Men are from Pluto

A colleague and I were talking about this and that recently and he said that at some point he needs to find a new research topic, as the one that he has been working on (very successfully, and in fact sort-of pioneered) is getting very crowded. It's not as much fun (says him) to be in a crowd instead of way out ahead.

So then he said that it was difficult to start working on a very-different topic because it can be difficult to get funding if you lack a track-record and expertise in that new thing. True enough. So I said, "Collaborate" (unsaid but well known: That's what I do).

He said, "No, you can't project authority if you collaborate."

Discuss.

Context: We are both full professors and therefore getting adequate credit for our work is not a career life-or-death issue as it is for early-career scientists. For the early-careerers, this can be important (depending on your particular context). Collaboration can still be a significant research component -- enjoyable and rewarding in many cases* -- as long as you also stand out from the crowd in some way for your ideas and expertise.

But other than that, who cares about projecting authority? OK, some people do. My colleague clearly does, and he is very good at it (projecting authority). I don't really care. Well, I do a bit (I don't like being overlooked), but I don't think collaborating has lessened my "authority". If anything, it has increased it.

I reject as a general philosophy the idea that collaborating de-authoritizes you (I just made that word up), although if that's what floats your boat, go ahead and enjoy your authority (alone).



* if your colleagues are not jerks, and if they don't hold up manuscripts and proposals.

Research Triangle

Over the years, various colleagues have explained to me their personal beliefs about what they consider the optimal number of PIs involved in research projects, not for any particular research project, but just in general. The proposed optimal number of collaborators is most typically 1 or 2, although some people make a case for higher numbers.

Note that these hypotheses refer to general situations, not necessarily to any particular individual or project. This is mostly a "thought exercise"; fodder for musing and discussion. In real life, of course, the nature of the project, the culture of the discipline, the amount and type of funding available, the type of institution, and the personalities and career stages of the people involved are important in determining the Optimal Number of Collaborators (ONC). Some people prefer to work alone, so for them, the ONC =  0. In my own case, the ONC is a very stable 1-2, but I am happy to work in larger groups for some projects.

I say "mostly" a thought exercise instead of entirely, because I know of some cases in which the organizational structure of a research unit (and even the design of research space) has been planned based on a hypothesis about the ONC.

The theoretical limit of certain types of grants can also affect this. For example, with most NSF grants (at least in my field), it's possible to have 2-3 collaborators, but more than that would blow the budget up beyond a reasonable (fundable) limit.

Eveb so, is there a general ONC that applies in many cases, considering mostly human factors such as how many people are likely to get along well and have good, productive discussions and overall collegial relationships? That is, can we say, without being too far from unrealistic, "The most productive and collegial collaborations involve n people"? Does anyone want to make a case, for yourself or for the wider world of researchers, for:

ONC = 1: collaboration with one other person, perhaps even the same person on many different projects over the course of a career (= research line, or dyad?);

ONC = 2: collaboration with two other people (= research triangle);

ONC = 3: collaboration with three other people (= research quadrilateral);

.. and so on, with various polygons describing higher ONCs.

And does anyone want to generalize about ONC > 3? Do these collaborations tend to be more/less productive than smaller groups owing to their larger size (the bigger the group, the more research results), or does the increased chance of personality clashes, miscommunication etc. make (some of) them more unwieldy than the lean, mean research machines of smaller teams?

I am veering back and forth between the general and the personal here because there are two different levels of questions I am posing:

(1) Do you think that in general the ONC concept is relevant to the World of Research? (and if so, what is the ONC?); and

(2) What is your personal ONC for most projects (or does this number vary a lot?), and do these collaborators tend to be the same ones for project after project, or do you play the field with collaborators and work with many different people (even if your ONC doesn't change)?

Works Not Well With Others

In Scientopia, a discussion of working with others vs. being immersed in your own work, as a student, research scientist, or professor.

ColleaguePoetry

Some people tend to send epic emails (I am guilty of this), and some people send characteristic emails that might as well be text messages, even if they type the message using a full-sized keyboard. At the moment, I am most entertained by the terse text-emails.

I have seen some of these emails recently, both from people who only send this type of email. These messages read almost like a strange form of poetry, although they don't seem to follow any obvious rules about number of lines or syllables.

I can't include the exact emails of course, but I can create my own versions that try to capture their essence. I hope that some readers will consider this a creative writing challenge and provide their own versions of terse academic-emails one might receive from colleagues (or students!).

I call this first email-poem: "I want to send you random out-of-context information about myself"

Check out this link.
It mentions me.
This topic is important.

And this one, which is a bit longer, is entitled: "I want you do something for me (guess what it is)"

We need to write another proposal.
It should be mostly [method].
We need to do this soon.
Someone else will do it if we don't.
We are the best ones to do it.
This is urgent.
The program director hates me.


Isn't that beautiful, in a way?

Academic Parasite

When I wrote the title above, I thought to myself "Wait, I must have used that title before." In fact, a quick search of the archives shows that I have done exactly two (2) posts that contain the word parasite, but never have I used this title even though one of the two (2) previous posts uses the term in the same context I will use it today.

So that's pretty exciting (for me), but what does it mean? That's what I am going to discuss today: what does it mean to be an academic Parasite?

I can remember hearing this term twice: once a very long time ago, and once this week. There may well have been others, but they have not been stored in my long-term memory compartments.

