Seth writes about this epidemiology class taught by Leonard Syme:

Every week there was a new topic. For every topic Syme would assign a paper laying out the conventional wisdom — that high cholesterol causes heart disease, for example — plus three or four papers that cast doubt on that conclusion. I think he even had American Heart Association internal emails. Several students would present the material and then there would be debate — what’s to be believed? The debates were intense. If ever the students seemed to be reaching agreement, he would say something to derail it. “You know, there was a study that found . . . ”

Practically all classes make you think you know more at the end of them than you knew when they began. Practically all professors believe this is proper and good and cannot imagine anything else. With Syme’s class, the opposite happened: Your beliefs were undermined. You walked out knowing less than when you walked in. You had been sure that X causes Y; now you were unsure. At first, Syme said, many students found it hard to take. A three-hour debate with no resolution. They did not like the uncertainty that it produced. But eventually they got used to it.

The overall effect of Syme’s class was to make students think that epidemiology was important and difficult — even exciting. It was important because we really didn’t know the answers to big questions, like how to reduce heart disease; and it was difficult and exciting because the answers were not nearly as obvious as we had been told. . . .

This sounds great and leads me to a few thoughts:

1. Seth and I tried to do something similar over 10 years ago when we taught our seminar in left-handedness: before every week’s class, the students had to read a book chapter and a couple of articles on some topic of handedness. Two of the students were given the assignment to present the week’s reading to the class, then we had discussion. It didn’t go quite as well as Syme’s class is described to have gone. Some differences:

a. Handedness is less important than public health.

b. We didn’t focus so strongly on controversies. We tried, but sometimes it’s hard to get articles on two sides of an issue.

c. When we did get articles on two sides of an issue, it was difficult for the students to evaluate the articles, beyond a high-school-essay sort of reasoning where you can give three reasons to support or oppose any argument. There was no sense of how to weigh the evidence. Of course, that’s the kind of skill you want to teach in an epidemiology class. I assume that Syme covered some methods in his class also, to move the discussion beyond nihilistic platitudes.

d. Syme’s class was 3 hrs/week; ours was 2 hrs, I think. We also didn’t have homework (beyond the readings and some data collection) and we barely taught any methods.

e. Syme’s class had grad students in public health, whom I assume were more motivated to work hard, compared to our class of undergrads.

f. Syme is an expert on epidemiology, Seth and I had no particular expertise in handedness.

Looking at a-e above, the key difference, I think, is that I bet Syme’s students worked a lot harder in the class. Syme deserves credit for this: motivating students to work hard and teach themselves is a fundamental challenge of teaching.

2. Regarding the discussion of whether universities should teach classes on office politics, and relating to point f above, I want to emphasize that we are not experts in this area. I’m an expert in statistical graphics. I’ve made thousands of graphs and done both applied and theoretical research in the area. Even if I were good at office politics (which I’m not), I wouldn’t be an expert, I wouldn’t have done research in the area, I wouldn’t be familiar with the literature, etc. At a place like Berkeley or Columbia, the profs are world experts in what they teach. Giving the students training in office politics might be a good idea, but I would clearly distinguish it from the main academic material.which is based on research and scholarship, not just anecdotes, opinions, and personal experience.

3. Thinking about point f above: I think it would be fun to follow Syme’s format in teaching a course on Controversies in Statistics. That’s a topic I’m an expert on!