Jay Kadane is the Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies statistical inference, especially Bayesian statistical inference, from both a theoretical and applied viewpoint. Professor Kadane received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1966, and has been at Carnegie Mellon since 1971. |
Chapter 5, selection: A Perspective on the
Faculty The opportunity to write this essay allows me to look
back on the important steps in my education and development as a professor
of statistics, with an eye toward the problems and issues I am currently
engaged in at Carnegie Mellon. From this reconsideration, several themes
develop, and they have more to do with moral principle, community, face-to-face
discussions, integrity, breadth of undergraduate learning, and interdisciplinary
leadership than they do with the specific demands of my field. We as faculty
are called upon to perform many functions that are not part of our training.
I was trained technically, and I conjecture that many of our Carnegie
Mellon faculty were trained technically to perform certain kinds of analyses
and computations or to achieve certain kinds of artistic expression. Yet
my university teaching and activities have led me to understand that the
moral component of what I have to teach is far more important than anything
technical. Many of us at the University are called upon to advise students,
to serve on and to chair committees, and to lead departments. Again, nothing
in our formal training prepares us for these roles. Faculty find models
for what they do in the actions of others before them, and invent based
on their own experiences. Universities are about people, and the level of apprenticeship
and colleagueship that people interested in teaching and learning can
have with one another. Much of the most important learning and teaching
happen in one-on-one interactions outside the context of regular classes.
Indeed, because of the strong influence of these relationships in my life,
I am skeptical that distance teaching can provide an adequate education.
I did my undergraduate degree in mathematics at Harvard.
I chose math, not because I necessarily expected to be a mathematician,
but because I thought it would be good training for whatever I finally
settled on. In my undergraduate years, 1958-62, I was deeply concerned
about the prospect that there might be a nuclear war, which was not an
unreasonable thing to think at that time. As a result, I was attracted
to the social sciences and to organizational work in international affairs.
Most of my friends were majoring in various social scienceseconomics,
government, social relations (a hybrid department at Harvard), etc.
and most of what we discussed was politics. |
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Last updated 01 November 2004.