My View From The Ruins of The Ivory Tower – Valedictory Address, Flinders University

Prologue

In mid 1983, I was an applied mathematician writing up my PhD thesis in the field of Applied Probability at the University of Cambridge in England. I was also madly applying for every academic position back in my home country of Australia for which I thought I was even vaguely qualified.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Flinders University, in my home town of Adelaide, was trying to fill a one-year Temporary Lectureship in Statistics. I was offered the position.

However, the University said to me explicitly that I was not what they were looking for, but they were desperate. You see, I was an Applied Probabilist and they were looking for a Statistician. They emphasized that it was only a twelve-month contract, and even if a permanent position should be made available, they stated categorically, indeed emphatically, that I would not be considered.

Now, thirty-three years later, I stand before you to deliver my Valedictory Address.

Play The Hand You’re Dealt

Let me commence with my health, lest that issue become the “elephant in the room” of this address.

I have been in poor health for my entire career.

Not long after I joined Flinders University, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a serious systemic disease that is best known for attacking the digestive system. This illness became progressively worse over the next few years, and led to three major surgeries. I have taken a number of non-trivial medications ever since the original diagnosis.

Then, in the late 1990s, I was diagnosed with major depression. A number of treatments have been tried over time, but control of the illness remains stubbornly sub-therapeutic.

And now the coup de grâce: idiopathic peripheral axonal sensorimotor neuropathy, a nerve disease that has been classed as a Total and Permanent Incapacity.

Many clinicians in my medical team believe that these three conditions are all due to the one underlying cause. I am inclined to agree. However, for me, this hypothesis is alas an academic observation. In the poker game of health, I was dealt the “eights and aces”. But in life it is how you play the hand that you are dealt that matters.

Apogee

In 1984, I joined a vibrant Statistics group that was led by Professor John Darroch, a statistician of international repute. We operated de facto autonomously within the formal Discipline of Mathematics, one of two Disciplines that made up the School of Mathematical Sciences. (There were no Faculties in those days.) In 1985, we were successful in formally being granted autonomy as the Discipline of Statistical Science.

Statistics was at its apogee.

We produced graduates who were not just qualified Mathematicians who had some statistical knowledge, but fully fledged Statistical Scientists. Each year, a senior officer in the Australian Bureau of Statistics would fly to Adelaide from Canberra. He and I would have lunch and discuss that year’s upcoming class of graduands. The Bureau always wanted to recruit the very best.

Nadir

In the 1990s, the enrolment numbers in Mathematics and like Disciplines waned. More and more, students thought that being a scientist meant admiring the pretty flowers or swimming with the dolphins.

By the mid 1990s, the Program in Statistical Science had vanished, and even Mathematics was reduced to a rump of topics that had managed to retain barely viable numbers for various reasons. However, taken together, these remnant Mathematics topics could not be claimed to form a balanced and considered Program in Mathematics.

With attrition, I became the only academic Statistician left, and that remained the case for many years.

Renaissance

The major restructure of the University’s curriculum in 2010 provided us with the opportunity to design from first principles a credible Mathematics Program again. The appointment of Professor Jerzy Filar as a Strategic Professor reinvigorated Mathematics, and two excellent appointments in Statistical Science were made. Our fortunes appeared to be rising again.

However, as I retire from the field, I believe dark clouds are again forming.

Good Entertainment Value

For most of my career, I was well known around the University. I can’t think why!

In the early days, my wearing of candy pink trousers to meetings in The Registry attracted attention. And of course, I achieved notoriety through my wearing of colourful suspenders. Indeed, unbeknownst to me, a group of students even created a Facebook page dedicated to my suspenders. A student publication once wrote, “The subject is boring, but the lecturer is good entertainment value.” One year, in the very first lecture to about 200 students, I was piped in by a bagpipe player who was dressed in full Scottish regalia. You could perhaps describe me as extroverted!

Bats in the Belfry

A balanced academic role – not that the adjective “balanced” is often applied to me – involves research, teaching, service to the profession and administrative service to the University.

Looking at my career, clearly research has not been my strong suit.

They say that a mathematician’s best work is done when they are young.

My first two papers, I believe, are undeniably my best work: they were both published in the Journal of Applied Probability, the top international journal in my field. But the roughly half-dozen other mathematicians in the world who were interested in my work didn’t exactly make the papers citation classics.

