Sex, lies, and nerds

Over on Facebook a few days back, a link to this story in Forbes about sexual harassment in the astronomy community was posted in a private group.  Alison Paige made the following, fairly astute, observation:

Astronomy, physics, computer science, engineering. Is anyone surprised that white males who love science so much that they participated in science fairs willingly and gym class only because it was required and played chess or D&D instead of attending the prom are really bad at communicating with women? These are the men who were bullied by teacher-coaches and fellow classmates repeatedly all through their grade school and HS years. They have no social interaction skills.

As a white male who voluntarily participated in science fairs, hated gym class, and played on my high school chess team - this was pre-Dungeons & Dragons - and then went on to get an advanced degree in materials science, I can affirm that there is a lot of truth to this.  People who go into the hard sciences, in general, don't come equipped with a full set of social graces.  Put these socially inept men on today's college campuses where even complimenting a woman's appearance is construed as an act of overt male aggression tantamount to rape and, well...yeah, sexual harassment charges will fly, regardless of whether the alleged act of harassment was real or committed with the most innocent of intentions.

I'll throw something else into this mix:  Hard science academicians past a certain age, i.e., those that were hired before political correctness and diversity became the driving principles for higher education,  are more likely to be conservative politically than their soft science and liberal arts colleagues.  As a consequence, all of their actions are going to be viewed through a liberal political lens that places them under far more scrutiny than, say, the politically correct English literature professor who may be staging Lolita reenactments in his classroom to bring Nabakov's writing "alive".

Having said all this, the reality of higher education in America is that heterosexual white male professors are indeed dinosaurs and are being replaced by a more "diverse" faculty.  Whether or not these professors are forced out by charges of sexual harassment, real or imagined, or simply retire, the end result is the same:  A faculty selected to be culturally diverse and politically homogeneous. This is not to say that these new faculty are not talented and, in some cases, extremely talented, but when a significant basis for their hiring is their sexual identification and/or race and political views, they are not required to be.

I could go on and on about all the reasons I believe that higher education is dying in America, but I'll save that commentary for another day and end this bit of Saturday morning amusement by making a prediction:  At present, American universities are net importers of foreign graduate students, mostly from China and India.  With ten year - fifteen, at the outside, this trend will reverse and serious American hard science students will be learning Mandarin and heading to China to learn their trade.