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\begin{document}
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\large
{\bf Statistics, Science and Public Policy:\\
Shifts in Culture \\[.2in]

R.W. Oldford and M.E. Thompson \\[.3in]
}

Working Paper 99-06

Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science\\
University of Waterloo 
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\vspace*{1in}

ABSTRACT \\[.3in]

\begin{minipage}{6in}
\noindent

In 1999, approximately 40 leading scientists, statisticians,
public science administrators, and journalists were invited to
Herstmonceaux Castle in Hailsham, England for the fourth conference
on Statistics, Science, and Public Policy.  The theme of this conference
was ``The Two Cultures?'' in recognition of the fortieth anniversary of
C.P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture where the growing gulf between the
traditional culture of the arts and the humanities and the newer culture
of science was first identified. 

The papers presented in this technical report are the written versions
of two talks.  The first is that presented by R.W. Oldford in a session
devoted to ``The University Culture''. The second, by M.E. Thompson, was
presented in a session entitled ``Science and the Public Purse''.

These papers, prepared in concert for the conference, took issue with
the identification of distinct cultures and instead chose to concentrate
on drawing attention to the ways in which intellectual culture has
shifts and the effects these shifts have on the role of the members of
the university and on the public support given to research.

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%\begin{document}
\chapter*{Cultural shifts:\\{\Huge Humanities to science to computation}\\
{\huge  R.W. Oldford }}
%\date{July 24, 1999}
%\maketitle
%\begin{abstract}
\subsubsection*{Summary}
It is argued here that the essential phenomenon of import which C.P. Snow described in 1959
as that of two distinct non-communicating cultures  -- one of `literary intellectuals'
one of `scientific intellectuals' -- is better described as a shift in emphasis
within the university culture from a {\em humanities dominated} one
to a {\em science dominated} one.

Society in general and university students in particular
actively participated in this shift.  The natural reaction of the student body
is to pursue perceived opportunity.
The university culture reacted in a lurch from one dominating group to another.
The consequent detrimental effect on the humanities at the universities has been
regularly argued with passion in the forty years since Snow's lecture.

There is now some evidence that another cultural shift is taking place or, in the
language of Snow, that a third culture is growing to stand beside the other two.
Unlike Snow's vision of a third culture, this one is technologically based and
cares little about bridging any perceived gap between the other two.

This new shift presents significant challenges to the natural sciences not unlike those
presented to the humanities at the last significant shift.
Ignore it and the cost to the natural sciences could be great;
recognize it and it could be significantly accommodated.
Either way, there should be a renewed urgency in the university culture
to ask the perennial question of what constitutes a well-educated citzenry.
%\end{abstract}

\section*{Shift in culture}
In 1959, Snow was writing
at a time when the `scientific culture' was ascendant and enjoying great popularity.
The twentieth century was a new age of enlightenment likened to that of the Elizabethan,
with Rutherford as Shakespeare.

Although the twentieth century, and particularly the times between and after the two
world wars, had been very good to science, it was not so good to the letters.
George Orwell wrote ``The literature of liberalism is coming to an end.
As for the writer, he is \ldots merely an anachronism, a hangover from the Bourgeois
age, \ldots from now onwards the all important fact for the creative writer is going to be
that this is not a writer's world.''\footnote{Quoted from de la Mothe, p. 34.}
Overstated perhaps, but it does convey the widely held sentiment that it was a better time
to start a scientific career than a literary one.\footnote{This case is convincingly made by
de la Mothe.}

For the most part Snow's essay on the `Two Cultures' was directed at the `other culture' --
the older, established culture of the literary intellectual.  Just look at the tests
he applies.  It is hard to imagine, even now, that any native English speaking scientist could have made
it through secondary school without having read at least one play of Shakespeare (and Shaw, and Ibsen, and Chekhov,  ...);
but it is still debatable whether a non-scientist should know the second law of thermodynamics (at least as {\em The Second
Law of Thermodynamics}). 
% How about the third law?  Especially since soon after Snow's
%lecture, knowledge of the first two laws has been put to song by that contemporary, comic, yet cultured
%English singing duo Flanders and Swann -- the third law might have been more challenging.
A somewhat comparable literary challenge might be having read and appreciated Horace or  Cicero.

