How it is hard to remove useless pap from GE curricula

The university curriculum evolves, and is a creature that is shaped by a variety of environmental forces tugging at it in different directions. Just like any other organism.

The curriculum is pulled by budgetary swings, administrative agendas, educational fads, and the politics of interdepartmental relations. Changes to GE happen, but are rarely optimal because they always are forged in compromise.

There’s is always the weight of past precedent, from prior circumstances, that weigh down the GE.

As a biologist, I see this as a university-scale example of genetic load.

J.B.S. Haldane coined the term “genetic load,” and mathematically expressed it. In a nutshell, for non-biologists, genetic load is the evolutionary baggage that you carry along with you as the result of natural selection on something else. As evolution improves on some traits, other non-adaptive ones often get packed for the trip as well. (No population of organisms is optimal in all respects, and deleterious mutations creep into the gene pool. An older post about genetic load is over at Sandwalk.)

At most universities with which I’m familiar, the General Education curriculum is weighed down with superfluous courses that were inserted at some point in the past but have lost their relevance or effectiveness. However, once these courses make it into the GE, then the courses stay there for good, because the become pets of the departments and faculty teaching them.

Eliminating a course from the GE is way harder than adding one. So, more and more courses get stacked on top of one another, often independent of their relevance or redundancy.

How do fix this problem? Well, don’t tinker with GE unless it’s broken. And when it is broken, then rebuild it from the ground up. I realize this is pretty much an impossible task. If someone knew how to fix GE, then GE wouldn’t be messed up at so many universities.

What do I mean by useless pap in GE? I’m a big supporter of a classic liberal arts education and I greatly value breadth. But, most “computing” requirements are out of date, and the implementation of writing courses sometimes doesn’t result in more or better writing. My university has some upper-division general education requirements in the sciences that make no sense to me at all, and the students seem to agree with me. Some courses are allowed for GE credit, while others would be great for GE but for political or historical reasons aren’t included.

Whenever someone wants to fix GE by mutating it, all the other stuff from decades ago sticks along for the ride. It’s a huge stinking mess, overloaded with units but short on a genuine broad-based education. At least, that’s how I see it at my place.

By the way, JBS Haldane was a top-flight ranconteur, and has taken to tweeting from the grave. He doesn’t tweet often, but he’s worth a follow.

Service obligations attack!

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

I’ve rarely overtly turned down service opportunities, but I’ve been able to finesse my way out a number of times.

That good run just came to a screeching halt.

Now, you may call me Senator McGlynn. I think they give us rings that our subjects may kiss.

There are different ways of taking shared governance seriously. On my campus, that is manifested with meetings every other week, for about two hours.

I’ve sat in on a couple of these meetings in the past. They have been about 42% self-aggrandizing blather by a small number of people, and 50% chiming in to affirm the importance of the blathering, accentuated with 3% of stuff that actually matters. I’ll have to go there often enough to catch that 3%. (The remaining five percent is the discussion of Sternly Worded Letters in the form of Senate Resolutions.)

Why did I agree to this momentous time suck? My department has lost so many people, and had no hires in so long, that we’re almost down to negative tenure-line faculty members. The other people in my department also have plenty of unsavory service duties and if I turned this down, then it’d be unfair to my colleagues, and I wouldn’t be pulling my share. If I said no, I’d be kind-of a jerk, if not a kind of jerk. Not a kind jerk, surely.

There is also an upside to taking this on. In the last few months, the stars have aligned and my Dean, Provost and President are all openly supportive of research and the mentorship of student researchers. I mean, they are so supportive that they’re actually putting money in that direction. There are probably some recalcitrant faculty that won’t want resources (especially reassigned time) going to research, and they might mount a last stand in the Senate. It would be handy to be there when it happens, even if the guy who runs the Senate is the biggest advocate (and example) for faculty research on campus.

I’ve been spoiled for years now, by not having to go to these kinds of meetings like I used to have to go to on a monthly basis at my old job. This time, I’ll have the wisdom to not ever attempt to reason with the unreasonable. The bottom line is that I’m very pleased that there are faculty who are heartily fighting the good fight to have control over our own university and our own curriculum. They are the ones protecting our students from administrative forces that want to push our students out of our classrooms and into online courses, and they are the ones that are fighting to keep the the campus from devolving into a career tech institute. What happens in Senate is important. I just wish I didn’t have this little part-time job in the sausage factory. But I’ve been eating the sausage for years, so it’s time I did my share.

If this is all I have to complain about this week, then life ain’t so bad.

Percent effort measures are a bunch of bunk

Many jobs come with an official “percent effort” job description, indicating how much time to spent on different kinds of tasks. Typically, effort in faculty jobs is divided among teaching, research, and service. There might be additional categories, such as “extension” in an agricultural department, or “administration” for those who have been suckered into taking on that kind of role.

It’s no secret that these percent effort numbers are mostly hooey. It’s not like we’re lawyers who bill time in fifteen minute intervals.

Not only do “percent effort” guidelines fail to correspond to how we spend our time, I don’t even think they correspond to how our job performance is evaluated. For instance, at a research institution, if the job is 25% teaching, does that mean that 25% of the tenure decision really banks on teaching performance? I doubt it, because teaching really doesn’t matter at research institutions.

In my last job, at some point we needed to formally decide on a percent effort allocation within the department. We had to decide how much of our job description was “teaching” and how much was “research.” Oddly enough, this was either a chair-level decision, or a chair-level decision that was delegated to the department for consensus.

It was expected that our research percentage should be smaller than teaching, and greater than zero. There was a lot of leeway, as I recall. I don’t even remember, exactly, what my department decided. I think research was set to 25%, but it could have been as high as 30% or as low as 15%. I do remember being disappointed at the lack of interest in upping the research fraction, but as an untenured faculty member I didn’t speak up, much, on this particular issue. (I probably said too much, nevertheless.)

Things are weirder in my current institution. The way our faculty collective bargaining agreement is constructed, there is absolutely no research in our formal workload, even though there is a clear research expectation of all tenure-line faculty. Somehow, without any workload allocated to research whatsoever, faculty members with no genuine research agenda may have trouble attaining tenure or promotion. How exactly does this works, I don’t understand.

The way I do understand things (which might an under-understanding), we are responsible for working 30 work units (WTUs) per academic year. Six of these WTUs are advising and service: three per semester. There is a set of formulas that are used to calculate how many WTUs are assigned to each kind of task. In general, an hour of instructional time in a lecture course throughout a semester is a single WTU. (Labs are worth less; that’s a whole ‘nother post.) A typical lecture course is worth 3 WTU.

So, a typical courseload is four lecture courses each semester. There are ways to reassign some WTUs away from teaching and towards other administrative, research or service roles. Anytime we need to shift out workload from the classroom, dollars need to be identified to purchase the time connected to those WTUs. How much does a WTU cost? Well, that depends on the source of funds. That part I do understand, and it still doesn’t make enough sense.

How is it that our formal agreement with our employer, to work 30 WTUs per academic year, necessarily requires research when none of these 30 WTUs are tied to research? We aren’t even expected to bring in external grants to buy out WTUs for research, though they’re quite welcome and we are expected to try to get external grants. I just don’t understand it. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the formal percent effort allocation in our job is out of touch with reality.

If you’re teaching well, even if you’re doing it efficiently, 12 WTU of teaching and 3 WTU of service is a mighty big full-time job. But we are all expected to do research, somehow, in our spare time outside of employment. That’s the only explanation that makes sense given our current system.

This is why percent effort formulas are a bunch of bunk.

Welcome back! Changes for Fall 2013!

I slowed the blog down over the summer, and now we’re shifting back the academic-year again. After reflection and experience, there’ll be some changes.

But first, what did I do this summer? I worked with students in the field for about three weeks, went to a conference, joined a working group, partially taught a field course, and a few other things. I am now just back from three weeks of bona-fide vacation away from home. Vacation was great, but this ain’t the venue for that.

My kid is back in school, I’m back on campus getting ready for the semester, and we have a ton of samples and a mountain of data to work up. And about three almost-submitted papers that need go get out. Good times!

The aspirational goal of the site is to promote the role of research in teaching institutions, and to enhance our profile and engagement in research communities. I don’t know exactly how a blog is supposed to do that, but I suppose being part of the conversation matters. I think things are at least going in that direction, though I don’t know the rate of travel. I have some related anecdotes that might be fun to share later on.

In the six months since starting the site, I’ve learned a lot about the time required to run a journalistic blog. The upshot is that, now that site is launched, I’m thinking it is reasonable to publish 2-3 times per week, instead of the five times per week when I started the site. Here’s the rationale, below. I realize I don’t need to provide one, but if you’re wondering my reasoning, here you go. Thoughts and corrections are welcome, of course:

Blogs should be well read by the core audience and is regularly updated. A bunch of people read most things that are posted on the site. I’m not an analytics dude, but I suspect that most regular readers look at the site a few times per week. That makes me more comfortable with the idea of posting a few times per week. I realize that it is critical to post regularly, if not daily, but also, I suspect that some posts are not seen by regular readers because they come out too frequently. If I make a point of creating posts that are thoughtful and substantial, then I’d rather have them have a broader reach. Simply put, I think it takes a few days for a post to have its full reach, and if I keep coming out with new posts before people are done reading the older ones, then they get overlooked.
Quality writing takes time. When it comes to workload, time = money. I cannot sustainably write a post to my level of satisfaction every weekday, unless I am able to purchase a formal part of my university workload for blogging. When people have asked, “how do I find the time?” I answer that I’ve treated the site like a class of its own, just with a bigger audience. While blogging has a bigger reach, it doesn’t (yet) pay the bills and my primary duty is to my own students. If I were to maintain the level of journalistic quantity and quality for the indefinite future, I’d need modest, but non-trivial, amount of cash. (Sugar daddies, feel free to call.)
I realize that I’d have more readers if I included images with every post. But I don’t. Most posts won’t be improved with a corresponding image that someone else already created. If you think text is boring, then perhaps you aren’t reading enough literature. You want photos of stuff? Go read some pap on the Huffington Post. The world is gorgeously visual. If you want beautiful images, go outside. On the other hand, if you’re an artistically talented person and wanted to make an original sketch to go with each post, then I’d be interested in the possibility of teaming up. (I usually have my posts written a few days before going to press, unless it’s on a very current topic.)
I enjoy a good novel. I haven’t read enough non-science since starting the blog. This is a problem.
I need to finish more manuscripts, and I still need to learn R. I have too many projects at the almost-done stage, and a few in the exciting early-development phase. I want to get working on these, and this is the kind of stuff that I might get done if I’m blogging every single day.
A multiplicity of views is great. I’m thinking about taking on one or two occasional or regular contributors. I don’t exactly know how this would work out, and I need to sort this out more, but there are lots of people with experiences different from myself who would be able to write some amazing things for the site. Wouldn’t that be neat? (Interested in being one of them? Let me know.) Also, along with the notion of facilitating a multiplicity of views, I’m going to make a point from refraining from commenting on posts within the first day or two after it appears, except when there are questions directed specifically to me. This practice follows changes made by Jeremy Fox at Dynamic Ecology. When the blog was younger, I wanted to respond to comments to facilitate a conversation. Now that there are more readers, I don’t need to fulfill that role. I’ve already had my say in the post, and what others choose to say should matter more in the comments.

These are things of which I was aware, but I hadn’t really learned until after doing it for six months. Thanks for your continuing interest. If you’d like to give feedback on what is working, and not working on the site, I’d be appreciative if you were to share in the comments in this post, anonymously or otherwise. Or send me an email or use some other social media platform.

On pseudonymity and making a difference in the world (updated)

New York City

My favorite pseudonymous person out there, without a doubt, is Banksy.

If you aren’t familiar with Banksy, check out some of his work. It’s spectacular. I’m not a professional art critic so I won’t say more about why this body of work rocks. Banksy’s work can speak for itself.

Because of his primary medium – public structures – people who own these structures are making huge profits by selling his work to private individuals though he designed it to be seen in public.

I don’t think he imagined several years ago, that a public wall would be removed from a structure so that his stencil graffiti would be sold at auction as fine art. I think it’s kind of awesome – a work of art highlighting the profiteering nature of humanity – that graffiti can become so valuable so quickly. The irony is delicious, that graffiti is undesirable by a property owner, unless it can be sold.

Banksy’s work is, arguably, a victim of its success, in that it is taken from the public after it is made.

The art of Banksy features a set of criticisms that are best seen broadly by the public. It is successful as social commentary, and the whole point of it, I would guess, is that they get seen by people.

If Banksy were not pseudonymous, he could create all kinds of public art, that would be far more likely to stay intact. But that’s not the way he rolls. In my opinion, part of the beauty of the work is the the lack of clarity in its origin, and that Banksy creates wealth out of a patch of wall that otherwise would be overlooked.

Since we don’t know who Banksy is, it’s easier for me to imagine that he is speaking for many of us. On the other hand, because we don’t know who Banksy is, it’s been said that he lacks credibility. I don’t think that’s true, but to many, without an identity his work is always going to have the same credibility of all other graffiti artists who are, technically, tagging illegally. I think his credibility comes from the great art itself, but that’s not a universally held notion.

I think there is a ceiling to how much difference Banksy can make in the world, because of his pseudonymity. I don’t think the social impact of something like Picasso’s Guernica could be matched by any single work by Banksy because the origin of the message matters along with the artist itself. We all might like to say that a novel, a painting, or a scientific paper can and should be seen on its own without looking at the creator. But, really, who the creator is matters, a lot. We know Banksy by his work, that’s not quite the same. The veil matters. People will think that he doesn’t have any skin in the game. In Banksy’s case, the veil is part of the art itself.

Closer to my own realm, some of the louder voices on the internet about life in science come from a cadre of pseudonymous science bloggers.

They don’t blog about their own science, because, well, then the veil would be lifted from the pseudonym. There are many real concerns that the pseudonymous science bloggers have, about life balance, gender equity, federal funding policies, research transparency, academic misconduct, and other stuff, including shoes.

This might be obvious, it wasn’t initially to me: a pseudonym makes a blog more personal.

This week, one topic that’s come up among pseudonymous bloggers is the fact that things are a lot harder for women in science compared to men, especially for those who have kids. These pseudonymous people seem to want change in culture and policies, in the direction of equity. There are some interesting discussions, and a lot of great ideas. But, even though the pseudonymous blogs are aimed at the public, it’s all very much a private endeavor. Because the pseudonymous people are not known, at least formally, then there is a low ceiling on impact. (Of course, I bet that these pseudonymous blogs are far more widely read than this site, so I’m not arguing that I’m having more of an impact.) For example, the impact of the well-known blog Pharyngula is much greater (and mostly negative, I think) because its creator is not pseudonymous. Putting a face and name — and a public home address to boot — for the author of that blog makes both him and his words more credible.

So, what really is the point of all of discussions on pseudonymous science blogs? I honestly don’t know. I imagine it’s for the entertainment of those running the sites, to form an internal community, and to influence the lives of those who follow these sites and are interested in the experiences of these pseudonymous individuals. But I could be wrong. I suspect the veil of pseudonymity really limits what a blog can do more than the identity of the author limits the reach of a blog.

Anybody can have a site, and write whatever they want in it, and communicate with others however they want. I’m just trying to make sense of both motivations and outcomes, and I’m still confused. In the meantime, there is a clear asymmetry between what can and does happen between pseudonymous sites and those with unveiled faces.

When I started this site, I thought the distinction between the two was minor, but over time the risks and opportunities from being overtly public are more known. I’m still in the not-making-much-difference-in-the-world phase, but, well, there’s lots of time.

—

UPDATE: While it wasn’t intended in any way, some pseudonymous bloggers — whose work I respect — are reading this post as a dig against pseudonymous blogs. I don’t know how broad this perception is, but since I’m a regular reader — and fan — of some pseudonymous blogs I’d like to clarify that I don’t have any negative thoughts about pseudonymous blogs, and I don’t question the validity of pseudonymous blogs.

As to the specific questions I asked, there is now some good discussion about them. These questions are, apparently, old hat to pseudonymous bloggers but not yet to myself. Considering that a pseudonymous blog is what got me started in the first place, I am familiar with the genre, but not the specific motivations of the authors. What I didn’t know is — in addition to those who have quite legitimate concerns about physical safety — the relationship between a concealed identity and the ability to affect the cause that is the reason for the identity to be concealed. Folks have made some strong arguments that a pseudonymous author can affect their cause in the non-blogging world just as as well as one who uses their real identity. There are lots of great viewpoints.

When I write “I honestly don’t know” or “I’m confused,” about a topic, then that is the truth. It isn’t concern trolling, These words represent my ability to profess not understanding something. To their credit, experienced bloggers have rolled in and helped create understanding, in the comments (which are worth reading) and other posts (which can be found in the comments).

Pseudonymous bloggers have been writing for years under their assumed identities, and think about their reasons and the consequences every day, I would think. Those issues are not something I think about every day. So if I write a blog post, open to comments, about something which I’m wondering, I do appreciate it when I have constructive and informative comments, which I have received. Thanks to all of you for those.

On the ethics of juggling job offers

The academic job market is tilted towards the side of the supplier. As any postdoc can tell you, there is way more supply than demand for professors (who are not employed as adjunct serfs). So, universities don’t need to give much leeway to job candidates. There’s always somebody good waiting in the wings, right?

As a job candidate, it is useful to remember that departments and universities have problems when a faculty search fails. Only a few candidates are interviewed – I’ve never heard of more than five. There is pressure on the department and dean to make sure that among these interviewees, a desirable candidate takes the job, because reopening the search is usually a mess for a variety of reasons.

