…at some very near point in the future, that there’s something inherently white supremacist about teaching and studying generative linguistics. They will never tell you how generative linguistics enforces white supremacy, but they will tell you that it represents a hegemonic power in the science of language (it does not, it is clearly just one way of knowing, spottily represented outside the Angophone west) and that it competes for time and mindshare with other forms of linguistic knowledge (an unexamined austerity mindset). This rhetorical trick—the same one used to slander the socialist left across the democratic West 2016-present—would simply not work on the generative community were they a militant, organized, self-assured vanguard rather than a casualized, disorganized, insecure community, one serously committed to diversity in race and sexual orientation but largely uninterested in matters of class and power. And then, once you’ve accepted their framing, they’re going to sell you a radically empiricist psycho-computational mode of inquiry that is deeply incurious about language diversity, that cares not a whit for the agency of speakers, and trains students to serve the interests of the most powerful men in the world.
Category: Politics
Words and what we should do about them
Every January linguists and dialectologists gather for the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America and its sister societies. And, since 1990, attendees crowd into a conference room to vote for the American Dialect Society’s Word Of The Year (or WOTY for short). The guidelines for nominating and selecting the WOTY are deliberately underdetermined. There are no rules about what’s a word (and, increasingly, picks are not even a word under any recognizable definition thereof), what makes a word “of the year” (should it be a new coinage? should its use be vigorous or merely on the rise? should it be stereotyped or notorious? should it reflect the cultural zeitgeist?) or even whether the journalists in the room are eligible to vote.
By my count, there are two major categories of WOTY winners over the last three decades: commentary on US and/or world political events, or technological jargon; I count 14 in the former category (1990’s bushlips, 1991’s mother of all, 2000’s chad, 2001’s 9-11, 2002’s WMD, 2004’s red state/blue state, 2005’s truthiness, 2007’s subprime and 2008’s bailout, 2011’s occupy, 2014’s #blacklivesmatter, 2016’s dumpster fire, 2017’s fake news, 2018’s tender-age shelter) and 9 in the latter (1993’s information superhighway, 1994’s cyber, 1995’s web, 1997’s millennium bug, 1998’s e-, 1999’s Y2K, 2009’s tweet, 2010’s app, 2012’s hashtag) But, as Allan Metcalf, former executive of the American Dialect Society, writes in his 2004 book Predicting New Words: The Secrets Of Their Success, terms which comment on a situation—rather than fill some denotational gap—rarely have much of a future. And looking back some of these picks not only fail to recapitulate the spirit of the era but many (bushlips, newt, morph, plutoed) barely denote at all. Of those still recognizable, it is shocking how many refer to—avoidable—human tragedies: a presidential election decided by a panel of judges, two bloody US incursions into Iraq and the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualities that resulted, the subprime mortgage crisis and the unprecedented loss of black wealth that resulted, and unchecked violence by police and immigration officers against people of color and asylum-seekers.
Probably the clearest example of this is the 2018 WOTY, tender-age shelter. This ghoulish euphemism was not, in my memory, a prominent 2018 moment, so for the record, it refers to a Trump-era policy of separating asylum-seeking immigrants from their children. Thus, “they’re not child prisons, they’re…”. Ben Zimmer, who organizes the WOTY voting, opined that this was a case of bureaucratic language backfiring, but I disagree: there was no meaningful blowback. The policy remains in place, and the people who engineered the policy remain firmly in power for the forseeable future, just as do the architects of and propagandists for the Iraqi invasions (one of whom happens to be a prominent linguist!), the subprime mortgage crisis, and so on. Tender-age shelter is of course by no means the first WOTY that attempts to call out right-wing double-talk, but as satire it fails. There’s no premise—it is not even in the common ground that the US linguistics community (or the professional societies who represent them) fervently desire an end to the aggressive detention and deportion of undocumented immigrants, which after all has been bipartisan policy for decades, and will likely remain so until at least 2024—and without this there is no irony to be found. Finally, it bespeaks a preoccupation with speech acts rather than dire material realities.
