Never Say: No One

It is always with great trepidation that I read an article about Our Failing Universities, even an article written by a professor rather than a journalist out to make a splash, and even an article in a publication that I greatly admire and enjoy reading (such as The New York Review of Books).

In a recent issue of NYRB, there is a review/essay by Anthony Grafton titled "Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?" (not Are They Failing, but Why). The essay mentions, at least briefly, 8 recent books with titles (and subtitles: every single one has a subtitle!) such as:

The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won't Get The College Education You Paid For. I have not read this book, but I hate the title (and the subtitle) for a large number of reasons that I can't explain without seeming professorial in the negative-stereotype kind of way.

OK, I will obliquely mention one reason: Do you have faculty lounges at your university? What goes on in them? Or is "Lounges" a verb here?

Anyway.. here's another one:

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. I am not really sure what it is that matters, but without reading the book (just the review), I probably agree with the author that there are too many high-paid administrators doing who-knows-what other than making the rest of us do time-consuming pointless things. But mostly I want to know: Have the faculty really fallen? What does that even mean? That we have no say in anything anymore? If so, why am I still on all these committees? Can I quit them? And if the faculty have truly fallen, where are we? It makes me want to say: We are here! We are here! We are here! (Seuss, 1954)

I am skipping over a few other books that have exciting words such as Exclusion and Assault in the title, and others that have already been much discussed in the blogosphere, here and elsewhere.

But I don't want to skip this one: Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Again, there is that scary and definitive why. This book is, according to Grafton, "a.. recent polemic against the corruption of the humanities". Alas, that is a topic on which I cannot even pretend to have any insight. Within my very limited socio-professional universe, all the humanities professors I know even reasonably well seem to be quite entranced with the meaning of life, unless they are secretly corrupt, and that is why they all wear so much black. Or perhaps the corrupt ones never leave their offices (or faculty lounges!?) and so I have not met them. Or maybe they are at your university, but not at mine.

In any case, what do we think about statements such as these, from the essay:

Particularly in the natural and social sciences, professors are encouraged to feel that it is legitimate to devote most of their energy to research.

and

The message is clear: no one sees classroom learning as a primary pursuit.

We have all seen statements like this before, and I have discussed them before. But I will ask again: Which professors? Where? Certainly there are research professors -- who typically raise some or all of their money from grants -- but most of the science professors I know are serious about both research and teaching, and see these both as important parts of their jobs. If, however, someone devotes 60% of their time to research and 40% of their time to teaching, the statement is true, but misleading. And that brings us to the second excerpt.

Does no ones see classroom learning as a primary pursuit? Is the emphasis on the word "primary"? If so, then perhaps that statement is also true for many professors and administrators at large universities. Classroom learning is just one of many aspects of a university. Even so, the statement is misleading and is an unfair criticism of universities, administrators, and professors of all sorts.

Classroom teaching is not my primary pursuit, but that doesn't mean it isn't as important as research, including research involving undergraduates. Does it have to be more important for more people for our universities to stop "failing"? My colleagues and I teach, advise, do research, and participate in various service activities in our departments, universities, professional communities, and beyond. We are busy people, doing many different things, most of which contribute to the vitality of the university and many of which directly or indirectly benefit students.

I am not saying that universities are perfect and that there aren't many things to fix, but it is quite rare to see the good and the bad considered in a fair and thoughtful way. Maybe (almost) no one would want to read such a book.

In the end, though, this is why I liked Grafton's essay: because he concludes that these books are not constructive contributions to the large task of figuring out how to fix the problems with US universities. He ends his essay:

..  public discussion and scrutiny would become much more productive if informed writers captured the texture and flavor of the American university .. The novelists discovered this territory long ago. Where are the great journalists? They will find students who manage to do excellent work and many more cases of wasted possibilities, and they might gain some insight into why.

Gentle Woman

At some point in the unspecified past, some colleagues and I were profiled in a University publication. This has happened at various times my academic career; I suspect that most us professors show up at some point in some University propaganda magazine, brochure, newsletter etc.

It is always strange for me to read about myself, but some of these articles are better than others (in my opinion) in capturing what (I think) is important about my research and my work as a professor in general. That's not surprising, but what surprised me recently was the dramatic difference between how I was portrayed and how a colleague in Another Science Department was portrayed.

We are both about the same age, both in physical science departments, and have other similarities in our career paths (hence the juxtaposition of these profiles).

And yet, the profile of me talked about my gentle personality (my soft smile, my quiet way of talking about my research passions), an important childhood experience, and how I came to be a professor of Science. The profile of the other professor mentioned millions in grant $ and buckets of publications. The person who interviewed us (separately) never even asked me about grants or publications.

The other professor, who is male, comes across as dynamic, assertive, and awesome in his funding and publishing. I come across as quiet and pleased to be doing some cool science.

This is not just a complaint about the discrepancy in how an MSP and an FSP were portrayed in these profiles, although it is partly that. This is also a musing about how I could have conducted the interview in a different way.

I was quite passive in the interview -- I answered the questions posed, and was only proactive a few times when I felt the interviewer was spending too much time on topics that weren't very interesting or relevant. But I didn't volunteer anything about my grants and publications or any other "metric" of my academic productivity and success. The interviewer had my CV, and clearly knew a lot about my background and career. My grants and publications are listed on my CV, so she had this information. And yet, these things weren't considered interesting or relevant to write about me, but they were for the MSP.

