Mathematics and Society
By: Michael Pearson, Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America
The recent surge of political activism exemplified by the Black Lives Matter movement poses a fundamental question: How do we, as a community of mathematicians, respond to social issues, especially those that transcend partisan preferences?
A further reminder of the ways in which larger socio-political forces come to bear on our work came with the Trump administration’s release of new guidelines for the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which threatens the status of many international students currently enrolled in U.S. institutions.
As we do on many policy issues, the MAA joined with other STEM organizations to register our opposition to this change in policy. However, most of these joint efforts are tied to federal funding priorities for research and education.
Those of us who work in education, at any level, depend directly on the goodwill and resources of the public, including through tax dollars, for our employment. Many who work for business and industry also find that government contracts are essential to support our work. These dependencies alone make it essential to consider the ethical, moral, and ultimately political aspects of our work as a matter of course. Our desire for support must not be accompanied by acquiescence to actions and policies that are opposed to the values that we, as a community, espouse.
This is not a new thought. In fact, the title of this post was inspired by “Mathematics in American Society 1888-1988: A Historical Commentary,” written by William Duren (MAA President, 1955-56), which appeared in A Century of Mathematics in America, Part II, published by the AMS in 1989. In Duren’s words, part of this history is
the story of how mathematicians have practiced their profession and earned their living in American society, and of how that society has treated its mathematicians. It is a story of research, scholarship, and teaching, of the practice of mathematics in science, industry, and government, of industry's use of mathematics, of society's support through education and grants of money, of mathematicians as citizens and citizens as mathematicians.
Our record as citizens has not always been exemplary.
In Part I, published a year earlier, Chandler Davis wrote of the challenges many mathematicians faced in the years following World War II as a result of the “Red Scare.” In The Purge, Davis recounts the story of many mathematicians who were denied employment because of real or imagined connections to the communist party. This was a part of the ugly history of the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the era of McCarthyism. The role of the mathematics community, and our professional organizations including both AMS and MAA, were decidedly mixed in our response, though over time we, like the rest of America, came to recognize the egregious mistreatment of our colleagues during this time.
Another critical intersection between the mathematics community and larger political issues came during the 1960’s, when both civil rights activism and protests against the war in Vietnam were the impetus for formal action. In 1969, the Mathematicians Action Group (MAG) was formally established. Opening the first MAG newsletter, Ed Dubinsky wrote “On Friday night, January 24, at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans, the site of the 1969 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Winter Meeting, a group of about 80 research mathematicians met to consider ways and means of continuing radical political activities in the world of mathematics.” The historian Patrick Catt provides an overview of this time in his unpublished paper, “Mathematics on the Barricades: Mathematicians and Political Change in the American Mathematical Society, 1965-1972.” Other outgrowths of the activism of these years included the establishment of the National Association of Mathematicians and the Association for Women in Mathematics. Recent events demonstrate that, 50 years later, our work is far from complete.
In Steve Martin’s remembrance of Carl Riener, he writes of a late-night call to discuss plans for the following day
I asked, “Am I interrupting you?” He said, “No, I’m just lying here going through a litany of my failures.”
It is never too late to reflect on past failures. But more important than acknowledging the past is how we choose to learn from it.
I hope we can find the collective will to seek a shared understanding of the ways in which our profession and the institutions in which we are situated remain complicit in sustaining white privilege. In the coming months, look for new opportunities to engage in conversations about systemic barriers to equity in our curriculum, instructional models, and assessment. Together, we can advocate for change to pursue our vision of a society that values the power and beauty of mathematics and fully realizes its potential to promote human flourishing.