Academia
catdynamics | April 1, 2008What would you do about Yoo at UC?
Brad deLong contemplates a moral issue - can a colleague's tenure be challenged for his actions outside academia, and if so in what circumstances.
At issue is Prof Yoo's long classified memo from the Department of Justice offering legal rationale for torture based on a theory of unitary executive.
The memo is, by all accounts, shoddy at best, profoundly dishonest at worst.
It also appears, to a non-lawyer, to subvert the Constitution of the United States and to act to actively undermine the Federal Government.
It is not against academic principles to argue…
catdynamics | April 1, 2008All of these are true:
Iceland is being attacked by bankrupt bears
This is why you do not want to do that
Economists actually use the "percentage" buttons on calculators
clock | April 1, 2008There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of intense mental focus are required, including the scientific research labs. Here is a recent article in New York Times:
So far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors' urine. And if there are illicit…
drorzel | April 1, 2008It's weird how blogs go in cycles-- I'll blog nothing but science for a while, and then flip into Academic Mode, as I have this week, and blog about nothing but tenure issues and academic politics. But, that just seems to be how things work, and the stories catching my eye recently are all about academia.
Such as this disturbing tale from Baylor. It seems that they're trying to boost their status in academia, but the latest attempt has caused a little controversy:
That’s because, several university officials said, senior administrators have come to believe that departmental standards were not…
catdynamics | March 31, 2008The essence of a good prank is to know when to stop
The incident of the Hula skirt was mildly amusing, although not really in the rank of Great Pranks of All Time, or even Great Pranks I Have Personally Experienced.
It was also mildly irritating, because it so happened my class quiz was out on my desk over that weekend, along with other random sensitive information like proposals for review, personnel letters and budget information.
Not that I think the pranksters were after that, or looked at it - if I thought they had, based on forensics, my reaction would have been different.
My main…
drorzel | March 31, 2008The latest issue of the Cult of the Purple Cow Quarterly-- er, I mean, the Williams Alumni Review has a story about a woman I knew in college (she was a senior when I was a freshman) who has started a non-profit organization called Quest for College, working to help prepare kids for college (annoyingly, the story is only available as a PDF file). The vehicle for this is a board game that she developed:
The game board features a student's path through high school, including points that colleges will consider in the application process. Four players or teams roll the die to move along the board…
drorzel | March 31, 2008Academics of all sorts are highly protective of their scholarly territory. It's an unavoidable consequence of the process of becoming an academic-- I've often joked that getting a Ph.D. requires you to become the World's Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares about. To make it through grad school, no matter what discipline you're in, you need to really like what you're doing, and that produces a tendency to angrily attack anyone who trespasses on "your" turf.
There's an interesting difference, though, in the way that scholars from the humanities and socials sciences approach the…
terrasig | March 29, 2008A paper in last month's issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery reported that US drug approvals during 2007 were the lowest number since 1983. (17 new molecular entities and 2 biologicals; see this figure for 1996-2007 data.) The review cites increased regulatory action as a factor in this reduction, especially following high-profile post-marketing safety issues with blockbuster drugs like Vioxx or Avandia. But other commentators have noted other problems such as the science of drug discovery in pharma being overridden by managers or the reluctance to develop agents for diseases that afflict…
drorzel | March 29, 2008Over at Reassigned Time, "Dr. Crazy" offers a remarkably sane post on what tenure means to her:
Ultimately, this is the allure of tenure for me, and it's what I think is most positive about the way I see tenure working at my institution. This is not to say that the tenure process at some institutions isn't screwed up, or that even at my own institution that the tenure process plays out this way for all people. Tenure can mean that people check out entirely, or it can mean that people spread their poisonous negativity around because they no longer fear retribution or negative personal…
drorzel | March 28, 2008My sabbatical is coming to an end, so I've begun prepping my class for the term that starts Monday. I'm teaching the honors section of introductory E&M, and for the intro classes, I lecture off PowerPoint. We're starting an entirely new syllabus this year, and I plan to use my spiffy tablet PC to do my lectures, so I've been making up new lecture slides.