During my interview, which lasted over an hour, the interviewer talked a lot about herself -- her childhood, her life, her travels, her family, her career. I would say that at least 62.5% of the time was consumed by the interviewer telling me about herself. Perhaps this was her strategy to make our interview more of a conversation instead of a list of boring facts about me, but it got to be a little strange when a brief answer from me kept turning into a longer answer from her about her own experiences, some of which were only remotely related to her original question.

I told some colleagues about this later, and all wondered whether the interviewer did the same thing with the MSP and whether, unlike what I did, he took charge of his interview and basically told her what to write. Perhaps because I didn't do this, the interviewer accurately portrayed me as gentle and passive, but I think it was an incomplete, and therefore somewhat unfair, depiction. I think it should be possible to describe me as a soft-spoken person who nevertheless brings in millions in grant $ and who has swarms of publications.

Gentle women can be very busy and productive scientists, although you might not know it to read about some of us.

Confident Distress

Media interpretations of the recent report on The American Freshman: National Norms 2010 are, perhaps not surprisingly, incoherent. Depending on which headline you read, 1st year students are either experiencing A RECORD LEVEL OF STRESS (The New York Times, among others) or are confident and ambitious (The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Economy Changed Freshmen's Plans but Didn't Shake Their Confidence").

Of course, you don't have to choose which one to believe; I believe them both. Anyone can have confidence in their knowledge and abilities and yet be anxious about various things (the future being only one of many possibilities). You could find similar results whether polling 1st year students or nth year doctoral students.

But that's not what interested me about this report and its media interpretations. I was intrigued by this, as reported in the NYT article:

In addition, Professor Sax has explored the role of the faculty in college students’ emotional health, and found that interactions with faculty members were particularly salient for women. Negative interactions had a greater impact on their mental health.

“Women’s sense of emotional well-being was more closely tied to how they felt the faculty treated them,” she said. “It wasn’t so much the level of contact as whether they felt they were being taken seriously by the professor. If not, it was more detrimental to women than to men.”

She added: “And while men who challenged their professor’s ideas in class had a decline in stress, for women it was associated with a decline in well-being.”

The article ends there, leaving me with quite a few questions. Alas, I have only read the official press release and the report summary, and gazed at the 43-slide presentation, but I did not purchase the report to read in full. The summary materials don't enlighten me more about the topic raised by the excerpt above, so I can only blog-muse about it.

My main question is: What is meant by "challenged their professor's ideas in class"? This sounds like it involves more than just asking a critical question or even pointing out an error. Does it involve more than just disagreeing?

Is being "challenged" by a student in class about ideas more likely to be a humanities or social sciences kind of thing than a science thing? I can think of ways in which students could "challenge" a professor's ideas in a science class -- e.g., if a student's religious beliefs about (against) evolution contradicted what was taught in a biology class -- but it's harder to think of examples for many science classes (the ones I teach, anyway). Even in upper level classes where I can expect students to have a pretty good base of knowledge, students are more likely to ask questions out of confusion or curiosity than to disagree with me (and my ideas) about a Science topic.

According to the vague excerpt above, our response to students is the key to having a positive interaction with a student, male or female. It seems obvious to say that we should all try to be respectful, even when our ideas are being challenged in class, but I suspect there are some gray areas in terms of whether a student would perceive that they are being taken seriously or shot down.

As a professor, I have, of course, been challenged by students about their grades, but rarely about "ideas in class", so I'd be interested to hear about the experiences of readers (professors or students).

Writing about this has dislodged an incident from my memory about when a (non-science) professor forced me to challenge him, causing a temporary decline in my well-being. More on that another time..

Jargonauts

My daughter is involved in a particular extra-curricular activity that has an incredible number of special terms, abbreviations, acronyms, and other words and phrases that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Just like Science! I have learned some of the terms, but there always seem to be more that I don't know. And no, this extra-curricular activity has nothing to do with athletics of any sort, so my ignorance is not related to my lack of interest in sports.

I will never learn all of this new activity-specific language, and that's fine. This is my daughter's activity, and it would actually be quite weird if I started hurling around the relevant acronyms in conversation.

When we were en route to visiting some relatives this summer, I said to my daughter "You know, you're going to get asked about Activity, and you should try as much as possible to avoid jargon and describe it using words that they will understand."

She was silent for a few moments, thinking about this, then said "You're right, but I'm not sure I know what is jargon and what isn't anymore. I should practice."

So we pretended that I was Great Aunt Milly and I asked her about her recent Activity activities, and my daughter started talking about this, trying but failing to avoid jargon. I listed the incomprehensible words she had just used, and she tried again. This time I made an obnoxious beeping sound whenever she jargonized, and then we both started laughing too much to continue for a while.

Later, we tried again, and she did much better, and by the time we were surrounded by Great Aunts and Not-Great Uncles, she did an excellent job of talking about her Activity, and our relatives were able to ask her questions instead of lapsing into stunned silence, which is what some people have done when she's gone into full-jargon mode in other conversations.