Universities also know that good candidates may get multiple interviews, and multiple offers. They can’t give good candidates the leeway to get away, so candidates are usually given a brief window of time to come to a decision, in the midst of a long job season.

This results in a set of dilemmas in the realm of game theory reasoning. The stakes of bet-hedging, and how one regards a bird in the hand, are incredibly high.

Once you get a good job offer or offers, at what stage do you pull yourself from the job market? This presents set of logistical and ethical questions.

Let’s say you get a job offer from your dream job, the one that you are sure you want over all others. That’s a no-brainer. Once you sign a contract you can pull yourself from the other searches.

Let’s be clear: you should keep looking for a job until you have a signed contract. At some institutions, this could take days. At others, it can take months. However, without a signed contract, no matter what anybody might say, you don’t have a job. When campuses are in times of tight funding, the faculty line might get pulled in the gap between the email conversations and the presentation of an actual contract. I know of a few circumstances in which someone has received a job offer verbally or by email, but the contract never arrived because the position was pulled higher up the administrative line. This stuff actually does happen.

The dream job is a convegence of geography, institution type, and the specifics of the institution. This is a rarity. Let’s say you are offered a job that you foresee enjoying, but you also other jobs pending that you see as more attractive. What do you do?

Here are some possibilities:

Ask for more time from the place offering you’re the job (useless)
Pull yourself from other job searches when you commit verbally or by email (a little unwise)
Pull yourself from other job searches when you sign a written contract (makes sense)
Keep actively searching for a job even after you’ve signed a contract (not necessarily evil)

Let’s size up each these options in more detail.

If you ask for more time, that might actually result in less time. Once you hint that you need more time for a decision, your negotiating partner will want you to sign quickly. If you need more time for your spouse to size up the location, then that might be received differently, but all of this will happen on a short clock regardless of the circumstances. Keep in mind that you need to be negotiating the position (salary, startup, moving expenses, resources, reassigned time, and so on) after you receive an initial offer. These negotiations usually take a couple days, maybe a couple weeks at most.

You’re not going to see a formal contract until you’ve already committed to the job verbally or by email. When you do commit your intentions, it should be entirely clear to both you and the university that you are intending to take the job. Also, it should be clear that, without a contract, that you are unable to wholly commit 100%. For a full commitment, you should have a contract. You can say that you’re excited for the position, but the only tangible commitment on both sides is a signed contract.

As soon as you agree to take the job verbally, the folks offering you the job will be happier if you drop out of all other searches, because you might find and take a better job. However, unless you’ve been presented with a signed and legally binding contract, the other university should have no reasonable expectation for you to withdraw from searching for other jobs.

How badly should you feel if you verbally/email commit to Job X, and get a better offer for Job Y before the contract for Job X shows up? You shouldn’t feel too bad. The institution offering Job X can’t reasonably expect you to commit without a genuine contract. They can’t sue you, surely.

Here is a principle for the academic job search process: Don’t hold yourself to any ethical guidelines that are also not being followed by the academic institutions involved in the search. To hold yourself to higher ethical standards than the ones your prospective employers is unfair to you, and leaves you at a structural disadvantage in the job search and negotiation process.

If chair or dean makes an offer, and then the position is later pulled by an administrator higher up the line, then they’d feel badly that you didn’t get the job but there’s nothing that they or you could do about it. Likewise, if the institution doesn’t get you a contract, and you find a better job before they get you a contract, there’s nothing that they can do about it, and of course you should take the better job.

So, what do you do if you’ve already signed on the dotted line on your official legally binding contract, and then you find out that you have interviews – or offers – from other more potentially attractive jobs? This is where I think people have strong and differing opinions. For what it’s worth, here are my opinions, though I don’t hold strongly to them.

I think it’s important to honor a contract that has been signed. I also recognize that universities typically do not look out for the welfare of their employees any more than any other employer; this is especially true for adjuncts. Universities in the US, as a class, aren’t well known for having transparent and fair labor practices. So, professors need to look out for their own interests. (That’s why we many of us have joined together in the process of collective bargaining.)

When a contract is signed, you need to have complete and specific plans for carrying out the contract. This, however, does not preclude being involved in other job interviews. Interviewing for a job doesn’t mean that you’re breaking a contract. All different kinds of things can occur on an interview. If another university calls you out to interview, you do owe it to yourself, and your family, to work to find the best job for you. Interviewing for a job even though you’re committed to someone else for the next year isn’t dishonest, unless you choose to be dishonest in the process.

Why would you go on an interview for a job at University Y if you’ve already committed to a different job at University X? Here are some things to consider. First, you only signed a contract for a single year of employment with University X. In some cases, University Y might wait a year for you if they really like you; you won’t know this unless you interview. Second, if you do get a job offer from University Y, you could indicate to them that you need to work out your relationship with University X. Then, if you approach you University X and told them that you plan to leave for University Y after one year, I am mighty confident that they would release you from your contract. Especially in the sciences, which involves startup expenses, why waste the funds on someone who is guaranteed to leave in a year? They would be downright bothered if not mad, but it’s an option available to you. I’ve been on the nasty end of the stick when it comes to university employment practices, and have seen all kinds of even worse stuff. So I’m relatively inured to the idea that someone might not choose to announce a brief term of employment before starting.

I don’t think I’d be happy telling one job that I want out of a contract once I’ve gotten a better offer, but I’ve also never been in the position in which I’ve chosen an acceptable job, and then got an offer for one that is much better for myself and my family. If I do ever move on to a different job than the one that I’m in, then I’m quite sure that when I sign a contract, that’s probably a job I’ll keep until retirement. But, my circumstances are different from a postdoc or young assistant professor with different needs.

When I’m on a search committee at University X, it’s my job to figure out if a job candidate really wants to work there for at least a decade. If the person doesn’t, then they probably aren’t a good choice.

It’s stuff like this that leads search committees from non-highly-ranked institutions to be wary of applications from awesome job candidates. Nobody wants to waste an interview slot on a person who is likely to get a better offer elsewhere. This is why “fit” matters so much in the application vetting process – because you want to pick someone who will build their career at a place, because a talented experienced professor on a particular campus is very valuable to the students and the institution as a whole.

So, this isn’t an advice post. It’s simply a reflection on the different ways that one can handle the prospect of getting multiple job offers. I’m not an ethicist by training, and morals are quite different from ethics. So, your mileage may vary.

Are trees the lawns of the future?

The lawn started as a demonstration of excess, as I understand it. A lawn indicates that the landowner has enough land to let some of it serve no use, and the resources to manage the land. Lawns are, typically, a decadent waste of land and resources.

Of course, people play all kinds of fun games on grass. In private homes, backyard lawn fun emerged from the existence of lawns. Lawns weren’t invented so that people could play with lawn darts and the slip-n-slide. The lawn in the British estate emerged before polo, rather than the other way around. I would guess.

As an environmentalist, I’ve been trained to dislike lawns. They’re ugly, wasteful and bereft of biodiversity.

I can take a more subtle view of lawns when I learn that, when not heavily fertilized, they can sequester substantial amounts of carbon. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that a lawn (or, as researchers call it, “turfgrass”) is capable of banking more carbon than an adjacent patch of forested land, depending on how both areas are managed. I don’t know if this is the case. (Most people with urban trees just collect up litterfall and don’t let any of its carbon mineralize into the soil, after all.)

Regardless of the carbon cycle, I’m not a big fan of lawns. Given the opportunity, I replace a lawn with native plants, which in California can be spectacular. Every kid should have a field in which to play sports, but it doesn’t have to be connected to one’s home.

Nowadays, I think it’s fair to say that most ecologists look at the proliferation of lawns throughout the United States as a waste of resources. Food isn’t grown where it could be grown. Residential plots may be too large to accommodate lawns. Over time, small pockets of natural areas i our cities have disappeared in favor of lawns. Lawns result in too much nitrogen and carbon pollution. In arid regions, lawns waste water.

Lawns squander our precious natural resources and are a scourge on the environment. That’s what many say, in our current time.

I wonder if, a couple generations in the future, environmentalists will be saying similar things about trees?

Don’t get me wrong: I love trees. I might even love trees as much as some people love their lawns.

I live in a city that’s known for having great trees. It isn’t entirely by accident that I chose to live in Pasadena. We even have tree police if someone chops down a tree illegally. I once called them on a neighbor who illegally removed a coast live oak that was at least 100 years old, and they had two agents on site within fifteen minutes. He paid a hefty fine. We take our trees seriously.

What do trees do for us, on the scale of our residential plots of land? Trees support plenty of biodiversity, even the towering pecan tree (not edible pecans, sadly) in my backyard. In a given day, at least several species of birds will perch on its branches. Commonly, it will also host a flock of feral parrots that roam through town. I think it’s part of the regular parrot circuit. It also casts a wonderful shade on the deck behind my house in the afternoon, and it supports half of the weight of a hammock. It’s a great tree. I like the oak tree in front of my house even more. Years after killing off the lawn surrounding the oak, I just found that the invasive ant inhabitants were replaced by a native species. That was a nice discovery.

However, while these trees provide services, they’ve also had a huge negative effect on me as well. They’ve kept me from putting solar panels on our roof. With the shade of these massive trees, it makes no rational sense to install solar panels. Of course, the trees mean that we don’t have to spend as much energy cooling our home in the summer – and the energy we use comes from electrons that arguably were generated by a wind farm (a privilege for which I pay 20% extra to alleviate my conscience).

While these trees are playing a role in carbon sequestration to some extent, the solar panels that could be used in place of these trees would probably result in greater carbon savings. My street, lined with oak trees, is gorgeous. This is a also a street filled with families that are carbon bandits, failing to generate electricity in an environment that is prime for the generation of solar power.

A gorgeous tree-lined street is a sign of prosperity and the luxury to be able to maintain such a show of status. We can afford to have trees in residential areas because we are wealthy enough to take carbon from beneath the floor of the ocean to power our appliances rather than use the same energy that feeds our trees.

As solar power gets even cheaper and even more efficient, then perhaps trees will be seen the way that we see lawns today? I don’t know if this will be the case, but if this comes to pass, I won’t be terribly surprised.

I grew up in a landscape which was inhabited by humans for some thousands of years, and large cities with dense populations for less than a hundred of those years. I’ve been spending the last few weeks – on vacation – in a landscape in which people have lived at high densities for thousands of years. It’s clear to me, in this environment where cities have exited for long periods, that trees are a luxury. Big tall trees, that cast a lot of shade, are not allowed to exist for their biodiversity value. They have the same role that lawns have arid North America. Trees are a symbol of wealth and also a form of beauty, and they also are nice to rest in under the shade. I imagine these trees also might provide more ecosystem services than a lawn, but are they better for the carbon cycle than a solar panel? I’m not sure. I spent some time searching and I couldn’t find the right data to compare lawns, trees and solar panels.

Of course, a landscape without trees has less biodiversity than a landscape with trees. Right? Would my city have lower biodiversity if it was not filled with towering trees, most of which weren’t there at the time of European settlement? If we had lots of native shrubs and annual plants in the place of these trees, would biodiversity be lower? I’m not sure. I don’t know if anybody’s evaluated this quantitatively.

I value trees for the services they provide, and their beauty. However, I ‘m not all that sure how much of the value that I assign is inflated by social context. Fine art masterworks sell for obscenely huge sums of money, and they only reason they are worth so much is because everyone who can afford them agrees that is how much they are worth. I recognize that the value that I place on trees is a product of my particular experiences and social context. It says something that our culture can afford to value trees for their beauty, when these same trees are sucking up photons that could generate electricity without contributing to the elevated pool of CO₂in our atmosphere.

Whatever happens in the future, I hope everyone’s values are more focused on carbon cycling than they are at the moment.

Do you want an office connected to your lab?

Wouldn’t it be great to have your office connected to your research lab?

Wouldn’t it be great to have your office separate from your research lab?

I’ve seen it both ways. I’ve never had my office connected to my lab, and my lab has always been a 30-second walk from my office, give or take a bit. And the lab has always been out of sight of my office, which often means that it’s out of mind.

I’d like to see my research students when they come in, and I want the lab in mind more frequently. And I want to make sure that happens in the lab is research, with a good dose of collegiality.

On the other hand, being in a suite of offices with my colleagues, as long as they’re good people, is nice too. One of the things that makes my small department wonderful is the people, and the casual hallway chats are often valuable. But a faculty office zone isn’t compatible with having our labs connected to our offices, which also is good.

I’m tempted to just move into my lab instead of using my office. If it’s not a good idea, I can just move back.

What do you have, and what would you prefer? Are you aware of any innovative designs that you think work best?

Model systems don’t work at teaching universities

Many research strategies, developed inside large research institutions, don’t work well in small teaching-centered institutions.

One of these strategies, I suggest, is the use of a biological model system.

What do I mean by model systems? Any system, used in multiple laboratories, that has been optimized for a broad variety of lab investigations. I’m thinking of zebrafish, Drosophila, mice, C. elegans, E. coli, Arabidopsis, and honey bees. For the ant people, this includes Temnothorax.

It might seem counterintuitive that model systems can prevent you from getting research done in a teaching-centered institution. After all, these model systems were developed, in part, to make research easier and remove methodological barriers experienced by those working in a broad variety of organisms.

Even though model organisms are easy to work with, have lots of standardized methods, and a massive bank of potential collaborators, the costs and risks of working with a model system far outweigh the benefits and the opportunities.

My initial thought on this topic came from observation. I don’t see much research on model systems getting done within teaching institutions. I also have seen a variety of people, who work on model systems in teaching institutions, experience substantial challenges that have kept them from getting work done. Here’s a list of problems that I’ve seen crop up for those using model systems in teaching institutions.

The low-hanging fruit has been picked. In model systems, the things which are a combination of easy, obvious and trivial have already been done. That only leaves things which are either difficult, requiring particularly deep insight, or trivial.
Model systems have intense competition. In model systems, many labs compete rather than collaborate. A small lab in a teaching institution isn’t built to deal with this kind of competition. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid competition by working on minutia, but it also means that you should choose an avenue that has high pressure competition. As any ecologist will tell you, competition is an interaction which has a negative effect on both parties. (An economist will tell you the same thing, though it’s better for the consumer).
You might get scooped. The probability that someone is doing exactly what you are working on is higher in a model system.
Collaborating is difficult. The labs that run model systems typically have lots of routine methods happening like clockwork, run by technicians and students who have become specialized in the model system. If you’re working on this model system, you are not likely to be able to contribute anything of substance to a big lab, which could do the same thing much more quickly than you could offer. Collaboration is easier if you have a specific resource or skills that others want or need, and that’s harder from a teaching institution if you work in a model system.
You may become isolated. In the community of people working in model systems, if you have a small undergraduate lab you’re more likely to be overlooked by your peers. I’m not sure how or why this is the case, but it’s what I’ve observed on several occasions. Everyone I know who has worked on a model system wasn’t well integrated into the community of frenemies that works on the system. It’s hard to have a scientific impact if you are unrecognized by your peers.
The bar for evidence is very high. Peer review is more likely to be rough and demanding. People with model systems tend to be territorial, and especially if you’re not perceived as a competitor that can bite back with teeth, then at least one reviewer is likely to go the extra mile to find something wrong with what you’ve done.
The minimum publishable unit is greater. If you’re working in a model system, odds are that the big labs working in the field are able to heavily replicate their experiments, and sandwich multiple experiments together into a paper. This establishes a standard for a large volume of data in a paper. I’m not arguing that you should seek to publish as soon as you have enough data for any kind of publication. However, if you have a genuine, interesting, and cool finding and want to get it out for everybody to read, it’s a bummer to have others telling you that you that it’s ready for publication because you don’t have a mountain of data.
Maintaining colonies takes continuous effort. Mustering any kind of consistent student work in the lab is a success. You don’t want your success in long-term student research to be squandered on the maintenance of lab colonies of a model system. You want to work on a system in which students can dive in and collect actual data, rather than spending all of their time keeping critters fed, clean, reproductive and healthy. Also, you want to be free to disappear for long periods of time, and not chained to the lab to maintain your organisms.

So why would one ever work with a model organism? One great reason would be to provide lots of valuable hands-on laboratory experiences to students. But in my observation, this kind of approach is a poor recipe for completing original research in a teaching institution.

In my opinion, if we are giving students research training, that means we’re giving them research training. Which means that they’re doing research, and research is something that ends up in new findings that are shared with the scientific community. If you want to give a genuine research experience to students, then you need to regularly publish the work that you are doing. From my vantage point, it’s very difficult to do this while working with a model system in a teaching institution.

I have a couple other alternative explanations for the (perceived) phenomenon that researchers working on model systems in teaching institution have a harder time publishing their work. The first alternative is that I’m just wrong, and that my experiences or perceptions aren’t representative or accurate.

The second alternative is that less research is completed because of the use of strategies from R1 labs that don’t translate to a teaching institution. Most people at teaching institutions, who work on model systems, are continuing with their dissertation system, I think. The research approaches from a dissertation lab probably don’t translate well to a teaching institution. I haven’t spent much time inside the labs of teaching institution professors using model systems, so I don’t know how they run things on a day-to-day basis, and am not too sure about this.

Do you think that it’s hard to get research done on a model system at a teaching institution? Did you switch into one, or out of one, to get research done? Thinking about it?

On the speciousness of “work-life balance”

Too often, people are apt to advise one another on how to live their lives. I’m not intentionally adding to this body of work, but remarking on it. I don’t intend to offer any advice in this post.

Let’s consider two pieces of career and life advice that we often hear.

Standard Piece of Advice #1. Choose a career that you love.

You need to pay the bills, but this should happen with a job that you immensely enjoy. Ideally, we love our job so much that it’s like a hobby. (And it’s that way for me. Science – the whole process – is a wonderful hobby. There are some parts I like more than others, but it’s a smashingly entertaining enterprise.)