The first time I heard it, I was a grad student and the speaker was an old and supposedly distinguished professor who hated most people, so it wasn't a surprise to hear him insult someone. Typically, that someone was me, but in this case, that someone was a perky-but-clueless visiting graduate student who had come to prostrate himself before The Great Man and glean little bits of wisdom. They met in the GM's office for an hour or so, and then the grad student came to my office to chat.

He said "We had a really great discussion!" (unlikely: The GM did not "discuss"; he lectured)

And "I think he really likes me!" Well, he did have a few acolytes, all male, who worshiped him, named their children after him etc., but I wasn't sure... and then:

The phone rang. It was The GM, wanting to talk to me. "Is THAT PARASITE still there?" he screamed into the phone. (etc.)

The second time, in a conversation this week, a professor who is a much nicer person than The GM asked me if I had ever worked with a particular individual. I said, without explanation "I used to, but not for quite a long time now." He laughed and said "Good! He's a PARASITE!" He's not wrong.. there are specific reasons I no longer work with that person.

But what does it mean?Are there different types of Academic Parasites? Do we need to classify them?

Of the two instances mentioned here, the first one was just a student asking a professor for advice, information, anything that would help him (the student) with his dissertation research. The GM's response was clearly extreme (it was a student asking for help!).

The second instance involves interactions among professors who are collaborators. In some cases, this distinction of student-professor vs. professor-professor interaction is important; in others, not. (<-- important note: That link is to a 2006 post, when things were different.)

I will propose a simple definition, for starters:

Someone who takes and uses the research ideas and/or results of others to advance their own research/career but doesn't give back, share, or cite appropriately = parasite.

But how do we know when someone has crossed a line between a somewhat unequal collaborative situation (this is not unusual) and a parasitic arrangement? Is a parasite by definition engaged in unethical behavior? That is, does the "taking" always = "stealing" (ideas, results)?

I think that if the taking/stealing involves people who are not collaborators, and the taking/stealing involves information from proposals or other unpublished work, the person in question is worse than a parasite, and there are probably more appropriate words. If, however, someone takes ideas from published work and then repackages them as their own (because they don't have any of their own), they are a weasly parasite.

If someone takes ideas and data from collaborators, then it is a bit more ambiguous. If someone is content to do (essentially) nothing but have their name put on papers as co-author, they are a passive parasite. If, however, they do (essentially) nothing and put their name on papers (but not yours or your students), then they are a more virulent and dastardly variety: the evil parasite.

This is not a very pleasant topic, but, in the course of a career, we encounter all kinds of people. Fortunately for me, the parasites have been few and far between, so my classification scheme (and/or my imagination) is rather limited. 

Opposites

A colleague of mine was recently asked to help organize part of the program of a conference, and was asked to recruit someone to work with him on this. This colleague was specifically asked to find their "opposite".

THIS INTRIGUED ME.

It intrigued me for several reasons, not the least of which were the opportunities for making jokes like "So you're supposed to find someone who is very organized and answers their e-mail but is not very smart?". And so on.

Let's consider what the relevant variables are in finding one's opposite. In this case, owing to the specialized nature of the conference, field of expertise is not a major variable, although there is room for considering different researchers who use different primary research methods.

Gender? Should one program organizer be male and the other female? I know this is not actually as simple as it may seem, but for a start, should there be one of each?

Age? The colleague in question is middle-aged, so this leads to the options of finding someone who is very young or very old. Or is your opposite definitely a much younger person because, after a certain career stage (tenure), we are all old?

Geography? Is your opposite someone from a different continent (or at the very least, a different country)? This raises the question of whether one's home institution's location is the relevant variable or one's country of origin, or both.

Primary Research Method/Subfield? If you are a theoretician, should you get a lab person as your opposite co-organizer? And so on?

What else? If you were asked to find your "opposite" (in a professional context, but within your general research field), what would you consider?

Responses need not be entirely serious.

But, if you do consider only serious variables and come up with a list of people who fit the description of your opposite, how many possibilities are there? Many? A few? None?

Token Help?

Today in Scientopia, I discuss a comment on yesterday's FSP post about tokenism: What can male colleagues do in situations like the one I described?

It's 10 PM. Do You Know Where Your Colleagues Are?

Presumably, if you are a professor in a small department, you know where your colleagues live. If you are in a medium-sized department (more than 15ish but less than 40ish faculty), you may or may not know. So my question, which is primarily aimed at professors in medium-sized departments, is:

Do you know where all of your colleagues live?

You don't need to have been to their homes or even know their exact street or color of their house. You can answer 'yes' if you know the eighborhood of residence of each of your colleagues, or at least a fairly specific geographic area in which they live.

I am specifying medium-sized departments because I am assuming that there are department sizes at which the question isn't even sort of interesting, either because there are so few faculty or so many.

I am in a meidum-sized department, and realized today that I sort of know where all my colleagues live, with one exception.

I think I acquired a lot of this knowledge early in my career in my present department, as that is the time when new colleagues are invited to dinner, even if such invitations become inconceivable later when you and some of your colleagues develop major differences of opinion about certain departmental issues and would therefore never voluntarily invite each other to visit.

And of course faculty move, but such moves are a common topic of inter-faculty conversation, so it's not difficult to keep track of the real estate adventures of colleagues.

Some days I am in the mood for a poll; some days I prefer to leave questions more open. Today is an open-question-mood kind of day, and I am wondering how well other faculty know the residential details of their colleagues in a non-small but non-huge department.

And, depending on the answer, what do you think this says about the level of collegiality in your department? Is it an indicator of collegiality (if you know where your colleagues live) or a lack thereof (if you don't)? Or is it unrelated to collegiality; e.g., merely an indicator of the level of obsession with real estate in particular regions of the country?

