Author: Terry McGlynn

Could twitter have saved the lives of seven astronauts?

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When the space shuttle Challenger launched on the morning of 28 January 1986, Roger Boisjoly couldn’t muster the fortitude to watch the launch of the shuttle, as its engines ignited on the launch pad. Moments later, the crew was lifted through the sky to their deaths. Boisjoly and some of his colleagues had spent the preceding night petitioning and pleading, in vain, to avert this tragedy.

Boisjoly was an engineer working for Utah-based NASA contractor Morton Thiokol, who worked on the design of the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle program. (Morton Thiokol received a $800 million in contracts for their work on the shuttle program, equivalent to a value of almost $1.5 billion today.) Boisjoly and his colleagues were terrified about the prospect of a disaster on this particular launch, because of the weather forecast for Cape Canaveral. The cold temperature triggered events resulting in the loss of the entire vehicle in the timespan of a couple heartbeats.

The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

Is Boisjoly complicit in the deaths of the shuttle crew? Not at all – he was a true hero. He did everything he could, ultimately sacrificing his own career.

This disaster may be blamed on those who failed to heed the specific and detailed warnings offered by Boisjoly over the year preceding the avoidable tragedy. However, this might not be what you will read in the Rogers Commission report issued in the wake of the disaster.

The Challenger disaster occurred because of a failure of leaders who did not think that public knowledge would, or could, have any bearing on the life-or-death decisions happening in NASA headquarters.

A lot has changed since 1986. The veil that separates the public from governmental and industrial organizations has been partially lifted, through the distributed access to information through social media. When the public has access to technical information about government operations, then the mechanisms of accountability may change.

In the media environment of 2013, is it possible that Boisjoly could have prevented a disaster like the loss of the Challenger? Could Twitter have saved the lives of the Challenger astronauts?

Imagine these tweets, if they came out 24 hours before a predictably fatal shuttle launch:

https://twitter.com/RogBoisjoly/status/400856882463535104

https://twitter.com/RogBoisjoly/status/400857411348467712

Why was Boisjoly so fearful that shuttle was going to blow up? One component of the design of the solid rocket boosters was an O-ring that would become predictably unsafe when launching in cold temperatures. The forecast on that fatal morning was for conditions colder than any previous launch — below freezing — and below the temperature threshold that Boisjoly knew was required for safe performance of the elastic component of the O-ring seal. (If you’re older than 40, then I would bet that you must remember hearing a lot about the O-ring.)

Three weeks after the disaster, in an interview with NPR, Boisjoly reflected:

I fought like Hell to stop that launch. I’m so torn up inside I can hardly talk about it, even now.

One year later, in a subsequent interview, he explained how close he could have been to stopping the launch, if he could have been more convincing:

We were talking to the people who had the power to stop that launch.

Is it possible that the people — the taxpaying public — could have been the ones with that power? I don’t know the answer, but it’s an interesting question. If Boisjoly was an active twitter user, with followers who were fellow engineers able to evaluate and validate his claims, wouldn’t they have amplified his concerns on twitter and other social media? Wouldn’t it be possible that, in just an eight hour period, that a warning presaging the explosion of the Challenger would be retweeted so many times that the mass media and perhaps even NASA would have to take notice?

Wouldn’t aggregator sites like The Huffington Post and Drudge pick up a tweet like Boisjoly’s warning, if it got retweeted several thousand times?

Wouldn’t the decision-makers at NASA have to include very public warnings about a disaster in their calculation about whether to greenlight or delay a launch? Don’t you think they’d get even more anxious about the repercussions of overlooking the engineers’ concerns?

Wouldn’t the risk of an disaster, after warnings by an engineer who worked on the project, alter the cost/benefit calculus in the minds of the people who would have been able to delay the shuttle launch? Even if they didn’t believe the claims of Boisjoly and his colleagues, then maybe they would choose to delay the launch anyway, if engineers using social media were claiming it would explode? Just maybe?

Social media has altered the power relationships among large agencies, the media, and the public. Individuals with substantial issues may have their voices heard, worldwide, over a very short period of time. It is possible that information sharing on social media could have prevented the loss of the Challenger?

Even though Boisjoly was, obviously and without any doubt, in the right, he was shuffled out of the industry because he dared to challenge authority in order to save lives. He should have been lauded as a hero, but I only heard of his heroics when I read his obituary last year in the LA Times.

If Boisjoly was successful in his bid to delay the launch using a rogue social media campaign, he still would have been blackballed by the industry as a whistleblower. If such a plea would have been successful, then none of us would ever have known for certain if his actions prevented a tragedy. All of us, including the lost crew of the Challenger, would be able to live with that uncertainty.

Richard Feynman was a member of the Rogers Commission investigating the loss of the Challenger. He issued personal observations as an appendix to the official report, and it’s not surprising that they deal with technical details with accurate conversational aplomb, while also cutting to the heart of the matter:

NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.     For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

The crew of mission STS-51L: Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, Ronald E. McNair, Gregory B. Jarvis and Sharon Christa McAuliffe. Image from NASA

The crew of mission STS-51L: Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, Ronald E. McNair, Gregory B. Jarvis and Sharon Christa McAuliffe. Image from NASA

Ant science: Ants try to eat protein beverages like solid food

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Collectively, ants are efficient, and you might even call them smart. But individual ants are so dumb that they don’t even know how to feed themselves, as we show in the latest paper to come out of my lab. You could say that these ants have a drinking problem.

A bullet ant with a bubble of sugar solution in its mandibles. Image by Alex Wild

A bullet ant with a bubble of sugar solution in its mandibles. No scale bar is needed; this ant is about the size of your pinky finger, unless you have a small hand. Image by Alex Wild.

If you’re given a protein smoothie, you drink it. But if you give bullet ants a protein drink, they chomp and pull at it. If they knew how to use a fork, they’d probably try that, too.

The bullet ant Paraponera clavata has a boring diet: workers mostly collect sugar water from the rainforest canopy, supplemented with chunky prey items, like other ants and pieces of caterpillars. When they eat carbs, it’s in the form of a liquid which they gather in a droplet held by their mandibles. When they get protein, it’s in the form of a solid which they chomp and bite.

While attempting to do an experiment, we discovered that these ants are absolutely hopeless at drinking a liquid, if it’s a protein solution.

What does it look like when ants try to drink something and when they try to chomp at solid food? Here are two very short videos taken by Jenny Jandt:

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We asked: what sensory cues do the ants use to decide whether to drink a fluid or to grasp at it as if it were a solid? We ran a field experiment with factorial combinations of various sugar (sucrose) concentrations and various protein (casein) concentrations, and used ethograms to measure behavioral responses. We replicated this across a bunch of colonies, randomized the order of presentation, and did other good stuff to make sure the experimental design wasn’t messed up. (We’re pros, you know.)

We mostly didn’t get stung while running the experiment. This matters because they are called “bullet ants” for good reason.

We found that the higher the concentration of sugar, the more likely the ants were to drink. If there was a little protein and no sugar at all, the ants would most likely grasp.  Once protein concentrations got near 1 micromolar concentration, however, the concentration of sugar did not affect the grasping response to protein.

So, if these ants are thinking, then this is what they’re thinking to themselves: “If I taste protein, it must be food. So I’ll chomp at it, even though it’s a liquid.” But, it doesn’t look like they’re thinking much at all.

We found that the ants demonstrate a fixed action pattern of feeding behavior in response to assessing the nutritional content of food. This operationally works for them in nature, because texture and nutritional content are coupled. When we experimentally decoupled texture and nutritional content, then we were able to identify the cues that the ants used to make their food handling decision. They decide to drink when they detect carbohydrates and they decide to chomp when they detect protein, and texture has little to do with the decision.

How this project happened in a teaching-centered institution

In the first half of 2011, Hannah Larson (a Master’s student in my lab) was spending several months at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, working with a microbial symbiont of bullet ants. She discovered the phenomenon of bullet ants chomping at protein solutions when she tried to experimentally feed colonies a protein solution, and the colonies opted to dismember the plastic pipets instead of drinking from them. She worked out other ways of delivering protein for her experiments, but we wanted to document and further understand this discovery.

That summer, I paired up my colleague Dr. Jenny Jandt up to mentor a student from my university on a totally different project. We all found this protein-chomping behavior so cool, and Jenny made the time for a second trip to Costa Rica after I helped her flesh the project out. My undergrad Peter Tellez was her wingman, and they did the experiment using the template of the many colonies that Hannah established for her thesis work. In late 2011, I drove out to visit Jenny in Tucson for a couple days, to work on this and another manuscript, in which the bulk of the paper was put together. Jenny put the finishing touches on this paper with just a bit of help from myself, Hannah and Peter. As it was a side project for all of us, it lingered a bit but Jenny persisted and she’s pretty much everything I could ask for in a collaborator and mentor to our students.

Where are they now? Jenny took a postdoc in the rockin’ lab of Amy Toth at Iowa State. Hannah is now in her second year of the DPT program at the Univ. of Washington and Peter is now a PhD student in the lab of Sunshine Van Bael at Tulane.)

In short, this cool paper came together because I was able to talk my postdoc buddy Jenny into coming down to the rainforest to work with my students for about a month. She is otherwise a wasp and bee behavior person, and I was glad to give her an avenue to work with ants and tropical rainforests, and my students greatly benefited from her careful mentorship and expertise in individual and collective behaviors of social insect colonies.

Reference: Jandt, J., H.K. Larson, P. Tellez, and T.P. McGlynn 2013. To drink or grasp? How bullet ants (Paraponera clavata) differentiate between sugars and proteins in liquids. Naturwissenschaften. DOI: 10.1007/s00114-013-1109-3

A copy of this paper is available on my lab website here.

This work was conducted under support of the National Science Foundation (OISE-0854259 and OISE-1130156).

Friday Recommended Reads #10

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This story was buried off the front page of my local paper, but did you hear about the discovery that when Yasser Arafat died in 2004 it was an assassination by Polonium radiation poisoning? The use of Polonium as a murder weapon wasn’t described publicly until a couple years later, when a KGB agent was killed this way in London.

Grandma got STEM. That’s what the site is called.

One hundred years ago this week, one of my heroes died: Alfred Russell Wallace. While science in the Victorian era was mostly the province of wealthy men, Wallace was a notable outlier. Whether you know the story of his remarkable life or not, I predict that any biologist will greatly enjoy this account told through superb paper puppetry. Nobody can go wrong picking up The Malay Archipelago and giving it thorough read.

Holy moly. The Australian government is seriously gutting its research labs.

You ever read a really cool science story in the news that sounds so awesome that it’s hard to believe? The latest one is about a fly with scary-looking critters patterned on its wings – believable but awesome. All kinds of people got duped but Morgan Jackson knows enough about flies that he looked at the same set of facts, got the story right, and then retold the story with high class.

Science never gets better than when you find out you’re wrong. Here’s a great story about that from Alan Townsend.

I’m loving this post by Chris Buddle about how he has his students do the teaching.

It’s wonderful to get to know undergraduates in my department. But boy howdy, it sure is crass when they try to buddy up with me with purpose of cultivating a letter of recommendation. Supporting students with letters is both my duty and my pleasure, but I want my relationships to be genuine. A recommendation letter should emerge as a natural by-product of a faculty-student relationship, rather than be the primary purpose of the relationship. Please do not regard your relations with people as mere tools for your own ends.

Do you know a young affluent person of privilege that is interested in using their position to facilitate positive social change? There are are a huge number of 1% kids that disdain the heritable inequity in their midst, but in their social realm might not feel empowered to realize all of the good things that they can do. In a comment on Wednesday’s post, Lirael shared a link to Resource Generation, which provides education and means for action. I spent some time on this site. it’s pretty cool.

By the way, if you’re looking for a fun read with or for your kid, check out the 2010 Newbery Winner When You Reach Me, which I read this summer. There are a number of elements of A Prayer for Owen Meany, if you’re a John Irving kind of person.

Have a great weekend – feel free to share more links in the comments.

Why I don’t take high school students into my lab

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Once in a while, I am approached about taking on a high school student over the summer. I always say no, for the same reason that I turn away most premeds: they want research “experience.”

Bungee jumping is an experience. Discovering that you’re allergic to seafood is an experience. Going backpacking in Europe is an experience. I don’t provide research “experiences” for students; I train scientists. I’m a scientist and a university instructor, not an unpaid private tutor.

High school students want to look awesome so that they can get into a fancy university. That has nothing to do with why I am paid to work for the State of California, so I’ll take a pass. But I don’t let the high school students off with a simple “No, thank you.”

The primary purposes of my research lab are to get research done and to train scientists. My lab doesn’t have room for tourists having an “experience,” because there is only space for researchers. I turn away high school students because they take resources (time, space, roles) away from the students who really need it and deserve the opportunity. These students that want to join my lab are the kind that end up winning science fairs because of privileged access to university resources.

I have another reason for turning away the high school students that come to me in search of a research experience.

The high school students who have sought research experiences have two common denominators: The first is that they’re wealthy. They attend either an expensive prep school, or attend public school in a district with million-dollar homes and a well-endowed foundation supplementing the inadequate funding provided by the State of California. These high school students think it’s perfectly normal – perhaps even laudable – to seek out research experiences at the local university that trains undergraduates.

The second common denominator among the high school students who ask to volunteer in my lab is they never, ever, will even consider attending my university, CSU Dominguez Hills.

When high school students ask me for a slot in my lab, the first thing I do is ask them about their college plans. They name schools with pricetags that would clean out the bulk of my salary. I then give these students some umbrage:

Do you think it’s acceptable for me to spend taxpayer dollars giving you free research training?

If getting research experience in my lab is good enough for you as a high school student, then why isn’t it good enough for you in college?

Why do you think that you might deserve a space in my lab over students who are enrolled at Dominguez Hills? Presumably you’re hard-working and smart, but how does that entitle you to special opportunities over the hard-working and smart students who have chosen to come to Dominguez Hills?

If this campus not good enough for you in two years, how is it good enough for you now? Why don’t you want to come to this university?