Standard Piece of Advice #2. Don’t let work get in the way of living your life.

There was a well-written post about this written by a recently tenured Harvard professor about “how to stop worrying and love the tenure track.” The author, Radhika Nagpal, had a useful list to advise readers about how to not let the pursuit of tenure consume our lives and make us unhappy. Second on the list of seven items was to stop taking advice from others.

Depending on how well you follow Standard Piece of Advice #1, then Standard Piece of Advice #2 seems irrelevant, if not a little misguided.

Should we treat a tenure-track job like a 7-year postdoc? I imagine that this is a healthy attitude for Harvard junior faculty, considering rates of tenure. Is this a good idea outside Harvard? Well, I guess so. I don’t know if postdocs are expected to work with less effort than tenure-track faculty. If the phrase “treat the job like a temporary postdoc” should be read as “don’t let the job consume your entire life” then I suppose the advice is spot-on.

Is it important to make sure that you’re a complete person outside your academic job? Definitely.

Should you prioritize your loved ones over your work, and cultivate relationships outside of academia? Of course!

Should we expect researchers be complete people outside of their research endeavors? Hell yes!

Should we designate and separate working hours from non-working hours as a hard-and-fast rule? Should we make sure that we have a special amount of personal time each week that isn’t tied to research? Umm… I don’t think so.

If you really love research, then isn’t it okay to do it as a hobby?

Here’s what I’ve never understood about the “work-life balance” concept: Is not “work” a part of your “life?” Haven’t we academics argued for many decades that what makes our job cool is that we get to do exactly what we enjoy doing, and we can choose how we do it?

Isn’t my choice to pursue a useful, fun and challenging academic endeavor part of my own life? By trying to create a balance between “work” and “life,” then doesn’t that make work something we do when we are not fully living?

I reject the work-life dichotomy that governs thinking about how academics decide how to invest time into their research.

It seems to me that the methods to achieve “work-life balance” don’t seem to entirely add up.

I don’t want any work-life balance. I want the scale to be tilted to 100% “life.” My job is one of the few that allow me to do that.

When I’m doing research, when I’m mentoring students, and when I’m teaching, I don’t want to have that always placed into the “work” box because it’s part of my life.

At least some of us in academia have argued is that the job is wonderful specifically because the things we do for the job can have personal meaning, tangibly change the world and other people’s lives, and are often enjoyable. That’s something I shoot for. That’s a part of my life. Yes, it’s a source of employment, but I refuse to put it in the “work” box separate from my life.

How about we just shoot for “life balance?” For some of us, that means “research-family-health balance.” For others, it’s “university-family-pet” balance. Maybe it’s “university-political activism-family” balance for some of you.

My wife and kid matter everything to me, and as a corollary, so do my own health and happiness for their sake. That means that I can’t do research, teach, (and blog), in a manner that isn’t good for any of us. In all of my decisions about research, teaching and anything else about my employment, all of my decisions take them into account first, as well as myself.

Does my job demand that I spend a huge amount of time on teaching and research? Yes. But I happen to love it, and that’s why I took this job.

Does my job require me to do more teaching and research than is needed for me to have a balanced life? Not at all. Does anybody expect this level of work from me? Maybe, but if they do, I can tell them where they can stick their outrageous expectations.

I am not employed by my University in the summertime. I’m not on their payroll. That means that my summer is mine. How am I spending it? Mostly on research, and mentoring student research. And a little teaching about ants. At the moment I’m on vacation, and enjoying it tremendously. I’m writing this for fun. I’m not writing it for my career. Is this “work?” Maybe, but that my job is one in which I don’t wish to create that work vs. life dichotomy.

How the heck can I have “life balance” if I’m writing this while away on vacation? Well, the spectacular setting and circumstances in which I’m writing makes it quite possible.

Maybe the phrase “work-life balance” is just a label. However, labels matter. If we academics do start to see our research and teaching as mere “work” in our own lives then we may have lost one of the few benefits that are tied to the profession. I’ll be the first one to point out that my employer is only entitled to about forty hours per week from me, and I’ll also probably be one of the first to exceed the forty-per-week mark partway through the week, if I have the opportunity.

Is it your right to consider a faculty job as a source of employment, to take a paycheck and perform your job description within forty hours per week? Definitely. I just enjoy it enough that I want to sneak in more when I have the chance. And when I do more “work” than necessary, I don’t worry that my life is becoming unbalanced. I’m just having fun.

What is the filter in NSF preproposal review?

A while ago, I had a conversation with a colleague that really bugged me.

This scientist submitted a biology proposal to NSF this January, which wasn’t invited for a full submission. I understand that the bulk of preproposals aren’t invited, but the rationale in this situation was messed up.

The reviews were clear that the research agenda and approach was excellent, and that the PIs were academically prepared to conduct the research. My colleague was told that the thing that tanked the preproposal was the lack of preliminary data. The panel thought that there were inadequate resources or facilities that enabled the PIs to get the project done, and that the junior faculty PIs were not prepared to run the project. Keep in mind that this was a project that was proposed to take place with senior collaborators at large research organizations.

I thought the purpose of preproposal was for the PI to argue for the importance of the question and the validity of the approach. Those conditions were met, quite well, according to the reviews.

If you’re at a small institution without a huge research infrastructure, did you know that you need to dedicate verbiage into your preproposal to defend the infrastructure at your institution? I didn’t. My colleagues got dinged on this at the preproposal stage.

Did you know that if you proposed an ambitious but eminently do-able project, that you needed to explain your qualifications in detail at the preproposal stage? I would have thought that that both of those issues would be something to deal with a full proposal rather than a preproposal.

To be clear: If the PI was a tenured professor employed by a large research institution, with access to more preliminary data, then it sounds like this proposal would have been given an invitation to submit a full proposal. In my view, this is an unfair bias against the PI, who wasn’t even given a full chance to propose a research project on account of institution size and seniority.

I was really mad when I heard about this – and I would have taken a few days to call down, before yelling at my program director. Am I off, or are these good reasons to triage a preproposal? They keep saying it’s about the concepts and experimental approaches (and broader impacts) at this stage, but it sounds like it’s just a regular NSF review.

I didn’t submit in the last round, but I am preparing a submission for the next round. I realize there are all kinds of great advice from Prof-Like Substance on how preproposals were handled in deed during this last round; I’m just wondering how much verbiage out of five pages you have to spend on things that aren’t the concepts, experiments and broader effects.

It’s okay to not fund all faculty researchers equally

One of the things that I love about liberal arts colleges and other small universities is the opportunity to spend quality time with faculty from other disciplines. We can form a truly diverse community of scholars that is hard to find at a big university where interactions among disciplines are less frequent. These friendships make it easier to shed the conceit that our discipline is more important than others.

Because we are familiar with one another’s scholarship to some extent, there is a high value placed on equal regard for one another’s work. I’m not in a strong position to evaluate the importance of scholarship in a department outside my own, and I’m glad it’s not my job to do so. I can simply appreciate the fact that I work in an environment full of experts, who know about a lot of topics in which I am a novice.

Nevertheless, it is clear that some people are far more focused on scholarship, and mentoring student research, than others. This doesn’t make anybody more or less of an expert, but it does mean that people spend their time doing different activities. Both the quantity and the quality of scholarship vary from person to person. This is normal, and to be expected.

Nobody’s equal. But on teaching campuses we often treat everyone’s scholarship equivalently. That spirit of egalitarianism is often taken very seriously.

I posit that this egalitarian spirit impedes student research. If you ask any departmental chair or administrator, you’ll know that there are some people who are a black hole for research money. If you give them resources, not much happens.

Other people use the funds with high efficiency and get a lot done when provided some resources.

At every teaching campus with which I’m familiar, there have been modest pools of money available for research (including salary, travel, supplies) on a regular to irregular basis. In nearly all cases, these funds have been distributed in an egalitarian – or functionally egalitarian – fashion. A proposal might be necessary, but funding is only deprived from those who don’t even bother to submit a marginally credible 1-2 page proposal.

Any report that is due after using internal funds is pro forma and how much product you deliver doesn’t count. You just need to turn in a report – of any kind – to get funded again. If you ask a chair or a dean about what percentage of faculty use these little pools of research funds to productive ends, with a promise of anonymity, I would wager that less than 50% of the funding recipients used the funds well.

A few hundred bucks doesn’t do anything for anybody, but if you give someone a few thousand, you’d expect to see something of a little substance. A talk presented at a conference, a submitted manuscript, or preliminary data for a grant.

If you just give all of the money equally to faculty, then some fraction of that money is going to be downright wasted. And, I suspect that chairs and deans know who’ll be wasting the money and who will make good use of it. Nonetheless, the egalitarian spirit prevails.

At research universities, non-productive faculty members are cut off. They lose lab space, get more service, and eventually become straight-up teaching faculty. However, at teaching universities with far fewer resources for research, faculty members who don’t produce any research are consistently given resources that often go to waste. They get to keep valuable lab space even though they haven’t published anything in a a hundred moons. The institution continues to harbor the polite fiction that all faculty are active scholars, when many just teach their classes and haven’t attempted to produce any scholarship in a long time, and have no specific plans to do so in the future.

All professors at teaching institutions should have the opportunity to do research. However, this shouldn’t preclude the institution from investing its limited resources wisely to create the biggest impact for the students and the institution. Like in any other profession, faculty members need to do their jobs. If they’re receiving resources for research, then they need to produce scholarship.

Just imagine how many more opportunities would be available for students, and how much more research could get done, if the research funds given to overt non-researchers were available to researching faculty. To do this, it would require abandoning the egalitarian spirit, that everybody deserves the same resources.

Everybody deserves access to the same opportunities. But not everybody should be given the chance, time and again, to waste opportunities. Let’s be clear: I see some people squandering funds made available to them, and I see students who would greatly benefit from others who are prepared to use these funds effectively.

It’s okay to identify individuals who make the best use of funds, and those that make the use worst of funds, and use this information to inform decisions. I wish this happened more frequently.

Changing families are behind the decline of field station culture

The title of this post is more of a working hypothesis than an assertion. I put together a few observations I’ve made over the last month and this idea fell together.

Overall, there has been a steady decline in the pursuit of biological research involving long-term field research that relies upon a deep understanding of natural history. This is a well-recognized phenomenon among ecologists and evolutionary biologists. There are many potential causes, but here is one associated phenomenon:

A great variety of biological field stations throughout North and Central America have experienced a decline in research activity. At least, it seems to me, that many field stations have stagnated or shrunk, while the number of scientists has grown.

I’ve spent time in a variety of field stations, some with long histories that boast tremendous records of scientific productivity and discovery. The scientific progress at these sites was enabled by a culture of long-term scientists who have spent their careers working at particular locations in detail, and by bringing generations of students to work at these sites.

This doesn’t happen so much anymore. This was explained well by Chris Buddle of Arthropod Ecology.

What nearly all of these stations – with some notable exceptions – are missing is a set of senior researchers who are resident on site for long-term doing their field research. Nowadays, senior researchers don’t typically live at field stations for extended periods. Field stations are places where grad students, and maybe postdocs, work long-term. Undergraduates spend summers at field stations doing research and taking field courses, but at most field stations the faculty aren’t there for too long.

Without the consistent presence of senior researchers field stations do not serve as social and academic hubs like they have in the past. The emergent benefits from the field station as a thriving academic community, located in an active working site for field biologists, have diminished, if not fizzled.

Why has this happened? I think the answer is simple. Field biologists are no longer men whose spouses can stay at home with the kids all summer, or join them in the field to take care of the kids all summer. Decades ago, field stations that housed long-term senior researchers had trailing spouses who cared for all non-scientific matters, or had spouses who stayed at home and didn’t need to work for income.

All of us, regardless of gender, are now expected to support our families with a full combination of income, time, and direct parental care. I cannot be – nor do I want to be – the spouse that goes off to a field station while my spouse is required to tag along, or while my spouse stays at home. Either scenario requires me abdicating my responsibility as a parent. This summer, I’ve been away from my kid for almost a total of a month, over three trips, and that’s too much in my opinion. My situation isn’t different from many other biologists who are also parents, who have spouses who can’t drop everything during the field season.

I think my idea is reinforced, when considering the field stations that have maintained an active culture of long-term senior researchers. I haven’t worked there myself, but I’ve heard a lot about Rocky Mountain Biological Lab (RMBL), in southwestern Colorado. There is a large group of senior researchers who live on station full-time during the summer. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the impression that nearly all of the senior researchers that work at RMBL have two parents that are both conducting research on site. So, there may be kids living on station, and these kids have two parents to juggle childcare together. Perhaps there are also senior researchers that have particularly flexible spouses or who are single. This seems to be a relatively unique scenario at RMBL, a special community that serves as home to two-career academic families over the summertime.

Another field station that has long-term senior researchers is Barro Colorado Island (BCI), part of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. What makes BCI unique is that the Smithsonian employs many full-time research scientists whose job is to conduct research, often in BCI and the local environs. Other research stations don’t fully pay a big scientific staff to conduct research on site. However, it’s my understanding that the academic environment on BCI has atrophied a bit, with much of the community shifting to the little town of Gamboa, which hosts the launch site for the regular boat to BCI. Because working on BCI is pricier for long-term researchers, and Gamboa offers are more community for families, many researchers set up shop in town and may only occasionally visit BCI. Most of the senior researchers that live in Gamboa for longer periods are employed to work on site full-time. I suspect that senior researchers from universities abroad typically don’t work in Panama for longer periods, because of the same concerns about parenting.

If we want to promote long-term research in the field by senior scientists, then perhaps we could make sure that field biologists marry one another. Perhaps we could sterilize all field biologists.

I don’t have any practical recommendation about how to make sure that senior scientists spend more time in the field, which I do think would be good for science.

The field station where I work, La Selva Biological Station, constructed family housing more than 20 years ago, to accommodate scientists bringing their children. (I made use of this feature this summer for a couple weeks.) However, that can’t get me to live on station for the whole summer. While my kid could come along, my spouse isn’t going to drop her life to watch me at a field station all summer. I’m not going to take my kid away from my spouse for the whole summer and hire someone to care for him while I do science. The family housing can make me stay a little longer, but it can’t work for long periods.

The emergence of field stations in the United States happened during a time when most senior researchers were men who had spouses who handled the non-scientific aspects of their lives. Those times are gone. I don’t lament the change, but it does mean that field stations are less like to become long-term homes to senior scientists.

While I’d love to be at my field station all summer, I love my family infinitely more.

Am I less of a biologist by spending less than the whole summer in the field? Yes, I think that might be the case. However, my short visits to the field station make me more of a parent and more of a spouse. If there has to be a scientist/parent tradeoff, the parent side will always win out.

Note: I am writing this post while teaching a field course on Ants of the Southwest. Two of the course faculty are mothers, with their <2 year-old kids and non-ant spouses joining us on station. This bodes well.

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Also, as an aside, here’s another prescription for helping improve the academic culture at field stations: shut off the damn internet between 8pm and 10pm. Lots of smart and interesting people hide with electronic devices when they could be interacting with one another.

Supervising students from afar

Note: Heads up, the site is going to stay a little quiet for the next few weeks, during some vacation. Posts will continue, at 2-3 week, though I won’t be able to respond to comments or moderate. Come mid-August, things will pick up.

With students in the lab and the field during the summer, there are plenty of times when undergrads are working and their PIs are not working alongside them.

It’s typical for a PhD student to go off to do one’s own research out in some remote place, like Andean glaciers. Undergrads, however, probably shouldn’t venture off on their own, if their project is going to be tremendously successful. And they probably don’t even work in the lab for extended periods without regular check-ins.

We can’t work alongside our students all the time. Our academic lives in the summer can’t principally consist of labwork and fieldwork. We have writing, conferences, and vacation.

As my lab is primarily built around field experiments, my students spend the summer in the field. The field, however, is several thousand miles away from home. This normally could be a problem with an undergraduate field crew, but I base the lab’s work out of an active field station. This site hosts a full community of other researchers, as well as great infrastructure that helps ensures that the resources for research are available, as well as meeting needs with respect to health and safety.

Am I concerned that the science might not work out as well as it might if I were there all of the time. A little bit, but not much. I have some rockin’ students, and I have full confidence that things are working out. Not only do my students know what they’re doing, but they also are good at diagnosing when they have doubts.

They know that I am easily contacted to deal with problems as they crop up. Except when I’m not available. I’m just returned from teaching a field course in a place that lacks cell coverage. I had wifi, but I wasn’t checking it every minute. Now that I’m heading on v

This is where I remind myself, this isn’t only my research; the students own the project as well. If they didn’t have the opportunity to make independent decisions, and have them be genuinely independent, then they wouldn’t be getting as much out of it. And, I’ve learned that when great students are making the calls things are often better than when I am in charge.

How much distance do you create/tolerate from the day-to-day work of your undergraduate research projects? What level of engagement leads to the greatest level of success?

Broader impacts ≠ reaching underrepresented groups

When the National Science Foundation introduced the required “Broader Impacts” criterion, it took more than a little bit of explaining at the outset.

Several years later, most of us understand what a “broader impact” is: In some shape or form, the funded project affects society beyond the scientific findings. There are a lot of ways to approach broader impacts. How do we go about deciding which way to fulfill the broader impacts requirement?

Earlier this year, Nadkarni and Stasch answered this question quantitatively, by evaluating the broader impacts included in nine years of funded proposals within the Ecosystem Studies program. There were some interesting finds, but there is one that I want to single out in particular.

Only 11% of the broader impacts in these proposals specifically targeted groups underrepresented in the sciences.

That’s right, only 11% of the proposals had broader impacts targeting underrepresented groups.

