Abelard and Heloise and sexual harassment in the Academy...

At the same time as some sexual repugnances are diminishing (e.g. same sex marriage), other kinds of sexual liaisons, such as those between college faculty and undergraduate students  now meet with increased disapproval and regulation.  A recent article in the Boston Review tries to put that in historical perspective:

The Erotics of Mentorship, by Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran

"In twelfth-century France, the prominent logician and theologian Abelard and his pupil Heloise famously struggle, in a series of letters, to determine whether the bond between them is intellectual or romantic."
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Here's Wikipedia on Abelard, and on Heloise. I hadn't remembered the details of their affair, but the outcome was quite drastic for both of them. Abelard continued to teach for much of his life, which wasn't so easy.

See my earlier post

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Faculty-student liasons repugnant at Yale

From the Yale alumni magazine: University bans faculty-student sex 

Interview on market design in Mundo Empresarial (in Spanish)

Recent mail brought a copy of the Summer issue (Segudo Trimestre 2017) of Mundo Empresarial to my desk, and it contains a multi-page interview with me that I only dimly remember giving. It may have been a while ago: the link below lists both Saturday, July 22, 2017 and May 14, 2015 as the date of publication. (I'm guessing the web version may have come out long ago, but I missed it.)

Entrevista a Alvin E. Roth, Premio Nobel de Economía 2012

 The last question and answer (with the help of Google Translate):

Por último, además de por haber ganado el Nobel, ¿por qué querría ser recordado Alvin E. Roth?
Me haría muy feliz ser recordado como un buen maestro que ha aprendido mucho de sus alumnos.

Finally, in addition to winning the Nobel Prize, why would Alvin E. Roth want to be remembered? 
It would make me very happy to be remembered as a good teacher who has learned a lot from his students.

Alex Peysakhovich is thriving at Facebook

Here's Alex Peysakhovich, on a list of  top 30 thinkers under 30

ALEXANDER PEYSAKHOVICH'S THEORY ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

"Alexander Peysakhovich is technically a behavioral economist, but he bristles a bit at being defined that narrowly. He's a scientist in Facebook's artificial intelligence research lab, as well as a prolific scholar, having posted five papers in 2016 alone. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he won a teaching award, and has published articles in the New York Times, Wired, and several prestigious academic journals.

Despite these accomplishments, Peysakhovich says, "I'm most proud of the fact that I've managed to learn enough of lots of different fields so that I can work on problems that I'm interested in using those methods. I've co-authored with economists, game theorists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, and statisticians."

Peysakhovich's interdisciplinary work is driven by his deep interest in understanding decision-making—both human and machine—and by his desire to figure out how artificial intelligence can improve our decision-making processes. He builds tools that help people make better choices, and machines that can turn data into, as he puts it, "not just correlations but actual causal relationships."
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The photo in the article comes from Alex's dissertation defense at Harvard (in 2012, when I was already at Stanford, hence that particular picture...)

Bobby Pakzad-Hurson defends his dissertation

Bobby Pakzad-Hurson defended his dissertation yesterday. (Successfully:) You can find his papers at the link. This celebratory photo was taken by Susie Gilbert.

Here's Bobby (in the suit, holding the bottle) with his committee: Fuhito Kojima, me, Nick Bloom, Matt Jackson and Itai Ashlagi.

Bobby's job market paper (with Zoe Cullen) was on pay transparency. He'll be going to Brown next year.

Welcome to the club, Bobby.

John Dickerson defends his Ph.D. thesis at CMU, on kidney exchange

John Dickerson will defend today:
Computer Science Thesis Defense, Friday, August 26, 2016 - 2:00pm to 3:30pm
8102 Gates-Hillman Center (or, via Skype, for those of us who are far away).

