The Wabash Commentary

JDP:  I think very few big decisions in life come from one big Eureka moment.  I left Wabash because of a slow accumulation of a number of things over the course of four or five years.

In some ways, I was in an unusual position on the faculty.  There are many faculty who have strong reasons for being in central Indiana, in addition to Wabash College, whereas for me and my family there were none.  My blood relatives live ten hours away from Crawfordsville; so do my wife’s. My wife didn’t have a job in Indiana that would have been hard to reproduce elsewhere; we didn’t have the two-body academic problem, she’s a school teacher, and can work anywhere. Also, we’re kind of an outdoors-y family, and living in central Indiana can be a challenge if you like wild places.  In short, our only claim to being in Crawfordsville was Wabash, so when that situation became increasingly less attractive, it was easier to move on.

It’s probably not appropriate for to comment here in great detail on why my situation at Wabash became less attractive to me, so let me just say that I think that faculty life at Wabash can be difficult for those professors whose ideas about liberal education are more than a few standard deviations from the professorial mean.

JDP:  When I talked about life on the margins, I was speaking not only about this or that college as a whole, but sub-populations, pockets on this or that college campus.  So I don’t know if I would say that Wabash, or in fact any one college, ever is what you described (I have forgotten the words you claim were mine!); I don’t know if Wabash ever was like that. But there certainly are strong (but small) pockets like that on campus.

JDP:  Well, I’m a stalwart champion of diversity in American higher education, of giving students real choice in the type of college they attend. I’m a champion of all-female, all-male, and co-ed colleges. I’m a champion of religious and secular institutions. I’m a champion of large and small institutions, of research universities, great books colleges, and community colleges. I’m a stalwart champion of colleges with unique identities. But I’m most certainly not a champion of the current trend in American higher education of the homogenization of colleges and universities; the desire to make them indistinguishable from one another, more or less.

What must change in my teaching style now that I’m no longer at an all-male school? Well, I teach mathematics, so that would be less of a pressing issue in my day-to-day teaching style.  If I were to teach a course like C&T here at Northern (and I won’t) I suppose I would have to think about that. . .  One thing that would change, of course, would be the way in which I would participate in the day-to-day life of students outside of the classroom or beyond the classroom, but in terms of teaching mathematics not much would change at all.

People sometimes behave differently with members of the opposite sex than they do with members of their own sex. Here in Marquette, for instance, there is an all-female kayak club and an all-female trail-running group. The idea, obviously, is that women will have a different experience participating in these activities if there are no men involved, and for some women this different experience might be a better experience. So the “outside of the classroom change” you ask about would simply be to be mindful of the various ways people have of communicating and interacting with each other, with a special sensitivity to the subtleties occasioned by these differences in style. And now that I think about it, I guess I should be mindful of this even in the mathematics classroom.

JDP:  I don’t know if I would say “superior” to any other homeland. But on the other hand, I am hard pressed to think of any that would rival her. . .  I guess one country that might is the United States.  One of our favorite conversation topics two years ago while I was on sabbatical in Prague, with some Czech friends whom I ate lunch with most days, was the many similarities between the United States and Russia.  We didn’t frame it in terms of spirituality, but that’s surely one of the stronger similarities, especially when compared to the rest of Europe, which is not a very spiritual continent at all.  I could just tell you what some of those similarities are between the United States and Russia, and you can extract conclusions about spirituality.

JDP:  We’re both pretty large countries, both in terms of population and square miles.  We both have a tradition--Russia’s is probably a longer tradition--of a kind of (maybe different kinds of) imperialism. But at the same time, we both tend to be quite focused on ourselves, on our own country, as opposed to the rest of the world, much more so than other countries in the West.  We also have a greater distance between the really wealthy and the really poor, both the United States and Russia, than do most of the other western and first world countries. I can go on.  . . We both have vast tracts of wilderness that we’ve “wrestled” with over the years; we’re two of the few remaining countries in the West in which executions are legal; we both have huge military forces and lots of nuclear bombs; we’ve both had recent wars with Muslim nations; people in both countries tend to be less multilingual than do folks from other countries of the west; Russia had serfdom, we had slavery; and so on.

