Political mathematics leading to disastrous outcomes

Following a growing trend in education called critical mathematics, the Seattle Public School system recently released a framework incorporating ethnic studies into their K-12 mathematics curriculum. It has a noble objective: To reduce the disparity in mathematics achievement between white students and students of color by teaching how different cultures have developed and employed mathematics through time.

But instead of equipping students to understand mathematics better so they can succeed, the new framework will leave students less prepared and teaches them a new dangerous lesson: mathematics is a tool of oppression.

At least, we think that is the gist of what Seattle’s new standards are saying. Sometimes, they seem to state concepts we agree with—for example, where they assert that learning math is ultimately empowering. At other points, however, they claim that the accepted way of doing mathematics is tainted by the Western intellectual tradition.

The standards are full of jargon and incomplete thoughts. For example, “student action, as defined by ethnic studies, is fostering a sense of advocacy, empowerment, and action in the students that creates intea rnal motivation to engage in and contribute to their identities as mathematician.” Sometimes the framework has apparent contradictions like when it asks, “How do we derive mathematical truth?” in one section and then in another section, “Who gets to say if an answer is right?”

We think it suffices to say that the last thing students in America need, to distract them from learning what mathematics is truly about, is to inject decidedly non-mathematical, social-agenda-driven content into the curriculum.

In our more cynical moments, we find ourselves thinking that much of our work as college mathematics and economics professors consists of trying to undo the damage done to students in their previous mathematics education. In America, many people come into college with a completely misguided idea of what mathematics is, and along with that an inability to do very basic mathematics (algebra, arithmetic, etc.).

Without a solid foundation in those basics, students quickly become frustrated and disillusioned, often believing they are just “not good at mathematics.” That frustration prevents students from engaging and excelling in a wide range of disciplines outside of mathematics: economics, finance, physics, and computer science to name a few. For students in those fields, mathematics is a liberator, not an oppressor.

In college math classes, it is crucial for students to focus their mental energy appropriately. Coming into college, many students have a lot of baggage that works against this. For example, “math anxiety” is a well-documented phenomenon. Students with math anxiety have a learned negative self-assessment of their own ability to do math. It can be crippling.

These students struggle in math class not because they lack the ability to understand the content, but because they are preoccupied with non-mathematical thoughts, many of them emotionally driven, that take away their focus on the content of the math. Introducing a social analysis component to math education adds fuel to this fire by giving students another thing other than the math itself to think about.

Students are already skeptical of math, eager to question its usefulness and protest whether we should be learning it at all. Things will be worse if they are trained to do this, receive approval for it, and are provided with a conceptual framework that legitimizes such protest.

We fear that the Seattle math framework will foster those ends, leaving the students subject to it ill-prepared for what they will experience in college-level math. Besides being a distraction to students, those new preoccupations could change the incentives for educators as well.

First, research suggests that when social justice concepts are taught in mathematics curriculum, teachers redirected their scarce class time toward social justice rather than math.  Second, educators may change the way they teach and grade if they come to fear accusations of bias. Grading may become more subjective.

When students subject to this arrive at college, they will be in for a shock as they discover their professors have completely different expectations for what good work is. It is already a problem that the reliance on student evaluations has encouraged grade inflation.

All this is assuming that the notions driving the Seattle framework, or other ideas akin to them, don’t find their way into the university. We have not seen this at our own institution, and we believe that real mathematicians, and others in STEM fields, at least for now, will have none of it. (Politically correct concepts do, sadly, appear to be surfacing in medical education.) If those ideas catch on in higher education, however, it remains to be seen what the pressure from administrators and those outside of STEM fields will be like.

Assuming that math and STEM fields go the way of humanities and many social sciences—politicized and seen by many as biased leftwards—future parents may view higher education more negatively than they do now. American higher education could also lose its prestige as the best university system in the world to other countries (as of 2019, seven of the top ten universities worldwide are in America and it is reasonable to say the top three in the United States are all STEM-focused).

As far as the notion that mathematics is a tool of oppression goes, we really can’t think of a more misguided idea—if it is an idea at all. The development of mathematics is one of the few things that is a truly global accomplishment: human beings from all cultures, times, places, and economic conditions have contributed crucially to its development.

