Tribalism in the sciences: empiricists vs. theoreticians

In complex societies, tribes inevitably emerge when individuals with similarities band together, to promote and defend their own interests. I’m not going to go all Jared Diamond on you and pretend to be an anthropology scholar. But I can go so far as to claim that like individuals gravitate to like, and then things have the potential to get ugly.

Scientific tribes are based on ideas. These often track one’s scientific lineage, but ultimately your own ideas — and the people with whom you associate — become your tribe.

Like in any social group, membership in a tribe offers a blend of benefits and costs. Tribes can expand your influence and power, though mostly only as far as the reach of your tribe. The leaders of tribes might be propelled into a greater role beyond the tribe, but the rank-and-file members of the tribe are stuck in that group.

In science, you can join a tribe, but you don’t have to. If you’re research active and collaborate, it takes some work to avoid drifting into one.

The problem with these tribes is that most people haven’t learned how to play nice. What’s worse, is that people have trouble separating out criticism of ideas from personal attacks. Some people conflate the two together. Others use personal attacks when they aren’t necessary or warranted.

On an unsettled topic, I occasionally do enjoy me a good argument, if I think it’s going somewhere and I have the capacity to learn or make a difference.

That’s a rare opportunity, because it seems that most interlocutors are not entering into discussion to genuinely convince another person, or with a mind that is adequately open to change. Instead, people enter an argument to win. I’m open to being convinced, but instead of getting a convincing argument, I usually get an attack on my ideas rather than a sales job on more attractive ideas.

That’s no good. That kind of discussion isn’t worth my time. I’d rather be exposed to something that has the capacity for a positive change, either on myself or others.

Those polemics used to be something I used to like, I think, though it was a while ago. I went to one of those liberal arts colleges where it’s not uncommon to find yourself staying awake into the wee hours of the morning discussing politics, history, religion, science, sociology and the nature of existence, and where all of these ideas intersect. I loved it. At the time, the school was as diverse as a privileged expensive school could possibly be, so there was always someone to disagree with you. It was an intellectually challenging environment, and I loved it. I learned a lot about how to disagree with people but still maintain respect for, and from, others. I wasn’t always successful, but I learned that this respect this is a priority. One model for this kind of collegiality is the late Paul Wellstone.

It turns out that most people haven’t developed that skill, even scientists with PhDs. Perhaps they have the skill but not the patience to exercise it. Or, maybe, they have the skill but have decided that winning an argument is more important to establish social dominance within a tribe. Social dominance within a tribe is important, because in a tribal environment you can only get ahead unless you’re leading the tribe.

This is why scientists often engage in pointless arguments in which nobody changes their minds.

One example is the recent kerfuffle when E.O. Wilson was the author of a Nature magazine article with a complex population demography model that purportedly supported group selection over kin selection in the evolution of eusociality. (I have to admit that, despite a few careful reads, I mostly but not entirely understood the technical merits of the paper.) The massive backlash from the kin selectionist tribe was not based on the actual science in the article, but instead at the inflammatory (and factually incorrect) statements within the article directed at the other tribe. Wilson designed the paper to start a hissyfit, and it did. There were several letters published in response to the article, which essentially were designed to punish Wilson for offending the tribe which he used to lead.

Both sides wanted to win the argument. Meanwhile, in all honesty, I can’t think of a single person who was an author to any of the articles or rebuttals that has deliberately and publicly sought to reconcile the ample contradictory evidence that exists. I think most of the people involved really wish to understand the science of how eusociality has evolved so many times, and under what selective forces. But nearly everything published is tribal in nature. Why is that?

I suspect that the benefits of the tribe outweigh the costs and limitations. it’s easier to lead a tribe than forge your own way. It’s not only easier intellectually, it can be better for one’s career. Ecology is filled with a history of feuds among tribes, and I’m sure other disciplines are the same way. The leaders of these tribes now have named professorships, big salaries, and are revered as great elders within their subsubfields. That’s what you get for leading a tribe.

To ascend to leadership of a tribe, you have to have certain attributes. One prerequisite is that you need to have an academic position at well-known research institution. Since I work in a small pond, that rules me out of tribal leadership. Unless I pick up and move to a place where I have PhD students, a big lab, and larger grants, I’ll never get past the status of beta male.

Since I can’t ascend to tribal leadership, why would I want to join a tribe? There are benefits to being a member of the tribe, but there are also costs and limitations. The benefits are small enough for me that I don’t want to incur those costs. A few years ago, I stuck my neck out to publicly support a well-established member of a tribe who was attacked by a rogue journalist, and at the first opportunity he disavowed my support, by lying to me, in a major public diss. It seems I’m not able to join that tribe, after all. (I don’t mind bringing it up here because, after all, I was already totally dissed as insignificant by this guy.) You won’t see me doing that again.

As the proprietor of this blog, I have to be particularly conscious about how tribalism works, as heavily expressing an opinion here or there could easily shift me towards a tribal affiliation, even though I wouldn’t get much benefits from the tribe. I can’t think of many scientific issues on which I feel the need to choose one side or the other. (Of course, I’m not counting non-controversies that make it into the media as controversies.) On the other hand, I am inclined to call out the ridiculousness of arguments when both sides aren’t listening to one another well enough.

I’m a member of a few clearly defined social groups, reflecting who I spend my time with in the sciences. These mostly include social insect researchers and also those who work in tropical rainforests, mostly at one particular field station. That group numbers easily in the hundreds to a few thousand. It’s a good crowd. But I stay out of arguments, like the silly one about Wilson that I mentioned above. I’m not an ant tribalist, or a La Selva tribalist. But those are the people with whom I run.

Which brings me to the current events that prompted me to write this post.

The latest tribalist kerfuffle started this weekend, yet again with E.O. Wilson, the gentleman rabble-rouser. He wrote an op-ed piece run by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, in which he argued that you didn’t have to be good at math to become a great scientist.

I agree with his idea, with some caveats. His supporting arguments weren’t that robust, mostly trumpeting his own success and ability to collaborate with top-notch modelers.

This didn’t stop some people from taking huge exception, yet again, like clockwork. There’s a good discussion over at Dynamic Ecology about Wilson’s notion that math isn’t important for generating new ideas.

It’s no coincidence that Wilson’s position on math comes not too long after he used some very sophisticated math to make an argument that got aroused tribal anger. The incongruity of the position that “math doesn’t matter but complex math is the main support of my controversial stance” is sending some people into fits.

Of course, this had to have been entirely calculated by Wilson, who wanted to start this argument. I think it’s a good discussion for us to have, broadly speaking, about the attributes that we need to develop to make creative scientists. That’s where this discussion is going, I suspect he hopes, once the outrage passes.

What are the tribes engaged in this argument that was prompted by Wilson? It’s one as old as the field: the empiricists vs. the theoreticians.

Yawn.

The theoreticians essentially have ruled the roost for the last fifty years in ecology. There’s always been a place for work that is driven by empirical investigation, which in fact occupies far more pages in journals that the more math-intensive theoretical work. Despite being outnumbered, the theoretically-focused researchers are the ones who tend to fill up the editorial boards, publish in the highest-impact journals, and attract the biggest crowds at conferences. There clearly is a celebrity culture in the field, and the top theoreticians mostly rank higher than the top empiricists.

Keep in mind that this is an artificial dividing line. Few are wholly theoretical or empirical. However, for those that have clearly identified affiliations, the theoreticians are in charge. They’ll probably tell you that their status has emerged because their work is more valuable. When David Tilman received an award from the Ecological Society, the main point of his address was that you should do theoretical work just like he does because other work is less valuable. That’s gutsy.

If theoreticians are so in charge of affairs, then why are they so upset when someone says that mathematically-driven theories are a footnote to science rather than the heart of it? That op-ed piece, after all, isn’t going to change what the theoreticians allow to be published in the top journals in the field. Why get so upset?

They’re upset because it came from Wilson. This man built his fame, in part, using theoretical models using somewhat to very fancy math, with collaborators who were good at math. He essentially wrote that he was the ideas man and that the math collaborators are easy to come by. If he mentioned Robert MacArthur by name as one of the easy-to-come-by-theoretical-collaborators, then all hell would have broken loose, considering MacArthur’s status as a tribe leader before his untimely death.

For an empiricist who built his reputation with the help from more analytically minded coauthors who often did the rhetorical heavy-lifiting, it’s pretty brutal for Wilson to overtly suggest in the Wall Street Journal that his contributions were the important ones. He was the man with the vision and those other guys with the math could have been anybody.

Now that’s gotta hurt.

If I was a theoretician, you’re damn right I’d be pissed off.

I’d be pissed off because I ‘d have difficulty separating the logic of Wilson’s argument from the personal nature of his message. What’s Wilson’s argument? That you can have great ideas, and make those ideas come into reality and make scientific progress happen, without being particularly good at math. You need to be okay at the math, but you don’t have to obsess on it.

Is that true? Well, partially. But it’s not true if you’re going to become a theoretician.

So why are theoreticians so offended, if Wilson says that there’s another valid route to become a scientist that isn’t driven by math-heavy theories? I think it’s because many of the them think that the central ideas in the sciences nowadays are mostly mathematical.

Are there major progresses to be made without a lot of math? My initial thought is: hell yes there are. We’re still in the wild west of scientific discovery, with huge frontiers yet to be explored. Not everybody agrees with that, though.

That is an interesting debate, in my view.

As I’m not in the theoretical tribe, I can look at this with some distance. I can do that because my contributions weren’t directly insulted, and I am in a position to separate the concept of his argument from the people in the argument.

Wilson, in a rhetorically inelegant fashion, just reignited the ol’ empirical vs. theoretical fight. I think if he were rhetorically elegant, it would have passed unread. It would have been too intellectual for ~~Fox News~~ The Wall Street Journal. And it’s such an old saw that typical venues wouldn’t be interested in hearing it. I wonder if the WSJ was his first choice.

Here, is the essence of the disagreement:

Are the central concepts in science based on equations and mathematical relationships, or are they built on broader principles that do not have to be described by mathematical models?

Here is how I reconcile the disagreement: All relationships can be described with math. To fully understand any phenomenon, math is the language of nature and the language of science. Math is key to understanding patterns and relationships, as math essentially the only way they can be expressed in a specific form, other than using logic. However, in order to be able to write the equations that describe the patterns, we must first be able to know what the variables are, and how they might be able to relate to one another. Wilson’s point, though written inelegantly, was that many of the potential relationships that might exist haven’t even yet come to our attention. You can’t build the model without knowing which variables to put into the model.

The fundamental divide between empiricists and theoreticians is a disagreement about whether we know what the most important variables are. Empiricists are in search of the variables, and theoreticians are seeking to develop the specific patterns among variables. When empiricists do experimental and observational research, they’re testing whether specific things matter, and if so, how.

A few times in my career as an empiricist, I think I’ve come upon new variables, or shown in a very clear way that the relationships between a few variables matters in a way that wouldn’t compel theoreticians without theoretical evidence. I am not as personally interested in working out the specific relationships between key variables as I am sorting out which variables matter.

I think the same could be said about Wilson. He thought that the size of an island, and its shape and distance from the mainland (and so on) would be very predictive of the species richness on an island. Then, he buddied up with MacArthur who worked with him on the details. I think they both were important – perhaps essential – in the development of the Theory of Island Biogoegraphy. I don’t know the history enough to know whether this is something that MacArthur would have, or could have, done without Wilson. Wilson didn’t invoke this example in his piece. Instead he invoked George Oster, who worked on social insect caste theory with Wilson. In this case, Wilson was clearly the social insect ideas man and Oster was the modeling man. I do think that Wilson is correct in this case – that Oster couldn’t have done it without Wilson in particular, but that Wilson could have found many modelers to work with him on this monograph. It was inelegant for Wilson to point out this fact. I hope I’m more gracious when I hit that stage of my life.

To slightly rephrase, here’s where the divide lies: does the world still need people who are envisioning these variables in the broad sense, or do we all need to learn how to do the complex math to model relationships?

I think we all should learn the math, we all should learn how to model, and this would inform our world view. However, there are only so many hours in the day. It so happens that some of the most visionary people are the ones that have focused on things other than modeling. It also so happens that some of our visionaries are excellent modelers.

As David Foster Wallace has pointed out (stay tuned for a post later this week): what we learn in our studies is not how to think, but what to think about. Should we think about models, or should we think about what belongs in the models? These are somewhat mutually exclusive, I think. We do need people who think about the latter more than the former.

In my experience, when I spend to much time trying to model relationships, I lose sight of the forest – both in metaphorical and in actual terms. If my projects lead to developing and testing models, I’m all over it. But right now, I’m still trying to identify which relationships matter, because there is so much that remains unknown. (In the coming month, I’ll take the time to write another long post about how avoiding modeling led to a discovery, oddly enough in one of Wilson’s pet genera.)

So yes, I think Wilson is right. You can be a visionary without being a modeler.

Modelers themselves are also visionaries. That’s where Wilson is wrong.

It’s horrible to be able to do research in your own lab

I can get a little jealous of people who have research systems in their labs, or do fieldwork nearby. You can just run experiments year-round if you want. A manuscript needs a more data for the revision? Go ahead and knock that experiment out. If you want flexibility when you get to do research, then having research right at home works quite well.

Then, why is it that some of the most successful researchers that I know have research systems that are geographically far away from the university? And the people — at teaching institutions — with the most tractable, easy-to-use systems can have trouble getting stuff done? (I think there’s a whole other set of problems with model systems on small campuses, but that’s a whole other diatribe post.)

Being far away from your research system can be a recipe for success. Among people I’ve known, a marine ecologist might have to drive eight hours to the rocky coast. Some physicists have collaborative projects at big national or international labs on the far coast of the US, Europe, and Japan. Anthropologists have sites in Southeast Asia and Central and South America. Humanities researchers rely on archives that are in libraries in distant cities. Others might study ephemeral events that occur locally, with no control over the timing of the events.

There are also successful people who work locally, too. Regardless, it is very clear that having your research system on the other side of the world doesn’t preclude success, even if you’re based in a small pond. That strikes me as counterintuitive.

In my own circumstance, I think having all of my fieldwork based out of Costa Rica has been a great boon for my productivity. If I was able to do research in the local mountains or desert, I don’t think I’d really get anything done. I’d never compartmentalize the time that it takes to fully focus on the work.

I’ll consider this with a social insect analogy.

Some of the most “advanced” social insect societies (as some call them) have workers that demonstrate temporal polyethism. That is: workers are born as nurses, then are promoted to guard duty or nest maintenance, and then they spend the last phase of their lives doing the most risky task, foraging. It’s well described in a variety of species.

This temporal division of labor makes for higher productivity, as a result of higher efficiency and organization of labor. (This is at least true in large colonies with a lot going on. The jury is still out on species with small colonies.) A big ant colony would be in disarray if all individuals tried to do everything at the same time. And so would I.

If I tried to run a field research program while doing every other part of my job, I doubt I’d be able to get high quality fieldwork done. I’ve figured out, in a clearly suboptimal fashion, how to juggle writing, teaching, analysis, mentoring during the year, service, and all that stuff. I can’t imagine adding “data collection” to that list of things to juggle during the academic year.

(And, of course, my greatest responsibility and source of joy is being a parent. But this isn’t a Daddy blog, even though I wish such a genre existed. Even though I spend my time writing here about research, don’t be mistaken. I’ve already established that parenting and spousal duties are more important than everything else.)

When I finish a field experiment, it’s over. One project might build upon the other, but I work with discrete ending points, and that’s when I pull the flags from our field sites and pack things to go home. I’ve hired people to do things in my absence for bigger projects, but for most work, I don’t have the option of just returning to do more. If an editor or reviewer asks for another sample, you know what? They’re out of luck, and I’m out of luck. They can buy their own plane ticket to Costa Rica to get that additional data point, if they don’t want to publish the paper without it.

My field site.

This finality of data collection helps me to get stuff done. I have no doubt when I need to start analyzing and writing the manuscript. It’s as soon as I leave the country.

I never think to myself, “Here is a little something which is missing from this project to make it complete.” Instead, I tell myself, “I have to package this as a complete project, and accept the fact that there are some missing holes.”

There’s another reason that working far away lets me get more work done. When I go to my field station, I’m in 100% data-collection mode. We’re running experiments full time, and I’m usually working my butt off. And I’m working my students’ butts off. There’s no way I could give so much focus to work like that while I’m at home, because I’d have to get home and cook dinner, and I’d choose to hang out with my kid at times. When I’m in the field, my responsibility to home is an evening video chat date, which is sometimes missed on one side or the other.

