(I didn’t have time to post anything on Wednesday, so I’ll write a second post today.)

I’m on an email list that I’m not supposed to talk about. But I expect that if what I heard is real, you’ll be hearing about it in the education news at some point anyway. A state university that seems to have more students than prestige sent an email to the math department floating the idea of eliminating math as a stand-alone department.

Obviously this was very upsetting to the math department in question. People don’t like change, and here was the administration proposing a very big change. A very big change that would mean that lots and lots of people would need to find new jobs or make significant shifts in how they do their jobs.

My thoughts (in brief) (and thinking much more broadly than just the one department that inspired this post):

  1. As much as we exalt the fact that mathematics is the language of nature and that arithmetic and geometry make up half of the quadrivium, how many people do we really need to employ doing mediocre math research? Like, there is only so much that the world needs to know about the hexaflexagon. The Life of the Mind is great and all, but everything in moderation. Sorry not sorry. (Note that this applies to lots of fields, not just math.)

  2. Also, the only reason that we have so many people devoting their lives to the hexaflexagon is because it is traditional to inflict at least a semester or two of math upon incoming freshmen. I’m going to hazard a guess that at nothing-special state university that there are a lot of students who didn’t learn much algebra in high school and then who go on to be unsuccessful at a course called “college algebra.” There might even be a task force to address this issue. I have only met two people even who were really good at teaching college algebra (one of them, Jeneva, was outstanding). Is there a good reason for the math department to be teaching college algebra? I am not convinced.

  3. Well, that is not quite fair. There is a good reason for the math department to teach college algebra (as currently conceived), and I wonder if the administration of this university has thought things through. I don’t know about this university, but the University of Tennessee has a remarkable amount of student attrition from year to year. This means that there are lots and lots and lots and lots of students taking lower division classes and a smaller number of students taking upper division classes. I’m going to put out a guess that college algebra is one of the cheapest classes for the university to teach. All you need is a room with a blackboard and some chalk. For real, I have taught math in a room that did not have a single electrical outlet. The people who teach college algebra are among the most poorly compensated people at the university (many of them not benefits eligible). These courses that one demeans as drop-out machines? Cash cows. They subsidize the upper division courses.

  4. How will the other departments feel about having to do their own dirty work? I’ve taught calculus to a lot of students who took it because they wanted to major in a popular department, and admission to that major depended on getting a good grade in calculus. I guess it depends on how many faculty lines these other departments get as part of the exchange.

  5. If the students at this university were actually learning from the lower division courses in math department, then I take this all back. But I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to consider that some other academic disciplines could give students a meaningful quantitative experience. Or, at least, one that is no worse than what they are currently getting in the math department.