Category Archives: Blog

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What’s The Matter With Comic Book Movies?

The giant cultural phenomenon of the moment is, obviously, Avengers: Endgame, the conclusion that twenty-ish movies have been building toward over the last ten-ish years. Kate went to see it Thursday night, but after watching Infinity War last year, I’m pretty much done with the whole superhero movie phenomenon. I looked up a spoiler-filled plot summary of Endgame, and that read like such a hot mess that I listened to the Ringer’s instant-reaction podcast about it just to confirm it. That really is not a thing I want to see.

So, while Kate was off at the movie, and the kids were spending their spring break with my parents, I stayed home and watched John Wick Chapter Two. Which is also a flashy, highly stylized– even more stylized than most superhero movies, to be honest– carnival of not particularly realistic action and violence. And a sequel, to boot, elaborating on the weird underworld of stylish but brutal assassins introduced in the first movie.

So, the question is, why do I like that so much, when I’m totally out on the superhero phenomenon? The idea of a luxury hotel chain that exclusively caters to an improbably large international population of stylish assassins is not particularly more grounded than the notion of superhumans battling aliens in the skies and streets of Manhattan, so why am I anticipating the third installment of the former and rolling my eyes at the latter?

I don’t really have a great answer to this, which is why I’m doing a noodly thinking-out-loud blog post about it, just to see if typing words into a box helps clarify it for me.

Some of the issue certainly has to do with the conversation around the Marvel universe, not the movies themselves, which are undeniably well-crafted and mostly perfectly enjoyable as spectacle (the individual hero stories, anyway; Infinity War was not, which is why I’m sitting this one out). I have a bit of a contrarian streak, and the constant barrage of thinkpieces telling me how Incredibly Significant the whole thing is make me turn against it.

There’s also an element of Marvel pushing my particular buttons. Some of this is a matter of leaning too heavily on comic-book technobabble (amplified by some outside discussion of how awesome it is that these movies use science concepts). A lot of it is more idiosyncratic– I’m really not fond of “alternate history” as a subgenre, which is rarely anywhere close to “alternate” enough. I’m willing to roll with movies where some magical thing shows up and turns a modern-day person into the first superhero, but when you put the origin of the whole phenomenon back in the 1940’s, that should change the world a LOT more than just a couple of tiny additional pop-culture elements.

I think the biggest issue, though, is the scale of the thing, which makes it all but impossible to avoid thinking about the other stuff that bugs me. I’m happy to glide over the question “Can there really be enough contract killers in New York to support a luxury hotel?” for the sake of a couple of fun shoot-em-ups, but not for too long. By the time you’re a dozen interconnected movies into the franchise, it requires actual effort to keep everything straight, and once I’m expending that mental effort, it’s difficult to stop short of poking at all the little inconsistencies and contradictions. If they keep making John Wick sequels for the next decade, I’ll probably tap out long before they stop making money.

And, again, this is an issue that’s magnified by factors outside the movies themselves. A lot of questions about issues with the movies get answers that start “Well, see, in the comics,…” and I “Nope!” right the hell out. I find it annoying to deal with ten movies worth of this stuff; the thought of needing to sort out fifty years of tangled continuity to make sense of this is just exhausting.

(This is probably related to my utter lack of interest in fan fiction, even for settings where I enjoy the original works. But that’s a different argument…)

It’s important to note that this is my personal reaction, not a slight on anybody else. I’m not saying that because I don’t like the MCU, everybody who does like it is Wrong. Tastes vary, and if you’re a fan of these movies, good for you. I’d be happier if they didn’t suck up quite so much of the cultural oxygen, as it were, but there are still movies that appeal to me being made, even if they’re not much discussed. This post is just poking at why I don’t like this particular pop-cultural moment all that much.

