Academia
jstemwedel | July 31, 2007An old friend turned up to comment on my post about juggling, and as a woman in academia she has some familiarity with the metaphor and with the reality it's supposed to capture. She writes:
The department chair when I was hired ... suggested that although we're juggling lots of balls, the ball representing our families and home life is made of glass. I COULD take that as a message that taking care of my family is my most important job (and my work is not? grrr.) but I think he meant it more as that part of our lives outside of work supports our lives IN work, and if that one cracks, it's…
sb admin | July 30, 2007
(This post is tagged for submission to the scientiae-carnival. I am sure there is a less obtrusive way to do this tagging... suggestions?)
A while back at this blog's former site, I wrote a post entitled A Career and a Life. Now that my career is on the precipice of undergoing a tremendous change, I thought it might be interesting to revisit that post.
First of all, everything I said before in there I still agree with.
But I want to go beyond that. As I described in that post, I willingly risked being seen as "not serious enough" by not allowing my faculty position to suck up all of my…
tsmith | July 30, 2007The Danica McKellar posts (review; interview) have sparked some discussion that I want to address here. It largely centers on the issue of McKellar's approach: is it a good one? Or is it trying to replace one Bad Thing (girls' dislike of math) with another Bad Thing (encouraging them to be, as one commenter put it, "consumerist tools of the patriarchy"?) More below...
Here at Aetiology, for example, Katie commented:
One of the reasons I liked science classes was because they were an oasis from the prevailing shopping/shoes/makeup ethic at my school.
Not every girl likes the same things. I…
jstemwedel | July 29, 2007Friday, my better half was preparing to cross the international dateline for a week-long business trip and my parents were getting ready to board a plane for a week-long visit at Casa Free-Ride. As I contemplated the prospect of digging out our guest room (known in these parts as "the place clean clothes go to wrinkle") it became clear to me that the chances of my finishing writing (and preparing overheads for) the two presentations I will be giving at the conference that starts the day after my parents depart before my parents' arrival were nil. Of course, this means that I will not be…
jstemwedel | July 26, 2007Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about the recent decline of peer reviewed papers authored by professors in top five economics departments in high profile economics journals. A paper by MIT economics professor Glenn Ellison, "Is Peer Review in Decline?," considers possible explanations for this decline, and the Inside Higher ed article looks at the possible impacts of this shift.
The alternative threatening the peer reviewed journals here is the web, since scholars can post their papers directly to their websites (or blogs) rather than letting them languish with pokey referees. But I…
tsmith | July 26, 2007 In terms of physical size, microbiologist Rita Colwell is a petitie woman. However, her distinguished research and service career has made her a giant in her field. Her research revolves around many aspects of water ecology, including the intersection of the environment and infectious disease (as I wrote about here following a talk she gave this past spring).
Much of her research has focused on Vibrio cholerae, including devising simple (and inexpensive) methods to remove the bacterium from contaminated water using cloth filtration. For these achievements and more, Dr. Colwell will be…
sb admin | July 26, 2007A couple of years ago, I went to a meeting for junior faculty at Vanderbilt about the tenure process. The ostensible goal of the meeting was to help us feel more comfortable by letting us better understand the process. The practical upshot for me, at least, was to ratchet up the tenure stress another notch or two, as well as add to the growing sense of despair I had about the whole thing.
Today, Chad points to an article in Inside Higher Ed about the size of university endowments. You know, those universities that have been increasing student tuitions at rates much faster than the rate of…
drorzel | July 26, 2007It's been a few days since I linked to Inside Higher Ed, and the Internet itself was threatening to collapse. They're got a provocative article today about university endowments, though, so disaster is averted. The author, Lynne Munson, compares colleges and universities to private foundations, and doesn't like what she sees:
A recent survey of 765 colleges and universities found they are spending 4.2 percent of their endowments' value each year. Meanwhile, private foundations -- which are legally required to spend at least 5 percent of their value annually -- average 7 percent spending.…
tsmith | July 25, 2007 Yesterday I reviewed Danica McKellar's forthcoming book, Math Doesn't Suck. When I contacted the book's publicist about receiving a review copy, I also inquired about an interview with Danica, and she graciously agreed. Perhaps this will cover some topics brought up in the comments section of my book review as well, as she discusses her motivation for writing the book, and what she hopes girls get out of it (in addition to a number of other topics!) Enjoy, and thanks again to Danica for taking the time to address my questions.
Q: First, I'm curious about your goals in writing the…
drorzel | July 25, 2007Some time back, I was offered a review copy of Why the Sky Is Blue by Götz Hoeppe by Princeton University Press. Looking at their web site, I noticed a forthcoming book by an emeritus professor at my alma mater, so I asked if they'd send me a copy of that, too. I'm all about the free books.