Perhaps the most telling sign of this one-sidedness is that scientists, for the most part, seem to agree
with Snow's
assessment while humanists have been quite dismissive of Snow's `superficial' and even `silly' dichotomy.\footnote{E.g.
Allan Bloom, Russell Kirk, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye.}
Snow's `scientific culture', feeling its youthful strength and insecurity, wants
recognition from the established `intellectuals'.  To me, this seems to be more symptomatic
of a shift than of a separation.

In his rebuttal to critics, written four years after the Rede lecture, Snow struggles to defend his choice
of the word culture and of the number two.  Parenthetically he remarks that ``No one, I think, has
yet complained about the definite article.''

The choice of `culture' is defended by appealing to a dictionary definition meaning ``intellectual development,
development of the mind'' and also to the anthropological distinction made between living groups of people.
Were he to adopt a definition from Coleridge of culture being those `qualities and faculties which
characterise our humanity', Snow admits that neither the literary nor the
scientific constitute cultures but rather sub-cultures.  In this light, the cultural shift is one
of emphasis. In Snow's view, too long has our culture nurtured the literary and starved the scientific.
Snow is interested in having the balance redressed.

Accepting Snow's choice of the word culture, it is easy to see that the number two could
be many more.  Every specialization could be called a culture. Indeed, in the forty years
that has passed since the Rede lecture, sufficient has been written on Snow's `Two Cultures'
that it might legitimately constitute a specialization of its own -- 
a humbling thought for those of us here who have been asked to address the matter for the first time.

Snow defends the number `two' on grounds of simplicity -- it crystallizes the two extremes for contrast.
It is interesting that Snow briefly considers three by the possible separation of technology
from science.  He dismisses it because he has observed that
the technologist, when designing a new technology,
goes through much the same experience as a scientist in designing an experiment.
To this I feel compelled to
add the words of the professional chemist,  Primo Levi, whose fame is established as a writer.
They should evoke kindred feelings from any theoretician:
\begin{quote}
\ldots I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure,
similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of
differential calculus.  It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is,
commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and
describe them with the greatest rigour and the least clutter.''

{\footnotesize From {\em The Periodic Table}, 1975, p. 160.}
\end{quote}
\noindent
A more understandable justification would be that technology has so long been
tied up with science that its separation seems unnatural to Snow.

One thing that the number two has resulted in is an entire cottage industry devoted to
finding number three.
Snow himself started this.
Although `technology' was rejected, in his rebuttal to his critics he did  introduce what he
saw to be the
beginnings of a third culture.  This third culture was being formed
by the social sciences, in Snow's words those 
\begin{quote}
``\ldots intellectual persons in a variety of fields -- social history,
sociology, demography, political science, economics, government (in the American sense), psychology,
medicine, and social arts such as architecture. \ldots All of them are concerned with how human beings
are living or have lived -- and concerned, not in terms of legend, but of fact. 
% I am not
%implying that they agree with each other, but in their approach to cardinal problems --
%such as the human effects of the scientific revolution, which is the fighting point of this whole affair
%-- they display, at the least, a family resemblance.''

{\footnotesize page 70 of {\em The Two Cultures} second edition.}
\end{quote}
%\noindent
%These are what we now call the social sciences.

Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book
{\em The Closing of the American Mind}, identifies the big three disciplines which
``rule the academic roost and determine what is knowledge'' (p. 356).  These are
the natural sciences, which are doing well, the social sciences which are more robust being more in
harmony with the natural sciences although in Bloom's opinion they only succeed in ``aping \ldots the
methods of natural science'' (p. 358),
and the humanities which are languishing having decided ``to proudly set up shop next door'' rather than
to ``humbly find a place at [the] court'' of natural science (p. 358).
The shift from Snow's view of the cultural problems to Bloom's is staggering.

