This is an expanded version of the general audience talk I’m giving at the Science on Tap–formerly known as Drunk on Science, which is much cooler but probably less professional–in Pune, the brainchild of the illustrious Anoop Mahajan, with craft beer sponsored by Great State Ale Works! See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

In the final part of this series, we’ll look at how mathematics operates within academia. I won’t be touching on this in the talk as it’s more of a special interest topic; also this is possibly professionally risky as someone far away from being a tenured professor. But the issues raised below are highly pertinent today, and it’s important to be aware of the waters we swim in.

What we’ll look at in this post does not directly involve the content of pure, or even applied mathematics, but rather the culture of modern mathematics, the power structures that support it and vice versa.

An ethnography

A well-known ethnography of a biological institute was conducted in the late 70s by sociologists Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts studied the social dimensions inherent in the production of scientific knowledge.

“Whereas we now have fairly detailed knowledge of the myths and circumcision rituals of exotic tribes, we remain relatively ignorant of the details of equivalent activity among tribes of scientists, whose work is commonly heralded as having startling or, at least, extremely significant effects on our civilisation.” – Bruno Latour (p.17)

By and large, the tools of anthropological study are often applied in the direction that power is distributed. Of course, it’s quite well known that it is the coloniser that gets to study the colonised, and inverting the lens of study often dredges up complaints like ‘reverse racism.’ This, like notions of white fragility when one’s position of privilege is exposed, reflects upon the obvious lack of empathy inherent in hegemonic structures.

The act of criticising the academy’s complicity with oppressive systems is not new, but its persistence makes it imperative for us to continually consider its failings, to speak truth to power, and of course, acknowledge our own complicity wherever we witness it at work. Intersectional theories—of the non-mathematical kind!—tell us that working in the ivory tower, we necessarily operate within a multiplicity of oppressive systems at any given point in time. The fact that these often resonate with contemporary struggles locates the academy as another site of struggle and potential solidarity. Many of the issues discussed will not be particular to mathematics, but I will discuss them in the context of mathematics.

The ethnography, that I mean to describe briefly, is my own witness of mathematics culture as observed in various institutions primarily in the US, Germany, and India. Most of all my two-month stay in the mathematics institute at Oberwolfach, where every week saw a different group of forty-odd mathematicians convene to discuss the most recent advances and problems in their field of specialisation.

“Math is awesome and math culture is terrible”

As such, the first point here is the jet-setting academic. Each week a different group of experts is summoned from across the world, which certainly requires a good deal of air travel. These are almost always sponsored by faculty grants or by the institution itself, which receives a fair amount of government funding. At most, this large, sustained carbon footprint is acknowledged—and I implicate myself in this—with a somewhat apologetic tone, but also with a disavowal of responsibility by invoking a perceived inevitability. The reality of one’s socio-ecological responsibility is essentially waived by a fantasy that there really isn’t anything that can be done about it.

As we shall see, the most pernicious stain on pure mathematics research is not that it could be actively used ‘for evil,’ but rather the widespread and deeply entrenched apathy. As the saying goes, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

The second point, is what is derisively called the cult of genius. While certainly there are those who are more naturally gifted in mathematics, the cult of genius that is pervasive in mathematics—not to mention the ageism inherent in the Fields Medal which only serves to exacerbate this notion—has a damaging effect on ordinary students of mathematics. This stereotype goes against the growth mindset and resilience that ought instead to be nurtured in students. According to Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College,

“In disciplines that say it’s about innate ability, there are fewer women.”

But not only are there fewer women, but it stand to reason from the more general phenomenon that success in college is biased against minority groups, that those who largely succeed are white males. And this is provably true.

Mathematics from the Margins

So let’s talk about the cis-het white male. Though mathematicians as a whole like to view themselves as a left-leaning community, it remains that the majority of mathematicians, alive or dead, are white male and cisgender heterosexual. This is particularly important, because the old white boys club, left to its own devices, will perpetuate itself, as demonstrated in this informal experiment. And it is only a small saving grace that mathematics does not require field trips, which is a hotbed of sexual harassment by senior male professors, as it is slowly being made known and documented.