I don't want to exclude too many readers from this query, though, so if you are in a huge department, you could answer anyway, either for the entire department or based on a sub-section of the department, and if you are a grad student or postdoc, you could comment on whether you know where your adviser/supervisor lives (and for students, where your committee members live). Or, if you are in a small department and don't know where your colleagues live, feel free to contradict the presumption I made at the beginning of this post.

The Long Haul

Some research projects take a long time to get off the ground, if they ever even make it, and it can be difficult to keep everyone in a research group focused and motivated during the long (2-3+ year) time required to determine if some projects will be funded.

One project with which I am involved is so far doing OK in the protracted process required for this type of large project, but it is too early to tell if it will ever be funded. We survived a pre-proposal and one round of proposal review, and are gearing up for another round in the coming year. These types of large proposals are never funded the first year, so I expected this to be a long and arduous process.

The research group is quite large and multi/inter-disciplinary, and is also very international. At the outset, I told everyone in the group that the proposal would not be funded the first time, and it would take a minimum of 2 years to get it funded, and of course there is always a (good) change it might never funded.

The US researchers were all familiar with this and accepted the reality of the long march to (uncertain) funding. What I didn't expect, however, was that some of our international colleagues didn't really believe that a rejected proposal would ever be funded.

One colleague who is in the UK system told me that he can only submit a proposal for a particular project once; if the project isn't funded after one round of review, the project is dead. He therefore viewed any proposal not funded the first time as somehow damaged and unlikely to get funding. A few other researchers in other countries were similarly skeptical, and were unsure whether it was worth their time to continue as part of the research team.

I can understand their skepticism. This system is not very efficient and it's hard to see a rejection of a proposal as a step forward, but rejection is commonly part of the funding process. I think that part of the philosophy behind the protracted process, especially for large, multi-interdisciplinary proposals, is to maximize the chances that the research teams will function well and optimize the use of grant money. The proposal with which I am involved has definitely benefited from the various review stages.

At some point, though, the length of time to get (possibly) funded has a negative effect on the timeliness of the research objectives and on the ability of the research team to maintain cohesion. Furthermore, it is difficult to write the project to involve specific postdocs or graduate students when the time frame of the process is so protracted. For these reasons, the long time frame of the review process decreases that chances that the research will be as good as it would have been if funded the first time.

In the meantime, I am trying to keep a large research team together and keep the proposal process alive for a bit longer because I think it will be worth it to try again. Beyond that, however, I'm not sure it will be worth it, even though some groups get funded after 3+ years of effort. In this case, however, I think the research ideas wouldn't be very fresh after that amount of time, and it would be better to try something else.

Of course I am hoping that I won't have to make that decision. At least for me, delusion is essential to the proposal-writing process.

Listen Up

Imagine that you have been making one particular not-very-complicated point for many years in various faculty meetings, individual discussions, memos, and e-mails. This point is about an administrative matter, not something related to your research; say, something involving the undergraduate curriculum (for example).

In recent years, you have made this point many times because your department has been discussing the curriculum a lot. When relevant and necessary, you say something like "Science 201 is an important class because it lays the foundation for every other Science class. It is the only one that involves concepts related to the dynamics of kangaroos, the moons of Saturn, and the novels of Willa Cather."

Most of your colleagues are convinced, but for some reason, the issue keeps coming up again and again: Is Science 201 still an important class, or is it a relic to which some of us are clinging because we hate change? Does this class integrate different aspects of Science? Is it broad or narrow? Is it fundamental?

These are important issues to discuss for any class. It is worthwhile to reexamine the curriculum from time to time and make sure that it meets the needs of the students. You don't mind in general having to justify this course and its continued place in the curriculum, but you do find it frustrating to make the same point again and again because certain people either don't believe you or aren't paying attention.

Furthermore, it isn't actually your own *special class* you are defending, although you have taught the class, so no one should discount your opinion on the grounds that you are just defending turf.

Now imagine that one of the colleagues who has most often brought up the issue of whether Science 201 is important (or not), and who is one of the primary reasons why you have to repeat yourself so often about the importance of this class, stops you in the hall and enthuses about an interesting talk he heard by a brilliant senior scientist at a conference. This brilliant man said that Science 201 is an important class because it is the only one that involves concepts related to the dynamics of kangaroos, the moons of Saturn, and the novels of Willa Cather! Did you know this? Maybe you could incorporate some elements of this idea into the class when you teach it?!

And maybe, if you use some of Brilliant Man's ideas and methods, the course could become as interesting and relevant as your colleague's courses are.

Question:

Does this mean that you have finally won because your colleague seems convinced that the course is relevant and important?

Or have you lost because your colleague, to this day, does not recognize that you have been making this same point to no apparent effect until it was said by a Brilliant Man?

The answer is: both. You may now have less trouble justifying a course that you feel is essential to the undergraduate program, thereby benefiting students (if you are right about the importance of the course), but you are still just a yapping female (in this case) with nothing of significance to say, even about topics with which you have some expertise.

Too bad that Science 201 is likely to be somehow flawed whenever you teach it because how could you do it right when you are not a Brilliant Man?

Of course one must consider the possibility that the Brilliant Man made a more compelling, eloquent case than you were ever capable of doing, but, after careful consideration, you find this explanation insufficient.

And perhaps the most depressing thing of all is that the Colleague Who Doesn't Listen To You is a junior colleague.

