Just a few questions on Sen, please

When you’re done with this, can I get you to write a chapter or two of my dissertation?

Since he is an undergrad, he is.

If it was a request for SOURCES which address those aspects I think it would’ve been a perfectly reasonable request.

Why not reply to him, in very general terms, and then use the reply as a blogpost?

As an undergraduate I sent an e-mail to a British prof. who had recently written a book on deliberative democracy (and critical of rational choice). I read it on my “free time,” not for any class or assignment, and I asked him a few questions. He never replied. I thought the book contained exciting arguments, and wondered how he’d deal with a few lingering questions.

Of course, that situation might be different to the one here in that I directly contacted the author, not some other academic. I wonder if he ever received my mail, or if he laughed at it. I’d written it suspecting he’d be more flattered than anything. I made certain to compliment him in my opening and conclusion, and to demonstrate in the body that I had in fact read the text. What a bastard.

I went and checked and all those questions are answered at Wikipedia. Lazy undergraduate.

I would be tempted to reply with a brief, encouraging note, and a pointer to some sources he could find without a subscription to pricey academic journals. Pointers to one or two websites with reprints, etc. Or even just advice on how to find pdfs of things for which the journal publishers charge obscene amounts of cash. Advice on how to google on things like papers amartya sen development and the like – or how to recognize crackpot pages if I knew of any.

Of course, I’m not on the tenure clock at the moment, and can afford to be supportive of strangers on the chance that they’re serious, but don’t know the right language to show they’re not lazy undergrads.

Rather than making fun of the undergraduate in a public forum, wouldn’t it have been more effective to briefly explain the weaknesses in his approach to research and then point him in the right direction?

I think that this one falls into the well-known category “rhetorical questions whose answer is ‘no'”.

“Is there any concept or thought which replaces Sen’s thought ?”

Yes. That thought is: “Lo! undetached rabbit parts!”

Discuss.

My favorite response is: a)who are you and b) what is this for? Response rate to these e-mails, almost nil. In the one case, the reply I got was from a student trying to do an opinion survey and had no idea how to go about it. He apologized profusely, realizing his survey was undoable and sent a much more doable version later. Got my name from some database at my institution at the time.

Someone should really come up with a nice boilerplate reply-message for this kind of naive inquiry . . . something that does due diligence to the academician’s commitment to educate but also ensures through its tone that the sender never makes the same mistake again.

Two things, from the perspective of an undergrad in the hard sciences:

(1) I’ve always been terrified of emailing profs. Even ones whose classes I’m taking. I’ll think about some topic and sometimes comes up with some question or another. I’ll put reasonable effort into trying to find out the answer–say an hour or two–but often I won’t even know where to begin to look.

But then I’ll just stop pursuing the question, because I know that if I ask it more than half the time it’ll be shot down by the sneering prof who’ll demand I find the answer on my own time, even if all I’d like is to know where in the literature to start looking. After all, it’s not like it’s their responsibility to teach or anything!

I’ve learned that the lectures students happen to find professors giving are just unfortunate burdens foisted on them by the university. I just hope you academics forgive us lowly undergrads for making the all too easy mistake of thinking a professor has some part to play in helping their students learn.

(2) In all fairness to the original post, the student’s questions are vague and hard to answer, and it’d be wrong to expect someone you don’t know to answer them out of the blue. So why not politely tell him that and that his approach isn’t conducive to meaningful discussion, instead of sitting back and mocking him with your fellow professoriat?

I have to respect your honesty, at least. Better being direct about hating students, instead of passive aggressively refusing to fulfill your obligations as teacher.

Zephyrus,

I do not think that the only problem is that all professors hate students and teaching (by the way if everybody else sucks maybe it is time for some critical self-reflection).

Maybe part of your the issue is this,

“I’ll put reasonable effort into trying to find out the answer—say an hour or two”

Get real!

“I don’t think it’s fair to expect a motivated student to spend 10 hours looking for something that someone well-versed in the area could answer (or point out where the answer is) in 10 minutes.”

This is not the issue at hand. Questions that only take a few minutes to answer get answered. But the number of questions that can actually be answered in a few minutes is pretty marginal. If the question will take me an hour to answer how many hours should I expect students to spend? I do not think that you will find many teachers that think that 10 hours is unreasonable.

Hi all,

Just an idle suggestion, since I’m a secretary at Large United States University–if you get such questions routinely and you have (as many academics do around here, anyway) secretarial support from someone with a college degree, you might be able to work with a secretary to write some boilerplate with a few general research hints/major sources/Google techniques and simply ask the secretary to respond to student queries. If your secretary works with you on grants or copy-edits your publications, he or she may even be able to produce a list of suggested reading or research advice on his/her own–I know I could do that pretty easily.