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Me on TV: NASA’s Unexplained Files

Back in October, I made a one-day trip down to NYC to film some talking-head segments for a TV show,NASA’s Unexplained Files on the Science Channel. This was actually a follow-on to an earlier recording with the same production company, though that show hasn’t aired yet that I’m aware of. The previous one was very short notice– they had a crew scheduled to film in Albany, but the person they were supposed to interview backed out, and I think they basically Googled for public scientists near Albany. This trip was planned in advance, though it took a huge amount of wrangling to get the schedule.

The first episode with any of my content in it aired last night– episode 2 of season 6, if you’re coming to this much later, “Aliens vs. Stalin at Area 51.” It aired after I went to bed, but I watched it on the DVR this morning, and indeed, I’m in it, as you can see from this cell-phone snapshot of the TV in Chateau Steelypips:

Snapshot of my face on TV, caption "Chad Orzel, Physicist"

In this particular episode, I’m mostly talking about Mars, and the possible terraforming thereof. This is not because I duped them into thinking I was some kind of Mars expert– they asked about a whole bunch of topics, and that happened to be one. They’ve got me saying that there’s evidence Mars used to be more hospitable, downplaying the idea of melting the polar ice caps with nuclear weapons, and saying something ominous about bringing dormant microbes back to life. When we shot, I think there was a bunch more about the idea of using orbiting mirrors to focus sunlight on the polar caps to melt them, but alas, it didn’t make the show.

I’m identified as “Physicist,” which is wonderfully vague, but they wouldn’t do an institutional affiliation. There’s also some gloriously dramatic lighting, with the background all blurred so you can’t see where I am.

The actual recording was in a townhouse rented from AirBnB in the un-gentrified wilds of Brooklyn. It was unseasonably warm that day– it got up into the 80’s– and the house only had a noisy window-unit air conditioner, which of course was much too loud to be left on while recording. As a nice bonus, there was either a police station or a hospital a few blocks away, so we were regularly interrupted by sirens, and needed to keep all the windows closed. So it was brutally unpleasant by the end of the recording; I’m a little surprised I don’t look sweatier than I do in the clips they aired.

Sometime after this, I ran into Brian Malow, the Science Comedian, who had also recorded clips for the earlier show (not this one, that I know of), and he said something that made me a little nervous that the show would actually turn out to push a weirder point of view than I’d really be comfortable with. Having watched it, though, I’m reasonably happy with it– they do some overly dramatic framing of some of the stories, and suggest some ideas that are frankly kind of wacky, but by the end of each segment, they pretty clearly reject the wacky bits.

The episode title, for example, relates to a claim that the infamous Roswell crash was actually a Soviet psychological warfare operation, using a Nazi flying wing and children mutilated to look like aliens. This even features one of the guys who regularly appears on the “Ancient Aliens” show, which really made me nervous. By the end of that bit, though, they reveal that it was actually the plot of a James Blish story, which was probably relayed to the reporter as a prank. It maybe could’ve been rejected a little more emphatically, but they definitely discarded it, which is a clear improvement over, well, “Ancient Aliens”…

So, anyway: I’m basically happy with how this came out. There’s a pretty good lineup of respectable scientists and writers offering commentary, as well, and it’s nice to be shown in that company. The Mars stuff is a small part of what I talked about when we were recording, so I’m pretty sure there’ll be more of me on TV, but I don’t know exactly when that will be, or what I’ll be talking about.

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Two Cultures in Colloquium Series

We’re going through a bunch of processes this year– a reaccreditation review, a new strategic plan, and a curricular reform– that involve reviewing the wide range of activities that go on at Union, and in the process I’ve become aware of a thing that strikes me as odd. That is, a rather stark difference between academic disciplines when it comes to external speakers.

In Physics and Astronomy, we have an approximately-weekly colloquium series bringing speakers from other institutions to campus to give talks about their research. This is a very common feature of physics departments– we had the same thing at Williams when I was an undergrad, and I make moderately frequent trips to other colleges and universities to give colloquium talks– last Friday, for example, I drove down to Bard College and gave a talk there.

