Academics
pharyngula | October 2, 2007Attila takes a tour of Nature headquarters — it looks like they're doing some cool, progressive, net-friendly innovation there. I was jealous of one thing: they're using an internal corporate blog instead of email. It's an easy and obvious solution, and I wish there were a way to implement that kind of thing at my university — we use godawful mailing lists for everything, which means notices about campus assembly meetings and student issues get all clogged up in my inbox with staff putting lawn furniture up for sale or disposable nonsense about football games.
We really should have a…
pharyngula | September 22, 2007I mentioned before that Mark Mathis is prowling Baylor, looking for new footage for his paean to creationist paranoia, Expelled. I have a suggestion for Mark.
Go north.
Just get on I35 and head north to Iowa, and pop into Southwestern Community College. Have a little conversation with Dr. Linda Wild, Vice President of Instruction. Mention the name Steve Bitterman. Bitterman was teaching a course in western civilization, one in which he uses the Old Testament, and here's what he taught them:
"I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn't given any more…
pharyngula | September 20, 2007Prompted by the skewed gender representation of a recent survey of science blogs, Zuska asks why there are no great women science bloggers. That's an ironic question, of course: there are great women science bloggers, but there is a strange blindness to their contributions, just as they are neglected in the greater blogosphere, and in science, and in politics, and in everything other than raising babies and making attractive centerpieces for the family dinner table, etc. It's a curious phenomenon that we have to try consciously to rise above, an effort hampered by the fact that there seem to…
pharyngula | September 16, 2007Everyone in academia knows it: textbook publishers abuse the system. Jim Fiore decries the high cost of college textbooks, and I have to agree completely. Basic textbooks at the lower undergraduate levels do not need a new edition every year or two, not even in rapidly changing fields like biology.
Churning editions is just a way for the publisher to suck more money out of a captive audience. It makes it difficult for students to sell off their used textbooks, it gives faculty the headache of having to constantly update their assignments, and if you allow your students to use older editions…
pharyngula | September 16, 2007Hey, University of Missouri-Columbia readers: Elliot Sober is coming your way. At 4:00 on the 20th (this week!), Elliot Sober will be speaking on Evolution versus Intelligent Design. It should be fun; somebody report back to me, OK?
Closer to my home, Steve Pinker will be speaking at the Minneapolis Public Library at 7:00 on the same day on 'The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.' I might be able to make it to that one.
pharyngula | September 14, 2007I expected that my students would get a little trial by fire in the furious life of the public intellectual, and the commenters here certainly provided that. Maybe a little too much of that. Dial the ferocity back a notch, OK? Constructive criticisms are greatly appreciated, but the nasty stuff is not. I suppose it's useful in the sense that it's going to toughen up the students, but it doesn't reflect well on you. One thing I'll be doing in class next week is making up some lists and handing them out in class: a list of the jerks ("You can ignore these commenters, they're wasting your time…
pharyngula | September 13, 2007Orac has a discussion that might be of interest to the young 'uns: what kind of debt is hanging around your neck after med school? I can't even imagine getting out of school with a bank expecting me to pay off a few hundred thousand dollars.
I went to college in the late 1970s, when we still had reasonable support for college students. I was on my own — my parents still had 5 other kids at home — but I could actually get through four years of college by holding down two part-time minimum wage jobs and with a fair number of scholarships and low-interest or no-interest loans. I graduated with…
pharyngula | September 10, 2007I'll tell you more later.
It's later now. I'm teaching a course in neurobiology, and one of the things I'm doing is having the students blog, to recount their experiences with neurobiology outside the classroom. In past years, I've set up a separate blog space for them to use, but I had a conversation with Beth Noveck of the Cairns blog at Sci Foo, and she recommended just throwing the students into the hurly-burly of the wider conversation. And after thinking about it for a while, I think she's right — toss 'em into the shark tank, and let's see how well they do. So beginning later this…
pharyngula | September 9, 2007Did anyone catch the reference to Donors Choose in Doonesbury? This is an organization that a bunch of us sciencebloggers campaigned for last year: teachers submit projects and requests for funding, and then we promote it and try to get people to make donations to support the projects.