JDP:  Yeah, I would agree with that, but I’d say that might be where the similarities end.  The Russian peasants have certainly suffered much more than the American working class over the centuries.  And Dostoevsky says that suffering is the origin of consciousness.  And while that’s not a wholly Russian idea, it’s certainly Russian-flavored.  So I won’t say that that kind of spirituality is unique to Russia, but it’s certainly central to who they are.

JDP:  One of my sabbatical projects – it was kind of an informal project, a labor of love –was to work through the five major Dostoevsky novels.  I did that, I successfully completed that, and so having read Dostoevsky more recently than the other authors, I would probably say Dostoevsky. And, in fact, my favorite book by Dostoevsky is probably too revealing: Notes from the Underground as opposed to one of the major novels.

JDP:  I’m not sure you can say what it’s about.  It starts out: “I’m a sick man, I’m not a well man, I’m not a well man at all.  I believe that my liver is diseased.  Well…let it get worse!”  It’s about a neurotic little guy who lives in a (almost, literally, subterranean) little flat in Leningrad, St. Petersburg.  He goes through life--he lives alone, he has a crush on a girl named Lisa--and he goes through life feeling every slight in a hyper-sensitive way. He lets wounds fester until they explode.  The book is also a stylistic masterpiece, almost lyrical. Some view it as the first existentialist novel—100 year before Camus.  And it’s a short novel – 120 pages that you can read in one sitting.

JDP: Yeah, I’ve got a lot of emotional problems (let them get worse!). But I think that every man – if he is really honest with himself – every man relates to neurotic characters.  Who was it (was it Dostoevsky?  If it wasn’t Dostoevsky it was surely another famous neurotic Russian) who said: “Every happy man is either an idiot or a liar.”  I don’t know if I believe that, by the way, but yeah, I like the novel because I think I can relate to the underground man. Hey, at least I’m not a liar.

JDP:  Oh, I am sorry.

JDP:  So this is off the record, when you write this up, you’ll have to say that I anticipated you begging for an apology.  That masterpiece, by the way, was not written by me.  It was written by my brother when he was thirteen, so…

JDP:  To be sure, on both counts: passing the blame and a talented thirteen year old. . . My little brother is probably the most artistically talented person I’ve ever met.  He’s kind of a savant in that regard (he’s a total mess in other regards).  He was amazing as a kid, he played drums, guitar, sang, wrote, all of it.  But on the other hand you listen to the lyrics and you realize, “Yeah, a thirteen year old kid wrote this.” But he was a supremely gifted kid; made everything look effortless. Once, when we were really young—I think I was 14, my brother was 10, the other guys in our band were my age—we snuck into a local bar and talked our way into opening for the “headliner” band—we played the opening set, and the guys from the “headliner” band got to nurse their whiskies for a half hour longer, that was the deal. The “headliners” were famous, in Sioux City at least—one of the guys in the band had played with Tommy Bolin (who played guitar for Deep Purple after Ritchie Blackmore quit), and they’d recently opened for Motley Crue in Omaha. Anyway, we did our set, the crowd loved us (I suppose it’s pretty amusing to a bunch of drunken bikers to see such young kids playing such loud heavy metal con such mucho gusto). Of course, my little brother stole the show, as he always did (and still does). So when the “headliners” came on to do the second set, they asked my little 10-year-old brother to sit in with them. The drum kit was way too large for him; he’d never practiced with these guys before; and for f***sake he was only 10 years old. But man, he slayed ‘em. The bar went nuts. He was on his way to becoming a Sioux City legend. We played in that bar many times over the next six or seven years. But the image of my little brother, at age 10, up on stage stealing the show with an experienced band, is my all-time favorite. . . So anyway, yeah, metal daydream.

JDP:  (Laughs.) On campus or beyond?

JDP:  Well, firstly, I recommend my website which will be migrating to Northern Michigan University.