I have scant tolerance for people who think that prep school students can slum around my low-income university to get free research credentials, as a way to further their access to elite institutions that my students are unable to access. Moreover, these people wanting a spot in my lab expect that it’s somehow part of my job to provide this training for free to students who have already chosen to opt out of the state university system.

This particular form of entitlement is offensive to my values and to my students. Even asking for the opportunity to join my lab as a high school student, while simultaneously ruling out the possibility joining as an undergraduate, shows how little these students and their families value education as a public good. I refuse to be their tool.

While not in my lab, in labs all around the country, wealthy high school students are getting high quality research training at universities while the majority of the nation’s public school children are now living in poverty and qualify for subsidized school meals. If I were to use my lab at CSU Dominguez Hills to provide research opportunities to the 1%, I’d only worsen this tragic failure of our nation.

I’m not inherently opposed to taking on a high school student, but I’ll be damned if I take an opportunity away from an low-income student who truly needs it and transfer it to one who comes from a position of privilege.

I’m not going to be an instrument of the upper class by perpetuating the heritability of educational and economic disparities.

Of course, if some parents of a high school student pony up the $2 million for an endowed chair at my university, I’d be pleased to reopen a conversation on the topic.

Friday Recommended Reads #9

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There’s a long tradition of using anthropomorphic common names for animals that do things analogous to humans. Years ago, there was some disagreement about whether we should stop using the term “slave making ants.” Alex Wild recalls that episode and proposes a new common name for these creatures: “kidnapper ants.” In terms of sensitivity to victims of crimes, I’m not sure this is a big step up. I just call ’em Polyergus.

Mulling over job interviews and offers usually presents big-time dilemmas. Mizuki Takahashi discusses his own experience with frank detail. The seasonality and non-synchronicity of interviews leads to some interesting thoughts about bet-hedging and game theory, with really high stakes.

On Wednesday morning, I heard a heartbreaking story on NPR about a Pakistani family that traveled to Washington DC to testify in a hearing about drone strikes. They recounted the remote-controlled murder of their grandmother by the US Government. One thing that they didn’t mention on NPR, as much as I recall, is that only five members of Congress attended this hearing.

Sometimes blogs include posts about blogging. This post by Simon Goring is about the personal motives for blogging and how whether, or not, it matters how well read your blog is. This post ended up getting seen, and commented on, by a bunch of other bloggers and the comments are worthwhile if you’re interested in the topic. (Note: this link starts out saying really nice stuff about this site. That’s not why I linked to it, though I always appreciate nice words.)

You know when a Senior Editor of scholarly journal is really pissed when the editorial is simply entitled, “Fuck Jared Diamond.” That message was brought to you by David Correia.

The density of people on the planet is unevenly distributed, to put it mildly. This animation of birth and death events, simulated using real demographic data, is really cool.

What if Darwin died on The Beagle? Jeremy Fox reviews the book Darwin Deleted that delves into this thought experiment. It was an interesting review, so interesting that I think I might not have to read the book. I’m not big on the alternative history genre, but I did enjoy and learn a lot from Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America when it came out.

Thanks to Boing Boing and Jane Zelikova for links.

Efficient teaching: Rubrics for written assignments

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I’ve often emphasized the importance of transparency and fairness in teaching. The evaluation of written assignments is an inherently subjective activity, at least from the perspective of students. The grading of written assignments is most prone to the appearance of unfairness. When students think they’re being treated unfairly, they are not inclined to focus on learning.

Moreover, in the grading of written assignments we are most likely to be inadequately transparent and unfair. By using rubrics to grade writing, we can mitigate, or perhaps even eliminate, this problem.

Some folks don’t like using rubrics because they think that written assignments should be evaluated holistically or by gestalt. As experts in our field, we can tell apart a B paper from a C paper based on reading without the use of a rubric, and we can explain to students in our evaluation how this distinction is made without resorting to over-simplified categories. We can reward deep insight without being captive to a point-making system.

Even if the concepts in the preceding paragraph were factually correct, the choice to formulate is such an argument indicates a lack of focus on student learning. Rubrics should be used to grade written assignments not only because they lend themselves to the appearance of fairness in the eyes of students, they actually result in more fairness.

Grading written assignments without a rubric is unfair. Why is that? It’s very simple: when an assignment is graded without a rubric, students do not know the basis upon which their writing is to be evaluated. Fairness requires that students know in advance the basis upon which their grade is being assigned.

There are many different components to good writing, and presumably someone who grades holistically takes all of these into account in an integrated fashion and then assigns a grade. However, if the purpose of the assignment is to learn about writing, then the student needs to which components are important constituents of good writing. And then the student needs to receive credit for including these components, and not receive credit if not including these components.

If a professor wishes to reward students for making “deep insights,” then these deep insights can be placed as a category on the rubric. And, when handing out the rubric when assigning work to students, the professor can then explain in writing on the rubric what constitutes deep insights that are worthy of receiving points in the rubric.

Rubrics don’t rob professors of flexibility in grading written assignments; they only prevent professors from ambushing students with criticisms that the students would not have been able to anticipate. They also prevent professors from unfairly rewarding students who are able to perform feats that satisfy the professor’s personal tastes even though these feats are not a required part of the assignment.

Is bad grammar something that deserves points off? Put it on the rubric.

Should it be impossible to get an A without a clearly articulated thesis and well supported arguments? Build that into the rubric.

Does citation format matter to you? Put it on the rubric? Don’t care about citation format? Then don’t put it on the rubric.

When you’re grading, you should know what you are looking for. So, just put all of those things on the rubric, and assign the appropriate amount of points to them as necessary. Of course any evaluation of “clear thesis” and “well supported argument” is to some degree subjective. However, when students know that the clarity of their theses and the quality of their arguments are a big part of their grade, then they will be aware that they need to emphasize that up front, and focus on writing well. This point might be obvious to faculty, but it’s not necessarily obvious to all of the students. To be fair, every student needs to know these kinds of things up front and in an unbiased fashion.

There are several other reasons to use rubrics:

Rubrics help reduce the unconscious effects of cultural biases. Students who write like we do are more likely to come from similar cultural backgrounds as ourselves, and students who write well, but differently than we do, are likely to come from a different cultural background. If grading is holistic, then it is likely that professors will favor writing that reflects their own practices. Without the use of a rubric, professors are more likely to assign higher grades to students from cultural backgrounds similar to their own.

Rubrics save your time before grading. Students often are demanding about their professors’ time when they are anxious about whether they are doing the right thing. The more specific information students receive about what is expected of them, the more comfortable they are with fairness and transparency in grading, the less often instructors are bothered with annoying queries about the course, and the more often they’ll contact instructors about substantial matters pertaining to the course material.

Rubrics save your time while grading. If you grade holistically without using a rubric, and it takes you appreciably less time than it takes with a rubric, I humbly suggest that you’re not performing an adequate evaluation.  The worse case scenario, with respect to time management while grading, is that a complete evaluation happens without a rubric, and then it takes only a few moments for the professor to then assign numbers on a rubric after being done with a holistic evaluation.

Rubrics save your time after grading. If students are unpleased with a grade on a written assignment, and all they have to go on is a holistic assessment and written comments – regardless of verbosity – they are far more likely to bother you to ask for clarification or more points. If they see exactly where on the rubric they lost points, they are far more likely to use their own time to figure out what they need to do to improve their performance rather than hassle you about it.

Most importantly, rubrics result in better writing practices from your students. It is a rare student who relishes receiving a draft of an assignment with massive annotations and verbose remarks about what can be done better. Those remarks are, of course, very useful, and students should get detailed remarks from us. When fixing the assignment, students will be focused on getting a higher grade than they received on their draft. The way to do promote success by students is to provide them specific categories on which they lost points. This kind of diagnosis, along with any written comments that professors wish to share, is more likely to result in a more constructive response and is less likely to terrify students who are unclear how to meet the expectations of a professor who gave a bad grade without providing a specific breakdown about how that bad grade was assigned. If a student wonders, “what can I do to produce excellent writing?” all they’ll need to do is look at where they lost points on the rubric. That’s a powerful diagnostic tool. If you think the use of a rubric in your course cannot be a great diagnostic tool, then you haven’t yet designed an adequate rubric.

Of course, it’s okay to disagree with me about writing rubrics. If you do, I’d be really curious about what your students think. The last time I graded a written assignment (a take-home exam), I asked my students if they wanted to receive a copy of a grading rubric before I handed out the exam. They all wanted it, and they all used it. By choosing carefully what I put on the rubric, I was sure that their efforts were allocated in the best way possible.

Collected observations from travels among universities

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Invited seminars and job interviews offer a unique opportunity to learn (and remember) what grad school is like and how universities work. You get to have a lot of intentional sit-down conversations on a wide variety of topics. Spending time meeting new people and learning new stuff rocks. And when you chat with other people about themselves, and their work, labs and universities, you have a chance to put your own way of doing things in perspective.

I’ve had a few such opportunities in the past month. There were a number of recurring conversational themes and undercurrents. During these visits, you get to have conversations to learn not just about all kinds of research, but about how people chose the directions that led to their current trajectories. And, you often learn about how personal lives shape our research directions and priorities, both by design and by hap.

Here are some of the highlights. None of these observations are shocking news by any measure. But I was struck by the obviousness of these ideas and the frequency with which they emerged, even when I wasn’t looking for them:

  • Research universities are no longer primarily oriented towards training excellent scientists. They are now primarily oriented towards teaching students how to publish and to get grants. If a grad student develops the desire to become an excellent practitioner of science, this is probably going to emerge from the undergraduate experience.
  • Anybody currently building a future in the quantitative sciences needs to learn how to write code to promote their own research success. Being able to manage and analyze super-duper huge datasets (bioinformatics) is really useful.
  • High quantity data will never be a substitute for high quality data.
  • People need to get off their goddamn phones.
  • Genomics is now at the point when all flavors of biologists are in a practical position to figure out heritable mechanisms accounting for phenomena involving organisms in nature. For many kinds of questions, any species can now be a model system.
  • Most ecological theories are ephemeral, and are either myopic or wrong. The parenting of popular, ephemeral and myopic theories is the prevailing route to success.
  • It’s difficult to maintain the presence of mind to recognize the power of one’s own authority.
  • In ecology and evolutionary biology, women fall out of academic careers most heavily in the transition phase between from Ph.D. to faculty. Lots of parties are at fault, but the ones that seem to be the most significant are some senior faculty (of both genders) and some spouses. Deans have many opportunities to proactively make positive changes, but that rarely happens.
  • The number of students who want to do serious, long-term, field biology in the service of contemporary research questions has sharply declined. This limits our potential to answer some major wide open questions in biology.
  • Universities that maintain a strong faculty actively keep their professors from going on the market in search of greener pastures. Universities would not lose valued faculty members as often as they do, if they actually supported faculty commensurate with the degree to which they are valued. Once someone is driven to look for a new faculty job on the market, then it’s impossible to not take a great offer seriously, even when there are many good reasons to not move.
  • The beauty of life – both in biodiversity and our relations with fellow humans – is immense beyond words. Humanity might be ugly, but people are gorgeous.

A snapshot of the publication cycle

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I was recently asked:

Q: How do you decide what project you work on?

A: I work on the thing that is most exciting at the moment. Or the one I feel most bad about.

In the early stages, the motivator is excitement, and in the end, the motivator is guilt. (If I worked in a research institution, I guess an additional motivator would be fear.)

Don’t get me wrong: I do science because it’s tremendous fun. But the last part – finessing a manuscript through the final stages – isn’t as fun as the many other pieces. How do I keep track of the production line from conception to publication, and how do I make sure that things keep rolling?

At the top center of my computer desktop lives a document entitled “manuscript progress.” I consult this file when I need to figure out what to work on, which could involve doing something myself or perhaps pestering someone else to get something done.

In this document are three categories:

  1. Manuscript completed
  2. Paper in progress
  3. In development projects

Instead of writing about the publication cycle in the abstract, I thought it might be more illustrative to explain what is in each category at this moment. (It might be perplexing, annoying or overbearing, too. I guess I’m taking that chance.) My list is just that – a list. Here, I amplify to describe how the project was placed on the treadmill and how it’s moving along, or not moving along. I won’t bore those of you with the details of ecology, myrmecology or tropical biology, and I’m not naming names. But you can get the gist.

Any “Student” is my own student – and a “Collaborator” is anybody outside my own institution with whom I’m working, including grad students in other labs. A legend to the characters is at the end.

Manuscript completed

Paper A: Just deleted from this list right now! Accepted a week ago, the page proofs just arrived today! The idea for this project started as the result of a cool and unexpected natural history observation by Student A in 2011. Collaborator A joined in with Student B to do the work on this project later that summer. I and Collab A worked on the manuscript by email, and I once took a couple days to visit Collab A at her university in late 2011 to work together on some manuscripts. After that, it was in Collab A’s hands as first author and she did a rockin’ job (DOI:10.1007/s00114-013-1109-3).

Paper B: I was brought in to work with Collab B and Collab C on a part of this smallish-scale project using my expertise on ants. I conducted this work with Student C in my lab last year and the paper is now in review in a specialized regional journal (I think).

Paper C: This manuscript is finished but not-yet-submitted work by a student of Collab D, which I joined in by doing the ant piece of the project. This manuscript requires some editing, and I owe the other authors my remarks on it. I realize that I promised remarks about three months ago, and it would take only an hour or two, so I should definitely do my part! However, based on my conversations, I’m pretty sure that I’m not holding anything up, and I’m sure they’d let me know if I was. I sure hope so, at least.

Paper D: The main paper out of Student A’s MS thesis in my lab. This paper was built with from Collab E and Collab F and Student D. Student A wrote the paper, I did some fine-tuning, and it’s been on a couple rounds of rejections already. I need to turn it around again, when I have the opportunity. There isn’t anything in the reviews that actually require a change, so I just need to get this done.