It occurred to me that I could use some help de-jargonizing my own descriptions of my work. I can easily give a 101-level description of my research, but in some cases (e.g., elderly family members) that doesn't work very well, probably because even the most science-phobic undergraduate has recently had some science in high school, whereas some of my relatives have not thought about even basic science concepts since Eisenhower was president.

So I started thinking about all the different 'levels' at which we need to talk about our general or specific fields of expertise; in this example, I will use Science:

- Great Aunt Millies: total non-scientists who don't know even the most basic words that we don't really consider jargon because they aren't particularly specialized are incomprehensible in this context.

- Non-scientists/non-students who can handle the basic vocabulary of science, either from K-12 classes or from watching shows on TV (or reading science fiction?) or maybe from some technical experiences related to their job of hobbies.

- Non-science faculty and administrators who read our internal grant proposals, award nominations, or other documents that are supposed to be jargon-free.

- Students in introductory-level Science classes (if not at the beginning of the term, by the end..).

- Students in more specific classes in Science.

- Science faculty or administrators who are in our department or our institution but who aren't in our specific field of research AND science faculty, students, and others who attend our invited talks at other universities (if the talks are supposed to be oriented to a general Science audience)

In grant proposals to programs in our field and certainly in articles in journals, we can typically go wild with the jargon because the people reading our text will understand these terms, although even here it is possible to go too far and use complex terms where a simpler one would suffice.

What about talking to the media? For those who aren't science journalists, I think it's best to go with the Great Aunt Milly level of simplicity, and for science journalists.. it varies.

My last experience with the media was with a science journalist who seemed to know the basic jargon of my field. Nevertheless, I kept having to decrease the Science level of the conversation because, although he knew vocabulary, he didn't really seem to know what these words actually meant in terms of processes or interrelated concepts. Although we talked for a long time and I asked him to repeat back some of the essential points (a suggestion that seemed to annoy him, perhaps understandably), the result was kind of bizarre. In fact, as I was trolling around the science news headlines, I overlooked the article about my research because the headline had absolutely nothing to do with my research. Only once I started getting e-mail about the article did I realize which headline referred to my work.

Clearly I need more practice de-jargonizing my Science speech. Fortunately, I know exactly the right person who will help me with this, most likely by making obnoxious beeping sounds when I use jargon, but that's OK.. that technique actually seems to help a bit.

Affirmative Action for Dead People

Someone wrote a letter of complaint to The New York Times, noting that there were typically about 8 times as many obituaries for men as for women.

The Times' obituaries editor responded that the newspaper only publishes obituaries for people whose former existence was of national or international interest. Most obituaries today are for people born in the 1920's and 1930's, when most important jobs were done by men. Ergo, most of the noteworthy people dying are men. The Times cannot right this historic wrong by publishing more obituaries for women and non-white men because there are fewer recently deceased women and minorities who did things of national or international interest. The number of obituaries for women is about 10-20%.

Apparently, there aren't enough qualified women dying.

The "public editor" (ombudsman) for The New York Times added his own comment, saying that he thought the Times could do a better job of finding information about remarkable women and non-white men; the Times researchers should try to find "a greater variety of subjects".

Is this situation analogous to arguments about the relative numbers of Great (white) Men vs. Women in literature, history, art etc., such as arguments related to why reading lists for classes on the Great Works of Literature are dominated by white male authors? That is, white men wrote the Great Works; that's just the way it is.

Some universities have addressed this issue by doing something similar to what the Times' public editor suggests: if you broaden your search, open up your definition of what is interesting and worthy of attention, you will find greatness.

Looking beyond the traditional definition of noteworthy for selecting candidates for obituaries in the Times is not affirmative action for dead people.

You can't right a historic wrong, but you can stop participating in the perpetuation of bias by focusing attention only only those who have succeeded in traditional ways in business, academia, government, journalism etc. Don't wait for the day when women and minorities succeed like white men in positions that were formerly the exclusive province of white men. Death to inequality!

Slate Takes On Tenure

The latest rant against tenure is in Slate.com. I have nothing against such discussions. Tenure, what it means, who gets it, and how it is gotten are important topics to debate and (re)consider from time to time. Any discussion of tenure, however, would benefit from accurate information.

The Slate.com article (by Christopher Beam) starts with a cute analogy. Imagine if cooks and waiters in a restaurant could not be fired! And not only that, but "they can say anything they want.. publicly and without fear of retribution." If it sounds absurd in a restaurant context, how can it possibly make sense in academia? I'm not sure, but maybe it's because a university is not a restaurant?

I learned from this article that lots of people want to get rid of tenure, even professors who are "constrained by its conventions". We would much rather have constant job insecurity.

Tenure is not cost effective for universities: "Keeping a professor around indefinitely.. simply costs a lot." In fact, we each cost our university $10-12.2 million over 35 years after getting tenure. You do the math and figure out if the numbers quoted in this article apply to you, factoring in institutional contributions to benefits.

I think it's a cheap shot to mention how much it costs to pay someone over a 35 year career. And it's strange not to mention the alternatives: e.g., hiring adjuncts at low salaries with lousy benefits and no job security.

Paying professors is really inconvenient for university budgets: ".. because most universities pay tenured professors out of their endowments, each professor freezes up tens of millions in otherwise-liquid endowment money for a generation." Are you paid from your university endowment, sucking the economic life out of your institution, providing only highly skilled labor in return?

