Long-time Giants quarterback Eli Manningannounced his retirement Friday after 16 years with the Giants. The last couple of years haven’t been great for him, with lots of people in sports media, and even some Giants fans, lining up to blast him as mediocre to bad. I think that’s largely a mistake.

Part of the problem is that most football fans vastly overrate the importance of “skill position” players relative to the line. The offensive line in particular is grievously underrated, mostly because there aren’t obvious flashy statistics for line play. Quarterback performance is hugely reliant on the offensive line, and Manning was hampered for years by playing behind some really awful blockers, because the Giants ownership tend to be cheap that way. He did remarkably well as a passer considering how regularly he had rushers right in his face. It’s not terribly surprising that arguably his greatest moment is a play where he had to pull away from what seemed an obvious sack to get free for a pass, because he had to do that all the time.

He gets slagged a bit for the Giants’ poor record outside of those two Super Bowl runs, but this sort of overlooks the bit where the Giants were 11-1 in 2008 and putting up great numbers before Plaxico Burress shot himself in the leg. They were a dominant team for most of that season, but the loss of Burress and the furor around his armed jackassery threw the team off and they never recovered.

Burress is also a good example of one of the things that I think is maybe the best testament to Manning as a QB. The signing of Burress is really the one time in the Manning era the Giants front office went out and got a “skill position” player in free agency, a move that was widely considered underwhelming at the time (Burress was the second or third-best receiver for the Steelers before that). Other than that, they were lining up either guys they drafted, or cast-offs from other teams.

What speaks well about Manning is the number of times through his tenure that reporters and pundits would talk about these guys as “all the offensive weapons” for the Giants. And also how many of them left New York for more money with other teams only to do nothing: guys like Hakeem Nicks, Kevin Boss, even the recipient of Manning’s other great Super Bowl play, Mario Manningham. These guys looked like really good receivers when they were with the Giants, but never did anything after they left. This doesn’t mean they withered after leaving the care of the Giants’ ace training staff; instead, I suspect that they were never actually all that good, but were made to look better by Manning throwing to them.

Which is not to say that Manning was a flawless quarterback. Nobody else in the history of the NFL has had quite the same gift for sailing a ball about eight feet over the head of a wide-open receiver (often to an opposing safety). And Eli had a tendency to attempt passes he really shouldn’t, trying to force the ball to well-covered receivers when he should’ve just chucked it into the stands to keep possession. He retires with a terrible touchdown-to-interception ratio, and most of that denominator was pretty directly his fault.

But the most important thing about him was that for fifteen years, he was there for every game. Until the very end there was no controversy about who would be playing quarterback for the Giants, and in the perpetual feeding frenzy that is the New York sports media scene, you can’t put a value on that. I mean, just look at the Jets.

For a star athlete in the New York market, there are really only two ways to succeed: you can either be a flamboyant larger-than-life figure, or you can be the boringest guy on Earth. The former has its benefits when it works out (see “Strahan, Michael”), but also a limited shelf life– the only thing the New York media like more than building up a larger-than-life figure is tearing them down. The boring path is harder to stay on, but really about the only way to have a long and successful career in New York.

Happily for Eli Manning, and the Giants, I’m not sure there’s ever been another NFL player more temperamentally suited to walk the boring path. He was relentlessly calm in the face of one of the most frenetic media cultures in the world, and that helped him keep his spot and keep the team stable for a decade and a half. And as a result, he leaves the Meadowlands as a beloved figure.

It’ll be interesting to see what he does after football. He doesn’t have the same pitchman energy as his more ubiquitous brother, though his few forays into media have shown a sneaky good sense of humor. It’s a little hard to see him making a second career in the media, but in a weird way, he might be good at it.

Whatever he does, though, I wish him the best. There are some things that could’ve gone better while he was playing, but he had clearly the best career of any QB I’ve seen with the Giants, and those two Super Bowl runs were magical. Whatever the stats say, I’ll always regard him as one of the greats.