Paper E: Collab A mentored Student H in a field project in 2011 at my field site, on a project that was mostly my idea but refined by Collab A and Student H. The project worked out really well, and I worked on this manuscript the same time as Paper A. I can’t remember if it’s been rejected once or not yet submitted, but either way it’s going out soon. I imagine it’ll come to press sometime in the next year.

Manuscripts in Progress

Paper F: Student D conducted the fieldwork in the summer of 2012 on this project, which grew out of a project by student A. The data are complete, and the specific approach to writing the paper has been cooked up with Student D and myself, and now I need to do the full analysis/figures for the manuscript before turning it off to StudentD to finish. She is going away for another extended field season in a couple months, and so I don’t know if I’ll get to it by then. If I do, then we should submit the paper in months. If I don’t, it’ll be by the end of 2014, which is when Student D is applying to grad schools.

Paper G: Student B conducted fieldwork in the summer of 2012 on a project connected to a field experiment set up by Collab C. I spent the spring of 2013 in the lab finishing up the work, and I gave a talk on it this last summer. It’s a really cool set of data though I haven’t had the chance to work it up completely. I contacted Collab G to see if he had someone in his lab that wanted to join me in working on it. Instead, he volunteered himself and we suckered our pal Collab H to join us in on it. The analyses and writing should be straightforward, but we actually need to do it and we’re all committed to other things at the moment. So, now I just need to make the dropbox folder to share the files with those guys and we can take the next step. I imagine it’ll be done somewhere between months to years from now, depending on how much any one of us pushes.

Paper H: So far, this one has been just me. It was built on a set of data that my lab has accumulated over few projects and several years. It’s a unique set of data to ask a long-standing question that others haven’t had the data to approach. The results are cool, and I’m mostly done with them, and the manuscript just needs a couple more analyses to finish up the paper. I, however, have continued to be remiss in my training in newly emerged statistical software. So this manuscript is either waiting for myself to learn the software, or for a collaborator or student eager to take this on and finish up the manuscript. It could be somewhere between weeks to several years from now.

Paper I: I saw a very cool talk by someone a meeting in 2007, which was ripe to be continued into a more complete project, even though it was just a side project. After some conversations, this project evolved into a collaboration, with Student E to do fieldwork in summer 2008 and January 2009. We agreed that Collab I would be first author, Student E would be second author and I’d be last author. The project is now ABM (all but manuscript), and after communicating many times with Collab I over the years, I’m still waiting for the manuscript. A few times I indicated that I would be interested in writing up our half on our own for a lower-tier journal. It’s pretty much fallen off my radar and I don’t see when I’ll have time to write it up. Whenever I see my collaborator he admits to it as a source of guilt and I offer absolution. It remains an interesting and timely would-be paper and hopefully he’ll find the time to get to it. However, being good is better than being right, and I don’t want to hound Collab I because he’s got a lot to do and neither one of us really needs the paper. It is very cool, though, in my opinion, and it’d be nice for this 5-year old project to be shared with the world before it rots on our hard drives. He’s a rocking scholar with a string of great papers, but still, he’s in a position to benefit from being first author way more myself, so I’ll let this one sit on his tray for a while longer. This is a cool enough little story, though, that I’m not going to forget about it and the main findings will not be scooped, nor grow stale, with time.

Paper J: This is a review and meta-analysis that I have been wanting to write for a few years now, which I was going to put into a previous review, but it really will end up standing on its own. I am working with a Student F to aggregate information from a disparate literature. If the student is successful, which I think is likely, then we’ll probably be writing this paper together over the next year, even as she is away doing long-term field research in a distant land.

Paper K: At a conference in 2009, I saw a grad student present a poster with a really cool result and an interesting dataset that came from the same field station as myself. This project was built on an intensively collected set of samples from the field, and those same samples, if processed for a new kind of lab analysis, would be able to test a new question. I sent Student G across the country to the lab of this grad student (Collab J) to process these samples for analysis. We ran the results, and they were cool. To make these results more relevant, the manuscript requires a comprehensive tally of related studies. We decided that this is the task of Student G. She has gotten the bulk of it done over the course of the past year, and should be finishing in the next month or two, and then we can finish writing our share of this manuscript. Collab J has followed through on her end, but, as it’s a side project for both of us, neither of us are in a rush and the ball’s in my court at the moment. I anticipate that we’ll get done with this in a year or two, because I’ll have to analyze the results from Student G and put them into the manuscript, which will be first authored by Collab J.

Paper L: This is a project by Student I, as a follow-up to the project of Student H in paper E, conducted in the summer of 2013. The data are all collected, and a preliminary analysis has been done, and I’m waiting for Student I to turn these data into both a thesis and a manuscript.

Paper M: This is a project by Student L, building on prior projects that I conducted on my own. Fieldwork was conducted in the summer of 2012, and it is in the same place as Paper K, waiting for the student to convert it into a thesis and a manuscript.

Paper N: This was conducted in the field in summer 2013 as a collaboration between Student D and Student N. The field component was successful and now requires me to do about a month’s worth of labwork to finish up the project, as the nature of the work makes it somewhere between impractical and unfeasible to train the students to do themselves. I was hoping to do it this fall, to use these data not just for a paper but also preliminary data for a grant proposal in January, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do it until the spring 2014, which would mean the paper would get submitted in Fall 2014 at the earliest, or maybe 2015. This one will be on the frontburner because Students D and N should end up in awesome labs for grad school and having this paper in press should enhance their applications.

Paper O: This project was conducted in the field in summer 2013, and the labwork is now in the hands of Student O, who is doing it independently, as he is based out of an institution far away from my own and he has the skill set to do this. I need to continue communicating with this student to make sure that it doesn’t fall off the radar or doesn’t get done right.

Paper P: This project is waiting to get published from an older collaborative project, a large multi-PI biocomplexity endeavor at my fieldstation. I had a postdoc for one year on this project, and she published one paper from the project but as she moved on, left behind a number of cool results that I need to write up myself. I’ve been putting this off because it would rely on me also spending some serious lab time doing a lot of specimen identifications to get this integrative project done right. I’ve been putting it off for a few years, and I don’t see that changing, unless I am on a roll from the work for Paper N and just keep moving on in the lab.

Paper Q: A review and meta-analysis that came out of a conversation with Collabs K and L. I have been co-teaching field courses with Collab K a few times, and we share a lot of viewpoints about this topic that go against the incorrect prevailing wisdom, so we thought we’d do something about it. This emerged in the context of a discussion with L. I am now working with Student P to help systematically collect data for this project, which I imagine will come together over the next year or two, depending on how hard the pushing comes from myself or K or L. Again it’s a side project for all of us, so we’ll see. The worst case scenario is that we’ll all see one another again next summer and presumably pick things up from there. Having my student generating data is might keep the engine running.

Paper R: This is something I haven’t thought about in a year or so. Student A, in the course of her project, was able to collect samples and data in a structured fashion that could be used with the tools developed by Collab M and a student working with her. This project is in their hands, as well as first and lead authorship, so we’ve done our share and are just waiting to hear back. There have been some practical problem on their side, that we can’t control, and they’re working to get around it.

Paper S: While I was working with Collab N on an earlier paper in the field in 2008, a very cool natural history observation was made that could result in an even cooler scientific finding. I’ve brought in Collab O to do this part of the work, but because of some practical problems (the same as in Paper R, by pure coincidence) this is taking longer than we thought and is best fixed by bringing in the involvement of a new potential collaborator who has control over a unique required resource. I’ve been lagging on the communication required for this part of the project. After I do the proper consultation, if it works out, we can get rolling and, if it works, I’d drop everything to write it up because it would be the most awesome thing ever. But, there’s plenty to be done between now and then.

Paper T: This is a project by Student M, who is conducted a local research project on a system entirely unrelated to my own, enrolled in a degree program outside my department though I am serving as her advisor. The field and labwork was conducted in the first half of 2013 – and the potential long-shot result come up positive and really interesting! This one is, also, waiting for the student to convert the work into a thesis and manuscript. You might want to note, by the way, that I tell every Master’s student coming into my lab that I won’t sign off on their thesis until they also produce a manuscript in submittable condition.

Projects in development

These are still in the works, and are so primordial there’s little to say. A bunch of this stuff will happen in summer 2014, but a lot of it won’t, even though all of it is exciting.

Summary

I have a lot of irons in the fire, though that’s not going to keep me from collecting new data and working on new ideas. This backlog is growing to an unsustainable size, and I imagine a genuine sabbatical might help me lighten the load. I’m eligible for a sabbatical but I can’t see taking it without putting a few projects on hold that would really deny opportunities to a bunch of students. Could I have promoted one of these manuscripts from one list to the other instead of writing this post? I don’t think so, but I could have at least made a small dent.

Legend to Students and Collaborators

Student A: Former M.S. student, now entering her 2nd year training to become a D.P.T.; actively and reliably working on the manuscript to make sure it gets published

Student B: Former undergrad, now in his first year in mighty great lab and program for his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Student C: Former undergrad, now in a M.S. program studying disease ecology from a public health standpoint, I think.

Student D: Undergrad still active in my lab

Student E: Former undergrad, now working in biology somewhere

Student F: Former undergrad, working in my lab, applying to grad school for animal behavior

Student G: Former undergrad, oriented towards grad school, wavering between something microbial genetics and microbial ecology/evolution (The only distinction is what kind of department to end up in for grad school.)

Student H: Former undergrad, now in a great M.S. program in marine science

Student I: Current M.S. student

Student L: Current M.S. student

Student M: Current M.S. student

Student N: Current undergrad, applying to Ph.D. programs to study community ecology

Student O: Just starting undergrad at a university on the other side of the country

Student P: Current M.S. student

Collab A: Started collaborating as grad student, now a postdoc in the lab of a friend/colleague

Collab B: Grad student in the lab of Collab C

Collab C: Faculty at R1 university

Collab D: Faculty at a small liberal arts college

Collab E: Faculty at a small liberal arts college

Collab F: International collaborator

Collab G: Faculty at an R1 university

Collab H: Started collaborating as postdoc, now faculty at an R1 university

Collab I: Was Ph.D. student, now faculty at a research institution

Collab J: Ph.D. student at R1 university

Collab K: Postdoc at R1 university, same institution as Collab L

Collab L: Ph.D. student who had the same doctoral PI as Collab A

Collab M: Postdoc at research institution

Collab N: Former Ph.D. student of Collab H.; postdoc at research institution

Collab O: Faculty at a teaching-centered institution similar to my own

By the way, if you’re still interested in this topic, there was also a high-quality post on the same topic on Tenure, She Wrote, using a fruit-related metaphor with some really nice fruit-related photos.

Friday Recommended Reads #8

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You probably caught the news about the oarfish. Two washed up in Southern California. Why did these creatures make it up to the surface? One idea, that I haven’t heard or read anywhere else, is that it was probably the US Navy. They keep using massive sonar instruments that are deafening to whales, and it makes sense given the locations. It’s wholly credible. (This wasn’t my idea, but a student’s, though I wish it was mine.)

Darwin was a loving and doting father, if not up to current standards, then at least a far better one than his contemporaries. And when he was done writing drafts, his kids used his paper for their drawings.

Heard that you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction? There’s no rule against it. So don’t sweat it if you do.

This newly-famous guy named Macklemore wrote on his website about the last year, about the process through which he became famous. It’s refreshingly reflective and honest about the interplay of the strategy, thrill and weirdness involved in going from a restricted distribution to cosmopolitan in a very short period of time.

When you’re in a teaching campus, how do you allocate your limited research time? Do you put all the eggs in one basket?

Is your department’s seminar series no good? Here’s how Alex Bond thinks they can be less sucky.

David Foster Wallace on doing science.  Okay, not really, he wrote about writing, but if you substitute “doing scientific research” for “writing,” this piece works just as well. Remember, we’re in this to discover stuff, and being high-profile should be a side benefit rather than the purpose.

If you’re wanting the authoritative recap on the sexual harassment saga in the Science Online community, it made it to the New Yorker. The ensuing discussions led me to think about how I structure discussions and work to be inclusive on this site. Some of the comments on that post earlier this week were curious and particularly revealing about the subculture of science blogging, and only reinforce my will to make sure that this site is a conversation designed for everybody.

Damn, Hope Jahren sure can write. A little flavor of VonnegutBorgesZadieSmithSedaris.

As always, share any other links you wish to share in the comments. People really do click on these things, you know!

Thanks to Arikia Millikan and Stacy Philpott for pointing to things via social media.

The conflict-cooperation model of faculty-admin relations, Part 4: Consequences of our social interactions

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This is the penultimate piece in a series on faculty-admin relations. Here are parts one, two, and three. You don’t need to get caught up to appreciate the set of tips inferred from prior observations:

  • Faculty are the ones who really run the show at universities. This is true as long as there is tenure, and especially as long as there is collective bargaining. Universities exist to let us do our research and teaching jobs, and any service on campus is designed to facilitate that core function. Any administrator that runs afoul of the faculty as a group will not be able to implement their vision with any kind of fidelity.
  • Administrators cannot be effective at serving students unless the faculty are on board.
  • In a university of adjuncts without tenure, the show is run by regional accreditors, because they can get administrators fired. This is why places run almost entirely by adjunct labor, such as “University” of Phoenix, have curricula that follow the prescriptions of regional accrediting agencies, without anything above or beyond what is required.
  • Faculty and administrators need one another. The more they can get along to meet shared goals, the better things are. When individuals pursue their own goals, that don’t contribute to the shared goal, conflict results. When there is cooperation toward shared goals, then all sides will be more able to fulfill their individual interests.
  • Good administrators and faculty share one common interest – serving students – but they also have many conflicting interests, and these are highly variable and shaped by the environment.
  • Professors typically want vastly different things from one another, so organization around a common interest is uncommon. This may result in administrators having their own interests met more often than the faculty.
  • Administrators can spend money on any initiatives they wish, but unless faculty choose to carry out the work in earnest, it will fail.
  • Conflict with your direct administrators over things that they are unable to change harms everybody. Individuals who can successfully minimize the costs of conflict are in a position to experience the greatest gain at the individual level, and these actions also serve to increase the group-level benefits of cooperation.
  • Administrators who don’t cooperate with their faculty will be ineffective, and faculty who don’t find common ground with administration don’t get what they need.
  • Universities have often evolved to take advantage of the faculty even though they collectively the machine that runs the show. Adjuncts have little power to individually control what happens in the university, and are highly subject to manipulation by administration and other faculty. If they wish to be a part of the system then they have little choice but to carry out the will of the administration.