At times like this, I wish I got paid an hourly wage, because I'd be tempted to send Microsoft a bill for the time I've wasted because of their redesign of Office. I spent an hour figuring out how to get things back to the way I want them…
drorzel | March 27, 2008The Dean Dad posted an interesting article about "national service" programs yesterday. He's against them, for class reasons:
The message that national service programs send strikes me as dangerous. The implication seems to be that rich kids can just jump right into higher ed and start moving up the ladder, but the rest of us have to do our time first. It's a sort of penance for not having wealthy parents. I know our society worships money, but there should be some kind of limits. It implicitly defines higher education as a purely private good, which I reject out of hand. (This isn't just the…
drorzel | March 27, 2008David Horowitz is an idiot.
Granted, anyone with any sense has known this for a good while now, but now we can prove it with SCIENCE!!! Well, political science-- Inside Higher Ed reports on a study of student political views that finds that liberal faculty make no real difference:
One of the key arguments made by David Horowitz and his supporters in recent years is that a left-wing orientation among faculty members results in a lack of curricular balance, which in turn leads to students being indoctrinated rather than educated. [...]
A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political…
drorzel | March 26, 2008Timothy Burke has a typically excellent post about the problems with academic tenure. Not the usual "It's an abomination that prevents that Magic Power of the Market from working its wonders" complaint from outside, but problems from the academic side:
Oso Raro and Tenured Radical underline one of the biggest problems with the tenure system in academia: its mystery.
They’re both trying to write about a controversial tenure case at the University of Michigan, to understand the seeming mismatch between the public transcript of the candidate’s accomplishments and the private decisions of the…
drorzel | March 25, 2008EurekAlert provides the latest dispatch from the class war, the the form of a release headlined " Family wealth may explain differences in test scores in school-age children":
The researchers found a marked disparity in family wealth between Black and White families with young children, with White families owning more than 10 times as many assets as Black families. The study found that family wealth had a stronger association with cognitive achievement of school-aged children than that of preschoolers, and a stronger association with school-aged children's math than with their reading scores…
jstemwedel | March 22, 2008Having recently posted on professors who challenged (and frequently scared) me, I was struck by a post at the Reality-Based Community suggesting that being the cool prof is not the path to effectiveness:
I want to make students uncomfortable-- challenging them to question their own ideas, take opposing views seriously, and grapple with difficult assignments and questions. I want to get them out of the echo chambers so many of us inhabit and learn that smart, good people can disagree. I want them to know that in the real world, effort is not the same thing as achievement, and that striving…
catdynamics | March 20, 2008I promised this to a colleague, after I made an unnecessarily cryptic reference to a potential solution to an academic issue that frequently comes up
I mean, how do you deal with some students?
drorzel | March 20, 2008Over at Making Light, Abi has proposed a parlour game using books as Tarot cards. As always for Making Light, the resulting comment thread is full of dizzyingly erudite responses, and clever literary in-jokes.
But it strikes me that there's a fundamental flaw in the game-- Abi's examples all involve selected works, chosen to be appropriate for the subject of the reading. For true divination, though, you need an element of randomness, whether it be yarrow stalks tossed in the air, or the iTunes randomizer. Fortunately, we have LibraryThing: if you look at our library, you'll see a "Random…
drorzel | March 20, 2008Johan Larson asks:
How would you change the requirements and coursework for the undergraduate Physics major?
This is a good one, but it's a little tough to answer. I have ideas about things I'd like to change locally, but I'm not sure I really have the perspective I would need to be able to say how much of what I see is a problem with physics education in general, and how much is due to local quirks (our trimester calendar being the biggest such issue) that don't generalize well.
That said, my feeling is that most of the problems we have are with the introductory classes. I went to an…
drorzel | March 19, 2008Anon_student asks:
You seem to enjoy teaching most of the time, but what traits/habits in students absolutely infuriate you?
Hoo, boy. There are so many, it's hard to choose just one...
If I'm allowed to group things together into a larger category of offense (and it's my blog, so I can do what I damn well please), I would say that the thing I find most infuriating in dealing with students is a lack of respect.
I don't mean "lack of respect" in the sense of "They call me 'Mr.' instead of 'Professor,'" or anything cosmetic like that. I'm talking about general behaviors that fail to respect…
drorzel | March 19, 2008"A" asks:
Given the chance, would you take a job at a major research-university, or do you enjoy teaching a lot and doing some research at your small liberal arts college?
My first answer is "no," though I guess it would depend on the terms of the offer. In general terms, though, I'm very happy with my job.
I went to a small liberal arts college, and really enjoyed the experience, so I actually went to grad school with the idea of getting a Ph.D. and then teaching at a small college. I've ended up pretty much exactly where I wanted to be-- well, OK, I'd probably be even happier at a certain…