This is true for nearly all of the science and engineering departments at Union– in fact, it’s a bit of a problem, because for stupid daily schedule reasons, we tend to all have our departmental colloquia at exactly the same time, creating lots of conflicts. It doesn’t really hold outside of the STEM disciplines, though. I did a survey of departments and programs as part of one of the things going on this year, and most of the non-STEM departments who replied said they do external speakers once or twice per term, if that.

I just noted that down at the time, but didn’t really think much of it. The topic of conflicts between talks came up yesterday in a meeting, though, and somebody from one of those departments said (basically) “Why don’t your departments just do fewer colloquia and coordinate so they don’t conflict?” My immediate reaction to that was strongly negative, surprisingly so– I think of the colloquium series as a really essential part of what we do in educating students, for a number of reasons. It’s a big part of building a sense of community in the department– we order in food from off-campus restaurants to encourage students to come– and a chance to expose students to current research topics that they otherwise wouldn’t see.

That got me wondering, though, why this pattern happens the way it does. That is, given that colloquium talks play an essential role in the STEM departments– every department has one, and strongly feels that their majors ought to attend– why don’t the non-STEM fields do the same thing? Why aren’t there regular speaker series featuring academics from other institutions in the other disciplines, the way there are in the STEM fields?

It might just be a simple matter of finances– STEM departments have larger budgets in general, and thus are better able to order pizza with which to bribe students for coming to talks. I wonder, though, if there’s some deeper structural reason for it, because several of the responses I got when I did the survey of chairs seemed sort of surprised that such a thing might happen. I’m not sure what that would be, though.

It’s a puzzle. In the highly unlikely event that anyone reads this and wants to suggest an explanation, I’ll open comments on this post for a couple of weeks, because I’m curious.

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On Admissions Preferences

Following on last week’s post about the college-admissions bribery scandal, I’m sure it’s no surprise that this has been a frequent topic of conversation in my little world. In particular, this whole mess has fed into a larger conversation about non-academic factors in college admissions decisions as a general matter. That is, since one of the “side doors” exploited in this scandal involved bribing coaches to pretend that students were recruited as athletes, this opens the question of whether there should be any preference given to athletes in the first place.

This is, as you might imagine, a common bugbear in discussions among faculty, many of whom feel that there shouldn’t be any preference given to applicants for being good at sports. As is often the case, I’m more conflicted.

Some of this is because even though I was never good enough at anything to benefit from an athletic preference in admissions, playing rugby was an enormously important part of my college experience. I wouldn’t want to deprive current and future students of the same sort of experience that I found meaningful as a student.

Of course, you could have sports at the collegiate level without giving a boost to the applications of recruited athletes, but things just work better on the sporting side if you can have some idea of what sort of team you’re going to put together. And that makes the experience more positive for the students involved, which is a good thing.

I’m also generally okay with some admissions boost for athletic performance because I think that’s a factor that reflects well on the student. That is, competing in sports at a high level requires a good deal of persistence, concentration, and discipline, all of which are also factors that contribute to academic success. Putting in the hours of practice needed to succeed in sports while also maintaining good enough grades to be a plausible candidate for elite college admissions says something good about the applicant’s personal character.

(I should probably note here that for the most part, my experience with having athletes in my classes has been positive. They do miss the occasional class due away games and the like, but those absences are made up for by generally having better discipline and time management skills than many non-athletes. They’re used to being given orders, so when you tell them to do something, they do it. The good ones also accept that failure on a first attempt is part of the process, and keep at it longer than some students who are more purely academically oriented.)

The same is true of students who benefit from most of the other non-academic factors that come into play– music, arts, community service, etc. are all activities that take time and dedication, and a student who can do that while also doing well in school is, to my mind, more impressive than a student with slightly better grades who does nothing outside of class.

Of course, the obvious objection to these is that doing those things also requires free time and as a result gives an extra advantage to applicants from affluent families over those who might have to be working jobs to help support their family. That’s true to a point, but as these things go, talent-based preferences (be it for sports, or music, or arts) are much less bad than many of the other options– there are at least some mechanisms out there to identify talented students from underprivileged backgrounds and give them opportunities that they might not be able to afford otherwise. And if nothing else, all of these extracurricular activities at least require the applicant to take some concrete action on their own to get the benefit.