What happens when you don’t know anything about the subject you’re teaching?

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Biologie & Anatomie & Mensch, via Wikimedia commons

Biologie & Anatomie & Mensch, via Wikimedia commons

Like many grad students in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, I my made a living through grad school as a TA.

One semester, there were open positions in the Human Anatomy cadaver lab. I was foolish enough to allow myself to be assigned to this course. What were my qualifications for teaching an upper-division human anatomy laboratory? I took comparative vertebrate anatomy in college four years earlier. We dissected cats. I barely got a C.

You can imagine what a cadaver lab might be like. The point of the lab was to memorize lots of parts, as well as the parts to which those parts were connected. More happened in lecture, I guess, but in lab nearly the entire grade for students was generated from practical quizzes and exams. These assessments consisted of a series of labeled pins in cadavers.

My job was to work with the students so that they knew all the parts for quizzes and exams. (You might think that memorizing the names of parts is dumb, when you could just look them up in a book. But if you’re getting trained for a career in the health sciences, knowing exactly the names of all these parts and what they are connected to is actually a fundamental part of the job, and not too different from knowing vocabulary as a part of a foreign language.)

The hard part about teaching this class is: once you look inside a human being, we’ve got a helluva lotta parts, all of which have names. I was studying the biogeography of ants. Some of the other grad student TAs spent a huge amount of time prepping, to learn the content that we were teaching each week. Either I didn’t have the time, or didn’t choose to make the time. I also discovered that the odors of the preservatives gave me headaches, even when everything was ventilated properly. Regardless of the excuse that I can invent a posteriori, the bottom line is that I knew far less course material than was expected of the students.

Boy howdy, did I blow it that semester! At the end, my evaluation scores were in the basement. Most of the students thought I sucked. The reason that they thought I sucked is because I sucked. What would you think if you asked your instructor a basic question, like “Is this the Palmaris Longus or the Flexor Carpi Ulnaris?” and your instructor says:

I don’t know? Maybe you should look it up? Let’s figure out what page it is in the book?

The whole point of the lab was for students to learn where all the parts were and what they were called. And I didn’t know how to find the parts and didn’t know the names. I lacked confidence, and my students were far more interested in the subject. It was clear to the students that I didn’t invest the time in doing what was necessary to teach well. They could tell, correctly, that I had higher priorities.

Even though students were in separate lab sections, a big chunk of the grade was based on a single comprehensive practical exam that was administered to all lab sections by the lecture instructor. Even though I taught them all semester – or didn’t teach them at all – their total performance was measured against all other students, including those who were lucky enough to be in other lab sections taught by anatomy groupies. Even I at the time realized that my students drew the short straw.

One of my sections did okay, and was just above the average lab section. The other section – the first of the two – had the best score among all of the lab sections! My students, with the poor excuse of an ignoramus instructor, kicked the butts of all other sections. These are the very same students that gave me the most pathetic evaluation scores of all time. They aced the frickin’ final exam.

What the hell happened?

I inadvertently was using a so-called “best practice” called inquiry-based instruction. That semester, I taught the students nothing, and that’s why they learned.

Now, I know even less human anatomy than I did back then. (I remember the Palmaris Longus, though, because mine is missing.) I bet my students would learn even more now than mine did then, and I also bet that I’d get pretty good evals, to boot. Why is that?

I’d teach the same way I taught back then, but this time around, I’d do it with confidence. If a student asked me to tell the difference between the location of muscle A and muscle B, I’d say:

I don’t know. You should look it up. Find it in the book and let me know when you’ve figured it out.

The only difference between the hypothetical now, and the actual then, is confidence. Of course, there’s no way in heck that I’ll ever be assigned to teach human anatomy again, because the instructors really should have far greater mastery than the students. In this particular lab, I don’t think mastery by the instructor really mattered, as the instructor only needed to tell the students what they needed to know, and the memorization required very little guidance. (For Bloom’s taxonomy people this was all straight-up basic “knowledge.”)

I do not recommend having an ignorant professor teach a course. If a class requires anything more than memorizing a bunch of stuff, then, obviously, the instructor needs to know a lot more than the students. Aside from a laboratory in anatomy, few if any other labs require (or should require) only straight-up memorization of knowledge. Creating the most effective paths for discovery requires an intimate knowledge of the material, especially when working with underprepared students.

For contrasting example, when I’ve taught about the diversity, morphology and evolutionary history of animals, I tell my students the same amount of detail that I told my anatomy students back then: nothing. I provide a framework for learning, and it’s their job to sort it out. If a students asks about the differences between an annelid and a nemadote, I refrain from busting into hours of lecture. But I don’t just lead them to specimens and a book. I need to provide additional lines of inquiry that put their question into context. It’s not just memorizing a muscle. In this case, it’s about learning bigger concepts about evolutionary history and how we study attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary trees of life. I ask them to make specific comparisons and I ask leading questions to make sure that they’re considering certain concepts as they conduct their inquiry. That takes expertise and content knowledge on my part.

To answer the non-rhetorical question that is the title of this post, then I guess the answer is: It will be a disaster.

But if you act with confidence and don’t misrepresent your mastery, then it might be possible to get by with not knowing so much and still have your students learn. Then again, if you’re teaching anything other than an anatomy lab that involves only strict memorization, I’d guess that both you and your students are probably up a creek if you don’t know your stuff.

The semester after was the TA for human anatomy, I taught Insect Biology lab. That was better for everybody.

This attempt to create an inclusive professional blog

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Running this blog has been a wonderful experience. I think it’s a productive and professional use of my time, and my intention is that those who spend time visiting this site will feel the same.

But.

In person, I typically am ashamed to even mention that I have a blog. This is equally true in professional and personal contexts. On average, having a blog is not a positive thing. I usually will only talk about this site after someone else brings it up.

I read a variety of blogs, so I have plenty of respect for some bloggers and their work. I hope that Small Pond Science continues to earn respect from others, throughout the scientific and academic communities. I recognize that respect is earned, especially in this specious and heterogeneous medium.

People who are not regular blog readers – which is most people – tend to think that a blog is a public diary, where people post about their meals and alternately brag and complain about their friends and family. Obviously that’s wrong, or at least an oversimplification.

To outsiders, it appears that there is a blogging scene among scientific and academic bloggers. At first glance, it may appear to be populated with a small cast of characters that have mutual respect and admiration for one another, spiced with an occasional dose of antipathy.

I don’t know how others feel, but even the existence of a “blogging scene” feels exclusionary to me. When I do visit blogs tied to the scene, I identify a variety of things that serve as barriers to new readers and people who don’t perceive that they are members of the community. The tone is highly personalized, and there are references to other blog buddies, narratives referring to in-jokes and incidents from earlier times, and there is the occasional use of pet names or acronyms.

Of course, many people who write and read blogs might point out that this highly personalized approach to a blog is not a bug but a feature. Especially for people in a position where they would be marginalized for speaking out, there are benefits to creating a closer-knit community that doesn’t make too much sense to outsiders. Of course, anybody can have a blog and they are free to write whatever they wish in that blog (unless they’re in the SciAm network). I’m totally cool with that. Write whatever you want in your blog, by all means. No sarcasm is intended.

The upshot is that when I read most blogs, I think to myself: this is a club to which I do not belong.

This last week, it was revealed that a central figure in the science blogging club is a lecherous creep. Now that the reeling is over, club members are evaluating the structure of their community more broadly to understand how such a malevolent oaf could gain so much power. As I’m not a member of the club, I can’t really contribute much of value to that discussion. I’ve never met any of the central figures. (I only know one person who is in any blog network, on account of a shared research expertise in a certain family of insects.)

One side effect of the events of the last week is that all kinds of blog readers and twitter followers are now getting a heavy dose of understanding how clubby this club is. This club is not exclusionary by intent, and I imagine that newcomers are welcomed quite quickly. However, it’s still a club, and the price of admission is an interest and investment of time in building relationships with people in the club.

There are some excellent blogs out there by people who don’t appear to be members of the club. I don’t know if Female Science Professor has ever buddied around with other bloggers. If she does then you wouldn’t realize it from being a semi-regular reader of her site. This is quite different than most other bloggers of academia, whose blogs make it pretty obvious that they are buddies with other bloggers and this buddy network features heavily in the content and context of posts.

There is a different kind of club for science bloggers, many who mostly write professional and not-overly-personal pieces on their blogs but engage in social media in a manner that seems exclusive and, well, clubby, to outsiders.

It is inevitable that the professional and the personal will intermingle when professionals spend time together as a part of their jobs. I’m not in a blogging club, but am I in other professional clubs? Sure. There are the people who work at the same rainforest field station, and there are people who work on the same taxon as myself. These personal relationships are a kind of glue that keep professional networks together, and friendship among colleagues is not inherently inappropriate. (A post by Chad Orzel, and including the associated comments which are thoughtful and productive, deals some of these issues.)

Many bloggers, though some of them even regard their blogs as a professional endeavor, conduct much of their blog-related friendships in the public arena. This public friendship happens sometimes through the content of posts, sometimes in comments on posts, and heavily on twitter. Many of these bloggers have thousands of followers who might have started following bloggers for professional reasons but very promptly were introduced into the interactions of their personal lives. Science blogs purportedly exist for science education and outreach, but they also come, whether you like it or not, with a heavy dose of the personal lives of bloggers and their friendships with one another.

The clubs of bloggers are very different from other professional clubs. What is the difference? The activity that brings the blogger club together is the medium through which they communicate. The personal aspects of their professional relationships are transparent and unavoidable to the public that is seeking information about science or academia.

Bloggers of science and academia conduct their business on their blogs, and also heavily socialize using their blogs and the social media directly tied to these blogs. If there is a line between the blogs of science and academia, and the social life of the bloggers, it’s so blurry that it is indistinguishable. I might have jumped into conversations with others in social media on occasion, but I hope that hasn’t resulted in a site that makes it looks like it is designed to be a social enterprise. Having my own blog has led to communicating with people with whom I might become friends. However, I’ll be darned if the those friendships chase away people who otherwise would read the site. I don’t want anybody to even suspect, for a moment, that by reading this site that they are looking at the internal workings of a club.

When I am doing my job as a tropical biologist or an ant biologist, my participation in professional clubs is not obvious in the primary activity of the club: scientific research, publication in journals, and the training of students. We socialize in person and through social media, but this kind of socialization doesn’t directly interfere with our missions of research and student training. In some ways it can indirectly help and indirectly hinder our goals, depending on individuals.

I’m not in a position to tell other people how to run their blogs. However, because the prevailing norm is different than what I wish for my blog, then I have to deal with the fact that this site is, by design, different than other blogs. I’m shooting for elements of Female Science Professor, Myrmecos, Dynamic Ecology and the New York Times. I want this site to be fundamentally different than a newspaper, but I would like to be journalistic in professionalism and accessibility. I want someone who comes here to not think that this site is just some blog, but to see content and ideas that serve the mission and are not designed for the discussion or entertainment of a social club.

While being in the blogger club would bring more attention to this site, it also would also put a fence around the site and keep some people out. I want everybody to feel welcome. I honestly don’t know how well I’ve accomplished this goal to date, and by sharing this mission overtly and publicly, I set the bar for a standard that I wish to maintain.

Friday Recommended Reads #7

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What are deans thinking when they’re evaluating tenure cases? Apparently, at least one of them is sizing professors up like used cars.

That’s not how you pipet.

I’ve always thought that the actual content of the bulk of TED talks are distilled bunk. I’ve discovered that someone wrote a critique of TED talks of which I am a little jealous because it’s so well done, but grateful because I was never going to write it.

Have you seen the fake TED talks from the Onion?  It’s the best illustration of how a typical TED talk convinces people that boring and well-established ideas are novel and interesting. Maybe people should, you know, read something with substance once in a while.

By the way, the biggest rock is Uluru. You can walk around it in less than a couple hours.

Getty Research Institute has an amazing collection of historic, compelling and often gorgeous artistic images. This week, they released a fraction of them for open content. It’s a good start, considering they’re still living off the legacy of an exploitative oil baron.

Here are a couple posts addressing core issues of small ponds:

Don’t like the continued exploitation of contingent instructors in universities? It’s up to tenured faculty to fix the problem.

This has been a challenging week for people who blog about science. It started with the fallout of Scientific American censoring Dr. Danielle Lee, which I’ve already addressed. These events caused an unrelated set of incidents of sexual harassment to become known, with victims providing clear, nuanced and details accounts of their interactions with one central figure in the science blogging and science writing communities. It’s broken out into the mainstream media and a summary of it on one such site is here. What has happened is not a rarity but something that happens every day, everywhere. This moment is different is because a few people had the courage to share their story, and the unflinching support from all parts of the community is heartening.  Here are a few of the reflections on this week that I wanted to share with you:

I haven’t written my own piece about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in science. I’m not going to, because I don’t think I could come close to matching the efforts above. I intentionally chose three guys’ thoughts, whose perspective on this matches my own, but whose ability to express these thoughts exceeds my own. I’m grateful that they took the time out to show how important this issue it is.

For a link, thanks to Paige Roberts.

As always, feel free to add your own recommended reads, or remarks on anything found in these links.

Why host a speaker?

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I recently went over why seminar speakers might give a talk.  Now, the flipside:

What is to be gained by inviting and hosting a seminar speaker?

There are institutional advantages to running a seminar series: to promote an intellectual atmosphere in a department, build a diversity of viewpoints, train students and keep everybody current. However, when an individual person or laboratory decides to host a particular guest speaker, there are other primary motives at work.

