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[Leaving the best for last, here is Ashwin Nayak's post. Unlike the other posts in this series, Ashwin does not just talk about events, but he also gives us a view of his inner life at several critical times. What can I say to introduce such a beautiful essay? I got this: congratulations Ashwin! -- L.T.]
(Some names have been changed to protect privacy. Some events have been presented out of chronological order, to maintain continuity in the narrative. The unnamed friends in Waterloo are Kimia, Andrew, Anna-Marie, and Carl. I would like to thank them, Joe, Luca, and especially Harry for their feedback on a draft of this blog post. Harry offered meticulous comments, setting aside a myriad commitments. Most of all, I would like to thank my sisters and my parents for graciously agreeing to being included in this story.
For those not in theoretical computer science, FOCS is one of the flagship conferences on this subject. Luca is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, and Irit at Weizmann Institute of Science.
A prelude: I was born into a middle-class family from the South-West coast of India. I am the youngest of three siblings, and grew up in cities all over the country. My father served as an officer in the Indian army, and my mother taught in middle school until she switched to maintaining the household full-time. I went to IIT Kanpur for my undergraduate studies when I was 17. At 21, I moved half-way across the world to Berkeley, CA, for graduate studies. In 2002, after a few years of post-doctoral work in the US, I moved to Waterloo, ON, to take up a university faculty position.)
We were walking through art galleries in San Francisco when Luca brought up the Turing centenary events that were taking place around the world. None of the events celebrating his work referred to Turing’s homosexuality. Luca wondered whether the celebrations would be complete without revisiting this aspect of his life. As a response, he was thinking of having a series of guest blog posts by contemporary gay and lesbian computer scientists about their experiences as gay professionals. How would they compare with those in Turing’s times?
I wonder how much of my attention was on the art in the next few galleries. Would I write a post? What would I write? For me, sexuality is so deeply personal a matter that I’ve talked about it only with a handful of people. Why would I write about it publicly? Something Luca had said stuck in my mind: “The post could even be anonymous. That would be a statement in itself.” It took me back to my first relationship: I dated Mark for over three years and no one other than his friends knew. Times when I was on the verge of telling a friend about my relationships flashed by. I remembered the time I discussed with my immediate family why I would not get married (at least not the way they imagined). Times when students recognized me at events for gays and lesbians resurfaced, as did conversations with friends and colleagues grappling with openness. I would write a post, I told Luca.
That night, I got little sleep. Memories that I thought had slipped into oblivion loomed large. Read the rest of this entry »
It is late Spring in 2000, and I am to have lunch in New York with Ran Canetti and Ronitt Rubinfeld. Ronitt is already there, and Ran arrives a bit late and asks what we are talking about. “I told Ronitt that I am gay” I say. “Oh…” says Ran “Congratulations!“
Faculty and students at UC Davis, and in a lot of other places, are outraged at the campus police who pepper-sprayed a group of students who were peacefully sitting down.
In their official response, the campus police said that the police officer in question felt “encircled and threatened” by the students, which reminds me of a classic South Park episode.
The context at UC Davis was that Chancellor Katehi had allowed “Occupy UC Davis” students to camp overnight on campus (which is ordinarily forbidden) for one night, but then sent them a message the following day that they were to disband, and she sent the police to enforce the decision. At Berkeley, Chancellor Birgeneau had similarly sent the police to disband an occupation, resulting in beat poets.
I can’t understand the rationale for these decisions. I don’t say “I don’t understand” as a passive-aggressive way of meaning “I disagree;” I genuinely don’t get what is going on. Chancellors are smart people, former professors, who are politically savvy and who care very much about students, or at least care very much about their relationship with the students. What could be so wrong with some students camping on campus that makes it, on balance, a rational decision to disband those camps with violence? Is it the Regents who are strongly against occupations? Is there a worry that an occupation would be unpopular with state officials, at a time when the California state budget has again a multi-billion shortfall that will require further budget cuts?
Edited to add: Another interesting question is why the police uses violence against peaceful protesters. After all, high-ranking police officials are themselves smart and politically savvy people, and such strategies are bad PR but also bad policing. Next time the campus police is called to diffuse a tense situation on campus, their presence will actually add to the tension. This interesting article by Alexis Madrigal (thanks to Sanjay Hukku for directing me to it) traces a change of police strategies to the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.
On Thursday, May 5th, David Karger will come to Stanford to give the second Motwani Lecture in theoretical computer science. As for the inaugural lecture there will be a reception in the Gates building and then the lecture will be at 4:15pm, this time in the Allen building. Recall that parking is free after 4pm.
Then you can go wild with Cinco de Mayo parties in San Francisco, recover from the hangover on Friday, and then head to Berkeley where, during the weekend, there will be the second conference on computation as a lens for the sciences. The speakers will include freshly Turing-awarded Leslie Valient. The event promises to be even better than the famously successful first conference in 2002.
FCRC will bring STOC and the Complexity Conference to San Jose on June 4-11. San Jose is the third largest city in California. Which are the top two?
During the next academic year, there will be a special year on Theory of Computing at Stanford, sponsored by the Computer Science department. There will be workshops, long- and short-term visitors and other stuff going on, about which more later.
