Academia

Jes Wienberg Shot Down My Habilitation

aardvarchaeology — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 09:41:10 +0000

Jes Wienberg Shot Down My Habilitation

Habilitation, docentur, is a symbolic upgrade to your PhD found in Scandinavia and other countries with a strong element of German academic traditions. You can think of it as a boy-scout badge. It confers no salary, but it opens certain doors including that of supervising doctoral candidates. Though formally handed out by the faculty, it's impossible to get without support from your department, as I learned from my abortive attempt at the University of Stockholm in 2010. If on the other hand you do have the support of your department, it's impossible to avoid getting your habilitation – a mere formality. Almost impossible to avoid.

After heading freshman archaeology for two years in Umeå, in February of 2015 I applied for habilitation there with the kind support of the department's ämnesansvarige, professor Thomas B. Larsson. He asked me, as is customary, to suggest a few names for the external reviewer. Trying to be shrewd about it, I picked two people who had written enthusiastically about my work in evaluations for jobs, and then I tried to think of a third person. Somebody senior, somebody impartial, yet vaguely friendly. And I thought of Jes Wienberg.

Wienberg is a professor of Historical Archaeology in Lund. We've only met once and have never collaborated. He owed me nothing and I owed him nothing, but we had corresponded amicably for about 15 years. My first memory of contact with him is from 2001/02 when I got his permission to re-print a really good article of his in the skeptical pop-sci journal Folkvett that I co-edited at the time. In 2004/05 he helpfully commented on the manuscript of a pugnacious debate piece of mine that appeared in the journal META, published at his department. He went on to publish in the scholarly journal I co-edit and was always helpful with recommendations when I needed a good reviewer for some new book on Medieval matters. Wienberg was never a big presence in my professional life, but he was a friendly one. Until he accepted the task of reviewing my habilitation application. And delivered his verdict.

The process took more than a year. I wasn't directed to send my publications to the external reviewer until May 2016. I mailed the hefty stack to Wienberg on 24 May, and then I got the whole thing back on 8 June. Right at the end of the spring semester, when there are so many exams to correct, grades to set and bits of admin to finish, Wienberg spent less than two weeks getting familiar with 846 pages of research into prehistoric archaeology, a field he is not active in. And his verdict was roughly this:

Rundkvist fulfils all formal criteria for habilitation. But I don't like his methods of research. So I refuse to give him my recommendation.

Those who read Scandy can check here whether the above is a fair summary of Wienberg's evaluation.

Wienberg's behaviour caused much consternation at the faculty in Umeå. Nobody ever does this. Habilitation is a ceremonial act. If you're asked to review work that you absolutely loathe, then you just don't accept the job. “Sorry, I'm too busy right now.” And Wienberg's value judgement of my stuff was completely beside the point, because those publications had already passed peer review and been published in high-profile venues. He wasn't just questioning my work, he was questioning the insight of among others Thomas B. Larsson and two fellow professors at his own department in Lund who had accepted reams of my writing for publication.

But anyway, I never did get habilitated. A friendly old Umeå professor from a neighbouring discipline did his best at the faculty to effect a re-submission opportunity for me, but it came to nothing. Due to flagging student numbers I no longer worked in Umeå, and my support from the departmental staff was lackadaisical. One guy wrote me explicitly that the question of my habilitation was linked to what the playing field would look like the next time a professorship became vacant in Umeå. We climb over each other to reach the top.

And so I learned yet again that a career in academia is never about the formal rules for how stuff should work, never really about qualifications. It's a tribal system of social patronage. I also learned, belatedly, not to trust Jes Wienberg.

aardvarchaeology Tue, 10/03/2017 - 05:41

Tags

archaeology

Academia

archaeology

Not familiar with the process, but that seems to me to be an uncalled for piece of treachery, for no evident reason.

I'm no archaeologist, but I do understand research methods, and I have edited two of your books - OK, just for form of presentation, not content, on which I am not competent, but to do that I needed to understand what you had done and why. I could see nothing wrong whatever with your research methods. On the contrary, you seem to me to be commendably thorough and careful, documenting everything based on empirical evidence.

People who smile to your face but then stab you in the back like that, totally unexpectedly, are snakes. There is usually another reason, one he is not admitting to, but digging deep enough to try to figure out what it is can be a futile exercise. The guy just had it in for you, for whatever strange reason, and when he got the chance to screw you, he did it. Heaven knows why, but I'm willing to bet that it was not for the reason he stated.

Thank you John!

Cheer up: Once you write a best-selling popular science book about archaeology, you will have a splendid opportunity to mention the anecdote..

Your namesake, the illustrator and comic book author Martin Kellerman cheerfully takes a revenge on assholes he has met by including them in his much-read stories.
People who behave badly assume that just because they cannot be formally reprimanded, their relative anonymity will allow them to get off scot free, with no censure.
This is the reasoning of online trolls, who then get shocked when a TV reporter turns up to hold them to account (Swedish TV reporter Robert Ashberg based a whole TV concept on this).
-- -- -- --
SMBC has a reference to unsatisfying jobs
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/unfinished-business

Re @3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWo_3CIcTBQ

In Wienbergs conclusion he argued that Rundkvist' "uphold a categoric methodic approach that hindered any qualitative exchange and recess". This conclusion is stated several times in Wienbergs response. There are also comments arguing that the publication was missing critical reflections and new perspectives and that Rundkvist in some cases added more to the research material than it could carry (prejustice). These statements are found in Wienbergs rejection argumentation, as any who can read Swedish can see.

Given these criticisms I cannot agree in the summary given by Rundkvist : "Rundkvist fulfils all formal criteria for habilitation. But I don’t like his methods of research. So I refuse to give him my recommendation." - This is simply not sufficient!

Wienberg gives reasons why the publication cannot be accepted as a habilitation and his reasons are pointed at what a scientist is expected to do. The formality (hours of teaching, former publications etc.) is OK, but that is formality. This is expected to be fullfilled. However, it seems that the publication is violation the deper layers of what a scientific habilitation must cover and so it must be rejected.

Rundkvist do not address these issues in this blog. That would have been most interesting, IMHO.

@5 - What you have said in English just comes across as gibberish. Sorry, but it does. Either your English sucks, or Wienberg's original conclusion in Swedish was already pseudo-academic gobbledegook. I can't tell which, although "violation the deper layers" suggests that it is your English that is not really up to the job.

And you could try being polite while you are at it, given that you are a guest on someone else's Blog.

@6 Sorry that you was not able to see thru some of my spelling errors. I would have written "violation of the deepers layers", but the article in question disappeared. I thought that English speaking readers of a certain level was able to let that pass, but of course I was wrong - my error.

However, you are correct in the assumption that I am not a native English speaker. I am Danish and as such I can read what Wienberg wrote. Without google translate, let me add. As Rundkvist added the link to Wienbergs evaluation I read it and thus my comments. They still stand. Runekvist did not in this blog address the issues raised, instead he summarized Wienbergs evaluation into an inprecise one-liner. It is his right, but I would have liked to see Runekvist' argumentation against the critisism raised.

As for politeness on a moderated blog, let that be the problem of the moderator.

No, as Martin's long time friend, I take your rudeness in referring to him as "Rundkvist" (or in one case as "Runekvist") personally, and I state a personal objection to it. If Martin thinks I am out of line, he will no doubt redact my comments, as is his right.

And you might not want to try to tell me what to do or how to conduct myself. It does not, shall we say, bring out my nicer side.

I am not going to rely on Google Translate to try to understand Wienberg's evaluation. If you are not able to state it in intelligible English, you might want to stay away from stating it in gibberish on an English language blog.

I find Normanns posts perfectly understandable, and I agree with his conclusion - that Martin's summary is not completely fair. (Which doesn't mean that Weinberg's conclusions or behaviour are fair, either.)

@8 OK, I wrote "Runekvist" instead of "Rundkvist". My apology. However, how can it be rude to use the last name of a person that you do not know? Is it more rude to do that than pick on a persons skill of language?

For Scandinavian readers the following may be clearer than my English:
Jeg kender ingen af parterne, hverken hr. Rundkvist eller hr. Wienberg. Mit indlæg er baseret på den foreliggende blog, og på den anmeldelse, som hr. Wienberg skrev i forbindelse med hr. Rundkvist habil. Jeg tillader mig at rejse den kritik, at hr. Rundkvist ikke adresserer substansen i kritikken, nemlig det kvalitative aspekt. Det er min pointe.

Google translate does a fair job in translating this, if need...

Your comprehension of written English must be better than mine, then. That's pretty commendable for a Swede who can't write English correctly himself.

@10 - It's rude just to refer to him by surname, particularly as you don't know him. The English do it to address people with whom they are on fairly but not very friendly terms, but I am not English and also consider that rude. You are not English either, obviously.

Try Dr Rundkvist.

@12 No, I am Danish. I wrote that already in @7.

@13 - Yes, thanks, you have mentioned several times now that you are Danish, as if that absolves you from anything.

Have you ever wondered why the population of Denmark is so remarkably genetically homogeneous? If you were Japanese, people would call you xenophobic. There are other, less polite, words for that.