Many inroads have been made by groups such as the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), but much more work remains to be done for those in ethnic and sexual minorities. Piper Harron, who has been voicing out against the issues she has faced as a black woman in mathematics has been met with much opposition, but has been supported on the new American Mathematical Society (AMS) blog Inclusion/Exclusion. I encourage you to read everything she has written on the topic on her blog. From the introduction to her doctoral dissertation:

“Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude. Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and even championed by those who find it conducive to success. […] The problem was not individuals, but a system of self-preservation that, from the outside, feels like a long string of betrayals, some big, some small, perpetrated by your only support system.” —Piper Harron

On the other hand Spectra, an association for LGBT+ mathematicians, was recently founded to provide recognition and community for gender and sexual minority mathematicians. Though, as noted by its co-founder Mike Hill, gender is performative, and in mathematical spaces it is rarely discussed. This comes back to the point of apathy: mathematics pretends to be color-blind and gender-blind, but the position of not taking a position is never neutral. Indeed, the pretension of neutrality simply serves to reproduce what Danny Martin calls the ‘racial hierarchy of mathematics education.’

The stereotype of asians being predominantly good at mathematics is part of a larger problem that is the model minority myth. While some might argue it is a positive stereotype, it is in fact damaging to asian americans as a community, being held to a higher standard when their innate ability to succeed in mathematics is no better or worse than anyone else’s. Rather, it is important to recognise that the model minority myth is a pillar supporting anti-black racism, and is historically facilitated by US immigration policies favouring wealthy, highly educated elites from asia to immigrate. Indeed, much of the racial representation that we see in the US mathematical community is in fact internationally ‘sourced’, and as such, professional mathematicians home-grown in the US remain sorely lacking in diversity. Through the model minority myth we can locate whiteness: non-asian students of colour are judged as inferior to their white classmates, whereas asian students who do even better than white students are explained away by the stereotype. So whiteness is the norm in mathematics.

Piper sums it up thus: Math is awesome and math culture is terrible. We can also take a hint from Linda Nochlin, whose 1971 essay on Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? is considered the founding of feminist art history. It is worth quoting her at length, thinking about women mathematicians in place of artists:

“But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault, dear brothers, lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education—education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs and signals. The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science, politics or the arts.” — Linda Nochlin

Nochlin goes on to take aim at the notion of Genius, or the ‘myth of the Great Artist,’ and examines the social conditions for producing art (or for us, mathematics), showing that the development of artists and their art is ‘mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions’.

The Adjunctification of the Academy

Implicitly, what I’ve described above pertains mainly to research mathematics, or mathematics performed by tenured or tenure-track faculty. As a proportion of those who teach mathematics in the college classroom, this is steadily decreasing, giving way to a growing army of contingent labor in the US academic system. Adjunct instructors are contract workers with little access to labour unions, health insurance, and proper workspaces. They are paid at a far lower rate than their faculty counterparts, and so cost universities much less to hire. For example, my own PhD advisor was convinced that since his retirement, his tenured position would be divided into several adjunct positions instead.

The adjunctification of academia exacerbates the labor struggle even of knowledge workers, creating a class difference within the faculty lounge, not just the classroom. Indeed, while adjuncting as a graduate student, at the end of every semester I received a letter saying that there was no guarantee that my position would be renewed, though I was assured by the chair that this was only a formality. For this reason, my time on the adjunct track was relatively protected, and as a graduate student it was understood that this position was only temporary. But for many others who have already earned doctorates but unable to land a tenure track get relegated to the ‘adjunct track’, a sort of eternal limbo. More extreme cases have grabbed the headlines such as Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars.

Adjunct labor is itself a product of the university as a capitalist institution producing far more aspiring academics than the academy itself can sustain. In turn the increasing number of trained intellectuals being subjected to oppressive labor conditions simply increase the likelihood that these intellectuals will become radicalised against the academy, which of course will find resistance by the host institutions themselves, which are inherently conservative. And all this not to mention the effect this has on the students that the adjuncts teach. The conditions under which adjuncts labour under necessarily reduces the quality of their teaching, though this weakness must be hidden away, say, in the form of grade inflation, in order to preserve the adjunct’s job.