Haves and Have Nottts

A reader wonders how tenure-track and tenured faculty can interact in a harmonious way with non-tenure track faculty and others who may be in a precarious or otherwise difficult employment situation.

I suppose the obvious answer is to be as respectful and sympathetic as possible. My experience as a non-tenure track professor was brief and not entirely pleasant, in part because some of my tenured colleagues treated me as a lesser being whose opinions and overall existence were inconsequential to them. Some were at least polite and willing to converse with me; others could not be bothered; yet others were patronizing and rude.

In any collection of people -- academic or not -- there are going to be jerks and non-jerks. Now that I am of the tenured species, I try not to be one of the jerks who assumes that anyone without tenure, or at least a chance at tenure, is somehow inferior rather than just being at a different career stage, having a different career preference, or dealing with employment or life constraints (or bad luck) beyond their control.

Some of my not-on-the-tenure-track (NOTTT) colleagues have skills that my tenured and tenure-track T/TT colleagues and I very much admire. Also, we like them as people. It is not a problem interacting with them in a positive and constructive way. We are on different career tracks, but there is mutual respect between the T/TT faculty and our NOTTT colleagues.

But what if the jerks are the NOTTTs? How much should we empathize with beleaguered adjuncts and others, however underpaid and under-respected, if they are aggressively bitter and resentful, even towards those with no role in their difficult situations? That's more of a challenge, but there's a difference between expressing anger about an unfair situation and creating a hostile work environment.

It is the responsibility of the department chair or other administrators to create a good working environment for all employees of an academic unit. Obviously favoring one group of people over another in such a way as to make the not-valued group unhappy and hostile (as in the case described by the reader who e-mailed me) shows poor leadership.

If you are convinced that the situation could be improved and that the root of the problems is not just the lousy salaries, lack of benefits, and overall stressful working conditions of the NOTTTs (i.e., issues over which the department head may have little control), perhaps there is a mechanism for expressing concern about the hostile work environment. An assistant professor might be reluctant to criticize the department head's leadership skills, but if the problem is pervasive, perhaps a group of senior faculty can try to work out a constructive solution to the problem, if they are aware (or made aware) of it. Maybe there are some basic things that can be done within the department to improve the work environment.

An example: In one department with which I was associated, the T/TT faculty so hated faculty meetings that they didn't even consider inviting their NOTTT colleagues. Who would want to go to a faculty meeting if they didn't have to? The NOTTTs were lucky. But the NOTTT faculty felt excluded, marginalized, and disrespected because they were not explicitly invited to these meetings. Once the department head became aware of this morale issue, he invited the NOTTTs to the meetings and specifically sought their input on particular issues. Some came to the meetings, some didn't. Some came when there was a topic of interest, and the problem was largely solved.

Otherwise, if the situation is not solvable by any means at your disposal as an individual faculty member, all you can do is be respectful, kind, and understanding to your colleagues, tenured or not; try not to let resentful people bother you; seek advice from wise senior colleagues in your department; realize you are lucky to be on the tenure track; and focus on your own career, which is probably stressful enough as it is.

Run With It

Have you ever voluntarily given away a good idea? I just did. I didn't do it out of altruism, although it's OK with me if the recipient of my idea thinks that.

I gave this idea away knowing that the person to whom I mentioned it might take it and run with it without me, but hoping that he would instead provide one little thing I needed to follow through with the idea myself or that he would at least express an interest in collaborating on the research related to testing my idea. In fact, he said "Great idea. I'll work on that and let you know how it turns out."

OK, that's fine. It isn't such an awesome idea that I am emotionally and professionally shattered by having someone else work on it. It just would have been fun. I could have worked on it without this guy, but it would have taken me a long time to get set up to do the research, whereas he, now that he has My Idea, can do the work rather quickly. I am sincerely looking forward to finding out the results, even if they are acquired by someone else.

I should also mention that this person is an assistant professor whose tenure evaluation is starting to loom. If this idea works out, it may help his career in some way. I hope it does.

Nevertheless, this incident started me thinking about what I would have done in a similar situation. The passage of years since my professorial youth has perhaps blurred my memory of what it was like to be an assistant professor, but the feeling of tenure anxiety is a rather visceral one that I don't think I have entirely forgotten.

So, I may be giving myself more credit than I am due, but I think that I would have taken the collaborative approach if given a good idea to run with. I think that I would have asked the giver if they wanted to collaborate, and, if they did, worked out a way to do so.

But everyone is different in terms of their interest and ability to collaborate. Collaborating has been a major feature of my career, and, for whatever reason, perhaps it isn't for the Recipient of My Idea. Maybe that's just how he prefers to work. Maybe he is concerned about getting maximum credit for his research.

What would you do if given a good research idea? (whatever your career stage)

Would you ever give away a good idea?

Paranoia the Destroyer?

Paranoia has been such a great inspiration for Art, including of course memorable song lyrics like these:

Girl, I want you here with me
But I'm really not as cool as I'd like to be
'cause there's a red, under my bed..

Paranoia, the destroyer
Paranoia, the destroyer
-- the Kinks

Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody's coming to get me
Just say you never met me
I'm running underground with the moles
Digging in holes
-- Harvey Danger (original erroneous attribution corrected)

(Feel free to submit your favorite mention of paranoia in a song, poem, or other artistic venue.)

But what of the role of paranoia in our daily lives as scholars and teachers?

A reader wrote to me wondering: Is there a healthy level of paranoia that we should maintain to protect our work and, as advisers, the work of our students and postdocs? Or should we try to trust everyone as much as possible, despite occasional reminders that some people really are out to get us?