It really is too bad that universities have to pay professors at all. It is true that it is customary for people, highly skilled or not, to be paid for their work, but it would be so much better if professors would work only for the privilege of having a small office with erratic climate control and a few friendly rodents. "The life of the mind is its own reward" (according to the article).

"If the average university tenured about 15 fewer professors, they'd be in the black."

Professors are standing in the way of balanced budgets!

Then there are some other paragraphs that can be summarized as follows: academic freedom is a joke, even tenured faculty are too afraid to speak up about controversial topics so tenure isn't even needed, tenure discourages intellectual flexibility and interdisciplinary research, tenure makes professors lazy.

Most of this fascinating insight and authoritative information comes from Professor Mark C. Taylor, chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University, and author of a book that will come out soon and break the news that tenure is bad.

If you can't be fired, what's to stop you from refusing to teach "an extra course"? "I honestly don't know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time," says Taylor.

The only thing stopping me from teaching "an extra course" is that I am too busy teaching my regular classes + graduate seminars, doing research, advising graduate and undergraduate students, mentoring postdocs, writing papers and proposals, giving talks at conferences and other universities, organizing speaker series, serving on committees, editing a journal, reviewing papers and proposals... and so on. I am not unusual (in this respect). Don't they do at least some of these things in the religion department at Columbia University? How can someone write a book on academia and have no idea what "a lot of academics" do with their time?

How can someone not factor research grants or the contributions to society of research of all sorts into the equation when discussing what professors bring to a university? It seems that we just take, take, take.

Would a system of renewable contracts really allow professors to break out of the "publish or perish" mania? Methinks it might have even the opposite effect. If there were no tenure, the rat race would never end. And, since academia is apparently equivalent to a customer service industry, consider what renewable contracts for advisers would do to their graduate students and postdocs, not to mention the research infrastructure that we build in part from grants and in part from our institutions, and use to train our advisees.

Another person cited in the article seems a bit more informed about academia and what ails it than Professor Taylor. Cathy Trower of Harvard University provides some ideas for "reworking" the tenure system without abolishing it:

"Create a tenure track that explicitly rewards teaching. Give interdisciplinary centers the authority to produce tenured professors. Allow for breaks in the tenure track if a professor needs to take time off. Offer the option of part-time tenure, a lower-cost alternative for professors who want to hold other jobs. In other words, make tenure flexible rather than a monolithic, in-or-out club."

Those ideas are worth discussing. Some of them solve problems, foster positive change in academia, and benefit faculty and students. I suppose they are a bit boring for general readers of online magazines, but it was a relief to see that paragraph at the end of the otherwise appalling article.

Despite Our Natural Inclinations

One thing that interests me about the recent Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education study is how certain media outlets have summarized the results.

According to the study, there may be differences in job satisfaction among untenured faculty in different disciplines at research universities (physical science professors are the happiest). There are also differences in job satisfaction levels between men and women within a particular discipline. The biggest gap is in the social sciences.

The study didn't ask faculty why they were answering survey questions the way they did. Any explanations presented in media reports are from interviews with people musing about the results of the study.

For example, in the Inside Higher Ed article on the report, there is an interview with Rosanna Hertz, the Classes of 1919-50 Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at Wellesley College and "a member of the Council of the American Sociological Association and .. that board's liaison to the association's Committee on the Status of Women in Sociology."

She describes how she has seen:

.. frustration among junior faculty about the tenure process. "Many say that they don't understand the tenure criteria," she said. "They ask 'Do I need a book? How many articles do I need?' They want to quantify it in a way that's not always quantifiable."

A Huffington Post article, which links to and cites the Inside Higher Ed article, summarizes this point as:

Pursuit of tenure often stumps female instructors who wonder what exactly it takes.

In fact, Professor Hertz didn't single out women faculty in her statement, but since we are trying to figure out why the women are so unhappy, I guess we can ignore the confused men for now.

Hartz also notes that faculty in the physical and biological sciences typically work together in labs and therefore have a lot of contact with other people. Social sciences faculty, however, may be more isolated. For junior faculty, therefore, particularly those who would like some guidance, "it can be more difficult to chart a path".

Without any context, the Huffington Post turned this into: new female professors looking for mentors struggle to find them.

For some reason the HuffPo condensing machine decided to skip over the paragraphs about the lack of female full professors (despite the large number of women who get a PhD in social sciences), and about the female economists who feel they are "passed over for promotion in favor of men" who in some cases may be less qualified.

No, we can skip over all that complicated, irrelevant stuff and get to the final point worth noting: that women who do research in fields outside the mainstream of economics (e.g., on gender and inequality issues) may be marginalized and may have trouble getting tenure for research in those fields.

OK, I believe that, but this is summarized as: Furthermore, women tend to get pushed into the gender studies departments, despite their natural inclinations.

This comparison of the source article and the HuffPo summary is not intended to bash the Huffington Post in particular, though it would be consistent with my natural inclinations to do so. Mostly I am interested in how a 'summary' of the findings of a study is not just incomplete (perhaps to be expected in a summary) but contains a fair amount of fabrication, resulting in a rather dim view of women faculty.