@14 Interesting how your defence of your friend becomes a personal attack on other peoples nationality, country, language skills and more. With friends like this, Dr Rundkvist does not need any more support, I am sure.

Good job, mr. Massey! You get what you want: I rest my case.

John, mate, you're out of line. Play the ball not the man.

Yes, Normann's English is awkward, it's not his first language. Deal with it, or ask for clarification if need be. You cope with broken English on Martin's FB page, at least when you generally agree with the comment. In 3 1/2 paragraphs there is one phrase that had me pulling faces trying to work it out. The rest is understandable.

Referring to Martin as "Rundkvist" jars a little but it's not uncommon. Surnames were used often at the boys' school my brother went to in Melbourne, both by the teachers and amongst the boys themselves. You hear it on sports fields all the time.

I have no idea whether Normann is a friend of Martin's, a chance drop-in, or even a friend of Jes Wienberg's, but he has bothered to give us a translation of the commentary. The only reason to attack Normann is if you have reason to believe he is not giving a fair translation. Could we please discuss the actual content, not the manner of it's presentation.

Fiona, I was deliberately being unpleasant, and deliberately playing the man, as you put it. I would have thought that was obvious.

Come on, I live in a community where I am an ethnic minority of one - you think I can't handle a bit of wonky English? I spend a lot of my work time editing very technical reports written by people for whom English is a second or even third language. I fix the English at the same time that I correct the technical errors. My Chinese boss has made me the gate-keeper of our technical reports because he is so appreciative of my ability to turn gibberish into what he calls my "beautiful English". I live in a home where my wife and daughter converse in Cantonese, or Mandarin, or English, depending on what they feel like at the time. Often they will switch language mid-discussion, sometimes mid-sentence. Do you seriously think I can't handle that?

I disagree with you on the surname thing - I find it rude and offensive, and I always will. The teachers at the boys' school I attended spoke to me that way and I accepted it as part of the student/teacher relationship (except for my English teacher in my final year, who always addressed me as Mr Massey - he was previously an instructor at Duntroon, and he was far and away the best teacher I ever had) but I will not accept it from anyone else. It costs nothing to treat other people politely.

No, Nielsen has not given us a translation of the commentary. If you care to look at the commentary, it is long and detailed. I don't accept Nielsen's brief summary of it, which I maintain does not make sense. If he had attempted to give an English translation of the whole of Wienberg's criticism, I might have felt more accommodating, but he didn't. He made up his own garbled brief summary. If that made sense to you, and you thought it was justified, bloody good luck to you. I don't care what you think.

And in any case, I see no reason why Martin should have to give a point by point rebuttal of Wienberg's criticism at this point. It's his Blog, he can do and say what he likes. He was making a general point - Wienberg was a snake who didn't play by the normally accepted rules. I thought that much was blindingly obvious from what Martin wrote. Whether Wienberg had any grounds in his detailed criticism, I don't know, and don't much care.

I read Nielsen as a troll who was trying to get a rise out of Martin, and Öberg as another one, and I will be as unpleasant to such people as I like, whether you happen to approve of my behaviour or not. The arbiter of behaviour here is the Blog master, and that's not you.

And don't tell me what to do, or you will get some of my less nice side too. Either that or I will just ignore you, depending on how I feel at the time and whether I have anything more diverting or valuable to do with my time.

Fiona is right. I understand Martin's point very well. However, I usually tend to heard both sides.
My English ist far from being perfect, but I can understand the point well enough. Assuming that being an ethnic minority prevents one from being being unfair to second language issue is logically not correct. It's like assuming that a woman can't be rassistic or antifeministic because she is part of a discriminated group herself. You see the point I think.^^
Besides, Nielsen is obviously Danish or at least he writes Danish, not Swedish. Google Translator would have told you if you don't believe him... If you assume that refering to someone's last name is rude, what is it to refer to a Dane as a Swede?

1) Adressing someone by the last name is standard in German academia, especially when talking about a person's writing. You just have to look at a single review in a German journal. I can't say if it is standard in Scandinavia.

2) a) Nielsen critiseses that Martin does not name the main critic, and is far as I get it, there are some critic points that might be true.
b) Nielsen makes clear he knows neither Martin Rundkvist not Jes Wienberg, as he stated in #10 ("Jeg kender ingen af parterne, hverken hr. Rundkvist eller hr. Wienberg").
c) I am pretty slow in reading Swedish, but as far as I can tell, there are some points that Wienberg says to be missing in Martin Rundkvistis works. I cannot judge that without having read the publication and other publications on that topic for I lack the qualification for Scandinavian archaeology.

3) In Germany, there is a different appraoch to habilitations. But for other projects/jobs/scholarships you need other professionals evaluations. In Germany it is not uncommon to get a negative evaluation for such things. I, however, believe Martin Rundkvist's point that it is not common in Sweden to get a negative evaluation.

And yes, I know that like Archaeology in Germany, who gets jobs is hardly ever fair or based on objective criteria. I believe that Martin Rundkvist has not been treated fairly in his career. But that does not justify personal attacks on other people's arguments, especially if these arguments have a point.

My point about being an ethnic minority was to make clear that I have no problem understanding people writing/speaking imperfect English. Take my word for it, Cantonese and written Chinese are a lot more distant from English than Danish is.

I didn't say Nielsen is a Swede, I guessed that Öberg is.

I don't care what is standard in German academia. It is irrelevant.

I believe that Nielsen and Öberg were trolling; trying to put in a hit. In any case, what I said is no reflection on Martin. If you are expressing disapproval of me, I couldn't care less what you think. Clear?

Any other points of logic that you need to have cleared up?

I know how different Standardchinese- though not Cantonese- is like compared to the Indoeuropean languages. (Wo shuo Hanyu.)

They are not trolling, they just argue on base of the evaluation document that you have not read. You say you cannot read it or use Google translator. (Which, btw, works well for Swedish-English, but not so well for Swedish-German.) I would say, try to read the evaluation first before you say something about the argumentation based on a document before you have read it? (I don't feel confident enough to translate two (foreign languages Swedish to English), but there is maybe a Native Speaker who can read Swedish?)
I have read it partially and I say there might be a point in it. So did Öberg and Nielsen. I am a prehistoric archaeologist, but no specialist for Scandinavia, so I cannot judge how valid the named points are. But it is a valid point to say that Martin Rundkvist might have said something about the argumentation given in the evaluation. Of course, it is his right to do so in a personal blog. This, however, makes it hard to evaluate it even for me. Yes, I do understand very well why Martin Rundkvist is so angry about all that. But for a fact based argumentation, I would also like to know what he or maybe another Scandinavian archaeologist says to the mentioned points. And this is why those wo guys have a point and are not trolling, but discussing.

Well, yes, there is one follow-up question on the logic. If you don't care what other people think or argue, why are you so eager on commenting?

846 pages of research, evaluated in less than two weeks.

I have an IQ of 140+ and excellent reading comprehension, and I spend a lot of my working life reading and correcting complex technical reports. I have read Martin's PhD thesis, given a very close reading to two of his books prior to publication, and have read some of his other work. I understand all of it. But I'm damned if I could come anywhere close to evaluating 846 pages of his work in less than two weeks.

I think you need to read Martin's post again. You are missing the point.

As for your last question: "If you don’t care what other people think or argue, why are you so eager on commenting?", now you are using wording intended to provoke, which makes you a troll too.

Unless you have understood the points that Martin has made in his post, and have studied at least as much of his work, tracked through the references, etc. as I have, you cannot possibly be in a position to know whether Wienberg's criticisms were valid or not. I doubt whether you, Nielsen, Öberg and Anderson have done that, which means you are all just trying to provoke, without knowing what you are talking about. (Of course, you could quote some of Martin's work to illustrate the validity of Wienberg's criticisms, but it is noticeable that not one of you has even attempted to do that.)

So I am defending my friend, for whom I have a lot of respect, having carefully studied a lot of his work, against people who are just trying to needle; i.e. trolls, or airheads, pseuds and poseurs, who are just as bad. As for what you think of me, I really don't care.

Well, John (you will notice I don't call you Massey, as I said, I don't like it), it is you who has admitted to going out of your way to be rude and obnoxious. Having seen your comments over many years I used to think you were a reasonably decent bloke, but not any more.

I also am a friend of Martin's, but I am not an archaeologist, far less a Scandi one, and have only read his social media work, not his academic. I therefore did not and can not comment on what Jes Wienberg's reasoning or ulterior motives may be. I am not trolling, I'm merely trying to see what happened through a language barrier.

Three Fortunate Young Oslovians

aardvarchaeology — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 06:25:58 +0000

Three Fortunate Young Oslovians

Oslo colleagues have asked me to give a fuller account of the spring 2017 hiring that I called the most egregious case I’ve seen. This is not because they're trying to make the University of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History look good, but because they feel that I unfairly singled out a single hire, when in fact there were three. I'm happy to oblige. For one thing, I hadn't even noticed that one of the three has no PhD.

Some background. Norway has a strong tradition of research performed at museums. Bergen's museum, for instance, was doing major science long before there was a university in town. The førsteamanuensis positions at the Oslo museum that I'm discussing here have 40% research time built into them. Hear that, academics everywhere? A full-time, lifetime job with 40% research time. 20 people applied for those three jobs.