I have worked with extremely paranoid people from time to time, and I know that I don't want to be like them. I had one colleague for a while who did not even trust me to know everything relevant to the project we were supposedly working on together. He was very secretive, even lying at times to protect information he thought I would steal from him and .. well, I don't really know what he thought I would do with it, other than use it for the work we were doing together. He had no basis for not trusting me in particular; he was like that with everyone.

He was so afraid that people would steal our work (or something) that he constantly criticized me for telling other people "too much" about our research. We annoyed each other at approximately equal and elevated levels, wrote one paper together, and that was it for me. From time to time he has approached me about new projects to work on together, but I always say no. I have told him that our working styles are not compatible and I am too busy stealing other people's research.

I also have a daily reminder about another incident involving Paranoia. The lock on my office door is a special kind that was installed years ago because a postdoc was breaking into my office, stealing things, and hacking into my computer because s/he wanted to find out what I was doing/saying about him/her. Perhaps I was stealing the postdoc's research? Perhaps I was writing mean things about the postdoc in unsolicited letters to other universities? Alas, the lack of evidence for any of these activities did not assuage the postdoc's paranoia, nor did all the cute photos of my cats.

That situation was extremely unpleasant and could have resulted in my being permanently paranoid about postdocs, but in fact I have found that I do not assume in advance that all postdocs will break into my office. The only reason I haven't gone back to a standard lock is because I just haven't bothered. If I did go back to a standard lock, I am certain that I would not spend my days worrying that psycho postdocs were rummaging around in my office when I wasn't there.

But what about more usual situations, such as when we send papers and proposals out for review, or plan the content of a talk? How paranoid should we be? I know from experience that some people will use ideas from unpublished research and try to scoop the original authors, but, in my experience, these have been rare events. I try to put my absolute best ideas and data into manuscripts, proposals, and talks, preferring instead to communicate these things rather than worry about the potential actions of unethical evil-doers.

I have always done so; it's not just a tenured professor luxury thing. It is my preferred mode of working.

I can do this in part because my research has little to no immediate economic value (i.e., no patents will result), and that surely simplifies things for me. The decisions I make are therefore primarily influenced by (1) my relatively low level of daily paranoia, and (2) my wish to communicate my best research results as soon as I am confident about them.

And, except in the most egregious cases (some described in earlier posts), I let it slide even if I suspect that someone is pursuing research that was "inspired" by one of my proposals, or manuscripts in review, or talks about work in progress. We all get ideas from each other in various ways, and it's not worth spending time having paranoid thoughts about the competition. I'd rather just keep doing my work in the best (yet most efficient) way that I can, and confine my paranoid obsessing to a bit of ranting over a double espresso with a colleague now and then.

Group Write

** Note: I'll be roaming around with limited internet access until sometime Sunday. I will moderate comments when I can. **

Last spring, I wrote about my efforts to get a group of people to work on a collaborative writing project. I tried a wiki for the first attempt, with little success.

Later I tried Google docs, which had some advantages over the wiki, but it was not significantly more effective or efficient than the classic method of sending lots of documents and parts of documents as e-mail attachments. Most text was sent to me, the main organizer of the project, and I compiled everything.

The group seemed to glance occasionally at the collaborative document online, and that was convenient because it reduced the number of drafts that I had to e-mail to everyone. We never reached the point, however, at which most participants were using the online document for their major editing. One or two did some editing of the online document, but most preferred the classic method of sending me comments or attachments by e-mail.

My being the group-write hub was convenient in some ways because I was able to work on the overall document bit by bit and integrate the various parts. In the end, the final document reflected significant contributions from a large number of people, each with a different style/format of writing, but the text ended up being coherent.

I think it is interesting that the online document/collaborative writing method wasn't particularly useful (or, at least, was not well used) for this project, and I still don't really know why my colleagues weren't comfortable editing the online document. I'm not sure what it would take to make an effort this like work well: different people, different project, different organization, different organizer?

I don't know all the participants of this particular project well enough to have any insight into their personal relationship with writing. It's possible that the online collaborative writing didn't work in part because of the organizational structure of the group. Although each group was semi-autonomous and had control over the content of its contribution to the final document, the organization had a specific 'director' (me) who was responsible for making the document coherent.

Perhaps the explanation for the lack of interest in editing the online document is the simple fact that it was easiest for everyone to send things to me, knowing that I would put all the pieces together.

Someday I would like to work on a truly interactive collaborative document. Perhaps the project would need to be shorter and simpler than the one I most recently worked on, so that each time a contributor accessed the document, it wasn't a monstrous task to digest all the recent edits and start in with new ones. And perhaps the project would have to involve an organizational structure in which everyone had an approximately equal role and responsibility for the final product (and/or no alternative but to work on the online document).

Pub Pubs

When I was a graduate student, I wrote a few papers that only involved other graduate students; no faculty were involved in these papers, and therefore only students were authors and co-authors. We came up with the research ideas by talking with each other, did the work, wrote the manuscripts, revised them, and eventually saw them published.

Our various advisers were pleased that we did so, and some of us benefited from these adviserless publications in our job searches. In fact, one of my co-authors was specifically told by a professor at another university that these publications sans professors were impressive because they clearly demonstrated independence and initiative. And I was told during one job interview that these and other papers without my adviser showed that I had my own ideas.

In some fields and in some sub-disciplines, adviserless papers may be impossible or at least extremely rare. They are not so common in my field, actually, but my fellow grads and I were fortunate to have advisers who liked the fact that we pursued and published our own work. I was never supported by a grant from my adviser anyway, and I came up with my own idea for a PhD project, so I was rather unconstrained in terms of what I worked on.