Here is a non-exclusive list of goals of hosts, that could explain why certain speakers are picked for a seminar series.

Schmoozing for a postdoc.  I think this is the main reason that speakers are invited. Grad students want to be able to land a postdoc, and PIs want their students to land postdocs. Bringing in potential postdoc mentors to build relationships with graduate students is an old tradition.

Hang out with your intellectual hero.  There’s something special about academically famous people in your field. The chance to visit just have a coffee with, say, Bert Hölldobler or Dan Janzen would be mighty darn cool. When I was in grad school, one person I invited was Ivette Perfecto. My main motivation was because because her science is just so darn awesome, and the chance to hang out with her was tremendous.

Quality time with a friend. Wouldn’t it good to see an old pal you haven’t seen for a while, and catch up on what work they’ve been doing?

Being an alpha. Hosts could invite junior speakers in their same field which are sure to be flattering of their more esteemed hosts whom they are visiting.

Be a beta. Hosts could invite senior researchers in their field, upon whose feet they may grovel. How is this different from hanging out with your hero? Betas are looking for status and opportunity, while it’s also possible to invite someone for less careerist motives.

Develop the career of another scientist. It could be that you just want to give an a good experience to a junior scientist who does good work, who could stand to benefit from giving an invited seminar.

Work with a collaborator. Some work is a lot easier, or more effective, when you’re in the same room, rather than using various methods of remote communication. Why not bring your collaborator out on the department’s dime?

Build a culture of inclusiveness. It’s no accident that most visiting speakers that I invite to my university’s lecture series are early career women, often with an international background or from underrepresented groups. This helps promote the careers of these scientists who are at a structural disadvantage because of biases in the system. An even stronger motivation, from my standpoint, is that these speakers are inspirational role models for our students, most of whom are minority women. I can talk about a commitment to diversity until my white face turns blue, but the fact of who I am speaks more than my words. Regular exposure to the experiences of senior doctoral students, postdocs, and junior faculty who have backgrounds not so different from my own students are critical. This isn’t the only factor involved in extending an invitation, but it’s a big one for myself and others at my institution.

Trade favors.  Bringing a speaker out might be to make someone owe you a favor or a way to repay a favor. This could be to help out someone’s postdoc, or help out someone with a shaky tenure case who could use a bit of external validation. This might sound like a silly motive, but not without precedent. Once, when I was organizing a symposium, someone asked me for a speaking slot, and if I did this favor, this person said that I would be invited for the seminar series.

Show grad students a variety of career options. The flawed default mode in many universities is that moving onto an R1 faculty position is the natural and expected progression after grad school. However, the majority of Ph.D. recipients don’t go this route. Inviting people who work in industry, NGOs, and governmental agencies can help broaden perspectives.  Also, of course, you could invite a researchers based out of a teaching institution. This will definitely widen the job horizons of grad students.

Entertainment value. Some people are invited because they’re known for giving a really great talk, will fill the house, and will bring not only reflected praise on the hosts but also a good time.

Learning science. Some people actually invite seminar speakers because they want to learn about the science that’s being done by the guest.

And that’s it for the list. Feel free to add the ones that I’m forgetting in the comments. Or to tell a funny story, for that matter. We could use more funny stories in the comments, right?

Hittin’ the lecture circuit

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Over the next couple weeks, my show is going on the road!

Tour dates:

  • 18 Oct 2013 – Boulder
  • 28 Oct 2013 – Miami

No tickets required. I am likely to entertain, and there’s a good chance of some enlightenment. There’ll be fun natural history, big questions, medium-sized answers, and a refutation of dogma.

It’s not frequent that a person from a teaching-focused university, like myself, ends up getting invited to give a talk at an R1 institution. It’s not a freak of nature or anything like that either. But if you look at the roster of speakers in most seminar series, it’s usually a roll call of other research universities. So, when you see the roster of the departments hosting me, it tends to look something like this:

Moab sticker

If you think that’s self-deprecating humor or some kind of dig at myself, please look in the mirror. Because Moab rocks. I love being from (the metaphorical) Moab. Clearly, Moab is the outlier, just like California State University Dominguez Hills is an outlier among Stanford, UMass, and the University of Vermont. That’s not a bad thing; I think it’s wonderful.

I just read something written by a professor who just left her job at an R1 university for a job at a Liberal Arts College, in order to solve a 2-body problem, and she is still settling into the new job:

I am learning that folks still define themselves as researchers here.

This shows that there is still plenty of work to be done, when a researcher shows up on campus and doesn’t even realize that her own colleagues are also researchers, and perceive of themselves that way!

One of these days, perhaps, it won’t be so surprising that tenure-track faculty at colleges and universities see themselves as researchers, and that the broader community will recognize the same. The more they invite me, and other research-oriented faculty from teaching institutions, to seminars at R1 universities, this fact should become self-evident to grad students before they leave grad school.

If universities aren’t inviting research-active faculty from teaching institutions as a part of their seminar series, then they are only perpetuating the misrepresentation of the status quo in higher education.

But for the moment, these invites are uncommon, and it provides an extraordinary opportunity to show folks what kind of research happens at my university. I’m excited for the trip because it’s going to blow some folks away how badass my stuff is, and how many of them won’t even see it coming.

I’ve got my work cut out for me, because whether I like it or not, I’m representing a whole class of researchers who do great work in teaching institutions. Even after I give a kickass talk, it’s inevitable that at least a few people will think that I’m punching above my weight. But if I go in with that kind of attitude, then that would only reinforce the false notion that I might have a chip on my shoulder about not coming from a research institution. Am I conscious of the issues face by researchers in teaching institutions and how we are perceived? Of course I am – I started a whole blog about it!

So, I’m just visiting to have fun, hang out with fellow biologists, share what I can, and learn what I can. And if you’re on the front range or on the toenail of the Florida panhandle, then maybe we can chat about your stuff, frontiers in the community ecology of rainforests, and, of course, ants.

More on seminar series tomorrow.

Why give a seminar?

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What is the purpose of an invited seminar?

Everybody wants to give a great seminar. But when the speaker gives the talk, what is the purpose or goal of the talk? What is the speaker trying to accomplish?

The purposes of dissertation defenses and job talks are obvious. However, whenever an invited speaker comes to give a seminar as a part of seminar series, the speaker could show up with many different kinds of priorities and purposes. We all have a variety of motivations that are context-dependent. Visiting speakers have overt and tacit messages that they have designed to be delivered in their slightly-less-than-an-hour timeslots.

Here is a classification of the non-exclusive goals that speakers might seek to accomplish in a seminar.

Build a reputation as an important scholar.  Seminars can be used to help the speakers grow the perception that they, and their work, are important. To some extent the invitation to give the seminar itself is a validation, but the delivery of the talk is required to cement that validation and help people spread work.

Being an alpha.  Some speakers know that they don’t need to build their reputation, but they can use the time allotted to them in a seminar to assert their dominant status. These talks might be used to stake out territory of interest to people working in the institution sponsoring the visit.

Be a beta. If the visiting speakers were invited by more prestigious research groups, then the speakers might choose to demonstrate behavioral submissiveness to the dominant hosts.

Bask in one’s legacy.  Some speakers don’t want to say anything particularly new, but want to use the time to provide an overview of the major accomplishments that have been made over a successful career.

Promote students and postdocs.  Seminar speakers are often invited to be the schmoozed, but they also can use seminars to promote the work of the members of their own labs. These kinds of talks heavily feature the roles of lab members in work presented in the talk.

Be entertaining and have fun.  Some talks are designed to entertain the audience rather than inform. Moreover, the speaker could be giving the talk just for the fun of it.

Show off smarts.  On some occasions, the speakers just want to show off how smart they are. This is likely to involve a number of obscure details that the audience wouldn’t want to bother understanding.

Not embarrass oneself.  The imposter syndrome is well described in academia and speakers might not recognize that they are up to the task or are worthy of an invited talk. Other speakers might feel great about their science but are not sure that they can give a great talk. So, just getting through the talk without screwing up might be a goal of its own.

Build collaborations.  When scholars visit one another’s institutions, the social context and resource access can facilitate collaborations more readily than what might occur at a professional conference. The seminar might be constructed to demonstrate opportunities where collaborations could be most fruitful.

Recruit students or postdocs.  Faculty should always be on the lookout for motivated and talented future lab members. If there are potential recruits in the audience, the talk could serve not only as inspiration but also communicate clear possibilities for exciting student projects.

Give a lesson or advocate for an approach to how science is done.  Oftentimes, seminars are most interesting not because of what was learned, but because the person presenting the work explained their rationale for choosing their experiments and provided arguments for the effectiveness of their approach to doing science. Speakers might choose to use their talk to give a lesson about more abstract ideas about the best ways to do science.

Argue for or against a pet theory, or shape the future of the field. Speakers might not be so heavily focused on their own findings, but instead use the seminar to advocate for or against a broader theory or direction for the field.

Pick an unnecessary argument.  Some people are inherently antagonistic. They might think so strongly that the advance of knowledge emerges from arguments among academics, that they pick arguments and intentionally say controversial things to get the ball rolling on arguments.

Be cool.  Some people need to show that what they are doing is cool. Obviously this purpose could overlap with other purposes, such as building a reputation or having fun. But sometimes, being cool is most important.

Inspire a new generation of scientists. Some speakers design their seminars specifically to be inspiration for the grad students in the audience. They might not be working hard to market their own ideas, or promote themselves, but to provide guidance for the junior scientists.

Actually give a science lesson.  This might sound crazy, but some people design their talks so that they are giving a lesson about their own scientific research so that people can understand more about the world.

And that’s it for the list.

So, what are my priorities in giving a talk? I’m all for everybody having fun. If someone in the audience sees potential for collaboration, then that would be really cool. I make sure that my students get appropriate credit when due, and I highlight the fact that my lab is an undergrad-run operation. I also want the grad students there to see what I’m doing and realize that a job at a teaching institution is compatible with mighty awesome research. Of course, I really do want people to learn a bunch about the topic of the seminar, and more generally I like to make the case that we need to change how we do science. (For example, in my next batch of upcoming seminars, I argue that orthodox ideas often are nonsensical and not well supported, and my whole talk is built around one of those ideas.)

And, I’d be dishonest if I ignored the fact that giving a kickass talk makes one look good in the professional arena, which has practical long-term career advantages. It’s all a part of the dumb sociological game in science. While we can pretend to transcend the game, we are on the game board whether we like it or not.

Later this week, I’ll be considering the various priorities that people have in mind when hosting a visiting speaker.

A response to censorship by Scientific American [updated]

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This post is mostly inside baseball among blog people, but it’s an important topic that I don’t want to ignore. It’s an incident that I kind-of observed unfold from the sidelines, and now it’s emerging in the mainstream media, or whatever Buzzfeed is, and will continue to grow. I’ve always thought of this blog as a blog-for-people-who-don’t-read blogs, and there is a lot of sound and fury among blogs that amounts to little that I try to not address. But, as has been pointed out, this one matters.

A recent cascade of events exemplifies the recurring discrimination against scientists from underrepresented groups, and the disempowerment of these scientists by those in authority.

In short: Here’s what happened. Some obscure schmuck named Ofek at an obscure aggregator website called biology-online solicited the science blogger DN Lee for a free guest post. She said no. In response, she was called a “whore,” in a manner that was both sexist and racist. Lee responded, quite appropriately in my view, by making a blog post about this incident, with a professional response and additional context. You can view this response, archived elsewhere, on the site of a colleague of hers. Why can’t you view her response on her own blog? Because her blog is a part of the Scientific American blog network, and the editor of Scientific American made the decision to pull her post from the site.

Overtly sexist and racist actions are, obviously, problematic. Compounding these ills by removing the victim’s ability to respond to in a productive and socially responsible fashion is an even greater evil. And, it’s an even bigger problem when it comes directly from Mariette DiChristina, the Editor-in-Chief and Senior Vice President of Scientific American. It’s been understood that the SciAm blog network operates with editorial independence. That was true, or at least appeared to be so, until yesterday.

This incident is important to share, and reflect on, because it directly reflects the challenges faced by the students in my lab and university, and the progress that remains to be made in our community. I was worried I couldn’t be eloquent enough, but fortunately the job has been done superbly, by Josh Drew:

This means that on both a personal, and on a professional level, it is my business to make sure that women in science have their voices heard and respected. When Scientific American says that it is does not stand by one of its own, that when a black woman says that the way she is being treated is unfair, that when a woman in science is silenced by the very institutions which are there to support her, when these things happen my students are directly and negatively impacted.

What can you do? Give Scientific American and Mariette DiChristina a piece of your mind. Let Scientific American know how you feel on their facebook page. And let other people know you you feel. (If you’re a twitter person, the hashtag that people are using is #IStandwithDNLee.)

Outrageously racist and sexist stuff like this happens all of the time, and this one seems to have exploded because the victim had the courage to speak out and had a platform from which she could do so. Let’s build the size of that platform.

Update, afternoon of 14 Oct 2013:

After a couple days of substantial brouhaha, Scientific American decided to publish the post by Dr. Lee. At this point, however, that post had already been seen by more than half a million people, where it was republished on the wordpress page of “Dr. Isis.” Clearly, if Scientific American hadn’t censored Dr. Lee in the first place, then this post wouldn’t have attracted as much attention.

The decision to quash Dr. Lee’s speech on her blog was, in my view and a bunch of others, transparently racist and sexist. It put Scientific American on the side that has institutionally exploited and limited the inclusion of women scientists and scientists from underrepresented groups. I think this was a great take, in particular.

Now, all we’re hearing from Scientific American is an excuse that they thought the post might not have been legal. That is pretty much bullshit. Right now, they’re saying:

“We’re sorry, but…”

Now they need to say:

“We were wrong. We are sorry. We will make amends.”

Full stop.

But I wouldn’t hold your breath over it.