Here's his summary of what he's preparing to defend:

"The exchange of indivisible goods without money addresses a variety of constrained economic settings where a medium of exchange — such as money — is considered inappropriate. Participants are either matched directly with another participant or, in more complex domains, in barter cycles and chains with many other participants before exchanging their endowed goods. This thesis addresses the design, analysis, and real-world fielding of dynamic matching markets and barter exchanges. We present new mathematical models for static and dynamic barter exchange that more accurately reflect reality, prove theoretical statements about the characteristics and behavior of these markets, and develop provably optimal market clearing algorithms for models of these markets that can be deployed in practice. We show that taking a holistic approach to balancing efficiency and fairness can often practically circumvent negative theoretical results. We support the theoretical claims made in this thesis with extensive experiments on data from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Kidney Paired Donation Pilot Program, a large kidney exchange clearinghouse in the US with which we have been actively involved. Specifically, we study three competing dimensions found in both matching markets and barter exchange: uncertainty over the existence of possible trades (represented as edges in a graph constructed from participants in the market), balancing efficiency and fairness, and inherent dynamism. For each individual dimension, we provide new theoretical insights as to the effect on market efficiency and match composition of clearing markets under models that explicitly consider those dimensions. We support each theoretical construct with new optimization models and techniques, and validate them on simulated and real kidney exchange data. In the cases of edge failure and dynamic matching, where edges and vertices arrive and depart over time, our algorithms perform substantially better than the status quo deterministic myopic matching algorithms used in practice, and also scale to larger instance sizes than prior methods. In the fairness case, we empirically quantify the loss in system efficiency under a variety of equitable matching rules. Next, we combine all of the dimensions, along with high-level human-provided guidance, into a unified framework for learning to match in a general dynamic model. This framework, which we coin FutureMatch, takes as input a high-level objective (e.g., "maximize graft survival of transplants over time") decided on by experts, then automatically (i) learns based on data how to make this objective concrete and (ii) learns the "means" to accomplish this goal — a task that, in our experience, humans handle poorly. We validate FutureMatch on UNOS exchange data and make policy recommendations based on it. Finally, we present a model for liver exchange and a model for multi-organ exchange; for the latter, we show that it theoretically and empirically will result in greater social welfare than multiple individual exchanges. Thesis Committee: Tuomas Sandholm (Chair) Avrim Blum Zico Kolter Ariel Procaccia Craig Boutilier (Google/University of Toronto) Alvin Roth (Stanford University)"

He'll be teaching CS at Maryland in the Fall.

Is it (always) repugnant for professors to date students?

Some recent policy decisions at Harvard and Arizona State clarify their position on romantic relationships between professors and students.

At Arizona State they've rejected a measure that would condemn all relationships between any professor and any student, and confined the ban to professors and students who they "teach, supervise, or evaluate."

The Chronicle of Higher Education has the story:

"January 27, 2015 by Andy Thomason

Arizona State Professors Expand Ban on Dating Their Students

Faculty members at Arizona State University voted on Monday to broaden the institution’s prohibition on dating between professors and students, reports The Arizona Republic.

The University Senate voted, 76 to 11, to ban professors from dating students over whom the professors can “reasonably be expected” to have authority. The current policy forbids relationships between professors and the students they teach, supervise, or evaluate.

Last fall the faculty body rejected a measure that would have banned all relationships between professors and students, save exemptions granted by the provost. The new policy still requires approval from the administration to take effect."  

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The Harvard policy forbids all relationships between professors and undergraduates, but forbids relationships with graduate students only if the professor is teaching or supervising them.

"FAS Policy on Relationships between People of Different University Status:
•     The FAS policy prohibits romantic or sexual relationships between its faculty and any undergraduate student at Harvard College, regardless of whether the instructor is currently supervising or teaching that student. The FAS Policy also prohibits romantic or sexual relationships between faculty and graduate students or Division of Continuing Education students whom the faculty member is teaching or supervising.
•     The FAS policy does not expressly forbid other kinds of romantic or sexual relationships, but it does describe the expectations for relationships between people of different university status."
(see http://www.fas.harvard.edu/files/fas/files/sexual_and_gender-based_harassment_policy_and_procedures_for_the_fas_.pdf)
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A Mentor of Market Designers

Here's an interview with Eduardo Azevedo about being my student: I just came across it recently. I'm proud of him too.  The Mentor of Market Designers

Notes on teachers and students from the rabbinical literature

As I get older I appreciate more the bonds between teachers and students. These aren't as recognized in modern literature as are other kinds of bonds, between parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters... One exception is in the rabbinical literature.