At the time, I didn't think about whether these adviserless papers were unusual. Whether or not they were at the time, I think they are (even?) more rare now. I discussed this recently with one of these collaborators with whom I wrote a paper when we were both grad students. He thought it might be more rare today, and wondered why it might be more rare, if it even is. Our two main hypotheses are:

1. Science, even at the level of graduate research, has become more interdisciplinary and involves larger groups. Our grad collaboration groups were somewhat interdisciplinary (i.e., we all had different advisers), but not extremely so (i.e., we were working in related fields). Perhaps it is much less likely that a group of grad students can reasonably organize and conduct research as it is done today.

or:

2. The culture of graduate programs has changed. Just comparing grad programs with which my colleague and I are most familiar today with our old grad department, it is clear that there is a lot more active advising today. By active advising, I mean that many advisers are more closely involved in all stages of the research and therefore likely to have contributed ideas, writing, maybe even data (!) to a paper, and therefore will be a co-author. In my old grad department, it was a rather extreme example of sink-or-swim, live-or-die. We were pretty much just set loose, and those who survived were very independent (or learned to be). It was not a great system, but perhaps one outcome was that we produced some original work that did not involve our advisers.

Do I really have to say that I am not basing a major analysis of academic cultural trends on these anecdotes. Experience shows that I need to make this point, or some readers will be shocked shocked shocked at my unscientific musings. But that is merely what they are: musings.

And lest anyone think that we did these adviserless projects because we had no lives outside graduate school and therefore never left our labs and computers and had lots of time: that was only true for some of us. Others in these grad collaborations had families, hobbies, and other outside interests. My first grad collaboration was with an outstandingly smart, kind, and thoughtful older grad student who was married, worked 8-5, and was very into sports of all kinds. Although we had little in common other than our mutual scientific interests, we found ourselves frequently hanging out at lunchtime or in the afternoon, talking about Science, and eventually the ideas we kicked around turned into a paper in a high impact journal within our field.

There is one aspect of that anecdote that might be illuminating in terms of the general issue of whether/how grad collaborations occur, and it is related to the topic of (undergrad) student lounges discussed last week: we grad students had a place to hang out. We had abysmal office space, but there was a central area with a couch and a table and some chairs and a scary refrigerator, and a lot of Science was discussed in that place. There was also a subset of us who regularly went out for coffee and cookies together in the afternoon (in fact, I have published a paper with my most frequent afternoon cookie companion from grad school) or to a local pub (I have published with my pub companions as well, so you I guess you can say that I have pub pubs, and hence the strange title of this post). Because we had these other occasions at which Science was discussed at length, I don't think our grad lounge area was the key factor in nucleating grad collaborations. It was nevertheless a factor.

I would be happy if grad students in my department collaborated with each other and wrote papers. Some do, but it is rare. As an adviser paying a student from a grant, I would want to be aware of such independent student collaborations in case I needed to give any general advice about priorities or time in relation to the grant that was funding them, but overall I think that these grad collaborations should be encouraged. They are difficult things to foster because of course the whole point is that advisers not be involved, but perhaps we advisers who value such experiences can at least be supportive when such collaborations spontaneously generate.

Comparative Loser

Many times I have conversed with a visitor who is much more famous and smarter than I am. We sit in my office and we/I try to find something of mutual interest that we can discuss. I am not a skilled conversationalist, but I can almost always find something to talk about for half an hour.

One of the things I am not tempted to discuss is the disparity in success or fame or IQ or amount of funding of whatever between the visitor and me. What would be the point of that?

It is therefore disconcerting for me when I find myself in the visitor's chair in someone else's office and they start the conversation with a series of self-deprecating statements about how they have not published as much as I have, and how I write better proposals than they do, and how they are basically not as successful as I am. This does not happen often, but it happens from time to time.

I hasten to note that this is not because I am so awesomely famous or well funded. My usual description of myself is "reasonably successful" as a scientist, and I think that is accurate.

I do not think the self-deprecation is a form of false modesty. The self-deprecating person is genuinely ripped up about their lack of productivity. I think these conversations stem more from insecurities than from anything specific about me or my career.

Even so, what I am supposed to say when confronted with these types of statements? I am more than willing to have a conversation about proposal strategies or ideas for new directions in research, or even to have a group wallow about some aspect of Science or Academia that is particularly controversial or nerve-wracking. If the self-deprecating person is a stressed out early career professor, I can go into mentor mode, if that seems to be a useful way to go. Otherwise, I try to steer the conversations to research-related topics that might be of mutual interest, or I ask a lot of questions.

It is possible that some "successful" visitors will want to tell you how amazing they (think they) are, but in the absence of such a conversational foray, here is a gentle request to those scheduled for an individual meeting with a visiting speaker:

Even if you feel that you are orders of magnitude less successful than your visitor in some professional capacity, even if you have the most raging case of impostor syndrome, even if you are in awe of the towering intellect of your distinguished visitor, and even if you can think of nothing more fabulous than being a short, unprepossessing middle-aged female science professor like your visitor, please tuck away these feelings and talk about Science or Students or Something else other than your (relative) lack of success.

Some visitor's egos may need continual care and stoking, but I think you will feel better, and everyone will have a more interesting half hour, if self-deprecation, whatever the reason for it, is not a major feature of the conversation.

Listen

When I was a young professor, I had a brief but transformative experience that still affects my behavior in Faculty Meetings to this day.