There’s also no way that I would be able to get so much dedication and effort from the students in my lab, without taking them to a kind-of-remote rainforest. When you plop people down in a place where there is nothing to do but fieldwork and labwork, and that’s mostly what you get. (If you bring the right people. I’m getting better at that over the years, but there are always flukes. Flukes, you know, are a kind of parasite.)

I’d guess that work happens by students on site about 12 hours per day, in one form or another. You don’t get that kind of consistent work at that level for an extended period at home. (I lament that the internet has gotten faster on station, because those with an internet addiction have a hard time fully dedicating themselves to their work.) So, at the end of a field season, we have a relative ton of data, much more than I’d have than if I tried to work locally or in the lab.

Some lab work does happen during the academic year, mostly dealing with samples that we collected during the summertime. However, we reserve the academic year for writing manuscripts and preparing for the next field season. Data only gets collected in intermittent bursts, and that has been more than enough for my lab. The fact that I can’t collect data except when I fly to Costa Rica forces me to spend my time writing up the results. That gives me a lot of time to write without any other research-related distraction.

If I block away time during the academic year, it’s usually not to do lab work, it’s only to analyze and to write. When I do research while abroad, it’s only to collect data, and not to write. This temporal polyethism is what allows me to get stuff done.

A field course about ants this summer (some self-promotion)

Last year, a new field course on ants launched at the Southwestern Research Station, in Portal, AZ, USA called Ants of the Southwest. It got rave reviews, and it’s happening again. Are you interested in going?

Here’s how to sign up!

The course is designed to provide a generalized hands-on approach to the pragmatics about research with ants. How do you observe and manipulate behavior in the field and in the lab? What kinds of ecological experiments are possible, and how do you do them? How do you collect, identify and maintain a collection of ants? How do you keep colonies in the lab?

There is a diverse set of experienced and talented instructors (in addition, I’ll be there for much of the time).

Don’t mistake this course with the long-running and superb Ant Course run by Brian Fisher from the California Academy of Sciences, which focuses on identification, taxonomy, systematics and building a collection. The Ants of the SW course is a complement to the Ant Course as a different introduction to ant biology, emphasizing ecology and behavior. It’s targeted towards graduate students, but is accessible to folks with other levels of experience.

If you are thinking about using ants as a model system but don’t have years of experience with them, this course would be a great place to figure how to do things, what works and what doesn’t, and will give you the chance to spend time in a community of myrmecologists in a hotbed of ant diversity.

If you have any questions about the course, you can contact me or leave a comments, and of course you can follow the link to the course page and contact the station. I hope to see some of y’all in July!

Science is real

I wish Richard Dawkins stuck to writing science books.

if you’re concerned that religion too often interferes with rationality (as I do), then being a petulant booby about it won’t do much good. Frans de Waal is more my kind of speed.

And, They Might Be Giants are too. This one song is probably going to make more change than the collected writings of Dawkins, Coyne and Myers. Just because you’re correct about the absence of a god doesn’t mean you should be annoying about it. You can’t win hearts and minds that way, you got to be a little more lighthearted about it. Start with the kids.

(song starts at 0:20)

Consequences for those who assault our students

I gained an education about the politics of rape on college campuses while I was still an undergraduate, coincidentally during the Clarence Thomas nomination disaster. (If you were unaware, he is not only a wholly demented Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, but also a big-time sexual harasser. The Senate knew this, and confirmed him anyway, in 1991.)

I was one of fifteen or so people who signed up to be trained as a “Sexual Harassment Advocate.” There was one other man. I received several hours of training over multiple sessions, and then my contact information was provided to anybody who had questions or concerns about campus sexual harassment policies and incidents. Though not by design, victims of sexual assault also might have contacted sexual harassment advocates.

Within a short period of time, the program was renamed “Advocates Working Against Sexual Harassment.” There were plenty of jokes that preceded the switch.

As you might expect, as a man, I didn’t get contacted often. I think it was twice, and once was by someone who was concerned about a report against him. During the same time, there were plenty of harassment incidents as well as sexual assault cases, that were not widely known on campus but definitely occurred. I graduated a year later, and I suspect the program didn’t last much longer after that time.

I didn’t realize, until much later, that this entire program on campus was essentially designed to circumvent legal channels of action. The campus was complying with the law, and genuinely concerned about its denizens, but also didn’t want people to contact external authorities.

More than 20 years later, it seems that things haven’t changed much.

What I find stunningly shameful is that some people think that students shouldn’t have the option to handle rape as a criminal matter to be handled by the justice system. What I find even more appalling is that plenty of college administrators actively discourage students to seek legal action against sex offenders. I have seen this too often, and I find it sickening.

When I was still learning the ropes as a faculty member, a student in one of my intro classes stopped attending, and she then took a leave of absence for the rest of the semester. As this was happening, I learned that another student who was also in the same class had (allegedly) sexually assaulted her. The campus was taking action to keep her from having to interact with him, but then stopped doing anything on her behalf as soon as she pressed charges. The campus wanted to punish this rapist on their own terms, by holding a little campus hearing and having some kind of little disciplinary action that would have no real consequence for him.

Meanwhile, if the accusation against him is correct, he deserved serious time in prison. Anything else would have been a miscarriage of justice. Yet administrators at my private, tuition-driven university actively sought to keep the case out of the criminal justice system and out of the public eye. As far as they were concerned, the less attention towards rape on campus, the better off the university is. That would only be true if the university were not the vehicle that allowed rapes to occur by letting the perpetrators get away with it.

In this particular case, this student transferred away from the university and never returned, and I heard indirectly that there was a criminal trial, though I never heard about the outcome.

This incident was an outlier. Most rapes that take place are never reported. Those that are reported to campus safety may or may not result in criminal charges. What affects how this happens?

Some campuses have real cops, and others have campus safety. On private campuses, the campus safety officers may be well trained, professional, and effective at their jobs, but they lack the authority of sworn police officers. They can’t issue traffic and parking tickets that are enforceable off campus, and they can’t arrest people when they do things wrong. They have to call the cops for that.

On public campuses, campus safety officers are typically real cops. Unpaid parking tickets can result in a genuine warrant off campus, and they can give you real traffic tickets that have the same legal effect as if you were pulled over by the cops off campus. They also can arrest you. They also are empowered to conduct real investigations when sexual assaults occur and are prepared to cooperate with the justice system when victims seek prosecution of their attackers.

My current campus has real cops, empowered by the State of California. We have a very safe campus, according to the statistics, and when a violent crime does happen on or near campus, we are notified about it very promptly. As far as I am aware, victims are fully empowered to go after their attackers with the full extent of the law. There’s no administrator trying to keep students from seeking the full consequences of the law off campus.

That doesn’t happen at some public universities, and I’m not aware of any private university where that happens. Private schools typically want to sweep it under the rug. It’s always been that way, and even when big incidents happen that make campuses demand more transparency and justice, I get the feeling that gains are ephemeral. Image management is paramount at private schools.

The astute administrator will realize that people concerned about sexual assaults on campus are aware that this kind of thing is far too common, everywhere. The public evidence of consequences for rapists is a good thing, because that shows the campus cares about its community. If you don’t see any talk at all about rape and its consequences, that means it’s being swept under the rug. No college is entirely safe, but there are some colleges where the criminals can actually get in trouble. It’s safer where you hear about these rapists, because that means that they are getting in trouble and aren’t shielded by the campus image police.

Until the people on all sides of the issue realize that public shaming and prosecution of rapists is a good thing, there will always be malfeasance in the guise of protecting the campus mirage of a safe environment.

Negotiating for reassigned time when writing a grant

Here’s a guiding principle: Don’t write a grant to do a project, if you don’t have the time to do the project that you proposed.

There are a substantial number of corollaries to this principle, especially at a teaching institution. The corollary I’m focusing on now is:

Be sure to get time assigned to the project by your administrators before you submit a grant.

Funding agencies spend most of their money at research institutions. Even if they claim to understand the role of research at teaching institutions, they do not back this understanding up with dollars. It’s tacitly understood that, if you land a grant, that you’ll have the time to work on the project. Even if the program provides for some salary for the PI, that salary isn’t enough to fully fund your effort on the project.

If your teaching load is two courses per semester, then you’re probably already expected to spend some serious time on research. However, if your load is much more than this, then most of your time is spent teaching, and the teaching would be substantially harmed if you’re trying to do a major project on a timeline at the same time.

If you are currently spending most of your time teaching, then you need to make sure that when you land a grant that you’ll be able to get the project done. The time to do this is before you submit a grant. After that, you won’t have much leverage in asking for time.

A number of my colleagues ultimately got fed up with, and left, their jobs because their administration wouldn’t give them the time to work on their externally funded projects. There has been some good discussion about this in the comments in an earlier post. These situations emerged because these scientists found themselves in a position in which they weren’t given the opportunity to do research that was expected of them by a federal agency. You don’t want to be in that position.

To avoid that situation, you need do talk to your chair, dean and provost up front about preparing and submitting a grant. Explain that you want to write a grant for X dollars to be submitted to Y agency that would accomplish Z. This project would bring in aX dollars of overhead and hire M students, and send some of them to grad school. However, you can only include bX dollars of salary for yourself, and to do the project would require more time if you’re going to do it right. Ask them what kind of support they could provide to make this project happen.

Negotiation is based on finding mutual interests. They administration wants a positive student experience, productive faculty, and external recognition of excellence. Grants can provide this for them, and they should be putting some money behind this. If they don’t want to reassign any of your time away from your teaching to work on the grant, then, frankly, you don’t want to waste your time writing that grant. You would be between a federal agency and a hard place if the grant came in and you couldn’t free yourself to get the project done right.

If your university can’t fund your time once your grants are funded, then your time spent writing grants might be better spent writing job applications. If your ambition is to do research, and your institution can’t support it, then you might well have some irreconcilable differences.

Teaching institutions have lower overhead cost recovery rates. Your provost and dean might not get enough overhead back to fully cover your reassigned time. If they do, then the decision for them should be a no-brainer. If they don’t, then they’ll have to find the money in other parts of their budgets to subsidize your research. If they value the research, and the opportunities it affords students, they’ll find the money. Remind them that you’re only asking for their support if the grant comes in, and that most grants are not funded.

On your end, you need to deliver product for the investment. If I’m ever asked to explain what I’ll deliver, I will promise to deliver a peer-reviewed paper in a well-recognized journal for every reassigned course (though not necessarily a first-authored paper). I’ve never been asked about this, though. My institution hasn’t ever funded reassigned time for more than 25% of my teaching load, so this hasn’t been a difficult benchmark to meet.

Most teaching campuses have their grant funding incentives bassakwards. There are plenty of grant incentive programs that help faculty get the time to write grants. I get that it’s cheaper to pay for time to write grants than it is to pay for faculty to work on funded grants.

Far less common is systemic support for faculty who are externally funded. This is what would really get grants rolling.

The last thing you want to do is pay an unfunded faculty member to write a grant. They’ll take the money, and might submit a grant, but if they do, is there any reason you should expect it to be competitive?

If faculty members are getting paid for their time to write a grant, but they won’t get any additional time when the grant comes in, then why would they want the grant to be funded?

When a faculty member really wants to do research, then a single reassigned course to write a grant isn’t goint to make a project happen. Those that want to do the research without reassigned time probably are already doing it.

For example, about a score of us on our campus just got funded a single reassigned course , plus some extra funds, to submit a grant within the next two years. I’m grateful for this time, and the additional funds to hire students to collect preliminary data, which’ll help me get a proposal out next January.

I was probably going to submit the grant in January regardless of whether the university gave me the time for it. I think most researchers who are earnestly wanting to get a grant funded would write the proposal without the time. Don’t get me wrong, the time helps, but it’s not making me write a proposal that I wouldn’t have otherwise written.

I am glad that I don’t have to squeeze it in so tightly, and it probably will be a better proposal because I’ll be less stressed in getting it together. I greatly appreciate the institutional investment. I really want the grant that I’m submitting to get funded. However, is that true for all of the other faculty who received these funds? It would not be rational for these faculty members to want to get the grant, because that just means more work without any time to make it happen. We’re already maxed out just teaching, so how are we going to add in more research?

Our university is paying for our time up front to submit a grant. And, once the grant comes in, do we have any time to do the project? The majority of the people who got funded are working in fields that won’t allow you to use much, or any, of your grant funds to buy your time to work on the project. (NIH is liberal about this, but there’s not much help for those in non-NIH fields. If you did buy enough time with the NIH grant, though, nothing would be left for the project.)

One thing to keep in mind is that writing a grant by no means indicates that you’ll get funded. Even R1 researchers are used to writing a ton of grants in order keep funding rolling, as most submissions aren’t funded. Check out the comments in Dr. Becca’s post showing how many grants folks submit to stay funded.

I don’t want to be put into the position of telling a federal agency that I will deliver on a project if I can’t create the opportunity to get the project done. If I got a standard NSF grant to do a research project, there’s no way I could get a project done to the level of NSF expectations without having the time in my schedule assigned to the project. I expect to get several publications out of a single external grant. That’s pretty standard for an NSF award, I think. How would I get the work done, much less write it all up, unless my institution gave me the time? NSF would let me buy out a course or two per year, or some summer salary, using the grant, but that might not be enough to meet NSF expectations.

So, now I’m in an awkward position. My institution is giving me time to write a grant, but as things stand, there’s no current policy in place about what will happen if it gets funded. So, before then, I’ll need to sit down with my new dean (my fourth in six years), and my provost (my fourth in six years), and have to ask, “I know you are helping me write this grant, but could I have some more?” Their answer will definitely reflect how I excited I am about the proposal that I’m writing over the next six months.

I’ll probably have to max out my salary in the budget of the grant, to the extent that I can’t fund students, and then it’ll get trashed in review for being topheavy. On the other hand, if I ask for only modest salary along with a time commitment from my institution, along the lines that you find from proposals originating from R1 campuses, then my proposal will look far more competitive. So, whether the administration realizes it or not, there are mechanisms that will prevent me from doing a project if I don’t have the time for it.

Making the telephone less annoying

The phone has no respect for your time. Other means of communication happen on your own terms, but this only happens with the phone if you ignore it.

Email is only reliable when the reply is important to the recipient. If it’s not important to the recipient, then it goes on the backburner, and may slowly carbonize.

You can email about some convoluted topics, but the email can be used for the sole purpose of scheduling a two-minute phone conversation. A scheduled phone conversation can make the phone less annoying.

Here are a couple scenarios in which the phone can easily trump email or texting.

A: Last month, I got a phone call from a colleague in another department, who I have not yet met, about some university service. We chatted for about five minutes. If we even came close to having the same conversation over email, it would have taken 30 minutes of back-and-forth typing and I wouldn’t have even come close to establishing the working rapport that happened in the conversation.

B: You can harness the dislike of the phone to work in your favor. Use the phone to avoid unnecessary interactions. Students will make all kinds of imprudent requests by email, that they’d never dare do so in person or over the phone. When this happens, email back one sentence: if you’d like to discuss this give me a phone call during my office hours. They probably won’t call or drop by. But if they do, it’s easier than the email. If you need to respond to this request with substance promptly, then you can call the student. Their phone number is on record. They probably won’t pick up because they don’t know the number, and then you leave a voice mail and you’re done. That’s faster than crafting an email that has the balance of politeness, concern, and firmness that you need to portray when responding to a peevish request in writing.

Caveat: do not leave a voice mail for me, unless I already contacted you and asked for something specific that requires a voice mail.

It’s not easier, just different

When I was applying for faculty positions, I had a number of reasons for focusing on small liberal arts colleges and other teaching institutions.

Among those reasons was that I didn’t want to have to worry about grant pressure at a research institution. I didn’t want to have to constantly think about keeping the money train rolling, as a constant source of anxiety. I think I was prepared to write a lot of manuscripts, but I wasn’t too confident that I’d be able to the land the grants that would be required to convert a tenure-track position to a tenured position. And, even if I did get those grants, I didn’t want to be in a position of “running a lab” instead of “doing research.” I wanted to be a small-town grocer instead of Wal-Mart.

At my field station, I saw that PIs swing through, give orders to grad students, get a token couple days in the field, and then move on. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be out there taking part in all of the stages of science.

With the grant thing and the not-being-a-manager-but-being-a-scientist thing, a teaching school seemed the way to go. And, oh, yeah, I really liked teaching.

I was naïve.

