjects notice falling applications resulting in their sliding in world ranking. These include other physical sciences, economics and computer science. Then biological and social sciences start suffering. These programs start having their own exodus to top 15 school and abroad.
Third, given the sliding of graduate programs across the board, the undergraduate education goes into decline across the country. Top US high school students start applying to school abroad. Many eventually choose to stay in these countries who welcome their stem excellence.
Fourth, the hitech, fintech and other science heavy industries move abroad closer to educated employees. United States loses its labor market dominance and starts bleeding jobs across all industries. The stocks and housing market dip down.
Fifth, under strong public pressure the apocalyptic law is repealed and all 180 Ph.D. programs are reinstated with both state and federal financial support. To everyone’s surprise, nobody is moving back. Turns out, destroying is much faster and easier than rebuilding, as both Germany and Russia discovered back in the 20th century. From that point on, January 1, 2020 became known as the day the math died.
Final message:
Dear Amy Wax and Glenn Loury! Please admit that you are wrong. Or at least plead ignorance and ask for forgiveness. I don’t know if you will ever see this post or have any interest in debating the proposition I quoted, but I am happy to do this with you. Any time, any place, any style. Because the future of academia is important to all of us.
Fibonacci times Euler
Recall the Fibonacci numbers 
(1) Define the Fibonacci polytope 
(2) 
Together with Greta Panova and Alejandro Morales we wrote a little note “Why is π < 2φ?” which gives a combinatorial proof of (2) via a direct surjection. Thus we obtain an indirect proof of the inequality in the title. The note is not a research article; rather, it is aimed at a general audience of college students. We will not be posting it on the arXiv, so I figure this blog is a good place to advertise it.
The note also explains that the inequality (2) also follows from Sidorenko’s theorem on complementary posets. Let me briefly mention a connection between (1) and (2) which is not mentioned in the note. I will assume you just spent 5 min and read the note at this point. Following Stanley, the volume of
Academia is nothing like a drug cartel
It’s been awhile since I wanted to rant. Since the last post, really. Well, I was busy. But the time has come to write several posts.
This post is about a number of recent articles lamenting the prevalence of low paid adjuncts in many universities. To sensationalize the matter, comparisons were made with drug cartels and Ponzi schemes. Allegedly, this inequality is causing poverty and even homelessness and death. I imagine reading these articles can be depressing, but it’s all a sham. Knowingly or not, the journalists are perpetuating false stereotypes of what professors really do. These journalists seem to be doing their usual lazy work and preying on reader’s compassion and profound misunderstanding of the matter.
Now, if you are reading this blog, I am assuming you know exactly what professors do (Hint: not just teaching). But if you don’t, start with this outline by my old friend Daniel Liberzon, and proceed to review any or all of these links: one, two, three, four. When you are done, we can begin to answer our main semi-serious question:
What is academia, really, if it’s not a drug cartel or a Ponzi scheme?
I can’t believe this trivial question is difficult to some people, and needs a lengthy answer, but here it is anyway.
Academia rewards industriousness and creativity
This might seem obvious – of course it does! These are the main qualities needed to achieve success doing research. But reading the above news reports it might seem that Ph.D. is like a lottery ticket – the winnings are rare and random. What I am trying to say is that academia can be compared with other professions which involve both qualities. To make a point, take sculpture.
There are thousands of professional sculptors in the United States. The figures vary greatly, but same also holds for the number of mathematicians, so we leave it aside. The average salary of sculptors seems to be within reach from average salary in the US, definitely below that of an average person with bachelor degree. On the other hand, top sculptors are all multimillionaires. For example, recently a sculpture by Jeff Koons sold for $58.4 million. But at least it looked nice. I will never understand the success of Richard Serra, whose work is just dreadful. You can see some of his work at UCLA (picture), or at LACMA (picture). Or take a celebrated and much despised 10 million dollar man Dale Chihuly, who shows what he calls “art” just about everywhere… But reasonable people can disagree on this, and who am I to judge anyway? My opinion does not matter, nor is that of almost anyone. What’s important, is that some people with expertise value these creative works enough to pay a lot of money for them. These sculptors’ talent is clearly recognized.
Now, should we believe on the basis of the salary disparity that the sculpture is a Ponzi scheme, with top earners basically robbing all the other sculptors of good living? That would be preposterous, of course. Same with most professors. Just because the general public cannot understand and evaluate their research work and creativity, does not mean it’s not there and should not be valued accordingly.
Academia is a large apprenticeship program
Think of graduate students who are traditionally overworked and underpaid. Some make it to graduate with a Ph.D. and eventually become tenured professors. Many, perhaps most, do not. Sounds like a drug cartel to you? Nonsense! This is exactly how apprenticeships works, and how it’s been working for centuries in every guild. In fact, some modern day guilds don’t pay anything at all.