“The psychological brutality of the post-doctoral system”

This precarity also extends to other forms of temporary labor in the academic workforce, even if slightly more respectable. The plight of postdocs in a publish-or-perish environment has brought to light issues of mental health in academia, for example a particular case of suicide which led to controversy surrounding a subsequent physics publication. An excerpt of the acknowledgements of Oliver Roston, in memory of his former colleague Francis Dolan:

“I am firmly of the conviction that the psychological brutality of the post-doctoral system played a strong underlying role in Francis’ death. I would like to take this opportunity, should anyone be listening, to urge those within academia in roles of leadership to do far more to protect members of the community suffering from mental health problems, particularly during the most vulnerable stages of their careers.”

The current trial-by-fire of the itinerant postdoc before going to bat for a tenure-track faculty position can be costly, in terms of mental health and emotional stability. Because of the nature of the acknowledgment, the paper was declined to be published by two journals, though the physics contained in the paper was up to standard, and finally accepted by a third journal. Moreover, a postdoc is no guarantee for a tenure job, and studies show it is worthless outside of academia](http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/01/price-doing-postdoc). Quoting Julia Lane, an economist at New York University, “a postdoc is essentially high-quality cheap labor for the machine that is modern-day science.”

A side note on the publishing industry, which profits off of the backs of scientists, as it were: “ Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.” link In the words of Dr Neal Young of the National Institutes of Health:

“We scientists have not given a lot of thought to the water we’re swimming in.” —Neal Young

The secret weapon of cultural imperialism

So far we’ve mainly looked at the structures surrounding the production of mathematics. Let’s circle back to think a little more about the reproduction of mathematics, namely, mathematics education. Now, there is a certain divide between mathematics education and mathematics research. For example, studies of mathematics education is largely focused on the grade school level, and scrutiny fades as we come closer to graduate-level mathematics. The result is that the critiques of the former are almost never heard in the latter. There is some sense to this, in that mathematics education at the grade school level involves every student, and by the time one arrives at university one already has entrenched preconceptions on who should excel at mathematics and who should not, and what mathematics is good for, and so on.

So let’s listen a bit on the conversation that has taken place in mathematics education: Alan Bishop has written on western mathematics as the secret weapon of cultural imperialism (1990), where western mathematics is understood to be itself a problematic term, having received essential contributions from Arab and Chinese mathematics, for example. Bishop writes that the process of cultural invasion by western mathematics in colonised countries has three major mediating agents: trade, administration, and education. The first two are quite routine, so I’ll focus on the third, also because it resonates with the theme that abstract mathematics is in fact political. The mathematics curriculum is embedded in the education of local elites, producing disciplined subjects in a European mould, that is, in the image of the coloniser. Indeed, as university-preparatory education, students were trained to aspire towards attending western universities, and the aspirations of the students were towards attending western universities, ‘educated away from their culture and away from their society.’

Towards anti-racist mathematics

Just as we have seen US military tactics abroad eventually come home to roost, so is the use of mathematics as a tool of subjugation in colonies brought to bear on a nation’s own citizens. Embedded within the methodology of western mathematics are the cultural values of rationalism (reasoning and logic), objectism (decontextualising in order to generalise), control (power over physical and social environments), and progress (industrialisation and development). These stand in stark contrast to the assumption that mathematics is universal and culturally neutral. Indeed, critical scholars have argued that mathematics education today is increasingly influenced by neoliberal and neoconservative market-focused projects, as we have already seen in military development and the commodification of students. Such projects can be seen as consequences of the cultural values embedded in western mathematics.

Arguably on the fringes of mathematics education (and non-existent in modern mathematics research) is the field of ehtnomathematics. While perhaps noble in its intention to explore and acknowledge the mathematical knowledge of nonwestern cultures (or even western cultures, in the case of indigenous americans), the project of ethnomathematics is fraught with the risk of simply reproducing the racial categories and hierarchies, becoming co-opted into ‘diversity’ efforts.

Martin identifies mathematics education itself as a racial project, that is, ‘simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics and an effort to reorganize or redistribute resources along particular racial lines.’ For example, we see this in the distribution of scores among US students in standardised tests like the SAT. This makes plain the imperative to locate whiteness in mathematics as the gateway to higher education and access, and anti-racist mathematics as an answer to it.