If you’ve got a typical over-educated and under-employed university secretary, he or she may well jump at the chance.

Also, the flip side of this sort of thing is professors (law professors seem to be the worst offenders though I’ll not name any names) with blogs asking their readers to do the research for them. (“does anyone know of any cases like this…”) Note that this is differnt from, say, Kieran or Henry posting a link to a paper and asking for comments, since in those cases they have already done the work.

Can I put in a slight plea to students reading this (prompted by zephyrus’s comment about being terrified of emailing profs who are his/her actual teachers)? Profs have office hours, and are present before and after lectures. TALK TO THEM! I don’t mind being emailed by my students, but I’d almost always sooner have them speak directly to me. Some professors would rather not speak to you, but most would!

Wow, you can really see in the responses who never gets random questions from strangers.

Ingrid, you have every right to be frustrated by this email.

My one dilemma in such cases is whether I should advise the person about a better approach to correspondance. At least now I can point people to this piece I wrote. Also, one of these days I hope to get around to writing a Web page about how people should contact me. If they can’t take the time to read the page then I won’t feel guilty about not taking the time to respond.

And yes, my new rule is that if a student doesn’t give me enough information, but I’m inclined to respond, I ask for the name of the course and the professor.

In a better world, I think it would be reasonable for professors to make themselves available as experts to anyone who asks.

This is an interesting attitude that not only students, but people in the private sector also seem to have. They’ll contact you for all sorts of advice and assume (on what basis?!) that you’re there to give away free advice, because .. well, because why exactly?

We all have projects to work on, papers to grade, many of us have graduate students to advise, committees to sit on, conferences to plan, papers to review, where in all that are we supposed to have time to do all this? And even if we did have the time, why should we respond to people in the private sector for free?

Would you say the same thing about a lawyer? Should lawyers be available to answer questions freely to anyone who asks? How about accountants? I could go on and on, obviously.

What is it about professors that makes people think we are supposed to be available to all free-of-charge at any time?

What is it about professors that makes people think we are supposed to be available to all free-of-charge at any time?

‘Students,’ you mean. ‘What is it about professors that makes “students” think we are’ etc.

It seems churlish to fault undergraduates for not having a strong grasp of how awful the life of the scholar is, eh?

Ingrid @ #23 – all I was suggesting was an email pointing out that he had asked you inappropriately open questions that he should be researching instead. i.e pointing out what he had done. It appears that you in fact did exactly that. Which is nice.

Eszter:

If you read my entire comment (granted, lengthy), you’ll note that I refer to much more than just students, because I have plenty of experience with more than just students making these assumptions.

No no, I understand this point – and though I have strong feelings about scholars’ responsibility to share their findings with the general public in a mode that’s useful to the public if at all possible, I agree that the nature of scholarly work is not well-understood by the public, and questions of scholarly responsibility tend not to be well thought out. But I don’t think you’re right about there being a broad perception that scholars’ time should be free for all, not even close. Employees of public universities are one thing, maybe, but I think your last sentence in #36 veers toward a weirdly self-pitying view common to scholars but unjustified by numbers. (I wonder whether blogging under one’s own name strongly affects the number of such inquiries one receives.)

In any case, Ingrid is talking about a student, and in the case of students I think the question is a little more clear-cut: Ingrid’s handling of the student’s question seemed sensible and worthy of emulation, but discussion seems to have brought out less pleasant attitudes, even if only slightly so.

Would you say the same thing about a lawyer? Should lawyers be available to answer questions freely to anyone who asks? How about accountants?

Of course! I wouldn’t expect a lawyer or accountant to spend more than a couple of minutes answering a friendly question – and I know no one likes to talk shop, say, at the urinal – but it seems absolutely @#$%ing reasonable to expect someone possessed (nominally) of expertise to share that expertise. If a well-intentioned question can be answered easily, dismissing it as ‘none of your business’ seems a bit nasty. And for what? But then I find talk of the immense time pressures on scholars somewhat disingenuous for a host of reasons, a feeling best left to another conversation entirely.

Harry@37:

I agree – I think I tend to want to give students the benefit of the doubt when such questions arise (I’m not a teacher, I mean in discussion). And it bugs me to see such questions turn so readily into a referendum on whether scholars should have to answer questions posed by anyone who isn’t paying to ask.

My impression was that this student was not from Ingrid’s institution (but she didn’t give us details so that may be the wrong assumption).

I consider student mentoring and communicating with students very much an important part of my job. Just ask students who receive emails from me at all hours of the day. (I am on leave yet I’m constantly providing students feedback on their work even now.) But that concerns mainly students at my own institution. Are you really suggesting that I should be equally available to any student from any institution all the time? That is just not realistic!