I get very little tv-watching time these days, thanks to a combination of rising early and kid-wrangling. I did, however, manage to stream the ten episodes of The Expanse that Amazon pushed out in mid-December, and wanted to type up some thoughts about it. This will, of course, be spoiler-filled, so here’s some filler space:

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This season covers most of the book Cibola Burn, and like that book, it represents a major change in the series, with most of the action taking place on the surface of a planet. Two groups have made competing claims to the planet and its mineral wealth, and the Rocinante is sent there to find out what’s going on. Which, of course, all goes sideways because the Rocinante is carrying a bit of active protomolecule with it, and its arrival re-activates long-dormant machinery on the planet, with disastrous results.

I don’t remember this particular book all that clear, but did know the basic beats of the story, which both helped and hurt with the tension in the usual manner when you’ve read the book the movie was based on. They make enough minor changes to keep things interesting, though, and it was cool to see what the set designers made of the planet and the protomolecule tech.

And, of course, the cast is excellent, particularly Wes Chatham as Amos. The “weirdly likeable barely restrained psychopath” thing is hard to pull off, but somehow it works, and he’s probably my favorite thing on the show. (An opinion shared by many…) Burn Gorman as Security Chief Murtry makes an outstanding antagonist, though he and Amos don’t go head-to-head nearly enough.

The Ilus/ New Terra plot is only one piece of the season, though. Where the books can more easily drop a whole set of characters for a time, the show needs to keep its fine collection of actors under contract, which means we also get a pair of plots about Bobbi Draper getting involved with criminals back on Mars, and the fabulously foul-mouthed Chrisjen Avasarala running a campaign for Secretary General back on Earth. Neither of these really worked for me, though I understand why they were there and what purposes they served. The third add-on was a little more effective, with Drummer and Ashford showing off their fabulous accents in pursuit of charismatic terrorist Marco Inaros, who’s up to something.

Anyway, everybody involved with this project is fantastic, and even the bits that didn’t quite come off were still way better than the historical average for live-action space opera. There were some slightly jarring aspects to the change from the SyFy network to Amazon streaming, mostly around the language– they can say “fuck” now, and boy, do they ever. This does at least enable maybe my favorite line of the season, namely the end of Avasarala’s charge to Holden: “Don’t put your dick in it, Holden. It’s fucked enough already.” (To which Amos replies “Good advice.”)

The one change from the books that I missed was a bit at the end of the book where, as I recall, Avasarala talks to Holden and says that she had sent him there not as a peacemaker, as she claimed, but thinking that he would end up being a chaos agent, as he’d been previously. Holden actually doing what he was told was the mission ended up throwing off her plans. That could’ve been a fun scene, but the show went in a slightly different direction with the whole thing.

I was wondering whether they would really follow the plot of the books, which takes an extremely dark turn in the next volume, but the Drummer/Ashford plotline is clearly setting things up to really Go There. Thanks to the set-up work, it’ll be somewhat less jarring when they get there than it was in the books, but I’ll be interested to see how they handle it.

Anyway, it continues to be a really good show; maybe not transcendently brilliant, but solid fun, and I hope they can keep it up.

We’ve come to the end of yet another year, which is a good time to collect the blogging I’ve done over the last few months but not yet rounded up here.

—What Will Win The 2019 Nobel Prize In Physics? The annual guessing game. As usual, I lost.

—How The 2019 Nobel Prize In Physics Depends On Atomic Physics And How Lasers Can Do Better: Some thoughts on the spectroscopy needed to make radial-velocity detection of extrasolar planets work, and how frequency combs can improve that.

—Why You Should Give Thanks For These Three Quantum Phenomena: A seasonally appropriate ride on my quantum-in-everyday-life hobby horse.

—Decades And Discoveries: Defining The Eras Of Physics History: The first of several posts wrapping up the calendrical decade of the 2010s, setting up the idea of notional decades in physics like those that we talk about in pop culture.

—What Are The Physics Stories That Define The 2000s And 2010s?: The previous post stopped at the end of the 20th century, this one picks up where that left off.

—What Was The Most Important Physics Of 2019?: Wrapping up a single year this time.

