What does this movie tell us about the modern university?

Last night, my wife and I watched the movie, Wit.

You can watch the full movie here (free with ads). I should warn that some of the content is quite disturbing and confronting.

I asked Google Gemini the following question:

"the movie wit, starring emma thompson, features two professors, one of oncology and another of english literature. the latter has terminal cancer. in spite of their academic credentials, neither seems equipped to cope with the human side of the suffering of the patient. alisdair macintyre was a critic of the modern university. what might have he said about this movie?"

Here is the answer.

"Alasdair MacIntyre, a prominent critic of the modern university and contemporary moral culture, viewed modern institutions not as communities dedicated to a shared human good, but as bureaucratic structures driven by specialization, technical expertise, and managerial effectiveness.

Based on his philosophical framework—most notably developed in After Virtue—MacIntyre would likely view the dynamic in the movie Wit as a quintessential illustration of the moral and intellectual failures of the modern university. Here is what he might say about it:

1. The Triumph of Bureaucratic Expertise Over Human "Telos"

MacIntyre argued that modern academic disciplines have abandoned any coherent notion of a unified human telos (purpose or ultimate goal). Instead, they have fractured into compartmentalized technical specialties.

• The Oncologist: Represents the epitome of modern "technocratic" or "managerial" expertise. To the hospital and the university, medicine is treated as a problem-solving science rather than a moral practice aimed at human flourishing. The patient is reduced to a data point, a mechanical puzzle, or a vehicle for research.
  
  
• The English Literature Professor: Though her field deals with the humanities, the modern study of literature has similarly grown hyper-specialized, detached, and academicized (focused on obscure analysis, such as John Donne’s holy sonnets, rather than wisdom or existential truth).
  
  

2. The Failure of Emotivism and Detached Rationalism

MacIntyre famously claimed that modern moral discourse has devolved into emotivism—the idea that ethical judgments are merely expressions of personal preference or feeling rather than rational truths.

• Neither professor is equipped to handle human suffering because their education has stripped them of a shared moral language.
  
  
• The literature professor spent her life analyzing deep themes of mortality and grace on paper, but because modern academia treats texts as objects of clinical critique rather than guides for living, she remains entirely unprepared to face her own mortality with actual grace. Her knowledge was purely aesthetic and intellectual, leaving a void where real moral virtue should be.
  
  

3. The Loss of Genuine Community

For MacIntyre, universities were historically meant to be traditions-based communities focused on cultivating virtues.  He viewed the modern university as having traded this for bureaucratic careerism and bureaucratic compartmentalization.

• In Wit, the coldness of the hospital-university complex highlights a complete absence of genuine human community. Interactions are transactional and analytical.
  
  

In short, MacIntyre would likely argue that Wit demonstrates the tragic irony of the modern academy: it produces hyper-competent specialists who know an immense amount about narrow subjects, yet are entirely illiterate in the art of being human."

That is a beautiful reflection. My enjoyment of it is somewhat overshadowed by my awareness that AI produced it. It also raises all questions about how to use AI in ways that do not diminish my own humanity.

Questions to consider when evaluating AI

 I am a slow adopter of new technologies. I have recently been playing around with AI at a very basic level on some research problems. Colleagues are also telling me about their experiences. I want to write something about its potential, both good and bad, for research and teaching. I want to hear from more people, particularly in condensed matter theory. However, before that, I think it is worth stepping back and asking some bigger questions than "Can AI help me publish more papers?" or "How do we stop students cheating on assessment?", as important as they are. I know the mathematics community is going through some angst and has issued a declaration about AI, and it is good to see that level of reflection.

Neil Postman (1931-2003) was a media theorist and cultural critic at New York University who spent a lifetime wrestling with questions about the broader implications of new technologies. In a talk given in 1998, he considered five things we need to know about technological change. Postman's enduring influence and relevance are marked by the fact that these five things featured in a column in The Washington Post, "Is the Internet Evil?" by Christine Emba, published in 2018.

Below, I summarise the five ideas from Postman's talk and provide questions (in italics) we should ask about any technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI).

1. All technological change is a trade-off. 

"the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences" 

Don't just ask the question "What will a new technology do?" Also ask, "What will a new technology undo?"

"a sophisticated perspective on technological change includes one’s being skeptical of Utopian and Messianic visions drawn by those who have no sense of history or of the precarious balances on which culture depends."

Through adoption of the technology, what will we lose, individually and as a society?

2. The advantages and disadvantages of a new technology are never distributed evenly among the population.

Who will benefit? Who will be harmed? 

Winners will try to persuade losers that they will benefit as well.

Benefits and harms can relate to employment, finances, social status, health, and political power.

3.  Embedded in every technology are powerful ideas. 

"These ideas are often hidden from our view because they are of a somewhat abstract nature. But this should not be taken to mean that they do not have practical consequences."

"The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection. The television person values immediacy, not history... the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom." 

"The medium is the message."

What ideas are embedded in the technology?

How does it make us use our minds and bodies?

How does it affect our personal relationships and social cohesion?

4. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. It changes everything.

"The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible."

The entrepreneurs who started the television industry "did not mean to turn political discourse into a form of entertainment."

The consequences can be social, economic, political, environmental, religious, and health-related.

What are the unintended consequences of the technology?

5. When a technology becomes mythic, it is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control.

"...our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us."

How does the technology lead to idolatry? Do some people worship it, its creators, or its owners?

Finally,

Do we use the technology or does the technology use us? 

In different words, will we shape our lives to fit the requirements of the technology, rather than have our values shape our use of the technology?

Measuring the social, ethical, and political values of different AI models

I continue to enjoy reading my hard copy of The Economist every week. Occasionally, I post examples of insightful graphics presented in articles.

Here are some graphics that struck me recently. They are taken from a fascinating article. AI models’ values are very different from most people’s

The first figure shows a comparison of the answers given to the World Values Survey by different Large Language Models and people from different regions (cultures) of the world. The vertical axis goes from traditional values at the bottom to secular values at the top. The horizontal axis goes from survival (or communal) values on the left to self-expression on the right.

Note how the different cultures do not overlap. Furthermore, the LLMs are distant from almost everyone. Just a few are close to the English speaking world. 

The second graph compares answers to the VOTER survey of political questions. The horizontal and vertical axes correspond to Social and Economic issues respectively. Positive and negative values correspond to conservative and liberal respectively. Answers from LLMs are compared to a sample of Trump and Biden voters from the 2020 USA Presidential election. Note the clear political polarisation. Furthermore, the AI models are all liberal.

I offer no comments on whether any of this is good or bad. I do suggest two implications. First, extensive use of AI will tend to shift peoples values in a particular direction, just like media (music, TV, movies, art) does. Second, given the conflict of values with most people these biases will offend or concern many communities and increase the backlash against AI companies and its widespread adoption. Consequently, some will modify the training of their models so they align more with the values of vocal communities. Whether or not that is seen as a good thing, will depend on whether you think some of those values should be affirmed.

What do you think?

Scandals in Australian universities

In Australia, scandals about the management of public universities continue to be covered in the media. A recent one is the use of billions of dollars to pay consulting firms to tell management which staff to sack and courses to cut because they are not making a profit.

Below is a recent episode of an ABC (Australian equivalent of BBC or PBS in USA) show on the topic, Chaos on Campus.

I tend to avoid engaging too much with media lamenting the state of unversities as I find it too disturbing. However, I was asked to reference the show in something I was asked to write and so felt I should watch it. It was painful.

This is definitely a scandal. However, it got me reflecting on something that I think gets virtually no media coverage and when I talk to people outside the university, they are pretty surprised and shocked. Anecdotal evidence from my colleagues is that attendance at lectures is now typically around 10-30 per cent of enrolment. Even before COVID-19, lectures at UQ were all recorded. Faculty have no choice. But only a few per cent of students watch the videos. This is quite demoralising for faculty.

What does this low level of student engagement mean for learning outcomes?

What is happening elsewhere? 

Here are some links from Google AI. 

I did not find them that insightful.

One link is an article from The Guardian in Australia from last year. It highlights how moving things to online and lowering standards is driven by financial incentives. This ties in with the scandals in the video. The values of Australian universities are money, marketing, management, and metrics.

What is your own experience with the level of disengagement? How do you think this is affecting student learning? How are you and your colleagues adapting? Are academic standards being lowered? Any suggestions on ways forward?

A multi-disciplinary perspective on mental illness

How is mental illness defined? What causes mental illness? How can a person be healed? Answering these questions will be influenced by our answer to the question of what a person is. Returning to the stratification of reality resulting from emergence, we see that there are social, psychological, neurological, physiological, and genetic dimensions to a person. To illustrate the complexity, I now take a brief tour of different university departments to get their unique perspective on mental health. Each represents a different tradition.

Biomedicine

The biomedical model for mental illness is based on the idea that brains are machines involving physical and chemical processes. Mental illness occurs when these processes do not function normally. Over the past few decades, brain imaging techniques have shown differences between the brains of healthy patients and those with mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. The best course of treatment is deemed to be drugs that target the parts of the brain or processes that are dysfunctional. Sometimes, physical interventions such as electrical shock therapies or surgeries are advocated. This biomedical model was embraced and promoted by most psychiatrists until relatively recently.  

Antidepressant drugs have been widely prescribed, and now there are many studies examining their effectiveness, side effects, and biochemical mechanisms. I mention three scientific problems. First, there is a large placebo effect. This is found in studies where two groups of patients are told they are receiving an antidepressant drug. One group receive the actual drug, and the second group receives a placebo, a pill that, unknown to them, does not contain the drug. The proportion of patients reporting a significant improvement in mental health was about 25% for taking the actual drug compared to 10% for those taking the placebo. In other words, it seems that believing one will get better can lead to significant improvements in mental health. 