A classic example is Srinivasa Ramanujan, a poor man from India who lived during British colonial rule. He had no formal training in mathematics but somehow had inexplicable, deep insights into many areas of mathematics. He is universally recognized as one of the most brilliant mathematical minds in history.

Ramanujan managed to catch the attention of British mathematician G.H. Hardy, and they engaged in a brief but extremely fruitful collaboration. Hardy, a brilliant and influential mathematician, was completely amazed by Ramanujan. He wrote:

I still say to myself when I am depressed and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.’

The very fact that Ramanujan, a poor man from India, treated Hardy as a mathematical equal, was deeply meaningful to Hardy. This is inspiring and illustrates the universality of mathematics.

Ironically, students of privilege (racial, economic, or otherwise) may be at a disadvantage with mathematics because one of the major obstacles holding people back in mathematics is misunderstanding what mathematics is and what it takes to succeed. That setback is more likely for a person of privilege because you cannot solve your mathematics problems with a checkbook or social connections.

Those students expect the hard work to be done for them. When they fail, they often see it as someone else’s fault rather than their own failure due to their lack of work or focus. Mathematics has no respect at all for cultural or social privilege. Mathematics is the great equalizer.

Fundamentally, mathematics is humbling. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your background is, you can excel or be terrible in mathematics. You don’t need any special equipment, or special experiences—just a pencil, paper, and an imagination. In mathematics, if you have the skills, it doesn’t matter who you are, you can make it. And if not…well, no amount of privilege is going to compensate.

Including stories of how people of different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds have advanced mathematics is noteworthy. However, if Seattle, or any other school system, does this inclusion at the expense of teaching its students mathematical concepts, and if they teach that mathematics oppresses rather than liberates, they will fail their students, being ironic the whole time.

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Derailing Australia’s Campus Rape Panic

by Bettina Arndt

As 2019 draws to a close, the manufactured rape crisis on Australian university campuses has suffered an important setback. Last month, a Queensland Supreme Court ruled that universities have no jurisdiction to adjudicate sexual assault. This prompted a major speech by the Federal Education Minister in which he affirmed that “If a student alleges they are the victim of a crime then our criminal justice system is the appropriate authority to deal with it.” This is hugely significant, but the media has been noticeably reluctant to report on this development.

Late last year, new regulations were introduced by a number of universities to establish committees and secretive processes to investigate and adjudicate sexual assault. These reversed the burden of proof, denied the accused normal legal rights, and required only a “balance of probabilities” to secure conviction. Many other universities have apparently made plans to proceed down the same path.

This followed a campaign orchestrated by activists who have spent the last decade successfully convincing the media that young women are unsafe on our campuses. As a result of their lobbying, the Australian Human Rights Commission spent a million dollars on a survey intended to uncover evidence of this alleged rape crisis. However, the survey found that only tiny numbers experienced sexual assault (an average of 0.8 percent over each of the two years studied), even when a broad definition of sexual assault was applied that included touching by a stranger on public transport to campus. The main finding was low-grade sexual harassment (mainly unwanted staring) which the universities then promoted as alarming levels of “sexual violence.”

Despite this setback, the higher education sector continued to toe the feminist line, setting up new measures to respond to the perceived crisis. Our university regulator—the Tertiary Education, Quality, and Standards Agency (TEQSA)—swiftly issued a “guidance note” advising universities to provide evidence of how they respond to sexual assault. This was widely interpreted by universities as a requirement to get involved in the criminal law business.

The kowtowing of key players to activist demands has been extraordinary. Prior to the recent Federal election, lobby groups almost succeeded in establishing a government task-force aimed at further bullying universities in this direction. “We were so close,” lamented Darren Brown, the former higher education officer working for the Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham, before Birmingham’s successor shelved the proposal.

