Brian Harvey on politics and our collective responsibility
May 1, 2017 10:49 AM   Subscribe

Speeches and papers from a Computer Science Professor that are even more relevant today. Dr. Harvey taught computer science for over 25 years at U.C. Berkeley and also led a course on the Social Implications of Computing. What follows are a few excerpts from his papers on computers and education.

Speech at UCB CS Graduation, 2005
"And don't get me started about the state of civil liberties in the United States today. When I was your age, we '60s radicals, who'd grown up secure in the protection of the Bill of Rights, often expressed contempt for what we called liberal values -- in those days, that phrase was an attack from the left, not from the right. I said I'd be brief today, so I won't drag you through the complete list of all the things you already know about secret "disappearances," torture, so-called "renditions" of prisoners by CIA agents to countries that practice torture openly, FBI infiltration of pacifist antiwar groups, and so on. The news reports from this country today are like the ones we found incomprehensible from places like Chile 40 years ago."
....
"First, of course, work responsibly. These days one of the trendiest places to work is Google. They've become a verb, the ultimate mark of success for a company, by providing a tremendous service, connecting people with information. They're also a huge privacy menace, collecting information dossiers on all of us that are meant for the relatively benign purpose of advertising, but will also, I'm betting, turn out to have worse implications in our rapidly developing police state. Make sure you do work that you can be unambiguously proud about."

"Second, don't buy into the hyper-competitive ideology of our time. Don't take it as obvious, for example, that your retirement or your health care should depend on your skills in the stock market. Don't think that to be a patriot you have to be contemptuous of the rest of the world. Don't think that terrorism is okay if it's US soldiers, or American-trained foreign allies, doing it. Don't think that extremist Islam is any worse than extremist Christianity."

On literacy:
"What the voters need is "political literacy": knowing how to read the newspaper without technical knowledge of the subject under discussion. They need the intellectual weapon of class analysis. They need the commitment to remember last year's scandals to help them understand this year's. They need the sophistication to understand dialectical tension, in which two contradictory views can both be aspects of the truth, without dissolving into relativism, in which everything and nothing is true."

His last lecture. is well worth watching, especially if you're in tech.
posted by threesquare (17 comments total) 42 users marked this as a favorite
 
2005? You can't say we weren't warned. You CAN say we didn't listen.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:36 AM on May 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


I doubt I'm the only person here to have taken his class - the original version with the SICP book, though that only lasted a few more years after me. One of my favorite teachers, and had a lot to do with solidifying my decision to go into CS.

He's still alive by the way, just retired.
posted by atoxyl at 11:57 AM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


I took 61A (SICP) and 61C from Dr. Harvey; he was an excellent professor. I appreciated that he reserved Friday lectures for CS culture, such as video presentations of The Mother Of All Demos, and was an Animaniacs fan.
posted by migurski at 12:06 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


I've never heard of the guy, but some of these articles are fascinating. Thanks!
Scratch is the brilliant grandchild of Logo, from the MIT Media Lab, that uses drag-and-drop visual programming to achieve, truly at last, the "no threshold" half of Logo's famous promise
It's hard to suppress a reflexive shudder here. Mostly because of the unbearably awful visual programming languages I've had to work with as an adult. But, also, despite enjoying and spending many tens of hours working with Logo as an elementary school kid, I'm skeptical that I actually learned anything useful except basic typing skills. (This may be the fault of my teachers, who didn't really have anything more interesting to suggest once we'd spent an afternoon mastering the basics. But, in that they weren't unique.) Of all the things computers could do at the time, we sure spent a whole lot of time on those with no possible utility or connection to later work.

I like that people are trying incredibly weird and counter-intuitive things in teaching computer science, but combining the uselessness of logo with the frustration of a visual programming language sounds like the sort of thing that would put me off programming for life. If you ask me, drag-and-drop programming is the open plan office of computing: a neat abstract philosophical idea that inevitably ruins one's ability to actually get things done when implemented.
posted by eotvos at 12:20 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


I took 61A (SICP) and 61C from Dr. Harvey; he was an excellent professor. I appreciated that he reserved Friday lectures for CS culture, such as video presentations of The Mother Of All Demos, and was an Animaniacs fan.

It's kinda funny. I remember a recruiter for the CS program at one of the other UCs had kinda made fun of the idea that the 61 series at Berkeley "hadn't changed in 30 years" - whereas they were of course teaching intro CS in Java, as was then the fashion. So I looked up 61A and SICP and I thought - uh, that sounds pretty interesting actually? And then there I am, showing up to my first CS lecture, and this old LISP hacker guy gets up on stage and pulls up Emacs and a Scheme REPL on the big projection screen and nothing else and this is fucking cool, joke's on you Java guys. Especially now that functional programming is (sorta) back.
posted by atoxyl at 12:36 PM on May 1, 2017 [5 favorites]


I just recently stumbled across a mid-1990s article from Dijkstra that I didn't recall ever reading before, and which gave me a few things to ponder.
posted by Wolfdog at 12:51 PM on May 1, 2017


@atoxyl Ha! I didn't mean to imply he was no longer with us. Yes he's alive and still a faculty advisor. I wish he had a public social media presence, but after reading all his work, it's not a surprise that he doesn't.