Students enter the apprenticeship/graduate program in hopes to learn from the teacher/professor and succeed in their studies. The very best do succeed. For example, this list of Rembrant‘s pupils/assistants reads somewhat similar to this list of Hilbert‘s students. Unsurprisingly, some are world famous, while others are completely forgotten. So it’s not about cheap labor as in drug cartels – this is how apprenticeships normally work.
Academia is a big business
Think of any large corporation. The are many levels of management: low, mid, and top-level. Arguably, all tenured and tenure-track faculty are low level managers, chairs and other department officers (DGS, DUS, etc.) are mid-level, while deans, provosts and presidents/chancellors are top-level managers. In the US, there is also a legal precedent supporting qualifying professors as management (e.g. professors are not allowed to unionize, in contrast with the adjunct faculty). And deservingly so. Professors hire TA’s, graders, adjuncts, support stuff, choose curriculum, responsible for all grades, run research labs, serve as PI’s on federal grants, and elect mid-level management.
So, why many levels? Take UCLA. According to 2012 annual report, we operate on 419 acres, have about 40 thousand students, 30 thousand full time employees (this includes UCLA hospitals), have $4.6 billion in operating revenue (of which tuition is only $580 million), but only about 2 thousand ladder (tenure and tenure-track) faculty. For comparison, a beloved but highly secretive Trader Joe’s company has about $8 billion in revenue, over 20 thousand employees, and about 370 stores, each with 50+ employees and its own mid and low-level management.
Now that you are conditioned to think of universities as businesses and professors as managers, is it really all that surprising that regular employees like adjuncts get paid much less? This works the same way as for McDonalds store managers, who get paid about 3 times as much as regular employees.
Higher echelons of academia is a research factory with a side teaching business
Note that there is a reason students want to study at research universities rather than at community colleges. It’s because these universities offer many other more advanced classes, research oriented labs, seminars, field works, etc. In fact, research and research oriented teaching is really the main business rather than service teaching.
Think revenue. For example, UCLA derives 50% more revenue from research grants than from tuition. Places like MIT are giving out so many scholarships, they are loosing money on teaching (see this breakdown). American universities cannot quit the undergraduate education, of course, but they are making a rational decision to outsource the low level service teaching to outsiders, who can do the same work but cheaper. For example, I took English in Moscow, ESL at a community college in Brooklyn, French at Harvard, and Hebrew at University of Minnesota. While some instructors were better than others, there was no clear winner as experience was about the same.
So not only the adjunct salaries are low for a reason, keeping them low is critical to avoid hiring more regular faculty and preventing further tuition inflation. The next time you read about adjuncts barely making a living wage, compare this to notorious Bangalore call centers and how much people make over there (between $100 and $250 a month).
Academia is a paradise of equality
College professors are different from drug gangsters not only in the level of violence, but also in a remarkable degree of equality between universities (but not between fields!) Consider for example this table of average full professor salaries at the top universities. The near $200,000 a year may seem high, but note that this is only twice that of average faculty at an average college. Given that most of these top universities are located in the uber-expensive metropolitan areas (NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc.), the effect is even further diminished.
Compare this with other professions. Forget the sculptors mentioned above whose pay ratios can go into thousands, let’s take a relatively obscure profession of an opera singer (check how many do you know from this list). Like academia and unlike sculpture, the operas are greatly subsidized by the governments and large corporations. Still, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a much greater inequality than in academia. While some popular singers like Dmitri Hvorostovsky make over $3 million a year, the average salary is about $100,000 a year, giving a ratio of 30+.
In other words, given that some professors are much better than others when it comes to research (not me!), one can argue that they are being underpaid to subsidize the lackluster efforts of others. No wonder the top academics suffer from the status-income disequilibrium. This is the opposite of the “winner takes all” behavior argued by the journalists in an effort to explain adjuncts’ plight.
Academia is an experience
People come to universities to spend years studying, and they want to enjoy those years. They want to hear famous authors and thinkers, learn basic skills and life changing stories, make lasting friendships, play sports and simply have fun. Sometimes this does not work out, but we are good at what we do (colleges have been perfecting their craft for hundreds of years). Indeed, many students take away with them a unique deeply personal experience. Take my story. While at Moscow University, I heard lectures by Vladimir Arnold, attended Gelfand’s Seminar, and even went to a public lecture by President Roh Tae-woo. It was fun. While at Harvard, I took courses of Raoul Bott and Gian-Carlo Rota (at MIT), audited courses of such non-math luminaries as Stephan Thernstrom and William Mills Todd, III, and went to public lectures by people like Tim Berners-Lee, all unforgettable.
