Academics
pharyngula | September 8, 2010Universities are supposed to be places where students are free to think and argue…but too often, if a student says something that contradicts the religious dogma of the institution, it's an excuse to be censored. Here's an example: a Mormon student at BYU wrote a letter for the school newspaper criticizing the LDS position on gay rights while still supporting Mormonism as a religious belief.
It is time for LDS supporters of Prop 8 to be honest about their reasons for supporting the amendment. It's not about adoption rights, or the first amendment, or tradition. These arguments were not found…
pharyngula | September 7, 2010I'm about to enter a classroom for the first time in over a year. I feel a strange dread that I've forgotten how to teach.
OK, I'm back. I survived. No students passed out. I think it was OK, although it was made more difficult by the fact that it involved a transition from one instructor to another.
Now to do it again this afternoon.
pharyngula | September 5, 2010Oh, boy, it's been a while. I was out for the first few lectures (which I am grateful to my colleagues for covering), so in my introductory biology class I get to plunge straight in to Darwin, Darwin's finches, and Sean Carroll's The Making of the Fittest. No preludes, baby, I'm diving right in.
And then I stumble across CreationConversations, which is kind of like the Ask A Biologist website, if it were staffed by idiots. People write in, and the gang there, which seems to be mostly junior league suck-ups to Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, tries to answer from the Biblical perspective. It's…
pharyngula | August 13, 2010That ridiculous article on Biblical diagnosis has been officially retracted, and the editor left a comment at Aetiology:
As Editor-in-Chief of Virology Journal I wish to apologize for the publication of the article entitled ''Influenza or not influenza: Analysis of a case of high fever that happened 2000 years ago in Biblical time", which clearly does not provide the type of robust supporting data required for a case report and does not meet the high standards expected of a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Virology Journal has always operated an exceptionally high standard of thorough peer…
pharyngula | August 10, 2010It's $20,000.
St John's is a very nice, private Catholic college not too far down the road from us. They also have a program named after our celebrated liberal Minnesota politician and alumnus, Eugene McCarthy, the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement, which has a Senior Fellows program to bring in new and interesting people to the community. So you'd think they'd be good guys; I've had a good opinion of them for some time. That's changing fast.
One of the Senior Fellows they recently appointed was Nick Coleman, formerly a well-known columnist at the Minneapolis…
pharyngula | August 4, 2010I blame Barbara Bradley Hagerty — or at least, she is the face of religious inanity at NPR. She has a new piece up titled Christian Academics Cite Hostility On Campus, and does she have any evidence for this claim? None at all. Actually, she has evidence contradicting the claim.
There are two parts to the story. The first is someone who is fast becoming a usual suspect, Elaine Howard Ecklund, the person who studied faith among academics and was surprisingly surprised to discover that, golly gee whiz, nearly half go to church! This is a fact that is only news if you've bought into the biased…
pharyngula | July 28, 2010Zeno catches something amusing: a right-wing radio host ranting about professors.
Sussman:I get a kick out of— You go to UC Berkeley, you go to Stanford, you go to these various campuses and these students are out there protesting, "We need more money for our schools!" And standing next to them are the professors. "We need more money for our schools!" Hey, have you ever asked that professor how much money they're making every year? These professors are all millionaires. They're millionaires with big, big salaries and big, big retirement packages. And yet they dress like little schmoes, you…
pharyngula | July 15, 2010Really, they are. A while back, the Institute for Creation Research moved to Texas, where they expected a friendly welcome, and instead they got spanked: their request to be allowed to hand out degrees was turned down by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. This made the ICR angry, and they made a wacky lawsuit. A genuinely deranged brief. Their minds work in very twisty weird ways.
They've gone down in flames — they are not authorized to give out degrees. But those creationist brains that scuttle sideways and inside out are not daunted by this mere legal restriction! Their website…
pharyngula | July 11, 2010The Supreme Court recently decided that campus student groups do not have to be subsidized by the university if they discriminate — so, for instance, the campus Christian club can't refuse to admit gays and also collect university money. Perfectly reasonable, to my mind.
It's driving flitterbrained conservatives mad, though. They can't discriminate? Injustice! Perhaps one of the craziest is Mike Adams, who has announced his intention to abuse the ruling at UNC Wilmington.
...when I get back to the secular university in August, I plan to round up the students I know who are most hostile to…
pharyngula | July 10, 2010Unfortunately, it's the administrators who shape the faculty, and they too often lose sight of the purpose of their institution. Here's Eva von Dassow trying to remind the UM regents of their job.
