I just went to a talk on cultural issues in broadening participation in mathematics. It was weird. The first half of the talk was the (middle-aged, white, Jewish) guy talking about how he grew up in the projects and went to public school. Then he talked about all his black friends. Then he showed some illustrations from the 1800s where black and Irish people were portrayed as animals next to the civilized Anglo-Saxons. Then the second half of the talk, he listed a bunch of mathematicians, and for each one, he played some music by a classical composer who was born around the same time. For the more modern ones, the music was all weird and atonal, and he called it "stagnant." Then he played some jazz by composers born at about the same time as those composers and mathematicians, and it was all exciting. And he told us that the classical music establishment would have benefited from some jazz influence, but it was kept out because it was black music. And that, if we reach out to get minority students into our departments, they might create the mathematical equivalent of jazz.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all that, he raised the question of whether there's enough Irish-American participation in mathematics, and he quoted an Irish friend of his as saying that the Irish are the black people of Europe.

Honestly, I don't think I got anything at all out of this talk.

if we reach out to get minority students into our departments, they might create the mathematical equivalent of jazz.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all that, he raised the question of whether there's enough Irish-American participation in mathematics, and he quoted an Irish friend of his as saying that the Irish are the black people of Europe.

Anyone else having flashbacks to The Commitments? Just me?

That said, I expect that encouraging a wide variety of people (racial, gender, religious, country of origin, etc.) to participate in a given field will enrich it. Not sure if your speaker found the best way to convey that, though.

he quoted an Irish friend of his as saying that the Irish are the black people of Europe.

OMG, eyeroll. My grandmother (rest her soul) used to go on about this all the time until I finally was like, um NO. I didn't change her mind, but she stopped talking about it at least.

broadening participation in mathematics.

I do not think this means what he thinks it means.

I'm confused... was he using the Irish as a substitute for black? Like, it was actually about there not being much math participation by blacks, but he couldn't say that for some reason?

Laga, you know how beyond happy I am for you, right? It's about time!!

Also, smonster, if I haven't already said so, I am also giddy for you.

That said, I expect that encouraging a wide variety of people (racial, gender, religious, country of origin, etc.) to participate in a given field will enrich it. Not sure if your speaker found the best way to convey that, though.

I went into this talk assuming that we were all taking that as a given, and that he'd be talking about strategies for recruiting and maintaining diverse students and faculty. He mentioned that his department has significantly increased African-American and Latino/a graduate student enrollment in the past decade, but he didn't talk at all about how they did this. Just this weird jazz thing that took up 25 minutes of his hour-long talk.

I'm confused... was he using the Irish as a substitute for black? Like, it was actually about there not being much math participation by blacks, but he couldn't say that for some reason?

I have no idea. He first mentioned the Irish thing when he was talking about when he was in elementary school in NYC in the fifties, and his Irish-American teacher told the class, "You think you have it bad in this city? The Irish had it worse." And then he came back to the Irish thing a few times, with no real purpose that I could see.

Oh, and there was also something about how white western society has become a "Cartesian" society, where we insist that people are separate from nature, but other societies maintain a connection to nature, and this is a cultural barrier to overcome, and the Cartesian societies are going to collapse because that's what always happens to people who separate themselves from nature. I'm not sure where he was trying to go with that bit.

That talk sounds mottsy and confusing.

I woke up early, fed the dog, watered the lawn, then lay down in bed to do some internetting.

I fell asleep and had a dream where I was sitting with a circle of women all talking about the ways in which we were planning to fix our men.

I woke up nauseated, saw that facebook was still open and immediately wrote on D's wall, "I will never try to fix you."

Fifteen minutes later I saw a post from D's BOSS about fixing someone and realized that that was what inspired the dream. I hope she doesn't make the connection. I r dum.

"You think you have it bad in this city? The Irish had it worse."

Yeah, the Irish were pretty shit on - they were poor, they were Catholic, the human condition always likes to dump on someone they perceive as "other" who is lower on the social totem pole than them (man, I read an awesome article about this re: American immigration trends in grad school, I can't remember where now though) - but that was a pretty temporary thing.

Ugh, I have so many things to say about this, but that's not really the point. This is something that has always upset me.

His slides also included a few pictures of him hanging out with his black friends.