The Simulacrum Syllabus

The Cop Show

I have watched a lot of cop shows. I like them. There is a genre to any type of show: certain norms of narrative and character which are just part of what a cop show is. These can be played with - Brooklyn 99’s Captain Holt is a distinctively subversive straight-laced by-the-book boss - but not too subversive: audiences want a cop show, not a not-cop show.

Captain Holt from Brooklyn 99 satisfies most genre conventions of a police chief, allowing the character to frustrate a few of the audience’s genre expectations.

Watching lots (lots) of cop shows, something a little deeper becomes evident. There are genre-like expectations about what police stations are like, about what police do, about how they work. The CSI approach to scientific evidence (ready after the third act ad breaks), the ‘one more question’ interview technique of Columbo, the suspects at desks in the Gotham bullpen, the audience behind the one-way mirrors in Criminal. These are the sorts of things which look like a cop show station. This is an example of a ‘simulacrum’: a constructed model of something which feels real, but isn’t quite true.

The thing which I find most curious is that the expectations in the cop simulacrum reach beyond the shows and into the world. This is most obvious with national differences. People in the UK do not have the same ‘right to remain silent’ repeated so consistently in US court drama; no English court would recognise a right to plead the fifth. Children in the UK have dialed 911 instead of 999 (or 112, citizens) when they need the emergency services. I submit that these are concrete consequences of the constructed fiction of cop shows.

Even when fiction tries to represent modern policing practices, the contrast with expectations is stark. Season 1 of The Wire dealt - in excruciating detail - on the bureaucracy required to build a well-evidenced case. The reviews (mostly good, some bad) all riffed off the way that this was not a normal cop show. It was great drama, but it broke so many of the cop show conventions that it is probably best considered outside the cop show genre.

I believe that the cop show typically articulates some ‘simulacrum’ of reality: the conventions about what a police procedural ‘should’ have in it typically override any duty to faithfully represent what police work is actually like. That’s fine: noone is expecting to learn about police protocol in an episode of Lucifer.

But I think the idea of a simulacrum is also helpful in the way we think about the HE Chemistry syllabus.

Like Plato’s allegory of the cave, it is possible to think of the chemistry syllabus as presenting students with a view of chemistry which relates to authentic chemical practices in ways which are not obvious to them.

The Chemistry Simulacrum

For example, I spend a lot of time teaching second years how to assign IR spectra of metal carbonyl complexes. This is not something that practising chemists do very frequently. Could we usefully view this as a simulacrum?

An algorithmic approach to predicting the number of IR stretches in the C3v fac-isomer of a tris(phosphine)tris(carbonyl) complex.

Putting something in a syllabus - like putting something in a cop show script - projects the idea that it is part of what professionals do. Cops getting donuts? That’s what cops do. Chemists working out the number of IR stretching fundamentals for fac-Mo(CO)3(PPh3)3? That’s what chemists do.

Except it isn’t, is it? I have never heard of a modern chemist who has ever done this sort of analysis with pen and paper in a real research setting.

This gap between contemporary professional practice and the syllabus seems very pronounced to me. Organic researchers do not seem to draw as many curly-arrow mechanisms as undergraduates. Theoretical chemists seem to let computers do more of their calculus than first-year maths exams permit chemists-in-training.

Three Defences of the Chemistry Simulacrum

Perhaps this training-practice gap is reasonable. Perhaps the training in a degree is a legitimately different thing to the practice in a professional: there might be some theoretical appreciation of group theory which a practising metal carbonyl chemist could not learn on the job. Carbonyl stretching modes prepare professionals like a driving theory test prepares drivers.

Perhaps, instead, the degree is not intended to produce researchers. It is important to be good at algorithmic manipulation when a chemistry graduate becomes an accountant, and bashing through the A1 + E stretches of a C3v fac-tris(carbonyl complex is a rigorous training for deducting VAT at the right stage of a company’s books. Carbonyl stretching modes prepare students for the world like jogging prepares you for playing football.

A third defence is one of extent: sure, this isn’t something practising chemists do every day, but there should be some deeper pieces of theory within the general portfolio of topics in a Chemistry degree. Stretching modes are a convenient way of linking the themes of group theory to organometallic bonding schemes, and merit a place not out of profound importance but mere circumstance. Carbonyl stretching modes prepare professionals simply because they are some Chemistry which relates both to prior and future learning. Any topic would do, but this one fits well. It is a rare date where the restaurant is more important than the company; perhaps carbonyl stretching modes are a good-enough restaurant for an evening out with molecular science.

Why is a Chemistry Simulacrum a Problem?

These all seem like reasonable responses to me, though I suspect the last one - appealing to some overall-balanced portfolio - contains the seeds of the rampant over-crowding of syllabus which I have seen in several institutions.

In my view, the gap between simulacrum and authentic practice is a really big problem. My main purpose in writing this blog is to begin articulating why.

1: PhD Recruitment Qualifications

We predominantly recruit PhD students on the basis of undergraduate degree results. Because of the simulacrum, these results do not reflect the skills required to succeed in a PhD. This means that superb candidates get turned down for scarce funding, which is instead given to someone who performed better at the tasks associated with undergraduate success. This is a misalignment which we could fix with a more authentic undergraduate degree.

2: Graduate Attributes

At every stage of Chemistry teaching, most students are at the end of the line. Most of them stop study at whatever level they are currently learning. What do they do with their science? They walk out into the world and they believe that Chemistry is something to do with the IR stretches of metal carbonyls. What do they think when they hear about the Nobel Prize for a lithium ion battery they don’t understand? What do they feel when someone asks them why CRISPR is so important and they don’t really know?

Science beyond the undergraduate canon is so untrodden to a graduate: the whole discipline looks profoundly different when it is unshackled from (easy-to-examine) closed-ended problem solving. The undergraduate simulacrum limits both the content covered in a degree, but also the relationship that graduates have with scientific knowledge.

Specifically, my view is that solving undergraduate problems requires a deliberate damping of critical thinking: questioning the terms of a problem is actively detrimental to exam performance. Exploring the context or application of chemical concepts is time which could be spent preparing for exams. So long as exams test a simulacrum skill-set (examinable Problem Solving), they will develop under-critical graduates.

3: Worthwhile Content

My students work hard to get good at predicting carbonyl stretching modes and rationalising frequency data. They spend time and effort on it. They get it wrong and they feel dissatisfied with themselves. They get it right and they feel a sense of satisfaction. They focus on it: it costs them attention and it costs them the opportunity to learn something else instead.

It is a good thing to know about metal carbonyl stretches. Is it the best thing to know? Probably not. We could be teaching undergraduate students how to engage critically with primary literature, for example. This is more authentic (a more true simulacrum) and would broaden the skills of our graduates. Is it right to teach students things which come at such an extravagant opportunity cost?

Reflective Conclusion

I feel that the UK HE Chemistry syllabus is typically creaking at the seams. I see the syllabus growing here and there, but never shrinking. I get it: I enjoy teaching the things I have become good at teaching, and feel so attached to my topics.

What we need is not a way of pruning the syllabus, but a way of constructing a renewed rationale for the Chemistry degree. Authenticity seems to me like the strategy offering the best hope for this project: it is coherent, but leaves room for imagination by instructors. More importantly, it contains both scope for repurposing existing material and also a basis for letting go of other material. It might also prepare MChem project students better for successful research projects, a tasty lure for even the most traditionalist of professors.

The simulacrum we teach at the moment is rigorous and challenging, but so are lots of other visions for the Chemistry degree. Most biochemists engage with the primary literature from first year; what would our graduates look like if we developed Chemistry-sympathetic ways of doing similar things?