This is not the only dimension on which the WOTY community has failed to self-criticize. A large number of WOTY nominees (though few outright winners) of the last few years have clear origins in the African-American community (e.g., 2017 nominees wypipo, caucasity, and 🐐, 2018 nominees yeet and weird flex but OK, 2019 nominees Karen and woke). Presumably these terms become notable to the larger linguistics community via social media. It is certainly possible for the WOTY community to celebrate language of people of color, but it is also possible to read this as exotificiation. The voting audience, of course, is upper-middle-class and mostly-white, and here these “words”, some quite well-established in the communities in which they originate, compete for novelty and notoriety against tech jargon and of-the-moment political satire. As scholars of color have noted, this could easily reinforce standard ideologies that view African-American English as a debased form of mainstream English rather than a rich, rule-governed system in its own right. In other words, the very means by which we as linguists engage in public-facing research risk reproducing linguistic discrimination:
How might linguistic research itself, in its questions, methods, assumptions, and norms of dissemination, reproduce or work against racism? (“LSA Statement on Race”, Hudley & Mallison 2019)
I conclude that the ADS should issue stringent guidance about what makes expressions “words”, and what makes them “of the year”. In particular, these guidelines should orient voters towards linguistic novelty, something the community is well-situated to assess.
Elizabeth Warren and the morality of the professional class
I am surprised by the outpouring of grief engendered by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s exit from the presidential primary among my professional friends and colleagues. I dare not tell them how they ought to feel, but the spectacle of grief makes me wonder whether my friends are selling themselves short: virtually all of them have lived, in my opinion, far more virtuous lives than the senator from Massachusetts.
First off, none of them have spent most of their professional lives as right-wing activists, as did Warren, a proud Republican until the late ’90s. As recently as 1991, Warren gave a keynote at a meeting of the Federalist Society, the shadowy anti-choice legal organization that gave us Justice Brett Kavanaugh and so many other young ultra-conservative judicial appointees.
Secondly, Warren spent decades lying about her Cherokee heritage, presumably for nothing more than professional gain. This is a stunningly racist personal behavior, one that greatly reinforces white supremacy by equating the almost-unimaginable struggles of indigenous peoples with plagiarized recipes and “high cheekbones”. Were any of my friends or colleagues caught lying so blatantly on a job application, they would likely be subject to immediate termination. It is shocking that Warren has not faced greater professional repercussions for this lapse in judgment.
Warren’s more recent history of regulatory tinkering around the most predatory elements of US capitalism, while important, are hardly an appropriate penance for these two monumental personal-professional sins.
Should Noam Chomsky retire?
Somebody said he should. I don’t want to put them on blast. I don’t know who they are, really. Their bio says they’re faculty at a public university in the States, so they probably know how things go around here about as well as me. Why should he retire? They suggested that were he to retire his position at the University of Arizona, that it would open up a tenure line for “ECRs”.1
Let me begin by saying I do not have a particularly strong emotional connection to Noam. Like many linguists, my academic family tree has many roots at MIT, where Noam taught until quite recently. I have met him in person once or twice, and I found him polite and unassuming. This is a surprise to me. The Times once wrote that Noam is “arguably the most important intellectual alive today”, and important people are mostly assholes.
But I do have very strong intellectual commitments to Noam’s ideas. I think that the first chapter of his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) is the best statement of the problem of language acquisition. I believe that those who have taken issue with the Aspects idealization of the “ideal speaker-listener” betray a profound ignorance of the role that idealizations play in the history of science.
I think The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), which Noam cowrote with Morris Halle, is the most important work in the theory of phonology and morphology. I believe that the critics who took issue with the “abstract” and “decompositional” nature of SPE have largely been proven wrong.
I even admire the so-called “minimalist program” for syntactic theory Noam has outlined since the 1990s.
It is impossible to deny Noam’s influence on linguistics and cognitive science. We who study language are all pro- or anti-Chomskyians, for better or worse. (And I have much more respect for the “true haters” than the reflexive anti-Chomskyians.) I don’t think Noam should apologize for his critiques of “usage-based” linguistics. I don’t think Noam can fairly be called an “arm-chair” theorist. I think generative grammar has made untold contributions to even areas like language documentation and sociolinguistics, which might seem to be excluded by a strict reading of Aspects.
And, I admire Noam’s outspoken critique of US imperialism. While Noam may have some critics from the left, his detractors (including many scientists of language!) are loud defenders of the West’s blood-soaked imperial adventures.
As a colleague said: “I like Noam Chomsky. I think his theories are interesting, and he seems like a decent guy.” He is a great example of what one can, and ought to, do with tenure.
None of this really matters, though. I do not think he “deserves” a job any more than any other academic does. So, could Noam clear up a “tenure line” simply by retiring? The answer is probably not. Please allow me an anecdote, one that will be familiar to many of you. I teach in a rather-large and robust graduate linguistics program at a publicly-funded college in one of the richest cities in the world (“at the end of history”). Two of our senior faculty are retiring this year, and as of yet the administration has not approved our request to begin a search for a replacement for either of them. Declining to replace tenure lines after retirement is one of the primary mechanisms of casualization in the academy.