For the record, I regularly respond to queries from undergraduate students and graduate students alike both from my institution and others. I also respond to others frequently about all sorts of issues.

My point above was to challenge the assumption that it is professors’ obligation to do so regardless of the effort (or lack thereof) put into the inquiring message even if the sender is not at the person’s institution.

Perhaps I should have mentioned this more explicitely: the student was not from my university. He is an Asian student based in the UK (I hesitated to write this in the original post since I was worried that it could harm to add irrelevant information that can lead to stereotyping certain groups). I don’t know whether the ‘Asian’ is relevant or not, but it is hard to imagine that there are universities in Asia were this kind of questions are seen as appropriate.

I should also add that the student opened his e-mail very politely. My hunch is that the student is not lazy, but that he has no idea of what it requires to answer these questions at any level beyond mere superficiality, and how little time I have to answer e-mails like these. And I also think that this student, and many authors of other similar e-mails that I receive, have a way too rosy view on how much time we can make available for e-mailing.

I admit that my post was written out of an unreflected frustration with a more general phenomenon of students from other universiteis e-mailing professors and scholars for all sorts of free advice. I was also genuinly surprised that someone can be a university student without knowing that one should simply not expect others to respond to such questions.

I am sorry that some have taken offence that I have posted this in the public sphere – though I think Harry (#37) is right about guessing my intentions. The discussion has helped me at least to see the many isues that are at work – there is the time pressure issue (Radek and wax bank, I am truly surprised about your view that this is not a reality), there is the issue about the corporatization of the university (this will require another post), the issue of what kind of questions are legitimate to ask if you’re a student.

Thanks to the students who have commented – it is important for professors and scholars to see it from your side too, and I hope that rather than having put off students of writing e-mails for advice or dropping in at office hours, this discussion has also sketched a little of the life at the receiving side of these kinds of e-mails.

My quick answers are here: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/04/questions_about.html

Wax Banks: students who ask other people to do their homework for them deserve to be publicly humiliated.

I disagree and find that attitude disgusting. (But then I think student plagiarists should be given a second chance and so forth.) Students can’t be expected to know these boundaries unless professors make them clear – another responsibility of teachers. Cheating is one thing but unless someone instructs student on how to become scholars they’ll never learn a damn thing. 18-year-olds know basically nothing about anything, of course. What a blissful time.

Atop which, in the era of Google-for-job-searching, public humiliation isn’t what it used to be. Rather a bigger deal in print, no?

Ingrid sez:

there is the time pressure issue (Radek and wax bank, I am truly surprised about your view that this is not a reality)

A two- (or ten-!)minute email response doesn’t cause much time pressure on me, no, and I’m generalizing from my own experience, perhaps unfairly (sorry). While I recognize (of course) that a professor’s time is as precious as anyone else’s, the fact is, professors tend to have comparatively flexible schedules, as part of the temporal oddity of college. At school I thought nothing of emailing a professor at midnight and getting a response at 3am, even expecting one (from certain teachers), and could think this way without feeling like a bastard because even though my teachers worked long hours, they chose their hours to an enviable extent. Which is for the professor comforting in a way and awkward in a way, yes.

You’re the judge of whether you can afford a couple of minutes for a student, naturally, but if you’re anything like the teachers I know (and have been), you can spare five minutes to help this poor sap or someone else in his position. And you did, for which thanks – it’s the aftertaste that, um, leaves a bad aftertaste. Can a prof spare five minutes for each of a dozen students of the kind? I hope so; maybe not, but that shouldn’t be their problem.

I understand your frustration though. Lazy beggars, all of them. Personally I think those damn kids should be driven into the sea and – hey, there’s a bunch of them On My Lawn! Excuse me while I go yell at them.

re # 30. Great idea, but… Underworked secretarial support? What’s that? My department barely has enough staff (including work study students) to make photocopies of our course materials. I suspect that’s more the norm in the social sciences / humanities than what you describe. Oh, that you worked in my institution…

Why are Americans so bloody enfatuated with politeness?

A few more things non-academics probably don’t know about, but which take up a lot of our time: referring for journals, administrative work like hiring or grad school admissions committees, writing reference letters for students and outside scholars, organizing conferences, presenting at conferences, work for professional organizations, etc. I’m not complaining about this, just noting that there are a lot of aspects of academic work that are invisible to people outside the profession.

Yes, teaching is a part of our job, and for many of us it’s one of the main things we enjoy. This is exactly why Lindsay from #45 should go to her professors’ office hours – we’re busy but we mostly really like talking with students.

For our own sanity we have to restrict this to OUR OWN students! This is nothing personal against other students – but we only have so much time to devote to students each day, and ethically we need to devote it to our own students first. Often the time we devote to our own students will eat up the day’s allotment of “student time.”