Here’s a related story that puts it in perspective. A couple weeks ago, I went to an evening coffee at the house of someone I didn’t know, to talk about a middle school in my local school district. Within the next year, my family will have to decide among middle schools for my kid. So, I’m starting to do my homework. A great-hearted nonprofit in my town is built to educate parents about school options, and sets up evening coffee discussions among prospective parents and current parents.

The coffee would have tolerated a boost of scotch, but alas it was a dry event. Sending your kid to middle school is freaky and scary for a number of reasons. Parents of elementary school kids have all kinds of concerns and worries about what their middle school is like, and they ask all kinds of questions to address their concerns. There was a lot of talk about certain worries regarding safety and supervision.

One parent made an excellent point, far too late in the discussion, that helped put people on track. She has been involved in a study addressing the concerns, strengths and weaknesses of the middle school experience in the area. One recurring theme, she reported, was that both elementary parents and middle school parents had big concerns about the middle schools. However, the concerns of the current middle-school parents had little to do with the concerns of the prospective middle-school parents. Once their kids actually started school, all those early concerns faded away and were replaced with entirely different issues on the ground.

Picking your middle school on the basis of your concerns as prospective parents won’t do too much to result in a good choice. Your concerns as a prospective middle school parent, that affected your choice of school, seem to fizzle once you get there and you’re dealing with the actuality of being in middle school. You realized that the factors you used in picking a school were mostly superfluous, and you should have looked at the process differently.

I don’t think I need to explain how this story can be modified to produce more generalized advice for scientists choosing among career options.

I’ll never forget the observation from one of my undergraduate professors that has been a model and mentor for me. Just as I was telling her about my concerns and grant pressure and all that stuff, she told me:

It’s not easier. It’s just different.

I asked her to amplify on this, and she did. She explained how the regular day-in and day-out demands of a faculty position at a teaching institution are not any easier than the demands of a high-profile position running a big lab at an R1 institution. She explained the various responsibilities pulling her in different directions, and claimed that her job was just as much work. In addition, it was not only an equivalent amount of work but it also was just as stressful, and the demands of getting grants and keeping a lab up weren’t substantially easier than everything that she was juggling.

It was just stressful in a different way, but not in an easier way.

I was skeptical. After all, one of my reasons to work at a teaching campus was to avoid the grant pressure. So, I wasn’t glad to hear that I was just trading one stress for another.

It took several years of experience for me to really understand what she meant. She’s entirely correct.

Your PhD advisor might disagree, and other faculty at research institutions might also be skeptical of this notion. Skepticism is fine, but belief without knowledge isn’t.

In my community, white middle class families have harbored a fear of public schools ever since forced desegregation in 1970. That was before I was born, so many things have changed. Our neighborhood school isn’t okay, it’s amazingly great. It is a shameful display of ignorance when 1/3 of all of the families in my city insist on sending their kids to private school, mostly out of fear of the demographics of the population in public ones. (Whereas I’m afraid of the private schools because of the demographics of the population in those schools. That, and the underpaid and undertrained teachers. I have lots of experience with these schools, so this fear isn’t based on ignorance.)

There’s plenty of old money that can only be spent on fanciest prep schools, but there are a lot of middle-class families going broke to send their kids to those same prep schools, mostly out of fear.

Among the public school advocates in my town, there’s a truism: don’t talk smack about the public school until you’ve visited one.

I’ve talked to so many people who say, oh, the public schools in our city have so many problems, I couldn’t send my own child there?! Then I ask, in feigned naivete, really, what have you heard? When you visited the schools what did you see that was wrong? That usually switches the conversation to a topic that involves less ignorance on the part of the public school vilifier.

By corollary, if you want to know what the daily life of a science professor at a teaching institution is like, you aren’t going to learn about it from a professor at a research university. Your concerns about the job before you head in are going to be inevitably very different from those when you are in the position.

All of the reasons that I had for picking a teaching school over a research school weren’t really that good. It is true that I am glad that I don’t have to worry about funding a lab of employees by bringing in grant after grant. However, the machinery that I do keep running, in various aspects, also requires constant fuel and lubrication. I’d be just as happy trading in those stresses for the need to get a big grant once every few years, or more often. It’s more complex than that, of course.

Should I have listened more to my mentor when I was choosing a job? I don’t think so, because at the time I did listen to her and valued her perspective. I didn’t think she was wrong at the time, I just didn’t adequately understand her. That’s because understanding required experience.

I accept the fact that when we make decisions – about schools for our kids, about our own careers, and most other things – the bases for these decisions don’t pair up with the functional positives and negatives once we’ve committed. You should still try to assess carefully when making decisions, but the assessment will be more effective if it emphasizes the actual experiences of others over your best guesstimate about what your priorities might be in the future.

Being naïve means that you don’t have experience. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you just need to know that when you do make decisions, you have no choice but to be naïve to the consequences, because after all, they haven’t happened yet.

A confession about service obligations

A standard piece of advice for faculty members is to learn how to say “no.”

No, there is no makeup assignment.
No, there is no space in my lab for you.
No, I don’t think it would be wise for you to ask me to write your recommendation letter.

No, I’m sorry, I’m not available to serve on that time sink of a committee.

My confession is that I’ve only said no to a service obligation once. (That one was a stinker, a game of chicken which I won only because I would have preferred the flaming wreckage over that particular task.)

I’m not often asked to run things. However, I do usually turn things in on time, show up when expected and try to keep my mouth shut. So, I’ve been on my fair share of service assignments, most of which I consider to have been worthwhile. When I say that I’ve done my fair share, I mean that. I haven’t done more than my share.

I don’t mean that I don’t say “no” in a literal sense. In most cultures, there is an exquisite art to saying no without using that ugly N-word. That’s a skill lacking in the US. I truly mean that I’ve not done the verbal no-dance nor said no directly. I say yes.

So, how am I not doing service 24/7?

When I say yes, I say “Yes, but is it important?” Usually, it’s not.

When I say yes, I say, “Yes. But if others come forward, please let me know because I’m busy with X and Y.” I am specific with X and Y, and they involve hard work and productivity and great things for students, and they are usually cool things that make my eyes light up. My suitors see me so happy about those ideas, and they can’t bring themselves to bring me down to earth. This often does the trick.

The result is that a couple times a year, on average, I get a visit or an email telling me, “That committee that you said you’re be on? I’ve got good news: we’ve found someone else.”

Doing your service time is valuable. It helps you get to know people on campus who you otherwise wouldn’t know, and building those connections will be important for you. I’m not the only one who thinks that junior faculty can benefit from doing their share of service.

I’m glad to be a team player. On every team, individuals have their roles. In all, I’ll leave the service-beast role to others.

Startup needs for researchers in teaching schools

When I started my current job, most of those who dropped by my office to say “Greetings,” first stopped short with a question: How did you get that monitor? (I have a big monitor. They no longer make them that big. I think it’s really helped me work more efficiently.)

I answered, “I asked for it.” It really was that easy. I gave up my printer for a big monitor. No biggie, I just brought my own printer.

When you start a new faculty position, you have to use the opportunity wisely. You’re over the moon that you actually landed the job, but don’t act too hastily. When you get the phone call, say that you look forward to discussing the offer very soon, don’t say yes. Once you sign on the line (it’s probably not dotted), you’ve lost all of your leverage for anything you want in the future.

Some schools leave things more open to negotiation than others. They’ll tell you straight out if something is fixed and can’t be changed. Often, things are flexible. You need to enter the conversation with the fact of negotiation. See what you’re getting as a starting point for discussion.

Salary is really, really important, because all of your future raises will be based on your starting salary. If you’re at a public institution, then salaries are probably public record. If you can’t find it online, then talk to a librarian at the university. These data matter.

You need to know what kind of ballpark startup you can expect. You should get this from the search committee rather than the Dean. You should find out what recent hires have got, and you should get at least that (depending on your specialty, maybe a lot more). Some schools will have a low five-digit offer and on the higher end some will have low six digit offer – and very wealthy campuses could shave something more. (This range sounds insanely low to faculty at R1 universities. Yup, I agree. Some places actually have startup that comes in four digits.) Sometimes people don’t like to talk with specific numbers. This isn’t the time to be shy. You don’t want to lowball your startup, and you also don’t want to get laughed out of the room for asking for an order of magnitude too high. Hopefully during your interview process you’ve built up enough rapport with your search committee, and your potential new chair should ideally be some help (if not your partner) on this as you go through the Dean.

What are the other things that you should or shouldn’t negotiate for? Here’s a quick review of the biggies, other than salary. Keep in mind that there is no grand wisdom in here, just a set of observations that plenty of others have made.

-Reassigned time from teaching. If it’s a teaching school, they hired you to teach. However, it will take a while for you to get on your feet and start up your lab. The longer you can prolong the reassigned time for you to focus on getting started and submitting grants, the better off you are. You don’t want to be a prima donna and ask for much much more than what others have gotten in the past, of course. You’ll note that I’m using “reassigned time” instead of release time. This is an important distinction in my book. “Release time” sounds like you’re getting out of a responsibility. “Reassigned” correctly indicates that you’re working just as hard on a different kind of assignment. Another thing that you should establish up front is under what circumstances, if any, funds are used for reassigned time in the future. If you bring in grants, can you negotiate for reassigned time even if it isn’t in the budget? Or, if you have to buy it with a grant, what is the rate? Especially at private institutions, the rate at which individual PIs are charged for reassigned time can be bartered. I’ve seen some people get outrageously great deals, only because they asked for them.

-Equipment and supplies. If your research requires a special piece of equipment that’s lacking, like a certain kind of mass spec, microscope, or whatnot, then this is your chance for the school to buy it for you. Keep in mind, though, that having equipment could be a curse rather than a boon. I have to admit that I can’t think of a fancy machine that would let me to things that I’m not already doing. You don’t want to admit this too readily, though, if that’s the main form of your startup. Often, once you get startup, you can spend it how you want. You can ask for cash for a big piece of equipment, but if you get it on the cheap or your needs change, you might be able to spend it in another way.

-Moving expenses. Sure, this is nice. But if you can convince them to shave money off of moving expenses to increase your salary, or reassigned time or something else, that is probably of more use to you.

-Space. If you want a better office or lab, now is the only time it’s going to happen, until someone retires or leaves. Nobody will get kicked out for you (usually), but if there is a variety of possible space then you should make your needs known.

-Staff. Will they guarantee that you have funds to hire a research assistant or tech? Small schools might be able to get you a paid part-time undergrad to work in your lab.

-Travel. To you, money for staff, travel, equipment and supplies all looks the same. But to the resource managers at the university who have to cobble together the funds for you, they aren’t. They need to get your startup from different pools of money with different rules. If you want to get money to travel to conferences, that might need to be specified up front. It also might not be possible, or might allow you to get a larger total amount.

-Duration of startup. Have you seen the Richard Pryor movie Brewster’s Millions? (This shows I am not young.) Pryor’s character has to spend a ton of money – all of it – in a short period of time. Most people who get startup are given a deadline to spend all of their money, and it typically arrives too soon. You’re so busy getting settled into your classes your first year, you can’t set up your lab on time. It’s likely that they’ll be pleased if you want your startup to be distributed over multiple years. That’s flexibility that you’ll appreciate. (I didn’t get the bulk of my startup until after I was tenured, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

There are a lot more details, and nuances about what kind of resources are better than others, but most of this depends on the specific circumstances of your particular needs and those of your institution.

Before your start your negotiation, there is a classic book about negotiation that I strongly recommend reading: Getting to Yes. This book will help you take away the adversarial approach to arguing over resources and instead help you find common ground. It should never be an argument, it should be a collaboration. Read this book before you get an offer.

How tinkering can work as a research program

This is the fourth and final post in a series, wherein I attempt to make the case that tinkering is a viable, and perhaps optimal, approach to conducting a research program, particularly for those at teaching-centered institutions. Here are the first, second, and third posts preceding the present post.

I’m a tinkerer. That means that I don’t typically design my research to fit the framework of a big theory, but instead I set out to answer a small little question that has occurred to me. I do experimental research, combined with observational research, to find the answers to open questions. I’m just not going after the big fish that other labs do. After all, I work in a small pond.

This is a personal narrative about how tinkering has worked for me. It’s hard to write about the concept in the abstract, so I’m going into the specifics about one line of tinkering I’ve done over the years. If I am going to make the case that tinkering works well for me, it’s easiest for me to to use specific projects to illustrate how tinkering has worked for me. So if you read on, you’ll be reading about ants. Consider yourself forewarned.

When I started as full-time faculty at a teaching institution, I found myself with the position of having a field season in front of me. What did I want to do?

I quickly decided that I wouldn’t continue along the lines of my dissertation, which was on the biology of invasive ants. There were so many questions about biological invasions that were interesting to me, but they all seemed too, well, big. For all of the specific big questions about invasiveness that I wanted to tackle, there were other labs that were going at it at the same time, full time with multiple collaborators, without teaching. (In the end, their work was — and still is — awesome in its creativity and quality, going well beyond my initial interests. In my position, I don’t think I ever could have run most of the experiments they have, at least not on the scale that they did. I admire their work a lot.)

My dissertation was one part of getting the invasive ant bandwagon rolling, but after taking a job at a teaching institution, I needed to find a better ride. I had a few papers that made a difference, by looking at the issue from a broader-than-usual perspective, and it was time to move on.

I knew that I wanted to get back to my field station in Costa Rica. It was a place that I knew well from my dissertation, and it had become kind of a second home to me, and I hadn’t been down there for 18 months. I had a few weeks on site, along with several undergraduate field assistants.

I wanted to pick a project that fit three criteria:

The project could be completed in a few weeks
The project lead to a modest publication, regardless of what the results were
It would be fun

Here was my thought process: This rainforest is chock-full of ants, everywhere. People study them all of the time. But they only study the cool and bizarre ones, like leafcutters, bullet ants, ant-plant mutualists, and army ants. There are hundreds of ants that make the forest run that are overlooked. I wanted to study one of those. So, I picked what I thought what was one of the most common, but unknown, species, and designed a cute little project around it. (By the way, free versions of all the papers in this post are found on my website.)

My main goal was to ask, “What is up with this extremely common species that we know nothing about?” I built it around a question about unpredictable resource heterogeneity, competition, and whatnot, but it was mostly a vehicle to play around, because I knew nothing about this species. And I wasn’t going to go down for a few weeks and not get a paper out of it.

Even though I designed that cute little project to be fail-proof (negative results would still be publishable), I barely eeked that paper out. That was because my sample size was dropping precipitously throughout the short experiment. We started out by marking a bunch of colonies in the field. As days progressed, the colonies flat out disappeared. Their nests were just empty holes. By the end of our experiment, we sorted out that they just moved nextdoor. Over the course of a few weeks, we’d lost well more than half of our colonies, but I didn’t have data on them after they moved.

The next field season — one year later, after my first year on the tenure track — I had a few more weeks with a team of undergrads. I wanted to understand the non-optimality of home range size. I was ready for nest movements, and built it into the experimental design. The answer was kind of interesting: foragers spent more time looking for food before giving up when the home range is of poor quality.

At this point, for two years on the tenure-track teaching a full courseload of new courses, I’ve gotten two okay papers out from two short field projects, while spending time on other projects as well. At the rate of a paper a year, I would’ve been well exceeding scholarly expectations at my university, as a decent first-authored paper per year is pretty good at a teaching institution with a heavy teaching load. I was okay with my publication rate, but I felt like I wasn’t taking this anywhere interesting.

I felt that I knew this critter pretty well. The most curious thing was nest movement behavior. Delving into the literature on nest movements in ants, I found that nest movements have been documented aplenty. But in each species, it was studied only once. It looked like everyone experienced what I did – they stumbled on the phenomenon which botched an experiment, and then they wrote up how the experiment was botched by nest movements. Then, they moved onto more tractable systems, using animals that don’t disappear when you’re not looking. Nobody had gotten far beyond the nest-movements-botched-my-study study.

I decided to directly tackle nest movements in my next field season, which was, again, with several undergrads for about a month. All I wanted to know was, “why do they move their nests all the time?” You can’t ask “why” questions with science, though, so I asked “how” and “with what consequences, correlates and a potential cause.” These results were really interesting to me. It turns out that they move, on average, about once per week, and it has nothing to do with food or competition.

After working on a variety of other things, I wanted to take some time to get back to these mysterious nest-moving ants. My earlier work suggested – only vaguely – that odors might play a role in how they move their nests. I wanted to see if this was the case. So, I ran an experiment by experimentally manipulating nest odors. It turns out that nest odors can keep them from occupying or staying in nests, but the manipulation had enough artifacts I can’t really trust that this experiment explained what was really happening.

