Where is The Math?

The Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Scholarship is here again. We are all for it. But wait, something is missing.

It’s that time of year again! The annual UMass Boston Chancellor’s Award lecture series has returned, and once again, it’s delivered us plenty of material to work with. Among this year’s gems: The 2021 rules for the anti-racist educator (tl;dr - hand out A’s like candy, never ask for a doctor’s note, rewrite the curriculum every time a student asks, and remember: you’re not here to teach them: you’re on the same level as the students. Oh, and also, capitalism sucks); the 2022 rules for equity and social justice in schools (where a white man passionately argues that disciplining black kids for misbehaving is inherently racist, because who doesn’t love a healthy dose of the soft bigotry of low expectations?); and, of course, the 2023 series where DEI pervaded every lecture, in particular the rules for DEI in STEM (where we’re told STEM is racist, but once again, no evidence is provided, just vibes).

But the 2024 lecture series really outdid itself by pushing "Scholarship", you know, the thing that used to be the most important, right to the bottom of the list. But what is this scholarship, really? Well, by definition, it’s “serious formal study or research of a subject.” In the golden days of the pre-Social Justice Era, math-heavy disciplines were actually kind of a big deal when it came to the Chancellor’s Awards for scholarship. But these days? Not so much. In fact, this year’s recipient doesn’t even have a PhD - just an inclusively excellent EdD. Because who needs a PhD when you’re busy redefining academic achievement, right?

Not wanting to let our imaginations run wild (or wildly accurate), we decided to pull up some historical data. And guess what we found?

The percentage of Chancellor’s Scholarship awards going to math-heavy fields has dropped by a factor of 1.5 under our current Chancellor of Color. It’s now a pitiful 20%, down from 30% under all the Chancellors before him. So, yeah, our gut feeling wasn’t just some math-starved hallucination.

Now, let’s be clear: we’re not saying that math-heavy disciplines are more important than others. They aren’t. But it’s hard to ignore how our administration seems so laser-focused on educational “sciences” and the closely related subset of humanities that everything else just gets tossed aside. They sound like a character from an 18th-century biting satire, Young Ignoramus by Fonvizin, mocking the uneducated Russian gentry.

Take Mrs. Prostakov’s thoughts on her son Mitrofanushka’s breadth of knowledge [“Nineteenth-century Russian plays,” by F.D.Reeve and D. Fradkin (Norton, NY 1973)]:

Believe me dear, that of course what Mitrofanushka doesn’t know is junk.

That, folx, is pretty much our administration’s academic philosophy in a nutshell.