Friday Recommended Reads #6

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My favorite new comic is BuzzHootRoar. It’s brand new, with two new comics that have come out this week. It has science that is accurate and interesting, and the art is super cool. I’d compare it to other comics, but I don’t want to make other comics look so inferior.

There is a group of National Geographic Society member/agitators advocating for a shift in how the Society does its business. Their site is called Society Matters, and if you’ve ever been curious about what it looks like at National Geographic under the hood (and what it means to be an NGS dissident) this is the place to visit. For starters, National Geographic TV Channel is operated quite independently of the rest of the Society, and the controlling owner is Rupert Murdoch. Considering the crap on the channel, compared to what’s in the magazine, that makes a lot of sense. (disclaimer: my research been funded by Nat Geo.)

A dangerous list. Meg Duffy compiled a great list of videos for teaching ecology concepts, but even if you aren’t a biologist you’ll find this a spectacular time sink, I mean, spectacular entertainment. And you might learn something, too.

It”s now clear that anybody who was going to have an Antarctic field season during this Austral summer is not going to have one. Here is a story from one of the many scientists who is adversely affected. (warning: contains offensive language and Comic Sans.) If John Boehner was a patriot, he’d call a vote right now to fund the US government, but he refuses to do so.

On a related note, Andrea Maguire wrote some tips for those writing an NSF Graduate Fellowship application, which could be useful if you presume that NSF gets funded again.

While still on the topic of the atrophy of scientific infrastructure, let’s look into a more historic example of how anti-science obstructionism put the stop to a major research endeavor in the US. Have you heard of the Superconducting SuperCollider? It was a partially constructed accelerator that would have dwarfed CERN, that was in production in Texas, funded by the federal government. Until it wasn’t. Here’s a story from last year about how the SSC was defunded after half of it was already built. When I was in college, I wasn’t even that interested in subatomic physics but I was excited for the SSC as it was under construction. Oh well.

Being a professor is awesome, isn’t it? Why don’t people stop complaining about how hard the academic life is, when it ain’t?

Being Canadian just got a little better. I’m not talking about Alice Munro, their new Nobel Laureate. Citizens traveling abroad can get free beer.

Morgan Ernest brought to my attention (via twitter) a “head-exploding” disaster of a paper by three men (a philosopher, a political scientist and an ecologist) who attempt to study the sociology of ecologists. It might seem vaguely reasonable and only slightly sexist by the abstract, but when you look inside and see the inferences and conclusions that are not supported by their own data, you have to wonder why they would go to the trouble to write a paper that spews 100-year old rhetoric that, in my view, seems misogynist. But please, judge for yourself. Really, if three dudes are going to be making such broad generalizations about women, you’d think they at least would have enlisted a female co-author?

Do you know the spectacular story of the American who is coaching the Egyptian soccer football team which is on the verge of qualifying for the World Cup? Grant Wahl’s latest piece in Sports Illustrated tells how Bob Bradley, who was recently a coach for the US National Team, is a hero, in the classic meaning of this overused label. Even if you don’t care much for football, then this is still a great story.

Everything I’ve read by or about Malcolm Gladwell has led me to think that he’s a pseudoacademic hack who who is brilliant at marketing overly simplistic ideas, but not good for much else. Finally, someone has suffered enough through his books to build the the rhetorical takedown that is well deserved and overdue. If I ever meet Christopher Chabris, I’d love to buy the man a drink. What does Gladwell himself have to say in response to his many academic critics? Oh, on the radio he admits that he writes books by cherry-picking concepts out of context to tell a false narrative, because that’s what the public wants and can’t handle serious thought or critical thinking. (That’s a paraphrase, but a pretty good one).

By the way, the Chabris piece was picked up by Slate and reprinted there, but I’d rather not give Slate the clicks because they often publish overwrought junk that serves no purpose but to generate righteous indignation, and as a result, revenue-generating traffic. Gladwell’s oversmug response to Chabris is on Slate, too, and I link to it only because he’s entitled to an attempted comeback from such an epic takedown. I do have to admit it is masterful how he slides in just enough slightly-condescending digs against Chabris, just enough to paint Chabris as an overheated academic, but not enough to make show any of his own flopsweat as the person under attack. Of course, he hasn’t done anything to address the heart of Chabris’s arguments.

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Thanks to Dawn Sumner and Alex Wild who brought links to my attention.

Efficient teaching: class needs to end on time

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clockClass needs to end when it is supposed to end.

If you did not plan adequately, it is not acceptable to unilaterally decide that class can be stretched beyond the scheduled time.

Your students might have another class to get to, or a study appointment, or a job. And, they probably want class to end and whatever you want to squeeze in during the last few minutes isn’t likely to have the desired educational outcome anyway. (Unless all you wish to do is blithely “cover material.”) Also, someone else might need to occupy the room, and if it’s a professor who is using digital stuff during the lesson, they need to get hooked up to make that happen and that could take a few minutes.

Here are some guidelines that I suggest, on handling the timing of class sessions:

  • Make sure that a clock is visible to you while you are teaching.
  • Tell your students at the beginning of the semester that you vow to always end class on time.
  • Ask your students to inform you when the end of the class period arrives. If this happens while you’re still in the middle of a lesson, stop at that moment and say “see you next time” immediately. No content is important enough to keep your students captive beyond the time allotted to a class session. (This still happens to me a few times per semester, and I’m thankful that students are comfortable enough to call me out on it.)
  • Start your class on time, even if people haven’t arrived or settled in. This promotes professionalism about the use of time in your classroom.
  • Assign your homework and reading, collect assignments and do other bookkeeping at the start of class, so that it doesn’t make the end stretch longer than planned.
  • Plan for your lessons to end a few minutes early. If they go to the end of the period, you’re okay. If you have a few minutes left as planned, you can do a quick “muddiest point” for students to complete on their way out. You might find muddiest points to be an important part of the course and it is useful to regularly leave time for them.
  • Write exams that can fit within your class period. Write them so that slower students can finish them within the prescribed time. (It varies by discipline, but a chemist colleague once said that if it took more than five minutes to take his own exam, then the exam is too long.)

If you can’t start a class on time because the room is being occupied by another class that has gone over schedule, quietly sneak up to the front and tell the instructor that your students will be entering the room in a minute. This will give them the time to make sure their students can leave the class unimpeded before you claim the room scheduled for your time slot. If you suspect that this instructor is a novice teacher, you might want to give them a few more minutes because they’re still learning how to run a class.

It’s easy to get peeved when students start rustling their bags and packing up before class is over. It annoys me, too. This bag-rustling is not its own problem but merely a symptom of poor engagement and time anxiety. The engagement problem is a whole ‘nother enchilada: you can’t be expected to keep everyone rapt at every moment. But you can take care of the time anxiety by being reliable and predictable. Students pack up when they feel like they are done and want to leave. If they know that they are staying until a precise time, and that they will always be free to leave at that precise time, then you’ll hear fewer zippers and rustles. You might even keep them more engaged.

Do you have any thoughts about managing the duration of a lesson, or have particular challenges with managing when to end class? How do you design exams to evaluate what you need to but make sure that nobody feels rushed? Any other tips you wish to share?

Biology departments need an accreditation body

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My department would be so much better off if it was possible for us to be accredited. But no accreditation is possible for Biology Departments in the US.

Every credible university (as well as some slimy and disreputable ones) is regionally accredited. However, accreditation for individual units within universities is not universally available.

In some fields accreditation is the norm. My university has a variety of accredited programs. Our Chemistry Department gets its undergraduate program accredited by ACS. The Department of Computer Science gets accredited through ABET, and this organization accredits a variety of other technical disciplines. Our School of Business has been accredited by AACSB, but I just failed to find them on the list. And the programs in Education are nationally by NCATE as well as within the state by the CCTC. And there are more, such as nursing.

As for Biology? There’s bupkis. Zip. Zilch. No professional organization has stepped up to the plate to offer such a service.

You might wonder, how is it that I even have heard about accreditation in other departments on my campus? Because I’ve seen those folks get better treatment, year after year. Whenever we all need something, those departments get it and mine gets the leftovers, if there are any. When we ask why other departments get more resources, the answer is that those departments need certain things to keep their accreditation.

Because there is nobody to threaten the loss of accreditation in my department, we have experienced chronic deprivation during times of financial stress. The accredited programs are in far better shape than our department and other non-accredited departments. If there was such thing as accreditation for a Biology department, we’d fall short of the mark in a number of ways.

Any higher level administrator will tell you what a pain in the butt it is to maintain regional accreditation. They’ll also tell you that good things come out of having to prepare for reviews, despite the headaches. The accreditation body prescribes the allocation of resources to areas required for long-term maintenance of institutional resources.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate bureaucracy. The process of getting accredited is probably a pain the butt. But for at least some of us, the benefits of accreditation would greatly outweigh the trouble.

There’s one organization that is in a position to develop an accreditation body for undergraduate Biology programs: The American Institute of Biological Sciences – AIBS. They’re the publishers of Bioscience. AIBS is national organization with a broad reach, and has a history of dedication to undergraduate education and working with undergraduate programs.

AIBS needs to step up to the bat and invest the time and money to get this effort started as a service to our community.

Just imagine if your departmental homepage could bear the stamp of AIBS Accreditation. Wouldn’t that be nice? Moreover, imagine that you needed a new piece of equipment for teaching because the old one died, and that you are told by administration that there won’t be the budget to replace the equipment for two years. Now, imagine how quickly that piece of equipment would be replaced if you mentioned that it was expected for accreditation.

Imagine that you just had a few people retire and someone leave your department, and that your administration isn’t funding the searches for faculty members to replace these lines. However, by not maintaining an adequate tenure-line faculty:major ratio in the department, you would have problems in your next accreditation review. Moreover, you need faculty members with expertise in a certain combination of disciplines to be able to maintain accreditation. Also, accredited departments are not allowed to use too many adjuncts to fill up the course schedule.

What I just described is not a farfetched scenario. Our colleagues in business and computer science have a lower teaching load than the rest of us, because the requirements of their accrediting bodies. Also, our colleges in accredited units are always first in line for new faculty hires because these hires are required to maintain, or to earn back, accreditation. Meanwhile, my department has half the faculty that we had when I arrived seven years ago and more than twice the number of majors. That situation would never have been allowed if we had accreditation.

The long years it took to replace the rickety autoclave, outdated microscopes, and a slew of teaching supplies would never have been necessary if we needed them to keep accreditation. There are still many basic instructional materials that we lack, but our operating budget is so low that it’s hard to foresee the acquisition of these items in the near future. That wouldn’t be the case if we needed these materials for accreditation.

If my department was accredited, faculty would be less overworked, students would have better equipped laboratories, we would have a greater range of faculty expertise, and we would be able to offer courses in particular elective areas that we have not been given the funding to offer to our students. But, there’s no accreditation body to whom we may appeal.

By the way, I’m not the first guy to make this argument. At an AIBS Undergraduate Biology Summit in 2008, this topic came up. Two guys made a good argument for the need for accreditation of undergraduate biology departments. This is the pdf of their presentation. It doesn’t look like much has happened in the past five years since this presentation was made. There is some kind of accreditation offered by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, but based on the website it looks entirely rinky-dink to me.

How do you think your department could change for the better in response to the need for accreditation? What kinds of changes do you think you would not want to make, that might be part of Biology accreditation?

If you are in an accredited science department, do you see the process of attaining and maintaining accreditation to be worth it?

Friday Recommended Reads #5

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Alan Townsend has a remarkably frank post about how departments and individuals handle tenure decisions, and how plenty of people are cowards. If you ever find yourself in a contentious tenure decision-making process, this post is important reading. Stay tuned for more strong experiences and opinions about retention and tenure decisions.

Lots of great things have yet to be digitized. We need to take great care to make sure that the efforts of those who occupied earlier times remain known. A truly wonderful story by Chris Buddle about his rediscovery of natural history information by some outstanding biologists that has been overlooked. It comes with beautiful images of ant-mimic salticid spiders.

It’s now official that NIH isn’t funding science education. Just forget about the anti-vaccine freaks and the public ambivalence towards the wanton use of antibiotics in factory farms that puts all of us at risk.

If the hopefully temporary shutdown of the US Government is boggling to you, here is the clearest, most straightforward explanation of how something this idiotic has come to pass: “America is being primaried.”  The consequences of this shutdown, and how it is handled by the current administration, transcend temporary politics and it is not hyperbole to claim that our democracy is at stake. Keep in mind that our constitution was a beta testing version for more contemporary parliamentary republics. It’s firmware so we can’t reinstall a new constitution.

Why do general education science textbooks suck? It would help if they weren’t designed for premeds who aren’t even taking GE science classes.

More plagiarism by a famous writer. This time it’s Dave Eggers. One of my favorite nonprofit organizations has to be 826 National, which has literacy and writing centers for kids in a variety of cities (Their time travel mart in LA is a great place for gift shopping, too.) It was founded in in part by Dave Eggers, author of the entertaining read Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and creative force behind McSweeney’s, for which I have respect on multiple axes. Kate Losse has made a forceful case that his latest book is heavily plagiarized from her own novel. (Some are viewing this as a gender issue, suggesting that he could get away with it more because he’s man coping from a woman. I just see it as a plagiarism issue, with a famous person copying a non-famous person.) These accusations of plagiarism aren’t new, though. A 2010 book of illustrations and quotes by Eggers is so highly derivative of work by Ketch Wehr, without appropriation or credit, and this is pretty much a textbook case of someone famous ripping off someone who isn’t famous and getting away with it. So, I don’t want Eggers to get away with it. But then again, if Doris Kearns Goodwin can get away with overt plagiarism, then I suppose Eggers will too.

Once a journal rejects you for some dumb reason, wouldn’t it be great to take those reviews, respond to them, and send them to a new journal to speed up the publication process? If you like that idea, submit to Biotropica. (As a disclaimer, I’m on the editorial board.)

Schadenfreudlicious. Finally one football coach whose sweetheart housing deal fell apart as quickly as his coaching ability. The loan for his fancy house was designed to be returned — with interest — if he left the job or got fired. He got the boot this week.

