What is a "professor"?

A long time ago when I was starting my teaching career, on a cross country trip, sitting on the next seat on the plane was a professor from the University of Chicago. He asked me what I did for a living. Proudly, I proclaimed I am a professor. He asked me what I profess. I was embarrassed. I knew what he meant. Oxford dictionary gives two meanings for a professor. First, someone who teaches, and second someone who affirms a faith in or allegiance to something. He meant the second, while I had meant the first. I have worked in at least four fields and held faculty appointments in all those (Management Science, Information Systems, Accounting/Auditing, and Informatics/Information Science). I would be frightened to have to affirm “faith” in or owe allegiance to any of the four, or anything if life for that matter. The word “faith” cringes me as an academic. I prefer my perch as a sceptic. Since then, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I tell them I am a teacher.

Once I served as a department chair. While I did quite well in ensuring the survival of the department, I consider that decision to be the biggest mistake of my life.

On quality education, and whats wrong with it in the USA.

My following response is based on my 36 years of teaching at universities in the US, mostly at post-graduate (masters and PhD level) level. Over those years I have had probably over 2,000 students, mostly at masters level, and students from over a dozen countries. I’ll respond only about American education, but intersperse with comparisons to the UK system (having gone through the sixth form education prior to college.

• Supremacy of Division 1 sports in college, with most high school years wasted in preparing for football/basketball/baseball (or whatever) rather than preparing for college. In fact I was so fed up with this that I refused to pay tuition for my kids if they went to any school that had Division 1 sports, EVEN IF IT WAS AN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL. One kid tested me on this by being admitted to Brown U. I stood my ground and the kid went to a highly ranked public university. In my humble opinion, Division 1 sports are the greatest corrupting influence on American education. UK schools have their rowing teams, cricket, etc., but not with the religious zeal that American students and their parents display towards sports.
• Political interference to diminish academic freedom. I am lucky I did not teach social “sciences” or humanities, for then the hordes of know-it-alls from either side of political and religious spectrum would have called for my blood if I exercised my academic freedom. My academic competency as well as my sense of fairness would have been irrelevant. I am sure things are not as dire in the UK as I hallucinate, considering the regard in which I hold British sense of fairness.
• In my opinion the elementary schools (first six years of schooling) here in the US are essentially child care for school age children. I remember attending a PTA meeting when some well-known sports figure caught AIDS and still continued to boast about his bedroom conquests; the parents seemed to show no outrage at the behaviour but were more concerned about too much homework for their kids cutting into their “quality time”. Education took a backseat. I am sure everyone in the UK is gung-ho about cricket and are ardent followers of famous cricketers as I was about WG Grace, Don Bradman, Gary Sobers,… in school, but sports was always an extra-curricular activity whichever way you define it. In most American schools sports trump just about everything else, except in some schools where academic excellence is a part of their tradition.
• American undergraduate education has now reached it a stage where it resembles a smorgasbord: you take what you like and leave what you don’t for others. When I taught at a prestigious liberal arts college, a student asked me for a reference for graduate school in Philosophy. The feather in his cap was a course on “Theories of Good Living”; I suspect it had more to do with avoiding difficult issues than philosophical inquiry about what it means to have led a good life. So, the course titles are catchy advertisements for enrolments than food for thought. I am sure in the UK the situation is quite different.

At the graduate school level, American universities excel because they attract the best talent from around the world. And Of course there is a sizeable American component. But this semester I taught a PhD seminar in Informatics; in a class of a dozen there were only 3 or so American students. That should sadden all of us Americans.

How do business schools teach accounting if the professors don't have enough experience?

Very bookishly. I can say that with full confidence, having taught accounting for 36 years at private as well as public universities/colleges, first as faculty member and then as department chair and director of graduate programs. In the old days there was a presumption that you taught accounting only when you had the competence in the subject matter, and that for accounting also meant meaningful practice experience. Then over a period of time since the Ford Foundation report (popularly known as Gordon-Powell report) universities as well as the accreditation body AACSB have de-emphasized practice. What is more important is that you know how to use statistical packages and are an expert at statistical lingo translated for economics. Now you have boatloads of PhDs with people who have learnt with nothing but books from people who too have learnt everything from people who also have learnt only from books. These days, for a sizeable accounting PhD students, in addition, English too is a second (or third) language also learnt from mostly books taught by people who also learnt it mostly from books.