—Three Physics Topics That Might Define The 2020s: Looking to the future, with the same notional decade framing as the previous posts.

This was a pretty frustrating stretch of blogging, to be honest; other than the Nobel stuff, none of these was particularly well read. I’m not super happy with most of them content-wise, either, because I was squeezing them in around a really hectic period of work and travel for various projects. That’s why I went nearly all of November without blogging at all, and I maybe should’ve taken a longer break.

Anyway, while I can’t be said to be heading into 2020 with any great blogging momentum, I can’t exactly stop it from arriving. So, like it or not, that’s a wrap on 2019 and we’re on to the next thing…

It’s been a couple of months, so here’s a collection of stuff I’ve written for Forbes recently:

—How Long Does Quantum Tunneling Take?: A look at some new results on one of the most popular questions in quantum physics: Does a tunneling particle spend time “inside” the barrier, or pass through instantaneously?

—How Does Classical Reality Emerge From Quantum Environments?: A look at some experiments that use small-scale artificial “environments” to probe how decoherence happens.

—How Ancillary Technology Shapes What We Do In Physics: Prompted by a question at a public talk, a look at the technological constraints that determine what experiments we do.

—What I Was Wrong About In Physics: Stealing a blog topic from my former ScienceBlogs colleague Razib Khan, a look at places where I’ve changed my mind about physics over the last (almost) twenty years.

—Many Worlds, But Too Much Metaphor: Why I don’t like the way most people talk about the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, and what I think would be a better approach.

—Can You Have Infinite Anything And Not End Up With Infinite Everything?: Maybe if you start with neutrinos?

This stretch is a pretty good demonstration of the inherently frustrating thing about modern blogging, in that I’m about equally happy about all of these as pieces of pop-physics writing, but the response to them has been wildly different. The tunneling one got tons of readers, but next to no discussion on social media, while the Many-Worlds one was basically The Velvet Underground and Nico: only a (relative) handful of people read it, but they all had interesting things to say about it.

I don’t really know what if anything can be done about this. I don’t know that I’d be comfortable being any more aggressive in self-promoting these on social media, because I tend to get eye-rolly about other people overdoing that (and also because when I visit my own posts and see the number of auto-playing ads Forbes slaps on these, I recoil…). Mostly, I’m just grateful that I don’t need to rely on blog income to make rent. That said, it’d be nice to have extra beer money…

A few weeks back, the kids started agitating for us to get Netflix, specifically so they could watch Stranger Things. So, we broke down and signed up for the streaming service. Whereupon The Pip watched maybe half of the first episode before “Nope”-ing out of the show (it’s hard to get a good read, but I think he was more bored by the middle-school stuff than scared by the monster), and SteelyKid watched the whole first season, but recoiled from the scene of Joyce and Bob making out in the supply closet in the season two premiere. Kids.

On the other hand, I had been sort of peripherally aware of Stranger Things as something likely to appeal to me, so I jumped at the chance to watch all three seasons over the course of the last couple of weeks. And I have this blog, so of course I’ll write up my reactions…

This is, as I said, something that’s very much in my pop-cultural wheelhouse, given that I’m just about exactly the age of the principal characters. So, I have direct memories of being a nerdy 14-year-old boy in 1985 to compare this to, and it does a pretty good job. I was actually a little surprised at how little the show leans on the nostalgia aspect, though, given the social-media conversations I caught the edges of– it basically just determines the sound track and set dressing, but for the most part, they don’t throw the 80’s-ness at the viewer quite as aggressively as I expected. There are a few points when they do– the “New Coke” speech in the third season lands with a thud– but it’s mostly just a period piece, not a “Look at us, we’re doing a period piece!” piece.

It was also interesting to me that there’s very little about the period setting that’s essential to the action. That is, it’s easy to imagine transplanting the core plot to other decades. The Cold War figures as a motivation for some of the characters, but you could easily move it forward 20 years and replace the Soviets with Al Qaeda without significantly changing anything else. Or, for that matter, move it forward to the present day without needing to change any of the Russian-speaking cast at all…

In terms of on-screen spectacle, it’s very well done, mostly because the cast is terrific. They rounded up a really good cast of young actors for the principal roles, particularly Noah Schapp as Will and Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven, both of whom do excellent work with body language.