While working on other stuff, this nest odor problem kept nagging at me. Eventually, while I had students doing a variety of other things, I cooked up a field manipulation for myself to run, by reducing odors within the nest. That made them like their nests more than they would otherwise. But then, again, what does this really show? If their endogenous odors make them dislike their nests, what’s the selective pressure behind nest movement? That’s a really hard question to address.

That was a few years ago. I’ve just returned to it last year. With one student student, I have (meaning, she has) rerun the earlier odor manipulation, but with narrow chemical fractions to identify which compounds are playing a role. We also have additional observational work happening to test some newer hypotheses. These projects are involving a chemical ecologist who I brought into this project, as I lack any of that mojo, as well as the equipment. (Sometimes not having the equipment is a good thing, I’ve already argued.)

All of these studies essentially have been a set of little side projects, that in all have amounted to a substantial line of investigation over the years. We know more about the ecology of nest relocation in this species, than any other. By the way, their name is Aphaenogaster araneoides. I eventually worked up a new official common name, “gypsy ant.” (That was Anna Himler’s idea.)

How were those experiments tinkering? Well, one thing you may or may not have noticed is that the only reason I did these experiments was to figure out what’s going on with these ants. I was curious about what they were doing, and so I tried to sort it out. I didn’t come in to working with this system with a big question about optimal foraging, neighborhood competition, or social organization in mind. I just wanted to know exactly what this one species was doing, because it was a mystery to me.

Because I was open to this species to telling me what it wanted to, I let it take me in the direction where I was led. You’re moving your nests all the time? Sure, I’ll try to figure that out. I wasn’t setting out to use nest relocation to evaluate any grand theory about social insect behavior or movement theory in ecology. I just wanted to know about what was causing them to move their nests.

In the process, I documented in some detail how they maintain multiple unoccupied nests, but only use one at a time. This was seen in a few other species, but it was a distinct and heretofore undescribed pattern of nesting. I thought to give it a new name — “serial monodomy” — which might stick. What else do you do when you find something that happens that doesn’t have a name?

This project has gotten me to think more about nest relocation in ants. It’s permeated a lot of my thinking about the biology of this community of ants, and has seeped over into my community-level work. I realized that nest relocation is biologically significant, and is not taken into account in so many studies. And we pick our study systems by focusing on the tractable species: those that don’t move. Looking at what is known, I found that most species are apparently mobile, and those are the ones that we don’t study for this reason. Our whole understanding about ants is very biased. I decided to write a review about that idea.

Ultimately, I think my work on nest movements on ants has had some influence on how our research community thinks about ant ecology. At least there’s been some movement (yes, that’s a pun) in that direction. Not too long ago, the prevailing notion was that typical ant colonies are like plants, that just don’t move. There are some oddballs, like invasive species and army ants, that move around, but everyone else is anchored down.

I’m pointing out to others that this notion is false. I’ve only done work addressing nest relocation with this one species, but in the process I’ve called attention to all of those other species that have been found to do similar things but are overlooked.

Of course, anybody who really knows ants easily realizes that nest relocation happens in a bunch of species. But this fact hasn’t been broadly appreciated, nor had it been documented. By working on this phenomenon, in detail, within one species, I was given the perspective that allowed me to make this concept more tangible across the phylogeny.

If you asked me after I finished my dissertation, what are you going to work on? I never would have said, “nest relocation.” I wouldn’t have identified any major concept or theory. I mostly was focused on teaching, after all. I wanted to do some cool projects when I had the chance. This brought me to working with a very common ant, which compelled me to figure out its nest movements because that’s a basic part of its biology. I was just tinkering around with it to figure it out, that’s all. But following that direction, once in a while over the years, I’ve built together a set of substantial ideas, that I imagine will continue to matter for some time to come.

This work on nest relocation on ants isn’t earth-shattering. But it is changing, just a little bit, how we think about ants, including changing some long-held and mistaken assumptions. This is just the result of five trips to the rainforest for 2.5-5 weeks each, over the last 13 years. That’s not too bad.

I think if I went down to the rainforest trying to test a big theory, I would have come back empty handed, or with a few papers that mostly would be collecting dust by now. But simply by wandering off without a specific vision of big theories, I think I’ve done something that results in tangible, if not big, progress.

So, that’s my case for why tinkering is a good way to do science. You might stumble on something amazing, or you might come upon something just mildly curious, but no matter what happens, you’ll learn something genuinely new.

Just imagine what else we’d be learning if other scientists doing basic research, in all kinds of disciplines, started doing research in obscure directions on things that were mysterious to them but didn’t seem of much obvious consequence. I think we’d be learning a lot more about the world and probably develop many new ideas more quickly than we are now.

Accessing the articles you need (or not)

We’re on the dawn of a new age with open publishing in science, yadda yadda, hubledydoo.

In the meantime, I just need that damn reprint.

If people at large research universities are having trouble getting their articles from certain journals, then how do you think it feels at Southern Northeastern Podunk State?

I got used to not having Web of Science when that was a necessary tool. Every year, it was on my wishlist for the library. We regularly argued for it. Two leap years passed. Then, they got Web of Science. The year I was leaving.

My current campus doesn’t get Web of Science, nor Nature or Science. I’m not concerned about that, as long as Google Scholar still exists and is free (and who knows how long that will last. I imagine once ISI loses its customer base, then Google will close up shop on Scholar or start charging big bucks. It’s funny that Google’s initial corporate sales pitch was “Don’t be evil.” Once they conquered RSS they killed Reader because the entire medium wasn’t profitable enough. Once they conquer scientific publishing databases, will they do the same?)

There are massive sweeps and suites of journals that we’re missing. We don’t get much from Elsevier, I think, but we do okay with Blackwell. (Or is it the other way around?). We get about 50% of the journals I want to access. That’s mighty horrible. I’d feel more horrible, though, if we squandered our limited resources by paying extortion to the publishers.

How to get everything we don’t get through the university? The majority of the papers get from the site of one of the authors, which is usually discovered promptly by Google Scholar. Sometimes it’s there but not indexed in Google Scholar. If it’s a new paper, I email the corresponding author, and I usually get the pdf within hours. I try to not do that, though I don’t mind the requests when I receive them.

That does leave holes. There theoretically is an interlibrary loan that could be used, but I don’t use it.

I have an research associate/adjunct appointment another university in my area, connected to my collaborations and I work there on occasion. Their library has decent access, but with lots of holes as well. By magical coincidence, the holes of the two institutions I use are entirely complementary, and I can access almost everything. This pretty much rocks, and I realize that I’m the lucky beneficiary of this arrangement.

I recognize that few people have this kind of opportunity, as most institutions have their library access locked down really tightly, so that various institutional hangers-on can’t get article access without physically being in the library.

This is a dilemma to which I don’t have an easy solution. Usually interlibrary loan requests are cumbersome, but if your institution allows it, that’s better than nothing. (That still beats what I did in grad school – pull if off the shelves of Norlin Library and photocopy it. Uphill. Both ways.) If you can’t do that, then I guess you’ll just have to contact the authors. I just feel bad being a part of the weight of another person’s email. Among the the administrative weight of email tasks, sending out reprints isn’t the worst thing, though. If your correspondent doesn’t want to deal with digital reprint requests, they should post them until they get a DMCA takedown notice from their publisher.

One of the best pieces of advice about literature research I got from my ‘intro to grad school and academic life’ class was, “Don’t mistake having a copy of an article for having read and understood it.”

You could do what most people probably do when they can’t get an article. Read the abstract and pretend that you read the entire paper.

If you have any tricks of the trade to get articles of which I’m unaware, please leave a comment.

One thing I’ve thought about doing is opening a dropbox file to colleagues with similar research interests, and we can all share there. I do with students in my lab, but I could open it up more broadly.

The “future” will solve these article access problems one way or another, I suspect, based on the hard work of academics pushing to change the industry. In the meantime, I’m tired of workarounds.

Efficient teaching: after academic dishonesty happens

One of the most unsavory parts of the job is dealing with violations of academic integrity policies.

This is an “efficient teaching” post because dealing with academic dishonesty is a part of teaching, and there are many ways to handle it, some of which are more efficient than others.

Just sweeping it under the rug is not efficient, because efficiency is a ratio of teaching effectiveness and teaching effort. Doing nothing about academic dishonesty is ineffective teaching, because if that’s what you do, then you’re not doing your job.

I used to be bothered by the poor judgment of the students. If students are driven to cheat, how can I be an effective instructor? What did I do wrong?

I’ve gotten over that worry. It was cured with data. If you’re familiar with the literature on academic dishonesty (the wikipedia page is particularly good), then you are aware that cheating on exams and assignments is rampant in all sectors of higher education wherever you go. That’s just a straight-up fact. Every class you’re teaching, there’s someone cheating in it. Don’t even try to deny it.

(To get the obvious stuff out of the way: Buckets of ink have been spent on how to deter cheating and plagiarism. Often it’s real ink, in the form of useless handouts at professional development sessions. I work hard to design my courses to reduce the incentive for cheating and plagiarism as well as making it harder to get away with it. Every student of mine is fully, wholly, aware about what constitutes academic dishonesty, so when they do it, there’s no doubt that they’ve made an active choice in the matter. You should only pursue consequences for academic misconduct when it is entirely obvious to you, without any doubt whatsoever, that the misconduct occurred. Moving on to the meat of the issue:)

Events of academic dishonestly don’t make me even think about my teaching quality anymore, or fuss about the welfare of the perpetrators. Nowadays, the only reason that academic dishonesty pisses me off is that it’s a massive time sink.

Students who cheat are selfish because they’re wasting my time while I make sure the proper consequences are administered. I deal with this almost every semester at least once. It’s maddening.

When a student decides to foul up in one of my classes, in a stupidly obvious way that I can detect it, it has the potential to screw me up just as it does for them. It can suck away many good hours that would be better spent on students who aren’t cheating, and on manuscripts that are waiting for me.

The first time I intercepted academic dishonesty (while not as TA) was when five students were all plagiarizing together on a lab research project. It was overt, badly done, and they clearly knew it was the wrong thing to do. One student even brought in someone’s draft from the year earlier (with edits on it from the instructor of the prior year!) to pass off as their own and ask me for input. I spent days – literally – doing all the legwork, paperwork, documentation, interviews, and other crap associated with making sure that these students got their fair dose of justice. My department was very supportive of it, but it mushroomed, because the students escalated the issue. And then one of the plagiarists claimed I was racist. Hearings were held. This is what you do not want to happen when you’re in your first or second year on campus.

This turned into an inquisition because I set the stage to let the students make this happen. In this instance, I was initially dealt a bad hand, as the assignment was designed for plagiarism by the professor who designed (or rather, didn’t design) the lab curriculum. Regardless, I lost control of the situation before I even started. I took the well-meaning but misdirected advice of senior faculty, who mostly did nothing about the plagiarism in their midst, who in fact encouraged it by usually ignoring it or giving extremely light penalties. Most faculty handle academic dishonesty in a way that is designed to make themselves miserable in the process, either by guilt or by effort.

There is a completely fair way of handling the situation without wasting all of your time.

It’s alluring to let students off light, because if you don’t, they can make a big stink which involves lots of paperwork, conversations with administrators, and hearings. However, letting students off easy (aside from being an injustice) also invites more cheating. Once you get a reputation for busting people — and the reputation does get out there — you have deterring effect.

So, how do you appropriately nail cheaters and plagiarists without making it your life’s work?

Here are some handy dandy observations that you should be aware of before heading into this morass:

When a students are personally accused of misconduct, they will deny it. It’s a gut instinct to defend one’s self against external threats. They’ll even deny it when the evidence is incontrovertible. You could have a photograph of their arms with smuggled formulas, a cheat sheet in your possession, or the original version of an online essay from two years that perfectly resembles their own. You could have a misdirected email between two students explaining to one another exactly how they cheated on the last test. You could invite God into your office and have him testify that he saw the student cheating. All but the most incredibly forthright students will still absurdly insist they did nothing wrong.
The reason that students deny in the face of total proof is, in part, because this strategy often works. It’s amazing how consistent denial in the face of clear evidence can persuade administrators to dismiss or lessen a university-level penalty. (Many student affairs offices are filled with Poppy Harlows that have trouble watching students experience the consequences for their poor decisions, regardless of whether the events were horrific or banal.)
Once a student claims innocence, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, there’s nothing you can do to get the student to recant. They won’t recant because then they’d be guilty about lying about dishonesty, which is just as bad as the original dishonest act. They don’t want to get busted for that either, and they won’t trust you after they lie to you.
When students feel that they are cornered, they might lash out. This could result in pages-long diatribes copied to every administrator whose email address is on the university website. If the student has a wealthy parent who donates to the school, or is a member of a traditionally disenfranchised minority on campus, or has a disability, or stands out in some other way, then their claims of persecution might have traction. Some students might lawyer up. A couple years ago a student said I was biased against him because he wasn’t from an ethnic minority. Seriously. These irrational attacks by students may or may not help out the students in the long run, but one thing is for sure: it’ll take a lot of your time.
Everybody handles academic dishonestly differently, and in your department, there are faculty members who have policies and practices that don’t meet your standard. It’s not useful to try to get someone to change their policies, because they have made up their mind and if you show that you think differently, you’re just losing common ground with your own colleagues.
It’s a fine practice to think of your syllabus as a legal contract. It’s not, but if a policy is clearly stated in the syllabus at the start of the semester, the university thinks that it is the students’ responsibility to be aware of that policy.

In light of these observations, how I have I decided to handle academic dishonesty when it happens? I handle the matter in a way that maximizes the probability that it will work out smoothly and not result in a big waste of my time, while making sure that the necessary outcome happens. Keep in mind that I follow this course of action only when it is 100% clear that there was an intentional violation. (If it’s plagiarism, then I am sure of intent; see #1 and #2 below.)

I put unambiguous and detailed policies in my syllabi. I discuss (meaning, talk at my students) in detail on the first day of class, informing them that I don’t expect anybody to be academically dishonest, but it’s something that I have seen often and I need to take care of it when it does. This policy results in an assigned grade of F in the course for any academic dishonesty. (I make this an “administrative F” by writing a memo to the Student Affairs office, so that the student can’t repeat-and-cancel, by retaking the course to eradicate the F from the GPA. Your institution might now allow that to happen easily, though.)
We go through a short lesson (5-10 minutes) on what constitutes plagiarism, to ensure that they know what it is. I’ve also assigned a short web tutorial with a quiz at the end.
When dishonesty happens, do not immediately engage with the student. If it’s a plagiarized assignment, don’t contact the student. If you intercept a student cheating, then you should document as much as possible at the moment, and don’t start a conversation. Make a note of who is sitting next to the student, and write notes for yourself.
Mention to your chair that you have an academic misconduct incident and that you’re handling it. That will be an inoculation against a possible toxic student outbreak, which is what you’re trying to avoid.
Within the next day, you need to spend about an hour writing a memo. This memo will be addressed to the student, and cc’d to your chair and the other authorities to whom you are supposed to report academic integrity violations. In this memo, you state that you establish the fact that the student violated the academic integrity policy. You spend several sentences going into some detail about exactly how you know this is a violation. Don’t overexplain, and don’t nitpick into detail, but report that it the misconduct was unambiguous and overt (as it needs to be if this is your course of action). If you used turnitin or a similar service, do not specifically reference the originality report, but instead indicate that sections are plagiarized from other preexisting sources in a fashion that it is logically impossible for the student to not have committed plagiarism, and that the similarity transcends coincidence. Be clear that this letter is to inform the student that you have determined the fact of the dishonesty, and that this is not a matter of further discussion, and if the student disagrees with this finding of fact this may be rectified with a formal appeal. This memo will then tell the student the specific consequence – that they will be receiving an F in the course and also that you’re reporting this to the appropriate university body. Write that the student is entirely welcome to continue attending class for the remainder of the semester, but that that any further involvement will not effect the grade at the end of the semester. Write to the student that, if he or she chooses, a meeting can be scheduled. To protect the student’s interests, any future conversation should be conducted in the presence of another faculty member, and should be scheduled through the departmental office. Indicate that you don’t require such a meeting, as the outcome is already determined and is not subject to change based on any further information. Remind the student that you are required to follow this policy and that you are working to represent their interests as best as possible, and as long as there are is no further academic misconduct, you are not going to request that the university pursue further sanctions such as probation, suspension or expulsion. The memo should also indicate that you do not want to discuss the matter over email or the telephone, as these matters are best handled in person and with the involvement of other parties, if necessary. Ask that the student wait at least 24 hours to respond, and if the student wants to file a formal response, you’ll accept it in writing and send it in to the university along with your report. A written statement should precede any formal meeting about the matter.
Send this memo to the student’s home address by postal mail, and also send a copy of it to the student as a pdf attachment to an email.