This is in stark contrast to “legacy preferences” which are probably the second most objectionable kind of preference given in admissions decisions. This is a boost given to applicants whose ancestors previously attended the school in question, and there’s really very little you can offer as a defense of this, other than the financial incentive to keep your alumni happy. If you put a gun to my head and asked me for a non-financial justification of legacy preferences, I’d seriously question your life priorities, but about the best I could come up with would be that children of alumni are more likely to have a sense of what they’re getting into when enrolling at an elite college, and thus are less likely to freak out and withdraw after a semester or two. That’s really weak, though, and I’d fully expect a bullet.

(Of course, even legacy preferences are more defensible than straight-up big-donor preferences, for people with no pre-existing relationship with the school who write a large check to get their kids in. As noted in the previous post, this is harder to arrange in reality than in the popular imagination, but there’s really no non-financial justification of it.)

And, of course, from a purely logistical standpoint, most elite colleges need to consider something other than “pure” academic matters, because most of these schools could fill their entering class several times over with students whose grades and test scores are “good enough” to get in. Unless you want to do a straight-up lottery among those passing some threshold level, you’re going to need to look at something else to winnow the applicant pool down further. I’d prefer for that to be based on something that the kids have done themselves, rather than just where their parents went to college.

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On Buying College Admission

The big splashy story-of-the-moment in my corner of the universe is, of course, the college admissions bribery scandal, which is highly relevant to my interests. And also has a lot of the bizarre little fillips that get it wide coverage throughout the media universe. I’ve said a lot of small snarky things about this on Twitter, but it’s probably worth typing out some of my longer-form Thoughts. In no particular order:

— As a graduate of and professor at an elite private college, the idea of students buying their way in is not at all a shocking revelation. I certainly knew of people when I was at Williams who were widely believed to have gotten in only because their parents donated shitloads of money, and I have heard the same said about some students at Union. This is a Thing in the elite-college world, and always has been; the current scandal just turns the dials up to 11.

— The most fucked-up part of this whole thing is that, in many of these cases, the students were apparently unaware of what was done on their behalf. There’s a sense in which this is a logical consequence of overly intensive parenting, but it’s also deeply and profoundly weird. I feel just awful for those kids. I mean, the kid who posed for photos to fake being a water-polo player can eat it, but the kid who was surprised to learn that he’d been recruited as a pole-vaulter deserves a bit of sympathy. And the ones who are just now learning that their high standardized-test scores were faked are genuinely sad.

— We’ll never get to know this, but particularly with the kids whose test scores were faked, I’d be curious to know how they’ve fared as college students. While the social-media presumption has been that all these kids must’ve been thoroughly worthless, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that while their admission was fraudulent, at least some of these kids have been doing just fine up to this point. I suspect that many of these kids are perfectly capable of making good use of their ill-gotten education, and some of them probably were. Again, that’s a sad outcome.

— The other baffling aspect of this is that some of the sums of money involved seem weirdly inefficient. If you’re going to spend a few million dollars getting your kid into a college, why wouldn’t you do it in the traditional manner, by endowing a professorship or building a dorm?

As I said on Twitter last night, I think the issue here is that most of these people weren’t spending enough to get their unqualified kids into a good school that they didn’t have a prior relationship with. If you contribute $500,000 to a college in the form of $50,000 alumni donations over a ten-year span and then happen to mention that you’ve got a kid who’s applying to colleges, that probably gets your indolent child some extra consideration. If you walk in off the street and say “I’ll give you $500,000 if you let my idiot son in,” on the other hand, they’re going to show you the door. Even at USC, that figure probably needs two additional zeroes for a one-time payment to get a kid in, and the check has to clear before Junior shows up for orientation.