When I think “broader impacts,” I first, and foremost, think of providing training and mentorship opportunities to students from underrepresented groups. I also think of outreach efforts targeting underrepresented populations.

That seems to be a relatively rare priority.

It doesn’t seem to be a big stretch to say that one of the major factors imperiling the future of scientific progress in the USA is that massive sections of our population – and the ones that are growing more quickly – are not interested in, or prepared for, careers in science. If you read every other piece of policy paperwork about science education, you’ll see that the country needs to open the pathway for careers in science to Latino and African-American students. It matters, big time.

But nobody’s doing it in their broader impacts. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?

There are so many possible reasons for this phenomenon, and I don’t want to speculate ad nauseum. Here’s one possibility, though: when people think “broader impacts” they actually do first think about targeting “underrepresented groups.” However, they don’t have a simple or effective route to do so.

How do you reach students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups? You start with students who are in disadvantaged and underrepresented institutions. Which means that the people who are getting all of these grants funded to implement broader impacts, if not at a disadvantaged institution, should start reaching out.

Are you one of those who haven’t included underrepresented groups in your broader impacts? If so, could you leave a comment about what kinds of things could smooth the path? What do you think that NSF, and we as a community, could do to help researchers at institutions with lots of NSF grants (and relatively few disadvantaged underrepresented students) reach out to underrepresented groups?

Reference:

Nalini M Nadkarni and Amy E Stasch 2013. How broad are our broader impacts? An analysis of the National Science Foundation’s Ecosystem Studies Program and the Broader Impacts requirement. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11: 13–19.

Applying for a faculty position at a teaching institution: the research statement

Pretty much every faculty job application requires a Research Statement. It could be called something slightly different (research plan, statement of research interests), but they’re all pretty much the same.

The research statement that you send to a research university has to be fundamentally different from the one you send to a teaching institution.

When you’re applying for a job at a research university, your research statement should explain that your research is academically exciting, you are a current or future rockstar, you’ll bring in a more grant money than a minor deity, produce a ton of prestigious publications, train amazing doctoral students and your research fits well into strategic emphases within the department. I guess. I’ve never been on a search committee at a research university.

If you sent that that message to a teaching institution, you wouldn’t make the shortlist, because you wouldn’t fit in.

What messages do you need to send to a search committee at a teaching institution in your teaching statement?

Your research is academically exciting
Your research will provide extraordinary opportunities for undergraduates
You have a realistic notion about the amount of research you’ll get done
Your work will be successful outside the context of big labs you have worked in before
You can get external funds, but your program won’t fall apart without it
Your research is complementary with the department (you fill an open niche)

You don’t need to overtly state the above points, but they all should be things that an informed reader can easily infer.

Teaching institutions want to hire the best researchers that they can. However, departments don’t want to hire someone who they aren’t sure can’t run a successful research program while teaching the standard teaching load. They don’t even want to waste an interview slot on that kind of person.

You want to make sure that your application doesn’t communicate, by inclusion or omission, that you might be someone who can’t teach a lot while doing research with students at the same time. But most applicants lack that kind of experience. This is not a handicap. Search committees can’t use past performance to evaluate how someone will do research in a teaching faculty position. Instead, they can size up the attitude of the applicant. When you write about how you mentor and do research, does your approach look like something they think would be successful? Those things matter, a lot.

Your research statement is not the centerpiece of your application, but it is important for narrowing down the applicant pool. The two major elements that the search committee will be looking for in your research statement are:

Your research fits the specialty that the department is looking for
Your attitude towards research fits well within departmental norms

Unfortunately, you don’t really have any control over either of those two elements. But what you can do, for the second element, is to make sure that the attitude in your application fits what you know of the institution and what might be more generally applicable to many teaching campuses.

One approach that can work well is to build your research statement around a five-year plan. You don’t have to call it that, but it should communicate the scope of how much work you’ll do before you submit your tenure file at the start of your sixth year. If you project much further into the future about what your research goals and interests are, you’ll sound unrealistic. If you don’t look ahead for multiple years of research, then you’ll appear unfocused. You shouldn’t describe specific experiments, but you should describe lines of research, where they’ll be going, and what you expect to discover.

One focal point of your research statement needs to explain the role of undergraduates. What is your mentoring style? How you do identify and recruit students for your lab? What are your priorities for student development? How do you design projects so that there are meaningful roles for undergraduates? These things are important. The fact that you place undergraduate mentorship inside your research statement is, itself, an expression of your priorities.

Like all other parts of the application, you’ll be more successful if you honestly communicate your priorities and goals. This will not only result in the right institutions picking you for an interview, but it also will have the added benefit of making sure that you will be able to fulfill the expectations that you create.

You don’t have to think too big or claim to be running a research program that will transform your discipline. You just need to get pubs out once in a while with student coauthors, mentor undergraduates in research, and hopefully get a grant. Put yourself in that mindset while crafting your research statement and you are more likely to have an ethos that will fit with the departmental mindset.

On specialization: don’t research your way into obscurity

A current conversation about model systems and the benefits of being a scientific specialist or generalist has been interesting, and I thought I’d join in. (This post was written for a while, but now’s a good moment to actually share it.)

Here’s my main point : Becoming a specialist on a narrow topic or taxon is a bad idea, because it narrows your opportunities and decreases both your visibility and your impact. If you’re in a position to choose your research trajectory and degree of specialization, I have two specific prescriptions near the end of the post.

When building a research program within teaching institutions, I’ve seen junior faculty advised by senior colleagues to avoid competing with big research labs. They are advised to find a specialized topic, not subject to competition, and develop expertise. For example, I’ve seen people whose entire research career, at a teaching institution, is built on the phylogenetic reconstruction of a single genus.

The notion behind this strategy is that you can be the world expert in something if nobody else is studying it. This route can allow you to retain a niche in academia, even if you are busy enough teaching that you can’t penetrate a more broader or more mainstream research agenda.

This sounds like a horrible idea.

If you specialize on an obscure topic that nobody is interested in studying, that means that you’ve become an expert in a mostly useless topic. What good is that?

If you are convinced that your particular obscure field should is truly important, and that the whole world is wrong, then that’s a different matter. If you think that understanding the detailed phylogeny of a single genus is important because of the unrealized significance of this group and the broad and general lessons to be learned from this model taxon, then fine, go ahead and spend your career working on it. However, if you choose a specialization for the purpose of defending a narrow niche, then you’re not allowing yourself the academic freedom that produces the best scholarship. And, you’ve intentionally chosen a route to obscurity.

Let’s just say that your obscure specialty suddenly matters to everyone? Let’s say that your model genus simultaneously emerges as an invasive species, produces a cancer-curing chemical and is the secret to carbon-free energy production. Are you going to have a great impact? No.

You’ll get more attention at first, but then you’ll then be shuffled back into obscurity when the big names in the field move into your pet taxon. Then, you won’t even own your little niche anymore, and your work will be seen as even more obscure.

Here’s a true anecdote: I once worked with someone who worked in a tiny niche, without collaborating. Coming up for tenure at a teaching institution, this person focused work on a single niche project over a few years. Shortly after the project was finished, less than a year before turning in the tenure dossier, this person was scooped by a bigger lab. This bigger lab just knocked out this work as a side project with some spare time. This unfortunate choice to overspecialize, without collaboration, meant that this person came up for tenure short of research expectations.

You won’t be a famous scientist working at a teaching institution. So, if you’re going to be a successful scientist, you need to be productive and successful one without the fame. Success in research is often based in collaboration, and people won’t be seeking you out for your narrow expertise in an obscure topic – they’ll be seeking you out because you are good and have something useful to offer for research on an existing question of interest.

Why would someone work in an obscure niche? Maybe it could be a personal passion, which would be a great reason, just like any other hobby. Other than that, the only reason I can think of is that a noncompetitive niche enables someone to continue to consistently publish a large number of papers that few people read. Some have made the argument that working on an obscure topic is the only reliable road to a position in the academic community, for those who are working in teaching institutions. It’s the road to being recognized as a scholar on your campus, but that’s not our real academic community.

Doing this work on an obscure topic buys you a place at the table. That might be true, with a caveat: Working on minutia buys you a place at the kiddie table.

What is a good attitude towards developing a research program at a teaching institution? It should take advantage of the fact that the productivity or prestige of your research program isn’t so important to your institution. I agree with Chris Richardson of Young Harris College, who uses his job at a teaching institution to give him the freedom to do research on anything that interests him:

There is… much less pressure on me to be the expert in one particular niche, leaving the research questions I can pursue much more open.

What is the best approach towards the generalization/specialization continuum as a researcher at a teaching institution? I have two specific prescriptions:

Do whatever you want! Be free! Use the freedom that have.
You’re best off if you general work on a diversity of questions, but within a framework that allows you expertise that will be of collaborative utility.

I’m not an ideal example, but at least I’m familiar with myself. Nearly everything I do involves ants. Moreover, it’s on one particular location that’s only 15 km² in area. It’s easy to argue that this is obscure. However, the questions that I have asked include behavior, community ecology, some ecosystem ecology and a little chemical ecology sprinkled in. I have a set of experimental techniques and data that allow me to have specific, and long-term, information that is very difficult to acquire in any system. So you could say that I only study ants, in this one tiny place. Or you could say that I’m a generalist who works on all kinds of questions, with this one particular system.

What has this approach done for me? I’ve chosen the place where I work carefully, and it is a place where a lot of other people work. The kinds of information that I have generated can be useful to others, and my experience allows me to be of substantial use as a collaborator. Actually, I’m not even close to being the main expert of my taxon of choice at my field site. I am, however, a guy who works there consistently and broadly on a variety of questions, and is prepared to engage with collaborators on new questions.

I’m not required to follow a path that necessitates continuous external funds, marketing my doctoral students and publishing well every year. This is the ideal academic job – I am not required to satisfy anybody with my research program, other than myself. Hopefully the research will be broadly useful to all, but I can design and run it as I wish, based on the funding, timescale and focus that suits my needs.

I’m not wedded to my study system, nor to the single place where I’ve conducted most of my field-based research for my career. But, it works for me, and I really enjoy it, and this depth of experience in this one system and location gives me an avenue to ask lots of questions in all kinds of fields that I wouldn’t be able to do if I switched to a different taxon or location with which I was less familiar.

So, I’m a geographical and taxonomic specialist, but a conceptual generalist. To me, this is the most fun way to do science, and it lets me give great opportunities to students as well as to collaborators. I think this approach merges the benefits of generalization and specialization but minimizes the drawbacks.

The Education-Industrial Complex

If I wanted to stop being a scientist and become wealthy, there’s one obvious path in front of me:

I’d become an educational consultant.

What would be the source of my newfound wealth? Federal grants, state programs and professional development funds from cash-strapped school districts. School districts that have stratospheric class sizes, have cut all arts, and fired their librarians long ago.

I bet I’d be able to double the income I’m making now, as a university professor.

Would be unethical to become a well-paid educational consultant? Myself, I’d have trouble sleeping.

How could I switch from being a science professor to educational consultant? It wouldn’t be hard. I have a Ph.D. in a STEM field and have been an educator for a couple decades. I have connections in a few school districts, and with a few years of experience working on STEM Education projects I could easily create a brand around myself as a pioneer in inquiry-based learning. I could hire a current or former teacher to gain K-12 classroom credibility.

If I were to come with a catchy name and website, and start pushing the pavement, I bet I could come up with a strong bank of clients within a year. I’d start out with some freebie gigs, build up a positive reputation, and then I could start charging, on a sliding scale depending on how much money the client has to burn.

Would I be a good educational consultant? No, I think I’d be a horrible one. Would people realize I’m a horrible one? No, because the reputation of a consultant isn’t necessarily connected with success of long-term outcomes.

I’d have little to offer than the obvious stuff that any scientist would be able to offer: Kids inherently love science. People learn though self-directed inquiry. Teaching science is hard because teachers need to provide a strong framework within which kids can develop and conduct their own experiments.

You don’t need a consultant to tell you that. But that’s what I’d do, and after I throw in a ton of accepted acronyms, and throw in one of my own invention, I bet it would sell like a snocone in the summertime.

Why would I think this could actually fly? Because I see it all around me.

When education falls on hard times, consultants win, and kids lose.

Teachers lose too, because the consultants are brought into to fix the teachers. What the teachers really need is the freedom to do what they’ve been trained to do, but no consultant can get paid to say that.

US educational levels are inversely tracking income inequality; that’s not merely a correlative relationship. School districts that have no money and are failing (also not a spurious relationship) are apt to find some kind of money to overpay consultants, with the mistaken thinking that if the people inside the system can’t make everything fine, you have to bring in someone from outside.

I’ve seen outside consultants receive huge checks from school districts, when the districts really, truly, need to spend the money other places. I haven’t ever seen any consultants fix anything for real. I have seen – and am part of – genuine partnerships that result in long-term changes over the course of several years. But hiring an outside consultant for a day, week, month or year? The only real result, that I’ve seen, is that the consultant’s pockets get stuffed with cash.

Educators tend to be smart people, so what’s with wasting the money on consultants? I’m not wholly sure, but here are some ideas. First, part of it is that administrators in underfunded districts can’t hire anybody to do certain tasks full-time, so they spend far too much on consultants to do jobs that should be done by employees within the districts.

Second, outside consultants have an odor of happiness and credibility. They dress like administrators and not like teachers, and appear well-connected to people of influence. Their dog-and-pony shows cause a happy feeling of positivity that you can’t get from someone you work with on a day-to-day basis. If you smile, bring bagels, and are full of funny ideas that appear to be innovative, then you’ll get good reviews and then you’ll get hired by someone else.

Third, hiring a consultant is easy. Making change yourself is hard, and making change happen in a stubborn community with which you work on a daily basis is even harder. But giving a check to someone who says that they can make change happen for you? That’s easy.

I am experienced with several troubled schools. Like all messed-up urban schools, the reasons for the problems are complex, but you could reasonably choose to see it as a simple matter, as symptom of poverty. These problems can’t be fixed with a consultant. This doesn’t stop the administrative efforts to find the consultant with a magic bullet.

I am familiar with one school in particular, which has been known to be a problem school for decades. For almost as long, this school has been working with an outside organization that has been hired as a consultant to repair the school. Obviously, the outside organization isn’t doing its job. If they were being honest with themselves, couldn’t the consultants return the checks to the school to spend the money more wisely? Yes, they could. But who works against their own livelihood?

When schools have excellent teachers who are empowered to teach as they see fit, and when the curriculum is designed for inquiry rather than memorization, then kids will learn. Right now, our public schools are missing those critical elements. Until consultants can find a fix to those problems, I wish they’d just go back to the classroom.

(As an addendum, you might ask what kind of long-term partnerships am I involved in and how do they help fix our problems? I’m mostly working to recruit and prepare more excellent science teachers than we currently have, and to promote science education for kids of all ages. Their effectiveness is handicapped by lack of funds, and policies set by the district, the state and the federal government.)

The cover letter for a faculty position at a teaching institution

What is the role of a cover letter in the application for a faculty job?

The primary function of the cover letter is to help you make the short list. Many search committee members use cover letters to cull the tower of applications to a workable height. If your cover letter doesn’t communicate a good fit, then it’s easy for your application to be tossed aside.

Once you’re on the short list, your application will get scrutinized in more detail. Your cover letter, along with your CV, is your foot in the door, before the door slams shut.

Because cover letters are used for culling, the absence of negatives in the letter is particularly important. In addition, the there are a number of required elements showing that you are a potential good fit. Your letter can’t have things that rule you out, and it needs to have things that take you to the next level.

It doesn’t take a paleocytogeneticist to figure out that you need to identify the traits that are seen as essential, negative, and positive by the institution to which you are applying. You can do some research, but what a department thinks is often mysterious, even to the members of the department. Regardless, there are a number of commonalities among most teaching institutions in how they pick candidates, which I attempt to elucidate here. This might be an incomplete or flawed list; I’d love to see comments.

Required elements: These are needed to make the short list.

You are capable of teaching what the job requires. You have to be qualified to teach the courses in the job ad, and then some. If you haven’t taught these courses already, that’s okay. Be sure to explain what you have already taught, where you’ve taught it, and that you’re fully prepared, and excited, to teach what is in the job ad.

You are focused on teaching. There are different ways to communicate this fact, but it has to clearly emerge throughout the letter that teaching is your highest priority.

You are serious about research, and discuss it in the context of undergraduate mentorship. Be clear that student research experiences are integral to your research. This doesn’t have to be the purpose of your research, but nearly every undergraduate institution is expecting its new faculty to substantially engage students in research.

Your research program is workable on campus. Nobody is going to want to interview anyone whose research looks like it isn’t compatible with the campus. It needs to be obvious that your research can continue after you move. If your work has involved specialized locations or facilities, you need to make it clear that you have a way to continue a productive research agenda after the moving. (For example, since my research is based in a different country, then I have to mention that I always do my fieldwork in summer and winter break. Another approach would be to indicate that I’m prepared to operate my research program locally.)

You’re not a weirdo. Being a weirdo isn’t just a negative; you have to actively not be a weirdo to get on the short list. What does a weirdo look like in a cover letter? Well, a weirdo has a weird cover letter, meaning that it appreciably deviates from the norm. Be normal in the cover letter, just do it in an excellent way. One exception is if the search committee is composed of weirdoes. This is academia, after all.

Negatives: Stay away from these things in the cover letter

Research comes before teaching: At a teaching institution, teaching comes first. That means, literally, that teaching should be mentioned first. Don’t be more excited about research than about teaching.

Research gets more verbiage than teaching. You’re being hired to teach. I understand that describing your research program in the level of detail you wish might take three paragraphs. But that would require at least three, better, paragraphs on teaching. And if you did that, your letter would be too long.