Snow thought that when this third culture came into existence it would serve to ease
communication between the two cultures.   This was because this third culture would have to
 ``be on speaking terms with the scientific one \ldots just to do its job.''
Perhaps it has but, if Bloom is correct, the communication sadly ended there.

More recently, John Brockman and others have seized on the communication between
science and others as the hallmark of the third culture.
His third culture consists of scientific thinkers who are able to communicate
directly with the lay public.  These include well known scientists like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould,
and Roger Penrose, and well known computer scientists like Daniel Hillis and Marvin Minsky.
%, and the occasional philosopher and science writer.

The primary medium for discourse seems to be the internet where
articles and follow up commentary are posted to open discussion groups.
(The principal web site is www.edge.org\//3rd\_culture.)
Whereas early scientists, at least as early as Archimedes, exchanged their ideas in letters written to other scientists,
challenging them to think on them, this third culture purports to replicate the exchange but with a much larger
collection of thinkers (scientists and the lay alike).
The writers and commentators are the third
culture, a culture of individuals whose ideas are reviewed by the public rather than by more traditional (and likely more
conservative) peer system.  Brockman writes
\begin{quote}
``Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the
marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: They will affect the
lives of everybody on the planet.''
\end{quote}
\noindent
Heady stuff.
Absent the internet, and so the immediacy of discussion, and this is just a
bunch of scientists, albeit articulate ones, trying to communicate to the lay public.
Nothing new to that.

In fact Snow had been quick in his rebuttal to point out the existence of such writers as J. Bronowski, G.H. Hardy, and A.N.
Whitehead who in ``some of the most beautiful prose of our time'' (p. 63) wrote directly for public
consumption.
But this is not a third culture in Snow's view,
simply additional evidence that science is
deserving of the word `culture'.

Scientists, curiously, have often not been kind to other scientists writing for the lay public,
particularly if it is found to be promoting a pet theory.
An early example is Descartes's biting review of Galileo's famous book, the ``Two New Sciences'':
\begin{quote}
``... his fashion of
writing in dialogues, where he introduces three persons who do nothing but exalt
each of his inventions in turn, greatly assists in [over]pricing his merchandise.''

{\footnotesize In a letter to the great experimental scientist Marin Mersenne (1588-1647),
dated 11 October 1638 \ldots from Stillman Drake's translation, 1975, p. 388.}
\end{quote}
\noindent
One is reminded of the current and much more public disagreement between Gould and Dawkins
where one worries publicly that the other writes perhaps too well.

A more interesting, and to me much more plausible, candidate for a third culture is the one
rejected by Snow, namely, technology. Not technology as Snow understood
it in 1963.  Far too much has changed since.  And not that of the specialized technology
expressly designed to address scientific questions.
The critical technology here is the general
purpose computer which now appears in schools and homes throughout every industrial society.

The ubiquity of this extremely malleable technology together with the instantaneous
worldwide communication between its users has enabled the growth of what Kevin
Kelly, the executive editor of {\em Wired} magazine, has called the `nerd culture'.

Kelly coined the term last year in
an essay in {\em Science}.  There he described the nerd culture as an outgrowth of science but
one which is quite separate from Snow's two cultures.
\begin{itemize}
\item The nerd culture pursues neither understanding of
the natural world nor of the human condition; it pursues novelty.
\item
Questions are framed so that the answer is
a new technology.
\item
It creates possibilities.
\item
Creation is preferred to creativity.
\end{itemize}
According to Kelly:
\begin{quote}
The culture of science, so long in the shadow of the culture of art, now has another
orientation to contend with, one grown from its own rib. 
\end{quote}
If Kelly is right, our culture is shifting in an important way again.  This time in a direction
which might affect science more than the humanities.

\section*{The student}
Imagine a student now entering university.
% in the midst of this new cultural shift.
The `nerd culture' is part of his or her culture.
It could not be otherwise. 
%He or she could not avoid exposure to the `nerd culture', it is pervasive
%in books, movies, arcades, advertisement, school, and home -- it is part of today's student culture.
What does this student expect of a university education?
What do we expect of this student?