Here's a brief collection of quotes, I'd be glad to know of more.

Rabbi Yitzchok Etshalom Talmud Torah 5:13
13. The students add to the teacher's wisdom and expand his understanding. The sages said: I have learned much wisdom from my teacher, more from my colleagues and the most from my students (BT Ta'anit 7a); and just as a small piece of wood ignites a large one, similarly a small student sharpens the teacher['s mind] until he extracts from him, through his questions, wondrous wisdom.

http://www.torah.org/learning/rambam/talmudtorah/tt5.13.html

alternate translation, from Maimonides, Laws of Torah Study, http://www.panix.com/~jjbaker/MadaTT.html chapt 5:
13) Students add to the wisdom of their Rabbi, and open his heart. The Sages said that they learnt more from their Rabbis than from their friends, but learnt even more from their students. Just as a small candle can light a big one so a student sharpens his Rabbi's wits, by extracting from him his wisdom by means of questions.

Pirkei avot: Chapter 1.1
The Men of the Great Assembly had three sayings:
Be deliberate in judging;
Educate many students;
Make a fence around the Torah.

Pirkei avot: (Chapte 1, 6) Joshua ben Perachyah and Nittai the Arbelite received the Torah from them. Joshua ben Perachyah said: Provide [make] for yourself a teacher and get [acquire] yourself a friend; and judge every man towards merit. http://www.shechem.org/torah/avot.html

Some commentaries have trouble with the first two clauses, and I've seen "get a friend" translated as "find someone to study with." But another way to understand it  (maybe, I'm no Talmud scholar) is that teachers and friends (and students and friends) can intersect and be the same folks...

5.12 12. There are four types of student. One who is quick to understand and quick to forget--his flaw cancels his virtue. One who is slow to understand and slow to forget--his virtue cancels his flaw. One who is quick to understand and slow to forget--his is a good portion. One who is slow to understand and quick to forget--his is a bad portion.

Sanhedren p105, side B: no man envies the accomplishments of his children or his students


"דאמר רב יוסי בר חוני בכל אדם מתקנא חוץ מבנו ותלמידו" "Reb Yossi bar Honi said 'of everyone a man is envious except his son and his student'."
( סנהדרין • קה ב )

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update: I should note that another literature/tradition in which bonds between teachers and students are noted is in martial arts .

Update: Charlie Nathanson reminds me of  Perkei Avot chapter 4, verse 12 (https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.4.12

רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן שַׁמּוּעַ אוֹמֵר, יְהִי כְבוֹד תַּלְמִידְךָ חָבִיב עָלֶיךָ כְּשֶׁלְּךָ, וּכְבוֹד חֲבֵרְךָ כְּמוֹרָא רַבְּךָ, וּמוֹרָא רַבְּךָ כְּמוֹרָא שָׁמָיִם:

"Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua said: let the honor of your student be as dear to you as your own, and the honor of your colleague as the reverence for your teacher, and the reverence for your teacher as the reverence of heaven."

Faculty-student liasons repugnant at Yale

From the Yale alumni magazine: University bans faculty-student sex


"After more than a quarter century of debate, Yale faculty members are now barred from sexual relationships with undergraduates—not just their own students, but any Yale undergrads.
The new policy, announced to faculty in November and incorporated into the updated faculty handbook in January, is “an idea whose time has come,” says Deputy Provost Charles Long, who has advocated the ban since 1983.
In his decades at Yale, Long has seen many faculty-student romances. Most turn out fine, he says, but others are destructive to students. “I think we have a responsibility to protect students from behavior that is damaging to them and to the objectives for their being here.”
Previously, the university had prohibited such relationships only when the faculty member had “direct pedagogical or supervisory responsibilities” over the student. That remains the rule for affairs between faculty and graduate or professional students, and between grad students and undergrads."