I was in a department in which various faculty were having trouble behaving in a respectful way to each other. I got along reasonably well with everyone, perhaps because I had not been there for very long, but I may have been the only one who did.

Even so, I often felt that my opinion did not count as much as that of my senior colleagues. I was new to being a professor, however, and assumed that this was the fate of assistant professors.

Some of my colleagues eventually got to the point where they couldn't even say hello to each other in the hall, so we had a special faculty meeting to discuss ways to be nicer to each other. We talked about the importance of collegiality. We talked about being respectful of our differences of opinion, and we all agreed to try to be nicer to each other.

The department chair said that he strongly believed that each and every faculty member had something valuable to contribute and that he would like each of us to give our opinion on a certain important issue facing the department. We went around the table and each person gave their opinion.

When it was my turn, the chair and another senior faculty member got up and went to pour themselves some coffee. While doing so, they chatted with each other about something else. I wondered if I should wait for them to come back to the table, but another colleague said "Go on, finish what you're saying."

So I did, although the chair and the other colleague clearly had no idea what my opinion was and clearly did not care. They returned in time for the senior colleague sitting next to me to expound on the issue, and gave him their full attention.

Jerks.

What do I do now that I am a senior professor and have been to many many faculty meetings? Do I give each and every person my full attention? Well, no, I do not, but neither do I try to be overt about my attention-straying. I have worked long and hard at appearing to be listening even when I am not giving someone my full attention.

Perhaps this strays perilously close to behaving like my obnoxious former colleagues, but it is a sanity-saving method that I find necessary to employ from time to time in faculty meetings.

I was thinking about this recently during a meeting in which a colleague sitting next to me sighed loudly, shifted in his chair, and rolled his eyes whenever a certain other colleague spoke. I actually felt the same way he did, but I suppressed my sighs, stayed still in my chair, and restrained my eyes from rolling. I did not pay close attention to what the crazy-boring colleague was saying, but I was respectful.

There are certain faculty who, when they start to speak, can safely be tuned out with no danger of losing the overall thread of the discussion. I think that the department chair should develop a polite way to circumvent or shut down their rants. I wish that we as a faculty could find polite ways to make it clear that self-serving pointless rants are not an acceptable way to spend our collective time. I wish that these ranting people would move to a moon of Saturn.

Perhaps my polite passivity in the face of time-wasting speechifying is part of the problem of why faculty meetings are generally useless and annoying. Perhaps, but I do not want to be like my former colleagues who ignored me in a humiliating way in my professorial youth.

Team Players

In my youth I had many of those classic experiences in which someone (typically a teacher) selects two of the most popular and athletic kids and asks them to choose their own teams for some activities. The designated team captains took turns picking team members, although there was never any surprise as to the order of the choices. I was usually selected somewhere in the middle; I wasn't the most awesomely popular kid but I was reasonably well liked.

As a professor, I am responsible for choosing team members for a big project. This project will involve a large number of people from many different countries, and I need to devise an effective working group. I have been working hard to come up with a research team that is as compatible as possible. Do I choose my friends? The most popular scientists? Some new kids?

Thus far, I have encountered two types of obstacles to establishing a harmonious team.

One type involves statements like “I refuse to work with X”, in which X = another person who is already part of the group and is already making important contributions. If someone refuses to play with others, they can’t be on my team.

Another obstacle occurs when someone has political reasons for wanting someone else to be invited to be on the team. An example is when a young colleague who is part of the group requests that a senior professor in the same department be invited because otherwise the senior professor might be angry and could make life difficult for the younger professor. Do we invite bullies to be on the team because otherwise they might beat up one of the team members?

It may not be possible to assemblage a diverse group of people who can all get along and contribute substantially to the group effort, but it should be possible to leave out those who don't get along with others and those who aren't interested in the research. For me, it seems that team-choosing is still a part of life and still involves complex social issues.

The Edge of Insanity

Professors as a group have a reputation for being a bit eccentric. This may be a stereotype or it may be a well deserved description of many professors. Whichever the case, this characterization doesn't help me with something I have been mulling over recently:

How do we know when one colleague's strange behavior is harmless eccentricity or a disturbing sign of a real problem?

As we age, we may get more forgetful, we may develop certain personality traits based on previous environmental conditions that no longer prevail (making us seem erratic or paranoid for no reason), or we may find ourselves ever more removed from the culture and mores of younger generations (and therefore we seem strange, even though we would have been seen as perfectly normal in a previous century).

All that is to be expected, but what if someone's behavior is outside the normal expected range of strangeness for a professor in late middle age or older?

I suppose one indication that someone's strangeness has reached a troubling level would be if the bizarre behavior impacted students. The problem might show up in teaching evaluations, or it might not be decipherable amidst the general vagueness of evaluations. Perhaps as long as a professor is able to do the basic requirements of the job, there is no need to do anything about a colleague's increasing strangeness, other than be concerned for their health.

It's not quite that simple, as possibly-insane colleagues may make disturbing decisions on important committees, may scare visiting faculty and students with strange and aggressive behavior, and may extend the length of faculty meetings owing to incoherent ranting.

Hence my recent mulling.

This is a generalization, and therefore inaccurate, but however fierce professors may be in reviews, exams, or seminars, many of us are reluctant to deal directly with personal issues, perhaps because so many of us are strange.

For example, it is difficult to imagine asking a colleague with whom one does not interact on a personal level or in a professional capacity beyond the daily requirements of being in the same department "Hey, I couldn't help but notice that your behavior in the last few faculty meetings was bizarre even by our quite generous standards for eccentricity. What's with that? Are you OK?"