Even if you disagree with my assessment of Noam’s legacy, the availability of tenure is not directly conditioned on retirements (though perhaps it should be). Noam bears no moral burden for simply not retiring. If you’d like to fight back against casualization of labor, take the fight to the administration (and to the state houses who set the budgets), don’t blame senior faculty for simply continuing to exist in the system.
PS: If you enjoyed this, you should read The Responsibility of Intellectuals.
1: I had to look up this acronym. It stands for “early-career researchers”, though I’m not quite sure when one’s “early career” starts or ends. I find that an unfortunate ambiguity.
The revolution will be at Starbucks
One of the biggest shocks about life in The Zone (11/9/2016-present) is how often Starbucks makes the news. Just a couple days after the election, a group of patriots, organizing around the hashtag #TrumpCup, decided to show solidarity with their big wet boy, subverting the sacred ordering ritual to trick baristas to shout “Iced Frappucino for Trump”. Then, there was the everyday-in-America story of a few young men thrown out—by the police—of a Philadelphia Starbucks for the mere act of being black in public. And now gloriously quixotic former CEO Howard Schultz is considering a third-party run for president. How has Trumpism turned America’s top coffee chain into a battleground?
I think I know. Starbucks is a looking glass, and when we gaze into it, we see what we want to. Allow me to explain.
We yet again live in a time where the public commons is contracting. It is not so much being “enclosed” (as it was in Georgian England) as neglected by the inexorable logic of austerity (as it happens, the key plank of Schultz’s platform). Even public libraries—a radical, and incredibly impactful, experiment in architecture and government—are at risk; President Trump has sought to eliminate federal spending on libraries, and they are under threat both in communities small and large. Faced with disappearing public commons, we turn increasingly to private simulcra of the park, the library, the school or university, and for some, a busy Starbucks will have to do.
Starbucks has another thing going for it. The product is really not bad, and of surprisingly uniform quality. While coffee snobs turn their noses up at the burnt-tasting drip coffee, the espresso drinks are quite good if not always great. The production of a large menu of high-quality, complex, labor-intensive goods, daily, at 14,000 locations across the US, is an incredible feat of logistics. US social welfare programs, increasingly administered by a patchwork of hostile state governments, do not come off well in comparison to the fungible, always-available Starbucks latte. It is easy to see why. Starbucks is embedded in an all-encompassing matrix of market capitalism, but internally, it is a command economy, one in which no store can be left behind. It is hard to even imagine living in an America where say, welfare or health care services are provided to citizens with the same efficiency of Starbucks manager requisitioning a case of oat milk.
At least that’s what I see when I look at Starbucks. But, as #TrumpCup shows, others see something different: the masses of Americans not moved—if not outright repelled—by the mixture of petty grievances and white identity politics that animates President’s Trump’s base. The libs (as we’ll call them) are a diverse group, better defined by exemplars—sometimes, right-wing media caricatures—than prototypes, and one key lib exemplar is the Starbucks barista. The barista is probably young, and possibly urban. Perhaps they have a college education and have taken the job for the health care benefits the state does not provide. Maybe they even share former CEO Schultz’s tepid opposition to President Trump.
If this wasn’t enough to forever code the barista as the Other, there is also a whole new language, not quite English, to learn. A small coffee is unexpectedly “tall”; a large is a “venti”; a “macchiato” is something else entirely. Mastering this language gives the customer the power to summon strange and fantastic beasts: the “blonde espresso”, or if the stars are properly aligned, the “spiced sweet cream nariño 70 cold brew”.
And, perhaps most importantly, the barista is a captive audience. The barista has a manager, and yes, you really can ask to speak to them. For the #TrumpCup Republican, this is a potent brew, a hierarchy in which they stand above the Other, the perfect victim for a bit of everyday cruelty and meaningless self-gratification.
It was probably inevitable that the of the most ubiquitous corporations in American life was going to ultimately come to index something, and where I see the state’s abdication of responsibilities inherent in the social contract, others just see a snot-nosed, underemployed 25-year-old who would rather not be working this job forever. In conclusion, Starbucks is a land of contrasts, and will remain so until we resolve the contradictions inherent in American society.
What to do about the academic brain drain
The academy-to-industry brain drain is very real. What can we do about it?
Before I begin, let me confess my biases. I work in the research division of a large tech company (and I do not represent their views). Before that, I worked on grant-funded research in the academy. I work on speech and language technologies, and I’ll largely confine my comments to that area.
[Content warnings: organized labor, name-calling.]
