Jenny Davidson wins Mark Van Doren Award, also some reflections on the continuity of work within literary criticism or statistics

For “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership” at Columbia College. Reading Jenny’s remarks (“my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. . . . we shared a sense of the excitement of the enterprise on which we were all embarked”) reminds me of the comment Seth made once, that the usual goal of university teaching is to make the students into carbon copies of the instructor, and that he found it to me much better to make use of the students’ unique strengths. This can’t always be true–for example, in learning to speak a foreign language, I just want to be able to do it, and my own experiences in other domains is not so relevant. But for a worldly subject such as literature or statistics or political science, then, yes, I do think it would be good for students to get involved and use their own knowledge and experiences.

One other statement of Jenny’s caught my eye. She wrote:

I [Jenny] am happy to spend half an hour in class working through a single sentence or paragraph of prose – obviously not just any prose, it’s going to have to be something really significant – one of those dense rich paragraphs you find in Richardson’s Clarissa or Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments or for that matter Austen or Henry James or Proust. It is tempting to rush to broad thematic generalizations about a work or an author, but how can you answer a big question about what something means if you can’t parse the meanings of the words in one enigmatic sentence? It takes a willingness to puzzle over small things – and often to admit that one doesn’t understand some particular turn of phrase or twist of argument – to earn the right to answer the bigger and more glamorous questions.

This reminded me of the statistical saying that God is in every leaf of every tree. I wonder how many of Jenny’s colleagues in the English and Comparative Literature department agree with her on this. When it comes to statistics, I’ve heard theoreticians opine that applied statistics is just the routine application of existing principles. And, of course, those who have this view tend to do their applied statistics in this way, thus confirming their view that this is all that applied statistics is.

Going deeper, though, I think the real issue is not how someone does applied statistics, but rather the idea of a continuity between one’s different research endeavors. There is a connection between my work in probability theory, my work in theoretical statistics, my work in methods, in computation, in various applications, my teaching, and my consulting. This all sounds natural–maybe inevitable–but it’s not always so. I’ve known some statistics professors who have done complicated theoretical research and then use simple methods for consulting. When teaching, they sometimes swing between extreme mathematical rigor (not always appropriate in applied work, given the shakiness of the assumptions in practice) and simple advice (listen to your client, think hard about selection bias, etc.) with little in between. That’s not my style, although I recognize that it works for some.

I wonder how this plays out for literature professors. My impression is that there are continuous connections between Jenny’s teaching, research, and popular writing, but maybe it doesn’t work that way for everybody in that field.

P.S. I looked up the past recipients of the award. Lots from History, lots from English and Comparative Literature, the others are pretty much all over the place. A few from Chemistry, but only 1/2 from Biology and none from Physics. Indeed, academic science is more research-focused and less teaching-focused, compared to the humanities, but I also wonder if the template for “outstanding teaching” somehow aligns better with what people expect out of a history course, where people can sit back and be entertained, like in a TV show. (Not that I think Jenny Davidson’s classes are like that.)

3 thoughts on “Jenny Davidson wins Mark Van Doren Award, also some reflections on the continuity of work within literary criticism or statistics

  1. Sounds like statistics to me – "puzzle over small things – and often to admit that one doesn't understand some particular [data] turn of phrase or twist of [assumptions] argument

    Both statistics and literary criticism "obsesses" (or should) over representations (how the model captures something for someone in some sense)

    Notably, CS Peirce was a major figure in both, though probably more so in lierary criticism (semiotics).

    His influence in statistics is becoming more well appreciated as for instance in this recent quote from Don Rubin Psychological Methods
    2010, Vol. 15, No. 1, 38–46 "It is extremely interesting to note that the American psychologist and
    philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce appears to have anticipated, in the late
    19th century, Neyman’s concept of unbiased estimation when using simple
    random samples and appears to have even thought of randomization as a
    physical process to be implemented in practice (Peirce, 1931)."

    Interestingly to Peirce, every individual was a unique web of representations, and hence when each comes to represent something to them selves and others – it will be unique.

    K?

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