For some professors, questions of a personal nature, however mild ("So, how are you?"), are very unwelcome and result in a monosyllabic answer.

I have an interest in the issue of increasing strangeness because some of my relatives have been quite strange. If I'm like my grandmother, serious weirdness won't happen until I am ancient and long retired. At the moment, when I am relatively sane (at least for me), my feeling is that I would want someone to tell me if I started to behave more strangely than is usual even for me, as long as this was done in a sensitive way and was motivated by real concern.

Maybe we should take a strangeness test to establish a baseline Strangeness Level against which our behavior can be subsequently compared. I know such things exist for cognitive ability and so on, but I would want a test that was specifically intended for the already-kind-of-eccentric professorial personality. It would have to be able to distinguish benign strangeness* from troubling strangeness in an academic context.

I know from experience with my mother that if someone either doesn't believe or doesn't want to admit they have a problem, it's extraordinarily difficult to get them to seek medical attention. Dealing with similar issues involving colleagues at work is also challenging, even without the emotional issues that accompany family situations. And, despite being Doctors of Philosophy, most of us are not real doctors, are to some extent eccentric relative to the non-academic world, and are clueless about dealing with odd behavior in others.


* Example: Recently I found a headline in The Onion extremely funny and laughed quite a lot while my husband just stared at me, unmoved to laugh himself. When I recovered, my husband said "You're weird". Of course I think he is the strange one for not finding this funny: Victims of cube scheme break even.

Ending It

Most of my collaborations, long-term and short-term, have been very positive experiences. I haven't had any trouble finding interesting and collegial people with complementary research interests. It can be frustrating working with other people who have a different style and pace of working (and writing/editing/communicating), but in general things work out for the best..

.. except when they don't, and then the situation and attempts to extricate yourself from it can be painful.

Last spring I wrote about Working with Jerks, as I believe it is nearly impossible for one to go through an entire career without ever working with someone of the jerkish persuasion. There are many different species of jerks, and some are more odious than others.

If you find yourself working with a difficult and/or unpleasant person and you want to get out of the situation, is there a good way to do it? The short answer is no, if 'good' means 'easy', 'uncomplicated', and/or 'without negative consequences'. These situations are seldom as simple as making a call (or sending an e-mail .. or text message .. or posting something on Facebook) to say "You are a jerk and I am not working with you any more." (even if you leave out the first part)

In some cases, there are ancillary, complicating issues, including personal connections and funding commitments. If there are such issues, you have to think carefully about whether and how to end a working relationship.

What if the jerkish colleague has some mitigating circumstances? For example, what if this person has had some difficulties in his career/personal life, has a 'mood disorder', has some difficulty relating to human beings but is not an evil person, and so on? Do all those what ifs add up to making excuses for someone who should be ostracized or are they sufficient reason to end a dysfunctional and/or unpleasant working relationship?

I know some people who would respond So what? to each of the what ifs above, and others who would take these into account and try to continue working with a difficult colleague. So, let's consider some more what ifs.

What if one of your jerkish collaborators runs a lab that you need access to and there are no other such labs on the planet? Unfortunately, I cannot recommend trying to end such a collaboration.

What if one of your jerkish current or former collaborators becomes an administrator at a major funding agency? If you've collaborated with such an administrator, they have a conflict of interest with you and cannot be involved in the review or decision process of your proposals, but it can make for a tense situation if you don't have a good working relationship with a grants officer. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend trying to end a collaboration with such a person either, though I've tried it.

What if you don't have a tenured or a tenure-track job (yet) and you can't go telling influential jerks to take a hike (yet)? Ditto.

What if the problem person is a dysfunctional student or postdoc and you have a lot invested in them (time, funding) and/or it would be a major problem for you and your research group if you fired them?

Do all these what ifs sum to the conclusion that, more often than not, we have to continue to work with unpleasant people even if we don't want to? Does this help perpetuate the existence and survival of the jerk species in academia?

I hope not, but only once in my career thus far have I successfully done a surgical removal of an extraordinarily jerkish collaborator, and it took many years of putting up with unpleasant behavior by that person before I reached the point of no return. The point of no return for me happened to occur in a charming alley of a major international city and involved my saying to my soon-to-be-ex-colleague, in a rather emphatic way that startled passersby: "You are a psychopath. I am done working with you." [FSP walks away]

It sounds kind of funny now, but at the time I was quite shaken by the experience because I had a lot invested in that collaboration (financially and emotionally), and I was worried about the collateral damage -- i.e. would there be negative consequences for my research group of severing this collaborative relationship? It was clearly the best thing to do, though, and the few negative consequences were worth the aggravation.

A more typical way to end an unwanted collaboration, however, is a more gradual, more diplomatic retreat.

As I get older, I have less patience with unpleasant people and in theory have the luxury of working with whomever I want, but it is never that simple. There is almost always some reason why I could put up with some amount of unpleasantness for the sake of the larger project, or the students, or other colleagues, or someone or something. I could, but do I want to? What level of difficulty is acceptable and what level justifies ending a collaboration despite the consequences?

There's no one answer, of course, in part because it's a moving target, but in general, if the bad outweighs the good, it's time to end the collaboration. Perhaps you can be open with the ex- or soon-to-be-ex-colleague about why you are no longer interested in collaborating with them, or perhaps you can "reevaluate your priorities". And perhaps you can gradually extricate yourself or find some other polite exit strategy that doesn't involve yelling about psychopaths in the middle of a street.