That’s the one bit on the parental side that’s sad. The sums of money mentioned in this case are mostly in the tens of thousands of dollars, and in the crazy world of elite higher ed, that’s just not that much. If your bribe budget maxes out at $50,000, you probably can’t do better than paying some huckster to photoshop your kid’s head onto a stock photo of a track star.

If you’re shelling out $6 million, though, I don’t understand why you’re dealing with a shady middleman and not just talking to the development office. People are strange.

— This is yet another story that slaps me in the face with what a bizarre world I’ve been living in for most of my adult life.

— This nonsense could not possibly have come at a worse time for the elite higher ed world. It’s already been a kind of scary year with the total collapse of a bunch of colleges, most notably Hampshire, which had some national reputation if not the flipping great wodges of cash they would’ve needed to stay open. The last thing we need is more news that makes responsible parents think the whole system is a corrupt scam.

— Prior to this story breaking, the higher-ed thing I was planning to blog about was this set of proposals from Catharine Bond Hill, which included both a suggestion that elite schools admit more students and allowing more communication between schools. I find both of those proposals interesting, and possibly even more relevant in light of this new scandal, but it’s really hard for them to compete for attention with William H. Macy memes.

— To be clear, the behavior of these parents is thoroughly reprehensible, and particularly harmful to good students from less privileged backgrounds who got squeezed out by the fraudulent applications of wealthier kids from their age cohort. The parents, and the kids who were active participants in these schemes, richly deserve their public humiliation. By all means, let us point at them and laugh.

That said, I’m not quite willing to join the torches-and-pitchforks brigade to burn the whole thing down. I freely admit, though, that that’s largely because I live here, and it’s hard to disentangle self-interest from the whole mess to decide what reforms ought to be made to prevent this kind of thing in the future. It’s definitely something that I’ll be thinking a lot about in the near future, though, and if I come up with anything, I’ll let you know.

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The March Meeting in Twitter Threads III

Same deal as with the previous two posts, but only one partial session because I needed to leave to drive home from the meeting. It was a “Focus” session with one 36-minute invited talk and a bunch of 12-minute contributed talks, though, so even though I left in the middle, it’s a bunch of threads:

And then one thread from someone who isn’t me, based on a discussion I had with some other folks about teaching quantum information/ quantum computing at an undergraduate level. This is a thing I may end up doing in the near-ish future, so I was interested to see if anybody else had brilliant ideas. Sadly, they mostly came from the same position, but we did have some useful conversation that was summarized in this thread by Peter Brereton from the US Naval Academy:

And that was pretty much that for the March Meeting. I felt like crap for most of it, thanks to this awful cold, which reduced the number of talks I was able to sit through, but I still saw some cool stuff. There was also less socialization and more feeling miserable in hotel rooms than I would’ve liked, but, you know, such is life.

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The March Meeting in Twitter Threads II

Same deal as the previous post, but I didn’t get to it yesterday. My talk was the first one in the early morning session, on “Sharing Science,” so the live-tweets pick up halfway through the second speaker:

I sat out or did minimal live-tweeting of a couple of other sessions Tuesday, but here’s a thread from the advanced lab teaching session:

Yesterday was a slow day for me, because there was a happy hour Tuesday night that ran very late and combining a hangover with the nasty cold I’ve had all week was… sub-optimal. I did check out one of the industrial sessions, though, on “The Future of Transportation”:

I didn’t do any other substantial live-tweeting after that; I started on the Kavli symposium, but the first speaker was pretty overwhelming, and I opted to go back to the hotel for a nap instead.

Not sure I’ll get to much of anything this morning before it’s time to drive back out the Mass Pike.

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The March Meeting in Twitter Threads

I’m at the March Meeting this week, where I’m doing a bit of live-tweeting of conference talks. This serves as a form of note-taking, to help fix things in my mind for later use. Of course, the deliberately ephemeral nature of Twitter makes it a sub-optimal tool for taking notes…

So I’m going to try collecting these on the blog. The following are links to the first posts in threads about some of the talks I attended, so hopefully clicking on any of them will get you the whole thing.