Your goal here is to handle the matter while letting the student know that you’re on their side, and are only following the policy. Give them 24 hours to cool down. If they find you at the office and lie to you before the cooling off period is over, tell them that you can’t talk, and they should put down in writing their response. Their lies look stupider to them on paper than they do coming out of their mouths, and they recognize this fact. So, make sure their first rebuttal (if any) is in written form. Since plagiarists are repulsed by actual writing, this can dissuade many of them right at the start.

There are a few possible outcomes from the memo. The best one, for all parties, is that the student disappears and you never talk about it again, and you just give the F when turning in your grades. This has happens for me the majority of the time. The student might email me with an excuse, and I just email back saying that the letter is unambiguous about the policy. Then it’s done.

The second best outcome is that the student wants to meet with you to proffer an explanation. In this meeting, you’ll get excuses or mitigating factors. You listen and then firmly tell them that your policy stands, and that all misconduct has this outcome. If they persist, then you remind them that further misconduct, which includes being untruthful about misconduct, would result in a request for more serious sanctions. The student typically then will face facts and accept the F.

This whole approach, keep in mind, is designed to get the student to recognize the obvious fact of the misconduct and come to terms with it before they choose to deny it. Because once they deny it, they won’t take it back, and if they won’t take it back, then they’ll fight you on it. You want them to accept it easily. You have to be your own bad cop and good cop. I do honestly believe I’m representing my students’ interests, and I don’t want them to be unnecessarily harmed. However, I have to administer the consequences that I set forth at the start of class if I’m going to be fair to everyone.

It might be possible that the student will fight the F by filing a grade grievance, talking to the Dean of Students or your Dean or whatnot. At this point, there isn’t that much for you to do. You let the student continue to attend class like normal. You’ve already written your memo that explains what happened. You might have to write a more detailed statement explaining exactly how it is a violation, but this shouldn’t be too much work. And if there’s a hearing, you go. You’ve done everything you’ve could to give the student an opportunity to do the right thing after misconduct, and if they choose against it and continue to fight, then you just have the facts on your side and it’ll speak for itself. Getting deeply engaged in thinking about it can’t help you. You’re just doing your job. If the student lawyers up, then let the lawyer deal with your administration, after all, that’s why they get paid the big bucks. But hopefully, it won’t come down to that, and by handling it this way, I think you’re minimizing the chance that it’ll happen.

Life is not fair, but I can work hard to make my classroom as fair as possible. If a student is caught cheating in your class, or knowingly plagiarizes an assignment, and you don’t flunk them, I don’t even want to hear about it. It’ll just ruin my day. This is where others of like mind might post a picture of a cat wearing sunglasses, captioned, “I CAN HAZ CHEETING?”

I got me the travelin’ blues

I imagine that when other scientists need to travel for research-related business, they file some paperwork, and then hop on a plane.

I only dream that I could do the same.

The official rule at my university is that faculty need permission one month before any work-related international travel. Period. Even if the funding is external. And even if it’s okay with your chair and doesn’t interfere with teaching.

This rule, in itself, is a massive handicap that puts my research program at a disadvantage.

During moments like these, it can feel like my own administration is the enemy of my research program. I know that they everyone is, in fact, quite supportive, at least in spirit. Nonetheless, I’ve had to grow accustomed to an administrative obstacle course.

Each year, I schedule round-trip travel for about ten people to go to Costa Rica. I’ve been doing this since I arrived at this university, and every year, weird stumbling blocks are put in front of me. Because of this rule, I’ve kept home people home who would otherwise could have joined our research trip, and I’ve spent several extra thousands of (taxpayer) dollars on airfare because of administrative dillydallying. (I’m sure my administrators see it differently, of course.)

To get travel authorization, I need signatures from a long series of administrators. Before signing, they have a series of questions about budget, insurance, and logistics that require detailed answers before a signature arrives. Sometimes this process has taken a few weeks, and that’s with our departmental admin person chasing the process diligently the whole time (for which I am eternally grateful).

ugh.

There are a few reasons why these questions posed to me are unnecessary, overly silly, and frustrating. First, all of the questions they ask could be easily answered by looking at the text of the grant itself, which was already approved by administration. Second, these administrators are aware that I essentially am doing the same thing every year with the funds, and so nothing changes. If I was approved the year before, what’s wrong with this year? Third, all of these funds are administered by the fiscally independent university Foundation, which operates outside contracts and grants, and technically my administration has no control over these funds and only need to approve my time away from campus. Also, this travel happens off the clock of the academic year, so really the only branch concerned with my time and the funds should be the Foundation.

This year, I should note, the process has gone smoother than ever before. It might be because I have the same Provost for two years in a row, which is a new record for me in the past six years. (So far, he’s been a keeper.) Moreover, the Provost’s lead administrative person is the most awesome ever, who used to work in my Dean’s office. Having her there is soothing. (Apparently, she spent an hour on the phone with my equally excellent departmental admin person sorting out technicalities that she was required to attend to.) I just got the signatures last night, and bought the tickets. This time it only took a couple weeks to get permission!

I can only take so much solace in the fact that an unnecessary process is less painful than it has been in the past.

How hard is it to travel with your university? Are the international travel rules overly onerous? How much of your time have you spent dealing with paperwork that you could have spent on teaching or research?

Lab meetings: the publication process

My lab meeting last week got totally derailed. In a good way.

One of my students mentioned the manuscript that she’s working on, and from all erupted a series of questions and questions about the publication process. Everyone wanted to know so much about that, we mostly ditched our original plans (to discuss the design of an experiment for the summer).

The social subtleties of how a paper gets published are entirely foreign to undergrads. Moreover, the basic mechanics of the process are also nothing of which they’re aware.

The meeting turned into a long clinic/tutorial about how the process goes. If I knew better, I would have been prepared with examples of cover letters, reviews, rejections, responses, and revisions.

Actually, I liked the way we went about it as an ad hoc conversation. I just answered their questions as they came in, rather than having prepared a little lesson about it. How do you pick a journal? How does an editor find reviewers? You mean they can just reject you without getting reviews? How often have you gotten rejected? How much do you get paid? You have to *pay* to publish? How much do you review? What happens when you say no? How long does it take for a paper to be published once you submit it? Can you submit to more than one at a time? What do you do when the reviewers don’t agree with one another? What does the university say when you publish a paper?

It’s important for my undergrads to be familiar with the how-we-do-things-on-a-daily-basis part of academia. They’ll be a lot more savvy as they gain more exposure and will be able to understand doctoral students, when they hang out and as they’re applying to grad school.

I’ve had this kind of conversation, informally, with students more times than I can remember. Little things get explained here and there, now and then. Lab meetings would be a good time to make this more formalized. There was a good discussion in an earlier post about what exactly we do and don’t do in lab meetings. So, here’s one thing you can dedicate a whole lab meeting to – the forensic analysis of the publication cycle of a couple manuscripts, explaining all the choices along the way.

My students are still surprised over the concept that it sometimes takes more work to publish a paper than it takes to collect the data, and even more surprised (or dismayed, perhaps) that it can take far longer to do so as well.

That’s a lesson that we need to reinforce, that much of science is about writing.

Tinkering around is the best way to do research

On my desktop sits a file, as a reminder. It’s the log of a Skype text chat dated 24 October 2007.

My desktop isn’t usually tidy, but this file always sits there in a corner. I haven’t read it in years, but its existence is, in itself, a reminder.

This article is third in a series of four. A couple weeks ago I wrote about whether or not we should try to develop new theories or to test existing ones by hopping on theoretical bandwagons.

Last week I wrote why theoretical bandwagons are good for, or at least well suited to, big labs and that small labs should avoid them. (You might want to read those over, if you haven’t yet, before reading the present post. Or not. Your call.)

This week, I’m explaining the kind of research that I choose to do in my own small lab.

This chat took place with a deep friend of mine as we both were undergoing career transitions, both of us starting out in new (and radically different) faculty positions. (It’s great when your friends are your role models, and when your role models are your friends, even if you only see one another in a long while. It’s not too often that you connect with others whose values and priorities are well calibrated to match your own, and it’s a pleasant confluence.)

Darwin was a tinkerer. (Richmond’s portrait of Darwin is from 1840)

I had just moved to a new position, back to my hometown. This change involved a massive shift in pretty much everything. I was wondering what kind of questions I should be pursuing, and how I should go about it. My friend was settling into a tenure-track position at a research institution and his lab was growing exponentially.

We were wondering what I was going to work on next. At this point, I wasn’t sure. I had a number of big questions that I wanted to tackle, each of which would involve a major direction for my lab. Up until this point, I had been doing a series of one-off projects (which essentially is what my dissertation was as well).

So, I threw out a bunch of ideas. I want to work on X, I want to work on Y, and Z looks interesting too. I said I didn’t want my work to get lost as ephemera, addressing theories-of-the moment.

Then, at the same moment, we independently stumbled on the term that describes the work that I enjoy most, and also has had the greatest impact.

Tinkering.

My best work has happened whenever I’ve found some little natural history curiosity that has piqued my interest, and then I designed an experiment (observational or manipulative) to tinker around with the system to figure out what’s going on. It was my doctoral advisor who first introduced me to “experimental natural history.” (Sorry about the paywall, damn JSTOR)

This leads to both the stuff that is most cool, interesting, and in the long term useful to other people. I think that good science happened because my approach was most likely to lead to discovery, even if discovery was not the goal.

Research is supposed to result in new knowledge.

What are the odds that you’re going to make a big discovery or formulate a grand theory as long as you’re working on the same ideas that other people are? How much are you pushing the frontiers of science when there are other people out there doing the same thing? If you’re working for a specific applied aim – an HIV vaccine, cancer prevention, et cetera, then I can understand that a massive push in one direction, like against a two-ton piece of stone, is what can make the stone move.

I’m not in the business of inventing vaccines for rapidly evolving viruses or building pyramids. I’m doing basic research. I’m just trying to understand how the world works. There is so little that is known, that I want to mine into directions that that are entirely mysterious. The world is still fundamentally mysterious.

I posit that there are two distinct philosophies that scientists have about the nature of our knowledge, with little middle ground. On one side are people who think that we have learned a lot in the fields that we have studied, and that research is filling in the gaps and discovering new fields that we have yet to understand. On the other side are people who think that we are still vastly ignorant about the world, and even the things that we have studied really heavily remain mysterious and what we think we know may in fact be wrong.

Is this a fair dichotomy? Does one of these describe you or do you fit in the middle somewhere?

I’m in the latter group (or at one end of the spectrum if it’s not a dichotomy). I suspect that a number of ecologists might fall into that group as well. For all the work that we’ve done, we’ve only scratched the surface, and that surface is probably deceiving. Some classic major concepts, such as “competitive exclusion,” are so simplistic that they don’t even begin to describe nature.

The one thing that students seem to learn in school about evolution is that Lamarck was wrong, and this lesson comes with a certain example involving a giraffe. It’s taken us a couple centuries to figure out that, to a certain extent, Lamarck was quite right about the inheritance of acquired characteristics after all. He just didn’t know the mechanism was epigenetic, just as Darwin wasn’t aware of the particulate inheritance mechanisms described by Mendel. Jerry Coyne addressed this a score of moons ago.

In short, some things we think we fundamentally understand, we really don’t. This is particularly the case for complex phenomena that are explained by theories requiring mechanisms that can’t be readily measured in nature. Natural selection is very straightforward and observable, and we have that one locked down. But many more intricate concepts in ecology? I wouldn’t buy stock in them.

If your research program is oriented towards testing theories, then you’re less likely to stumble on a new perspective.

When I design experiments, I “tinker” with natural systems by tweaking them in small ways to see what happens. I do this because I find something that’s curious to me, and I want to understand what’s happening in that system. I don’t pretend that what I find will answer a grand theory or unify different branches of our disciplines. I just want to get a little answer about a little thing that’s curious. My suspicion, that might approach something resembling belief, is that this kind of work will help us learn more about the world than most theoretically-driven research. I think that most of our major advances came from this kind of approach as well.

You’lll find some mildly unflattering things said about this approach, over at Dynamic Ecology. This is a healthful disagreement of opinion. (Heck, there might even be a claim that it wasn’t unflattering!) I recognize that what I’m writing goes against current dogma, that if your work isn’t driven by theory, then it’s not of much value. I can respectfully disagree, but then again, there’s no major concept or principle with my name on it, either, so I can’t push my point too firmly.

If you take a walk through a rainforest, a few hundred curiosities, with no known answers, should slap you in the face very quickly. This happens during a walk during the desert, as well, though with lower frequency as there’s less biomass.

When I walk through the rainforest, I see something new every time I step out. Among the things that visibly move under their own power, ants are clearly the dominant feature of rainforests. If I want to be able to ask a whole bunch of questions, and had to pick a taxon, ants are a good way to go. (A well known and true event is that Bert Hölldobler and Ed Wilson spent two weeks together at what is now my field site; it resulted in three very cool publications based on what they found.) One major unexplored frontier is the leaf litter of tropical rainforests. Nearly all of the the primary production of the forest ends up on this thin layer between the sky and the earth, as Jack Longino once said, and we know so little about it and its denizens. It’s a big linkage in food webs that is a huge black box with respect to most fields of ecology (aside from ecosystem ecology, though this is still not as well known as it could be in this respect).

Now you can see why I have trouble assembling an elevator talk.

I propose a taxonomy of research goals, with three domains:

Discovery. Finding or creating something brand new – a species, a theory, a mechanism.
Improving ideas. This is the theoretical bandwagon – amassing evidence to flesh out, support, refute or modify existing theories.
Tinkering. There’s a little something that doesn’t make sense and you want to figure it out. Your goal is not to create a new theory or to test specific hypotheses.

Obviously the third category wouldn’t sit well with funding agencies. That’s not keeping me from adopting this approach as my primary orientation. From reading my papers, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which primary goal led to a particular manuscript, though it’s almost always the result of tinkering. You can’t sell tinkering to well-read journals in the current environment. They want you start your story as if your experiment was always designed to test one very specific hypothesis, even if everybody knows that isn’t true.

When I’m wondering what project I want to do next, I do a few things. I weigh a bunch of factors – what’s fundable, what’s do-able, and what’s publishable.

Then I notice the file on my desktop, and I toss all of that crap aside.

I do that little thing that’s always been nagging: “Answer me!” Then, I go off and do that project. My only problem is that the list of nagging questions is far too long for me to answer in one lifetime.

You might be asking, “How’s that working out for ya?” I’ll get to that next week with some specific examples.

It’s taxonomist appreciation day!

Have you reminded that special person in your life exactly what they mean to you?

Research engines come up empty for the phrases “systematist appreciation day” and “taxonomist appreciation day.”

I want to declare a new holiday!

If you’re a biologist, no matter what kind of work you do, there are people in your lives that have made your work possible.

Even if you’re working on a single-species system, or are a theoretician, the discoveries and methods of systematists are the basis of your work. Long before mass sequencing or the emergence of proteomics, and other stuff like that, the foundations of bioinformatics were laid by systematists.

We need active work on taxonomy and systematics if our work is going to progress, and if we are to apply our findings. Without taxonomists, entire fields wouldn’t exist. We’d be working in darkness.

I can lay it on thicker, but you know how important systematists are. Arguing for their importance would just minimize the obviousness of their significance.

Taxonomists and systematists often work in obscurity, and some of the most painstaking projects come to fruition after long years with only a small dose of the recognition that is required.

One particular systematist has made almost everything I do possible. He chose one small piece of the planet, and decided to make it his goal to find every single ant in the place. He came mighty darn close, with well >400 species documented. Check this out: He didn’t just document them, but for pretty much every genus, he came up with user-friendly and easy-to-use taxonomic keys for the region. In some messy genera, in which keys are difficult, he came up with even more user-friendly ways to distinguish species among one another. Each species has its own page, with detailed notes about natural history, including where, when and how it has been collected, with lots of useful but not over-reaching speculation based on his supreme natural history mojo. This all happened in one of the most species-rich spots on the planet (if only because he documented all of the richness better than anybody else anywhere).

You wouldn’t think that one of the easiest places in the world to identify an ant to species would be a tropical rainforest, but thanks to his work, it is. For years now, he’s moved on to the rest of the tropical Americas. I’m excited for what’s next.