JDP:  “Metal Daydreams”, “Born to Rock”, and “Plight of the Youth”.  Three original masterpieces from the 1980’s.  So that’s the first place I would look, for salvation, harmonic and otherwise.  I would also recommend that you go to one-half of the charter membership, the founding genius of, The Fragments.  The one-half that still remains at Wabash, and that’s Mark Brouwer.  The other one-half, of course, is me, and so the band you speak of (i.e., post-fragments) was spawned by pure, bitter, envy-- disgust even--at The Fragments, and of course in our anger and self-hatred that we abandoned ship before their meteoric rise to fame. . . I can’t believe I said that without laughing.  I am really proud of myself, that’s gotta be in there.  Yeah, I’m talking to you Morillo.  I know he won’t read it because he doesn’t read The Commentary. . . Btw, I would also look to Dresden for salvation, in this regard, at least this semester. That’s where the real inspiration for this project lies. Do you think anyone will understand this remark?

JDP:  That’s right.  Announcing the non-concert concert.

JDP:  The Thoreau quote is fantastic, and it pretty much sums up why I like the wilderness so much.  We mathematicians explain, or we try to explain, everything.  Mathematics is a Greek word and its root means ‘that which is learnable.’  So when you give your life over to studying mathematics and discovering new mathematics it means you have a huge appetite for learning, and you want to explain everything.  But there is something about a wilderness experience which is beyond that.  It’s one of the only experiences that I’m aware of that I can’t fully explain why I like it, why it’s often such a purifying experience.  It’s a way of “being in the world” that is completely healthy and right, and you can’t always give voice to why it is so.  And in that regard it is quite different from mathematics. 

It could be that I’m just an inarticulate fellow, but I think that it’s also something about the wilderness itself.  The word ‘wilderness’ only makes sense, only has meaning, compared to ‘civilization,’ so there’s something about civilization – artifice is manmade and hence can be explained or at least talked about, whereas wilderness is the opposite.  It’s much harder to “account” for; it’s mysterious, qua Thoreau.

JDP:  Monosyllabic words…so I can’t even use the word “monosyllabic”.  The majority of my research has been in an area of mathematics that you can get a glimpse of at Wabash if you were to take abstract algebra, in particular, the theory of groups. And one way to describe group theory would be to say that it is the investigation into the behavior of sets of objects that conform to a few very simple, quasi-arithmetical rules, and more importantly, their resulting logical consequences—the theorems.  So that would be one way to describe it.  I was drawn to this line of research because of the seductive combination of spare and simple assumptions that give shockingly deep results. The seduction is surely aesthetic: a very simple palette of a few colors that are combined in unanticipated creative ways to give paintings of breath-taking beauty. . . I’ve also gotten involved in the last ten years, with automated theorem proving.  And it has been the combination of automated theorem proving and group theory generalization that has been an almost perfect combination.  To be more specific, the generalization of group theory that I’m most comfortable with is loop theory, and it’s almost as if the theory of loops was tailor-made for the powerful techniques of automated theorem proving and I just happened to be in the right generation of mathematicians, picked the right area of research, happened to meet the right guys at conferences, so that I could learn how to use automated theorem provers and finite model builders at just the right time, right when those tools were emerging, before anyone else did, so that I could solve some hard, old open problems in algebra.  So, anyway, I do loop theory and I use automated theorem provers.

JDP:  Absolutely.

JDP:  One of the things that I like about living in the Upper Peninsula is that it’s a beautiful place.  Everywhere you turn. . . you look to the Lake, and it’s stunningly beautiful.  You look to the lee, and, you know, it is thick coniferous woods, small mountains, streams, lakes…the beauty is overwhelming.  I think that that’s salutary, because what you see – day after day, week after week, year after year – I think eventually gets reflected in your soul.  So if you see beautiful things, you become more beautiful.  If you see ugly things…well, you can finish that thought. 

So one of the reasons that we should study mathematics in the modern university would be the same reason we study poetry, music, painting: because we’ll be better men and women if we do, because it is beautiful.  And then also all of the propaedeutic stuff, the preparation for more serious philosophy and serious stuff that you mentioned with Plato.  And then also in a very crude way, the more mathematics you take, the more well-compensated professions will remain open to you.  A very crude, monetary reason, to be sure, but one with an appeal to many students.

JDP:  Those are my only two choices? 

JDP:  I would rather prove the Riemann hypothesis

JDP:  If you polled 1000 mathematicians and asked for the most well-known open problem in mathematics, that is probably the one that would win.  But that’s not in my own area; in my own area I have some problems that I would like to solve, but I won’t bore your readers with that.