In just three short sentences, we learn that women faculty are confused, struggling to find people to advise them, and pushed into research fields that go against their nature. We do not learn that women are passed over for career opportunities and promotion. We therefore do not learn why untenured women faculty in the social sciences are much less satisfied with their jobs than are their male peers.

If you are dissatisfied with your job as a faculty member, whether tenured or untenured, in whatever field, what is the #1 reason for your dissatisfaction? Is it related to the specific place where you are employed, to something more general to your field (does your research go against your natural inclinations, whatever those are?), to your lack of tenure (yet), or something else entirely?

Shiny Happy Professors

News flash:

Physical science professors are happier than professors in other disciplines.

This professorial happiness index was calculated by considering "teaching hours, university expectations for tenure, ability to balance work and home responsibilities and time for one's own research."

The slide show is awesomely strange.

The #1 happiest physical science professor is shown standing in front of a chalkboard covered with drawings and equations that will be familiar to many of you. He is doing an experiment at the front of a large lecture hall and appears to be explaining what he is doing. One student may be raising his hand to ask a question. Alternatively, he is pulling out his eyebrows; our view is blocked and we can only surmise.

#2. In the next slide, a "humanities" professor is standing in front of a desk covered with papers. He is holding a book, and appears deep in thought, eyes narrowed. The chalkboard has only one word on it: Madness. Say no more.

#3. The environmental science professor is standing in a marsh.

#4. The business professor is wearing a tie, speaking in the atrium of a building filled with well-dressed people. He seems to be making a speech.

#5. Representing the only-medium-happy social sciences is a woman holding a book titled "Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement". This is the only female professor in the slide show. Are we to surmise that her research interests focus on women?

#6. The medical people are wearing lab coats! Does anyone know what the Professor of Medicine is pointing to? What are those greenish blobs on sticks? Please tell me they are not organs.

#7. You may be thinking that the Physical Sciences Professor photo is my favorite, but you are wrong if you are thinking this. The Biological Sciences professor (also wearing a white lab coat!) is way more awesome. There are dead things floating in jars in the background, there is a very large dead thing in the arms of the professor, and the expression on the professor's face is.. inscrutable, but somehow.. wise. Perhaps he is mad?

#8. It is too bad that Math & Engineering are at #8 and not higher because these guys are clearly having a lot more fun than some of the bio/med people even though they don't get to hold large dead things. They aren't wearing lab coats, but in their own way, they are very geeky-cool. (Why are Math & Engineering lumped together? Was it a tie? I guess if you can lump all of "Humanities" together, you can combine Math and Engineering?)

#9. The Education Professor is only a small part of his photo, which mostly shows a highly engaged classroom of hand-raising and smiling students, who don't actually look like traditional students; some guys are in ties. Are they grad students? Robots? Why are so many of the women wearing pink? The students have name cards in front of them; clearly the professor cares about them as people (although, unless it's the first class, he doesn't have a good memory; it's not a large class, so why doesn't he know their names?).

#10. What exactly are the "Health and Human Ecological Sciences"? Anthropology, apparently, but why would that include Health Sciences? I don't know, but the guys in the photo are clearly scientists because there is a copy of Nature on the table. There are some impressive tomes on the shelves behind them. These guys seem to be part of a panel of experts debating or explaining the timing of migration of humans into northern Europe. They appear to be very unhappy, or mad. Perhaps that is why they are at #10 in the list.

#11. Visual & Performing Arts. Why so sad? The people I know who are in the V & PA all seem like happy people who enjoy their jobs, but maybe they hide their pain when they are around me, a happy physical scientist with the best professorial job in academe?

So now I need to do my own scientific study of the happiness index of FSP readers. When you vote, I want you to search your heart for the best answer and not be competitive and try to get your field to be at the top (or bottom) of the list.

The question is simple, and the factors on which your answer is based need not be limited to the professorial components of the Harvard Graduate School of Education study (the results of which are listed above). In the comments, to provide more background, you could give more information, such as: humanities professor, 1; environmental science postdoc, 7; or math graduate student, 3 (with the number corresponding to your answer to the poll). The results will be completely uninterpretable, but might provide some entertaining diversion on a summer day.

On a scale of 1 to 11, how happy are you?
	1 : happy happy happy
	2
	3
	4
	5
	6
	7
	8
	9
	10
	11 : not happy at all
pollcode.com free polls

iCollege U?

Knowing that I am interested in how higher education is perceived by those outside academia, and in particular the depiction of higher education in the media, a friend sent me a link to a video of an interview on The Daily Show. In this episode from last week, the governor of Minnesota had this to say about what we need to change about how the government spends taxpayers' money:

For example, higher education.. Do you really think in 20 years, somebody's going to put on their backpack, drive a half hour to the University of Minnesota from the suburbs, haul their keister across campus, and sit and listen to some boring person drone on about Econ 101 or Spanish 101?

No, of course not! In 20 years we will all have personal jet-packs so we can fly from the suburbs to our classes and jobs!

Actually, no one said that. In fact, Jon Stewart said, Isn't that was college is supposed to be?

Governor: Yeah, partly. Partly.