I've kept stats on who has gotten lectureships and førsteamanuensis positions in Scandy archaeology for the past 14 years. The median age of the hires is 43. Half of the hires are between 40 and 46. The youngest person to get one of these jobs since I started counting in 2003 was 32, at Uni Oslo's Museum of Cultural History, this past spring.

But yes, there were three hires. They're 32, 35 and 39, that is, all three are exceptionally young. One worked at the museum when the jobs were advertised, another had worked there previously, and one of these two hasn't got a PhD! A third one had a post-doc position at Uni Oslo's main campus just across town, where this person had done their PhD (post-doc at your home department, huh!?). This one is also a long-term collaborator on two projects of the hiring committee's chairman, who is a professor at the museum in accordance with the fine Norwegian rules for these things.

I believe that by the time they reach 45, two of these people will have strongly competitive CVs. (They're getting paid to do research at 40% of full time, after all, and all three certainly seem bright enough.) My point in bringing them up is that in 2017 none of the three have this. There is nobody under the age of 40 in Scandinavian academic archaeology who can compete in front of a fair and impartial hiring committee with people who have published research voluminously for a quarter century. Because nobody starts publishing research at age 15. So it's pretty damn egregious the whole thing.

aardvarchaeology Mon, 10/02/2017 - 02:25

Tags

I can't speak about the qualifications here, but rather raise a more general point.

One can argue that the best qualified person should get the job. This might mean, as you claim here, that it goes to someone who did research for decades with no permanent position. Wouldn't it be better for science, though, if people got permanent jobs earlier? Surely you could have done more research if you had a permanent job at 30, right? So, assuming that the people are smart enough (which, in my experience, one knows even after the first degree), isn't it better to give them a permanent job now, rather than risk them being less productive than they could be, perhaps even leaving the field, due to lack of job security?

No, because archaeology PhDs are a dime a dozen in Scandinavia. There is no need to nurture individual ones. Tomorrow there will be ten new ones to choose from.

Cynic or reaslist? :-|

Surely the best strategy is to give the best people permanent jobs as soon as you are reasonably confident that they are the best.

FUUUUUCK!
(OT) Las Vegas shooting: death toll rises to 50 as police name suspect – latest updates https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2017/oct/02/las-vegas-two-dead…

Predicted outcome: NRA will say this had nothing to do with guns.

...Also, the media is naturally calling him a “lone wolf”, since he’s white and so can’t possibly be a terrorist fed conspiracy theories.

The high cost of academic reimbursement

tsmith — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 13:29:55 +0000

The high cost of academic reimbursement

Spring, 2004. I was in the second year of my post-doc, with kids ages 4 and 2. Because I was no longer a student, the full brunt of my student loan payments had hit me, which were collectively almost double the cost of my mortgage. To put it generously, money was tight. Truthfully, we were broke as fuck and struggling each month to stay above water.

I'm from a blue-collar background. My dad was a factory worker for 40 years. My mom had a teaching degree, but "paused" her career to have me (followed by my sister and brother), and was then diagnosed with multiple sclerosis shortly after my brother's birth. Hers was rapidly progressive and she was unable to return to teaching--leaving the family with one income and a lot of unexpected medical bills.

So when it came to navigating academia, it goes without saying that I was out of my element. But I knew I had 2 years of funding for my fellowship, and that time was quickly coming to an end. I needed to figure out a next step.

My PI suggested applying for both additional fellowships as well as professorships--though we figured I wouldn't land the latter, at least the application process and (maybe) interviews would be good practice. At the time I started looking, there was only one assistant professor position in my niche that was advertising (I had missed much of the big interviewing season--also something I didn't understand at the time). I applied, and somehow, a few weeks later I was invited to the University of Iowa for an interview.

The departmental secretary emailed me to set up travel. She explained that they had booked a hotel for a 2-night stay, and they'd reimburse me for my airfare--just send her the receipts after the interview.

Um.

We were barely keeping up on bills as it was, with 2 kids in full-time daycare and my student loans. We had no credit card availability. We had no family we could borrow from--they were all as broke as we were or worse. We couldn't afford date nights out. Hell, we couldn't afford frozen pizza in. Where was I supposed to find $300+ for a flight in two weeks?

I almost canceled. "Thanks anyway, but I'm too poor to come out."

Luckily, what I did have was my 1996 Dodge Neon, purchased early in my post-doc for $2000 from an elderly woman who was no longer able to drive. It got about 40 miles per gallon on the highway, Iowa City was only about an 8.5-hour drive away, and gas was still under $2/gallon. I told the secretary I'd just drive it instead of fly in. I'm sure she thought I was phobic of flying or something (why drive otherwise??), but she said that was fine and arranged my meetings. When I left for my interview, I packed a sandwich, snacks, and drinks for the drive because stopping places for food added up.

All of this to say--I completely agree with Holly Bik's thread on academic reimbursement.

https://twitter.com/hollybik/status/913097093165678593

I was able to drive, but what about those who need to travel cross-country or internationally? How to pay for meetings to network and find opportunities when you're barely scraping by between paychecks? To travel for field work necessary for a degree or project?

As a professor, I've tried as much as possible to put student travel on my grants, or help them search for university or other funding sources to attend conferences. Sometimes it's only partial coverage, which is better than zero but still is a financial burden on my trainees. We always apply for the travel grants (and have gotten a few). But even when it's paid, it's typically not comped up-front--and can take months to come back. As Bik notes, it's just one more way the system is rigged against those who don't have access to some kind of familial assistance--and that includes a lot of people we're trying to recruit into the field, or retain once they're here.

I don't know how to fix it. I know some places are better than others. At least at my current institution, reimbursement tends to be relatively quick (~3-4 weeks or so) and will do direct deposit (some places still, inexplicably, insist on paper checks, which drags out the process even further). I know budgets are tight everywhere. I know that not every professor can afford to pay for all their students up-front either. I sent 5 trainees to the American Society for Microbiology meeting in 2016 in addition to myself, and even after 13 years as a professor, I still can't afford to just pay all of that in advance. Our financial people have often been sympathetic, but tell us their hands are tied due to all sorts of regulations.

As with so many areas of academia, we need to do better. From Bik's thread, some places seem to be able to front costs--why can't that be universal? It seems like a small thing when you have money, but for many struggling academics it's the difference between "making it" and leaving the field. If administrators are truly committed to diversity, they'd find some way to make this work more smoothly.

tsmith Fri, 09/29/2017 - 09:29

Tags

This is a class issue. It's not much different from "unpaid internships". We make things possible for those with resources or family resources. If we want diversity in academia we must look at the things that get in the way of people succeeding.
http://mistressoftheanimals.scientopia.org/2015/10/06/class-issues-the-…

Preach it sister!

When I worked for a local government in Japan, they came up with a sum presumably based on where I was going and how long I'd be away, and gave me a pile of cash before I left. How I chose to spend it was up to me, and the amount was always sufficient. Of course politicians in the US would never approve of such a scheme, because someone might get something more than the minimum, or worse yet rip off the system like the politicians would.

I really appreciate you posting on this, because I was ignorant of the degree of the problem and am horrified to find out how clueless I was. Really, I have a similar reaction to this as I did to finding out there are people without bank accounts, or that headline about 46% of Americans being unable to handle a $400 emergency.

I read a lot of personal finance blogs. There are people out there who LOVE playing the credit card reward travel point game. For those people, it's a loss when a university books travel directly instead of letting you make arrangements and get reimbursement. I'm not in that category, because I don't travel enough. But I do plenty of other strange contortions to maximize rewards. If any student at my uni needed someone to front the cash for this kind of thing, I would be beyond happy to help, out of both wanting academics to not have stupid class barriers and ALSO out of cold rational self interest. I can't help but think there should be some kind of network to match people up.

Yeah, Screw You Too, Academia

aardvarchaeology — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 06:27:20 +0000

Yeah, Screw You Too, Academia

I recently received a long-awaited verdict on an official complaint I had filed: there was in fact nothing formally wrong with the decision by the Dept of Historical Studies in Gothenburg to hire Zeppo Begonia. Since the verdict didn't go my way, as planned I am now turning my back on academic archaeology. The reason is that qualifications don't count in Scandyland.

Being friends with people inside, and preferably being a local product, is what gets you academic jobs here. I need to cut my losses and move on. I would call this post a burning of bridges if there were any to burn, but there are none. Fourteen years on this joke of a job “market” have demonstrated that it doesn't matter whom I piss off now: there won't be a steady job for me either way.

I've been applying for academic jobs all over Scandinavia since 2003. The longest employment I've been able to secure was a 6-month temp lectureship at 55% of full time – during one of three happy years when I headed freshman archaeology in remote Umeå. But time and time again, I've seen jobs given to dramatically less qualified colleagues.