First up, some twisted graphene:

And the some superconducting hydrides at ultra-high pressure:

Then the afternoon session on quantum foundations:

And a final joke:

It was a long day, but provided at least two future blog posts’ worth of material, assuming I can wrest enough free time to write them out of the million other things I have going on.

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Pop Culture Miscellany

This was a heavy pop-culture weekend for me, in an unusual way, with one musical theater performance and one animated movie. Neither of these are really my top choice, genre-wise, but it was nice to get out of the house…

Kate and SteelyKid are way into Hamilton, and the touring production is coming to Proctor’s in August, so in order to be sure of getting tickets, we bought a season subscription. We got four seats, though I have yet to see any shows in that, because the one week I was going to go, The Pip rebelled and I ended up staying home with him; the other weeks, I’ve voluntarily given up my seat so SteelyKid could invite her BFF.

Anyway, at the previous show in the subscription, SteelyKid saw an ad for The Lightning Thief musical, based on Rick Riordan’s book from the Percy Jackson series. She loved the books, so I got a text from the theater asking me to look into tickets.

The Pip had to be just about dragged out of the house, with promises from Kate that if he hated the first half, she would take him home at intermission. Of course, he was captivated from the start, so that wasn’t a problem…

For my part, the show was… fine. It’s a very small and minimalist production– only seven actors in the cast, most playing multiple parts, and the stage is just a backdrop with some bits of scaffolding that serve multiple purposes, and a few props that get wheeled in as needed. The monsters were puppets, and when they needed Percy to use his magical powers to hit people with big waves of water, the role of the waves was played by toilet paper rolls shot out with leaf blowers.

The cast was working very hard– as noted above, most were playing multiple roles– and it was kind of fascinating to watch the logistics of the production. As noted above, though, I’m not a big musical fan, and this didn’t really rise to a level that gets past the fundamental dippiness of people just randomly bursting into song. SteelyKid loved it, though, which was the important thing, and at bedtime when she found that Kate had downloaded the soundtrack to her iPod her face absolutely lit up.

The other pop-culture moment of the weekend was taking The Pip to an early Sunday morning showing of The Lego Movie 2, which he’s been clamoring to see for a while. I usually take the kids out for lunch and shopping on Sunday mornings, so this took the place of that in our regular routine. SteelyKid opted to stay home and have a friend over instead, so it was just a Dad and Dude event.

I took SteelyKid to the first Lego movie back when it came out, and enjoyed it more than I expected to. The animated bits of that moved along very briskly and had a good mix of jokes that worked for both kids and adults. The live-action bits with Will Ferrell and the kid were very effective, and genuinely touching, possibly because they were a surprise.

The animated bits of this were also very good, with some quality jokes at both levels, but the live-action section fell short of the quality of the first. The message in those bits had potential, but where Will Ferrell dialed things down to play the fussy dad figure in a very effective way, Maya Rudolph’s harried mother felt like sitcom shtick (an impression not helped by Ferrell’s few lines yelled from offscreen) in a way that undermined the whole sequence.

Again, The Pip loved it, which was the really important thing. As an adult, though, this wasn’t as good as the original, though it was fun to see it with the Little Dude.

In the broader pop-culture universe, of course, the Academy Awards were last night, and a lot of people are angry that a movie I haven’t seen won Best Picture over a bunch of other movies I haven’t seen and also Black Panther which I didn’t think was all that great. (Honestly, I thought the Spider-Man cartoon, which we saw over New Year’s in South Carolina, was better– its story was much less predictable, and Miles Morales had a better character arc than anyone in Black Panther.)

The Oscars were mostly notable as my annual reminder that there was a time when I would’ve made an effort to see more of the sort of movies that end up nominated for awards, and been more invested in the whole thing. Then again, from the tenor of a lot of this year’s Oscars conversation, maybe I’m happier being out of the loop on this one…

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When Professors Get Bored

I’m teaching sophomore-level “Modern Physics” this term, which is my third year in a row doing this particular class with basically this set of notes. I do little tweaks of things here and there, but the general topics to be covered and the order in which to cover them is pretty well set.