The adults are also really good, with Winona Ryder doing a great job as the barely-holding-it-together Joyce. I also realized in the middle of the third season that while I was one of the boys at the center of the story, at this stage in my life the character I most related to was David Harbour’s exasperated-dad Hopper. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that SteelyKid doesn’t have telekenetic abilities…

Plot-wise, there was nothing too surprising, but they hit all the necessary beats and hit them well. The third season went a little over the top with the poor-man’s-David-Cronenberg body-horror stuff, but that’s a matter of taste as much as anything. I also could’ve done without Jake Busey; honestly, that whole plot line could’ve gone away, but his part was particularly awful. But, again, a matter of taste, and I’ve always hated that kind of thuddingly obvious messaging.

Of course, being who I am, I can’t help poking at the setting a bit, and really, there’s very little there that makes any sense at all. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense of the size of Hawkins, IN, which oscillates between “small Midwestern town” (it appears to have one store and a total of six cops) and “mid-size city” (dozens of people vanish without really raising alarm, and nobody knows anywhere near enough about everybody else’s business for it to really be a small town) as required by the plot. And where, exactly, do the presumably hundreds of employees of the Hawkins National Lab live that none of the characters know anybody who works there, and life just goes on as usual after they’re all eaten by extradimensional monster dogs?

Also, the Russian plot in the third season is sublimely ridiculous, in terms of the setting. I mean, the scale of the operation is mind-boggling, and how, exactly, did they get that number of Soviet scientists and military personnel who speak absolutely no English into Indiana in 1985?

This kind of hits the sweet spot of stupid, though, in that it’s dumb enough to be entertaining to think about, but not played so seriously that it gets in the way of enjoying the action. If it continues much longer, it runs some risk of crossing into the MCU Zone where the sheer weight of dopey continuity starts to overwhelm the fun bits, but for the moment it’s still in John Wick territory. As always, your mileage may vary.

Anyway: A fun show, and I’m glad I watched it. When they do a next season, I’ll definitely tune in, and actually maybe be in step with the pop-cultural moment for the first time in years.

It’s time for another post collecting links to my blogging at Forbes. This is a highly irregular series, so where the last installment covered about six months, this one’s only going to be two. But I was a busy blogger in July, so it’s a reasonable amount of material:

—Physicists Gotta Physics: Why New Eperiments Are Inevitable: In which I take issue with Sabine Hossenfelder over the question of whether it’s a good idea for physicists to start new experiments looking for exotic physics predicted by current theories.

—What Do We Know About Quantum Jumps? A look at what’s arguably the signature quantum phenomenon.

—The (Mostly) Quantum Physics of Making Colors: A run through several processes that make light of different colors, and how they’re rooted in quantum mechanics.

—Why Study Science? The Same Reason You Would Study Anything Else: A little pushback on the common narrative that students choosing STEM majors are doing so mostly for economic reasons.

—The Crisis In Theoretical Physics Is Not A Moral Imperative: More about my disagreement with Sabine Hossenfelder over whether physicists in other fields should launch experiments to search for “new physics” predicted by current theories.

—Indirect Contributions Are Essential To Physics: Some thoughts about physicists who are best known for teaching and helping others who became more famous.

So, you know, that’s some stuff. As I noted on Twitter the other day, I realized that I’ve mostly become a pundit these days, doing commentary and not much in the way of reporting or direct experiment/analysis. That’s been driven by a combination of software and editorial limitations and what the audience at Forbes will read– posts where I play around with stuff on my own just get no traction there, for whatever reason. And since those are very labor-intensive, I mostly don’t bother any more.

On the one hand, I sort of miss the more playful style, and wish I had the time and space to do more of that. On the other, the conscious realization that I’ve made this shift is sort of helpful, mentally. Thinking of the blog less like a space where I ought to be doing lots of actual physics work and more like a kind of weekly-ish column has helped make it easier to see angles and Takes that turn into blog posts. It’s definitely a difference, though, and I’m still sorting out what I think about the whole thing.

