why was sean carroll denied tenure

I didn't really want to live there. There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. Yeah, it absolutely is great. Again, while I was doing it, I had no idea that it would be anything other than my job, but afterward -- this is the thing. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" I'm close enough. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? I will never think that there's any replacement for having a professor at the front of the room, and some students, and they're talking to each other in person, and they can interact, and you know, office hours, and whatever it is. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. I got a lot of books on astronomy. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, Harvard -- the astronomy department, which was part and parcel of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- so, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory joined together in the 1970s to form this big institution, which I still think might be the largest collection of astronomy PhDs, in the United States, anyway. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. You know, students are very different. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. They were like, how can you not give it to the Higgs boson book, right? And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. Like, that's a huge thing. Mark Hoffman was his name. Well, it's true. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. I think it's part of a continuum. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. Who hasn't written one, really? The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. Then, of course, the cosmology group was extremely active, but it was clearly in the midst of a shift from early universe cosmology to late universe cosmology at the time. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. These were all live possibilities. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. I was awarded a Packard fellowship which was this wonderful thing where you get like half a million dollars to spend over five years on whatever you want. If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. But the only graduate schools I applied to were in physics because by then I figured out that what I really wanted to do was physics. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. I've done it. And my response to them is what we do, those of us who are interested in the deepest questions about the nature of reality, whether they're physicists, or philosophers, or whoever, like I said before, we're not going to cure cancer. I've never cared. But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. Was the church part of your upbringing at all? And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. I think there have been people for many, many years who have been excellent at all three of these things individually. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. So, I used it for my own purposes. So, I want to do something else. So, they keep things at a certain level. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. It was fine. So, I made the point that he should judge me not on my absolute amount of knowledge, but by how far I had come since the days he taught me quantum field theory. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. My favorite teachers were English teachers, to be honest. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. Sean, as a public intellectual with your primary identity being a scientist but with tremendous facility in the humanities and philosophy and thinking about politics, in the humanities -- there's a lot of understanding of schools of thought, of intellectual tradition, that is not nearly as prominent as it is in the sciences. I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. I lucked into it, once again. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. What was he working on when you first met him? I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. Also, assistant professor, right? However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. I had never quite -- maybe even today, I have still not quite appreciated how important bringing in grant money is to academia. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. I took almost all the physics classes. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. That's okay. That was always temporary. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. Nearly 40 faculty members from the journalism school signed an online statement on Wednesday calling for the decision to be reversed, saying the failure to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones "unfairly moves the goal posts and violates longstanding norms and established processes.". We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. They chew you up and spit you out. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. Should we let w be less than minus one?" First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. Even the teachers at my high school, who were great in many ways, couldn't really help me with that. I'm not sure. By the way, all these are hard. And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. Everyone could tell which courses were good at Harvard, and which courses were good at MIT. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. I heard my friends at other institutions talk about their tenure file, getting all of these documents together in a proposal for what they're going to do. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. But it did finally dawn on me that I was still writing quirky things about topological defects, and magnetic fields, and different weird things about dark matter, or inflation, or whatever. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." And he said, "Absolutely. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. No one does that. One of these papers, we found an effect that was far too small to ever be observed, so we wrote about it. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. So, I think that when I was being considered for tenure, people saw that I was already writing books and doing public outreach, and in their minds, that meant that five years later, I wouldn't be writing any more papers. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. There are evil people out there. But I did learn something. Those poor biologists had no chance that year. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. In 2017, Carroll presented an argument for rejecting certain cosmological models, including those with Boltzmann brains, on the basis that they are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. Some people are just crackpots. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. That's a recognized thing that's going on. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). Yes, but it's not a very big one. It worked for them, and they like it. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. There were two that were especially good. Reply Insider . He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. But most of us didn't think it was real. It's just really, really hard." It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. I do try my best to be objective. Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." One of them was a joke because one of them was a Xerox copy of my quantum field theory final exam that Sidney Coleman had graded and really given me a hard time. You have the equation. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. They saw the writing on the wall. Was this your first time collaborating with Michael Turner? When I got to Chicago as a new faculty member, what sometimes happens is that if you're at a big name place like Chicago, people who are editors at publishing houses for trade books will literally walk down the halls and knock on doors and say, "Hey, do you want to write a book? There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. Everyone knows -- Milgrom said many years ago in the case of dark matter, but everyone knows in the case of dark energy -- that maybe you can modify gravity to get rid of the need for dark matter or dark energy. Most of the reports, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, mentioned that Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics who blogs on Cosmic Variance, also was denied tenure this year. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. I haven't given it up yet. They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". Part of it was the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and the decision on the part of the field just to shut up and calculate more than to fret about the philosophical underpinnings. It wasn't really clear. I did not succeed in that goal. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. And that's not bad or cynical. So, I was not that far away from going to law school, because I was not getting any faculty offers, but suddenly, the most interesting thing in the universe was the thing that I was the world's expert in, through no great planning of my own. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? What are the odds? I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. You're not going to get tenure. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. It was not a very strict Catholic school. Maybe it's them. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. Absolutely the same person.". As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. The dynamo, the Biermann battery, the inverse cascade, magnetic helicity, plasma effects, all of these things that are kind of hard for my purely theoretical physicist heart to really wrap my mind around. All while I was in Santa Barbara. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? What you hear, the honest opinion you get is not from the people who voted against you on your own faculty, but before I got the news, there were people at other universities who were interested in hiring me away. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. Some people love it. It's difficult, yes. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. At the time, . But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. Well, one ramification of that is technological. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. I got a lot of books about the planets, and space travel, and things like that, because grandparents and aunts and uncles knew that I like that stuff, right? So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. We had problem sets that we graded. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. Now, you might ask, who cares? People shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, you know, there's zero chance my dean would go for you now that you got denied tenure.". Sean Carroll on free will. So, that's how I started working with Alan. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. So, that was a benefit. I'm curious if your more recent interests in politics are directly a reflection of what we've seen in science and public policy with regard to the pandemic. Do you ever feel that maybe you should just put all of that aside and really focus hard on some of the big questions that are out there, or do you feel like you have the best of both worlds, that you can do that and all of the other things and neither suffer? Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. So, I do think that in a country of 300-and-some million people, there's clearly a million people who will go pretty far with you in hard intellectual stuff. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them.

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