It is a time honoured tradition in academe to lament that students are not what they
once were.  But this just isn't true in any important way.  In terms of
intelligence and motivation little has changed since ancient Greece.

Students have always enjoyed, and will always enjoy, the contemplative and the puzzling.
And, they have always been, and will always be, interested in personal gain -- whether financial, or affiliation with an elite,
or fame, or power for its own sake.
It is no accident, for example, that students appearing in the Platonic dialogues
are intent on honing their rhetorical and dialectical skills so as to acquire and wield political
power.
Nor is it coincidence that the elite of Athenian society would charge Socrates not just with impiety
but also with the corruption of their youth.
One can imagine the appeal of a classical education to a youth in classical times.

Our principal means to give meaningful power to students is through specialization.
Acquiring some mastery of a subject requires spending considerable time
immersed in it, exploring a terrain so well that it not only becomes familiar
but that one can at least imagine how it might be extended into new territory.
This is an intellectual power that every educated person should experience.
Even so, a specialization which cannot assure the student a certain success in
society after graduation will be avoided, if not shunned.

Natural science might still provide that path to success but the nerd culture
has already informed students that computer science delivers in spades!
It is fresh, exciting, important, modern and has yet to experience its Chernobyl.

Like earlier times in the natural sciences,
the nerd culture presents an encouraging and friendly face.  Internet newsgroups
and the like provide a supportive and competitive forum for neophytes and experts alike.
Recall nineteenth century science, when letters to Nature might recount the
strange behaviour of a gentleman's dog, or describe flora and fauna observed on a
trip abroad.

Start up costs are minimal. One achieves 0 to 60\% effectiveness in real world application remarkably fast.
Many budding computer science students make money with these skills before reaching university -- graduate specialization is
unnecessary.  Think of the feedback to the student: older generations are amazed and the skills transfer easily to almost any
area of application!

Intellectually, general purpose computers are machines which manipulate symbols  -- some of these just happen to
represent floating point numbers.  The technology is extremely malleable and so provides
a new medium for representing ideas, expressing relationships, and modelling just about anything.
The only bounds are the imagination and the finite but very large number of states.

This is power -- power with some immediacy.  Joseph Weizenbaum expressed it first, and best, as follows:
\begin{quote}
The computer programmer, however, is a creator of
universes for which he alone is the lawgiver.
So, of course, is the designer of any game.
But universes of virtually unlimited complexity
can be created in the form of computer programs.
Moreover, and this is a crucial point, systems so formulated and elaborated
{\em act out} their programmed scripts.
They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behaviour.
No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful,
has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command
such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.

{\footnotesize  {\em Computer Power and Human Reason}, 1976, p.115.}
\end{quote}
Of course, Lord Acton's dictum applies. That this power corrupts was Weizenbaum's point,
applied to the often over-reaching claims of Artificial Intelligence.

\section*{Challenges}

The nerd culture is, I think, a genuine cultural shift.  Perhaps not as large
as that from a humanities dominated culture to a science dominated culture,
but it does seem more a shift than a fashion.
How we are to accommodate this shift is a significant challenge to the university
and to the natural sciences.

The last shift, that heralded by C.P. Snow's Rede lecture, was accommodated
at a substantial cost to the humanities -- a cost from which we have yet to recover.
Standing proudly aloof, as Bloom said of the humanities, seems a strategy
intent on reducing one's influence.  And aping the methods of the foreign culture
is quickly seen for what it is.  

Fortunately, there is much in the sciences that is already heavily computational
which could easily be, and should be, made more visible to the student.
Gratuitous computational use, however, is not on -- aping is aping.
In this it is important to
remember that, while we may regard the computer as a powerful and even essential tool,
in the `nerd culture' it is the {\em raison d'\^{e}tre}, a malleable medium for
expression -- in, of, and for itself.

