Faculty Commons Book Club

Article by Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning February 05, 2018

Book club announces its February selection

The University of Delaware Faculty Commons Book Club has announced its February selection: Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, an examination of the growing role that surveillance and data-driven decisions make in our lives.

Discussion of the book is scheduled at 12:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 15, and the session will be co-facilitated by Jenny Lambe, associate professor of communication, and Kevin R. Guidry, associate director of the Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning. Those planning to attend may register online.

According to Weapons of Math Destruction, from birth to death, including critical transitions such as applying to college and seeking jobs, the algorithms that make decisions about our lives are increasingly powerful and resistant to examination.

O'Neil's book raises critical questions for college and university faculty and staff:

Are we complicit in deploying and using "weapons of math destruction" with our own complex, opaque systems of evaluation and judgment (e.g., admissions, financial aid, early warning indicators)?
How are we preparing our students to live in a world where invisible systems hold powerful sway over their lives but are often as unaccountable as they are complex?
What role do university researchers and scholars have in supporting, monitoring and challenging these systems?

This book comes at a critical time in the development of UD's General Education objectives, especially the "computational thinking" objective added by the Faculty Senate in 2014. Book club co-facilitators Lambe and Guidry are members of a larger team of UD faculty and administrators working to understand how this new objective can be fulfilled by all UD undergraduate students.

O'Neill holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University. After teaching at Barnard College, she worked as a "quant" at a prominent hedge fund before moving on to work as a data scientist at several start-ups. She began the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia University, and she blogs at https://mathbabe.org/.

The meeting for this book will be from 12:30-1:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 15, at Faculty Commons, 116 Pearson Hall. Drinks and dessert will be provided. A free book will be provided for some early registrants. Those planning to attend are asked to RSVP.

A printed copy and an eBook version are available on reserve behind the Morris Library Circulation and Reserve Desk, which can be checked out. The book club reserve course is called FCOM 999 (Faculty Commons Book Club) and has the call number 289790X. The loan period is three days in order to make it available to as many borrowers as possible during the next few weeks.

The Faculty Commons is always looking for book club facilitators. Those who are interested in leading a discussion or sponsoring a session in the future can contact faculty-commons@udel.edu.

For more information about these events, visit the Faculty Commons website.