Not doing your homework: There could be many small things that could suggest that the applicant hasn’t taken the time to learn the basics of the campus. Don’t mention that you really want to teach a specific class that is clearly the territory of someone else. Don’t say that you would like to teach the laboratory of a course which is offered without a lab. Don’t refer to a department-less program as a department, and don’t use acronyms or names for things on campus unless you know those are in common use.

Typos. One can be overlooked, but two is mighty bad. Be careful to avoid cut-and-paste errors that show traces of other applications. Of course everybody knows that applicants apply for many jobs, and this isn’t fatal, but it obviously doesn’t look good.

Educational mumbo-jumbo. It would be great if your teaching included quickthinks, think-pair-share, formative assessments, and uses Bloom’s taxonomy to formally establish expectations. To many scientists, even at teaching institutions, you’d be overbearing if wrote about it in your cover letter. You might not even want to mention clickers unless you know the department has already adopted them. Many scientists, even at teaching institutions, are threatened by other scientists who are progressive in finding effective modes of teaching. You can present yourself as a progressive, experienced and innovative instructor without making the recalcitrant relics in the department think that you’ve gone to the dark side of education.

Namedropping. Let your CV and reference letters speak for themselves, especially if you were blessed with a pedigree including Dr. Famous. Keep in mind that small campuses have people in such divergent fields that Dr. Famous might not even matter to your audience.

Boasting. The cover letter is not the place to mention awards you’ve received, big papers you’ve published, or big grants you’ve landed. That’s on your CV and it can speak for itself. Discuss your projects, but not the amount of money connected or who funded it. If you have a record of external funding, then say in your cover letter that you intend to continue the projects that you’ve been running.

Discussion of the nice location of the campus. Anybody can waste words about the perfect weather in coastal Southern California, the great cultural scene in Los Angeles, New York’s great bagels, that charming rural towns are great places to raise families, and that Andy Warhol came from Pittsburgh. To say so is cloying, unless you’re a Warhol scholar.

The mistake that being a student informs you about the life of a professor. Many people who apply to liberal arts colleges mention that they were liberal arts college students, suggesting that this experience gives them a better preparation for the job of a liberal arts college professor. This argument is both pedestrian and non-compelling. We are smart enough to read your CV and connect the dots. It’s okay to mention it, but don’t write about the topic as if you have some magical level of understanding, unless you had attended the same school to which you are applying for a job. Being a student at a liberal arts college doesn’t help you know what it is like to be a professor at one. If imply this idea, you could sound a little naïve.

You’re coming up for tenure. The longer you are in a faculty position, the harder it is to move, unless you want to become an administrator. If you want to move from one job to another, it’s possible, but you have to convince the committee that you’re really serious about moving and that you’re not just applying for a counter offer, or to test the waters. Don’t mince words and be clear about your motivation if you want to leave. You also need to remain positive and not say anything negative about your current position. This is a delicate dance. Make sure that this is backed up by a letter-writer from your campus, who can be more frank than you. You need to bring this out in your cover letter so that the committee will choose to look beyond your CV.

Expression of negativity about anything. Don’t complain, don’t make excuses, and don’t air any grievances about anything. If your publication record is subpar, the worst thing you can do about it is to make excuses or promises. If you’re looking to leave one job for another, or choosing one career path over another, your motivations need to be positive. You might be working in a snakepit, but you can’t speak badly of your current employer if you are to land a new one.

Positives: Recommended but not required

The letter is the right length. Spilling onto a third page is too wordy, but not getting far enough into the second page is too terse. The best cover letters I’ve read (in my opinion) go some distance into the second page. Five brief paragraphs should be fine. You’re not fooling anybody by shrinking the font, other than yourself.

You communicate that you might have a realistic idea about what it is like at that institution. Many applicants for teaching jobs really have no idea how much teaching happens. If you’re smooth, you can subtly phrase things to make it clear that you won’t get sticker shock when you find out what the teaching load is like. If you can find a credible way of explaining that you are able to thrive while teaching a full course load, include it in the letter. As a drawback, I don’t know how to recommend how to do that smoothly without having already had that experience.

You are open-minded about your teaching assignments. Sometimes, new hires are stuck with the classes that senior faculty are tired of teaching. In others departments, new hires are rewarded with the opportunity to teach their specialty. You never know what the department needs, and even if the job ad is detailed and specific, the people in the department might not have equally specific ideas. In addition to explaining that you can teach the things in the ad, you should indicate that you enjoy teaching at all levels (if this is true) and that you’re open to a variety of courses that are suited to your qualifications (if this is true).

Specific references to campus-specific traits indicating that you can fit in well: These things are particular to a person and to a campus. For example, if you do work in Latin America and the university has a clear emphasis or strategic direction towards Latin America, bring this up. Another example could be that you know that the college has a nature preserve adjacent to campus, and that is the home to organisms that you study, and that working there would facilitate long-term and student-centered research. The more you do your homework, the greater the chance you might find a connection. Don’t make a stretch, but if it’s a natural fit, it’s okay to mention it in the cover letter and them amplify in the teaching and research statements as needed.

Your research is in the area required in the job ad. Perhaps this is a surprise, but this is not in the “required element” category for a reason. Job ads are forged through compromise, and are typically unsatisfactory to members of the search committee, and might be altered by administrators before going to press. You can’t put too much stock in them (Including the role of research on campus, or the role of religion on campus). You never really know what the department is looking for, from just reading the job ad. You can’t ever really know until you get an offer. If you really want to work at a particular school, it can’t hurt to apply even if you don’t fit the exact subspecialty in the job ad, except for the time spent on the application. Your odds are lower, as the job ad might be accurate about the search, but you never know if they’ll like what they see. Just don’t try to sell yourself as something that you are not. For example, the ad for my current position called for an ecosystem ecologist. I clearly am not an ecosystem ecologist. It turns out that the department just wanted an ecologist, and an ecosystem ecologist was a field that they were somewhat interested in, but they weren’t that picky. If you do fit, that’s wonderful for you, and you have much better odds. But, there is a chance you still could land an interview if you don’t have the exact specialty in the ad. Just be honest about your qualifications and interests, because the untruth usually smells a lot like bull.

Gorgeous prose. A workmanlike and sufficiently written letter isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. But excellent writing will make you stand out. There are different ways to write beautifully, but they all require practice. There are lots of people and places that are pleased to tell you what good writing looks like.

You’re a member of an underrepresented group. Nobody is going to be hired solely because of ethnicity or gender. However, this can help get you on the short list. Once you get on campus, this stuff mostly doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter to the department, though it could to an administrator. (I’ve only once been involved in a faculty search in which there was a clear affirmative action candidate. Administration insisted that we create an extra interview slot for a particular applicant from an underrepresented group, who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten a slot. This person showed up and was nothing short of amazing, far better than all of the other candidates. That was affirmative action at its best, in an environment where it was necessary.) If you’re a member of an underrepresented group, make sure it is overt in your application somewhere, because it could increase the chance you get an interview. It’s not cheating, and it’s not unfair. It’s giving the institution the opportunity to make the choice that it wishes to make. Once people meet you in person, how you got the interview doesn’t matter. My campus is has 50% Latino and 30% African-American students, and we need more faculty who are not only role models for our students, but also physically appear to be role models. Research shows that this makes a difference in students’ lives, and if there’s a chance that a person from one of these groups might be the best candidate, I definitely want to find that out. The best person for the job is picked, but indicating your underrepresented status could give you the opportunity to show that you’re the best.

If the job is in an unpopular or expensive location, provide a compelling reason to live there if you have one. In my opinion, it’s helpful to spend a single sentence explaining a specific personal reason for moving to, or staying in, what many consider to be a difficult place to live. For example, there are a bunch of great colleges in the Midwest, and upstate New York, in tiny towns multiple hours away from what any genuine city. Those places may have trouble recruiting – and keeping – faculty because of where they are located. There are similar recruitment problems in very cosmopolitan – but expensive – cities. If you explain that you have deep personal ties to a location, or that your spouse is interested in returning back to his or her hometown, I think it would help. For example, when I applied for a job in Los Angeles while I was employed in San Diego, I had to explain (in one sentence) that I grew up in the area and was interested in moving back. Otherwise, they probably would not think that I was serious, because San Diegans universally think that San Diego is way more awesome than LA. (When I lived there, I thought that, too. It might be something in the unfluoridated water that causes the mass delusion.) Keep in mind that your reason to bring up personal stuff has to be very compelling. Just saying that you’d like your kids to grow up in a rural town with a nice community isn’t going to cut it. The academic job scene is a seller’s market, and these personal factors matter only when you think you can prevent them from not taking you seriously. For example, if an applicant has a very strong publication record, teaching campuses might be afraid to waste an interview slot on someone who, in their view, is likely to opt for a job at a research institution.

You don’t have too many strings attached. Search committees shouldn’t – and often don’t – make decisions based on their knowledge of the personal lives of the applicants. But, if you have information, it’s hard to avoid thinking about it. The bottom line is that if you have a spouse with a portable job, and the search committee knows this, they would feel better about investing an interview slot in you. Likewise, if they suspect that you have a personal barrier that would keep you from moving, this could, unfairly, influence the decision-making process. Such possible scenarios include dual-academic-career situation when a double hire is impossible, or being single and moving to a small remote town, or having a spouse whose job cannot easily move. If you can say something to make it clear that these possible negatives don’t apply to your situation, you might be better off by doing so. Is it fair? No. But it is in your interest, and life isn’t fair. You don’t want to specifically refer to a spousal employment situation, or the lack thereof, with specifics. But pushing that borderline by saying that you ”do not have any personal or professional constraints that would prevent you from permanently relocating to the area.” (I’d like to be very clear that I intentionally work at avoiding using these kinds of data when making decisions about applications, and I honestly think that I am functionally unbiased. However, I’m going to leave it to the committee members to decide which information they want to use, and I typically lean towards sharing more rather than less if it has the potential to work in my favor.)

That’s the end of the lists.

As a guiding principle, when in doubt, be straightforward and honest. You don’t want to get a job by pretending to be someone that you aren’t, because then you’ll have to continue pretending for another six years.

As a caveat, keep in mind that all generalized advice about how to prepare a faculty job application is apt to be wrong about some things. The people who evaluate applications are normal folks just like you and me, and we all do things our own way. So, anybody who says that the cover letter is the most important part of the application, or that the CV is, or that the teaching statement is, well, they’re just making that up. The search committee is not monolithic, and every part of the application is important. I’ve already written about the teaching philosophy, and more on the other parts is forthcoming.

Holding my own with the big boys and girls

Coming from a teaching institution, I consistently push against the stereotype that I can’t be as good as someone from a big research institution.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking in a symposium along with a couple of the most prominent people in tropical biology. There were other good, non-famous, people there too. It was great fun, and I gave a damn good talk, even though the topic was slightly outside my normal line of research. After the conference, a periodic collaborator of mine told me that I was able to “hold my own” with the high-powered crowd. This was clearly a form of congratulations. Keep in mind that this is a person who I’ve known for over fifteen years.

What I thought, and didn’t choose to say, is: “That’s a funny thing to mention. Of course I did. Why would you think otherwise? Would somebody think that I might not be able to?”

If I worked at a big research university, nobody would have ever congratulated me on “holding my own” in the presence of more esteemed scientists. I would just be expected to fit in. If anything, my presence in the symposium should indicate my enhanced stature, not a temporary ability to be acceptable in the presence of the great ones.

Why didn’t I tell my buddy that this compliment wasn’t a compliment? Why didn’t I say that he revealed his own bias, or his own low expectations?

I didn’t say anything because it wouldn’t do any good. I’d sound petulant. Some might say that I’d be looking for an insult where one was not intended. (Perhaps that what readers are thinking now.) Perhaps it would give the false impression that I’m unhappy.

I don’t see the remark about “holding my own” as a personal insult because I understand that it originated from a bias against my employer rather than against my work. This is especially the case because this colleague is in an entirely different subfield and I doubt he’s read many, if any, of my papers.

In that symposium, there were many people in my sub-subfield in attendance, who are quite familiar with my work. I don’t know what they were thinking, and I’m not going to ask. All I can do is continue to show again, and again, and continually, that I belong. Maybe one day, my colleagues won’t have to compliment me on holding my own with the big boys and girls.

Applying for faculty positions at teaching institutions: interpreting research culture and opportunities during an interview

This is a follow-up to an earlier post on how to look at a teaching institution to find out if serious research is possible on campus. One main point was that you can’t diagnose whether or not you will be able to run your research program at a teaching school until you have some direct experience with the campus, like you’d get during an interview. So, in this post, I discuss how to handle plans for serious research during the interview.

When interviewing, keep in mind five main points about research at teaching schools:

The culture of research on a campus isn’t predictive of how much research that you personally will be able to get done.
Before you interview, you need to be able to envision what your research program will look like and how it will operate, so you can know if you will have what you need to flourish.
At most teaching campuses, you’ll have few to no specialists in your field. So you should market your research program not with the potential for scientific discovery, but instead with the great opportunities that will be created for students.
The more specific you describe your plans, the more opportunity that others have to identify a perceived mismatch.
Ignore advice on how to succeed on a particular campus unless it comes from someone who is very successful at that institution.

(A sixth point might be that you can throw all of the preceding ideas out the window, if you happen to be the proprietor of a blog about doing research in a teaching institution. I haven’t interviewed yet since starting this site; if I am able to land any interviews this year, this could be interesting.)

The best way to figure out whether or not you could run your research out of a particular campus is to have a series of long, frank conversations with the faculty in your prospective department.

Those conversations aren’t going to happen; you can’t be that frank and I doubt your interviewers will be either. Your interlocutors may be wholly frank, but it’s not always possible to tell if this is the case. Be honest, but omit unnecessary details.

Let’s say you arrive for your interview with a very specific idea of what your research program will look like, and what it will take to succeed. Or, let’s say you don’t have a specific idea but you are open to a variety of approaches. In either scenario, you’ve got a problem during the interview. You won’t be able to spend the 1.5 days on campus smoking out all of the details about how you would run your research program.

There is a lot of ground to be covered in an interview. You’ll be expected to talk a lot, answering questions that the department has about you. Many of these questions will be about teaching, some will be about your research, and more about how you engage students in research. You also will be expected to ask a lot of questions. However, the majority of questions that you ask should be about teaching, because the institution is, after all, focused on teaching.

Remember that your ideas about research are probably very different from the people who have worked on this campus for a while. Your definition of being an active scholar is probably different from theirs. You lack the campus frame of reference. You can’t accurately perceive that frame of reference through a mere conversations. It actually takes years to figure out a campus.

You can attempt to construct a makeshift understanding of the campus research culture by reconciling what you hear and see on an interview with external information. You should be aware of what everyone is teaching, research specialties, and levels of research productivity. You can’t look at everyone’s CVs, but you can look at their websites and do a literature search before you go on an interview.

Then, you can search for consistencies and incongruent conceptions.

In my experience, the people who spend the most time talking about research during an interview are the ones that do the least amount of research. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. Most people are excited to learn about your own research and see the interview as a learning opportunity, and this is true regardless of one’s research activity. Some people who aren’t serious researchers think that they are, and want to have a heart-to-heart talk about what it takes to do research on campus and how to overcome obstacles.

For the most part, the others in the interview are trying to convince you to take the job, assuming that you get the offer. So, they are working to make sure that you have a realistic view of the situation while also understanding the available opportunities and resources. This sales job by the department is based on their incomplete understanding of what your research program requires. The more the department knows about what you need, the more they can inform you about the advantages and drawbacks of this particular position. However, the more the department knows, the more likely they will identify ways in which the job won’t work for you.

Keep in mind that what a person chooses to discuss doesn’t communicate personal priorities. Most people are trying to provide interviewees with as much information as possible, in a positive light, to be able to help everyone make the best decision. Some might be emphasizing a sales job to convince an applicant to come, and others might be trying to be evaluative of the job candidate to see if they have the right answers. Everybody is different.

I have always made a point to ask a couple questions of many different people in the department, and it’s been very informative to see how responses vary among individuals. It might be “How do you find students to work in your research lab?” or “What is it like working with the grants office?” or something about the level and predictability of small-scale internal research funding.

Moreover, I often asked, “What is expected before coming up for tenure?” This is a totally reasonable question that everyone would expect to be asked, and it’s expected that you’d ask it several times with different people. This is an open-ended question that can help you identify individual priorities and perceptions of internal challenges. (Also, highly inconsistent answers are a very bad sign of a fractured institution.)

Be sure to listen to questions you received. For example, when I interviewed for my last job, nearly everyone asked me at one point or another, “What do you think about the idea of having a graduate program in the department?” It didn’t take long to identify the majority and minority factions in the department. This was an indicator of a division within the department that I learned about during the interview. It was complicated and I didn’t have all of the facts, but I saw that the role of research in the department was a fractious issue, and I went in with that concern in mind.

You’ll never get to understand the individual priorities that each professor has during a search. Most faculty are just looking for a colleague who can teach well, get research done with students, be effective, is easy to get along with, and won’t leave for another job. Some faculty might be concerned that junior faculty will raise the bar on research expectations. Some faculty will want new people to relieve them of teaching or service assignments of which they’ve grown weary. Others might want a friend. Too often, people want to have their own pet statistical consultants. These little quirks vary and you can’t really predict or control for them.

Regardless, you should realize this much: very few faculty at teaching institutions are actively excited about hiring junior faculty who are planning to have extremely robust research agendas. Most people at teaching campuses see those big research ambitions as a poor fit, and think that those people belong at R1 universities.