Uh-oh. Von Dassow is in one of those liberal artsy departments, Classics and Near East Studies at the University of Minnesota. Now somebody up top is probably scrutinizing that academic unit and measuring its revenue generation, which, of course, is the true measure of a scholarly endeavor.
(via Left of Centre.)
pharyngula | July 9, 2010Kenneth Howell was an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois. He is not being rehired at the end of his contract, apparently because he has been accused of hate speech against gays by a student. He had written an email to his students defending the Catholic position on homosexuality, and a friend of one of the students wrote to the university and the media accusing the professor of "hate speech", of "indoctrinating students", and "limiting the marketplace of ideas".
I hate to say it, but I think the student was wrong. I read the professor's email, and I don't think it is hate speech…
pharyngula | June 12, 2010Wow. The University of California system is facing a 400% increase in the subscription cost to Nature Publishing Group's journals. Libraries have been struggling with this problem for years, with journal costs spiraling ever upwards (usually it's Elsevier that is leading the way), and it's a tremendous chunk of university library budgets. UC libraries are currently spending $300 thousand on just the various Nature journals — increasing that expense for a university system that is already straining to keep up sounds like a nightmare. Of course, not getting Nature is also a nightmare to…
pharyngula | June 9, 2010Scott Hatfield, a fellow who comments here from time to time, is planning to do coursework in the Galapagos — for the good of the students, of course, he couldn't possibly enjoy spending time on some exotic islands in the Pacific. You'll have to stop by and see what he's up to, and if you can, donate to help him meet the expenses. For the students.
pharyngula | June 9, 2010You may have noticed one thing about our so-called free society: there is one group of professional, well-educated, articulate people who have been de facto forbidden to speak aloud about their views. Those people are our teachers. In particular, if they dare to express liberal, socially conscious views in ways that risk a difference of opinion getting back to parents or, jebus forbid, donors and community activists, we all know what will happen: they will be fired. The teachers know this, too — almost all of them willingly self-muzzle, because it has been repeated over and over to them that…
pharyngula | May 15, 2010Whoa, dudes. Did you hear about the bats who have oral sex?
Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does…
pharyngula | May 6, 2010Not that I'd ever apply; I wouldn't ever want to work in an instition with an irrational commitment to a weird medieval superstition. It leads them to make all kinds of strange decisions.
Marquette University has just done that. They've been searching for a new dean for the college of arts and sciences, and had made an offer to a Dr Jodi O'Brien, a professor of sociology at Seattle University. They have now abruptly yanked the offer off the table and announced that the search has failed.
The reason? Partly, it's because she's a lesbian. Marquette does have other gay faculty, though, so that's…
pharyngula | May 3, 2010This is an education plan I could get behind.
One additional requirement, besides diverting reasonable amounts of money into education: demand improvements in quality. Not this misbegotten accountability of No Child Left Behind, but shakeups in how school boards manage budgets; remove the elected officials from the business of dictating pedagogy and content, and let the qualified professionals design curricula that actually works. I listened to the video and just felt a sense of dread at the thought of the Texas Board of Education suddenly flush with new money and deciding to buy Bibles for…
pharyngula | April 23, 2010Last year, Liberty University picked an appropriate commencement speaker: Ben Stein. And the laughter did peal across the nation.
What could they do to top that this year? Who could they possibly get as a commencement speaker for the class of 2010 to signify exactly how deeply into Wingnuttia they are? Who could possibly stand up and show them their future?
It's Glenn Beck. Perfection!
They may have peaked. I don't know who they could possibly get to be as representative in 2011.
pharyngula | April 20, 2010Post-docs are the weird, easily forgotten positions in academia, neither fish nor fowl. They're something more than a student — they've got Ph.D.s! — but definitely far less than faculty. On the plus side, it's often the one position where you get to do nothing but research, research, research…but on the negative side, you've got minimal official status within your institution, have no say in governance or administration, and are at the mercy of your academic overlords. It's also a low-paying position (although it has gotten somewhat better and more realistic since my post-doctoral days, when…
emjohnson | March 24, 2010Ann Coulter is a vicious and mean-spirited demagogue and I'm ashamed that I share more DNA with her than chimpanzees or bonobos. She represents the worst kind of reactionary partisanship and should be condemned by all quarters in the spirit of basic decency. That being said, however, I don't believe a government should have any role in prohibiting her speech, regardless of how offensive it is. And it's pretty offensive. Just after the Sept. 11 attacks Coulter wrote, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." This got her fired from the column…