The challenges to the natural sciences are:
to ensure that science and scientific reasoning
are an important part of everyone's education,
to attract the good students to the sciences, and
to apply scientific knowledge and reasoning to this new specialization.

The broader challenge to the university culture
is to incorporate important cultural shifts without sacrificing
the best of what went before.
We have a new shift that requires addressing and we have yet to deal justly with the last much
larger shift.

The same questions still need to be answered.
Northrop Frye argued in 1963 that C.P. Snow's problem of two (or now more) cultures
is not a major problem of society.
%Northrop Frye wrote about C.P. Snow's problem of the two cultures:
\begin{quote}
``It is not the humanist's ignorance of science or the scientist's ignorance of the humanities
which is important, but their common ignorance of the society they are living in,
and their responsibilities as citizens.
It is not the humanist's inability to read a textbook in physics
or the physicist's ability to read a textbook in literary criticism, but the
inability of both of them to read the morning paper
with a kind of insight demanded of educated citizens.''\\
{\footnotesize From {\em The Changing Pace in Canadian Education}, the Kenneth E.
Norris Memorial Lectured delivered at Sir George Williams University, January 24, 1963
as reprinted in Frye, 1988, p. 69.}
\end{quote}
\noindent
What should constitute
an education?  Must specializations be so specialized?  And so soon?
Allan Bloom suggests that posing some of these questions would be a threat
to the peace, yet pose them we must.  But  where?

This series of conferences is important in that they
provide a rare forum where scholars from across the spectrum
of intellectual inquiry can raise and discuss these and like
questions.
How to foster the same kind of discussion back at our
home institutions is a challenge for all of us.


\section* {References}

\smallskip \noindent
Bloom, A. (1987). {\em The Closing of the American Mind: How higher
education has failed democracy and impocerished the souls of today's students},
Simon and Schuster, New York.

\smallskip \noindent
de la Mothe, J. (1992). {\em C.P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity},
University of Texas Press, Austin.

\smallskip \noindent
Drake, S. (1978). {\em Galileo At Work: His Scientific Biography},
Dover Publications, Inc., New York.

\smallskip \noindent
Frye, N. (1988). {\em On Education},
Fitzhenry and Whiteside, Markham Ontario.

\smallskip \noindent
Kelly, K. (1998). ``The Third Culture'', {\em Science}
Vol. 279, \# 5353, Issue of 13 Feb 1998, pp. 992 - 993.

\smallskip \noindent
Kirk, R. (1988). {\em The Intemperate Professor and other Cultural Splenetics}, 2nd Edition
Sherwood Sugden \& Company, Peru Illinois.

\smallskip \noindent
Levi, P. (1975). {\em The Periodic Table}, (1984 translation by R. Rosenthal)
Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, Toronto.

\smallskip \noindent
Snow, C.P. (1959, 1964). {\em The Two Cultures},
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

\smallskip \noindent
Weizenbaum, J. (1976). {\em Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation}
W.H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco.
%\end{document}


%\begin{document}
\newpage

\chapter*{Shifting cultures:\\{\Huge The role of societal support}\\
{\huge  M.E. Thompson }}
%\title{Shifting cultures:  The role of societal support}
%\author{M.E. Thompson \\ University of Waterloo}
%\date{July 24, 1999}
%\maketitle

\section*{The role of societal support}

I want to illustrate three aspects of the influence  of societal support on
shifting cultures. First,
the balance of strategic imperatives -- the imperatives of the warriors
and the victims, to use the terminology of Freeman Dyson\footnote{Weapons
and Hope (1984), Chapter 1. Harper \& Row, New York.} --
and their impact on the academic imperative to understand:

\begin{center}
 {\bf Table 1: Strategic Imperatives}

\begin{tabbing}
\hspace{1cm} \= - defence \hspace{4cm} \=  \\
 \> -  creation of wealth \> warriors \\
 \> - global competition \\
 \\
 \> - environmental preservation \\
 \> - health and welfare \> victims \\
 \> - social justice \\
 \\
 \> - quality of life
\end{tabbing}
\end{center}

Then, two
manifestations of a new relationship between societal support and
the academic enterprise: the
noticeable evolution of traditional modes of support, and a more
subtle manifestation contributing to cultural shifts, which I call 
the ``intelligibility test''.