So, there is little to be gained by explaining that you have big research plans, if you have them. Of course you need to communicate that you will be getting research done with students, publishing, and plan to land outside grants. But you don’t want to make an overly big deal about research.

Why not? Having a research-serious departmentmate doesn’t really help any other faculty in the department. Some people might see it as a net drain, if the new researcher is taking away the best research students, buying time out of teaching and forsaking service for research. Even faculty who are strong researchers don’t have much incentive for bringing in additional researchers. They’ll just compete for limited resources from the Dean’s office and steal the limelight. (Those don’t matter for me, as the resources are already so limited that another mouth to feed can’t hurt me, and the research limelight on my campus is dim for all.)

Am I overstating the lack of interest in research in job candidates at teaching campuses? I don’t think so.

I’m as gung-ho for research as anybody on my campus. But whenever we get to make a new hire, is it important to me that this new person builds a productive research lab? Not really. I would like it because it would help enhance the overall research climate in the campus, but we have many more pressing immediate and long-term needs, dealing with the curriculum, departmental service, advising, vetting out jerks and finding someone who is truly student-centered. If a productive research lab run by a new hire isn’t my own priority in a search, it’s probably not a top priority of other reasonable people who aren’t working to actively promote research on teaching campuses.

Here’s another quirk of teaching campuses: Because research is mostly a solitary endeavor (because each campus typically has only one person in each specialty), then the professors on campus who talk a lot about research are prone to be seen as narcissists or out of touch with others. If you talk too much about your research during an interview, then you risk sounding like one of those narcissists.

If you’re asked about your research ideas or plans, give a 30-second summary. Elaborate when asked, but you shouldn’t be giving a reply that takes more than a minute or two unless you get clear verbal or nonverbal cues to continue. That’s true for almost every question, but it’s particularly important to remember to be brief about your research.

After you’ve done your best to understand the research culture during an interview, then you need figure out how, or if, you research can fit in on the campus. Remember that the absence of a research culture doesn’t preclude the establishment of a productive research program. It just means that your productive research program wouldn’t matter much to anybody, or it might even be threatening to others.

While all kinds of support is wonderful, it’s perfectly fine if your research program is greeted with ambivalence.

How can you tell whether an agenda for serious research will be greeted with antagonism? It’s not easy, and I got it wrong when I was interviewing.

At a distance, if you were to look at my current and previous departments, it would be easy to make the mistake in thinking that research would have been more possible in my old job. People in that department published more often, and there was a lot more talk about research. The university was able to give every professor a few thousand bucks per year for research, paid for travel to conferences, and there was a university-funded student research program in the summer. What was less obvious to the casual observer is that there was clear antagonism to big-time productivity. There was one big-league researcher in my department, and he kept all of his research almost secret.

At my current job, you might think that research is impossible. We have scant startup funds, very low rates of faculty publication, and no internal support for research or travel (though this year is an exception). However, a productive research program is far more possible in this job compared to my old one. Anybody who can build a highly productive research lab is more than welcome. That welcome doesn’t translate into more space or resources, but everyone is happy and that kind of thing is strongly encouraged. I didn’t realize this would be the case until I was well established into the job, and I’m very glad it has turned out this way.

How can you figure out if a teaching campus passes the anti-research smell test?

You need to pay attention to subtle cues, see how people talk about one another and their priorities. If you don’t mind not getting a job offer from a place hostile to a highly productive lab, you could ask straight out, “How would you feel if I ended up getting big grants, reduced my teaching load down to two courses per semester and spend lots of time training research students and writing manuscripts?”

Or you could ask, “When is too much research a problem?” When approaching this issue, remember that you don’t want to be seen as overly optimistic, or naïve, or not interested in teaching.

In sum, you need to be all about teaching, and that makes it a tricky dance to learn about true research opportunities. Because every faculty member needs to be dedicated to teaching above all else, you need to communicate this priority in the interview. I’m all about teaching and my students, but I’m also all about research. That idea is really hard to communicate in a short interview. You communicate your priorities with your words and your actions, and people expect them to match.

To be successful in research, you need to forge your own path. This is particularly true at teaching institutions.

To be continued: specific things to do, and specific things to avoid, throughout the job application process.

Stop using “silverback” to describe scientists. It’s sexist.

Some people have taken to referring to influential senior scientists as “silverbacks.”

This practice should stop.

I’m writing this at a scientific conference, and I’ve heard it several times in independent contexts, in a non-ironic use. I also heard this term at the last three conferences I’ve attended in the last few years by both European and North American researchers. I’ve learned that at least one university has a lecture series called the “silverback” sessions.

I don’t know the specific origin of the term, or when it emerged as a regular term of use. Regardless, I don’t like it.

For those unaware of the behavioral ecology of non-human apes, a “silverback” is an older, large-bodied and behaviorally dominant male gorilla, characterized by silver fur on its back. With respect to at least certain aspects of a social group of gorillas, silverbacks are in charge. Their dominant status emerges from their age, size, interactions with others, experience and ability to advance in the social network of their group.

What’s the problem with the use of the term “silverback?” I don’t have a problem with the practice of using analogies from the behavior of other species to be applied to our own, as long as they’re appropriate.

Labeling influential senior scientists as “silverbacks” is a bad idea for one big reason:

It is sexist.

Female gorillas are never silverbacks. By using the term “silverback” to as a synonym for “influential senior scientist,” one is implying that women are not, or cannot become, influential senior scientists.

This objection isn’t about political correctness. It’s about recognizing the influential women in our midst, and showing respect for them. (Most people with issues about so-called political correctness are those who have trouble showing respect for others.)

What can we do? Join me in calling out the sexism of this word when it gets used. If you hear it in conversation, perhaps you could mention that you don’t think it’s a good use of the term because it excludes women?

(Most of my contemporary scientific heroes are women, after all.)

I’m a less-influential not-that-senior scientist, so I’m not in the best position to bring this issue to the forefront. Maybe we can bring this up with some big-time men and women to take up this issue?

Have you heard this term or is it a new one to you? Any additional observations, ideas, or suggestions?

Applying for positions at teaching institutions: identifying opportunities for serious research

Are you looking for a job at a teaching institution but and want to pursue an aggressive research agenda? Are you advising grad students or postdocs who might move into a job at a teaching school? Here are some opinions.

Let’s get two important points out of the way, that you should consider before applying for a job at a teaching school.

First, if you dislike teaching, don’t apply. This is in your own interest. As I’ve written before, if you’re going to move “up” from a job at a teaching university to a job at a research institution, you’ll have to be awesome, and to do that, you’ll have to be great at the job, including teaching. The people who leave teaching schools for research universities are the kind of people who get awards for their teaching. I have yet to see a person who doesn’t like teaching to be truly great at it, even though some have claimed it’s possible.

Second, if your primary goal is research fame, you’ll never become famous for your research while working out of a teaching institution, at least in the sciences. Even if you’re doing rockstar-level work, you won’t be a rockstar until you go elsewhere. And to move elsewhere, you need to be a great teacher. You can get excellent research done at a teaching school, but earning broad respect for your research is difficult, and fame is pretty much out of reach. A couple of my research heroes built their research careers teaching institutions. But are they broadly famous in their fields? Not as famous as they should be based on their achievements.

With those two caveats aside, let’s say that you’re focused on research and you are open to working at a teaching school. What do you need to know to figure out of a school can support your research agenda?

Before attacking that question, first let’s address a fundamental difference in culture and terminology between teaching schools and research institutions.

At most teaching-centered schools, “research” and “research active” means something different than you might expect. A typical “research-active” faculty member doesn’t necessarily publish often, and might not even be pursuing external funding. Someone with a reputation for being a strong researcher on campus might be unknown as a scholar off campus. At teaching schools, if you’re “research active,” that means that you’re doing scholarship and sharing it in some form, which in the sciences could mean training students in the lab, getting them into doctoral programs, and presenting research at local and undergraduate conferences.

What I just pointed out isn’t negative, or a dig against teaching campuses. I’m merely clarifying what “research” means at teaching campuses. If you don’t evaluate schools through this lens, you could be in for a rude surprise.

So why do teaching schools perceive research so differently than the broader research community? Isn’t research simply research? We all are used to the notion that standard measures of research success are publications, citations, and funding. Right?

At teaching institutions, it’s easy to lose focus from what happens in the scholarly community in your own field. People spend plenty of time teaching, and tenure decisions are based on what people on your campus think of you. It’s easy to focus your lens exclusively on campus culture. At any teaching campus, very few people have a well-established research presence in their international scholarly community. To do a great job, you just need to teach well, get a few pubs in minor journals, and sell yourself well on campus. It’s what most people do, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s the culture on many teaching campuses. Some of the top-notch scholars on a campus may produce little in the way of papers, but produce many new scholars. Sending many students off to good doctoral programs is, arguably, a bigger contribution to the field than publishing some papers on your own. (I s there an oversupply of scientists? Hell no.)

When you read job ads, draft your application, and interview on campus, remember the teaching school lens. If a job ad gives equal verbiage to the importance of teaching and research, and the need for excellence in both, then the be aware that teaching campuses use an entirely different measuring stick for research excellence than the academic community in general. You could be called “excellent” at research on a teaching campus but have very few publications. Most teaching schools, except some well-endowed privates, do not solicit external reviews of scholarship. (My campus actually forbids committees to contact off-campus experts for evaluating research in tenure packages!)

If you hear that that serious researchers are welcome, or that serious research is expected, what does that typically mean? That means you’re expected to have multiple publications when you come up for tenure and that you attempt to gain external funding. That’s serious research at a teaching campus. A scientist with one paper per year in a decent journal is considered to be mighty good at most teaching campuses. At very well-funded private teaching campuses, there may be higher expectations that go along with a lower teaching load. If the base teaching load is three courses per semester or higher, than it’s unlikely that “serious research” means anything more than a few pubs (though you’re usually expected to try to get a grant). If you think this is an unacceptably low level of productivity (in others), or if you think this is a sign of mediocrity, then you don’t belong on a teaching campus, because you’d get resentful of your colleagues right away.

You’ve got to be able to distinguish productivity from quality, and the fact that someone can be a great researcher while producing at a level that would be unacceptable at an R1.

What’s the best indicator of genuine campus research expectations? Look at the people who are recently tenured. What do their CVs look like? That’s what expected, or maybe just one little notch higher.

Regardless of what a campus regards as “research,” every 4-year teaching institution expects serious research at some level. All individuals are expected, at least pre-tenure, to sincerely pursue a scholarly agenda and publish. The research expectation for tenure might be just a single publication before coming up for tenure, as it was at my last job. The expectation might be 2-3 pubs before tenure (in my current position). That level of productivity might be laughable from the perspective of a research institution, but it’s serious business on a teaching campus. And when you’re teaching 3-4 full courses per semester, and your job counts on having these courses go very well, it ain’t easy.

Let’s say that you want to pursue a serious research agenda at a teaching institution, and by “serious research agenda” you mean that you want to maintain a level of research activity that will keep your CV looking like it could belong at an R1 institution. You want to publish a few papers per year and you want your research to be recognized, cited and make a difference in your discipline. Is this possible? Yes. It is common? No. Is it possible at the job to which you’re applying? Maybe. Let’s consider how you can tell if it’s possible.

If there are genuinely well-recognized researchers in the department to which you’re applying, then that’s great news for you. It’s possible! You could be one of them! That’s a wonderful sign. The flowchart ends with “sounds like a good place for research.”

What about the other branch of the flowchart? What if a department doesn’t have any productive researchers? Could a new hire run a productive research lab in a department that doesn’t have strong researchers? On some campuses this is a definite possibility; on others, it won’t be possible. How can you distinguish the former from the latter? That’s really tricky. It depends on what you think you need to run a successful research program, and if it can fit into the bounds of the institution.

A successful research lab on a teaching campus doesn’t look much like a successful lab at a research institution. Success in research at a teaching campus needs to take an entirely different route than the one that you saw in grad school. (This is a whole other long post, but here’s a start on the concept.) The things that typically result in success at research institutions just can’t happen at teaching campuses. You probably won’t have other labs with which you can collaborate. You won’t have a serious research student for more than two years, tops. You aren’t going to have postdocs to do analyses and writing on your projects, and you won’t have any single person working consistently in the lab during normal working hours. Maintaining an atmosphere of an active R1 research lab would be a full-time job, if it were even possible. You’ve got to develop a research lab that works for you on your own terms, and you need to find a campus that provides you what you need, which is individualized to what makes your program work.

What do I need to keep my lab running? Once in a while I am contacted by a colleague who wants to “visit my lab” and spend time with my “research group.” I can’t help but chuckle to myself. My lab is more often empty than not, filled with a bunch of samples that need work. When it’s not empty, it’s full of undergraduates who are more focused on studying for their exams than they are on bringing their research towards publication. (Don’t get me wrong: my research lab is critically important space, and I need more of it; I just use this space differently than R1 labs.) My students are my highest priority, but the route that I take is to emphasize productivity of my research program over providing detailed and careful mentorship to my students year-round. This might be heresy in some teaching institutions, but I think it’s a strategy that serves the interests of my students the best.

With my lab looking like I just described, how do I get research done? During the school year, aside from a few small contributions by students apart from coursework, work gets done by me. (I can’t pay students to work in my lab, and all of my students need to earn money, so they typically have outside employment.) I got to spend a few weeks at the scope this spring, to finish up a very cool project, but I’d say that 98% of my work is me sitting at a computer.

During the academic year, I’m analyzing data, writing manuscripts, and feeding collaborations in a variety of ways. This work is sometimes done best when I’m not at work. I can do some things well from home, but I might work elsewhere away from campus or home too.

The source of my data arrives in the summertime. I go to the rainforest for a few weeks, and I have 1-4 students working there for the full summer. This work, along with other small projects here and there, generates more samples and data than I can handle throughout the academic year. My manuscript backlog is substantial, and if science is going to happen predictably, year after year after year, then nearly all of that work has to be done by me.

I sometimes feel like the early British explorers of the Antarctic who brought sledge dogs but didn’t know how to use them, so they ended up pulling the sleds themselves while the dogs were running alongside without any burden. This isn’t the way things really are, and my students do make great contributions, but most of them are not yet equipped to write manuscripts and if I equipped them, then far too few of them would ever come to press.

In sum, what is it that I need from my institution to get research done? I have the freedom and flexibility to be able to focus on writing. The campus culture doesn’t expect me to provide a sophisticated mentoring agenda for every student who comes into my lab, and I’m evaluated on the basis of the output (of students) rather than the methods. The bottom line is that I am sending students on to graduate programs, and that I am producing scholarship with student authors, and that I am bringing in grant money. That is valued, and I’ve never gotten any guff about how I go about making that happen. That’s how my campus allows me to get research done.

How can you apply my personal anecdote about my own campus to figuring out how other campuses can support your productive research program? You need to identify what route – or routes – exist for research success and whether those campuses enable those routes. You need to be able to envision exactly what you need to be successful, and then see if that is possible within the job. This takes an understanding of how you run your lab and how you get stuff done. This might be hard to figure out if you haven’t done it yet.

What is the worst indicator of whether a campus can support your research? Whatever they tell you. Having administrators that support research in concept is important. However, whatever they imagine you need, and whatever they want to provide, may not be what you truly need. You have to figure out what you really need, and I think this is highly individualized.

For example, if your program relies on the upkeep of some model organism, are there technical staff or work-study funds to pay someone to maintain your critters without you having to worry about it? If your work relies heavily on some fancy piece of equipment, is there one of those on campus with a service contract that you can use for your research? If you need to go two weeks at a time to a collaborating lab during the academic year, do you have the flexibility to schedule your classes to make that happen? If you need relatively untrained students to do repetitive work in the lab, are there funds or people that enable that to happen predictably or consistently? If you have a field site six hours away for your project, does the institution have a van that you can use to take students out and do you have a student population that can afford to go away for extended work?

A lot of professors who aren’t getting much research done at teaching institutions are frustrated because their institutions lack what they need to get done – not just in terms of equipment, but in terms of flexibility. There is often a structural mismatch between a professor’s research ambitions and what is possible on campus. You want to avoid that mismatch. You can do that by being flexible in what research questions you ask and how you go about answering them, or you could do that by finding the campus that can give you what you need. (I’ve done both; the latter was more by accident than design.)

Is the way the job is structured able to give you the time and resources that enable you to focus on research? You can’t tell that from a job ad. Unless you know exactly what your research program is going to look like, you can’t even learn that from an interview.

Last, can you be a serious and well-recognized researcher on a campus that doesn’t even seem to care about research at all? You definitely can. It doesn’t matter what people say or think on your campus. If your campus gives you the time, space and resources to make you successful – whatever it is that you need – it doesn’t matter what the campus culture is at all. Talking about research on a teaching campus won’t do your research program any good. You just need to, privately and in an individualized fashion, get it done.

The hardest part about being a researcher at a teaching campus is that this part of your job is very solitary. To be successful on a teaching campus typically means that you’re doing it on your own, and with collaborators who aren’t with you on your campus. This is radically different from what you experienced at research institutions in which you worked with a lab group. Even if your buddies worked on different projects, you still had one another.

How do you run a productive research program over your career in which you won’t have a peer, or highly trained mentee, working on directly related questions? Your specific answer to this question can tell you whether or not a job at a teaching institution can support your research agenda.

How can you tell this from the institution’s website and from the job ad? You can’t. Which is why you need to apply, and then find out if you land an interview. To be continued.

Efficient teaching: how to use the course management system

A wise friend of mine once advised me: the most valuable resource is our own time.

Consequently, I have emphasized efficient teaching tactics. Efficient teaching is effective teaching that doesn’t take a lot of your time. There are many routes to being an effective teacher, and some of them require far more time than others.