Former barrister, now Queensland Senator, Amanda Stoker used a parliamentary committee to grill TEQSA officials about the impact of that “guidance note.” A video shows bureaucrats squirming as Stoker points out that the resulting university regulations contain barely a word about ensuring proper legal rights for accused young men. The accused, Stoker explained, had no access to evidence against them, there was no effort to ensure the reliability of that evidence, no power to call evidence in their own defence, no legal representation, no presumption of innocence, and no right of appeal.

A secretive, unsupervised committee would determine guilt on the balance of probabilities with power to impose serious penalties including expulsion from the university. As Stoker observed, this means that any student so punished will have wasted money and time invested in their degrees and are likely to be excluded from chosen professions—all penalties absent from the criminal justice code.

I’ve spent the last year touring Australian university campuses speaking about what’s happening, and Stoker played a pivotal role in our first major achievement. When the riot squad had to be called to remove violent protesters blocking my audience from accessing the venue at which I was speaking at Sydney University, Stoker used a similar Senate Estimate committee to question TEQSA about Sydney University’s failure to protect free speech. This led to the Federal government setting up an inquiry which ultimately led to our universities imposing new free speech codes.

But the major breakthrough came when the Queensland Supreme Court decision in November determined that universities have no jurisdiction to adjudicate sexual assault. This landmark case involved a University of Queensland medical student who was accused of sexual assault by another student. Wendy Mulcahy, the lawyer for the accused student, took the matter to the Supreme Court arguing that UQ did not have the jurisdiction to adjudicate such matters. In her judgement, Justice Ann Lyons concluded that universities are only entitled to make decisions in sexual assault cases which have been proved in criminal court.

Dan Tehan, our Federal Education Minister, used this legal decision to instruct TEQSA that the criminal justice system, not a university disciplinary process, is the right place to deal with alleged crimes that occur on campus or in the student commun­ity. “Universities have a duty of care to their students and that ­includes ensuring processes around the enforcement of any codes of conduct are legal, fair, and transparent,” he told a TEQSA conference in Melbourne later that month.

Earlier this year, a university administrator admitted in private correspondence with a student representative that his university had assumed they might still proceed with a misconduct hearing to determine the guilt of the perpetrator even if the accused had been found not guilty in criminal court. The reason? The university had a lower standard of proof, he said. That’s the point of this whole exercise—to use “victim-centred” justice to ensure more rape convictions. Feminists are angry that juries so rarely convict young men in he-said, she-said date rape situations, and “believe-the-victim” campus investigations make securing a conviction much easier.

That was widely acknowledged as the goal in 2011 when President Obama required all publicly funded universities to establish tribunals to adjudicate rape on campus. This led to over 200 successful lawsuits against universities for failing to protect the due process rights of the accused —rights the Trump administration is now seeking to restore. Given that recent history, it is extraordinary that our higher education sector has allowed itself to be led down the same path. Universities Australia has just commissioned a new survey on sexual assault intended to cook up more impressive rape statistics after the failure of the AHRC to produce the desired results.

It’s a relief to see a few shots finally fired across the bow of this misbegotten enterprise, and hopefully there are more to come. I’m about to launch a campaign to enlist alumni from all Australian universities to send Vice Chancellors a series of questions, drawn up by the legal team assisting me, asking about these institutions’ plans regarding the direction given by the Education Minister.* (Some universities have already written to the Minister stating they are discontinuing investigations.) I’ll be continuing my campus tour to educate male students about the risks presented by this manufactured crisis. I now have a list of cases of young men who have had their lives derailed by these courts and have made YouTube videos featuring two of these students, one in Adelaide and another in Perth.

One other minor development bears mention. In my previous Quillette article I mentioned I’d made a complaint to the university about key organisers of the Sydney protest, providing hours of video evidence and numerous witnesses to show they were breaching the university’s bullying and harassment regulations. After an investigation that lasted over 8 months, the university finally took action, suspending the key organiser, Maddy Ward, for a semester. Ward is a serial troublemaker who already had a strike against her following a notorious protest at which she exposed her breasts to an anti-abortion group. Ward proudly took ownership of the protest against me but was outraged that I had succeeded in “weaponising the university codes of conduct” against her. It was the authoritarian Left that insisted on regulating behaviour on campus, but they do not, it seems, like being held to the standards they impose on others.

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