Norwegian university recruitment is particularly ugly. There, rules stipulate that the “external” hiring committee has to be chaired by a senior faculty member from the hiring department itself – with predictable results. The most egregious case I've seen was not long ago at the University of Oslo's archaeological museum, where a [uniquely young] recent [University of Oslo] PhD with hardly any publications at all got a steady research lectureship. She had been working closely with a professor at the museum. Who chaired the hiring committee. And who was once, prior to this, super angry with me when I complained about the Norwegian system on Facebook, haha! I've seen the same thing at the Oslo uni department and at NTNU in Trondheim recently. Local people with poor qualifications who could never compete anywhere else get permanent positions.

Denmark's system is completely non-transparent. You don't get a list of who applied and you don't get to read their evaluations, like you do in Sweden and Norway. What tends to happen in my experience is that you get a glowingly enthusiastic evaluation, which feels super nice, and then they hire some Dane. The country has only two archaeology departments that produce these strangely employable Danes.

Finland's university humanities used to be poorly funded. To boot they have recently been radically de-funded from that prior low level. The Finns understandably never advertise any jobs at all.

Sweden is no better than its neighbours. Our hiring committees for steady jobs are fully external, so that's good. But you get steady jobs on the strength of your temping experience. And temp teachers are hired with no external involvement at all, like in the recent case of Zeppo Begonia in Gothenburg. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. The Faculty of Humanities at this university, let me remind you, was severely censured by the Swedish Higher Education Authority back in May for many years of gross misconduct in their hiring practices. Local favouritism is the deal here.

There are quite a few people in Scandy academic archaeology whom I'd like to see driving a bus for a living. Zeppo Begonia is not one of them. He is a solid empiricist prehistorian of Central European origin whose work I respect and admire. If you ask me who should get research funding, I will reply “Zeppo Begonia”. I would like to see many more Zeppoes in my discipline. I think we should import them to replace some of our own shoddy products. But look at our respective qualifications for this measly one-year temp lectureship at 60%.

The ad specified that you needed solid knowledge of Scandy archaeology to do the job. I'm 45 and I've worked full time in Scandy archaeology for 25 years. Zeppo is 39 and started working and publishing here four years ago.
I have published five academic books. Zeppo has published one.
I have published 45 journal papers and book chapters in a wide range of respected outlets. Zeppo has published 23.
Zeppo and I have both been temp teachers for some percentage of four academic years.
I have published 29 pieces of pop-sci, including one book, plus eleven years of this blog. Zeppo has published no pop-sci.
Out of Zeppo's research output, little deals with Scandy archaeology, but several of these pieces are co-authored with senior figures in archaeology at the University of Gothenburg. Hint, hint.

This, as you can see, is just ridiculous. And there is no legal recourse unless you are discriminated against on grounds of race, gender etc. The appeals board has proved to ignore qualification issues. Believe me, I've tried.

To finish off, a few words for my colleagues at Scandinavian archaeology departments. Have you published five academic books and 45 journal papers? Are you extremely popular with the students? Have you worked in Scandinavian archaeology for at least 25 years? Have you got other heavy qualifications, like an 18-year stint as managing editor of a major journal and 11 years of keeping one of the world's biggest archaeology blogs? If your answer to any of these questions is no, then I would have your job if Scandy academic archaeology were a meritocracy.

The head of department, Helène Whittaker, has declined to comment on the case of Zeppo Begonia. I use this pseudonym for him to emphasise that he has done nothing wrong. He just applied for a job.

aardvarchaeology Fri, 09/29/2017 - 02:27

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If it helps, I've found life outside academia to be very agreeable. Less stress, greater security, and, actually, more freedom to plan and implement my job than when I was staff scientist.

Desperately unjust and disheartening. I am no stranger to such unjust treatment, towards the latter part of my previous career. A lot of people sympathised and expressed to me their sympathy and sense that I had been treated unfairly - I was grateful for their sentiments, but they actually did nothing to help. The bitterness it engendered in me hurt no one but myself. Carried too long, the bitterness can translate into real serious physical illness.

In financial circles there is a thing called the 'sunk cost fallacy':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

The term also applies in military conflicts.

The rational actor accepts that the 'sunk cost' has turned out to be a bad investment, despite showing early promise, and determines not to throw any more resources in after it, but instead pursues a different and more promising direction. The sooner that the rational actor comes to this decision, the better off he will be.

Cutting your losses and moving on without a backward glance, and if possible without harbouring feelings of bitterness (difficult, I know) is the very best thing you can do for yourself, and will cause you the least harm.

Academia in 'Merca: "Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/28/adjunct-professors-home…

I'm so sorry that things didn't work out, Martin. So... you've got qualifications, you're a good communicator and you have an internet audience. What's your next step in life?
PS, if it's sex work, please don't post videos...

Not to downgrade "Scandy" problems, but here at the University of Washington in Seattle WA USA the Regents violate the Washington State Open Meetings Act; they carved out a special, phony, high-paying job for a Seattle mayoral candidate who recently had to resign as Mayor of Seattle in the face of numerous allegations of past criminal behavior; and they have partnered with the student-murdering government of China to open up a "Global Innovation Exchange" near Microsoft. My alma mater University of Washington has become a corrupt, money-chasing elite club of country-club types and corporate whores who care not one whit about student lives or student welfare. Remember the Tiananmen Massacre!

Archaeology is shitty.
"No. 2 if by sea: Outhouse tied to Paul Revere is excavated" https://phys.org/news/2017-09-sea-outhouse-tied-paul-revere.html

PhDs are grossly overproduced so that very fine academics, such as yourself, have little hope of getting tenure-track positions. All of us employed outside or inside academia should be sympathetic.

Here in the U.S., collegiality, attitude, "fit", and predicted future productivity are all taken into account in hiring. It is not enough to say "X has more publications than Y, therefore X must be hired" (or, if Y is already employed there, that Y's job should be given to X). After all, that doesn't even take into account the quality of publications; it's only a bean count.

As for pop-sci and blogging, some departments may love that, but if too much time is spent on that, others will view it as a distraction from "real" scholarship. You have shown that you can be productive in both areas at once, but departments may still see the former as a time-waster. Maybe not fair, but the reality of academia.

I'm sorry to hear about your situation as well. I'm not an academic, but I'm having similar issues as an older lawyer without what we call "portable business" in the US. What do you plan to do next?

Martin, why was Scandinavia the only option? In the fields I know better, its pretty much expected that you will apply for jobs around the world if you are serious about a teaching career (even though that weighs the scales against those with spouses, dependents, or health problems). Canada has a larger population than the five Scandy countries put together, but that is still not a large academic job market.

The Assyriologists in Finland seem to have a bit of money this decade, but I think I am going to google that "radically de-funded" bit.

Thank you everyone for your kind words!

John, you are absolutely right, this is a time to remember the sunk cost fallacy.

Catherine, I have begun asking around for work in contract archaeology. This non-academic business offers the great majority of jobs in my field, and has to do with land development.

Sean, archaeology is strongly regional. My knowledge of archaeological finds and structures is useless in southern Europe, not to mention other continents. I've applied for numerous jobs in the UK on the strength of the Viking connection, with no result.

You got that right! All the best and good luck!

Thank you Mads!

Work to live, not live to work..but keep on chasing rainbows Martin.

To my experience the ONLY thing counting in academia is publishing in high profile peer-review journals.

That is:
Books: "What is this?" - 0 points
Book chapters: "Oh, pleeze..." - 0 points
Articles in non peer-review journals (like FV): "Give me a break!" - 0 points
Popular science: "HAHAHAHA!"

So, how was the stand between you and Zeppo with this system in mind?

I still beat him, but not by as large an amount.

Looking in from the outside, for a discipline like Archaeology, active involvement in field work seems like it should be an important component. Actually, essential, I would have thought.

For my own specialist discipline, Geotechnical Engineering, going to site is an essential component. There is no place for 'desk jockeys'. I have sacked Geotechnical Engineers who declined to engage in field work (or who pretended they were going to site when they weren't - spending whole days on site in rough terrain wearing a three piece woollen pin-striped suit and polished leather shoes? In the middle of a tropical Hong Kong summer? Not once, but frequently? Really? See that door over there? Walk through it and don't come back.)

At http://www.dailyuw.com/eclipse_services_classifieds there is now a campaign to break up the nefarious relationship between the University of Washington in pursuit of greedy revenues and the student-murdering government of China.

The US academic market is worse in most respects than what you have been dealing with in Scandinavia. Hiring committees are always comprised of professors in the hiring department. Rumor mill sites exist (at least in physics), but you can never officially know who else is applying, other than the person who ultimately accepts the job. And it's not unusual to see applicant numbers in the triple digits for a single position, so the committee often must weed out qualified applicants even before the interview stage.

The US actually does have laws against discrimination on the basis of age (as long as you are between 18 and 70). I understand that is unusual, and that many countries are free to consider you "over the hill" because you have passed your 40th birthday.

Eric, I believe US hiring committees rarely pick a locally educated applicant, though.

Martin, that depends strongly on the institution and department. In some fields, most especially chemistry, it is expected that faculty will have undergraduate degrees, Ph.D.s, and postdocs at three different institutions, none of which is the hiring institution. Physics, especially in large departments, is somewhat more forgiving: while such cases are rare, I do know of people who came to their institution as first-year students and never left. And while there is plenty of demand for both entry-level researchers and top level people, mobility for mid-career types like me is just about nil. Many physics departments will follow chemistry's example in insisting on hiring outsiders as faculty, but that is not always the case.