Many have advocated using web-based course platforms to increase teaching efficiency.

I’ve been a user of Blackboard, Moodle, and WebCT, with varying levels of experience. These are course management systems (CMS). A CMS can be mighty powerful once you’ve learned how to use one. All kinds of activities in your class can be conducted smoothly within the CMS. Some folks call them the LMS, with the L standing for learning. (I’m not going to imply that by managing a course online, I’m actually managing learning, so I’ll stick with CMS.)

If I were asked for advice how about how to use the CMS efficiently, what would I say?

Ditch the CMS.

I wouldn’t be equipped to recommend otherwise, because I have no idea how to use the CMS efficiently. If you’re not running an online course, then I don’t see why you’d need to a CMS unless you’re looking to lose time and make yourself miserable.

If you really learn how to use a CMS, by making an investment, then it can pay off. If you’re not ready to make that investment, don’t feel bad about it. If you’re using a CMS, and it seems like a time sink, don’t feel bad about dropping it.

I’ve seen others use the CMS effectively and have it an immersive part of their course. I’ve worked closely with a high school science teacher who runs a paperless classroom, with absolutely everything on Moodle. He puts up reading, assignments, quizzes, exams, and avenues for student-student interactions. That’s exceptional, meaning that it is an exception. He put a lot of front-end investment into this system, and it only started paying off because he is teaching the same curriculum, with little change, over several years. That’s wonderful, and it’s a great experience for his students as a part of building technological literacy.

I haven’t dedicated that kind of time to make the CMS work. I haven’t identified a specific benefit that I would obtain from doing so. I can teach my courses efficiently without having to use the CMS, so that’s what I’m doing. Would my teaching be more effective with the CMS? Perhaps. I’m not sure. It wouldn’t be more efficient, at least without a big front-end investment that I’ve yet to make.

Some students love the CMS; some are as annoyed by it as I am. Some people simultaneously love it and are annoyed by it, like they feel about some family members. We can’t choose our family, but we can choose against the CMS.

The main reason that students love the CMS, from what I have gathered, is that they can access their grades quickly, they know their grade in the class at any given moment, and have quick access to the files for their lectures. The CMS gives them a feeling of control over the course. They can log in at any moment and have the resources of the course at their fingertips.

From my viewpoint, those reasons are not connected to effective teaching, and may even hinder teaching effectiveness. The CMS might help students overemphasize grades over genuine learning, and memorization over exploration and deep understanding, depending of course on how you use the CMS. Whenever a student asks me to use the CMS for the course, it’s because they want a digital copy of a presentation I did in class, or because they want their grade more quickly. Those, in my view, are horrible reasons to use the CMS.

A number of faculty in my department have been using the CMS to connect clickers to grades for the course. It works for them. The clicker/CMS combo can be used to take attendance, spot quizzes, and even entire exams. That’s not a bad selling point. If you’re teaching a particularly large class, then the CMS/clicker combo can help with classroom management. However, if you’re only using clickers for immediate pop questions (“formative assessment” as they say), then you don’t need the CMS, unless these questions have grades connected to them. I have noticed that faculty members that are heavy CMS also spend a lot of time on teaching outside of the classroom. I don’t know where the threshold lies that CMS use saves time rather than costs time. For me, I suspect, I’d never hit that threshold no matter how much I teach or how big my classes are.

Another reason that I forgo the CMS is that it increases student expectations of constant availability, and for you to provide information more promptly than should be reasonably expected.

I tell my students that I’ll get back to them within a business day after they contact me. My response time is typically is far more rapid, but I don’t want my students to build the expectation that I am at their beckoning.

I want my students to think that business is conducted during class hours and office hours. Why do I want this? First of all, I think it’s healthy for the students to be able to rely on themselves to work on the course material. I am not focused on customer service, I’m focused on learning. Learning inherently requires some struggle with content, and I want my students to struggle so that way they can learn. If I clearly explain to students, during class hours, exactly how I expect them to struggle with the class material, then we can update their progress in class and office hours.

Having students expect things of me beyond class time and office hours is horrible for my own time management. If I’m teaching multiple courses simultaneously, I need to be able to put my work on those courses on my calendar, and not work on those courses when time isn’t budgeted.

It’s harder to compartmentalize your work on your course when you use the CMS, because the expectation of the students with a CMS-heavy course is the same way that other social media are used, opportunistically and frequently. Just because other parts of our lives are replete with social media, we don’t need to mimic this pattern with university coursework. There is a social burden for all of us, including our students, to frequently access information online. Do you want be a part of the problem or be a part of the solution?

In short: If the CMS works for you, great! If not, don’t feel guilty about it.

The CMS should be used to find solutions to problems in your teaching that increase efficiency. If you don’t foresee that the CMS will help accomplish this goal, don’t feel bad about not trying. If it feels like it’s not working for you, don’t feel bad about not giving it up. If it is working for you, before you recommend it for others, be sure that you have a specific and useful reason for your recommendation that is directly relevant to your colleague’s situation.

Before you pigeonhole me as a latter-day-Luddite, keep in mind that for the last year, I’ve been the “Digital Ambassador” from the Chancellor’s office to my university, tasked with promoting the use of technology to improve teaching effectiveness. (I haven’t been an effective ambassador, but I clearly am interested in integrating new and useful technology into teaching.) So, I am entirely open to using technology in the classroom. I’d like to emphasize that I’ve been an ambassador for technology in the classroom. I don’t want to extend it far beyond the classroom. Outside the classroom, I want students to engage with nature, with books, and with one another. There are some great tech tools out there that make teaching better. Is the CMS one of those tools? Not in my, albeit limited, experience.

Field courses need more units

Field courses are critical for the development of scientists in a variety of disciplines.

This fact is self-evident to many. For those whom it is not, then Chris Buddle has already written a great post explaining exactly why field courses matter. He also has some top-notch specific tips on how to run your field lab.

In this post, I’m not talking about an outdoor lab section during the semester. I’m thinking of a course that is based somewhere away from the university, in a field location apart from a university. These are immersive experiences, that don’t last a whole semester, but include a semester’s worth of work in a shorter period of time. They are taught in a way similar to how courses in the block system are taught.

It’s getting harder to find these courses within universities. Why is that? I think there are a number of complex intertwined factors. I’d like to single out one of those factors:

At many universities lacking a strong tradition of field courses, students don’t get enough academic credit for their field courses, and faculty don’t get enough credit to teach these courses.

This creates a disincentive for faculty to offer such courses and for students to enroll in them. This isn’t the only reason field courses have experienced atrophy, but I think it’s a big piece.

You might ask, “What atrophy? We have plenty of great field courses at my university over the winter break and in the summer!” I might then, ask you, “How many semester hours of credit go with the courses, relative to the hours of instruction, and how much credit do faculty get towards their annual teaching loads?”

Field courses are often undervalued relative to traditional courses taught within the university. This undervaluation reflects not just the funds allocated towards operating the courses, but also the work of the students and faculty. After chatting with some colleagues at an international field station, I’ve discovered that some of the faculty teaching field courses are working out of generosity, because they’re being undercompensated. Moreover, the students on field courses are participating even though they’re not earning the academic credit that should be associated with their effort on the course. I’ve discovered more often, though, that faculty aren’t teaching field courses because it’s not worth their time, the way that their universities account for their time.

I do realize – and have witnessed – that some field courses could actually be light on academics and hard work, and could amount to a vacation for all people involved. (Taking an undergraduate course traveling throughout Costa Rica is definitely not my kind of vacation.) For a course to receive appropriate credit, it’s only reasonable for there to be some degree of accountability so that everyone involved knows the hours of specific directed academic work that were conducted by the students on the course. However, this entirely point is a red herring because the potential for a no-work vacation-like aspect of courses is independent of the field. Lots of on-campus labs and lecture courses lack rigor, perhaps more often than field courses.

Here’s my relevant anecdote: Just weeks into my first tenure-track position, I put together a new course proposal that I brought to a departmental meeting. The proposal was well-vetted and approved by my chair, who was a lab-oriented scientist. The proposal was for a standard field course in Tropical Biology, in a few sites in Costa Rica, during the university’s January break. The proposal was straightforward, without any hitches, resembled excellent courses with which I was familiar, and followed standard practices. Running an entire class as a field course, with a few pre-departure sessions, was a novelty in my department at the time.

The department thought the course was great. However, they wanted it to be offered as a three-unit course, not as a four-unit course, as I had proposed. I looked at how much time was being spent on the course, how much work was scheduled for the students. I also looked at university guidelines for the hours of instruction and lab activity are supposed to be associated with units.

My proposed four units was a lowball, because the amount of class time and field activities with the course far exceeded a typical 4-unit course, even if the time frame was relatively short. This notion didn’t sway my department from the request that the proposed course run at three units.

Most of my new colleagues simply thought that the duration of the course shouldn’t merit four units. They wanted me to lengthen the course by several days if I wanted a four-unit class. I said if I did that, then I wouldn’t have any time for my own field research, and that also wouldn’t be fair to the students who would be doing much more than 4 units’ worth of work. (Alternatively, I could have organized the course for students to be working fewer hours per day, which I rejected a recipe for mischief, as I’ve seen in other undergraduate course traveling around Costa Rica.)

They asked, what’s my priority? Teaching or research? Do you have a problem with spending all of winter break teaching a four unit course? I thought to myself, I do have a problem if it’s far more than four units worth of work for myself and for the students.

Essentially, my department rejected my argument, not with any specific rebuttal about the value of units or how much work or time was spent on the course. They just didn’t like the idea that students could earn four units over such a short period of time. I think they didn’t realize how much I’d be working the butts off of these students on the course. They didn’t think I’d be running a field course with twelve solid hours of work per day. I’ve seen such courses, and in my view they’re the most successful ones.

I dropped the proposal.

Instead, I resolved to make as many field opportunities as possible for research students.

To date, I have yet to teach my own field course in the tropics, though I often have a very minor role in other courses offered through other institutions. And I am now an instructor on a field course operated by a field station.

I thought my experience in getting mildly shafted on the units was rather unique, but then I was chatting with a variety of people and realized that this limited-units situation might be the norm rather than the outlier. One of my field station buddies just finished teaching a demanding field course this summer. The students just went home.

I asked her if the summer course counted towards her academic year teaching load. She said it did, that the field course counted for half of a regular lecture course.

I saw her course in action. They were traveling around for multiple weeks, and working in earnest 12 hours per day, if not more. Even if you run the numbers so that all activities are considered as a “lab” rather than a “lecture,” then it’s obvious to everyone that the students should be earning a full lecture course credit for the experience, and also that the instructor receives full credit for a teaching a full course. Clearly, from where I sit, this course was far more work, cumulatively, than any normal lecture course during a regular semester. Yet she only got a half-course credit.

She said that she was turned down for full credit for the course, and she taught it anyway. Her circumstance was similar to my own, but the difference is that her students benefited from her decision to sacrifice herself.

I told her I was surprised that she decided to do it. (We’ve never had problems sharing our unsolicited opinions with one another.) If I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t be teaching it again unless everybody involved got appropriate credit. She had wonderful reasons for teaching the course. She provided amazing opportunities to a group of students that she likes and at her university. If she didn’t do it, those opportunities wouldn’t exist. If our job is to inspire and change the lives of our students, then her field course epitomizes her success as a teacher, from what I saw.

I also saw how much time she had put into the experience: far more than any normal course, and for half of the credit. That’s not only unfair, it’s also unsustainable. I can’t imagine anybody sensible person doing a more than a full course’s worth of work for the credit of a half-course on a regular basis.

Why do these field courses not get enough credit from universities? This might be overly simplistic, but I suspect it’s because most faculty – who don’t teach these courses and probably have never taken one – don’t understand them. Perhaps we could invite them along to join one of these courses for a few days and then evaluate if they’re worth the credit. If they’re not willing to invest their own time into sizing it up, then they should be willing to abandon their objections. The understanding of these field courses is inherently experiential.

I don’t know whether, from campus to campus, the problem is more often at the level of the department, the college, or the dreaded and dreadful curriculum committee. Perhaps if students finishing up a course wrote a summary of exactly what they did, and what they learned, and how it fit into the calendar, it would make a difference.

In theory, the numbers should be the numbers. But at some places, the number of hours in lecture and the lab (or field) aren’t enough to satisfy critics, who might find other reasons to oppose full credit, with the tacit bias that fieldwork isn’t as valuable as labwork.

Have any of you helped gain adequate credit for a field course in a system that had undervalued them? Does your university offer strong field courses, and if so, are they accompanied with a robust credit structure for students and faculty?

–

Tips o’ the hat to Alex Bond, Chris Buddle, and Cat Cardelus for digital or corporeal conversations on the topic.

Attending conferences as a professor from a teaching institution

We are hitting the peak season for conferences.

For those of us from teaching-centered schools, we have an extra challenge with conferences that can make the experience less pleasant.

At conferences, social status matters. Having your unknown or lesser-known teaching institution under your name on your ID badge can be a social obstacle.

Some people may disregard others on the basis of the institutions on their nametags. If your nametag says LargeR1 University on it, more people will talk to you than if your nametag lists a school that sounds like it lacks a substantial research community.

To some people at a research conference, if you work at a teaching institution, you matter less. I’m not saying this to be bitter or accusatory. I’m just recognizing the way things are and discussing it in daylight. It’s hard to deal with a problem if you don’t recognize it.

If you’re thinking about working at a teaching campus, then you should be aware that networking with other researchers who don’t know you from your work may be more difficult because of where you work. Also, people who do know you, when they realize that you’ve taken what they perceive to be a non-research job, might also treat you differently as well. Even though any faculty job is scarce nowadays, many researchers will feel sorry for people who they think settled for a job at a teaching institution.

Of course, the majority of people out there are wonderful and don’t have this bias. But it isn’t a rare bias, and it’s something that we need to understand so that we can deal with it.

Why do I think that the institution on your nametag influences perception? Well, I it’s obvious. You don’t have to be a sociologist to figure that out.

Moreover, before I moved to my current position I used to work for an equivalently obscure institution. However, this institution was named such that a good number of people, who were not very familiar with California, were apt to assume that I worked for a well-known university just up the road. Sometimes I clarified things, sometimes I let it ride. Regardless, the point is that since I moved to a campus that can’t be mistaken for a research university, I’ve seen changes in how people treat me based on my institution. I never realized I had it so good when people falsely assumed I was a professor at a research university.

People attend meetings for a variety of purposes. They go to learn about new things, to see old friends, to make new friends, to “network” and build collaborations, develop skills, find a job, and maybe tack on a vacation. I might have missed some reasons. (I don’t know when “network” transitioned from being a noun to being a verb, but I don’t like it.)

If you look at those purposes I just listed, I suspect you’ll find that some people might harbor this notion: Professors at teaching schools don’t help fulfill a number of these purposes.

If you have a teaching school on your nametag, some folks might think that you might not be worthwhile for schmoozing. I’ve seen others, as well as myself, passed over for initial schmoozing not on the basis of what we work on, or how well we publish, or who we work with, but where we work. It’s rough, but I suspect that’s the way it is.

Why aren’t we schmoozable? Some might wrongly assume that we aren’t conducting cutting-edge research, so they can’t learn anything from us. It’s unlikely we’re going to hire postdocs, we aren’t taking on Ph.D. students, and some might falsely assume that we aren’t equipped with the facilities, time or expertise for collaboration.

Is that overly harsh? Probably. I’ve never entered into an interaction with the presumption that others are biased against me based on my institution, but I’ve had plenty of conversations in which that presumption of lack of bias has been promptly invalidated.

In all of the conferences I’ve attended, where have I felt the least welcome? The Ecological Society of America. It’s also typically the biggest of the meetings that I have attended, so it might not be discipline-specific. It’s not timed well to fit my summer research and travel schedule; I typically only make the time if I’m invited to give a talk in a particular symposium. Regardless, it’s clear that some ecologists, at least at this meeting, are big on status. I’ve been around long enough that I know plenty of people who attend the meeting, from a variety of contexts. The last few times, I’ve had great fun and have been compelled to turn down as many social invitations as I am offered. However, it’s still quite transparent that I get overlooked by some people because of where I work. Perhaps it’s even worse at meetings like the Neuro conference, or with the ~~Sophophora~~ Drosophila people, or the physiologists. I have no idea, as I don’t go to those meetings. Maybe professors at teaching colleges get the heavy schmoozing treatment at those meetings.

I don’t have any authoritative advice on how to handle the issue, but I wanted to bring the concept up, and I’m wondering how others perceive this issue. For those you at teaching campuses, does my experience and opinion seem too extreme or do you feel this issue too?

How I approach meetings with this issue in mind? I try to not make it an issue as much as possible. Nowadays, my work is known within some sub-subpopulations well enough that there are occasional people who are excited to meet me and hear what I have to say. So I’m not overly concerned about being wholly marginalized, anymore. I try to be gregarious, especially reaching out to grad students who might not yet feel at ease at meetings. It’s fun to introduce people with shared interests who don’t yet know one another. Most people are interesting if you get to know them, and so I try to get to know people.

This might by cheesy but I sometimes use “California State University” on my nametag as shortcut for my campus name. I don’t do this to hide my little-known campus, but to avoid the boring conversations about where I work. I’m just tired of answering questions about teaching while I’m at a research conference. I didn’t put much thought into the decision, but that’s also how listed my affiliation on the masthead of a journal that I help edit.

As it’s often argued, first impressions matter. For my own part, I mostly recall a string of horribly embarrassing first impressions that I must have left on others. Nowadays, I don’t want the first impression to be that I’m the guy at an obscure teaching college. At an academic conference, my impression should be that I do awesome research, and that I also have a lab filled with awesome students.

