— A followup to yesterday's note on mathematics as a post-Communist activity
From Log24 on May 20, 2008—
The Dictatorship of Talent, by David Brooks in The New York Times of December 4, 2007:
“When you talk to Americans, you find that they have all these weird notions about Chinese communism. You try to tell them that China isn’t a communist country anymore. It’s got a different system: meritocratic paternalism. You joke: Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army.”
The New York Times this morning—
BEIJING (AP) — China threw open the gates of its secretive Central Party School on Wednesday, offering foreign journalists a rare but carefully scripted peek at the leafy campus where the country's Communist elite are trained.
The tour is part of a drive by the Communist government to show it's becoming more open and transparent…
The tour was also part of activities marking the 89th anniversary this week of the founding of China's Communist Party.
The American Mathematical Society's top news item today—
"Data collected this March by the AMS from approximately sixty mathematics departments in the U.S. shows that the number of open full-time academic positions requiring a Ph.D. in 2010 is down 57% in two years."
Party on.