What follows is a collage of quotations, with commentary, taken mainly
but not entirely from the literature of Canadian funding programs.
If there are themes they are the usual ones: that the priorities of 
the warriors are in 
ascendance, with strong implications for academic cultures; and that
the new stronger engagement of society with the academic enterprise
carries with it a sense of ownership which can be wonderfully beneficial
but also constricting -- but the reader may deconstruct at will!

\subsection*{Balance of strategic imperatives}

The new generation of warriors in the developed countries sees a strong
analogy between making war and making money. The latter has gained 
in fascination, being more rewarding and personally fulfilling:

\begin{quote}
Nowadays, CNBC has bureaus in London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. `We caught
on to a Gulf War that's going to last forever.  An event like this
[stock market tumble] happens and Ron Insana becomes Norman Schwarzkopf',
declared CNBC's president, Bill Bolster, \ldots .

New Yorker, Talk of the Town, October 1997
\end{quote}

\begin{quote}
No doubt the boys in red suspenders have destabilized a government
or two in the process.  But by their intolerance for officially
sanctioned lies, they have helped, not hindered, the cause of democracy.
Currency speculators?  Call them freedom fighters.

Andrew Coyne, Southam News, November 1997
\end{quote}

As a cursory glance at any business section confirms, 
fascination with money goes along with  fascination with 
the electronic media.  The Canada Foundation for
Innovation is an extremely important
new federal program which funds physical infrastructure
for research -- equipment and installations and libraries:

\begin{quote}
The Canada Foundation for Innovation has earmarked up to
\$20M for a project to license the electronic delivery of scholarly
periodicals to research university libraries across the
country \ldots Some research libraries are still hopeful that a 
virtual research library, including books as well as learned journals
will exist in Canada in the not-too-distant future.

University Affairs, March 1999
\end{quote}

Public interest in health research: the  plan for 
a Canadian Institutes for Health
Research has recently been launched with the federal budget, which also  
on an interim basis allocated an increase of \$50 million per year for health
research over the next three years to the granting councils and established
programs:

\begin{quote}
An August 1998 poll conducted by Ekos Research found that the vast
majority of Canadians attach great importance to health research.
In fact, when asked about a variety of policy options, Canadians
placed health research only slightly behind funding for medicare, and
ahead of tax cuts and debt reduction, as their top choice for 
government action.

First communiqu\'{e}, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, November
1998
\end{quote}

The people responding to the August 1998 survey no doubt were thinking,
``Maybe they'll find a cure for such and such a condition before it's
too late for my mother, my brother, my child.''  In a more recent mission
statement, the improvement of the health of Canadians is secondary
 to considerations of international competition and the
synergy of health research and the economy:

\begin{quote}
 \ldots  it is critical that Canada ensure global competitiveness for
the funding of this innovative new enterprise \ldots

Therefore, as a primary mission, the CIHR will facilitate investigator-
initiated and discovery driven research that creates the new knowledge 
required to feed the innovation pipeline and improve the health of
Canadians.

The CIHR Concept\\
http://www.cihr.org
\end{quote}

A plaintive note, sounded by a plant geneticist who studies the speciation of
desert flora:

\begin{quote}
At the announcement of provincial funding for UW research on Monday,
UW president James Downey remarked that ``After a period of relative
drought, it can be said that the desert of academic research is 
beginning to bloom again.''

Biology professor John Semple finds some irony in that analogy since, he
says, ``As a consequence of over concern for `industrial partners' research
by federal and provincial governments, there is an ever decreasing
amount of funding for the study of deserts and things that bloom.''