What makes a professor so scary as to make going to office hours scary? I’ve had students say that they thought I was scary but I don’t understand it at all. (I was _much_ less scary or aggressive or harsh than my own undergrad professors were, for example.) Students almost never came to my office hours, despite my encouraging them to do so. (Some of this might have been due to my tendency to schedule one hour at 9am, though.) Most professors will be quite happy to have you come by. (Why would Hilzoy be scary? I’ve only met her once but she didn’t seem scary at all.)

“Having once been a student of Hilzoy’s, I can mention that her actual students were usually far too terrified of her to actually ask any questions, about anything, anywhere.”

So all those roughly twenty year olds were imposters?

Ingrid, I have every sympathy with your predicament I appreciate that it is not only not humanly possible to answer all or even some of the (200 or so daily emails?) received by the profs from students not necessarily from their own universities, but it also begs the question as asked by you as to why a prof should be obliged to answer such queries, particularly when an undergrad expects a professor to do his job for him thus saving his painstaking information-gathering just because the prof knows the answers or can easily find out where to look for them as was the experience of Kieran Healy with regard to his correspondent, the B.Sc student who asked him for an overview about Michael Mann’s book so he could find a shortcut to answering his management exam questions.

That said, one must also take on board, as suggested by aaron_m (#28) that if a genuinely motivated student with an enquiring mind asks some questions which may take only 10 minutes to give guiding answers as against the poor undergrad’s 10+ hours to even scratch the surface of the whole answers, then I should make an effort in rare circumstances, as suggested by Zephyrus (#27) minus the “rude” parts of his reply.I do admit that these 7 guestions (a bit vague though) about Amartya Sen are rather over the top, let alone trying to answer them; yet if I were to answer them I would do so in the following way:-
1. Read “Development as Freedom” & see below.
2. See below.
3. See below.
4. Yes. See below.
5. None. Read “Identity and Violence…”
6. Yes.
7. (a)No. (b) Huntington’s “Clash of civilisations”

N.B.Refer to Sen’s Nadine Gordimer lecture in South Africa yesterday,his recorded lecture in the Humanist Chapel’s 30th anniversary conference at Harvard University today,Sen,s Naascom keynote speech at the IT conference at Mumbai in Feb,07 followed by his speech as guest speaker in the Indian President’s especially organised conference at Delhi attended by some foreign statesmen including the Pakistani Foreign minister and Manmohan Singh the Indian PM and a Cambridge economist, followed by his UN’s Lifetime achievement award speech in Bangkok; Sen’s speech in Beijing in Nov.06 about the deterioration of Chinese healthcare due to the reversal of the Govt. policy; watch out for Sen’s forthcoming keynote speeches in Basel,Paris,Harvard again, Oslo, York, Oxford in May-June and Munich, Osnabruck, Hong kong, bangkok again, Singapore, Calcutta and Delhi in July.

Wildcrier.

C’mon, this is a no-brainer. The student wasn’t enrolled Robeyns’ class; s/he didn’t even attend her school; so why is Robeyns under any obligation to respond?

I’m a teacher, too, but that does NOT mean that I must answer any and every question that anybody or everybody sends me via email, does it?

I haven’t yet gotten through reading all responses. So I apologize in advance if this is a redundant comment.

Something I noticed, which is not intuitive to me, is that achieving the proper tone via e-mail can be difficult. As an undergraduate, I have found myself on both sides of this issue. I have e-mailed professors at my university (even my research advisor on some occasions) and been surprised by how antagonistic I read the response to be. I have also spent considerable time composing an e-mail on a subject I thought might be delicate, so I show my draft to a friend who quickly remarks that my tone is not appropriate and potentially adversarial. Usually I find that the antagonism I originally detected from the professor’s response to my e-mail was a complete mis-read. And I can say with certainty that I have never felt the adversarial tone that my draft e-mails have expressed. I suspect that e-mail is peculiar in that it is a difficult balance between a conversational medium and a more formal one. Furthermore, when a student is composing an e-mail to a professor he/she is, for the first time, on equal footing with the professor.

I should also point out that, although I seem to be in the minority among undergraduates commenting on this post, I have had many fruitful experiences stemming from e-mails with professors I have never met before. I think this issue is much less of a problem than people are making it out to be. For the most part professors are surprisingly active in aiding curious undergraduates. Although I hope there is not a future backlash against responsing to undergraduates who introduce themselves via e-mail, I also think that it is a worse situation for everyone if a professor feels obligated to respond beyond the level of response he/she is comfortable with. In particular, if there is an unaproachable, undergrad-hating professor in person, I wouldn’t want to be mislead to his office by kind responses to my e-mails.