It is difficult to change the situation when accreditation bodies such as AACSB insists on classifying faculty (AQ and PQ, etc.) the way the immigration inspectors at Ellis island classified prospective immigrants in the good old days. Those days, they were worried about immigrants becoming public charges and were not from the “right” countries. These days in accounting, it is to make sure that the faculty have “published” so called “papers” of almost zero consequence to accounting practice in journals that no practicing accountant dare to read for fear of mental derangement.

I would suggest students ask instructors if they have had practice experience. The problem that accounting academics like me faced was reconciling our need to be respected as scholarly colleagues while at the same time proud of our heritage as teaching a profession to aspiring future practitioners. These days, accounting faculty have consigned the latter to the trash heap while really failing in the former.

What happened to the Manchus?

In reality there are 10 million Manchus in China ("Genomic Insight Into the Population Admixture History of Tungusic-Speaking Manchu People in Northeast China), and form the fifth largest ethnic group in China. Manchus are Tungusic people and so closer to Mongolian, and they have a writing system of their own which is an adaptation of Mongolian. They are most certainly NOT Han even though those who had migrated to Han areas absorbed many cultural features of the Hans.(What are the differences and similarities between Manchu and Mongol people?)

In my nearly forty years of college teaching in the US, I have had boats load of Chinese students, many of them Manchus. Whenever I ask them their ethnicity they arlways say Chinese first, and when prodded say Han. But whenever my office door happened to be closed and asked for their ethnicity, they are more honest and admit Manchu as if it would be a crime to confess it in public. Then they breakdown and tell me about how the Hans have destroyed their identity, culture, language, and everything that make them Manchu. They are not allowed to study the Manchu language is schools and universities that today there are only 20 or so Manchu language native speakers left (Saving the Manchu language: 9 critically endangered languages from around the world). There are a few thousands who can speak it as a second language many of whom are probably linguistics scholars. Manchu is an endangered language (Saving the Manchu language: 9 critically endangered languages from around the world), and is being Killed, very sadly.

When there are no fundamental rights one’s ethnic heritage is always a sure casualty. Instead of celebrating ethnic diversity and enabling openness and free speech, tragically we have a situation where it is not safe to even admit one’s ethnicity.

On my learning English

English is my third language, and I learnt English (Latin really) alphabets in the First Form (now sixth standard/grade). I had a hard time. Then I asked a paternal uncle of mine for help; he was an English professor and a Shakespeare scholar. He had a wonderful theory about language learning. He told me, initially just ignore grammar in the classes (that is, just do enough work to pass), but be a voracious reader of GOOD English literature. He cautioned me that it would be a tough row to hoe and frustrating, but would pay off in the long run. The most complex human task ever done by a baby is learning a language, and every child learns language with virtually no help from anybody. He said It matters that whatever I read is high class (otherwise this answer would contain expletives and other bad language). Then he gave me his copy of AJ Cronin’s “The Citadel” to start reading; imagine reading a novel when all you know are just the alphabets and a few words. The dictionary became my best friend and has remained so till now. And he threw his personal library at my disposal. It was the most fascinating experience spending time discussing English with him. In fact I got into trouble with my parents because I was spending more time at his home than at mine.

I learnt the language by repeating patterns of great phrases, clauses, sentences from whatever I had read. I sailed through school, college, graduate school, published quite a bit in my domains of interest. I came back to English grammar after my PhD when I did some work on statistical linguistics. Now a dozen or so books on English grammar are permanently on my desk.

On Goa, Portugal, and India

  As a person with Goan ancestry I have no issues with 1961. All our original temples are in Goa and my family had been thrown out during the inquisition. Around 1956 my grandmother was almost on her death bed and expressed her wish that my thread ceremony be performed at the temple in Goa. But we were not allowed to even enter Goa for a short visit. Her last wish was not to be. My thread ceremony was performed in 1958 in north Kerala, she died six months before India took over Goa.