(various jokes about how college is supposed to be boring or students will just party and never want to graduate)

The governor continued: Is there another way to deliver the service other than a one-size-fits-all monopoly provider that says "Show up at 9:00 on Wednesday morning for Econ 101"? Can't I just pull that down on my iPhone or iPad whenever the heck I feel like it, from wherever I want, and instead of paying thousands of dollars, pay $199 for iCollege...

There followed a somewhat incoherent and disjointed discussion involving public vs. private options, the governor's repetition of his statement that there is a "one-size-fits-all" system run by a bureaucracy, and his wish that we could "put the consumer in charge".

This is strange on so many levels. I think it would be great if a college education were much less expensive and easily accessible to all (without massive student loans), but somehow I don't think this governor is proposing to increase state funding for his university to allow for tuition decreases.

But let me be more systematic so that I don't drone on and on like I do in my Science 101 lectures. Here is a list of the things I don't like about this grim depiction of the travails of 21st century college students:

• the emphasis on the (implied unreasonable) physical effort and time involved in attending a class. Even if we expunge from our minds the vision of an otherwise able-bodied student lying on the couch in the rec room of their parents' suburban home, unwilling to do more than push a few buttons on some awesome later generation of iPhone, and instead imagine someone with work/family commitments that make commuting to a campus difficult, does Governor Pawlenty think that even today there are no other options for that student?

• the gratuitous insult that implies that instructors "drone" to passive audiences, making it not worth the effort to attend a course in person. You can't even fast forward when someone is speaking to you in person, in real time!
  

• the implication that it is obnoxious for a university to expect that a student will show up at a particular time and place for a class. I have heard that some companies expect their employees to do this as well, but maybe that's just a vicious rumor.

• one-size-fits-all? Where does that come from? What does that even mean in this context, especially in a statement that implies that, in the future, no one will physically want to travel to a campus to take classes? There are many options in higher education today, not just public vs. private, but also within public university systems, and even within a single university. There are online courses and other forms of distance learning, there are large classes and small classes, there are lectures and seminars and independent study programs. There are day classes, night classes, and summer classes. There are typically multiple sections of intro classes. All of these are potentially quite interactive, including the online courses, providing students with a wide range of options.
  

• Put the consumer in charge of what? That's a buzz phrase -- let's empower the people (who will pay lower taxes), not the big institutions (that suck up all our tax money and give nothing back)!
  

Public universities should provide high-quality education to students, and should keep costs to students and taxpayers as low as possible. There should be constant efforts to improve teaching and the overall educational experience for students. Some of that push to improve comes from the needs and demands of the "consumer", so if that is what it means to put the consumer in charge, I can agree with that. If it means that states can squeeze the budgets of universities because consumers don't want to pay more for a course than they do for an iPhone, then I start to disagree.

And I don't agree that there is a monolithic University bureaucracy that has only one idea about how to educate its students.

All that aside, I do hope that the governors of our states realize that there is more to a university than how it lectures to undergraduates, important though that part of a university certainly is. I hope they realize that the research and teaching missions of a university are intertwined, that there are real people teaching those courses (only some of whom drone), that there are discoveries and innovations resulting from the efforts of those people (including some students), that some courses do require physical participation by real 3D students and professors in real time, and that perhaps businesses and other organizations seeking to hire graduates of our great institutions of higher education will prefer that their new employees are willing and able to haul their keisters into work at a specified time and place.

But I Don't Want to Write about John Tierney Again

Thanks for all the e-mails and comments with links to the New York Times commentary by John Tierney, but what he wrote is just more of the same of what he's written before: i.e., many women don't want to be scientists or engineers, others can't because they aren't as good at math as the guys. Oh yeah, and Larry Summers made some reasonable statements in a speech that was misunderstood by hysterical females.

This is the person who questioned the National Academy of Science's report, Beyond Bias and Barriers, because a committee with lots of women on it produced the report (and women aren't objective about these issues).

This is the person who wrote a bizarre op-ed column about how women who accompany their husbands to Civil War reenactments must find it liberating to wear bulky clothes that make them swelter in the heat. The women don't get to do excellent things like pretend to kill people and be killed (only authentic men can do that), but at least fat women even look kind of good if you bundle them up enough.

And so on. I stopped reading his commentaries after that, until forced under torture to read his latest thoughts on the topic of Women.

His new essay is more of the same: There are flawed studies that show that females and males have similar quantitative skills and better studies that show that more males than females are extremely talented at math. This is one reason why men are more successful in math, science, and engineering. If women were good at math and science, perhaps they would understand these scientific studies with all the numbers in them.

On one point I reluctantly sort of agree with him: i.e., workshops to "enhance gender equality", mandated if certain legislation becomes law, could be kind of grim. In all likelihood, these would be yet another sounds-good-in-theory administrative requirement that PIs and others would have to sit through to be allowed to run our research groups.

I could be wrong about that. I know that some targeted workshops on equality issues -- e.g., for hiring committees or department chairs -- if run by peers with experience in the relevant activities, can be very effective.

I am, however, picturing something along the lines of the dismal "ethics" workshops that researchers at my university have to attend at regular intervals, or a workshop I went to about teaching those delicate creatures known as "first year students" -- a workshop at which we professors were instructed by people who had never in their lives taught a first year, or any, student. I am thinking about other workshops at which participants were bombarded with surveys filled with leading questions that provided data so that someone could assess what we think before and after we are workshopped. I do not play well with others when I am being assessed by poorly worded surveys.