Salary
Fact of the matter is, industry salaries are determined by a relatively-efficient labor market. Academy salaries are compressed, with a relatively firm ceiling for all but a handful of “rock star” faculty. The vast majority of technical faculty are paid substantially less than they’d make if they just took the very next industry offer that came around. It’s even worse for research professors who depend on grant-based “salary support” in a time of unprecedented “austerity”—they can find themselves functionally unemployed any time a pack of incurious morons seem to end up in the White House (as seems to happen every eight years or so).
The solution here is political. Fund the damn NIH and NSF. Double—no, triple—their funding. Pay for it by taxing corporations and the rich, or, better yet, divert some money from the Giant Death Machines fund. Make grant support contractual, so PIs with a five-year grant are guaranteed five years of salary support and a chance to realize their vision. Insist on transparency and consistency in “indirect costs” (i.e., overhead) for grants to drain the bureaucratic swamp (more on that below). Resist the casualization of labor at universities, and do so at every level. Unionize every employee at every American university. Aggressively lobby Democrat presidential candidates to agree to appoint the National Labor Relations Board who will continue to recognize graduate students’ right to unionize.
Administration & bureaucracy
Industry has bureaucratic hurdles, of course, but they’re in no way comparable to the profound dysfunction taken for granted in the academic bureaucracy. If you or anyone you love has ever written a scientific grant, you know what I mean; if not, find a colleague who has and politely ask them to tell you their story. At the same time American universities are cutting their labor costs through casualization, they are massively increasing their administrative costs. You will not be surprised to find that this does not produce better scientific outcomes, or make it easier to submit a grant. This is a case of what Noam Chomsky has described as the “neoliberal confidence trick”. It goes a little something like this:
- Appoint/anoint all-powerful administrators/bureaucrats, selecting for maximal incompetence.
- Permit them to fail.
- Either GOTO #1, or use this to justify cutting investment in whatever was being administered in the first place.
I do not see any way out of this situation except class consciousness and labor organizing. Academic researchers must start seeing the administration as potentially hostile to their interests, and refuse to identify with, or (or quelle horreur, to join) the managerial classes.
Computing power & data
The big companies have more computers than universities. But in my area, speech and language technology, nearly everything worth doing can still be done with a commodity cluster (like you’d find in the average American CS departments) or a powerful desktop with a big GPU. And of those, the majority can still be done on a cheap laptop. (Unless, of course, you’re one of those deep learning eliminationist true believers, in which case, reconsider.) Quite a bit of great speech & language research—in particular, work on machine translation—has come from collaborations between the Giant Death Machines funding agencies (like DARPA) and academics, with the former usually footing the bill for computing and data (usually bought from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), itself essentially a collaboration between the military-industrial complex and the Ivy League). In speech recognition, there are hundreds of hours of transcribed speech in the public domain, and hundreds more can be obtained with a LDC contract paid for by your funders. In natural language processing, it is by now almost gauche for published research to make use of proprietary data, possibly excepting the venerable Penn Treebank.
I feel the data-and-computing issue is largely a myth. I do not know where it got started, though maybe it’s this bizarre press-release-masquerading-as-an-article (and note that’s actually about leaving one megacorp for another).
Talent & culture
Movements between academy & industry have historically been cyclic. World War II and the military-industrial-consumer boom that followed siphoned off a lot of academic talent. In speech & language technologies, the Bell breakup and the resulting fragmentation of Bell Labs pushed talent back to the academy in the 1980s and 1990s; the balance began to shift back to Silicon Valley about a decade ago.
There’s something to be said for “game knows game”—i.e., the talented want to work with the talented. And there’s a more general factor—large industrial organizations engage in careful “cultural design” to keep talent happy in ways that go beyond compensation and fringe benefits. (For instance, see Fergus Henderson’s description of engineering practices at Google.) But I think it’s important to understand this as a symptom of the problem, a lagging indicator, and as part of an unpredictable cycle, not as something to optimize for.
Closing thoughts
I’m a firm believer in “you do you”. But I do have one bit of specific advice for scientists in academia: don’t pay so much damn attention to Silicon Valley. Now, if you’re training students—and you’re doing it with the full knowledge that few of them will ever be able to work in the academy, as you should—you should educate yourself and your students to prepare for this reality. Set up a little industrial advisory board, coordinate interview training, talk with hiring managers, adopt industrial engineering practices. But, do not let Silicon Valley dictate your research program. Do not let Silicon Valley tell you how many GPUs you need, or that you need GPUs at all. Do not believe the hype. Remember always that what works for a few-dozen crypto-feudo-fascisto-libertario-utopio-futurist billionaires from California may not work for you. Please, let the academy once again be a refuge from neoliberalism, capitalism, imperialism, and war. America has never needed you more than we do right now.
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy my paper, with Richard Sproat, on an important NLP task that neural nets are really bad at.