JDP: Smarmy bastard.

JDP:  You mean as opposed to some of the other integers, or integers in general?

JDP:  Do they exist?  Yes, they do exist.

JDP:  The mode of being of mathematical objects is one of the thorniest… Stop your recorder while I think.  That’s really tricky.  Trying to describe their mode of being is the whole point of Jacob Klein’s book Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.  So I don’t know if this is what Plato really meant or not, but this is what Klein says he meant:  the table here in my office is a table insofar as it participates in the ideal form “tableness” floating around out there in the ether of forms and ideas (Professor Brouwer knows I don’t really think this is what Plato was up to, but this is what the textbooks say he was up to).  Now think about numbers: two cats, two dogs, two cattle, two speakers, two computers—each of these exists here in the physical, sensible word.  But where does the “twoness” exist that those things participate in?  For Klein, the world of mathematical ideals or forms, as opposed to the so-called Platonic forms--they’re not quite intermediary, that implies a midpoint--but it’s one notch lower than the Platonic world of forms, so it’s more accessible, more learnable, which is the entire point.  In other words, “twoness” is not something in the sensible, physical world, and it’s not something quite as lofty and abstract as the world of Platonic forms, but it’s sort of the first big step to get there.  And that’s why learning about them is so propaedeutic to philosophy.  So “twoness” exists in a way that’s analogous to, but not coextensive with, the way that Tableness exists. Well, that answer just  sucked, didn’t it?

JDP:  Well, the answer is ‘yes’ in the same way that we all do.  Let me tell you a story: 

My mom now lives in a condo, and the condo association has just uncovered some graft.  The president of the association was ripping off the other homeowners (and if he happens to read this interview, he’s probably going to sue me).  But it was clear that he rationalized every time he was ripping the association off.  So, for instance, the association pays their dues, and then he was the guy who had to hire the snow removal crew.  So he would write the check for the proper amount, hire the company, but he would say:  “Don’t remove the snow from my own driveway.”  And then he would remove the snow from his own driveway, and he would pay himself.  And I guess I’d say that this is a perfect example of the sort of self-delusion that we are all prone to if we are not really diligent, because if you asked this guy if he’s an honest man:  “Sir, are you an honest, law abiding man?”  He’d say, “Well, hell yes I am.  I play by the rules, I work hard.” But he was ripping other people off, and he did it in a way so that he could rationalize it, so he didn’t have to confront that ugly part of his soul.  So that’s what it means to be self-deceptive.  Now what was the question?

JDP:  Well, in general, I’d say that most colleges are pretty self-deceptive about liberal education.  The rhetoric most so-called liberal arts colleges use to talk about the liberal arts is often not grounded in any serious reflection.  Phrases like “the liberal arts” can become mere locutions, buzz words, like “critical thinking”.  This means that if you have an idea—any idea, no matter how cockamamy--that you think sounds nifty for the college, than you can attempt to justify it on the grounds that it is a perfect fit with “the liberal arts” or “critical thinking”; you end up never having to justify it, to ground it by saying what “the liberal arts” are, what “a liberal education” is.  So in general there is a tendency for liberal arts education to be self-deceptive in that way.  In my eight years at Wabash, I don’t think that I was ever clear about what the College thought liberal education was or what the liberal arts were.  I’m quite clear what I think they are, but I was never clear what the College thought they were.  But the College talked about them a lot. I often wondered what it was that we were talking about.

JDP:  Yes.  And by the way, I don’t think that this is necessarily unique to Wabash; I’m sure it applies to most colleges.  But at Wabash, the place I know best, I can say that it is difficult to be more than a couple of standard deviations from the professorial mean regarding attitudes about liberal education.  If you’re one of those outliers, the communal academic life can be challenging.  That was one of the reasons that I’m no longer there.

JDP:  Yes, exactly.  I think of some of my friends on the faculty at Wabash (this applies more generally, but I’m thinking about a few friends in particular, now).  Some people really like to play that role of the outsider, the provocateur.  I guess that being a couple standard deviations from the mean with regard to, amongst other things, ideas about liberal education, even about education in general, can be energizing for some folks.  But for me it’s not; it kind of wore me down.  So it’s personality specific.