UW Daily Bulletin, March 17, 1999
\end{quote}

And indeed, the ``strategic areas''
of the granting councils,  of which two are the
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) are
extremely wide ranging but quite anthropocentric:

\begin{center}
{\bf Table 2: Strategic themes}
\begin{tabbing}

NSERC \= - Biotechnologies \\
  \> - Energy Efficiency Technologies \\
  \> - Environmental Technologies \\
  \> - Information Technologies \\
  \> - Manufacturing and Processing Technologies \\
  \> - Materials Technologies \\
\\
SSHRC \> -
Challenges and Opportunities of a Knowledge-based Economy \\
  \> - Society, Culture and the Health of Canadians \\
  \> - Exploring Social Cohesion in a Globalizing Era \\
  \> -  Valuing Literacy in Canada 
\end{tabbing}
\end{center}

\subsection*{Modes of support}

Another president and another professor, this time
talking about donations  --  the engagement and the snares: 

\begin{quote}
The thing with private support is that it's not just valuable for the
funds it generates, but also for the process of accountability it 
engenders.  Engaging with the individuals and communities that surround
us causes us to become a better university.

Rob Prichard, President,
University of Toronto, Autumn 1997
\end{quote}

\begin{quote}
This is the modern tension.  The mediaeval scholar had to worry about
the church \ldots. We have to concern ourselves with the directing power
of money.  It's a seductive and driving influence.

Bill Graham, President of University of Toronto Faculty Association,
June 1998.
\end{quote}

My own department has recently received a very large gift
>from a donor who insists on 
remaining anonymous and receiving no benefit from the donation.  And
there are many others who give large donations to support institutional
priorities out of altruism or gratitude.  But  not every large donor is
content to be honored with a scholarship, a lecture series, or a chair.
Donor agreements increasingly use the language of partnership.

The older language of collaborative research and development and university/
industry synergy is giving way as well, at least for now, to the  
language of partnerships: public sector/private 
sector partnerships where  both sides are equally engaged, 
leading  to quantum
jumps, simultaneously, in academic prowess and profitability.
The Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund (ORDCF), the agency
concerned in President Downey's announcement,  talks not of
projects but investments:  

\begin{quote}
 \ldots [we must get used to thinking of] 
the scholarly pursuit of truth alongside the pragmatic pursuit
of profit.

ORDCF spokesman, April 1999
\end{quote}

\begin{quote}
If your vision does not exceed the complement of researchers and their
excellent track records already in place, and if the investment by the
ORDCF and your partners doesn't vault your institution into a pre-eminent
position in their area, then you probably haven't got an opportunity
whose vision encompasses the potential for high levels of excellence
and impact.

Open letter to ORDCF community, 1998
\end{quote}

SSHRC has taken up the language of partnerships as well, with
an emphasis on  non-financial returns,  and joint ownership of the
research activities:  

\begin{quote}
 Dr. Renaud [President of SSHRC] said that the new theme programs will
\ldots forge stronger linkages between university researchers, various
communities and institutions -- governments, for example -- that need
social sciences and humanities research expertise in order to craft
policy and make decisions \ldots A key goal is to build interdisciplinary
partnerships, bringing together the `producers' and `consumers' of research     
\ldots

SSHRC Website December 1998
\end{quote}

The new SSHRC Community-University
Research Alliance  (CURA)
program will actually receive applications jointly from 
universities and community organizations. The latter will have not only a 
stake in the research, but a new kind of ownership. 

\subsection*{The intelligibility test}

Perhaps the mathematicians feel the intelligibility test
as acutely as any. A recent cartoon
in the December 1998 issue of  The Emissary, showing a mathematician
being pelted by rotten tomatoes, has the caption ``Let  $M$ be an 
ensemble of matrices with a measure $\mu$ \ldots ''.  