I am all for equality workshops if by some miracle they are more effective than other workshops that help us be better researchers and teachers. I do not agree with Tierney that these workshops are unnecessary because (1) what inequality exists is just the natural order of things (men are better at math), and (2) "careful" studies show that women already get lots of grants and promotions and therefore there is no inequality in those respects (apparently the subject of a future column).

My favorite quotation of the essay, on the topic of high SAT scores: "..someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university."

He does not, however, take that thought too far (smart!), and he does admit that there is possible "social bias" against women. And some other complex factors. And stuff. But don't expect a lot of women scientists at top universities anyway.

We have made some progress towards increasing the participation of women in STEM fields in recent years, but an important question that many are asking now is why the greater numbers of women undergraduate and graduate students in STEM fields has not translated into more women at more advanced levels of academia and industry. Something just doesn't add up.

Ask a Scientist

The Chronicle Review (the magazine-like part of The Chronicle of Higher Education) recently asked a group of "scholars and experts" to comment on stress in the lives of academics, using the Amy Bishop incident as a springboard for the discussion; i.e., what role might stress related to the tenure process have played in this tragedy?

The scholars and experts included:

• a writer and PhD candidate in English literature
• the chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education
  
• a professor of international politics
• a professor of English
• an assistant professor of public policy and political science
• an assistant professor of sociology and women's and gender studies
• a PhD candidate in anthropology
• a dean of a School of Arts & Sciences
• a professor of management
• a professor of history

Clearly there was an effort to consult a wide variety of academics associated with the US system of higher education: professors and administrators, tenured professors and tenure-track professors, professors at universities and professors at small liberal arts colleges, even some PhD candidates who have no direct experience (yet) with the stresses of being on the tenure-track. Many of these people had thoughtful insights; I was interested to know the opinions of sociologists and anthropologists and others.

Even so, Amy Bishop was an assistant professor of biology. Does it seem odd to anyone else that there were no biology or other science professors in this particular group of academics commenting on the incident? I looked up the chancellor and the dean and learned that their field of expertise is psychology, so perhaps they come the closest, but that's not the same as getting the opinion of someone who has recently experienced the tenure process as a scientist.

I realize that a biology professor would not necessarily have any more insight into the general implications of the incident than those who provided comments in this piece in the Chronicle. And I still stand by my overall view (shared by the PhD candidate in English literature) that the murders were the actions of an imbalanced person with a rage problem (and a gun), and the tragedy was therefore not a direct result of the stresses of academia in general or the tenure evaluation system in particular.

Still, I think it is strange that in an otherwise diverse group, not one is a science professor with direct knowledge of what it is like to get tenure as a scientist today at a university. Consider how bizarre it would have been if an English professor (for example) had committed a heinous crime that may or may not have been related to the experience of being an English professor, and the only people asked to comment (in a particular series of essays) were science, engineering, and math professors.

I also think it would have been illuminating to read, for comparison, the thoughts of a scientist recently denied tenure. With all due respect to the PhD candidates and literary scholars who wrote thoughtful essays for the piece, surely the Chronicle could have found some current or former science professors -- ideally in the life sciences -- to comment?

I don't want to perpetuate an "us" (scientists) vs. "them (non-scientists) mentality, but often when I read about academia, in the Chronicle and elsewhere, the point of view of non-scientists is the only one represented. This gives a very incomplete view of academia and the lives of academics, in general and in extreme cases. Although we have much in common as researchers and educators, there are also significant differences that, at times, merit consideration.

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.

Diss-cussion

Last week I clicked on a science news headline that suggested that

Maybe an Asteroid Didn't Kill the Dinosaurs.

I followed the link (to Time Magazine) and read about the recent research of someone who disagrees with the prevailing ideas about dinosaurian demise. I asked an old (paleo) friend of mine about this and he explained that the scientist who wrote the paper profiled in the article is one of very few scientists who has long held a contrary view about this issue.

I can't assess this particular case, but I am interested in the general situation of Scientific Dissenters. In fact, in this particular case even NSF seems to think that this contrary view is worthy of publicity, so maybe it's not the best example of my topic today. This will not, however, stop me from my general discussion of the role of Dissent in scientific discourse and discovery, specifically in the context of how dissent is conveyed to the public.

Journalists like to (and should) present different sides of a story, but in the case of Science this may involve digging up the last remaining person who refuses to release their grasp from a discredited hypothesis -- perhaps someone who makes it their mission in life to be the lone voice in the wilderness for a hypothesis that no one believes any more. The motivation for this dissent can be noble (the person truly believes that everyone else is wrong) or a way to get attention (some people might like it when Time Magazine calls). Dissenters obviously can't all be lumped in one category.

When the topic is of interest to the general public, the journalistic practice of seeking and highlighting controversy can give the impression that scholarly debate continues about something that is no longer in serious doubt. Perhaps a love of dissent stems from a desire to shake things up, overturn dogma, and prove wrong those complacent brainiacs who think they know how things work. Not all of those are bad, necessarily, but it is a slippery slope to fostering doubt about things that are well known (e.g. the "It's just a theory" type of argument).