Second, there is a large variation between patients concerning how effective the drugs are. Patients’ perceptions of change in their mental health range from getting slight worse to no change to large improvements. Third, the biochemical mechanism of the drugs has become controversial. When the class of drugs known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) were introduced, psychiatrists were confident that they knew how they work. Depressed patients lacked serotonin. SSRIs blocked the reuptake of serotonin into neurons, increasing the levels of this neurotransmitter in the synaptic cleft. However, a recent meta-analysis concluded as follows. 

“The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations. Some evidence was consistent with the possibility that long-term antidepressant use reduces serotonin concentration.”

In her book, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, Anne Harrington, a historian of science at Harvard, commented.  

“Today one is hard-pressed to find anyone knowledgeable who believes that the so-called biological revolution of the 1980’s made good on most or even any of its therapeutic and scientific promises. It is now increasingly clear to the general public that it overreached, overpromised, overdiagnosed, overmedicated and compromised its principles.”

Psychiatry is a tradition, for better or worse. Its proponents persist in their faith that the biomedical model has the best answers to mental illness, even though the evidence for this belief is ambiguous. Science can involve faith. 

The stakes are high. If a patient takes medication, they may get better, worse, or experience no change. If they don’t take medication, they risk missing out on healing.

Psychology 

Psychologists present a multitude of theories of and treatment plans for mental illnesses. The focus is not on biology but on mental processes. Some focus on the subconscious and others on thoughts we are aware of and can articulate. Some focus on current life experience and thinking patterns, whilst others delve into the past, including unresolved childhood conflict or trauma. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, claimed that depression was due to aggression toward the self.  A century later, there is no empirical evidence to support his claim. Other psychologists claim depression is predominantly a loss of hope. Opinion is divided about the best method of psychotherapy, where a patient has regular sessions with a trained professional to address unhelpful thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. Names for different methods include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Psychodynamic Therapy, Humanistic Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).  Central to CBT is the claim that "Irrational thinking is at the root of much emotional distress that people experience."

This diversity of perspectives and treatments highlights the level of scientific uncertainty about both causes and treatment.

I now mention three developments that are receiving increasing attention in psychology research and have a transcendent dimension.

Mindfulness practices. These involve training patients to focus their “attention on the present moment—thoughts, feelings, sensations, and environment—with an attitude of openness, curiosity, and non-judgment. It involves observing experiences directly, rather than overthinking or reacting impulsively. Key elements include breathing techniques, meditation, and bringing awareness to daily activities.”  (Google AI overview).

Forgiveness. The American Psychological Association offers a continuing education article that cites studies showing that practising forgiveness can improve mental health.  

Awe and wonder. Dacher Keltner has made extensive studies of the experience of awe and recounted them in a popular book.  In a recent article with Maria Monroy, they:  “review recent advances in the scientific study of awe, an emotion often considered ineffable and beyond measurement. Awe engages five processes—shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning—that benefit well-being. We then apply this model to illuminate how experiences of awe that arise in nature, spirituality, music, collective movement, and psychedelics strengthen the mind and body.”

Integrated medicine

The past few decades have seen the rise of integrated medicine, which promotes the view that many diseases, both physical and mental, are best treated by a holistic approach that combines treatments from different specialists. For mental health, it proposes that treatments might include not just drug and talking therapies but also address lifestyle issues. This means considering the role of sleep, exercise, diet, stress reduction, connection to nature, and screen time. With regard to diet, this builds on recent research showing deep connections between what goes on in the gut and the brain. Perhaps this is not surprising because our brains are not disembodied. They are part of our bodies and are connected to our whole nervous system.

Sociology 

Sociologists have investigated how mental illness can arise from social isolation. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was one of the founders of sociology. His book, Suicide: A Study in Sociology was published in 1897 and pioneered the scientific study of social phenomena. He proposed that suicide comes in four types, being distinguished by the level of imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation. Based on a detailed analysis of statistical data, Durkheim concluded that suicide was more likely in men than women, for single people than those who are married, for people without children than people with children, among Protestants than Catholics and Jews, among soldiers than civilians, and in times of peace than in times of war.

Since Durkheim, many more sociological studies suggest that social isolation and a lack of meaningful relationships can be a major contributing factor to depression. Some of this research has been reviewed in a popular book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari.  He was motivated by his own experience of being prescribed and taking antidepressants for many years without consideration of how his social isolation might be a contributing factor.

This short survey of the perspective on mental illness from a range of scientific disciplines illustrates the complexity of the issue, the multifaceted nature of reality, and scientific uncertainty.

Naturally, this survey of different scientific perspectives raises questions about my own experience. Why did the antidepressant drugs seem to work sometimes and not others? Did I experience a placebo effect? Why was mindfulness helpful to me two decades ago but not more recently? What was the role of stress, childhood experiences, social isolation, personal pride, or introversion in creating my mental illness? I simply don’t know the answers to these questions and don’t think I ever will. What does matter is that, somehow at different times, I did experience degrees of healing that allowed me to function, albeit sometimes at diminished levels. Regardless of which traditions you choose to guide your journey and whatever choices you make, trust (faith) is involved.