I have no direct knowledge of what the situation is in the humanities, other than that we, like everybody else, are overproducing Ph.D.s. But you would almost certainly be having difficulties in the US system, because the chances of getting a tenure-track position are vanishingly small for anybody whose degree is from one of the top-ranked (between 10 and 20) US universities. For example, a local construction contractor who has done some work on my house has a Ph.D. in history with a specialty in Colonial era music. In his case it was a hobby that he was serious enough about to pursue a Ph.D. When I first met him, he was a student, and he was doing construction work to pay the bills. He continues to do construction work because it pays far better than any job he could get with his Ph.D. Our history program has historically been one of our top-ranked Ph.D. programs, but it is definitely not in the top 20.

One scam that is routine in the US is the overly specific job advertisement (this is not limited to academia; you see it in the private sector as well). Sometimes the hiring department knows in advance exactly whom they want to hire, and write the job description such that the preferred candidate is the only one who qualifies. I don't waste my time applying for those jobs because I know they are looking for somebody else.

I think there's a "not" missing from "the chances of getting a tenure-track position are vanishingly small for anybody whose degree is from one of the top-ranked (between 10 and 20) US universities".

The overly specific job ad is well known in Scandyland too. We call it the "shoe size ad".

Physics Blogging Round-Up: July

drorzel — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 04:18:04 +0000

Physics Blogging Round-Up: July

Another month, another collection of blog posts for Forbes:

-- The Physics Of Century-Old Mirror Selfies: Back in the early 1900's there was a brief vogue for trick pictures showing the same person from five different angles; this post explains how to do that with mirrors.

-- Why Research By Undergraduates Is Important For Science And Students: A reply to an essay talking up the products of undergraduate research projects, arguing that the most valuable part of research is the effect on students.

-- What Does It Mean To Share 'Raw Data'?: Some thoughts on the uselessness of much "raw data" in my field to anyone outside the lab where it was produced.

-- Breaking Stuff Is An Essential Part Of The Scientific Process: Thoughts on how the most important year of my grad school career was the frustrating one in which I broke and then repaired everything in the lab.

-- Measuring The Speed Of Quantum Tunneling: A couple of recent experiments use a clever trick to look at whether there's a time delay as electrons tunnel out of an atom in a strong electric field. Unfortunately, they get very different results...

I was a little disappointed that the photo-multigraph thing didn't get more traction, but it was fun to do, so that's okay. The quantum tunneling post did surprisingly well-- I thought it was likely to be a little too technical to really take off, but it did. Always nice when that happens.

The other three are closely related to a development at work, namely that on July 1 I officially added "Director of Undergraduate Research" to the many hats I wear. I'm in charge of supervising the research program at Union, disbursing summer fellowships and small grants for research projects and conference travel, and arranging a number of research-oriented events on campus. This involves a certain amount of administrative hassle, but then again, it's hassle in the service of helping students do awesome stuff, so I'm happy to do it.

Anyway, that's where things are. Blogging will very likely tail off dramatically for the fall, possibly as soon as this month (though I already have one post up), as I have a book on contract due Dec. 1, and a review article due to a journal a month later. And, you know, classes to teach and research to direct...

drorzel Tue, 08/08/2017 - 00:18

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Has anyone confirrmed Diracs prediction that gravitatonal force strength has declined since the beginning of time?

My view of raw-data is "do what you can". My research was closer to mechanical engineering (and so the data I collected was fairly close to understandable physics concepts - force, displacement, etc) and much of my code was "scripts to process into nice figures", but it wasn't much headache for me to share things on GitHub. At the very least, there were several papers in my field where I was trying to estimate values based on points on graphs, but if I could have recreated the graphs on my own computer pulling out the data would have been very easy.

And any simulation work done should be easily shareable. If it's in-house ad-hoc stuff, just publish the scripts. If you've got ABAQUS or Gaussian or other proprietary software platforms, at least include whatever scripts/parameters you had as input for them.

In a particle free environment does time cease to exist? Next question. What would happen if a Black Hole ran out of matter to consume?

If antimatter is truly the opposite of Matter how is it that scientists are able to define it with particle based physics! It doesn't exist.

Academic Recruitment in Sweden is a Mess

aardvarchaeology — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 12:20:37 +0000

Academic Recruitment in Sweden is a Mess

Academic recruitment procedures in Sweden are a mess. There are at least four strong contradictory forces that impact them.

Meritocracy. As Head of Department you are legally obliged to find and employ the most qualified person on the job market, even if it's just for six months. This is after all the public sector.
Labour laws. As Head of Department you are legally obliged to give a steady job to anyone who has worked at your uni for a total of four semesters in the past five years, regardless of their qualifications.
Funding. As Head of Department you cannot give anyone a steady job unless you know how to pay them long-term. Else you will have to fire someone soon, which will get you into big trouble both with the Dean and with the labour union.
Nepotism. As Head of Department you want to employ your buddy Bengt. He can be a recent home-grown PhD whom you want to give a break. Or he can be an old stalwart that you'd be ashamed to meet in the departmental coffee room if you didn't help him.

This is coming to a head in a big way. Five years ago it became mandatory to advertise even the shortest academic jobs, the ones that were typically quietly given to Bengt before. At least one Swedish university largely ignored this and has now endured official censure and much bad press. Academic leaders currently don't seem to know what's best practice. I've asked around with just one of the questions involved, and nobody in charge seems to know quite what the answer is.

Remember, as Head of Department, because of funding constraints you generally cannot allow anyone to pass the labour law's four-semesters-in-five-years threshold and get automatic steady employment. But when you advertise a short contract, chances are high that the most qualified applicant will be so near the limit that the short contract would effectively mean automatic steady employment. How do you deal with this situation, even ignoring any impact of nepotism?

So far I've never seen any department say plainly that “We realise that Berit has by far the strongest qualifications, but because of the labour laws we will instead employ Nisse, despite his weak CV”. I have however seen a case where the department suddenly discovered and described many flaws in Berit that made her an unattractive candidate, despite the fact that they had happily employed her on a series of short contracts up until the day when the labour law's limit came into sight.

aardvarchaeology Tue, 06/27/2017 - 08:20

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Oh yes, I am all too familiar with that game - you decide not to employ (or promote) the most deserving candidate for whatever reason, and then concoct perceived flaws in that candidate to defend yourself with, in the event that your decision is questioned, challenged or appealed against.

If you are really clever (or have read Sun Tzu), you foresee the situation arising well ahead of time, and 'manufacture' the imaginary flaws in the candidate that you do not wish to employ/promote. Then when challenged, you can present the past record that supports what you are saying in defence of your decision.

I don't know how often this happens in Sweden, but one way to get around the public advertisement requirement is to write the job qualifications so narrowly that only your preferred candidate meets the qualifications. This happens often enough in the US that job seekers learn to detect such scams, and avoid applying for such positions.

This isn't a problem only in Sweden. I have seen job ads which included "Mit der Bewerbung von Institutsangehörigen ist zu rechnen", i.e. "Note that members of the institute will probably apply", which means that it is already clear who will get the job. Often, the funding agency requires the name of the person who will be funded, but the institute requires that the position be advertized. Such a statement highlights the silliness, and saves everyone involved some time, but does also indicate that the person who gets the position didn't get it in any type of fair competition.

Obviously, employing someone without funding can't work. The labour laws are also good. The solution is to do away with the myth that academic research is done via projects staffed as needed by a pool of researchers waiting in the wings. All funding should go to permanently employed people. Have open and fair competition for permanent jobs and employ the people after they get their doctorate.

Eric, we call that "shoe-size ads". These days we react to them by reporting the department to the authorities.

Phillip, staffing a research project offers its own conundrums. In the blog entry I'm referring to the department's basic teaching positions.

Eric, the other trick with those ads, often used if you want to employ someone from outside the country, is to advertise the job in the most unlikely place, often the classifieds in the back of a small town weekly paper.

It's not dissimilar to the bit from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where "publicly posted" meant "behind door with sign declaring 'beware of leopard'!"

There is yet another motivating factor in hiring a certain person: If you can form a strategic alliance with A and not B in the office politics world, A is your choice. Similar to but distinctly different from nepotism. And of course, it produces the same race-to-the-bottom spiral as nepotism.

Yeah, nepotism may not be quite the right word for what we see in Swedish academia. It's rare to see someone literally hire their nephew. Bengt is instead usually someone with whom the departmental establishment has a relationship of friendship, patronage or collaboration. Bengt may be the pupil of an important professor at another university, someone who may control important resources. It's the compadre phenomenon, where an alliance is cemented not by me marrying your daughter, but by me becoming godfather to your newborn son. Little infant Bengt's personal qualities and CV are not important there.

If you can form a strategic alliance with A and not B in the office politics world, A is your choice.

This phenomenon exists in the US as well. We call it the old boys' network, because the perpetrators and beneficiaries of this practice are overwhelmingly likely to be male.