And, you know, three times through this is probably about enough. Once is definitely not– putting together lectures is a significant enough effort that it’d be a shame to do all that work for a single term of classes. Twice is probably also not quite enough– the second pass gets some bugs out, and smooths off some rough edges, but there are still things that could go better. Four times, though, would probably be too much, and five, as they say, is right out. Around the fourth time through the same material with the same approach, I start to get bored, and if I’m bored with it, odds are good that the students will be, too.

This isn’t too much of a problem with fairly standard major-track courses like sophomore “Modern Physics.” If I bow out next year, there are several other folks in the department who could take my place and do a great job. I’d happily pass on the notes and assignments that I’ve used, for them to do with as they will. Or, if I get assigned this course again, I can fairly easily blow it up and re-do my notes enough to make for a fresh approach that would keep me from burning out completely.

That’s a harder problem for courses that are more unique, though. My fall term course was another one on its third pass, and that’s something I pieced together myself to fit in our “Sophomore Research Seminar” program. The semi-joking title is “A Brief History of Timekeeping,” and that’s not a topic for which a set book exists (though it’s on my list of potential next-book projects). I had to make all the materials and assignments up on my own, and it’s a lot harder to change gears with that.

The Timekeeping course, though, is not a course topic that has to be covered in the way that sophomore “Modern Physics” is. That is, if I get bored with it, and don’t want to do it again, it’s not something that anyone else would be obliged to take up. I could just walk away, and not do it again for several years (in fact, the three times I’ve taught it have had a gap of at least a couple of years between them). Or ever, if I was sufficiently bored.

At an institutional level, though, that’s a bit of a problem, because the course does fill a curricular requirement for sophomore-level courses that introduce research without being tied to a specific discipline. Every student at the college needs to take one of these, which means we need to offer a whole bunch of these every year. So if I walk away from offering one of these, the specific topic might disappear, but somebody else needs to pick up a course in that same category.

And those courses are a ton of work to put together, particularly for someone coming from the sciences, since the modes of research explicitly called for in the standards for these courses are not the kind of thing we usually do. Even for folks on the other side of campus, though, coming up with a sufficiently general topic is a ton of work, and not something that’s easy to switch from one person to another.

Staffing these kinds of requirements thus becomes a bit of a headache for the college as a whole. The courses can be fun to develop, so when a requirement like this gets introduced, it draws a bunch of interest from faculty looking for something novel to do, but making it a requirement means that those courses have to get offered and staffed long past the point where the initial cohort of faculty have grown bored with their original topics. Those faculty might not easily be able to come up with a second good idea, and the faculty who didn’t jump at the initial round likely aren’t all that interested in taking their place. But somebody has to teach something that checks off the necessary box for students who need it to graduate…

This has been on my mind a bit, as we’re in the process of discussing changes to our “common curriculum”/”general education” program, the set of required courses that all students have to satisfy in order to graduate. There are a lot of general ideas being kicked around that sound really innovative and exciting, courses where I think “Yeah, it could be fun to be a part of that…”

But as I head toward lecturing about solutions of the Schrodinger equation for a finite step potential for the third consecutive year, I wonder what happens to those innovative and exciting courses after the first couple of years, when they stop being quite so much fun to teach. The problem is further compounded when you consider interdisciplinary or team-taught courses. I might have fun putting together a new course together with a faculty member from another department, but for more specific and interesting topics, that seems difficult to modularize in a way that would let somebody else easily take my place. But the prospect of locking two people into teaching the same material every year in perpetuity seems pretty unappealing from the faculty side…

Of course, it’s possible that this is mostly a problem specific to me– that is, I may just be unusually easy to bore. I don’t think that’s the whole story, though, given some of the issues that are driving the aforementioned revision of the Gen Ed requirements. And I wonder what methods are out there to get around the staffing problems that come up when fun new courses start to seem dull to the professors who have to teach them.