On TV as the new novel. I can only imagine there will be a lot of scholarship about Breaking Bad, as the show is a single 50-something-hour-long, beautifully created, Shakespearean tragedy. The Chronicle of Higher Ed had a piece about TV as the new novel last year, too. Let’s not forget, though, that the novel is still the novel.

On mentorship. We shouldn’t treat students as roles (like this). We should treat students as people. Advice ain’t mentorship.

What character in popular culture, in the depths of a cancer diagnosis, used extraordinary talents to become rich as a drug kingpin before an ignominious fall? Lance Armstrong, of course. That piece is by Dave Zirin, who writes about the politics of sports. Even if you’re not into sports or politics, he is routinely interesting and raises important issues that a lot of people would otherwise fail to consider.

Having a child? Even if you’re already vaccinated, go get your pertussis vaccine booster.

Nate Silver on how to become a statistician. He says that it’s more important to teach yourself by doing than going to school. That’s true, unless the faculty do it right, in which case the students are still teaching themselves by doing.

A well-researched piece of long form journalism about gender inequity in science came out in the New York Times. There is nothing new in it, but it is probably shocking to people who are unaware of how messed up things are, and that for all of the progress, much work remains. The problem about the inequity experienced by women in STEM isn’t the lack of awareness, but instead the lack of specific resources to fix the problem within a structured agenda. Systemic bias doesn’t get fixed by an awareness campaign.

Feel free to add additional recommended reads in the comments.

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Folks who brought these reads to my attention via social media, in no particular order, include @SciOfMotherhood, @pankisseskafka, Anna Dornhaus, @sarahkendzior, @leafwarbler, @KateMfD and @natesandersUTK. These are all interesting people to follow, by the way.

The conflict-cooperation model of faculty-admin relations, Part 3: How our universities run like social insect colonies

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With the understanding that we are social animals and that principles of behavioral ecology for social groups can apply to us*, let’s look at six relevant concepts from ant societies.

1. Workers are in charge of ant colonies; faculty are in charge of universities. The stereotypical, and false, model of ant colonies is that they’re run by the queen. In fact, workers are the ones that are collectively running the show. The queen is the factory that produces eggs, but the workers actually benefit more from the reproduction of the queen than the queen herself (in terms of raw genetic relatedness). A queen is as much a slave of her own offspring than she is the leader of a band of her daughters. I’ll spare you the social insect lesson in detail, but the upshot is that most colony-level decisions are made collectively among the workers and the queen has little to no say in the matter. The queen is just along for the ride, and her life can be truly at risk if she doesn’t lay the right kind of eggs (by using the wrong sperm, or choosing to not use sperm at all). In universities, professors run the show, even when there is little true faculty governance. Even with a heavy-handed administration, we faculty control what happens. The best that admins can do is provide, or remove, incentives for particular activities. Regardless, faculty will do as they please. The good administrators recognize this fact and work within its bounds.

2. Limited resources affect how ant colonies compete with one another; limited resources predict how universities compete with one another. From the perspective of admins, universities are competing with one another for status and funding. Colonies under extreme resource limitation allocate their resources very differently than those that are not those limitations. Unpredictability of resources also affect allocation decisions. The way in which colonies compete with one another is structured by the ways in which resources are limiting.

3. Workers and queens have different interests in how the ant colony invests resources; admins and faculty have different interests in investing resources. It’s a longer story, but the upshot is that workers want different things than the queen. That’s a textbook conflict of interest, though slightly overgeneralized. (Find your local social insect biologist for a longer lesson.)

To make this messier, the workers themselves may not even be closely related to one another, because queens often mate with multiple males and colonies can have multiple queens. Many social insect colonies have behavioral bedlam at their core, with torn allegiances, nepotism, assassinations, and workers policing one another to make sure that they don’t cheat. The harmonious work-together-for-a-common-cause is a thin veneer that disappears once you start watching carefully.

In a university, faculty often have interest interests or agendas for resource allocation, so they can’t all agree. If the faculty can’t organize in a common agenda, then the administrative agenda is often the one that wins. When faculty with conflicting agendas can agree on shared priorities and can communicate these, they have a chance at winning in a conflict over resource allocation, if unified. When faculty are divided, then the ones who win are those whose priorities are consonant with the administration.

4. In ant colonies, the queen controls the productivity of the colony, but the workers have ability to shape that productivity; In universities, admins distribute funds but faculty members are the ones that make those funds go to work. Queens can control the ratio of male eggs and female eggs that she lays. The workers then can choose to help those eggs grow, or eat them. Likewise, administrators can spend all kinds of money on useless initiatives, but they will go to waste if they’re not useful to faculty.

5. While there is conflict in ant colonies and in universities, there is plenty of cooperation. By banding together in a colony, the fitness of any single individual is much greater than it would be if they were on their own. Colonies that don’t effectively work together have lower fitness, and then everybody would be worse off. Wise administrators will recognize that providing faculty with the resources that individuals need to be successful will contribute to higher levels of productivity at the level of the organization. Wise faculty members will recognize that flexibility in using the resources available from administrators, even if not efficiently allocated, is better than intransigence.

6. Developmental constraints have resulted in the exploitation of workers. Natural selection has favored the evolution of cooperation in ant colonies, however in “highly eusocial” groups that have worked cooperatively for a jazillion generations, there are likely to exist developmental canalizations and constraints that may result in workers that have no choice but to cooperate in a way that isn’t working in their best interests. If your mom creates you without ovaries, then well, you better help her reproduce, because otherwise you have no affect on your fitness whatsoever. (Note that this is not a fact that social insect researchers consider as often as they should.)

Likewise, universities have developed a system that exploits their workers that have little to no power to address inequitable distribution of resources. The conversion of teaching faculty into a caste of contingent employees without a voice in institutional governance has resulted in an excess of power in the administration that does not necessarily work in the best interest in the members of the community.

Next week: The consequences of our sociality.

*If you harbor some old-school critique of sociobiology, please take it elsewhere.

Two Tenure-Track positions in Biology at CSU Dominguez Hills

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My department is hiring two biologists. What field of biology? You name it! The department has a broad variety of needs.

Some ad text is below, which provides the basics. Note that application review starts in late October.

The Department of Biology at California State University Dominguez Hills invites applications from individuals for two Tenure Track Assistant Professor positions, open to all disciplines of biology, starting August 2014. We are seeking two biologists who have passion for teaching biology and conducting research with undergraduates and Master’s students. A Ph.D. in biology or a related field is required. The applicants must possess scholarly and professional competence as demonstrated by a record of research publications and have demonstrated potential for effective teaching of undergraduate and graduate courses. The applicants must have demonstrated ability and/or interest in working in a multiethnic, multicultural environment. Teaching responsibilities may include general education, introductory biology, non-majors courses, and upper-division and graduate courses in the candidate’s specialty. The positions require the establishment of an active research program, as well as service to the university.  The Department of Biology offers four baccalaureate programs, an M.S. program, and two Minor programs. Recognizing the crucial role of research in science education, the Biology Department is committed to offering research opportunities to all interested and qualified students.

Review of applications, consisting of a CV, cover letter, teaching and research statements and a list of 3 references, will begin on October 23, 2013. To apply, submit materials through http://www.csudh.edu/employment/ and additionally send all materials as a single file to biologysearch@csudh.edu, instructing references to send letters to biologysearch@csudh.edu.

EO/Title IX/ADA Employer

Efficient teaching: Getting metacognitive

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I’ve built up a little speech that I make on the first day of class, after we’re done going over the syllabus and before we start the first lesson. It sounds something like this:

This semester, my goal is to teach you absolutely nothing.

If I do my job as well as possible, then I will not teach one single fact or concept. Instead, I will set up the circumstances for you to discover information on your own. You only really learn something if you discover it on your own. So, our classes will be set up so that you sort through and find information provided to you, to answer questions, and to go through experiences that enable you to make your own inferences and figure out concepts on your own. And you’ll be reading a lot outside class.

We learn better when we are conscious about the fact that we are learning, and when we are aware of the methods that we are using to learn. In other words, we need to study metacognitively. Cognition is what happens in your brain when you sort through things and learn. Megacognition is being cognitive about cognition.

Different kinds of facts and concepts are best learned in different ways. Lectures are pretty much the worst method for most concepts. When we do activities in this class, and when you are working on assignments, or solving problems on your own or in groups, these are designed for you to have a cognitive experience.

As you are going through your cognitive experience, it is useful to be mindful of the fact that you are having a cognitive experience. In other words, when you are solving a problem in a group, you should keep in mind that the process of solving this problem, itself, is provided so that there is something specific for you to learn and understand. When you are aware that there is a set of concepts tied to cognitive activities, that practice of metacognition will help you guide your cognitive processes towards the central question at hand.

If you wander through a maze without paying attention to your route, you may eventually get out, but it will be inefficient and probably unpleasant. However, if you are aware of the fact that you are in a maze, and you focus on the methods that you are using to get out of the maze, then you will not only get out of the maze more quickly but the process of solving the puzzle might be more fun as well.

This course has a route. We will discuss this route and there are lots of concepts that interconnect. However, if I show you a map of the maze, then you will be deprived the opportunity of truly learning the maze by building the map yourself. Don’t blindly study the concepts in this course, but be metacognitive in your approach to learning about the concepts and how they relate to each other. When you are working on a question or a problem, be sure to recognize specifically how, that your approach to studying is tied to the larger questions at hand.

You might have some classes in which you’re expected to write down notes from powerpoint during every lecture session. That won’t be happening here – we’re using our time together to interact and learn from one another and engage substantially with both the material and as a group. Metacognitively, you should be aware that this approach is not because I don’t like to lecture, but because the science of learning is unambiguous that we learn better when interacting and working in groups. Learning solitarily is lot more difficult, and learning by digesting notes from a lecture is inefficient. This may be different from the bulk of your classes, but I ask that you put some trust in me and that when your work is evaluated throughout the semester, that this approach will not only be fair but also provide you with a better opportunity to learn.

The measuring stick of how well I teach is not about my performance as a theater exercise, but how well you learn. I’m not talking about how well you do on an exam in this course — though that matters — I’m talking about what you know about this topic ten years from now. [for statistics] Do you fundamentally understand how a statistical test works, and what a p-value represents? Can you identify an experiment with solid design and can you create an experiment that isn’t pseudoreplicated? If you can’t do that ten years from now, then I will have failed. But to accomplish that goal, I need to choose ideas carefully because there are only so many topics that we can cover with such depth that they stick with you for a long time. I refuse to barrage you with information that you will soon forget, and instead I’m choosing to teach a small number of concepts, chosen carefully, that will stick with you well after this course is over.

I’m sorry to lecturing to you for so long about this. Hopefully, if I do my job well, I won’t do this much speaking again throughout the whole semester.

Among other consequences of this little speech, I’ve found that it reduces the number of students who are uncomfortable working in groups or who feel dopey when class doesn’t have lecture but has problems to be solved. How to get students to engage, especially in a larger room with more students, is a challenge for classroom management. How the tone is set on the first day goes a long way.

Friday Recommended Reads #4

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Predicting successful scientists early in their careers? There was a paper in Bioscience by Bill Laurance et al. with a somewhat obvious finding that students who publish a lot early will publish more and be more successful, in traditional measures. The final author of the paper, Corey Bradshaw, wrote about this paper in his blog, acknowledging that this kind of thing just feeds the frenzy for frequent publication over thoughtful and reflective publication. The argument for fewer and better papers is often made by Lee Dyer among others. (This is Dyer’s “Public and Perish” talk as a pdf). But before you get all excited about the Laurance et al. paper, you might just want to read Emilio Bruna’s high-quality assessment of this paper, which really makes you wonder how it got through the peer review process by the editors of Bioscience. Maybe we could convince the authors of the paper to respond to Bruna’s remarks in the comments on his site.

Don’t Be That Dude. Tenure, She Wrote does it again with a handy list of things that men should be sure to do, and not do, in the academic workplace to promote gender equity. Early indicators are that this post has given birth to yet another textspeak acronym, #DBTD.

Trouble delegating research tasks? Chris Buddle has your back. Keep yourself from burnout, get more done, and be a better mentor.

Just as troubling as the death of the Duquesne adjunct Mary Margaret Vojtko were her living conditions, as described the article to which I linked last week. The activism for a living wage for contingent faculty has grown in the past week, especially in the face of asshattery, excuse-making and rhetorically absurd justifications by the people in charge at Duquesne University. Lots of great things have been written about it, and by far my favorite has been this one by Rebecca Schuman. She explains why people at large aren’t up in arms about the tiny fraction of university budgets that go to pay for the efforts of the majority of instructors. I am remarkably surprised how mum tenure-track faculty are on the matter. I hope it’s not because we’re just a bunch of lazy selfish bastards, as was argued by one petulant commentator on my post on the topic earlier this week.

Staging the World Cup in Qatar is projected to cost the lives of thousands of migrant workers, caused by the lack of regulation and human rights abuses of the non-citizen underclass. What makes this more troubling is the abject lack of concern in the pro forma response by the people in power who are capable of preventing these labor-related deaths.

How about having journals put in offers to publish your paper? Here also is a curious newish phenomenon in scientific publishing. Some folks have set up a for-profit business that solicits peer reviews for you, and then journals can see the paper and reviews and put in an offer. They’re just doing ecology/evolution at the moment, and some mighty decent journals have signed on, and others will accept the reviews from this group. They’re called Peerage of Science. As for the for-profit thing, well, most scientific papers make it to press with for-profit publishers. Anyway, I’m tempted to try it out. If so, I’ll let you know how it goes. The notion that a set of reviews travels with a paper from journal to journal is a lot better than the idea of editors having to scrape the barrel again and again to get more and more reviews for the same manuscript. As for any scientists who don’t like the fact that this is a for profit company, I’m sure these objectors must charge for-profit publishers for reviews and editorial services, and wouldn’t ever let a for-profit journal publish their work without getting a cut from the publisher.