Jack Longino, you are the wind beneath my wings.

Get out there and #loveyourtaxonomist, even if Linneaus was a pompous jerk.

How to figure out if you want to work at a teaching university

Do you want to know what it’s like to be a professor at a teaching campus? The single best thing you can do to figure this out is to visit.

All through grad school, I was pretty sure I wanted to work at a PUI (primarily undergraduate institution), if only because I went to one and liked it so much.

At the time, I didn’t really know what the job was like. My time as an undergrad didn’t give me any idea about what it would be like to be a professor at one. I knew what life as a PI at an R1 university was like from being in the lab, seeing what what faculty were doing all the time, particularly my own advisor.

A teaching campus is really, really, really different from where you went to grad school and did your postdoc. It’s hard to learn what it is like unless you spend some real time at one, and not as an undergrad. Interviews don’t count at all, either. That’s a magical time when money flows easily, everybody has time for you, anything you choose to ask for can be agreed to as a possibility, and they are trying to convince you to take the job. It’s different once you’re there.

The best way to do this is to take a job as a visiting Assistant Professor, on a sabbatical replacement spot. But that choice would lead you near-permanently off the road towards a tenure-track position at a research university. If you aren’t sure about your calling, this is an extreme step. Those jobs aren’t easy to get, anyway. Adjuncting at a teaching campus doesn’t count either. If you’re an adjunct, then your experience will be fundamentally different than the tenure-track experience.

The best thing to is to visit. Call some colleagues up — if you don’t know anybody, ask around — and ask if you can spend a day or two on campus. Ask if it’d be possible to give a talk. Visit a fancy expensive small liberal arts school, and a 4-year regional teaching campus (North Southern Western State), and whatever else that isn’t too much of a drive. If you went to one for college, go back and visit. Your old professors would get a kick out of seeing you, and they can give you an honest take on their job.

This is how I cure premeds. I ask them if they’ve volunteered in a hospital, or if they’ve shadowed a doctor. Most premeds don’t know what it’s like to be a doctor on a day in, day out kind of basis. If they’re spending time with a doctor, then they’ll see it’s a pretty boring job, and with a lot of monotony, and with little freedom. You shouldn’t be a premed unless you’ve spent lots of time in a hospital. This is prerequisite for an informed decision.

Likewise, you shouldn’t be applying to PUIs unless you know what it’s like to be a professor at one. I’m writing about the various challenges we have, and the wonderful things that happen too, but the understanding is primarily experiential. What is it like to teach that much, and how does it affect what else I do? How do you relate to students, what do they expect, what kinds of resources are available in labs, and how do your collaborations work?

These things all very greatly from campus to campus. But unless you know exactly what the experience might be like on a daily basis, you won’t know what to look for when you’re interviewing. Putting in the time up front will help. And, when you go to conferences, hanging out with the faculty from those kinds of schools will give you a good idea, too.

So, give some of us a call. We’d love to hang out with you for a day or two. It won’t be the most exciting thing, but you’ll see what we do, what we can do, what we can’t, and how we balance things. Better yet, you can look up someone with whom you want to collaborate, and it can be a working visit. (If you’ve got some serious community assembly mojo, you’re particuarly welcome at this moment. I’ve got something with 2% left that’s driving me nuts.)

Online learning is the ghetto of higher education

People need to rethink the concept of the digital divide.

In our society, the digital divide doesn’t separate those who have access to computers and those who don’t.

It separates those who are required to use digital devices for learning and those who have the privledge of learning directly from genuine experts.

Soon enough, if my legislature has its way, the wealthy will get to go to real colleges and take classes with real professors. Everybody else is sitting at home on a computer.

Those who are pushing MOOCs and online learning as an alternative to higher education are trying to take my students away from me. The big push is coming from those who stand to gain financially, or from those trying to balance the budget books, so I won’t trust them much on the matter of best educational practices.

Perhaps I’m narcissistic in overvaluing my role in higher education. I think the most important part of my students’ experience is me. I’m involved in their lives in a way that can’t be done online.

The student population on my campus is mostly low-income, working part-time or full-time, first-generation college students, nearly all from groups underrepresented in the sciences. These are, by definition, disadvantaged students. This isn’t an insult, just a fact – the deck is stacked against them based on their background. They have a competitive disadvantage against those with more resources and against those with a pedigree that creates access to fancier opportunities.

This year, a few undergraduates who have worked with me are heading off to great graduate programs. What all of them have in common is that they started working with faculty at my university in the classroom and in the lab, in person. They’ve all told me and my colleagues that there’s no way they would have been able to do what they’ve done without us as a resource and as an influence. I take them at their word.

All the research shows that personal interventions into the lives of disadvantaged students is what leads to their success.

The students that need personal interactions with their professors are the ones that are the most economically disadvantaged.

This is the same group of students who will be the first pushed into online education instead of going to college for real. Why aren’t people more worried about this?

Some are – there is a bunch of concern at Computing Education, such as this post. Overall, though, as usual, the underrepresented students remain, well, underrepresented.

Pointing this fact out doesn’t come without some personal risk at annoying my higherups. My university is deep in the push for online education, and has a mess of wholly online degrees, such as a B.S. in “Applied Studies,” whatever that is.

My university is also known as a place of refuge for the disenfranchised and disadvantaged. This is a painful irony that we are at the forefront of the push for online learning. Pushing students out of our labs and onto their laptops.

As a mentor to undergraduates, and an advocate for undergraduate research as a great way to learn, I wonder how this online education trend will affect the ability for students to truly move ahead. I wonder, but I will never want to find out, because I don’t want it to happen.

I just want these students physically in my lab, where I can chat with them personally and help them in ways that I can’t over a computer screen. Please don’t take them away from the university. Please give me the chance to speak with them, listen to them, and show them how to become scientists. Please don’t take away their best chance at success. Don’t make them settle for anything less than what wealthy students are getting at more heavily endowed campuses. Give them what they need to get from college – personal, actual connections with their professors.

You can let the students of privilege take their classes online, if you think online education is just as good. Those students don’t need the face time like the disadvantaged students do. If you don’t like that idea, it’s only because you acknowledge the fact that one truly is lesser than the other.

Ant science: Thievery persists in a world of plenty

I can forgive people for overlooking the fascinating behaviors of the thieving ant Ectatomma ruidum. There are so many ants with peculiar and amazing features (like agricultural ants, and those with rampaging armies). Some just fly under the radar.

Here’s the latest from my lab.

A few decades ago, Mike Breed and his students were studying behavior, and one part of the work involved using baits to feed ants. He noticed that sometimes, when a colony brought a good piece of bait underground, a different ant took it out of the colony, and carried it in a straight line to a neighboring colony. With a set of careful observations, excavations, labeling workers and some nestmate recognition chemistry, he described a unique phenomenon.

The sneaky thief

Colonies of E. ruidum steal from one another, all the time. They have a caste of specialized thieves that spend their time hiding out in a particular neighboring colony. When some good food comes along, they bring it back to their own colony. The best food items move around from one colony to another like uneaten Christmas fruitcake, only everybody wants it instead of passing it off. The behavior of the thieving has been worked out well by the Breed lab, in a great set of papers. (And, I’m biased, because Mike Breed was my own PhD advisor, the best one I could have had.)

I wanted to understand how this thieving can persist, with everybody stealing from everyone else. This phenomenon makes a jumble of most game theoretical models, because everyone seems to be cheating, all of the time. What makes thieving happen? If they have plenty of food, do they stop thieving?

We ran an experiment in which we gave the colonies as much food as they ever could have wanted. It turns out that the rate of thieving did slow down.

The surprising result was that they kept continuing to steal from their neighbors, even when they had everything they could ever want.

This raises many more questions about the function, evolution and maintenance of thievery. We’re actively working on that, with some work finished and more in the works, and I’ll share more as it comes out.

How this project happened in my teaching institution

I’ve long wanted to work on the ecology of thieving, ever since I helped out on a project with these ants. However, I never had the time to set aside.

In 2008, a friend of mine had a PhD student who was working on poneromorph ants, who was interested in getting some time in the tropics. I was down in Costa Rica with a group of undergrads at the field station, and Benoit Guénard joined us a few weeks. He was a tremendous influence on my students with his enthusiasm, natural history talent, and the most robust work ethic I’ve ever seen. Seriously. We knocked out this project together, with Benoit taking the lead.

So, it took 4 years to get this paper out. In that time, Benoit completed his dissertation on the invasion of the Giant Needle Ant and also has done some top notch work on the macroecology of ant diversity patterns. Once his dissertation was out of the way, he focused on writing up this thieving experiment that we started early on in his dissertation. (I also have a few other collaborations with grad students, and former grad students, that are also awaiting a writeup. We’ll get to them, eventually. There are worse things than a backlog of papers that need to be written.)

Theoretical bandwagons are for big labs

Small labs should avoid theoretical bandwagons. It’ll make it hard to get money, publish and do good work effectively.

In an earlier post, I described two categories of research: the development of new ideas, and the testing, shaping and fine-tuning of these ideas.

I said I didn’t like either of the categories. I’ll explain that next week, but to get to that point I need to explain how big labs are designed for bandwagons, and how labs at teaching institutions should avoid designing their work to address bandwagon theories.

A bandwagon — as I use it here — is any theory, topic, or issue that lots of people are working on simultaneously. What do I think are some bandwagons at the moment? It’s easy, just pop open a journal and look at the table of contents! In ecology and social insects, my two main fields, here are a few that are at some point in the bandwagon boom-and-bust cycle: functional traits to understand community structure and assembly; genomic approaches to understanding the social regulation of development; models of geographic range shifts in response to climate change; physiological and genomic mechanisms of task allocation. (You could also throw in arguing about group selection, but that’s more about yelling than data.)

I’m not saying that the scientific community doesn’t need this work to happen. All of these topics are very interesting, and people have chosen them because they’re ripe for discovery and progress. It’s not a bad thing that these topics are bandwagons. When great ideas come along, we need people to work on them, including both disagreements and points of consensus. This is the standard practice of science.

It’s so much the standard practice of science, that labs at research institutions are engineered to thrive while working on bandwagons. Race cars are built for speed, thermoses are designed to keep your drinks hot, and many big research labs are designed to produce bandwagon research. (Not all big labs do, but they can be easily engineered to do so if this is the goal of the PI.)

If you’re running your own small lab at a teaching institution, there are a number of major strategic disadvantages from working on the same questions as big labs. These are disadvantages because they make it harder for the lab to get grants, publish papers, have a visible research profile, develop collaborations and provide the best opportunities for students.

No matter what you do, you won’t be perceived as the primary expert on the bandwagon topic. There will always be someone who is considered to be the authority, who is more productive on the topic. This person will have a whole lab working alongside them on the same topic. Moreover, this person’s name tag at conferences will have the name of big of a research university next to their own. Does this perception as an expert matter? Sure it does. This kind of perception enables you to do better science and gives better resources for your students.

Big labs can mobilize to jump on bandwagons quickly. They can turn on a dime by having a new dissertation start on the project, or assigning a postdoc to it. (You’re thinking, dissertations don’t start overnight?! Compared to the timescale of when I start and finish projects, they do. Tomorrow is a story about a quick project done in 2008 but was published this year. That’s par on my course. The manuscript I’m editing today has has had all of the data assembled on my hard drive for seven years. And I’ve been thrilled about it the whole time, too. And – get this – it’s still not stale. It’s actually ripened.)

You don’t want to work on a specific aspect of a project when other bigger labs will get to them quickly. Moreover, big labs will work so quickly that they will exhaust it before you get finished. In ecology, for example, thank goodness I didn’t work on the mid-domain effect myself or I would have entirely missed that wave before I even submitted my first paper. I would like to work on functional traits in ants, as the ideas seem interesting, but the same thing will happen to me if I do that. My paper would be passé by the time I tried to publish it.

Big labs need big funding. Theoretical bandwagons are the things that attract dollars. They can be sold as “transformational” research that NSF is seeking to support. Most of these potentially transformative projects will end up in the dustbin of history, and a small fraction will result in big change. If you’re a big lab and you need to pay for people, then you better hop on board! If you don’t, you’ll have trouble keeping staffed. If you’re top notch, you an create your own bandwagon. But if you catch it in the first couple years, then you can still get in there for one grant cycle, or maybe even two. Following the same principle, bandwagons are horrible for small labs because they can never compete with these big labs that are putting in proposals on the same question. They’d never survive a side-by-side comparison once you put the biosketches up against one another. Of course they’ll fund the lab that they think will get 10-20 papers out of a project when they think you’ll only get a few out of it. So stay away unless you have the record to show that you can beat the top labs riding the same bandwagon.

To be clear: I am not suggesting that scientists at teaching schools specialize on an obscure topic that nobody is interested in, that can be mined for a series of novel but inconsequential publications.

I not suggesting that you stay fully clear of theoretical bandwagons under all circumstances, but only that if you hop on it should be with a big lab that is ready to roll. You also could take an existing project of yours and sell it this way, if you wish, though that will shorten its shelf life.

Next week, I’ll share a taxonomy of research goals, which will explain how I think you can do novel and truly meaningful research without chasing theories-of-the moment.

Mentorship = Training?

When I was an undergraduate in the early ’90s, I didn’t do much research. But when the students in my midst were doing research, they weren’t being “mentored.” They were getting “research training” or doing “undergraduate research.”

Nowadays, we “mentor.”

Is there any difference in what we are doing now compared to what people used to do, or is it just an evolution of nomenclature?

Here’s exhibit A. On Dynamic Ecology and elsewhere, they were having fun comparing historical trends with Google’s n-grams. I couldn’t resist cooking my own up:

Google n-gram of the use of the terms “undergraduate research,” “research training” and “mentorship” in books over time

Oddly enough, the rise and fall of “undergraduate research” corresponds well with the use of that dated term to refer to female college students, “coed”:

The way I read this, there was a steady climb in “research training” after World War II. On the other hand, the popularity of the term “undergraduate research” tracks disco on the airwaves, or the push for the Equal Rights Amendment. “Mentorship,” though, has steadily climbed since the 1980s, following the wake of “undergraduate research.” I won’t tell the people at CUR if you don’t tell them.

I think what we are doing, on a day to day basis in our labs with our students, hasn’t substantially changed ever since the term “undergraduate research” was popularized.

The term “mentorship” is broadly applied to many circumstances. It’s not just used for undergraduate research. (In 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy was Liz Lemon’s “mentor.”). However, the rise of the term in general does seem to have displaced “undergraduate research” off the radar.

I have to admit that I’m partial to the notion that “mentorship” is different in philosophy than “training.” In the context of training Master K-12 science teachers to help new teachers being inducted into the profession, I’ve gotten some exposure to training in a formalized program that shows people how to mentor, called “Cognitive Coaching.” I bet the Cognitive Coaching people will disagree with me, but this is mostly about learning how to mentor, by learning how to truly listen well and coach someone through a learning process or challenge. I was skeptical of the whole concept at first, but let me tell you that every person I know who has gone through the training is very positive about it and says it was helpful, and these are people who don’t like to have their time wasted.

I can train someone. Mentorship is more difficult, because it takes more patience. Mentorship requires that you help someone figure it out for themselves when they can. Training is just showing someone how to do it and make sure they copy well.

I aspire to the practice of mentorship. I’m not a patient person, but I try. Let’s hope the change in language reflects a change in practice. However, I wouldn’t recommend that the Council for Undergraduate Research change its name to feature the role of Undergraduate Mentorship more prominently.

On gender, parenting and academic careers

It used to happen all the time. I’d be out in public, with my son, at the grocery store, zoo or bagel shop. A friendly person would ask,

Babysitting today?

And I want to punch someone. Or punch something else. Or cry.

Instead, I grit my teeth, and reply with masked fury, in a moderately loud and determined voice:

I am not babysitting. I am parenting. This is my own son. We do this all the time.

Then, I mutter under my breath:

Idiot.

I don’t get this remark anymore, now that my kid is approaching ten years of age. Instead, I can see that when I’m hanging out with my kid on a Saturday morning, folks could be jumping to a couple other conclusions. One might be that I have partial custody and am getting in “quality time,” or that I’m letting mom sleep in because she’s worked so hard parenting during the week. They might not jump to these conclusions. But one that is less likely is the truth, is that I’m parenting while my spouse is working.

I regularly get asked about my field research. I go to one place in the rainforest for weeks at a time, during which I am supervising students, working in the field and lab, and am generally really busy.

Do you take your wife down with you?