The first confirmed event will be a workshop on going beyond worst-case analysis, organized by Tim Roughgarden. Confirmed plenary speakers are Avrim Blum, Bernard Chazelle, Uri Feige, Richard Karp, Michael Mitzenmacher, Dan Spielman, and Shang-Hua Teng.
The workshop will be on September 19-21.
Last week, at BATS, a colleague from a research lab was asking me what exactly is going on with the budget of the University of California. The conversation went like this:
“How much does the state contribute to the UC Budget?”
“About a third”
“And how much has the state contribution decreased this year”
“About 20%”
“So that’s about 6% of the total budget. How come they need to cut salaries by 8% and increase tuition by 32% in order to recover from a 6% budget cut?”
How come, indeed? Over the weekend I have tried to make sense of this question, but unfortunately it is very difficult to make sense of the UC budget, not to mention that the numbers in the 2008-09 budget document from the office of the president are quite different from the number in the 2008-09 audit.
Here is, however, what I have understood so far:
Read the rest of this entry »
On Thursday, the Regents of the University of California met at UCLA and voted to increase student fees (tuition) by about 32%. There will be a 15% increase this Spring, and another 15% increase in Fall 2010.
Friday, while the theoreticians where at the Bay Area Theory Symposium, was a day of protest on campus, which showed the best and the worst of Berkeley.
Protesters went around campus buildings pulling fire alarms (bad), resulting in my colleague David Tse teaching probability and combinatorics outside in the rain (very good — or as one of the youtube commenters put it, “epic WIN”):
A group of about 40 students tried to occupy some rooms of Wheeler hall, the English department building, and up to 2,000 students showed up outside the building on a cold (by California standards) and rainy day (very good).
A few days of occupation at Wheeler would have probably received ample news coverage and would have publicized the fundamental fact of the present situation: that the University of California, and U.C. Berkeley in particular, will lose its character of public university if the funding crisis persists, and that the budget cuts are not free money for the tax-payers; they will have real negative consequences of hundreds of thousands of middle-class families.
Yet, the administration (very bad) instead of supporting the students sent the campus police first, and then police in riot gear from the Berkeley police department and the Alameda county’s Sheriff’s force (and possibly Oakland police, whose presence is disputed) to arrest the would-be occupiers and beat up the crowd outside Wheeler.
It’s anybody’s guess what the Chancellor might have been thinking.
Tomorrow’s New York Times has an op-ed by Bob Herbert on the funding crisis at U.C. Berkeley. He makes the important points about the uniqueness of Berkeley in giving top-quality education (and a good chance to move on to grad school) to students of very diverse backgrounds, serving working class and middle-class students like no other top university. He also makes the following, very important, point
[The changes caused by the budget crisis] would most likely hurt students from middle-class families more than poorer ones. Those kids are caught between the less well-off, who are helped by a variety of financial aid programs, and the wealthy students, whose families have no problem paying for a first-class college education.
This week, the New York Times Magazine has a conversation with University of California President Yudof. He explains that what we really have are salary cuts, and that he is calling them furloughs just to humor the faculty, who thinks that furloughs “sounds more temporary.” (Meaning, evidently, that they are not.)
Also, surely I am not the first one to notice the resemblance to John Hodgman.
There are two qualities that together make UC Berkeley unique among worldwide institutions of higher education.
One is that our several academic departments cover nearly all fields of scholarship, and that nearly every department is at the very top of its field. Very few places have this phenomenal combination of breadth and depth, although, admittedly, there are some.
The other is the diversity of the student body. Not ethnic diversity, because the passage of Proposition 209 made black and (to a lesser extent) Latino students almost disappear from campus. But, at least, UC Berkeley has been an engine of upward social mobility for a lot (and, being a big campus, it is really a lot) of white and Asian Californians from middle and working class families. To be sure, the top East Coast private universities do admit several students who are not from privileged families, and they do provide generous financial aid, but one has to be off-the-charts brilliant to get in based on raw talent alone. The merely very smart students can get in only if they have the kind of expensive resume-padding extracurricular activities that are out of reach for most students. At Berkeley, the merely very smart student has a good chance to get in by simply doing well in high school. And then, tuition is low for everybody who is from California, and the state used to give additional grants (80% of tuition) to everybody with a 3.0 GPA; plus the UC system has its own financial aid program.
Two days ago, the Chancellor announced that because of the cuts expected as a consequence of the state-wide budget crisis, UC Berkeley needs to cut about $100 millions. Next year, we should expect a complete freeze on hiring, layoffs of administrative staff, strong cuts to student aid, increased tuition, and salary cuts of 8%. For 2010-2011, rumors are that the sun will go dark, it will rain blood from the sky, and then the locusts will come and eat us alive. Unfortunately, 2011-2012 will be much worse. Read the rest of this entry »
This is were the notable earthquakes of the last few days have taken place, according to the US geological survey web site. And Berkeley had the distinction of three earthquakes in four days, as reported, among other sources, in the People’s Daily.
It must be especially annoying if you happen to be living on a tree.
An associated press article is so very reassuring:
But the minor earthquakes should not be interpreted as omens of a more destructive one to come, said Jessica Sigala, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center.
“It could mean there’s something coming, it could mean there’s nothing coming,” Sigala said.
Merry Christmas! Happy Holydays!
[Update 12/27: now that a real earthquake has hit Taiwan, this post sounds especially needless and petulant.]
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