Month: August 2011

Teaching and Research

For the last few years, I have been dabbling in academic administration, first as Associate Dean for Research and now as Senior Associate Dean, Education here at the Tepper School of Business.  While there are frustrations in this position (“There are how many courses not covered?  And are all the adjuncts on vacation in Aruba now?”), some aspects are wonderful.  Working with new faculty is a great pleasure,  a pleasure that alone almost offsets the hassles.  I love the excitement and the energy and the feeling that anything is possible.

This was easy on the research side of the organization:  my job was to create a great research environment (subject to resource constraints, of course!), and that was very rewarding to do.  On the education side, my job is a bit different.  While some faculty love teaching, for others it seems to take time away from what they really want to do: research.  How can they do any research if they have to do any teaching?

Teaching is hard, and takes time and energy.  Does it take time away from research?   While I can talk to new faculty about how teaching and research intersect, and how one builds on the other, I can see a fair amount of eye-rolling.  Of course, I would say that:  that’s my job!  And when I explain that the entire “sports scheduling” part of my career happened due to an offhand conversation with an MBA student, the response is a mixture of “That’s what I have to look forward to?  Sports Scheduling?” and “Sure, teaching might be OK for practical types, but what about us theory types?”

Thanks to a colleague (thanks Stan!), I think I now have the perfect riposte.  This is from Richard Feynman‘s “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!”:

I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I am making some contribution” — it’s just psychological.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”

If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.

If not teaching ruined the minds of those at the Institute for Advanced Study, imagine the effect on us mere mortals!  So teach, already!  And if you want to teach a bit extra, I happen to have a few courses that need to be covered….

Passwords and Reviewing

I was asked to review a proposal today.  Right now, I am feeling a little overwhelmed:  I have a new administrative position (“Senior Associate Dean, Education”) which involves, among 1000 other things, using a 25 year old computer program (ahh, ms-dos days!), I have some sports schedules that have to get out, I have a pile of referee reports, I am getting behind on some editorial duties, and I still have aspirations of publishing something myself once in a while.   But I try to be helpful in the review process:  I recognize how important these are for people’s careers.  This was the proposal too far, however:  the title did not seem particularly relevant, and contained words that I am naturally suspicious of.  But it couldn’t hurt to check it out and see if I might have some unique insight that might be useful.

I go to the funding agency’s website, and find that I have to create an account to view the proposal.  No problem:  account creation is one of my skills.  But I was stymied by the password requirement:

The password must follow these rules:

  • Must be at least 10 characters long
  • Must contain at least two capital letters
  • Must contain at least two lowercase letters
  • Must contain at least two numbers
  • Must contain at least two special characters: ~!@#$%^&*()_-+={[}]|:;>,<.?

Ummmm….. let’s see.  I certainly can type in some nonsense that I can’t possibly remember, hoping that the reset simply goes to my email account (which has a pretty good password, but not one that meets those requirements).  Or I can … “Thanks, but my schedule precludes my taking on more at this time.”  Really… my reviewing of a funding proposal requires this amount of nonsense in a password?

xkcd, as it often does, got it right (I believe the 2^44 comes from choosing 4 of the 2000 or so most common words):

A New ISI Operations Research Journal

I have mixed feelings about things like journal impact studies.  Once a ranking is announced, forces come in to play to game the ranking.  For journals, I have seen things like “helpful suggestions” from the editor on references that should be added before the paper can be accepted (“Perfectly up to you, of course:  let me see the result before I make my final decision”).    Different fields have different rates, making it difficult to evaluate journals in unfamiliar fields.  Overall, I don’t know what to make out of these numbers.

I think I am particularly annoyed about these rankings since my most cited paper (according to Google) doesn’t even exist, according to “Web of Knowledge“, the current face of what I knew as the Science Citation Index.  According to “Web of Knowledge”, my most cited papers are “Voting schemes for which it can be difficult to tell who won the election”, and “Scheduling a major college basketball conference”.  If you go to Google Scholar or, better yet, use Publish or Perish to provide an interface into Scholar, my most cited works are the volume I did with David Johnson on the DIMACS Challenge on Cliques, Coloring, and Satisfiability and “A column generation approach for graph coloring” (with Anuj Mehrotra).  “Voting Schemes…” and “Major College Basketball…” come in third and fifth.  Now I understand that the volume is difficult to work with.  Editors of refereed volumes don’t often do much research in putting together the volume, though I would argue that this volume is different.  But where is “Column generation approach…” in Web of Knowledge?  How can my most referred-to (and certainly one of my better) papers not exist there?

It turns out that in 1996, when “Column generation was published”, INFORMS Journal of Computing, where it was published, had not been accepted by ISI, so, according to it and its successors, INFORMS Journal of Computing, Volume 8, does not exist (indexing seems to have started in volume 11).  Normally, this wouldn’t matter much, but we do keep track of “most cited” papers by the faculty here, and it hurts that this paper is not included.  And including it would increase my Web of Knowledge h-index by one (not that I obsessively check that value more than a dozen times in a year and wonder when someone is going to cite the papers that just need one or two more cites in order to ….., sorry, where was I?).

This is a long way of saying that while I am not sure of the relevance of journal rankings and ISI acceptance, I certainly understand its importance.  So it is great when an operations journal I am involved in, International Transactions in Operational Research, gets accepted into ISI.  ITOR has done a great job in the last few years in transitioning into being a good journal in our field.   The editor, Celso Ribeiro, has worked very hard on the journal during his editorship (I chaired the committee that chose Celso, so I can take some pride in his accomplishments).  ITOR is a journal from the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS), so this is good news for them too.  Some schools only count journals with ISI designation.  ITOR gives a new outlet for faculty in those schools.

Congratulations ITOR and Celso!