In his review of Joseph Hermanowicz’s book Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers (University of Chicago, 2009), Robert Hilborn remarks, “The most important lesson [of the book] is that the science community’s obsession with research as the sole reason for recognition and reward leads to frustration and dissatisfaction when reality fails to match expectations. And that, as the sociologists would put it, ‘leads to anomie’” ( Physics Today, January 2010, page 48). Although that statement essentially describes my career in physics, I still find it shocking. How can brilliant people be so stupid?
According to the Random House Dictionary , 2nd edition (1987), anomie—derived from the Greek word for lawlessness—is a sociological term meaning “a state or condition of individuals or a society characterized by a breakdown or absence of social norms and values, as in the case of uprooted people.” Uprooted people have an understandable excuse. What excuse can the physics community offer?
The obsession with research as the sole measure of an educator’s worth came close to ruining my career but for the intercession of a few farsighted colleagues in the University of Minnesota physics department who came to my aid and helped me get some recognition and at least some improvement in salary. Today, after decades of work and dedication on my part, and after 10 years of retirement, I am considered a master volunteer teacher in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and I had a similar reputation throughout most of my tenure at the university.
The research obsession is both self-reinforcing and self-destructive. The eroding state of science and science education in the US today is at least partly due to that misguided and harmful attitude in our universities. It has disfigured the humanities into useless imitations of some kind of quantitative science and has made the exact sciences a shadow of what they ought to be as part of liberal education and knowledge. It’s tragic that at a time when science should be setting the standard for truth and understanding, science academics and administrators are too preoccupied with their own self-advancement to play the valuable and important leadership role.
My case is a small example of the problem. My department didn’t recognize the value of my talents and skills, which it could have used in “selling” physics to the lay community. I could have been a central player in efforts to popularize, explain, and spread understanding of physics.
Teaching physics has been so undervalued for so many years that its denigration has become a serious, even self-destructive problem for science and society. Now, when we need science and scientists most, the populace has little understanding of the value of either, and even ridicules science on a regular basis. What have we wrought?