My most cited paper is a joint collaboration with two animal behaviourists from the School of Biological Sciences, “Roosting activity budget of the southern bent-wing bat (Miniopterus schreibersii bassanii)”, published in the Australian Journal of Zoology. After meticulous but tedious observation of bats and a careful and methodical statistical analysis, we concluded that bats spend the vast majority of their time hanging upside-down doing absolutely nothing.

Obviously, my serious health problems during the 1980s affected my early research career, and chronic ill-health affected my entire career. Also, being the lone statistician from the mid 1990s and through the 2000s did not create a productive research environment. But another factor that affected my research was a deep cynicism. Let me justify that with two anecdotes.

Scattered Electrons, Battered Reputations

An early collaboration was with some experimental physicists at Flinders University who were into electron scattering. They had stumbled across a statistical technique that they wished to apply to their data. I was familiar with the technique and it was applicable to their investigation. However, they were intent on misusing the technique in order to make their results look better, despite my protestations. In the end, I walked away. Some time later I learned that they had nonetheless presented the paper at an international conference and it was published in the conference proceedings – with my name still listed as an author! I have never included that paper in my publications list.

Data Squeezing

One time, I was at a School of Biological Sciences strategic planning retreat. Why was I there you may well ask – shit like that happened to me all the time. Sigh! Anyway, in one session, the School’s Associate Dean for Research was exhorting the troops to rummage through the drawers of their desks to look for old datasets, squeeze something out of them, and publish whatever they could dredge up – all this to raise the School’s research performance measures. What an excellent basis for a planned research program!

Catching Moonbeams in a Jar

The bean counters are obsessed with measuring research performance – talk about trying to catch moonbeams in a jar! Surely, the act of attempting to measure research performance in itself alters the nature of the research program – a type of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for research.

Use Your Imagination

Whilst collaboration with industry and the production of patents is laudable, surely a University should encourage blue-sky research.

It was in the sixteenth century that Rafael Bombelli regularized the concept of imaginary numbers. Even the term “imaginary” was first used by other mathematicians in a pejorative sense. Had the modern style of research management been in place back then, Bombelli would have been lucky not to have been the victim of a forced redundancy program. And yet today, imaginary numbers are fundamental to Mathematics, Engineering and Physics. The importance of blue-sky research can take literally centuries to be fully appreciated!

A Reinvigoration

It is only in the last couple of years, with the arrival from Vietnam of the sisters Hoa and Huong Pham as PhD students, that I have started again to be engaged in constructive statistical modelling. Their solid academic preparation, their keenness to learn, their newly developed skills in innovative thought and their sheer hard work have reinvigorated this curmudgeonly old cynic, but alas right at the end of my career.

An Unrepentant Didact

Some years ago, the then Deputy Vice-Chancellor described my teaching style as rather didactic. I was quite pleased, until someone pointed out to me that this was meant as a criticism, not a compliment.

As an example, it is certainly necessary for a mathematics student to have an understanding of what concept the mathematics of the continuity of a function is trying to capture – but it is not sufficient!  When push comes to shove and the mathematician is investigating a function of interest, it is not sufficient to have a feel-good kind of idea of continuity, the mathematician needs to bloody well know the definition!

So, ever since, when a form asks for my religion, I respond “Unrepentant Didact”.

Lies, Damned Lies and SETs

Anyone at Flinders University who has been involved with Teaching has encountered the SET: Student Evaluation of Teaching. I stated at a University-level committee one time that I was rather keen on the SET: it provided me with a convenient example for my first-year students of just about everything you could do wrong in a survey design. The Chairman replied that at least it was better than nothing. No! The results of a flawed survey are worse than nothing!

Applied Statistics Laboratory

Over the years I developed and taught a number of topics in Probability and Statistics of which I am quite proud.

But I believe that my signature achievement was the design of a paradigm that eventually became known as Applied Statistics Laboratory. While appropriate as a first topic even for students of a full Program in Statistical Science, it was primarily intended as a service topic to teach basic statistical concepts to students of other disciplines. Such students often had poor quantitative backgrounds and little love of “Stats”.

But for decades, in many universities, acrimonious debate has raged about who should teach Statistics to students of other disciplines. I would have thought that the answer was obvious. After all, in order to study Biochemistry, a student is required to take Chemistry 1 … which is taught by a Chemist! But in respect of Statistics, all sorts of specious arguments are put forward as to why the client discipline should teach the Statistics.