We aren't going to be pushing it just yet — wait until October — but this is the time for teachers to be writing up short requests and sending them in. Janet has all the details, but the rough summary is that if you're a teacher, and you've got a great little idea that all you need is a few hundred dollars to…
pharyngula | September 9, 2007The University of Minnesota, Morris is hiring! We need someone to teach an undergraduate course in classical transmission genetics for the spring semester — I know, it's short notice, and this is only a temporary position, but it would be ideal for someone who wants to pick up some teaching experience at a highly regarded liberal arts university while applying for permanent positions.
This is the course I teach in alternate years (2008 is not my year!), and I will be available to help whoever takes the job — at least, I'll share my syllabi and exams and lab notes. It's also an opportunity to…
pharyngula | September 8, 2007I got some email today with lots of constructive suggestions (See? Not all my email is evil!) for how we ought to change the education of biology students — such as by giving them a foundation in the history and philosophy of our science, using creationist arguments as bad examples so the students can see the errors for themselves, etc. — and it was absolutely brilliant, even the parts where he disagreed with some things I'd written before. Best email ever!
Of course, what helped is that I spent my summer "vacation" putting together a new freshman first semester course for biology majors that…
pharyngula | August 30, 2007We had our very first meeting of UMM Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists tonight. About two dozen people had expressed interest before, so we expected, optimistically, about 20 people to show up. We got there a little early, and people were waiting for us … and then our 20 were there, and then more, and then more, and then more. I had to keep going up to the counter to tell them we were going to have to order a few more pizzas.
Final tally: 60 students showed up. We basically took over the whole restaurant.
Skatje Myers and Collin Tierney are the co-chairs, and here they are addressing…
pharyngula | August 30, 2007I have survived the first week of classes (my schedule leaves Fridays free of lecturing), as have my students — one down, sixteen to go. I've got a fairly heavy load this term, with a brand new introductory biology course (with 84 freshman students!) and a neurobiology course for more advanced students, so it's going to be a long hard slog, I can tell. Pity those poor students, though — thrown right into the lion's den. Ask Billy Graham, he knows.
Q. I'm headed for college in a few weeks, and as a Christian I'm wondering what to expect. Some people say that my faith will be attacked there,…
pharyngula | August 29, 2007Last night was the activities fair at UMM, where student groups try to catch the attention of the new students and persuade them to sign up. It was a mob scene with hundreds of milling people, and there in the middle of it … the brand new UMM chapter of the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists. Here are most of the current officers — the missing one was me, behind the camera.
Viktor Berberi, Collin Tierney, and Skatje Myers (and Richard Dawkins playing on the computer)
I was impressed. I expected they'd go over there and get maybe half a dozen to a dozen people to sign up, but instead…
pharyngula | August 23, 2007This week's Nature has a horribly depressing article. If you're a graduate student, don't read any further.
Really, stop. I hate to see young biologists cry.
NSF data show that the number of students in US graduate programmes in the biological sciences has increased steadily since 1966. In 2005, around 7,000 graduates earned a doctorate. But the number of biomedical PhDs with academic tenure has remained steady since 1981, at just over 20,000. During that period the percentage of US biomedical PhDs with tenure or tenure-track jobs dropped from nearly 45% to just below 30%.
7,000 students per…
pharyngula | August 13, 2007I am so pleased to learn that Focus on the Family is freaking out a little bit.
The trend is known as the "Great Evacuation," and the statistics are startling to youth ministers.
Studies have shown at least 50 percent — and possibly as much as 85 percent — of kids involved in church groups will abandon their faith during their first year in college.
The best part of this statistic is that college professors and administrators don't even try to divorce students from religion — despite my evil reputation, I don't say a word about religion in any of my classes. All we do is open students' eyes…
pharyngula | August 9, 2007Pity the children at Castle Hills First Baptist School. It is a truly god-soaked institution, where everything is distorted to fit a fundagelical vision. I've heard of inserting God into biology, obviously, but the description of godly calculus has got to be seen to be believed. And history is apparently the study of the nature of god as revealed by social studies, while Jesus' preferred economic model is capitalism.
It's in Texas, of course.
I wonder if it is the perfect model of what McLeroy wants done with the public school system?
pharyngula | August 7, 2007It's that time of the summer again, when classes loom all too near, and enthusiastic students start asking for the reading ahead of time so that they can both find the books from a cheaper source than our bookstore and get a jump on the material. So to handle all those requests at once, here is a list of my fall term classes:
If you're an incoming freshman biology major, you'll be taking Biology 1111, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development (FunGenEvoDevo, for short), either in the fall or the spring term. This course is primarily a qualitative introduction to the basic…