I am pleased to announce the launch of the Institute for the study of the globalisation of science (ISGOS)

Sujay Rao Mandavilli

First they just sent choice of candidates to all. When people asked details then this! What is mess! in process of choosing near and dears!
From umea uni:))
Du har inte fått den befattning som 1-2 Universitetslektorer i datavetenskap med diarenummer AN 2.2.1-100-17 som du sökt. Anställningen har gått till N.N.
>
> >
>Beslutet meddelades 2017-06-19 på Umeå universitets officiella anslagstavla och genom det här brevet.
Unfortunately, I have received incorrect information so I have sent a notice of rejection the fixed case has not been decided yet. I apologize so much.
You have not been rejected but still have the chance to get the job.

Swedish Academia Is No Meritocracy

aardvarchaeology — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 12:20:32 +0000

Swedish Academia Is No Meritocracy

After almost 14 mostly dismal years on the academic job market, I find it a consolation to read an opinion piece in Times Higher Education under the headline "Swedish Academia Is No Meritocracy". In my experience this is also true for Denmark, Norway and Finland. In Norway, for instance, the referee board that evaluates job applications isn't external to the department: it is headed by a senior employee of the department itself. With predictable results.

At Scandinavian universities, people who didn't get their jobs in fair competition are often handing out jobs to their buddies without any fair competition. But I see encouraging signs that the PR disaster that recently befell Gothenburg University's philosophy department may have put a scare into the whole sad business. At least temporarily. Meanwhile, I'm finishing my sixth archaeological monograph. Never having had a longer contract than 28% of one academic year.

aardvarchaeology Fri, 06/02/2017 - 08:20

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True report! You will not find diversity and Merit at all in Swedish Universities. They select near and dear ones shamelessly! Many are EIC in known journals and promote and publish their peer papers! Shameless and Corrupt and preach fairness and transparency to the World

To be honest, no academic area is immune to this. And beyond that, just do a quick search for "Bro culture" to realise this selective evaluation is endemic to any business area.

Basically, either suck it up, or take your ball and leave, pretty much.

"In Norway, for instance, the referee board that evaluates job applications isn’t external to the department: it is headed by a senior employee of the department itself. With predictable results."

OK, but realize that Sweden is an exception here in that there are external referees for job searches; in most countries there aren't.

On the whole, the process in Scandinavia and Finland is probably better than elsewhere. I'm not disagreeing with you, merely pointing out that elsewhere it is worse.

In Norway, for instance, the referee board that evaluates job applications isn’t external to the department: it is headed by a senior employee of the department itself.

This is considered normal in the US as well. Most of the members of the committee will be in the subfield in which the department is looking to hire (at least in physical science departments; I know essentially nothing about faculty searches in humanities and social science departments). There may be somebody in a different field there to keep the other search committee members reasonably honest.

This committee does not, in general, make the final hiring decision; that is typically done by the department as a whole and the choice approved by the relevant dean. What the committee does do is select the short list (typically four or five candidates, but I have seen as few as two and as many as six) of candidates who are brought to campus for in-person interviews.

Things do often get tricky with trailing spouses. It is common, at least in the US, for women with Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences to be married to men who have Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences, leading to the infamous "two-body problem". The trailing spouse won't necessarily be offered a tenure track job, but there will be some effort to ensure that (s)he can find employment in the same metropolitan area. A tenure-track position for the trailing spouse becomes more likely as the level of the hire increases, approaching certainty for hires at the dean level or higher.

I don't know what it's like outside Scandyland. But Swedish academia certainly doesn't work as advertised.

How true! Swedish universities are soaked in nepotism and mafia activities. With my experience from Denmark, Finland, Germany and the US, I can only conclude that the Swedish system is the worst: corrupt through and through. Department heads hire friends or even former PhD students, who can go on to become department heads themselves and hire their friends or people who can do the work for them. And that does not stop a career which can move on to more imortant posts.
Laws may require public announcements and external experts etc, but if you break the law it is accepted as long as you don't appear in the news.
And the result is predictable: in spite of the largest per capita investments in public funded science in the world, Sweden shows slowly but consistently falling grades in science when measured with internationally recognized metrics.
The latest idea is to completely abandon inclusion of the scientist's qualifications when proposal time comes around. Seriously!
But of course, that certainly makes it easier to move the goalposts.

The latest idea is to completely abandon inclusion of the scientist’s qualifications when proposal time comes around.

Huh? Please elaborate!

60% of Swedish university professors (that is, the tier above lecturer) are employed at the department where they did their PhDs.

'The latest idea is to completely abandon inclusion of the scientist’s qualifications when proposal time comes around.'

This is according to the latest newsletter from VR. Happily only a suggestion, but there is no guarantee this will not be implemented.

You mean they might evaluate project proposals without knowledge of the applicant's qualifications? If this can be done blindly, without knowing anything else about the person either, it would actually be effective against nepotism.

I don't see any reasonable way to evaluate somebody's publication record without having some idea who the person is. If you list the publications (whether they are monographs or journal articles or conference proceedings--whichever the field in question typically uses to evaluate this), then it's kind of obvious who the person is. If you don't, then it becomes a counting game, and you encourage the submission of Least Publishable Units. Not to mention that there is no way under this method to distinguish a crank publication from a legitimate publication.

If the field is small enough, then a truly double blind review becomes impossible, because everybody knows everybody else, and the reviewers can deduce who the authors are. The reverse, authors deducing who the supposedly anonymous reviewers are, is already a problem in my field; it is a common game to "guess the reviewer".

Eric, it sounds like Klavs might be suggesting that they evaluate the proposals without reference to anyone's publication record. Which would of course cause insurmountable problems with blinding, given that everyone in a field knows who usually does what.

J.A.T., a major personal problem of mine with the Swedish inbreeding system is that I didn't get along with the powers that were the department when I did my PhD. Which has left me out in the cold.

I'm not in academia, but from my friends who are, in the US there is a cultural thing that you don't go to grad school where you did your undergrad, and you don't post-doc where you did your doc.
I do know people who are tenure-track at the institution where they got their PhDs, but it's very unusual. (Physical sciences)

I don't think it's any kind of rule, just one of those cultural things, but it might help a smidge with reducing the "I'll just hire my student" thing.

"Things do often get tricky with trailing spouses."

As much as I sympathize with their predicament (and I did work in academia four years abroad while the family were living in another country, so I know what I am talking about), offering the trailing spouse a job they would otherwise not get is completely wrong. In any other context, getting a job because one has a sexual relationship with the "right" person is considered morally wrong (not because of the sexual relationship, but because employment should not be based on it).

The justifications are bad, really bad. "Oh, it's not a permanent job, it's just a five-year fellowship until I can find something else." Yeah, right, many struggling junior scientists would like one of those. "I'm not taking a job away from anyone since the position was created especially for me." The money had to come from somewhere. "It is difficult for my spouse to find a job nearby." Not compared to other people's spouses who perhaps cannot even work at all at the new location.

Seems to me that there is more wrong about academic recruitment practices than is right.

For trailing spouse hires in the physical sciences in the US, there is at least the option of a research faculty position. This means the position is entirely funded by grant money, and would typically be equivalent to the position (s)he had at the previous institution. The funding agencies typically don't care whether the work is done in Berkeley, California, or East Podunk, Vermont. The hosting institution is expected to supply an office. Overhead from the grants will typically cover that expense. So that scenario is at worst break-even for the hiring institution.

Universities are not immune to the prestige factor, either. This is why it may be in their interest to have Mrs. (or Mr., as the case may be) Dr. Bigshot on their payroll along with newly hired Prof. Bigshot. The US system also tends to favor superstars, which also tends to encourage such hiring since superstars can credibly threaten to go somewhere else that will satisfy their demands. Not that this is necessarily defensible, but I do expect institutions to act in what they perceive to be their interest.

I do know that administrative hires at the dean level or higher invariably include a tenured professorship in the appropriate department for external hires (internal hires will of course already have this). Even when trailing spouses are not an issue, this has been the case. It's rare for a former administrator to go back into teaching, but I have seen it happen.

Incidentally, the highest paid state official in every US state works for a state university. Most often it's either the (American) football coach or the men's basketball coach; some of these are paid even more than the President of the US. (Which gives you an idea of how warped priorities are in the US, since the legislature can in principle refuse to appropriate money for such salaries.) In some states it's a university president, or dean of the medical or law school. Private universities also tend to pay their presidents and revenue-sport coaches very well.

At Scandinavian universities, people who didn’t get their jobs in fair competition are often handing out jobs to their buddies without any fair competition.

The Inescapable Vagueness of Academic Hiring

drorzel — Thu, 04 May 2017 07:16:24 +0000

The Inescapable Vagueness of Academic Hiring

Inside Higher Ed ran a piece yesterday from a Ph.D. student pleading for more useful data about job searching:

What we need are professional studies, not just anecdotal advice columns, about how hiring committees separate the frogs from the tadpoles. What was the average publication count of tenure-track hires by discipline? How did two Ph.D. graduates with the same references (a controlled variable) fare on the job market, and why? What percentage of tenure-track hires began with national conference interviews? These are testable unknowns, not divine mysteries.