Anyway, that’s the current state of my physics blogging. I’ve already got a couple of posts up in August, and an idea for at least one more, so we’ll see if the “Weekly-ish column” approach continues to work, or if I fall into something else.

Yesterday I had to spend a bunch of time waiting for a repair guy, so as a way of passing time I started a very silly thread on Twitter: descriptions of what various famous historical physicists would’ve been like on Twitter. You can find the start of the resulting thread of extremely niche jokes here, but as a hedge against the deliberate ephemerality of Twitter, I’ll collect them here in blog form:

P.A.M. Dirac has been on Twitter since 2009, follows two people, and has tweeted six times. All six have gone viral.

Niels Bohr’s feed is entirely full of 35-part tweet storms with the threading all screwed up.

Sir Isaac Newton’s Twitter feed alternates between screenshots of complicated calculations annotated in Latin and quote-tweet dunking on Robert Hooke

Richard Feynman’s Twitter feed is mostly Instagram links to photos of himself at sketchy parties and video clips of bongo playing.

Wolfgang Pauli’s Twitter feed is just endless shitposting.

Marie Curie’s Twitter feed is still highly radioactive.

Otto Hahn’s Twitter feed is all retweets of Lise Meitner.

Julian Schwinger’s Twitter feed is only active between midnight and 6am. It’s mathematically identical to Sin-Itiro Tomonaga’s.

Lev Landau’s Twitter feed contains all the rest of Twitter.

Henry Cavendish is not on Twitter.

Erwin Schrödinger’s public Twitter is polite and erudite, but he’s really on the site so he can send skeevy DMs to a series of younger women.

Once a month, Werner Heisenberg RT’s a bunch of old stories about how he deliberately sabotaged the Nazi atomic bomb project.

Emmy Noether is only allowed to post to Twitter using David Hilbert’s account.

Robert Millikan has been known to delete selected tweets that don’t fit in with the story he’s trying to tell.

Ernest Rutherford inexplicably appears on a list of “100 Top Chemists on Twitter”

James Watson’s most-liked tweet was copied without attribution from Rosalind Franklin’s Twitter feed.

George Gamow has been known to @ Hans Bethe into random Twitter threads for no good reason. Bethe is bemused, but proceeds to contribute usefully to them.

Johannes Kepler keeps quote-tweeting incorrect decodings of Latin cryptograms from Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei’s Twitter account was suspended for making fun of the Pope.

All of David Bohm’s tweets are geotagged with a definite position and momentum, but you can only predict them with a non-local model.

Pierre de Fermat’s tweets are full of abbreviations so that he can reach his point with the least possible characters.

James Prescott Joule can give you an exact numerical value for how much work he would’ve done if he hadn’t been faffing about on Twitter.

Michael Faraday got a permanent job because he made a kick-ass Storify out of Humphrey Davy’s tweets.

John Stewart Bell tweets more than can be explained with any strictly local model.

It’s possible that I’ll return to this, but I’m close to exhausting all the historical physicists I know anything amusing about (I’ve been trying to avoid jokes about people who are still alive or recently deceased). If I do come back to it, I’ll use the #FamousPhysicistsOnTwitter tag.

I managed to sneak out for a few hours on Saturday to see the new Quentin Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. I’m a sucker for his movies in general, and this is one of the few big releases this year that seemed interesting enough to go see right away.

This is, of course still in theaters, but it’s also not really possible to say much beyond “I liked it” without spoiling the plot, so I’ll throw in some space in the unlikely event that anybody’s reading this and doesn’t want the movie spoiled.

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I’m totally on board with not wanting this spoiled, by the way– I made a point of avoiding spoilers for the plot before I saw it, which is important because it’s based on real events, but Tarantino has demonstrated a willingness to play fast and loose with actual reality. It was clearly going to diverge from reality at some point, but it wasn’t clear where, and I didn’t want to know.

This is regularly described as “wistful” and a “love letter to old Hollywood,” and that’s largely accurate. It’s mostly free of the ostentatious flourishes that usually mark a movie as “Tarantinoesque”– for most of the run time, it’s remarkably quiet.