What is odd, is that people rarely ask if she joins me. They ask if I’m taking her. I do take students down. But if my wife were to go, I wouldn’t be “taking” her. She’d be making the time to come along. I think, “She’s not a possession for me to bring along as I please wherever I go. We both have things to do you know.” Instead, I reply:

No, she’s busy working. I don’t think she can blow so much time to go to watch me work or to volunteer as my field tech. Also, someone has to take our kid to school and feed him, so I’m rather grateful to her to cover for me while I’m gone. She has come down a few times, for some vacation before or after my work, though we’d rather vacation somewhere new when we have the chance. Actually, this summer my kid’s coming along for a couple weeks and I’m looking forward to that.

I’m more inclined to give people a free pass, because most people — even other scientists — can’t really imagine what it’s like down at the field station where I work, nor what I do from moment to moment. Nevertheless, it does seem absurd that someone would think my wife could just drop everything and join me as an accessory.

The bottom line is that If I was a woman, nobody would be asking me if I “take my husband” to the rainforest while I was working. Nobody would ask me if I was “babysitting” my own child if they saw me with him in a jogging stroller at the zoo.

These remarks don’t make me a victim of bias, other than the fact that I find them annoying. These remarks actually have the false presumption that I am the beneficiary of bias.

The unfortunate truth is that these mistaken assumptions have a real basis. Why do I really want to punch someone when they ask if I’m babysitting? Because most of the other guys at the grocery store with their kids probably are babysitting their own children.

Many families that I know well have one parent employed full-time, with the other part-time or not at all. In those cases, the division of parenting and household labor makes sense. In dual-career couples, though, it’s far too often that the guy ends up not holding up his end of the marital bargain.

I don’t know if my wife would tolerate it if I didn’t do my fair share of parenting. She presumably would be annoyed, but if I just abdicated my responsibility, then she would have no choice to pick up the slack. It would be the same the other way around, if she didn’t do her share of the parenting then I would have to.

This is the book I'm reading with my kid now, from a 1927 edition. The token role of fathers in their children's lives has always been important to their development

This is title page of the book that I’m reading with my kid now, from a 1927 printing. Even back then, the token role of fathers in their children’s lives was promoted, perhaps even more robustly than in today’s parenting culture that still emphasizes the role of mothers over fathers.

In our culture, in dual-career couples, many fathers feel perfectly free to let the mothers do more than their fair share. This rarely happens the other way around.

I don’t look at the arc of history and see the need for systemic progress. It would be great if our jobs made more accommodations for working families and the entire NSF work-life balance agenda is great. But this is not the root of the problem, and you can’t fix it by simply giving women more slack or more time or more money. Those fixes just make it less worse.

I see individual people making bad decisions. I see men who choose work over family voluntarily, and I also see some women who step in and parent without giving their spouses the opportunity to carry the load. The problem starts once a dual-career family lets one spouse assume more responsibility than the other one.

In my family, we’re not equal, but I think we are equivalent. I have to admit that I rarely do our laundry. On the other hand, I spend an equivalent amount of time cooking. I would hope that if a behaviorist were scoring my house with an ethogram, that we’d come out relatively even with respect to domestic duties. The number of nights that I’m out for social affairs or volunteering match hers. (I do teach nights a couple times per week, though that often means that I get other mornings and evenings. It evens out.)

More importantly, we come out equivalent on parenting. I hold this as a point of pride, but it really should not be a point of pride. It should be the status quo, at least when both parents are working as much as the other.

The fact is that women are doing more parenting than their spouses, in most dual-career couples. This is not caused by biology or by the system. It’s caused by individual men screwing up.

I am tired of the trope that biological differences between genders makes women expend more time parenting than men. For most academic work (aside from dealing with reagents, and some fieldwork, and medical complications), women are capable of working for nearly the entire time they are pregnant. A few weeks after giving birth, in some cases, women are as physiologically capable of working as men. The one factor that continues is milk production. However, pumping can often work well and formula isn’t exactly evil. (For what it’s worth, my wife went back to work full time after six weeks and we never spent a dime on formula.)

The only biological difference that causes women to parent more is that men might be more likely to be born as jerks that let their wives’ careers suffer because they are inadequate parents.

Just because women are the producers of milk, shouldn’t that mean that men can just as easily step up to the plate and contribute in other ways?

Especially in academia, men have plenty of latitude to do their fair share of parenting compared to other careers because it’s so flexible. Women partnered with someone working a typical non-academic inflexible job also can get lots of spousal support, from a partner that is available to cover mornings, evenings and weekends.

I essentially took six months off to parent full-time, aside from Tuesdays when Grandma stepped in for us. Did this hurt my career? Actually, it did. I was at a Catholic university at the time, and my male Dean expressed concern about my request for paid parental leave (as clearly specified in faculty handbook), because that was intended only for mothers and not fathers. He told me that he understood my dilemma because he had five children of his own and he never missed a day of work. That conversation was not good for my career.

My point is that there is no inherent biological reason that mothers, more than fathers, may have more negative repercussions at their work because of parenting, because both are equally capable of doing so. There may be sexist reasons that transcend scheduling and effort, like I experienced, but that’s not going to stop me from doing my job as a parent.

(As a side note, have you ever looked inside Parenting magazine? It should be renamed Mothering magazine. There is always a column about fathers, but it is always, without exception, about how women can convince their husbands to do something like change a diaper once in a blue moon or do bedtime reading.)

The only biological difference that makes women parent more is that some men are assholes. These men don’t fulfill their duties to their spouses or they demonstrably care less about raising their families on a day to day basis.

If you tell me that women have more problems at work because of they have more parenting obligations than their spouses, then I tell you: their spouses are doing it wrong. And the women are doing it wrong because they’re accepting less than 50% from their spouses.

As you can tell, I get mad when gender is conflated with work-life balance issues. This is probably a chip on my shoulder from being a dad and spouse that did his fair share, in an environment where this is a rarity.

If you want to fix the dual-career couple inequity issue with respect to parenting, the first step is to tell women to not marry men who don’t parent enough. Women should not be spending more time parenting than their partners if they’re both living in the same house and both working full time. How many times and ways do I have to write this? Apparently, it is a lot, because it doesn’t seem like anybody else is saying it.

Of course, in our country there is so little systemic support, from the government, our own workplaces and our extended families, that we have a greater stress placed on working parents overall. This is not a gender issue, it’s a parenting issue.

If a married woman says that she has a greater challenge at her job because of the time demands of parenting, then she needs to hear that the problem is not the system, it’s her spouse. The problem might be her spouse’s boss, but I’m not convinced that this is a rampant problem. Perhaps this should be the main problem, but right now it isn’t.

I avoid these conversations because I it never has ended well when I’ve told a guy that he needed to spend more time parenting. And I don’t have the temerity to tell a woman that she picked a crappy husband who isn’t willing to accept 50% of the parenting load. (Now, I can just tell people to read my blog post about it and be done with it.) I’m not sure how to implement change when the necessary change requires individual responsibility on the part of others. We can raise sensitive males that understand their roles as partners. Hopefully, I’m doing that by example.

For me, it’s not a problem, because hanging out with my kid is the best thing in the world. I can’t conceive how a man would think otherwise about his own kids. I was lucky that my academic career gave me the flexibility to shut down my research program for a spell, so that I could be at home with my baby. (This I could do because I was at a teaching institution. With a big lab, and pressure for grants and pubs, it wouldn’t have happened that way, and daycare would have started earlier or we would have relied on extended family, both of which also would be fine options.) If I didn’t have that flexibility, I wouldn’t demand it of my wife. We’d solve it together, and it wouldn’t involve sacrificing her career.

There are substantial issues involving sexism in the sciences and academia, independent of parenting. That’s a separate issue, and one that I’m not addressing here. Perhaps I’m addressing it by claiming overtly that it is a separate issue — that parenting should not be a gender issue, and it’s only an issue in dual-career families in which the man is a wretched bum.

Every time I see a story or hear a person remark, “it’s great and inspiring that this woman can be a scientist and a parent” I get mad. You know what? That statement can apply to me, too, aside from the fact that I’m a man. I do just as much parenting as my spouse. My “success” or the lack thereof, that is tied to my status as a parent and a researcher, should represented in equal measure as it is for female scientists. (This would be different, of course, for single parents or those who have demonstrably jerky husbands.)

If you think that notion isn’t broadly applicable to all men, that’s because you think that many male scientists with kids are deadbeats. I might agree with you on that. The father-scientists I’m working with now seem to be dedicated and supportive of both their kids and their spouses, but that’s not the norm. My non-academic father friends are also doing their 50%, or their share depending on the family employment situation, but then again, I feel like I can’t relate to most guys, in part because of a fundamental difference in values. I can accept that some guys would be nuts for basketball, or have a specific religious belief, or drive a fuel-inefficient vehicle. But not parent 50%? That’s a dealbreaker.

If a man says that his full-time job doesn’t allow him the time or flexibility to do what needs to be done as a parent, and that’s why his wife is doing more parenting, I call bullshit. A woman would never say that she is incapable of doing what is necessary to be a good parent. A man should never be able to get away with saying something like that.

That just means that you don’t have the courage to tell your work that you prioritize your family over the job, and it means that you’re letting your wife do that and take the damage to her career as a result. That’s cowardice.

If there’s going to be a change, then men have to stop being cowards and start parenting. Men can address this problem by accepting the same career risks of parenting that are being endured by their partners. Until that happens, any progress is a mirage.

What happens off campus stays off campus

I suspect that one’s research profile on campus has no relationship to what happens off campus in the research community. (Keep in mind that this pertains to teaching campuses.)

These kinds of perceptions might matter, to some extent, if they govern how resources are allocated.

A person might be considered to be mighty fine on campus in their small pond (get it?!), but among their research peers could be unknown. Likewise, I’ve known a couple people who have been tremendous scholars in their own fields but this fact was either unknown, unappreciated, or willfully ignored on their own campus.

There might even be a negative relationship between the two parameters. Some people who have scant standing in their scholarly communities can easily puff up every little thing and can readily deceive professors outside their disciplines. In some fields, conferences are more prestigious than journal articles, and in others, only books count for much. In one’s own department, the sham might be transparent, but throughout campus the big scholarly charades can be successful. Promoting yourself on campus takes time, and that’s time that could be spent getting real work done.

Serious and productive scholars may have no time or incentive for promoting or discussing their research on campus. In departments or colleges where major research is more cause for suspicion than praise (which I’ve seen multiple times), wise researchers should keep their heads down.

(As a corollary, most administrators are smart people and can see through the bunk pretty easily, and they also have access to information that others don’t have. So, a widespread perception among faculty on campus doesn’t mean that the the Dean and the Provost don’t know the time of day. This is, as far as I’m concerned, the only place where perceptions matter, because this is where resources get allocated. I don’t really know how to influence this, though, other than by keeping my head down and working. If I use my words sparingly, each one will have more weight. So, I avoid interacting with administrators as much as possible, so that if I really do need something, there’s a greater chance they’ll be there for me. That’s the most sophisticated I’ve gotten at image management, which I think is rudimentary.)

In short, my anecdotal observations suggest that, the more someone talks about research on a teaching campus, the less it happens. I’m not sure how universal this observation might apply, though.

Efficient teaching: exam writing vs. exam grading

Grading sucks. I hate grading. I guess even the best job in the world has its downside.

I hate grading because it makes me think about all of the less un-fun things that I could be doing at that moment. And I often do those things (like laundry, or dishes) instead of grading. Which only makes grading worse.

I’ve never actually given a scantron exam in a class that I’ve had the freedom to teach how I wanted. I haven’t had a massive class that’s required this approach (or a small army of student graders). I’m not inherently opposed to multiple choice exams, but I’ve mostly been in places where they were not appreciated, at least not in the kinds of classes I have been assigned.

One of the reasons I haven’t liked multiple choice exams is that writing a good one takes a lot of time. (And, even when I’ve used some of these questions on a paper exam, I find that they can contain a lot of hidden cultural biases that only come out when talking with students afterwards.)

If your exams aren’t multiple choice, then how can you do spare yourself grading hell?

You can’t. But you can lessen it.

Which is more annoying, writing an exam or grading?

This is just a working hypothesis. It’d be interesting to really know. But not interesting enough to delve into the education literature.

On one extreme, you could write an exam in ten seconds. It would ask:

Explain in detail the five most important ideas that you learned while studying for this class in the past month.

Very easy to write, very hard to grade.

When underthinking exam questions, then we could be in for a world of hurt when we have to grade the responses. You can’t necessarily create a perfect rubric up front, because you might get correct but unanticipated answers.

Students can put all kinds of crazy stuff down when you ask questions on exams. Sometimes, this crazy stuff is actually factually correct and directly answers your question. Even if the answer is not addressing the content that you were expecting the question evaluate?

Badly Worded Question: When the earth had more oxygen in the atmosphere, would the sky appear orange or not? Explain your answer with a sentence.

Correct answer: Yes. The sky would either be orange, or it would not be orange.

I have a really hard time marking points off a question which is fully answered correctly, even if the correct answer isn’t what I anticipated. (In fact, I promise I won’t do this to my students, as a part of a policy of transparency and fairness.) The onus is on me to write questions that directly get at what I need to know to assess their content knowledge and the ability to process it (Blooms taxonomy, yadda yadda…)

So, if you make sure your exam is airtight going in, then grading it should be easier.

But writing exams is no fun either. So we don’t write the best exams in the first place. Maybe the memories of painful grading are enough of a stick to make us write tighter exams.

hat tip to Prof-Like Substance for venting about grading.

About face

I’ve wholly changed the ‘about‘ for the site. You can learn more about me that way.

I’m still new to blogging. Just like playing an instrument or wrangling a bullet ant, being a dutiful observer doesn’t mean that you can do it well. I’m still learning. Even if the blog isn’t about me, it’s my blog and being forthright about that fact is part of doing it well.

I’m psyched about how the blog is coming along. I particularly want to thank Jeremy Fox and his blog, Dynamic Ecology, which has been particularly supportive. I don’t want to blog about blogging, so I’ll just shut up. Thanks for reading.

Making ideas or evaluating them? Climbing aboard theoretical bandwagons

It’s no mere coincidence that both Darwin and Wallace figured out natural selection at roughly the same time. The basic facts at the foundation of the mechanism of natural selection seem to have been established for a couple millennia. They didn’t converge until the Victorian era of natural philosophers. Before that time, some false assumptions about the nature of existence stood in the way.

In a similar vein, both Newton and Leibniz independently developed calculus at the same time as one another.

Likewise, Verhulst created the logistic equation. Then, it took almost 100 years for someone to come upon this again, by Pearl and by Lotka who did this independently of one another.

At the start of the 1900s, people were attempting to build a heavier-than-air machine capable of controlled flight. There was a convergence of technology and ideas that allowed these things to develop on three continents, at just about the same moment in human history. That’s no mere coincidence. History was ripe for that to happen, though it took a special vision, and plenty of hard work applied in just the right way, to put things together. The Wright Brothers were were perpetual tinkerers. They were also driven by data, experimentation and critical analysis of their findings, allowing them to figure out the actually fatal errors of their predecessors. (It’s worth a visit to Dayton, I had the chance to visit a couple months ago. Their bicycle shop looks and feels a lot like a lab you’d find at a small teaching school. It’s mighty inspiring.)

For every Darwin and Newton, whose ideas had contemporary shadows, there are many more innovators that go it alone. If their ideas were not developed, then we have to wonder if they ever would have happened. Some people say that about the smartphone. It’s hard to say how often this is true. Regardless, there is a reward to the first to figure out an important idea, when these ideas spur progress. (I have to admit that the copy of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions on my shelf is dusty and not fully read. I think more people have made it through Ulysses.)

I got to take a vacation to Iceland a couple years ago. It was enlightening. And there was a Penis Museum in Húsavík, too. For a millennium, Iceland’s subsistence living, and whatever mediocre export economy that could be mustered, depended heavily on sheep. While farmers in Europe were using the spinning wheel for centuries, Icelandic farmers were still spinning wool with feeble handspools. Moreover, back in the day they made shoes out of hide, but never figured out how to make leather. A long journey would require several pairs of shoes for long journeys because they would wear out so quickly. Some contemporary roads are named after the number of pairs of shoes it used to take to make the journey along the road. I don’t mean to pick on the Viking ancestors of contemporary Icelanders, as they withstood the little ice age far better than I ever could have. I don’t know if, while spinning wool on a handspool, I would have been the one to independently invent a spinning wheel separate from outside influence. I’d like to think I could have been that resourceful, though I might have been too busy to take the days off to work on it.