Am I worth schmoozing? Definitely. I have skills, access to resources, insights, connections and all that stuff. And, if you’re looking for doctoral students, I have the best damn students that you might ever hope to bring into your lab. Each meeting I’ve attended in the last few years, I’ve emerged with a few cool collaborations in the works.

Ultimately, those who think that I’m not worth their time aren’t worth my time. If my skin were less thick, I’d have a hard time at conferences. Also, working long-term at a field station where I’ve made friends from all over North America and beyond has helped. I would have a hard time at meetings if my network was just composed of old friends from grad school. I don’t go to meetings because I have to, but because it’s tremendous fun. (This season, I’ll be at the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, in a joint meeting with the Organization for Tropical Studies. I’ve never not had fun among other tropical biologists.)

You might be thinking, maybe the level of respect/attention/schmoozing is entirely independent of institution, and just depends on how well known you are from publications other parts of your reputation? Clearly, if people directly know of your work, that might trump the institutional effect to some extent. However, if you’re meeting someone outside your subfield, with whom whose work you’re not familiar, then my hunch is that institution matters.

Anyway, if or when you bump into me at a meeting, I don’t fuss about whether or not I might get dissed. We are often busy trying to get from one room to another, trying to find old friends who we’ve promised to meet for coffee, and catch a person who we really need to see. I’m just there to have fun, learn about other people and their work, share the cool stuff I’ve been doing, be proud of my students, learn science and if the stars align I develop new collaborations. (Heck, mention you read this post and I’d be glad to buy you an overpriced convention center beer.)

If I’m not schmoozing people in high places, that might only be because I don’t need to do so. My job doesn’t require that I am known by, and work with, famous people. My work doesn’t want me to aspire to fame, because if I were successful, then they would guess that I’d leave. So meetings are just for fun in my book, as I’ve got no ladder to climb.

I suppose that, if I was stressed about getting a postdoc, or a tenure-track R1 job, or tenure, or promotion, or a fancier job or a big-time collaboration, that I’d overlook people like me too. So I don’t resent anybody for it. But I can address the situation by making it clear that I am worthwhile, not just as a nice guy but also as one who can be a great asset in our scientific endeavor.

Have you been on the receiving end of being ignored because you weren’t working in a research institution? Do you avoid meetings because they’re not as fun as they could be? Do you think my perception is off, or I am oversensitive? Do you think there are actual things that could ameliorate the issue (if it exists)?

First, let’s remove all the desks

Let’s say I were a provost or president, and had some hundred thousand dollars lying around that needed to be spent on an initiative to improve undergraduate education. (This isn’t an unlikely budgetary scenario.)

I’d spend all of it on furniture.

Starting with the smallest classrooms in the university and going up in size until I run out of money, I’d sell off all of the single-person desks as surplus, and replace them with smallish round tables that seat 4-6 students and chairs that go along. This wouldn’t diminish classroom capacity by much, if at all, as long as the chairs are well positioned. The fire marshal won’t be bothered by it, either.

If there were some money leftover I’d spend it on professional development. However, you can lead a faculty member to professional development but you can’t make them drink the kool-aid.

Most of us prefer teaching our lecture courses in a classroom full of desks pointing at us, rather than in a room with students seated at tables facing one another. Why is that? There are many reasons, I suspect, but at the root is the fact that we were taught this way in university, and it’s also the way we learned to teach. It’s familiar to us, and we might be disposed to thinking that it’s better.

There’s a lot of research to suggest that sitting around a table is much better for learning, especially when the course is designed to incorporate frequent student interactions. This is even true in a content-rich class like an introductory majors biology course.

Wouldn’t this move just be administration forcing on faculty top-down decisions without faculty input? Isn’t this too autocratic? You could see it that way, sure. Keep in mind that, right now, the status quo is being forced on faculty without their input too. I doubt faculty were consulted before all the current desks were purchased for all of the classrooms. (Don’t worry, I won’t become an administrator, so I won’t be one of those people who takes hare-brained ideas and scales them up without building consensus.)

Perhaps the way we teach is structured by the environment. Maybe, if we give faculty a room full of students positioned to interact with one another, then we’ll get lessons designed that take advantage of this interaction to improve learning. Maybe professors who are tired of lecturing will discover that they have more fun guiding learning rather than delivering content.

If you haven’t taught several semesters to a classroom full of tables, instead of students facing forward, then I recommend withholding judgment. Once your classes are designed for students to work together solving problems, instead of listening to the delivery of facts and ideas, then students may learn more from the course. I haven’t had this opportunity myself, either, but I am getting sick of having my students have to rearrange chairs at the start and finish of every time we meet.

I bet most professors wouldn’t like the change, at least at first. But, what happens in the classroom isn’t for us, it’s for our students. And there’s no real evidence out there indicating that this change would harm students, and at worst it would only slightly inconvenience faculty members who dislike the situation, but might empower others to make effective changes in how they teach. As new faculty come to campus, when they build their courses they’ll know about the tables and design their classes in mind.

Have you taught in a classroom like this? Do you teach lecture courses in a lab, that allows this kind of interaction, maybe? How mad would you be at your admins if your big lecture hall was converted to tables? Would you change your teaching, if you were paid a little stipend or given more time to work on your curriculum?

On not liking teaching

Some hubbub has emerged over an opinion piece published over in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few days ago, entitled: “I don’t like teaching. There, I said it.”

You should go over, give it a read, and please let me know what you thought, before I let you know about what I think about it.

I’m not writing this response so that I can contribute my own $0.02. I’ve written this response because I hope to move the conversation beyond the myopia of the entire discussion involving the article, which only tracks the myopia of the piece’s author.

On one side, you have a predictable argument: “If she doesn’t like teaching maybe she should have a different profession.” On the other side, you have a predictable response, “If she’s teaching well, she doesn’t have to like it because that’s her own business.” Another predictable counter to the initial criticism is that teaching is only one part of the job of a professor.

The preceding statements are all correct, and they are not contradictory. And they’re all mostly pointless. Instead, we might want to look at the nature of our profession, and why this particular pseudonymous author doesn’t like teaching even though she’s chosen this line of work.

For starters, I don’t know many people that received their Ph.D. because they were interested in teaching and who were primarily interested in teaching at the university level. If this is one’s primary motivation in completing a dissertation, what are the odds that the dissertation will be completed, and what are the odds that the person will do a good job?

I have to admit that, if I were in a position in which I had doctoral students, I would be reluctant to take such a student into my lab because that student would lack the ganas that is required for success in grad school. You just don’t do research on something for five+ years unless you’re passionately into it, and that isn’t going to come from a desire to teach at the university level. If students go into grad school with love of teaching above all else, will these students ever publish their theses?

Being a professor may or may not someone’s greatest passion and a personal calling as a career. Regardless, being a professor is a job. You do something and you bring in a paycheck. In my view, it’s a friggin’ awesome job. No matter how you dress it up, though, it’s a job, even if you love it.

Most people don’t like their jobs. You wouldn’t judge your supermarket cashier, your plumber or your associate director of human resources based on whether or not they like their jobs. You care if your plumber replaces your fixture promptly, professionally, and at a good value. Your interactions would be more pleasant if he enjoyed his job, but that’s not your concern. Your plumber might not like being a plumber. For a bunch of people, this is what life is like, to a good extent, and our default mode is to not enjoy our moment-to-moment existence. (To be clear, the last plumber I interacted with was talented, friendly, pleasant and seemed to be enjoying life.)

Maybe my plumber was doing the same thing that the pseudonymous author of the Chronicle piece does. Maybe he doesn’t like plumbing deep down but he has to convince his clients that he likes it because that’s the only way he gets referrals and keeps his job. Heck, I’d be glad to offer a referral, and if he seemed like a gloomy gus then that might not be the case. I’m not sure. Smiles do matter. I would wager a small bet that my plumber, deep down, is happier than the author of the Chronicle. I doubt he’d write an article for a plumbing trade journal about not liking plumbing.

Would my plumber be a better plumber if he enjoyed his job? Over the years, I would think so. It’s hard to have pride in one’s job over the years if one doesn’t enjoy it. Why stay current with the latest plumbing technology? Why focus on quality control, and why not get a job done in the minimum amount of time and effort required as long as you can get away with it with the client? Yes, I do want a plumber that enjoys his job. Other than my empathetic concern for all other people, I don’t care if my plumber enjoys his job. However, I’m willing to bet that the happy plumber will be the more effective plumber in the long run.

The author of the Chronicle piece writes that if one likes teaching for the wrong reason (“because one loves the spotlight”), then this person might be a worse teacher than a person who doesn’t care about teaching at all. That’s a Ray-Bolger-scale strawman argument that I’ll choose to ignore.

The author implies that she’s a perfectly fine teacher, just as she is perfectly fine at cutting the grass, changing diapers and doing the laundry: “You don’t have to enjoy something to do it, and you don’t have to enjoy something to be good at it.”

In short, the author dismisses the notion that happiness leads to doing a good job. If you know how to go through the steps to do laundry or make risotto, then you don’t have to enjoy it to do it well, right? Isn’t teaching the same way, if you do what it takes to be effective in the classroom you don’t have to enjoy it to do it well, do you?

Is teaching so special? Do you have to enjoy teaching to do it well even though that’s not true of many other tasks?

I think that might be the case. A good performer that could fake enjoyment might be just as effective, perhaps. What evidence do I have? Oh, I don’t have any. I’m not even particularly concerned about being right, that’s just a hunch.

This question itself – is teaching different because excellence requires a passion – is the center of the banal discussion of this article that I’d like us all to get past.

This whole discussion has been based on a linear thinking about teaching. You enjoy teaching or you don’t, and as a result you are good at it, or you’re not, or there’s no relationship between enjoyment and effectiveness.

Instead of asking whether enjoyment of teaching is required to be an effective teacher, how about we ask:

Does effective teaching lead one to be happy?

It seems this is not true for the author of the article. She argues that when she’s an effective teacher she doesn’t enjoy it. This means that effective teaching doesn’t make her happy.

Now, that’s her real problem.

And, I suspect, it’s her students’ problem too.

Ignoring the parts of teaching that none of us like (grading, grade grubbers), do I like doing most of the other stuff? Not really. Do I derive deep enjoyment from crafting a particularly good lesson? No. Do I really like developing a new laboratory exercise that involves inquiry for students to learn a central important concept in my discipline? Not much.

I don’t need to hide behind a goddamn pseudonym to say that. You know why I don’t need to hide? Because I deeply enjoy teaching. I love it.

How can I love teaching if I don’t enjoy doing all of the parts of it?

I don’t love the process; I love the outcome.

My brain is adequately wired, and has enough experience, that I can be driven by delayed gratification. Among the list of great feelings are having taught a great class and a having taught a great course. Even better is when you’ve spent the whole semester teaching an academic scientific concept, and at the end, students tell you that you’ve made a difference in their lives.

You’re damn right that’s enjoyable.

If that’s not enjoyable, then I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you. If students aren’t telling you that you’ve made a difference, then you might want to reconsider what constitutes effective teaching.

So how are mowing your lawn, making risotto and picking up trash different from teaching? You do the first three for yourself. When you teach, you are not doing it for yourself. You’re doing it for others. That’s the difference.

Let’s look at the author’s risotto example more carefully. According to her, if you know how to follow the steps, then you can make a great risotto. (By the way, if you are making risotto with all of that stirring instead of using a pressure cooker, you’re nuts. Seven minutes under high pressure and the risotto is perfect without any stirring. Get yourself a pressure cooker pronto if you don’t have one, and let me know if you need any tips.)

So, she claims that that she can make a good risotto without enjoying the process if she follows the steps. That’s true, but who is eating this risotto? It’s my bet that she is. If she’s making this risotto and not tasting it, then she’s probably not going to be focusing on doing a great job.

If she’s making risotto for others, and she’s not eating it herself, would she still make good risotto? You bet she would, if she actually cared about the people for whom she was cooking. If it was her spouse and kids, she’d make it super-tasty, take the time to mince the garlic just right, and all that. If it was just some schmo who she was feeding in a soup kitchen, maybe she wouldn’t make as good of a risotto. She might be able to, but does she go through the effort? I doubt it.

I love making a great risotto, though I don’t do it often. I’ll spend much more time in the kitchen making the risotto just right because that makes it so much more enjoyable. Do I inherently enjoy peeling and mincing garlic? No? Do I like peeling, seeding, and cubing a butternut squash? Not particularly. Do I like making a special trip to the store that has the particularly good parmesean? Of course not. But I do it, because I really like the risotto. I don’t find the cooking process objectionable, and I love being able to make a wonderful meal.

If you were to ask anybody who knows me very well, they’d say that I enjoy cooking.

So, now let’s look at the teaching of our pseudonymous non-liker of teaching, which can only be evaluated based on what she says and chooses to not say. She implies that she’s a perfectly fine teacher even though she doesn’t enjoy teaching. She’s only teaching because it’s her job.

Even though she’s teaching just fine, she still doesn’t enjoy it. Effective teaching, even when done efficiently, takes plenty of time. If she’s not enjoying the product, then how does she go through the motions to teach so well? Let’s take a look at what she thinks goes into effective teaching:

Effective teaching is, after all, a set of behaviors. What students need from us are clear presentations, careful selections of course material, engaging discussions—in short, the right behaviors.

If she thinks that this list above comprises the top requirements for highly effective teaching, then no wonder she doesn’t enjoy teaching.

I’m willing to wager that if she were to cook some risotto for me, I would find it passable but not delicious.

What do I think is highly effective teaching? Here’s a starting point.

If you’re going to enjoy teaching, then what brings you the most enjoyment is successful teaching. If you think that a rote set of behaviors, disconnected to your own emotions, makes you an effective teacher over the course of your career, then you’ve squandered your time failing to change the lives of your students.

Juggling summer parenting and research

Some people think that when kids are old enough to go to school, that parents get more time available to them.

For US academics, the opposite is true. Most scientists lose time for research when their kids transition into kindergarten.

Preschool is, or can be, year-round. However, once kids get beyond preschool, K-12 education takes a huge break in summertime. In summer, you’ve got a childcare issue smack in the middle of time when you aren’t teaching and is best for field research, travel and focusing on long-term projects.

Of course, summer is also arguably the best time to play outside with your kids, travel as a family, and hang out with friends for barbeques and stuff like that.

Today was my kid’s last day of school until late August. I get to spend more time with him, but also, this is a challenge for getting research done.

What can you do with your kids who are out of school?

stay with the kids and have fun playing with them
stay with the kids and attempt to work on occasion
enlist your kids as research participants
sign the kids up for day camp
ship your kids away to faraway camp for the whole summer
share your kids with extended family and friends
release the kids into the neighborhood village
go on vacation with your kids

How both parents make a living matters a lot. If one parent has a stereotypical weekday job, with some weeks of vacation, then the academic-job parent may end up spending a lot more time with the kids in the summer, but there are constraints on travel and recreation because of one parent’s job.

If both parents are academics, then there’s a lot of flexibility in the summer, but there also is a need for both parents to be able to focus on research and find a way to care for the kids. I suppose tag-teaming could work, but for the whole summer?

I know many couples that have an academic spouse and another that works consulting or some other gig that could be flexible and maybe even part-time. That lends itself to a variety of possibilities. And then there are those of us academics who have a full-time partner at home. That isn’t a carefree existence, but flexibility and planning for childcare and travel does sound a lot easier.

This much is the case, regardless of your situation: You just can’t take a full summer off if you have an active research agenda. You’ve got to work, at least part of the time, and you’ve got to do something with your out-of-school kid during that time.

How have I handled this with my family, over the years?

When my kid was a baby: I was parenting full-time and stopped research for several months.

When my kid was in preschool: As a field biologist, I’ve got to get into the field. This was easy enough to do, when my spouse could deliver the kid to preschool when she was working. A couple times, my family traveled to my field site (which happens to be a big vacation destination as well) and we then traveled around. We also took vacations elsewhere, sometimes around an international conference in a cool place to visit.

When my kid is on K-12 summer vacation: In previous years, I would be free from the university for almost a month before he got out of school. This was a perfect time to go to my field site with students to get research projects started. Then, I’d come home as my kid was getting out of school, and then it would be a mix of the options above. Some weeks, he’d be in camp. Some, he’d be with me. One week per summer, he’s out of town spending quality time with my spouse’s mom. We also would travel on a genuine vacation.

This summer: I went to the field for a couple weeks while my kid was finishing school. Then, I came back from the field, and I am taking him out to be my technician/assistant/collaborator. I have a few projects with which we can work together and get real stuff done. He’s 9 years old, and I don’t expect full long days in the rainforest conducting meticulous measurements, but we’re going to work together and hang out for a couple weeks, and my kid will be a real scientist by the time he’s done.

My students are already established in their projects, though I imagine they still want more input and participation from me to some level. So, I’ll be busy with mentoring my students, but this is also the first field season in which I’ll be truly combining research and parenting.

Once I return my kid from the field, then he’s at camp for a couple weeks while I am attending a conference and joining a working group, and then I’ve got a week with my kid, then I teach a field course, and then we go on a genuine vacation as a family for a few weeks, and then school starts back up. It took a lot of planning. I’m dizzy and the summer has only started.

Despite all the work in the summer, I am committed to spending some time traveling on vacation to somewhere new, as a family, whenever we can. (That can be expensive and difficult, but much of that is fixed by doing a home exchange.) My priority, in every decision I make, is the happiness, fun and well-being of my kid and spouse. Trying to make that compatible with everything else is the hard part.

How’s your summer juggle? Do you have a set routine or do you have to plan every summer differently? Do you get even half as much done as you hope to get done?

Small Pond Science

Research, teaching, and mentorship in the sciences

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