Jim Henson died early and suddenly, but he wrote goodbye letters well in advance. They are light-hearted and touching. That’s brought to you by Letters of Note, one of my favorite nodes on the internet.

You’ve seen those camera trap images of an eagle taking out a deer, right? Just in case you haven’t. You can go find that picture of a Rhinella marina toad that swallowed a bat on your own.

The conflict-cooperation model of faculty-admin relations, Part 2: We are social animals

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I’ve noticed that faculty members are prone to discuss administrators almost as frequently as discussing their own students.

You might think that this is odd, because most faculty rarely interact with their administrators. However, our ability to do our jobs and our quality of life is controlled more by administrators than by students.

Administrators can give you time and they can take it away. The same goes for space, money, service, and – for the first six years – our jobs.

Faculty members are often in surreptitious or overt conflict with their administration. Many of these conflicts can develop from the fact that some professors are irrationally upset with, and overly judgmental of, administrators. While there are often rational grounds for being mad at your administrators, these conflicts are often amplified because some faculty misunderstand the fundamental nature of the faculty-administration relationship.

I’ve used my familiarity with the social biology of animals to consider the relationship between faculty and administrators. I’m sure a sociologist would hate me for this because of the oversimplification and duplication of existing theory, but if you’re not a sociologist, then please read on.

In every social group, relationships are forged through both conflict and cooperation. Groups of distinct individuals persist because the benefits of the group outweigh the costs of being in the group. Cooperation emerges, in theory, because the greater benefits of cooperation outweigh the cost incurred through cooperation.

Faculty members can’t really do their main jobs (research and teaching) without the cooperation of the university. Administrators can’t really do their jobs (make the university run and fulfill the overt and tacit missions of the institution) without having the faculty carry out the grunt work of that job.

Let’s be clear: Faculty are the necessary grunts of the university. We are the ones that do the essential job of the campus (except for some schools, where the coaches and athletes are central). Without us, the university has no way to exist.

Next week: How our universities are like ant colonies.

On being a tenure-track parasite of adjunct faculty [updated]

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My job, as a tenured associate professor of biology, wouldn’t be possible without a sizable crew of adjunct instructors in my department.

Here is some context about the role of adjuncts in my particular department: At the moment, the ratio of undergraduate majors to tenure-line faculty is about 100:1. This isn’t unprecedented, but is on the higher end of laboratory science departments in public universities. Because we have so few tenure-line faculty, and so many lectures and labs to teach, we hire a slew of adjuncts every semester.

It’s not like the adjuncts are there to make life easier for tenure-line faculty. They’re here to keep the department from falling apart and to teach classes that otherwise we would be unable to teach. One thing that keeps us tenure-line faculty busy is advising. All of our majors required to be advised every semester in half-hour appointments, one-on-one with tenure-line faculty, in order to be able to register for the subsequent semester. In addition to our base teaching assignment of four lecture courses per semester and the standard research and service expectations, we’re worked mighty heavily.

Lest I complain, I am thankful on a daily basis that I am paid a living wage, if below market rate, and I am in a union that has mostly held on to benefits like our parents fathers used to expect from their employers. That’s more than our many adjuncts can say. If it were not for a stroke of tremendous fortune in a very difficult time, I would not be able to be in this position.

While I do have some additional responsibilities that are not expected of our adjuncts, this disparity between job expectations is tiny compared to the massive disparity between our relative pay, benefits and job security. While I would hope to think that the things I offer on top of my teaching (research opportunities and individualized mentorship for a small number of students, external grants to bring money and reputation to the institution, and a meaty role in institutional governance) bring value, I cannot reasonably rationalize that those services justify the massive gap between the my compensation and that of my adjunct colleagues.

I also am conscious that many tenure-line faculty in my university do little to nothing more than some of the adjuncts, skipping out on faculty governance, making themselves unavailable to students outside class, and not providing research opportunities. These faculty are more like adjuncts with a full professor’s paycheck and pension. What’s worse is that I could choose to devolve into such a role with no consequences for my pay, benefits or security of employment.

I have particularly benefited from the contributions of adjunct labor. In my current university, I actually have never taught the full base teaching load, as I’ve always had some fraction of my time reassigned to additional research, administration, outreach or professional development activities. (And, to be clear, I spend more time on the jobs to which I am reassigned than is expected of me while teaching.) The only way that I have been able to carve out time to keep my research lab ticking, write grants and run some programs is because others have stepped in to get the work done. These people are as qualified as I am to teach these courses, have plenty of teaching experience, and are getting paid less than I would if I were to teach those courses.

Hiring an adjunct instructor as a one-off to cover a course that needs to be covered isn’t necessarily exploitation. But if this temporary labor pool is not truly temporary, and if these are not one-off arrangements but instead a machine that requires the dedicated effort of many contingent workers on a long term basis, this is overtly exploitative of the contingent labor pool.

It is wrong that my department has several people who teach lots of courses for us, year after year, and aren’t able to receive an appointment as a professional ‘lecturer’ that acknowledges their professionalism and compensates them as one would expect from an employer after providing years of service. It’s not criminal, but in some countries, it might be.

When I graduated from a mighty-fine private liberal arts college twenty years ago, the catalog had the name of a tenure-track professor next to every course. I had taken two courses with adjuncts the whole time I was there (one of which was taught by a senior and established person in the field who did for it fun and for the students). Now, students on this campus take many courses with adjunct instructors, the campus catalog no longer has the professor’s names tied to courses, and there is a large and growing pool of adjuncts clamoring for equitable treatment. This isn’t a sign of the decline of this institution, but instead an indicator of the adjunctification of higher education.

Like the house elves in the Harry Potter series, an army of highly-qualified and hard-toiling adjuncts make the magic happen in a university, without recognition or reward. Faculty members on the tenure-line are not ignorant of this massive injustice that empowers their existence, but mostly feel powerless to rectify the systemic situation. Universities have created a caste system, and how is it that individual members of one caste can create an equitable labor arrangement? Short of a quixotic revolution, what is there to do?

We can agitate for change. We can decry the situation. We can write blog posts, articles and books about the exploitation of adjuncts as working-class academics. That’s part of moving towards change, I guess.

However, I feel that this isn’t enough considering that I am a member of the caste that benefits from the labor of the adjunct caste. I’m not saying that I don’t deserve the compensation that I receive, but it is abundantly clear that long-term adjuncts don’t deserve the lack of compensation that they receive. I just don’t see any particular course of action that I can do within the context of my own job. I can, and do, treat adjuncts as full colleagues, and I can join the others in our union to advocate for adjunct rights.

I do not have the power to make right any systemic wrongs, and neither does my Chair, nor my Dean. I suppose the power is within the Provost’s office to make these changes but the budget isn’t there. The entire university system has been calibrated to cut costs on the backs of adjuncts.

If tenure-line faculty members are failing to press hard for the reasonable and fair employment of the adjunct labor pool, then it’s probably not because they aren’t aware or because they don’t care. It’s the same reason that they don’t take specific action in their lives to reduce their own carbon emissions, and it’s the same reason they don’t buy all of their clothes that are certified sweatshop-free, and the same reason why they don’t buy books from independent booksellers. The problem is so big and so systemic, that it’s overwhelming.

Individuals have trouble remembering that individual actions, at the right place and the right time, make change happen. The university is not making things easier for tenure-line faculty either, who need to take up a greater share of the non-teaching work as tenure-line positions fizzle away. I want to rage for adjunct rights, and it makes me upset, and I want to do something. So I wrote a blog post, but I can’t imagine that this will change anything.

So, what else should tenure-line faculty do?

Update 27 Sep 2013: The non-rhetorical answer to the rhetorical question above was provided by Jenny in the comments, who shared this story about specific and concrete efforts at Portland State University written by Jennifer Ruth. That is, apparently, what we should do.

Please don’t hold out-of-class review sessions

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Some professors are so dedicated to the success of their students that they are generous enough to hold review sessions before an exam, outside regular class hours.

This is a tremendously poor idea, for one big reason and one smaller reason.

The big reason is that it is inherently unfair to the students. Not every student is equally available to make it to an additional session outside class hours. Holding a session that not all students are available to attend confers an advantage to the students who are more available for the times designated for a review session. (This rationale is similar to the one fort why we shouldn’t offer extra credit.)

Students are aware that these review sessions are a moment of the big reveal about what is going to be on the exam, where professors give hints about what is important to study and what is less important. Even if this isn’t true, this is the widespread perception. I know that when I was a student, not attending one of these sessions was a huge disadvantage.

Therefore, students will go to all extremes to attend a outside-class review session. I know students who have skipped out on their work obligations to make such a session, and I also a student that once missed an important and difficult-to-schedule medical appointment for this kind of session.

A standard lecture course at my university has about 45 contact hours. If that’s not enough time to cover the curriculum and prepare students for exams, then the solution isn’t to add another hour of optional class. Instead, the curriculum, or how it’s taught, should be fixed so that everything that students need for exams can happen within the time scheduled for class.

Students who might feel that outside-class review sessions are unfair are likely to not complain. Such a complaint would arouse the ire of fellow students, would be particularly upset if the gift of a review session were revoked because of a spoilsport.

I ask: why is such a review session needed? It is because the students haven’t learned as much as they needed to prior to the exam? If that is the case, it is the result of deficiencies on the part of the instructor or of the students. If it’s the deficiency of the students, then those who didn’t invest as much as others don’t need an extra boost, just like they shouldn’t receive extra credit. If the failure of students to be adequately prepared for the exam is the fault of the instructor, then adding extra optional class time isn’t a professional way to fix pedagogical shortcomings.

The smaller reason to not hold out-of-class review sessions is that this practice increases the emphasis on high-stakes testing and further drives students to obsess about what is on the exam rather than learning the material comprehensively.

Let’s face it: students who attend these sessions and ask questions are, predominantly, focused on discovering what questions will be on the exam. They may very well be seeking knowledge and understanding about the course material, but their focus is to do well on the exam rather than to learn. Moreover, I believe that’s the focus of faculty who offer such sessions as well, to help students do well on the exam by providing even more preparation. That’s an admirable goal, but all students deserve equal and fairly distributed access to such opportunities.

So, what’s the harm with offering a review session that gets students to study more than they would otherwise? Here’s the harm: it gets them studying for an exam. If students are cramming for an exam, they’re not learning in the long term. Instead of spending time focusing our teaching on getting students to jump through the hoops of exams, we could design our classes for substantial and long-term engagement with the material. The more we freak students about exams and focus on them, the less they will engage in genuine, self-driven, inquiry.

Friday Recommended Reads #3

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The New York Times published a feature on various leaders in government, science and education and their ideas for improving science education in the USA. When I read this, all I thought was BLAH BLAH BLAH. And then I got terrified because all of the important decision makers were clueless about what really is happening in public K-12 classrooms across the country. These folks aren’t wrong about good science education, but they’re fooling themselves that if they could implement their ideas, that this would result in change. They all made me sigh with disappointment because of the inability to see the forest. The only great and important ideas came from the kids. That was uplifting. But, they’re not the ones making the decisions. Yet.

A crowdsourced list of teaching faculty pet peeves. Mine was #2, but they’re all spot-on. (To strive for excellence as a teacher, please don’t get peevish about these peeves.)

A not-too-long article, The Death of an Adjunct, is important reading. The invention of the adjunct caste in higher education is unconscionable.

John Green made a video that explains how, and somewhat why, healthcare costs in the United States are so much higher than elsewhere. More importantly, he clearly demonstrated that any discussion about as issue as complex as this one requires reflection, knowledge, curiosity and an ability to see beyond overly simplistic concepts.

On a related note, Brian McGill wrote something this week that probably has changed some opinions about publishing ethics and open access. This detailed and carefully reasoned piece over in Dynamic Ecology is a breath of fresh air in its view from 30,000 feet. I wouldn’t want to argue about open access publishing at all with anybody, but if I had to, then I’d make sure that all participants in the argument were very familiar with this piece.

If you appreciate the history and geography of our species and the environments that we create, then I recommend checking out Atlas Obscura.

Here’s a quick piece of advice for humanities faculty, and I guess anybody whose discipline is focused on scholarship in books rather than journals. Write your second book fast. Just do it, or you might never. A parallel prescription for new science faculty is to be sure to start and publish on a new line of research after completing the dissertation. Don’t get stuck in a rut. Be sure to develop (and show) the ability to do and complete research on more than one thing, which will help serve you for a long time in your career.

Just in case you’re curious, the non-science I’m reading this week: Finished Ian McEwan’s latest, and deep into the collected Bone for the first time.

Feel free to add in the comments any other great reads you came upon this week that you’d like to share.

The conflict-cooperation model of faculty-admin relations: Part 1: Know Your Bosses

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Being a professor is a relatively unique job. We have near-total authority over how we do our jobs, but there are a lot of interests working to shape what we do and how we do it. How we interact with the administration at our university can affect whether we can be successful in what we want to do.

Here’s a way to think about how we approach our jobs, as researchers and teachers within universities.

If you have a salary, you have a boss.

We should consider what structures our relationships with our bosses. Because professors enjoy academic freedom, and those with tenure are free to speak their minds on nearly everything, this relationship is different than most boss-employee relationships.

To do our jobs well, we need to understand the nature of our relationship with our bosses. We need to know how this relationship affects how we interact with our students, and the research community outside our campus.

When the faculty vision of the boss-professor relationship is incongruent with the vision of administrators, things can fall apart.

Here I consider the differing roles of professors and their bosses in the university, and how these distinct roles can work together to maximize the benefit for all parties: administrators, faculty, students, and the scholarly community. By understanding how the faculty-admin relationship is structured, we can all relate to one another in a fashion that fits not only our own interests, but also allow us to provide more and better opportunities for students.

Administrators can empower, or minimize, your ability to get stuff done. By understanding the areas of cooperation and the areas of conflict with administration, we can work to maximize the benefits for all parties. Administrators won’t make decisions in the interests of faculty unless it meets their own interests as well. So, you need to understand not only your own interests, but also the interests of your bosses.