From the age-old Jobtracks project (ended in 2001, archived here) to those 21st-century methods such as the American Historical Association’s jobs-to-Ph.D.s ratio report, many studies have examined the employment trajectory of Ph.D. students. Few, however, have cross-referenced the arc of tenure-track success with the qualifications of the students on the market. Instead, only two types of applicant data are typically deemed significant enough to gather in these and other job reports: (1) the prestige and affluence of their alma mater, and (2) their age, race or gender.

Thank you so much for the detailed information about all the things in my application that I can’t improve.

I have a lot of sympathy for this. As a profession, academia is awful about even collecting data on critical topics, let alone sharing it with people who might make use of it. This can be maddening when it comes time to apply for jobs, or to seek tenure or promotion. The criteria for hiring and promotion seem to be shrouded in mystery, and you can never seem to get a straight answer to simple questions.

Some of this is, like every irritating thing in modern life, the fault of lawyers. Criteria are vague because giving more specific values opens the door to lawsuits from people who meet one stated criterion, but are manifestly unsuitable for some other reason-- someone who has more publications than the stated threshold, say, but 75% of those are in vanity journals. If you try to get a little bit specific, you quickly find yourself having to plug stupid loopholes, with wildly multiplying criteria, until you need a degree in contract law to read the job ads.

(And if you don't believe there would be lawsuits over that kind of nonsense, well, I'd like to request political asylum in your world. I could tell you stories about idiotic things that people have threatened to sue over. That is, I could, if it wouldn't be wildly inappropriate for me to do so, so instead I'll just darkly mutter that there are stories to be told...)

The bigger problem, though, is that most of the stats that could readily be reported are noisy garbage, subject to wild misinterpretation. As nicely demonstrated by the paragraphs where the author tries to highlight real data of the type he'd like to see:

However, secondary data analysis of other studies that have been generously made public can reveal clues that the job reports don’t care to. For example, a 2016 study that measured the publications and impact of STEM Ph.D. students happened to simultaneously measure the average number of their publications while in grad school, cross-referenced to their later hireability. The average number of publications for each future tenure-track hire was 0.5, a surprisingly low number that would likely be higher in humanities disciplines.

Another study from 2014 measured similar survey data with similar results, but it added that publishing rates among graduate students have been steadily increasing over time, while hiring rates have been steadily decreasing. That study placed the average number of publications around 0.8. It is clear that standards are shifting, but how much? And how do those standards vary by field?

Those numbers both registered as wildly implausible to me, so I looked up the papers, and they're both misrepresented here. The first study, showing half a publication per tenure-track hire is restricted to Portugal, which the authors describe as "a developing higher education system" that is "still characterized by poorly qualified academics-- only 68% of academics in public universities hold a Ph.D." The number from the second study is a flat-out misquote-- the 0.8 publications per student number is for publications by students who did not publish with their advisor as a co-author. Those who did co-author papers with their advisor, as is common practice in STEM fields, had 3.99 articles pre-Ph.D.; averaging them all together you get 1.88 publications before the doctorate for all the students considered in the paper, more than twice the figure quoted.

Even if you crunch the numbers correctly, though, these statistics are not all that meaningful, because acceptable publication rates vary wildly between subfields, even within a single discipline. I had a total of 5 publications before I finished my Ph.D. (though one of those was a theory paper to which my only contribution was delivering a floppy disk full of experimental data to the theorists upstairs), which is pretty respectable for an experimentalist in my field. I came into an established lab, though, and just picked up on an experiment that was already working. I know of grad students who were involved in lab construction projects who ended up with only one or two publications, but who were well-regarded scientists in the field because of the scale of the work they did building up an experiment that would go on to churn out lots of papers. In a very different field, on the other hand, a former student who went into theory had eight papers pre-Ph.D., which is more in line with expectations in his field.

And the noisiness of the data only gets worse. People working in fields like nuclear and particle physics, where papers are published by large collaborations, can end up with their names on dozens of papers, because everybody in the collaboration gets listed on every paper from that collaboration. (I don't think grad students are generally included as full members in this sense, though junior faculty often are.) You can, of course, attempt to divide things up by subfield, but as always, the more finely you subdivide the pool, the less reliable the data gets, from simple statistics.

I'm not going to say there aren't hiring committees doing simple paper-counting as an early weed-out step, but it's not remotely a good metric for making final decisions.

In the end, the question comes back to a point raised earlier in the piece, namely what factors the candidate can control. Hireability is not a matter of hitting some threshold number of publications, it's about making the most of the opportunities available to you, and being able to make a persuasive case that you have done so, and will be able to do so in the future, as a faculty member. What counts as "enough" publications to get a degree or go on the job market isn't a bright-line rule, it's a judgement call, and making a reasonable decision about when you have "enough" is part of the transition from student to scholar.

The factors a job applicant can control are making that central decision-- what constitutes "enough," in consultation with the advisor(s)-- and making the case that the decision was a good one. When we're doing a search and trying to separate "frogs from tadpoles," we're not just counting papers, we're reading statements, and (speaking for myself) a clear and convincing research statement putting past work in context and showing how it carries through to future work carries a lot more weight than an extra paper or two on the CV.

That is, I realize, maddeningly vague. I've been through the process, and been maddened by it. But as comforting as it might be to have more stats about the process, that comfort would be an illusion, because most of the readily available measures are junk.

(And, of course, everything comes back to the central problem, namely the vast gulf between the number of qualified candidates and the number of available jobs...)

drorzel Thu, 05/04/2017 - 03:16

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Priority Expectations and Student-Faculty Conflict

drorzel — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 07:56:44 +0000

Priority Expectations and Student-Faculty Conflict

There was a kerfuffle in academic social media a bit earlier this week, kicked off by an anonymous Twitter feed dedicated to complaints about students (which I won't link to, as it's one of those stunt feeds that's mostly an exercise in maximizing clicks by maximizing dickishness). This triggered a bunch of sweeping declarations about the surpassing awfulness of all faculty who have ever thought poorly of a student (which I'm also not going to link, because they were mostly on Twitter and are now even more annoying to find than they were to read). It was a great week for muttered paraphrases of Mercutio's death speech, in other words.

These opposite extremes are sort of interesting, though, in that they both spring from the exact same core problem, namely that each side of the faculty-student relationship thinks they should be the other's top priority, and are annoyed when they're not.

Faculty complaints about students missing class, not handing in work, etc. in the end trace back to the feeling that class work-- and specifically their class work-- ought to be the single highest priority for students in that class. I realized this a few years back, when I had a horrible experience with a couple of pre-med physics classes, who were infuriating even by the standards of pre-med physics classes. What I found most maddening about this particular group was that they didn't even try to hide the fact that my class was their lowest priority. It wasn't just the constant requests that I adjust my due dates to work around the organic chemistry class running the same term-- those are a constant with the pre-med crowd. This particular group would come to a physics recitation section in a first-floor classroom that ended ten minutes before my lab on the third floor, then leave the building to go get coffee in the campus center, and roll into lab 10-15 minutes late. The colleague who taught the recitation section was usually back in his office down the hall well before the students in the class he'd just finished teaching would stroll by on their way to lab.

(I eventually lost my temper with them, and started locking the door at the beginning of the period, only letting them in after I finished the pre-lab lecture to the students who cared enough to arrive on time. This... did not end well.)

On the student side, a lot of the complaints about faculty practices and policies boil down to the same thing in reverse-- the idea that faculty need to have the needs and wants of individual students in their class as their absolute top priority. One of the most common complaints about faculty is that they're "not available enough" and "too slow returning graded work," both of which implicitly assume that the faculty don't have anything else to do that's more important than grading papers and waiting for student questions. That's not remotely accurate, even if we restrict the scope of activities to professional duties alone, leaving out personal and family concerns. There are research papers to be written or re-written, grant proposals with hard deadlines, committee and department service tasks, and lots of other things that take faculty away from working on that specific class.

And a lot of things that seem like perfectly reasonable requests from an individual student perspective have very real costs for faculty, and for other students in the class. I'm pretty flexible about due dates and the like, but I can't wait on one student's homework indefinitely, no matter how good their reason for needing extra time, because it harms the other students in the class. My general practice is to make solutions available to the class as a study aid, and I can't do that until I have all the homework that's going to be graded.

Are there faculty whose draconian policies are an unfair imposition on students? I think so, yes. Are there students who feel entitled to excessive deference? Absolutely. (The go-get-coffee-and-come-to-lab-late thing was beyond the pale...) For the most part, though, everybody has priorities they're trying to balance, and we're all doing the best we can.

It's important for both faculty and students to recognize that members of the other group are people trying to balance multiple competing priorities as best they can. Students who really like the class and want to do well can end up having to give other courses, other activities, or their personal well-being a higher priority for part (even most) of the term. And faculty who want to do right by their students can nevertheless have any number of valid reasons for drawing a line and saying "I can do this much, and no more."

We all want our thing to be everybody else's top priority, that's just human nature. It's not always going to work out that way, though, and recognizing that is the key to avoiding a lot of needless conflict.

drorzel Thu, 03/30/2017 - 03:56

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This particular group would come to a physics recitation section in a first-floor classroom that ended ten minutes before my lab on the third floor, then leave the building to go get coffee in the campus center, and roll into lab 10-15 minutes late.