But I do have a pet peeve about the way the government of India behaved towards Goan INDIANS with regard to language. Since Portuguese had ruled India for over 400 years, most education was in that language which had permeated through the local culture. You only have to look at pictures of Hindu temples in Goa to realise that they ar different. Once India took over, immediately Portuguese ceased to be the official language and stopped teaching it in schools. I remember as a graduate student in Calcutta where a Goan student had to use an English-Portuguese dictionary in the classes. In the meantime Konkani and Marathi could be used only in subordinate courts. India lost a golden opportunity to use Portuguese language as its window to Europe at the same time it was shoving English, no less an alien tongue, on the population fed on Portuguese for centuries.

Goan Indians born before 1961 takeover were offered Portuguese citizenship, and today even the Prime minister of Portugal is a Goan. On the other hand, there were 40,000 Goan Indians born in Portugal with Portuguese citizenship who were still in a purgatory when it came to Indian citizenship after 54 years. Compare that with the British who did not even accept Anglo-Indians but left for the Indian taxpayer the bill for the upkeep of cemeteries where tens of thousand British citizens are buried in India.

The Escola Médico- Cirúrgica de Goa was established in 1842, just a few years after the establishment of Calcutta Medical College in 1835 by William Bentinck. In 1822, Bernardo Peres da Silva and Constancio Roque da Costa became the first two Goans to sit in the Portuguese Parliament in Lisbon. Show me the first Indian who sat in the British parliament (Dadabhoy Naoroji SEVENTY years later in 1892).

It is only after the Carnation revolution in 1974 that the relations between India and Portugal started improving. When I came to US for studies the year before, my passport was NOT endorsed for Portugal (and Israel and South Africa).

In mathematics it is possible to write a great PhD dissertation in a very short time. Here are some examples: George Dantzig was a doctoral student of the great statistician Jerzy Neyman at Berkeley. In one of his classes, Neyman wrote two problems on the board. Dantzig arrived late to the class that day, and thought they were the homework for the week. He solved and submitted them. Then he was told that they were two of the unsolved problems in mathematics. Later, when Dantzig met Neyman to discuss possible dissertation topics, Neyman told him he could submit the “homework” he had done as dissertation. Later, the two were published. Very brief. In dissertation work what counts in posterity is the quality of work and not the bulk. Some of the greatest dissertations i history are ridiculously short. Alan Turing (father of Computer Science) dissertation at Princeton was only 28 typed pages long. The dissertation of John Nash (one of the greatest Game Theorists, also at Princeton, was only 27 typed pages long. The shortest PhD dissertation is supposed to be one in mathematics at MIT that is only 9 pages long. 

 Tragically, the average length of dissertations is 133 pages. See: https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/researcher-determines-average-length-theses-dissertations-quebec/#%3A~%3Atext%3D%E2%80%9CThe%20world%20record%20for%20the%2Chave%20become%20longer%20over%20time.

The length of dissertation titles seems to be getting longer. A grotesque example is the one in Psychology:

“Stress maternel prénatal et développement précoce : données de naissance, attention et sécrétion cortisolaire à trois mois. Association entre le stress maternel prénatal, l’âge gestationnel et le poids de naissance du bébé : une analyse d’études prospectives. Association entre le stress maternel prénatal, l’attention/éveil et la sécrétion cortisolaire de l’enfant à trois mois.”

That probably deserves an IgNobel prize.

For those interested, here are the two papers by Dantzig:

Dantzig, G.B., 1940. On the non-existence of tests of" Student's" hypothesis having power functions independent of σ. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 11(2), pp.186-192.

Dantzig, G.B. and Wald, A., 1951. On the fundamental lemma of Neyman and Pearson. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 22(1), pp.87-93.

Altogether they are only 12 pages long. Incredible. At first I thought it was a tall tale, but then found it had been vetted by snopes:

The Legend of the 'Unsolvable Math Problem' A student mistook examples of unsolved math problems for a homework assignment and solved them.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-problem/ The Dantzig story is supposed to be the inspiration for the popular movie “Goodwill hunting”.