So this is my big NO to those who want to replace tenured faculty with adjuncts, leveling the academic salaries, and commodifying the education. This just would not work; it is akin to calls for abolition of haute cuisine in favor of more fast food. In fact, nobody really wants to do either of these. The inexpensive education is already readily available in the form of community colleges. In fact, students apply in large numbers trying to get to a place like UCLA, which offers a wide range of programs and courses. And it’s definitely not because of our celebrity adjuncts.
In conclusion
Academia is many things to many people. There are many important reasons why the ladder faculty are paid substantially better than TA’s and adjuncts, reasons both substantive and economical. But at no point does the academia resemble the Ponzi schemes and drug cartels, which are famous for creating the economic devastation and inequality (and, um, illegal). If anything, the academia is the opposite, as it creates economic opportunities and evens the playing field. And to those educational reformers who think they know better: remember, we heard it all before…
College admissions I. Discrimination and lies, Jews and Harvard
Recent reports on alleged discrimination of Asian Americans at Ivy League schools (read a discussion here and view this graph), brought a lot of disgust in me, as well as some ambivalence. Here and in the next post I will try to deconstruct these feelings.
In this post I mention my family and my own history of dealing with discrimination. I then briefly review and make parallels with the current discussion of the issues, and make some recommendations. In the next post, I will explain why the whole issue is overhyped and what does that say about american culture.
Russian Jews go to school
Well, this is a really long story, but when it comes to educational opportunities, things were always pretty bad. By 1880’s most universities and gymnasiums in Imperial Russia instituted a 5 to 10% Jewish quota, which remained in effect until the Russian revolution in 1917. Read more on the history in this book (part III), and in amazing personal memoir (in Russian).
Communists abolished Jewish discrimination replacing it with anti-religious discrimination, often having similar effect. In the 1930s, my grandmother was expelled from college after communist officials discovered that her father (my great-grandfather) was a rabbi. A local newspaper went all schadenfreude about her, and published an anti-clerical article “The wolf in sheep’s clothing”, apparently missing the irony of the origin of the title.
By the early 1960s, Israel became a super-enemy of USSR, and things were slowly getting hotter for the Jews. For example, despite high exam grades, my father and few dozen Jews was denied admission to Moscow University (МГУ) on account of “lack of dorm space”. Some scandal ensued and he was accepted a month later. By the late 1960s, after the Six-Day War, the Mathematics Department of Мoscow University settled on 0.5% quota (about 2 Jewish students in a class of 450-500), which typically went to children of the university faculty and occasional party officials. When I applied in 1988, I was rejected as the quota remained in effect. In 1989, things were starting to change, and the quota was raised to about 4%. I got in. In the meantime, I became somewhat of an expert on “Jewish problems” (see also here and there), once even holding a seminar on them.
Curiously, the officials had supported the quota very openly, justifying it as follows:
1. We need to maintain proportion of Jews the same as in the country, so as they don’t take space from ethnically Russian students.
2. Jews are already privileged by the virtue of living in large cities, but Russians from small villages need extra help to get quality education. Of course, Jews in Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Belorussian villages were mostly killed in the WWII as part of the Final Solution.
3. Future Russia needs an educated workforce. There is no point of preparing “cadres for Israel“. Thus the “diploma tax“.
My little brush with discrimination in the US
In 1994, already a first year grad student at Harvard, I applied for NSF Graduate Fellowhip, which was highly selective but much less generous back then. I mailed my proposed plan of research, letters of recommendation, transcripts, and the required GRE, both General and Subject. I was rejected. Since I received a more selective Hertz Foundation Fellowship (see my discussion of it here), I wasn’t too upset, but I was curious what did I do wrong. So I filed a FOIA request, and got a reply a few weeks later.
What I learned was remarkable and made me really upset. I discovered that the NSF reviewers rated A all my materials, both the transcript, all the letters, and plan of research. I had a maximal GRE Subject score. But you see, me being Russian and all, I had a mediocre to poor GRE General score on the Verbal Section. The paperwork indicated that the committee then took weighted average of all these grades, made a list of top scorers and I didn’t make the cut. Since I could not fathom why would I need a top GRE Verbal score for Math Ph.D., this seemed clearly discriminatory, on the basis of my native language.
So I found a lawyer (tiny Cambridge, MA is full of them). He patiently explained to me that my Russian native language is not defining me as a member of protected class, and I have no case against NSF. He said that even politically, there is no such thing as “Russian language lobby” (despite our large numbers), and given that there was no harm done (my Hertz), I should go home and learn to be happy. Naturally, I did.