Over the years, I have seen the pendulum swing back and forth, back and forth.

The University has invested millions of dollars into the facilities here at the Tonsley Building, which includes a computer teaching laboratory that perfectly complements the teaching and learning methods of the Applied Statistics Laboratory paradigm. And yet before the last echoes of my stentorian voice disappear from the University, Applied Statistics Laboratory has been wiped from the University’s teaching offerings.

Do I sound angry? I am bloody furious!

Fads, Fashions and Red Flowers

I have always had a passion for Curriculum Design and for Teaching and Learning. Indeed, I have served on many committees at various levels, both within the University and externally, devoted to these issues.

I do, however, get frustrated by the periodical fashions of the day which become institutional obsessions.

Take for example “Flexible Delivery of Learning”. For my sins, I was put on the Faculty’s Working Party on the Flexible Delivery of Learning. The University was throwing pots of money at this latest infatuation and so it took on a high priority. The Working Party had several meetings, and yet we never really did agree on what the hell “Flexible Delivery of Learning” actually meant. The whole thing just melted away.

A pet hate of mine – but I am sure many of my colleagues will disagree with me on this one – is “WIL”, “Work Integrated Learning”. We are supposed to be a University, not a Technical Training Institution: education versus vocation! When I gave a presentation to Admissions staff in Central Administration about the new Bachelor of Mathematical Sciences Degree, I was asked, “Are there plans to introduce WIL into the curriculum at some later date?” My reply of “I certainly hope not” caused a delightful reaction. My final University-level committee membership was the Course Advisory Committee; even there, the members could not seem to agree on what constituted WIL!

Another type of fad that I opposed, as a lone voice in the wilderness, was the proliferation of highly specialized undergraduate degrees. Such things as “Bachelor of Botanical Sciences (Red Flowers)” might entice wavering students to come to Flinders University and not elsewhere, but it is highly irresponsible. I saw huge numbers of students flocking to Forensic and Analytical Chemistry purely on the basis of the popular and completely unrealistic CSI television shows. Marine Biology students flooded in (pun intended) to swim with the whales, and were surprised to discover that they actually had to do some serious study. In my opinion, this practice of offering enticing sounding degrees was often deliberately deceptive.

One time I was paid a visit by the Course Coordinator of the Degree in Marine Biology. She said that the students were complaining that what I was teaching wasn’t relevant to them. I showed her the computer laboratory workshop I was using for her cohort and others from the School of Biological Sciences. It used statistical techniques to examine species differences in grey kangaroos. And then the penny dropped. I said to her, “Are you seriously telling me that the Marine Biology students cannot see the relevance of this workshop to their discipline because kangaroos are terrestrial and not marine? If it had been about, say, dolphin species, then the scales would have fallen from their eyes?” She looked down at her hands sheepishly. I told her to get out of my office.

Lots of Generals, Not Many Soldiers

I also harbour bad feelings about the trend towards Coursework Master’s Degrees that are designed for students who have done a first degree in another discipline.

If someone has already done a Bachelor’s Degree and wishes to make a career change, then they can take a second Bachelor’s Degree. This has been a well trodden route for decades. Why should the second Bachelor’s Degree be artificially promoted?

Oh, I’ve heard all the arguments about how students in the topics in the so-called “Articulation Master’s Degree” are judged at a higher standard than students undertaking the same material in a Bachelor’s Degree, often in the same classes! I just don’t really buy it. And, yes, they have to do a research thesis. I’m still not convinced that this is really a Master’s Degree. It’s a slightly tarted up second Bachelor’s Degree.

Let’s be honest – it’s all about marketing. And marketing to the full-fee paying international student market makes for a lot of dollars – what’s a little academic prostitution in return for a tidy profit.

Lose One, Win One

In respect of service to the profession, in the 1980s I had a number of miserable years trying to make a difference to Mathematics in Year 12 of the secondary schooling system, both in curriculum advice and public examination setting. The politics drove me crazy … and I gave up.

My major efforts were directed to my professional body, the Statistical Society of Australia Incorporated, in which I have held many positions both at the local and the national levels. In 2002, I was awarded the Society’s Special Service Award. I have found my association with this body immensely rewarding. I am a veteran of over 30 years’ standing, and I have already paid up my dues until my 40th anniversary in 2025, at which point I shall receive OBCM – Old Buggers Complimentary Membership. I plan to continue my involvement in the SSAI into my dotage.