As contemporary Icelanders can tell you, the development of new ideas matters.

Orville and Wilbur Wright invented the plane. Now, without consulting Wikipedia, can you tell me who else was critical in the development of early airplanes?

Many people did great and important work on early flight. Their contributions were critical, even if we can’t recall many of their names. Heck, I’ve been surrounded by aviation history for more than a decade (on account of my spouse’s job and the location of my campus) and I can’t name more than a handful of the pioneers of early flight.

from Wikimedia Commons

Here’s why we can’t remember those other guys (and, it seems they indeed were all men) who turned early planes into something workable for society: their jobs were interchangeable.

I posit that anybody with the training in engineering, math and workmanship skills could have followed through on the first principles developed by the Wright Brothers to grow the field of aviation. Much of it was done by the Wrights themselves, but they had many colleagues and competitors. Flight wouldn’t have taken off (heh heh) unless there was the labor and brain juice expended by many people at the time.

When a new idea comes out, which is more important, the development of the idea or the fleshing out of the idea? Clearly, more glory comes with the former. Both are important. I think it’s silly to say that one is more important than the other because both are essential components. When a great idea comes around, someone’s got to put meat on those bones. It take a whole community of researchers to do that.

For example, some have said that E.O. Wilson is one of the most important scientists of the past century. Why do people say that? Because he created the kernels of many ideas. He put them out into the world, and then many people pursued them. These include the taxon cycle, island biogeography, the social regulation of caste in social insects, sociobiology. He fleshed out the ideas enough to get others to test them out in great detail. He never really lingered on these ideas once he put them out there.

The community of scientists is principally composed of people who are testing theories and fleshing them out. After someone figured out the spinning wheel, then there were many people who worked on the design to make it better. That task of filling-in-the-details is the currently bulk of work in science.

Humor me while I bring out a couple more examples.

In the field of ecology, Hubbell’s formulation of neutral theory was a major progress as a null model that was entirely lacking in community ecology. In the field of behavior, Hamilton’s conception of inclusive fitness revolutionized how we think about the evolution of social groups. After these ideas were formalized, small armies of researchers have pursued these questions to hammer out details, question theoretical foundations, and understand how things can be generalized and how things might not occur. Regardless of how significant kin selection is 100 years from now (I am not invested into it either way), the formulation of the idea by Hamilton was successful in spurring a scientific revolution, which is still spinning to this day (and Wilson even stepped into the fray as a gadfly).

Many of my friends and colleagues have done great work, with much of their careers invested, on the details of kin selection and many of its subtheories and corollaries. So, I hope I don’t hurt any feelings when I suggest the idea that a lot of this work could have been done by interchangeable scientists. (I’m open to being convinced otherwise.) The work required brilliance, perseverance and specialized training. However, if any one person didn’t make some of the contributions, then the gaps would have filled in by the others. As a group, the entire endeavor was significant and as a community, researchers of social animals learned a ton. I greatly value their contributions, and some of them are a model for how I run my own lab in a number of ways.

Who should be a part of that workforce ? Does it matter? Who is best suited to it?

Who is suited to making big new concepts, and who is suited to that kind of fleshing-out-of-ideas science, to test existing theories, and build upon these to make new subtheories? Moreover, what kinds of research labs are suited to each kind of option? My little undergraduate lab probably shouldn’t follow the same path of a lab with multiple doctoral students and postdocs.

So, I don’t choose that path. I mean: I don’t like either option. I choose option C.

What’s option C? That requires a taxonomy of research goals. That’s a set of posts within the next month.

Undergraduate research offices: what makes one work well?

Many universities – of all conformations and sizes – have a special center or office dedicated to undergraduate research. It’s a nice idea.

On some campuses, they are tremendously helpful. On others, I’ve seen or heard that they’re more of a hindrance than a help. Some campuses don’t have one. That’s a good thing if the office would be unhelpful, or a bad thing if the nonexistent office would be successful.

The scopes of these undergraduate offices vary, depending on how well they’re funded, and what level of buy-in they have from the administration and faculty. I actually haven’t had the benefit of having the services of any one of these offices yet, though I’ve worked with colleagues at many universities who have talked to me about their experiences. (I also have mentored students from schools with these offices.)

On the whole, I’ve heard more complaints than praise, but considering that our species is wont to complain, I imagine that by the existence of praise, a lot of these offices are doing fine. A colleague of mine once got a great bottle of wine for just submitting a grant that included undergraduate research. She didn’t complain.

Here is a partial list of things that the office can do:

Track data and progress on undergraduate research projects
Provide support for undergraduates, with respect to writing, test preparation, workshops
Coordinate lecture series
Promote and facilitate grant-writing to support undergraduate research.
Facilitate and advertise selection of students applying for undergraduate research programs (REU, MBRS, IRES, RISE, McNair)
Provide support to PIs of grants involving undergraduate research
Support (financially and otherwise) faculty mentoring undergraduates
Coordinate an undergraduate research-related events (like a poster session)
Direct an program that funds undergraduate research projects with internal funds
Provide space for research students to gather
Provide administrative support for project coordination

Sometimes these offices are run out of, or in coordination with, the offices of sponsored programs on campus. sometimes they’re separate entities that are run with distinct budget lines. I think the latter might allow for more latitude for the center to focus on its mission. What is that mission, though?

Often, what these offices do is murky and there is disagreement about the best use of the resources of the offices. I think that these conflicts arise from fundamental differences in the purpose of undergraduate research on campuses. Sometimes, there is a disagreement about what constitutes research itself.

It is mostly established that undergraduate research enhances the educational enterprise, and coursework that includes genuine and novel inquiry results in better learning. Some administrators and faculty have this as a primary goal, as a way of increasing retention, decreasing time to graduation, and promoting “best practices.” Some, on the other hand, see undergraduate research as an enterprise to prepare students for graduate school, and as having inherent value regardless of its effect on other aspects of academic life on campus. Others see undergraduate research as a mechanism for conducting a research program, and if a the campus is full of undergraduates, then “undergraduate research” just means “research.” On some research campuses, the office might even protect undergraduates from being the serfs of their labs.

I don’t think we all can agree on a definition of undergraduate research, though such definitions do exist. I say that research means that original scholarship is being conducted. If students are involved in research projects that are not intended to make new discoveries, then these in fact are not research projects. They’re merely learning exercises.

Moreover, scholarship itself is only useful if shared with the academic community. If a student develops new knowledge but that knowledge isn’t disseminated to the community of researchers in that field, then the research project was not a success. In my view — and I recognize that this is a minority view on teaching campuses — if a student research project doesn’t eventually make it to press, then it is not clear if it was genuine research. It was clearly research training. Keep in mind that pilots can go through stages of flight training without ever leaving the ground, and we go through earthquake safety training without having an earthquake.

So, are undergraduate research centers supposed to promote undergraduate research training, or undergraduate research itself? This is not idle discussion because it affects the decisions about how resources get allocated.

This distinction is tied to the heart of the notion of what happens on a teaching-centered institution. Is faculty research just there to keep the teaching instrument sharp, or are faculty expected to be active scholars? If it is the latter, then faculty are doing students a disservice if they’re not fully engaging them in opportunities for genuine research that are already taking place.

So how do you know if undergraduate research centers are successful? Many institutions use vague accounting, listing the number of students reported to participate in projects. More concretely, other metrics include the number of publications with undergraduate authors, the number of students employed to do research in the summer full-time and part-time during the academic year, or the long-term professional outcomes of the students. Others will count the number of dollars spent on student research; some administrators will be counting indirect cost recovery. The best metrics depend on the mission.

So, perhaps when building such an undergraduate research center, focusing on the mission is a critical starting point. You can’t get everyone to agree, but you need to clarify what the center is doing, and also why it is doing it. Consensus is always good, when possible.

If you have an undergraduate research center, could you remark on what you think works and doesn’t work? If you were in charge (or, if you are) what would you do if you could, and what would you not do?

We exist.

The National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC, USA

This is a manifesto about science research.

The National Museum of the American Indian opened on the national mall in Washington, DC in 2004, as a branch of the Smithsonian Institution. The building is a work of art, the exhibits are mostly engaging and informative, though the most remarkable thing about the place is the food court as its own lesson in biodiversity and cultural plurality. It’s worth a visit, along with scores of other great museums in DC.

The mission statement of the museum reads like boilerplate, about advancing knowledge about the diversity of Native American cultures in the Western Hemisphere. The museum itself accomplishes this task as well as it can, considering the massive diversity of peoples that could be represented within one building.

The NMAI was born after a long gestation, more than a decade. The creators of the museum had a tremendous challenge in presenting a unified structure that communicates the experiences of so many different kinds of peoples, ranging from those in the arctic to Patagonia and every place in between. They developed many mini-exhibits featuring a representative but small subset of the peoples of the Americas, featuring citizen curators who worked with the museum professionals in an attempt to use a small amount of space in an attempt to represent a culture. It was ambitious, and the success of these efforts varies. The result is a visual melange, and a cognitive jumble. This medium appears to be, in part, the message of the curators.

When the museum was being developed, it is my understanding that the creators had a more challenging mission, which isn’t explicitly stated on their website. They realized that most US citizens have a mistaken view of the role of Native Americans in our past and present.

This primary task for the museum is very straightforward: Tell the people that Native Americans still exist. Tell the people that Native Americans are one of us.

I suspect that museum staff hopes that visitors to the museum leave thinking, “I had no idea! This was a total surprise.” I would guess that the typical visitor walking through the doors for the first time might expect a series of maps, valuable old artifacts, and a history lesson. Instead, the exhibits are about the lives of people who are alive today, where they live, how they make their living, and the great diversity of their spiritual, linguistic and social practices.

American Indians are not (just) a part of history. They are a large set of vibrant and active cultures living within and among all of those who live in the Americas. If you learn about American Indians in school in the US, the story you learn is that the European settlers steadily and systematically exterminated Native Americans. That story is a falsity. Native Americans persist. They are both distinct and a part of us.

What does this have to do with being a scientist?

The mission statements of this site, of sorts (the “about” tab and “rationale for existence“) said that I wanted to represent the experience of doing research in a teaching institution. There are many kinds of teaching schools, and they all have different kinds of opportunities and challenges. I thought that those of us doing research in these environments should have a bigger voice.

I have received unanticipated (and uniformly wonderful) feedback from readers, especially senior graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty. Based on what they’ve told me, I now realize that I had jumped the gun with my mission statement. I started by getting into the nitty-gritty of what it’s like doing research on a teaching campus. That wasn’t a mistake, but I didn’t adopt the broader perspective. I needed to follow the example of the creators of the National Museum of the American Indian. I neglected to frame this endeavor with an elemental message:

We exist.

We are doing research in these teaching campuses. To take this kind of job doesn’t mean that our research career is over. We do research in your field, and we train those who become your graduate students. We create new knowledge and we are scholars just like you.

We are one of you.

We are rarely on disciplinary grant review panels or the mastheads of journals. We aren’t able to hire your grad students as postdocs. We are rarely invited to give seminars at your big research universities, because schmoozing us won’t yield as many tangible benefits as schmoozing someone else.

This doesn’t invalidate the fact that many of us have good research labs. We read and publish in the same journals as you. We get funding from the same agencies, and we have specific talents and resources that allow us to get stuff done and to be valuable collaborators. Our undergraduates do not handicap our research programs. These students are our greatest asset. They are both the means and the ends.

The grad student who opens a research lab in a teaching campus is not a failure. Be proud. Do not expect us to disappear from science. If you keep us as members of your research community, we will be able to participate in the community.

Don’t see this as settling for less.

It’s not less, unless you perpetuate this perspective.

On teaching campuses, faculty aren’t required to do much research, if at all. This doesn’t prevent some us from running serious and productive research labs. We have to do some things differently. We also have the opportunity to do things differently.

And, let’s face facts. There is a steady decline of tenure-track positions as the 20th century notion of the professoriate is relegated to the history books. Nowadays, lots of researchers are taking teaching positions. Research institutions, and their faculty lines, will not disappear, but it’s been a long time since research has broken out of traditional research institutions in the United States.

Researchers have a variety of motives for taking jobs at teaching schools. Some are dedicated to teaching and are seeking to do both teaching and research actively. Others are more excited about teaching, and others might prefer a research institution but have personal reasons for choosing a particular job. While there is more competition for tenure-track jobs at top research universities, none of these jobs are inherently easier, less stressful or more rewarding, if you’re doing them right.

It’s not easy to do research at any university. You’re working to keep funded from grant cycle to grant cycle, and juggle competing demands of student training, teaching, service, writing, and outreach. At teaching campuses, we do things differently than at research institutions. That’s what this site is about – how research gets done at teaching schools.

It sounds like I’ve struck a resonant chord so far. I’m hopeful that what I choose to write here continues to be helpful to those developing their career paths, at all levels. So far, I’ve heard that the most helpful aspect has been the formerly tacit message, that we exist.

It should seem perfectly natural for labs at research universities to train people to run research labs on teaching campuses. After all, that is the actual status quo. My job here is, in part, to make this obvious fact more visible, and a shift in this perception will continue to produce more great research labs on teaching campuses. If this site is capable of shifting perceptions, then it is my hope to write this blog out of existence.

And now, back to our normal programming.

A formal model for undergraduate authorship

The standard guidelines for authorship rarely address undergraduate-specific issues. Earlier, there was some interesting discussion about what it takes to make an undergraduate a first author, and the costs and benefits of working to make this happen. Since then, I’ve been made aware of a detailed and thoughtful article specifically addressing this topic, by Burks and Chumchal at Southwestern University and Texas Christian University.

If you’re thinking about investing the time into mentoring an undergrad through the long slog of the writing process, this fuel for thought is worth your own time to read. There is a great list of recommended strategies, which we only touched on in the comments before. Here’s a copy. The paper includes this decision tree:

a decision tree to figure out how an undergrad is an author

From: Burks, R.L. and M.M. Chumchal. 2009. To Co-Author or not to co-Author: How to write, publish, and negotiate issues of authorship with undergraduate research students. Science Signaling 2: tr3.

This article was sent to me by a reader who didn’t want himself to be identified. Thanks, anonymous correspondent!

This paper is spot on and provides a very useful way to structure a project even before you start. There are a few tacit assumptions in here, though, of which I’m not wholly convinced.

Publication with undergraduates makes it harder to get into a higher tier journal (potentially because of time constraints)
Lack of institutional support may alter the costs and benefits of involving students in research
The motivation for supporting student authorship will vary with tenure/promotion status

The paper also addresses whether or not students earn any authorship at all, and if so, what position. This part made me feel better, because it looks like my current practice mostly follows the recommendations. However, the authors suggest that if a project couldn’t have been completed without a student, then that students merits authorship, at least somewhere in the paper. Almost nothing in my lab gets done without students. What is the role of an undergraduate student who performs the role of a thoughtful technician? This student didn’t conceive the project, but they spent 200 person-hours working on it. They aren’t in a position to analyze or write (or, at least, I’m not in a position to mentor them on it). They collected nearly all the data but didn’t do much else. Are they coauthors? This is murky. The student has a good deal of ownership and the project would not exist without the student, but you did everything but collect data. I prefer to involve students more deeply, but sometimes this doesn’t happen.

This is still a dilemma for me. One of the pragmatic aspects that enter the equation is the professional trajectory of the student. Would the paper matter for them? This shouldn’t be a part of authorship criteria, but it’s hard to ignore.

Small Pond Science

Research, teaching, and mentorship in the sciences

Author: Terry McGlynn

Tribalism in the sciences: empiricists vs. theoreticians

It’s horrible to be able to do research in your own lab

A field course about ants this summer (some self-promotion)

Science is real

Consequences for those who assault our students

Negotiating for reassigned time when writing a grant

Making the telephone less annoying

It’s not easier, just different

A confession about service obligations

Startup needs for researchers in teaching schools

How tinkering can work as a research program

Accessing the articles you need (or not)

Efficient teaching: after academic dishonesty happens

I got me the travelin’ blues

Lab meetings: the publication process

Tinkering around is the best way to do research

It’s taxonomist appreciation day!

How to figure out if you want to work at a teaching university

Online learning is the ghetto of higher education

Ant science: Thievery persists in a world of plenty

Theoretical bandwagons are for big labs

Mentorship = Training?

On gender, parenting and academic careers

What happens off campus stays off campus

Efficient teaching: exam writing vs. exam grading

About face

Making ideas or evaluating them? Climbing aboard theoretical bandwagons

Undergraduate research offices: what makes one work well?

We exist.

A formal model for undergraduate authorship