The bulk of the movie follows a couple of specific days in the life of some marginal Hollywood figures, former TV star Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double and general gofer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who happen to live next door to the house being rented by Roman Polanski and his new wife Sharon Tate. Interspersed with the day-in-the-life stuff about Dalton’s latest guest spot on a tv show and Booth’s day spent fixing Dalton’s TV and picking up a hitchhiker there are scenes of Tate running some errands and stopping into a theater to watch herself.

The Tate stuff is the obligatory meta controversy about the movie, because Margot Robbie as Tate doesn’t have much dialogue. She’s mostly there to embody the potential Tate had at the time, and to just exude niceness– when people call this the most sentimental of Tarantino’s movies, I think this is the part that’s most responsible for that feeling.

Given that role, and the weight that comes with playing a fictional version of a real person, I think it makes sense as a matter of craft for Robbie-as-Tate to say very little. She certainly couldn’t be turned into an ass-kicking figure like Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies, and I’m really not sure how you could fit in a big flashy Tarantinoesque speech for her.

It would also be kind of incongruous for her to get that kind of big speech, because nobody else really gets one, either. The only really classically Tarantino scene is the bit where Marvin Schwarzs the producer lays out a theory of Dalton’s career trajectory to try to convince him to go to Rome and make spaghetti Westerns. (Schwarzs is played by Al Pacino; it’s a kind of broad performance, but then so is everything he’s done since about 1993…) The runner-up is probably the bit where an eight-year-old actress (played, I think, by Julia Butters) holds forth to Dalton on the set of the tv show where he’s playing the villain of the week.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a bunch of Tarantino’s signature meta commentary in here, it’s just a little more subtle than usual, largely showing up through things like the mix of real and fictional people who appear, and the way he cast those roles. (As an aside, watching that video and listening to the podcast linked above made me realize how decoupled from pop culture I’ve become– twenty years ago, I probably would’ve known who a lot of those actors are, but the names “Damian Lewis” and “Scoot McNairy” really don’t mean anything to me, though they clearly matter to the crew at the Ringer.) There are a few flashes of “aren’t I just the cleverest boy in the whole world“, like the Bruce Lee scene, but it’s not as in-your-face about that as in some of his showier movies.

Of course, one of his real strengths is the ability to build tension in a scene where nothing all that dramatic is actually happening, and he’s got that here in a couple of places. This is where not spoiling the plot really matters, because it’s not at all clear what’s going to happen in the interactions with the Manson Family. The Spahn Ranch scene was genuinely tense when Booth confronted Squeaky Fromme (and well defused by Bruce Dern’s appearance as George Spahn). (The trailer was good at setting this up, in quoting the “Charlie’s going to love you” line, leaving the implication that Booth and/or Dalton might get pulled into the Manson cult. That’s pretty quickly taken off the table, though, when Booth asks “Pussycat” for ID in the car.)

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Tarantino movie without a bit of gratuitous violence. There are really only two violent scenes, one a bit of literal hippie-punching at the end of the Spahn Ranch sequence, and the other the climactic showdown. As is Tarantino’s wont, these are both bloody enough to be disturbing, though the ending then goes completely over-the-top to the point of becoming funny.

Anyway, while it shares the alternate-history aspect with Inglourious Basterds, in a lot of ways, this has more in common with Jackie Brown, being a quieter, more character-focused kind of film. DiCaprio does really great work, committing fully to the washed-up-star character of Dalton (“Why did I have to drink eight whiskey sours? Why couldn’t I have stopped at three or four?”). Pitt as Booth is a lot less showy, but also very good (though I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for that type of character, so salt to taste).

In addition to the alternate-history ending, though, this does have another common element with Basterds. That is, when Basterds came out, my immediate reaction was “This is Tarantino doing a Coen brothers movie,” and I have a bit of the same reaction here. This is much more No Country for Old Men than Fargo, though– much more contained and less showy, but with some similar preoccupations.