I can understand your frustration with this group. A little bit of advance planning, e.g., getting their coffee before they came to the physics recitation, would likely have avoided that problem. I say "likely" because there may have been some in that group who had another class on the same side of the quad immediately before the physics recitation. In that case the logistics get a little harder. But even in such cases, Thermos bottles exist and would alleviate the problem.

In the unlikely event that a student has a good reason for such behavior, she can discuss it with the appropriate dean, and if no better solution is available , said dean can take you aside and explain what's going on. That's how I was expected to deal with it in my student days. But in those days undergraduate students were assumed to be fully adult--helicopter parenting wasn't a thing for kids in our generation. Would one of today's students in this situation make the effort, or would she assume that it would be taken care of?

Can you comment on the new LHC data released last week? See https://tienzengong.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/nowhere-to-run1.pdf

I am lead to believe that is the result of three generations inadvertently teaching their darling offspring that the world revolves around them.
In a Philosophy 101 class I was exposed to the idea that the student should not be too comfortable lest they begin to believe that they need not work as hard to get through the material. On the other hand, there seems to be a desire to get through a course and degree in order to get to work and start on that almighty career path.

"CERN Invented the Web" Isn't an Argument for Anything

drorzel — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 09:58:57 +0000

"CERN Invented the Web" Isn't an Argument for Anything

I mentioned in passing in the Forbes post about science funding that I'm thoroughly sick of hearing about how the World Wide Web was invented at CERN. I got into an argument about this a while back on Twitter, too, but had to go do something else and couldn't go into much detail. It's probably worth explaining at greater-than-Twitter length, though, and a little too inside-baseball for Forbes, so I'll write something about it here.

At its core, the "CERN invented WWW" argument is a "Basic research pays off in unexpected ways" argument, and in that sense, it's fine. The problem is, it's not anything more than that-- its fine as an argument for funding basic research as a general matter, but it's not an argument for anything in particular.

What bugs me is now when it's used as a general "Basic research is good" argument, but that it's used as a catch-all argument for giving particle physicists whatever they want for whatever they decide they want to do next. It's used to steamroll past a number of other, perfectly valid, arguments about funding priorities within the general area of basic physics research, and that gets really tiresome.

Inventing WWW is great, but it's not an argument for particle physics in particular, precisely because it was a weird spin-off that nobody expected, or knew what to do with. In fact, you can argue that much of the impact of the Web was enabled precisely because CERN didn't really understand it, and Time Berners-Lee just went and did it, and gave the whole thing away. You can easily imagine a different arrangement where Web-like network technologies were developed by people who better understood the implications, and operated in a more proprietary way from the start.

As an argument for funding particle physics in particular, though, the argument undermines itself precisely due to the chance nature of the discovery. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and the fact that CERN stumbled into a transformative discovery once doesn't mean you can expect anything remotely similar to happen again.

The success of the Web is all too often invoked as a way around a very different funding argument, though, where it doesn't really apply, which is an argument about the relative importance of Big Science. That is, a side spin-off like the Web is a great argument for funding basic science in general, but it doesn't say anything about the relative merits of spending a billion dollars on building a next-generation particle collider, as opposed to funding a thousand million-dollar grants for smaller projects in less abstract areas of physics.

There are arguments that go both ways on that, and none of them have anything to do with the Web. On the Big Science side, you can argue that working at an extremely large scale necessarily involves pushing the limits of engineering and networking and working in those big limits might offer greater opportunities for discovery. On the small-science side, you can argue that a greater diversity of projects and researchers offers more chances for the unexpected to happen compared to the same investment in a single enormous project.

I'm not sure what the right answer to that question is-- given my background, I'm naturally inclined toward the "lots of small projects (in subfields like the one I work in)" model, but I can see some merit to the arguments about working at scale. I think it is a legitimate question, though, one that needs to be considered seriously, and not one that can be headed off by using WWW as a Get Funding Forever trump card for particle physics.

drorzel Fri, 03/24/2017 - 05:58

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What Tim Berners-Lee did was invent HTTP, which went on to become the standard for what we call the World Wide Web. But there were competing protocols in the early 1990s: gopher and archie, and even FTP (an even older protocol which is still used today in specific situations). It was hardly inevitable that HTTP would become the standard.

The main thing about HTTP was that it was intended to be independent of client hardware and software. Some scientists in those days used VAX machines, and others used Unix boxes. Some even used MS-DOS (early versions of Windows were only recently available at the time and did not achieve significant market penetration until a few years later). HTTP didn't care what you had on your end, as long as you could connect to the server. Which made it a good solution for a problem experimental particle physicists had at the time: how to share their data with their collaborators.

So yes, "CERN invented the Web" is a valid argument for funding science in general, but it is not a valid argument for being more specific about what science is to be funded.

Wasn't the Internet itself a US Government-funded DARPA project? CERN only created the WWW as an easy way to connect and navigate it.

We could equally argue that GPS is a reason to fund differential geometry (no differential geometry => no general relativity => GPS doesn't work) and algebraic geometry (no algebraic geometry => no arithmetic of elliptic curves => what do you think internet security protocols are based on?). In general, I'd say what it means is fund *all* basic research, because you don't know which part of it will be applicable (and when).

Chad, your post is disappointing. It's a straw-man and it's parochial and leaves an inaccurate impression about my field. While I cannot speak for every single one of my particle physics (and yes, I work at CERN) colleagues, as a former chair of my department, former chair of the DPF, former chair of the Fermilab Users Executive Committee, former co-convener of the Energy Frontier working group for the (sort of decadal) "snowmass study" about the future physics in particle physics, and former chair of the US ATLAS Institutional board I have many times been called on to justify basic research in general and particle physics in particular.

I've never used the WWW as a reason to fund particle physics in the spirit that you suggest and certainly never seen anyone do so. "Steamroll" is just not fair, nor is the implication that particle physics gets what it wants because it "invented" the WWW. Of course it didn't. The infrastructure was in place in the US exactly as KAL notes, as a DARPA project and a matter of national preparedness in the cold war. And, as Eric points out, HTTP was Berners-Lee's contribution. That wasn't entirely trivial and it did break conceptual ground about how the large group communications problems that LEP experiments were facing might be facilitated.

We have often pointed at the WWW as an example of how problems get solved in science...maybe even problems that weren't necessarily recognized as problems at all. But we always do so in the broader context of increased funding for all of basic research. In fact, the GPS example from Barbara is perfect. Who would have thought that GR would be a practical need?

The best spinoff argument for particle physics (It's somewhat controversial as to whether "spinoff" should ever be used as an argument. I think it's fair.) is accelerator physics which enjoys the position of having two feet planted firmly in both the basic research landscape as well as an increasingly vibrant applied landscape. We don't do accelerator-based research anywhere in the world without them.

Particle physics doesn't get everything it wants. I don't know a single research group in the US that has not seen significant cuts in university research grants over at least the last 3 cycles. So again, you leave an inaccurate implication.

The "we'll do better with your money than you will" argument (again "steamroll" sticks in my craw) is not a winner for anyone. We've always argued on behalf of my physics - and yours - and everyone's basic research, especially at universities and I wish you'd do the same. I'm glad this wasn't in Forbes, frankly...which was a good article, apart from the short swipe at particle physics.

I enjoy your books, but this post, as I say, disappointed me a lot.

I'm sorry to disappoint (but then, I'll be happy to refund you the full cost of the post...), and glad to hear you don't use that argument in that way. If you've never heard it used as such, though, we're clearly not talking to the same set of people.

I've heard the WWW invoked innumerable times when the question of whether particle physics is a good investment relative to other areas of science. I've even had someone say to me "Return on investment? What, the Web isn't good enough for you?" (or words very close to those).

I agree that there's a good case to be made, particularly in the area of accelerator physics, that development of a next generation machine might offer good opportunities for technological advancements that will have impact well outside the fundamental physics community. I'd like to see that argument made more frequently, particularly in public outreach contexts. It's far more common, in my experience, for discussion of particle-physics spinoffs to begin and end with the Web, though, and I think that's a shame.

I find the accelerator argument to be totally bogus, because accelerators and accelerator-based treatments came out of nuclear physics back when the highest energy physics used cosmic rays to do experiments in balloons or on mountain tops rather than accelerators in a laboratory.

Eric, @ #1,misses the important detail that ftp offered most of what you need to share data. It wasn't neat and tidy if you didn't have a decent sense of how to put together directory tree, but it enabled the easy movement of data and was widely used for that purpose. It didn't have to be replaced if the users were all techno-geeks.

You all seem to miss the importance of Hypercard (a vast improvement over a directory tree and Readme files) to the idea of hypertext. That came out of Apple, not government research, but it was signficant that Apple machines were widely used on the non-computing side of physics research. HTTP was a very clever invention of a way to make the Hypercard idea work independently of hardware and o/s platforms. Maybe it wasn't inevitable, but I know people who argued ad nauseum that people with messy file systems to manage should use it, only to be met with "but I use a VAX", and never went further than to mutter under their breath. .