JDP:  I think of a liberal education as being different from other forms of education.  Most other forms of post-secondary education are in some ways professional training. You’re trained either to be a surgeon or a refrigerator repairman or a lawyer or an auto mechanic; you’re trained for some sort of professional activity.  Or, at the undergraduate level, you’re trained to go on to graduate school to get that professional credential.  But the hallmark of a liberal education is that it is not merely professional training or training for graduate school (which then gives you the professional training).  So I guess I’ve defined what liberal education is by saying what it’s not, which is a valid way of answering the question (there are worse guys to ape than Socrates!). 

More so, liberal education is a kind of inquiry, it is a kind of inquiry that is not as narrow or as directed as inquiry in the disciplines is.  In fact, I guess that the fundamental difference between liberal education and other forms of education is that liberal education ought not to be entirely grounded in the disciplines.  So I guess that I would say that one of my fundamental disagreements with many folks in the liberal arts education racket is that the reliance on the disciplinary model is probably a false turn for a genuine liberal arts college.  If a liberal arts college is just a bunch of departments stapled together with that teensy, weensy, bitsy (and perhaps even shrinking) two-course core that moves every-so-slightly beyond the disciplines, than in what ways are you really different from being Purdue or IU or Northern Michigan?  And, in fact, if it really is just about disciplines and departments, one could make the argument that it is better to be at IU or Purdue or Northern Michigan (i.e., at a university that does those departments really well, and makes no pretenses about being anything else).

To be more specific than simply “beyond the standard disciplinary model” I would say that a genuine liberal education is one that questions presuppositions. Professional education begins with presuppositions that cannot be (or at the very least, simply aren’t) questioned. Engineering schools teach you how to build bridges; liberal education asks if bridges are worth building. Business schools teach you how to market products; liberal education might ask about the nature of the relationship between human appetites and profit (or perhaps even invite you to judge this relationship morally). A technical school might exploit the law of logical necessity in order to cultivate mathematical and computational competence; liberal education might ask if logical necessity might lead you astray. You get the idea. . . Questioning presuppositions like this is obviously dangerous work. Firstly, if the questioning is genuine, then it must take seriously the question of its own existence (the ultimate presupposition). Obviously, this is a dangerous question. Secondly, when you question presuppositions, you can’t assume ethical conclusions—the beneficiaries of liberal education legitimately might not turn out ethically the way you want them to. And thirdly, questioning presuppositions angers people. It happened not infrequently at Wabash that a colleague would say “That question has been settled” or “The faculty is in agreement on this issue”. Of course, as a matter of policy one has to say silly and unsavory (or worse) things like this from time-to-time (politics is a rough business). But as a matter of academic inquiry, it’s hard for me to imagine ever saying something like this, at least about things that matter. It’s been one of my greatest professional disappointments that faculty culture is mostly hostile to questioning presuppositions. Faculty culture places a far greater premium on unity than it does on the sort of inquiry that allows for questioning presuppositions, at least it has in my experience. This has been a disappointment to me, at times it has even been painful.

JDP:  Bird photography is a subtle business.  Some folks get these giant lenses and they think that a really good bird photograph is one that magnifies the image of the bird so greatly that you can see a little parasite on the second primary feather, or a little dab of mucus in the eye lining.  Other folks think that you want to get the prettiest, colorful little birdie in the picture.  For me, ideally you want to photograph the bird so that it is clear that this is really what you say it is--that this is, say, a Loggerhead Shrike, or whatever it is that you’re shooting.  But also that it has some aesthetic features to it so that it’s not just a hyper-magnified image of the bird.  The idea is that I want “First View” to be a photograph that is not like the sort of photograph or painting that you would find in a field guide, but is instead how you experience that particular bird in the field and in as beautiful a way as possible.  So “first view” means first and foremost my own understanding of what the bird is really like. 

JDP:  Last view?  Well, my last view of Wabash College is of the scores of individual acts of kindness and friendship directed my way as I was leaving.  My last view would be the offers of one last meal together, very kind email messages, and visits in the office…that’s my last view of Wabash.

JDP:  (Hesitant silence, and then…) Maybe.  Because that answer means I’m not a lady. . . Wait, I’ll say it in Italian: May-ah Bee-ah.

TWC:  That’s very vulgar.