Researchers are increasingly encouraged to explain their work
in plain language, to make their work intelligible to the public and to the
overseers of the funding programs.  In one way this is a very positive
development, in that it reflects a public  and political 
eagerness to become involved.
But it can also be stifling.  
Very often, if research has reached the stage where it is ready to be made 
clear to a non-expert, it is essentially finished research. The
intelligibility test cannot easily capture, except in retrospect,
the creative throes at the
beginning of research.  I worry about this particularly in connection
with new researchers.  The application form for the Ontario Premier's Research 
Excellence Award, for new researchers, says only that a 150
word summary in plain language must be given.  But the instructions for the
first round of proposals
given to our applicants internally went further: 

\begin{quote}
[The proposal] is not written for a committee of your peers as are proposals to
NSERC/SSHRC/MRC.  It will be reviewed first by civil servants in the
Ministry \ldots then by the PREA Board \ldots generally the committee
is composed of experts in bio-technology, engineering and information
technology.  Both of these groups of individuals should be regarded
as intelligent generalists \ldots Therefore, the proposal {\em must} 
be written in general language that these individuals can understand.

UW internal memo, 1998
\end{quote}

And the oral
instructions went further still:  don't use technical terms or 
acronyms;  try to tell a story which will capture the imagination.
In later rounds, the intelligibility requirement has given way to
an executive summary requirement, 
with applicants being asked to cut their detailed research
proposals down from five pages to two!

The CFI  has a standard 
application form, to be filled out by  all, including new researchers applying
for equipment under the new opportunities program.  For
each of ten categories, the applicant must choose a phrase from a menu of
phrases,  
and take up to a page to
justify the chosen phrase.  The intention
is to enable the application to be judged by
non-experts: 

\begin{quote}
The assessment section gives the applicant the opportunity to assess
the project against each of the CFI criteria in a structured way, 
using the ProGrid$^{TM}$ methodology, which is a combined application/evaluation
tool.

ProGrid is a procedure for measuring the value of intangible assets,
where precise numerical information is not available.  It is a 
decision-assist tool customized to the needs of the CFI \ldots
Reviewers will evaluate the merit of the project using the same 
methodology.

\end{quote}

Seasoned 
applicants appear to  take this  new kind of form in stride, 
though privately regarding it perhaps as an invitation to new
levels of perjury.  But perhaps a new researcher, at the
outset of a program which could go anywhere, should be excused from
this kind of exercise. 

Apparently even NSERC has been assaulted by the rotten tomatoes  of the
clamour for plain language once too often, as evidenced by this quote
>from the French edition of the most recent issue of Contact:

\begin{quote}
Just call us ``En'serk'' -- spelled ``NSERC'' --

Even other federal departments have been known to get the English
version of our name wrong \ldots  

Ce texte n'a pas \'{e}t\'{e} traduit, car son contenu ne peut \^{e}tre
compris que dans la langue de Shakespeare.

CRSNG Contact Printemps 1999
\end{quote}

Further up in the text, francophone readers, members of the
scientifically educated public, are told that they, like their anglophone
counterparts, 
need no longer remember what CRSNG stands for.

But of course there is a more positive
 way of looking at that other academic imperative,
the imperative to communicate, and I will let a writer on mathematics have
the last word  (Allyn Jackson of the AMS and MSRI):

\begin{quote}
  \ldots What do mathematicians hope to accomplish by
influencing media coverage of their subject?  If the hope is that
increased media coverage will translate into increased financial support
for mathematics, that hope might be misplaced.  Consider the example 
of NASA, whose highly successful public relations organization captivated
the nation with full-color footage of space exploration but whose
budget has shrunk dramatically in recent years.  Is celebrity the goal?
It is hard to imagine that many mathematicians yearn for the harsh and
fickle limelight accorded to celebrities today.  Perhaps the aim
is simpler:  To edify the public about an important part of human culture.
This is the most exalted and difficult goal of all.  What it requires is
a new orientation for media coverage of mathematics, one that makes
a place for all the important developments in mathematics, not just
the most easily explainable.  It also requires mathematicians to think
deeply about how to describe in plain terms why these developments are
important.  The media, with their newfound attention to mathematics,
may well be ready to listen.

The Emissary, December 1998
\end{quote}
\end{document}

\end{document}