Universities are obsolete!
rzwitserloot posted in education on April 15th, 2006

Perhaps the title of this observation is ever so slightly exaggerated, but I’ve been thinking along those lines for quite a while.

Here are 3 anecdotes that support the notion that universities are no longer useful - or at least very very strange and bureaucratically inefficient places:

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Last week I took the exam for Cryptography, a course about, well, cryptography - a hobby of mine for quite a while.

Aside from being a course mostly involving the nuts and bolts underlying crypto, namely, cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and AES instead of much more widely applicable stuff like the engineering of protocols and the basic concepts, the entire course sucked, from a didactic point of view.

The book, written by the teaching professor, was ridiculously technical and very hard to follow mostly where it wasn’t important. In fact, on the exam, you had to perform, by hand, the first cycle or two of a couple of crypto algorithms, with nothing to assist you except a calculator and some tables of numbers. When will that EVER be a useful skill, ever? I’ll always have internet to look up the specific gory details in the extremely unlikely event that ever pops up.

More importantly, I never even touched the book - wikipedia serves a whole bunch of articles on the subject which are better adjusted to today’s state of crypto and far more extensive, easy to read, didactically nicely written, and in general, just better. (Some examples: how AES works, LFSRs, or even a general overview of the entire field.

The fact that this professor is still trying to improve his book is a fairly fundamental indication that he really just doesn’t get it. Forget the bloody books covering the basics, you’re free to do cutting edge research! The notion that so many profs have pipe-dreams about being the publisher of the de-facto standard book is a real shame. Books no longer serve AS a de-facto standard in many situations, and, if you really want to be the author of that book, it better be of impeccable quality, didactically speaking. Most profs aren’t trained or naturally skilled at teaching, yet they all want to write books.

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One of the many papers I wrote for publishing, together with Maja Pantic, my thesis coordinator, leads me to another anecdote about university ‘cutting edge’ life which boggles my mind:

The paper in question was targetted at a publisher making an ‘encyclopedia’ about the state of artificial intelligence. Any academic could write a paper, submit it to the editors, and provided the paper is good enough, get it included as ‘article’ in the encyclopedia. Nevermind that you then get a list of papers and not an encyclopedia in the sense of i.e. wikipedia.

After sending in my submission, I promptly got 2 papers back with the request of editing them. That is, reading them, and commenting on the quality in general, along with stating particular improvements. I handed those in as well, wondering what the hell the publisher was doing except sending out a bunch of emails, and then received 2 direct copies of the same form I just handed in, evidently filled in by submitters of other articles who had been randomly chosen to edit my submission.

I paid mostly lip service to one, which made fairly ridiculous claims of improvement, and did a better job integrating the suggestions of the other one which was far more useful, and submitted the final version.

That version made it into the book. I got an offer from the publisher to buy the book at half price, being only 250 or so euros instead of the full 500 euros.

How in the name of all that’s fair in the world do university professors fall into this utter load of crap? For doing what amounts to zip squat, these guys are peddling an incoherent bunch of papers bound into book form for 500 euros a pop. That’s so ridiculous I’m speechless.

Yet, when I confronted Maja about the rather odd arrangement, Maja herself was confused about my apparent state of disbelief. Turns out this kind of thing is entirely normal and a side-effect of the notion that universities hand out ‘points’ for successfull submissions, which in turn confer status and paycheck increases. …and these educational publishers laugh all the way to the bank.

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here’s one about possibly the most ridiculous course I’ve taken - Sustainable Development. The entire course is a combination about Treehugger propaganda, doomsaying how ‘we’ are ruining the world at large both by destroying the environment and not giving enough money away to third world countries. I’m all for discussions about such topics, but preferably with some intelligence behind the arguments made. Needless to say, a full blown mandatory university course on the subject should definitely be using some sound scientific methods to derive some form of answer.

The stated purpose of this course was to teach the importance of sustainable development, and also, HOW to build stuff in a sustainable way - nevermind a large chunk of the field of informatics has built-in perfect sustainability: The copying of data costs nothing and is endlessly sustainable.

I was a bit late in starting studying for the course. I noticed on the lecture information site that the lecture materials, normally available in book form at the university press, was available online because the university press had run out. The note accompanying the online PDF version also stated that the PDF would be taken down shortly after the exam.

The book turned out to be the usual didactic disaster, in that it was immensely boring, whereas the subject matter can actually be told well by using lots of interesting real-life cases. However, it was also loaded with argumentative fallacies, chief of which was the faking of scientific rigor: All brain-dead conclusions were backed up with reams and reams of facts, whereas such statements as ‘over half the children in asia have AIDS’ were accompanied by exactly zero references - they were to be believed on sight.

As my own little act of rebellion against this silly course, I mailed the chief educator of this course suggesting that he kept the book online. After all, letting people read the book on computers which with all likelyhood are going to be on anyway saves another tree or 5. Also, in a much larger sense of the word sustainable - (internet) search engines are pretty much the most ’sustainable’ development I know of, in the history of man. Anyone, anywhere on planet earth, can find, see, learn, and interact exactly the same way I can provided he finds an internet uplink someplace.

In that sense, I strongly urged him to make an example and place his book online, so that at some point the TU heads can wake up, smell the technology, and offer a TU wide booksearch function that lets me find the course relevant to a line of research simply by searching through the related book materials.

A pretty sound argument for someone teaching the importance of Sustainable Development, I’d say. A week or two later (what’s up with that delay?) I get a reply: He was thinking about getting it published and was afraid that putting it online too long would hamper his chances.

Nevermind the fact that this yet again highlights the notion that professors by and large are still so outdated that they still believe getting published is the holy grail - this guy was actively harming a perfectly fine sustainable idea just for the sake of his own wallet. As so many left-leaning figures of some importance are wont to do, he was being rather extremely hypocritical. A real shame, because obviously it would be a better state of affairs if the gaps between rich and poor weren’t so large.

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A bit unfortunate that Alper told me this only last week, but I should really have CCed these mails at least to the delta, the university newspaper. At least that might have engendered some form of discussion.

Still, as much as the TU is moving faster these days, the world is changing even faster still.