The Grand Contraption is an excellent example of what I call a Smart People Book, in which the author pulls together a wide range of material to take an exhaustive look at some topic or another, and basically show what a smart person he or she is. This particular book is subtitled "The World as Myth,…
jstemwedel | July 24, 2007Let's say you're looking at a wide-open fall semester, and you are asked to be a participant on a panel at a conference. Since your semester is wide open, you agree.
Months later, you're asked to be a participant on another panel at another conference. Except for the conference you already committed to, your semester is still wide open.
What do you suppose the chances are that the two conferences overlap in time? And meet in different cities? Was this predictable, or am I just lucky?
(It looks like the two panels will meet on different days. Assuming no plane-grounding weather events, it…
jstemwedel | July 24, 2007In the July 16 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (secure behind a paywall), the article "FBI Reaches Out to Campuses" [1] caught my attention. The gist of it is that academic scientists are increasingly the targets of foreign espionage, where the stakes have less to do with national security than potentially huge economic losses. The FBI would like to help academic scientists avoid being dupes and giving scientists in other countries an unfair advantage.
From the article:
[FBI chief of counterintelligence strategy Thomas J.] Mahlik notes that classified research usually starts off…
tsmith | July 24, 2007 It's not a rosy picture for girls in math. As Barbie infamously framed it, girls should think that "math is hard." While Mattel (rightly) received a lot of flack for that comment, the sad fact is that Barbie was reflecting the attitude many girls tend to take toward mathematics education: it's difficult, it's boring, and who needs it anyway? Surveys have shown that, while girls and boys in elementary school show similar attitudes toward mathematics, by junior high girls tend to have a negative attitude toward math, along with lower confidence in their ability to handle math problems. Of…
catdynamics | July 23, 2007InsideHigherEd appears to have assimilated the Confessions of a Community College Dean blog
hope it is a permanent arrangement, the CoaCCD blog is a good read, and enhances the IHE web site
current advice to adjunct looking for tenure track is good (although when I saw the title "Ask the Administrator: How to Break In", I have to confess I was expecting a completely different set of instructions... figuring out how to get into locked campus buildings off-hours is almost as valuabell skill - of course getting on the tenure track usually leads to access to more master keys, so that is one way).
drorzel | July 23, 2007There's a quick mention in Inside Higher Ed today of the latest news on the college presidents opposed to the US News rankings. They're up to 61 signatures on their letter committing college presidents to 1) refusing to provide information for the rankings, and 2) refusing to use the rankings in their publicity.
61 signatories is a good start, but I really doubt that they have the rankers quaking in their boots. I recognize a lot of the names on the list, but then, I'm in the liberal arts college business. Only two of the 61 (Kenyon and Denison) are in the top 50 of the infamous rankings, and…
tsmith | July 20, 2007A looong time ago, I mentioned that I spent St. Patrick's Day weekend in Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, at a symposium I helped to plan (but neglected to blog! Oops). Along with other scientists, theologians, philosophers, and generally interested persons, we worked for a bit over a year to put this symposium together. Why?
The principal aim of the conference is to clarify the causes of the conflict between science educators and those who wish to have Intelligent Design taught in public schools. We do not claim to be neutral on this issue. We are convinced that ID is not good science…
scientificactivist | July 20, 2007I've been tagged by Hope for Pandora (who was tagged by DrugMonkey, who was tagged by Writedit) in a blog meme regarding the NIH's request for feedback on its peer review system. I'm not huge into these blog memes, so I'm not going to pass this along to seven others, but I will share a few thoughts.
Being only in the second year of my Ph.D. (and studying overseas), I haven't applied for an NIH grant before, so I'm not intimately familiar with the NIH's peer review system and can't offer much in the way of constructive criticism there. I can, however, speak generally about some of the major…
drorzel | July 19, 2007Because it seems to be a good day for psoting about totally non-controversial political topics that I will undoubtedly not have time to follow up on, here's an article from Inside Higher Ed that takes a dim view of current arguments about Title IX:
Right now, the situation is getting us nowhere. Ultimately, all we ever talk about is the number of men and women playing sports at a given institution, and whether the women's number is as high as it ought to be. Raw participation numbers occupy a pretty small portion of the U.S. Department of Education's Title IX regulations, but the overwhelming…
catdynamics | July 18, 2007Where Most Needed worries about elite university endowment, and InsideHigherEd decides to be helpful
The problem is Harvard's endowment - estimated at $25-30 BILLION (presumably depending on just what the position of some closed hedge funds are this afternoon).
That's a lot - but there are ~half-dozen other universities with endowments in the $5-15 billion range - the rest, not so much.
The catch is: as a charity, Harvard has to spend ~ 4-5% of its endowment each year - they can boxcar average this, and rich universities do so to be conservative and buffer bad investment years, but the…