I happened to be going through my old CS 195 coursework and realized I should have been listening a lot harder 18 years ago. He was definitely one of the best teachers I have ever had.
posted by threesquare at 1:34 PM on May 1, 2017


Ha! I didn't mean to imply he was no longer with us

I know you didn't but I thought I should clarify what with the retrospective tone and "last lecture."
posted by atoxyl at 2:20 PM on May 1, 2017


from the Djikstra article:

The original Oxford Colleges were buildings fortified in order to protect the students against the rabble, and if you think that that is old hat, I refer you to the DDR or the People's Republic of China of only 25 years ago.

But in China's Cultural Revolution, the students were the "rabble" attacking Universities.
posted by thelonius at 2:24 PM on May 1, 2017


Second, don't buy into the hyper-competitive ideology of our time.

Isn't it really common to grade CS classes in the College of Engineering on a really harsh curve? Kind of makes it hard not to be competitive. Not to lay this on one professor, but I've heard how famously brutal and competitive the intro CS classes are. It makes me wonder if that's a flaw in how CS courses are taught nowadays.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:33 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


Brian Harvey wasn't a Professor. He was an "Instructor" or "Lecturer" for his whole career. This made me unreasonably angry at the time, especially as EECS seemed happy to hire new (Assistant/Associate/Full) Professors every year who couldn't teach and cared only about boring "research." Dr. Harvey had written books, taught generations of students, and served Computer Science with vigor, and he wasn't getting his deserved reward, and it upset me.

Of course, this was all happening at the same time I was a graduate student, and increasingly overcome with the disturbing feeling that it wasn't going to be four years of Learn To Be A Professor College with a guaranteed academic job and funky old house as the reward at the end. So maybe there was some displaced anxiety going on.

Nonetheless: ROCK ON, BRIAN HARVEY!
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:48 PM on May 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


Also btw he sounds awesome. I loved that commencement speech. His name sounds dimly familiar, too, which is either because it's two very familiar names (possible) or because I've seen it in conjunction with some political stuff on campus (also seems possible, based on what he's written).
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 3:16 PM on May 1, 2017


Brian Harvey wasn't a Professor. He was an "Instructor" or "Lecturer" for his whole career. This made me unreasonably angry at the time, especially as EECS seemed happy to hire new (Assistant/Associate/Full) Professors every year who couldn't teach and cared only about boring "research." Dr. Harvey had written books, taught generations of students, and served Computer Science with vigor, and he wasn't getting his deserved reward, and it upset me.

At least by the time I was there he was a Lecturer, SOE - meaning a tenured full-time lecturer. In a sense positions like that are a solution to the problem of impressively credentialed research profs with little interest in really teaching. What's arguably unfair though still is that I believe pay for those jobs does cap somewhat lower than for research professorships.
posted by atoxyl at 5:11 PM on May 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


Isn't it really common to grade CS classes in the College of Engineering on a really harsh curve? Kind of makes it hard not to be competitive.

I have a rather indistinct memory that the lower-division EE/CS courses (including 61A-C) are technically not "curved" for exactly that reason - they're targeted to be hard, but there's no fixed percentage of students who can get an A so you are encouraged in theory to help each other out.

(That may not necessarily be true for all of the upper division classes, and for people who didn't initially apply/get accepted to the College of Engineering there was competition to get into the L&S version of the CS major or transfer into Engineering.)
posted by atoxyl at 5:21 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


What's arguably unfair though still is that I believe pay for those jobs does cap somewhat lower than for research professorships.

Though - you can view pay for UC professors online, so I just looked up Dan Garcia (another well-liked full-time lecturer in CS) and he seems to be making out very well these days. So they may have made their scale a little fairer toward those particular teaching positions - or just generally, in perspective, one ought not to feel too bad for popular STEM faculty at top-tier public institutions.
posted by atoxyl at 5:44 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


(That may not necessarily be true for all of the upper division classes, and for people who didn't initially apply/get accepted to the College of Engineering there was competition to get into the L&S version of the CS major or transfer into Engineering.)

That parenthetical is a big deal. When I took CS 61A with Brian Harvey in 2001, the CS major was "impacted" and 61A grades were a big factor in admission to the major. That semester, rampant cheating on a midterm was discovered (link goes to Daily Cal write-up with comments from the ever-humanistic Harvey). The exam was thrown out and the whole class had to retake it. I remember feeling worried that my own perfect score would look suspicious. Luckily I had done good work up to that point, and Brian knew me from office hours and knew that I wasn't trying to get into the CS major anyway, so I got the benefit of the doubt. I bet most people did.
posted by aws17576 at 6:42 PM on May 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


The EE half of the EECS department was definitely a tinge more socially/politically/economically conservative (I'd think there are reasons for that). I had friends tell me to take Brian Harvey's class instead, but it just didn't happen due to semester scheduling. Knowing that Harvey was more politically outspoken, I wonder how that would have affected my education as a student. And it's not to say there weren't other openly left/liberal voices in STEM, as there were a few; the day we had Richard Stallman give a talk was an indelible influence on my learning and then later on reading the ever-curmudgeonly missives of Edsger Dijkstra outside of the stuff we were supposed to study made the experience of engineering programs as slightly less like the hypercompetitive, atomized, internalized shark pool that Harvey alluded to.
posted by polymodus at 8:24 PM on May 1, 2017


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