Jews at Harvard and the geographic distribution
The story of Jews at Harvard has been described in great details at a variety of sources. In short, Harvard instituted a 15% quota, which was later softened, substituted with geographic distribution preferences, having same effect on Jewish enrollment. The following quote about the evolution of Harvard President James Conant (1933-1953) is revealing:
Conant’s pro-quote position in the early 1920s, his preference for more students from small towns and cities and the South and West, and his cool response to the plight of the Jewish academic refugees from Hitler suggest that he shared the mild antisemitism common to his social group and time. But his commitment to meritocracy made him more ready to accept able Jews as students and faculty.
While the quotas are both illegal and a thing of the past, the use of geographic distribution in admissions never went away. While not discriminatory in the strict legal sense, they were created with a discriminatory intent, and still have discriminatory effect, as recent immigrants, Jews and other minorities tend to concentrate in large population centers. Not unlike the Russian “village” arguments, this is a slight of hand, which first creates and then heavy-handedly destroys a straw man, all in an effort to deal with other issues which are kept out of sight. We will see this in other cases as well.
All students are somebody’s children
Legacy preferences is another example of misleading practices potentially having discriminatory effect. Universities are claiming that this creates a brand loyalty. But that is misleading of course. Do Ivy League schools really need to develop brand loyalty when they have 10-20 applicants per spot? The truth, of course, is that children of alumni have money and willing to pay a full sticker price of the tuition, and the admission officers aim to have about 20% of such legacy students in each freshmen class.
In fact, the honest market based solution would be to auction this portion of the freshman class to the highest bidder, charging tuition perhaps as much as 100K per year. This auction would raise significant funds which can pay for poor students’ scholarships and stipends, and open up these admission slots to everyone, not just children of alumni. As it is, legacy candidates get preferences in admission and, perhaps counter intuitively, have their tuition subsidized as others may potentially be willing to pay more for their spots. Now, I am NOT advocating for this, just showing how misguided and fundamentally unfair are the current admission policies.
Texas 10% solution
This rule was enacted in response to state losing in Hopwood v. Texas, as a novel legal way to introduce diversity in admissions. An ultimate geographic preference, this rule fills about 75-80% of the freshmen class at the leading Texas universities. Note that the Fisher case is about the affirmative action for the remaining spots.
But it is exactly the kind of rule which makes wrong priorities for the students and the society. In general, it is beneficial for the society when students have a choice which K12 school to attend. It is undoubtedly good when they study in the most challenging environment, work hardest on the most advanced courses available. This rule pushes students to take the easiest courses in the least challenging school, aiming to attain the highest GPA and enter the coveted 10%. And guess what – Texas students do exactly that (this in addition to other rule troubles).
A case for honesty
As it stands, the universities are on the brink of losing another affirmative action case in the Supreme Court. Perhaps this is not immediately apparent, but they are also on the brink of a giant PR disaster when it comes to their hidden quotas for Asian Americans. With good intentions, the admission officers and politician keep coming up with twisted, misleading, uncomfortable and occasionally self-contradictory rationale as to why they do what they do (see above). The problem is – with all the history, we’ve seen this all before, and nobody is buying it. With so much public pressure, they probably have to stop and own up to their choices.
I think it is clear what many top colleges are doing. They have a goal of a freshmen class which would have f(x)% students with property x, for many different x, which can be race, gender, wealth, political connections, geographic location, sexual orientation, sports, music, science and other achievements, etc. So they produce all these policies like the early action, and many rationalizations aimed at reaching that goal. One should have a lot of chutzpah to believe to know exactly the “right mix” function f, but of course they think that…
If it was up to me, I would give the universities a complete freedom to accept whoever they want without fear of lawsuits, in exchange for complete transparency. Education is really not like housing or employment, it is fluid and highly competitive. In exchange, make the universities publish the exact numbers of how many students with every property x have applied and got accepted. For the sake of anonymity, delete all the names and zip codes, and publish on the web the rest of the data from their applications. Let the future applicants, or nonprofits on their behalf, decide their chances of acceptance and make rational choice whether to spend their $75 and endless hours applying to that school. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world, but you have to let colleges compete with each other, which is the most fair and offers the best model of education.
Finally, when it comes to Asian Americans – Harvard and the rest of the Ivies should just apologize, and starting next year accept twice as many as this year, to compensate for the real or perceived discrimination. Otherwise, a hundred years from now, somebody might still be writing how stupid and morally twisted were these old early 21st century admission policies.
Warning: Here I neither endorse nor reject the affirmative action, but rather advocate for some honesty, clarity and transparency.
Igor Pak's blog 