158 Teaching Minds

158 Teaching Minds department affairs, never about computer science. We had nothing to say to one another about that. The same is true in every department. Academic departments are made up of faculty who have been thrown together for historical reasons but really have no business being in the same department. What does a clinical psychologist have in common with someone who studies animal behavior? Do they talk about crazy chimps? What does an historical linguist have to say to a Chomskian linguist? What does someone who works on the philosophy of mind have to say to someone who studies religious philosophy? Departments probably should have been organized around ideas instead of around words. I tried to facilitate that when I helped create cognitive science as a discipline by founding the Journal of Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science Society. That was over 30 years ago and while some cognitive science departments have been created, in the end the disciplines that study the mind continue to do so in their own ways. Computer scientists who study the mind build comput- er models, and psychologists who study the mind run experiments. Anthropologists who study the mind do descriptions. That these are three of the twelve cognitive processes is no accident. Departments are organized to some extent around the processes that they use, but that is by no means the central organizing principle. As that old adversary to the creation of the Yale Computer Science Department said, the central organizing principle was a machine and that is kind of silly. Who suffers from this state of affairs? The students, of course. When a department’s faculty meets to decide what courses students must take in order to major in their field, it is not a sage conversation among scholars about what it means to be a computer scientist or psy- chologist. It is a political tug fest, where people from very diverse fields within these departments push and shove for turf. Why do they care? There are two big reasons. First, if no one signs up for the courses you teach, you won't be teaching them for long. Second, if many students sign up for the courses you teach, you can justify hiring more faculty in your subdiscipline, which means more friends to hang out with and more power in department meetings where the votes can now go your way. You think this stuff doesn’t matter? These issues are the lifeblood of every university department. Let’s look at both of these and see why they might matter. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023904