For God So Loved The World, He Didn’t Send a Committee

My administrative service to the University has been substantial and varied, ranging from the delightfully silly Furniture and Minor Building Modifications Sub-Committee of the University’s Resources Committee in my early days, to several terms as Deputy Dean of the School.

I suspect that my mathematician’s analytical mind, congenial personality and ability to get a job done properly predisposed me to being asked to serve in these various roles – either that or they just saw me coming!

This Sporting Life

I was a representative of the University Council on the governing body of the Flinders University Sports Association Incorporated for 14 years, nine of those as Vice-President. Following a restructure, I was Chairman of the Board of Directors of FUSA for a further two years. I was made an Honorary Life Member of FUSA.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

I was invited to become an ALLY and also an Equal Opportunity Contact Officer. As an ALLY, I counselled students and staff in respect of LGBTI issues. In some cases, there were students who were having gender identification issues or who had even progressed to reassignment surgery. There were students whose sexuality was giving rise to conflict. There were staff members who were involved with teaching transgender students who sought my advice. But what I found rather ironic is that by far the biggest category of people I counselled was that of straight guys who wanted an independent confidante with whom to discuss their girlfriend issues!

My Machiavellian Streak

There were occasions in my administrative service when I had to resort to Machiavellian means. I was appointed the Chair of the Topic Information Project Development Group in 2003. One matter constantly stalled the work of the Group: whether or not to make the Educational Aims and Expected Learning Outcomes for a topic part of the topic information on the website. To me it was a no-brainer: of course we should.

But you see, historically, Educational Aims and Expected Learning Outcomes had typically not explicitly been formulated when designing topics. It had been only recently that there had been an edict of the Vice-Chancellor that, not only all new topics, but also all existing topics, had to explicitly articulate them.

I noticed that one particular member of the Group, a Faculty Registrar, was the member whose strange behaviour was causing the matter to stall. So, I did a little asking around some sources and discovered that a major School in his Faculty had deliberately ignored the Vice-Chancellor’s edict and had not formulated Topic Educational Aims and Expected Learning Outcomes. He was deliberately white-anting our deliberations in order to shield that School!

So, I wrote an Interim Report that I presented in person to a meeting of the Vice-Chancellor’s Committee. I explained that it was not the Final Report as the School of … had decided not to formulate Topic Educational Aims and Expected Learning Outcomes. I then gathered up my papers and excused myself, as the colour ran out of one of the Executive Deans present and the Vice-Chancellor turned bright crimson before exploding in fury.

The Group’s work concluded successfully shortly thereafter.

Franz Kafka and Time Travel

In 2009, I had an acrimonious dispute with the University. To be fair, there were a number of very senior staff who supported my side, but the “System” said “No”. I received a form letter from Human Resources in which I was told that if I wished to appeal, then this particular date was the deadline to lodge my intent to appeal.

The only problem was that I was not going to be told the reasons for the University’s decision for two weeks after that date.

I wrote a letter to the Manager of Human Resources pointing out that I could not possibly know if I intended to appeal when I did not yet know the reasons about which I may wish to appeal … if you follow me. I received a formal response from the Manager of Human Resources that simply stated, “This is standard University policy.”

It was a sickening Franz Kafka moment, and years of devotion to the University drained out of me. In the end, I won my case, but I could never quite restore the way I felt about the University after that.

I fear that there will be a lot more stories like mine to come in the near future. Cavete!

The Ivory Tower

It is past High Time for this True Believer, and I must retire.

I fear for the future of Mathematics and Statistics at Flinders University. I fear for the academic integrity of the University, and for the entire University system in Australia.

Modern-day incarnations of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonians have torn down the Ivory Tower, and the True Believers have been taken into captivity.

Will you stay true to your principles? Will there be a modern-day Zerubbabel to lead the rebuilding of the Ivory Tower? I hope so.

I look back at the institution of the University in which I have invested 33 years, and already I can see little evidence to suggest that I have ever been there.

But then I realize that I am looking in the wrong direction. If I look out at the graduates I have taught and mentored, the colleagues with whom I have collaborated and the professional staff with whom I have worked – people such as yourselves who have honoured me with your presence today – it is then that I see the positive influences that I have had.

I see that this is where my legacy lies. And I am content.

FAREWELL!