Computer Rant

By Devin Gaffney '10

Typically, when thinking about this college beyond my own time here, I quickly become frustrated with what could, but likely can’t, be a part of Bennington’s future so long as the current situation continues. I have a tough time discerning whether or not the frustration is either reasonable in the facts of our current situation or unreasonable due to my dealings with, in my own experience, an unbalanced and profoundly out-of-touch administration.

I’m not going to delve into my personal academic dog-and-pony show experience, as I can deliver the tale much better in person when I’m able to fully illustrate the various inadequacies ranging from numerous unresponded e-mails to the utter fabrications surrounding a particular faculty hire, and at this point, their failure on me as a student is moot.

What I do want to go into, however, is the problem of computing at Bennington. I have been harping on this for one and a half years, ever since they fired our last computer science professor, and I first saw the profound disconnect between the administration and the sciences in generalEver since the Administration fired Joe Holt, computer science professor prior to Jeff Croud, I have been adamant about the need for a more resolved computer science program. It is interesting to me that the administration has maintained an attitude towards the computer sciences that seems to oscillate between flippancy and complete disuninterest. This attitude in turn manifests itself throughout the systems this campus uses: the antiquated e-mail server (which, until last term when I published an article in the paper detailing a security exploit, was completely open for anyone to hack into and send e-mails like the one from Liz_rollin_deep@bennington.edu), moodle, csm-symplicity, the main site’s accessibility, and our access to computers and servers is an abomination of higher education IT in the first order. Although some interest or regard for computer science could lead to changes for the better in classroom environments with students and administrators working together, we maintain a system that barely functions and leads to miscommunications, missed deadlines, and faulty assumptions all the time, which in turn affects everyone.

This attitude is further manifested in the hiring process of new computer science faculty members.- Joe Holt, who is now a forgotten person, was fired (the administration’s euphemism, for those who are interested, is “non-renewal”) without explanation with one term of lead time to start the search for a replacement. Instead of beginning the process immediately (so that students could participate), the urgency of this change in faculty iwas apparently lost on the administration, and the process instead took place during the summer of 2009..

Although I specifically e-mailed the administration repeatedly to be involved (or at the least, involve some student somewhere) in the process, as I had some familiarity with what the student body as a whole could use in a computer science professor, I was left out, as were any other students. The administration’s attitude played out in the e-mail I received July 13, 2009, informing me that in an hour and a half, and I was urged to join in and participate in meetings with the potential hires. Despite the physical restrictions of traveling 3,000 miles in 90 minutes, I asked to see resumes of those being interviewed, so that I could talk to other students and forward a student opinion – I was never responded to. Ultimately, there was zero student input on the hiring of the new faculty, despite the fact that, as Joe was the only computer science professor, perhaps the best people to ask were the students, since they knew what they could benefit from in a professor. As a result, or at least a correlating fact, the bulk of Joe’s programming students from the past were left out of the new “computer science” courses, and had to move on to either new plans entirely, leave Bennington College entirely, or load tutorials on Jeff Crouse’s schedule, outside of his area of expertise. As for myself, I started begging professors outside of Bennington to help me on my thesis on their and my own time without pay outside of any academic setting.

And again, this attitude is being manifested in yet another hiring process, as Jeff Crouse is not coming back next year. I personally talked to Provost and Dean, Elissa Tenny, who at theat time gave no promises for student input. According to Ian Pearce ’11 and Max Darham (’11), a similarly cool response was met when they also asked to be involved in the process., or at least provide a student opinion. One of the main arguments I personally heard was that what one or two computer science students may want is not necessarily what the rest of the students want. Fair enough, but does that mean that there should instead be zero student input? Or, better yet, who speaks for computer science students? Should anyone interested take a poll? Whatever is needed, I am sure, can be reasonably conducted, Ggiven the focus and attention placed on other hirings, such as in the literature department, computer science should be treated in the same manner..

It’s incredible that these are the facts of the case as far as the administration’s relationship towards the position goes, given that Bennington so clearly gains from knowing as little as it does about computer science. In the arts, people like Digital Arts faculty member, Robert Ransick, are aided by computer science people like Joe Holt, who can combine their foci and create something as ambitious and creative as the Bennington Bookmarks project.

In science, the need to understand how to compute is of paramount importance; you will be hard pressed to find one faculty member in Dickinson without some level of programming experience, as it is required in sampling data, doing complex measurements, and leveraging research software. This applies to their aspiring students just as much.

In the social sciences, a new field , where I now claim membership as a published academic, is being created at this moment, and is called internet studies. It is a marriage between computer science and political science, and asks questions perfect for a design lab: does online activism (eg: people using Twitter to talk about the Iran Election last summer) actually mean anything? How can, and to what degree, China censor its citizens? If we have access to all this data from actual human beings producing Facebook statuses, can we learn anything about human interactions in communities? These are all questions that may not be answered fully, but are quite approachable, when you actually have the ability to understand computational thought.

Computer Science is this magical concept, that when used correctly, can change the world in any field. This is the core idea: if you can formalize a thought into a process of true or false questions, you can arrive at the answer for anything, granted you model the situations correctly. So far, this has not been proven wrong, and it’s been around since the Victorian age. It has willed only a few unremarkable abilities into being, such as the ability to have access to any piece of information anywhere instantly. It also, in no particular order, helped us land on the moon, understand global warming, map the human genome, and break the Enigma Machine in World War II.

At a time when computationally expensive questions are becoming more and more accessible to even the cheapest computers, it seems that the ability to think algorithmically will be of increasing importance in the real world. I am not talking about coding up some hack-job HTML page, I’m talking about thinking in terms of how to frame problems in ways that can be done automatically with some formalization – to know when a computer is and isn’t useful for a problem is important – optimizing the way one thinks is more important. In any field, computer science can aid in problem solving, efficiency increases, and a better appreciation for the way the modern world operates. There is no better group of students to take lessons from abstract, high level computer science courses and turn them into compelling projects that can change the world. There is no better group of students to take the hours of slogging through technical material and, realizing that things can be made simplified and streamlined, to do so. Computer science desperately needs people like Bennington students, and the programs here desperately need some formal education about how to think and how to implement thought for the most transformative machine ever created by people.

My worry , at the end of this college experience, is that the incredible opportunity will not exist simply due to an attitude issue from an administration that is, while surely well-intentioned, tends to handle this matter in the worst possible fashion. As a result, unless students consider the role that computer science can play in their education and act on this accordingly by begging for input, on this next dog-and-pony show, Bennington will completely pull the blinders over, and refuse to engage with a field that, possibly more than any other, will dictate the terms of our future not just at this college, but as people in a digitally transformed society.