Anyway, while this wasn’t super flashy, I thought it was very good, maybe excellent. I see so few serious movies these days that it’s a little hard to rate things– the only movies I’ve seen in the theater in the last several months were Spiderman: Far From Home (with the kids) and John Wick 3: Parabellum (just me). This is easily of higher quality than either of those as a capital-F Film, though less overtly fun. It’s not as quotable or rewatchable as Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs, but it’s interesting, and I’m glad I saw it soon after release.

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Alex Small suggests an improvement to the “diversity question” asked in faculty searches. He argues that it should be more specific and target concrete institutional goals by “ask[ing] faculty candidates what they have done and want to do going forward in order to help struggling, underprepared students.” I certainly agree that that would be an easier question to answer well, but I’m not sure that’s actually a useful thing to do.

I should note up front that I’ve never been part of a search that asked a “diversity question” of all candidates. I’m old enough that it wasn’t a thing when I was hired, and for whatever reason that hasn’t yet been something we’ve required of applicants in the searches I’ve been on. We’ve had a fair number of applicants include a “Statement on Diversity and Inclusion” in their materials without being asked, probably because a lot of other places do officially ask for one, and if you’ve got it you might as well send it. I can’t pretend to have seen any kind of representative sample of these, though.

That said, the few of these I’ve seen have been more or less as Small describes: trite and full of platitudes. And I can easily imagine that skim-reading a couple hundred of these would be wearying. I feel very confident in saying that, because skim-reading a couple hundred statements of “research goals” and “teaching philosophy” is wearying.

And I think you could make exactly the same sort of argument that Small makes about “diversity questions” with respect to the research and teaching statements. That is, the usual request for materials is incredibly vague, and mostly leads to trite and platitudinous statements about the importance of encouraging student interaction in class, etc. A more targeted request for specific pedagogical information would undoubtedly produce more focused and concrete essays in response.

At the same time, though, I’m not sure that would be an improvement in terms of the ability to differentiate between candidates than what we get from the current vague and open-ended questions. That is, the very fact that there’s a clear and obvious “right” answer (which Small outlines) will naturally lead to everybody writing versions of that. Which doesn’t help with the “skim-reading a couple hundred trite essays” thing, even if it does boost the mean relevance somewhat.

In a lot of respects, it’s the very open-endedness of those questions that makes them useful to determine which candidates are right for the job. In our specific context, the open-ended request for statements about research is a great weed-out question, because lots of people will respond with descriptions that are way too high-level, or say things like “with three grad students this will be complete in two years,” which is a dead giveaway that they don’t actually want a small-college position, or know what it means. We’d still get a few of those with a more targeted question, but mostly from idiots who would rule themselves out in other obvious ways. A format that led more of the applicants to more of a “right answer” wouldn’t be as useful.

And at the end of the day, “college professor” is a very open-ended job, with extremely nebulous requirements and evaluation standards. So asking vague questions of applicants is arguably appropriate, and a reasonable way to assess whether they’ll be good at the job. People who give trite and platitudinous answers will often be… fine, with all the faint-praise damning that implies. The rare candidate who finds a novel way to frame their answers, though, is really showing something about their overall “quality of mind,” as it were. Leaving the questions more open-ended gives those people a chance to really shine.

(Admittedly, there’s a bit of a “delta function above a sea of shit” quality to this, to use a memorable phrase from a past colleague. I think that’s probably inevitable, though, because most people, even professional academics, just aren’t very good writers…)

The thing that’s a problem is when you ask a vague and open-ended question but expect a very specific answer. I hit this with a former dean after my reappointment review: I was asked to provide a teaching statement, and found a way to frame it that I liked a lot, but that wasn’t the format she wanted. So we had a slightly testy meeting in which she disparaged my statement while I sat there and thought “If you wanted that specific thing, you should’ve asked for it.”

That’s mostly an attitudinal problem on the evaluator’s side, though– if you’re going to ask vague questions, you need to be open to the possibility of answers that take unexpected forms. In the case of most of the things we ask job applicants for, I don’t think we’d be all that well served by more specific questions that lead to more specific “right” answers.