I think that it is important to have dissenters whose arguments push others to make sure their reasoning and evidence are as solid as possible. Dissenters have the useful purpose of making it not so easy for everyone to jump on the scholarly bandwagon du jour. And journalists do have a responsibility to examine various sides of issues.

At the same time, it is too bad that non-expert readers of media reports of scientific issues may get an unrealistic view of the state of the science. It may be difficult to distinguish a dissenter with a valid and significant point from an attention-mongering crackpot, especially if the latter is a professor at a distinguished university. I also realize that it is much zippier to write a headline like the one above, and the news that "Scientists understand This and That and are now trying to figure out These Other Things" is perhaps not going to grab anyone's attention.

Even so, scientists do make discoveries and may reach consensus on important issues, not because we are all sheep who mindlessly believe the prevailing view on a topic but because we make progress in understanding how things work. It is disheartening if the general public is given the impression, via sensational headlines and articles relying on the opinions of lonely dissenters, that in fact we really don't understand some fundamental aspects of the world.

I admire science journalists for the excellent work they do translating sciencese to the general public and highlighting what is interesting and important about scientific discoveries. I do think, however, that the practice of seeking contrary views should be done carefully, and choices made based on a broad and objective view of the relevant scientific field. That's a difficult task, but an important one.

Law & Science

News articles and editorials about Obama's possible Supreme Court justice candidates show how much has changed for women lawyers and judges in recent decades. Reagan apparently didn't have a lot of options for women candidates when he selected Sandra Day O'Connor. Clinton had more options when he selected Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but the pool of possible women candidates was still small.

Today that is no longer the case. Obama has a wide range of choices among highly qualified women and men representing diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

If Obama selects a woman to replace Souter, it will be particularly interesting because less than 2 years ago Souter was quoted as saying that all the "top" applicants for law clerks that year were men. I was skeptical about this and used the incident to discuss the concept of "top" applicants in general.

Why has the number of women reaching the upper levels of the legal profession changed so much in the past 20 years but the same is not the case for science and engineering in academia, government, or the private sector? The number of women students has increased tremendously, but the ceiling or the leaking pipeline or whatever symbol you want to use to explain the lack of women full professors, deans, directors, presidents and so on still exists for women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.

Maybe there are so many differences between law and STEM that the question is pointless, but it caught my interest that one male dominated field changed so dramatically and another has not changed nearly as much.

Is part of the answer, at least in terms of comparing law with the physical sciences, that the legal profession has many more options and available positions, creating more opportunities?

When positions at a certain level are limited (Supreme Court law clerks and justices), however, and women are no longer the "top" candidates as often as men, do the differences between law and science diminish?

Mostly I am wondering, if it is reasonable to make any comparison between law and science, whether there is something we can learn from the evolution of the legal profession in recent decades that would help increase the number of women who choose and succeed in professions involving science, technology, engineering, and math or whether the differences are intrinsic to each field.

25% Solution

A recent article in Slate.com about biomedical researchers scrambling for stimulus funding caught my attention because of this statement:

At the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, for instance, faculty members normally spend about 50 percent of their time working on grants, .. in March and April, however, faculty members have spent more like 75 percent to 90 percent of their time going after stimulus dollars.

The first part of the statement didn't surprise me at first, perhaps because the phrase is ambiguous. I interpreted 'working on grants' to mean 'working on grant-related activities', including writing proposals, but the second part of the sentence strongly suggests that this statement actually means that med school faculty typically spend 50% of their time writing proposals.

That's huge. It doesn't surprise me that the % time is higher than that of physical sciences faculty members, but I wouldn't have guessed that it was 50% (if that number is, in fact, correct).

The amount of time I spend working on proposals varies a lot from month to month, and in some cases from year to year, but it is definitely not 50%. If I spent 50% of my time writing proposals, I wouldn't have time to do the research that was funded by the grant. Yes, much of the research is done by graduate students and postdocs, but not all of it.

I like writing proposals, but I would not want to spend so much time attempting to acquire grants, leaving little or no time for doing science. For me, a reasonable % proposal planning and writing time that can potentially provide me with enough funding for research, not take over my life, and still let me enjoy both proposal-writing and science-doing is probably somewhere around 25% (±5). That number includes time thinking about proposals and thinking about thinking about proposals, not just the writing.

Has my proposal writing been affected by the appearance of stimulus funding? Only a little, mostly involving a request for some snazzy new equipment, as part of a large interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers who all want the same snazzy new equipment.

Owing to the fact that I spend a lot of time doing various other professor things (for example, teach and write things other than proposals), there is no way that I could spend 90% of my time (or even 75%) on proposal writing, no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars were in the offing.

The University As We Know It

It is always interesting -- and in some cases disturbing -- to read a rant by a professor about the current (apparently awful) condition of graduate education in the US and what (radical) things need to be done to change not just graduate programs but the university as we know it. The most recent example was in the NY Times on Monday.

I do not recognize the university environment described by the author, a professor of religion. It is of course possible that my inability to share the view that the graduate education system is flawed in the ways described could relate to my narrow view of the world but it is also possible that my views are directly related to my very different perspective as a Science Professor.

Long-time readers will know that one thing I love about being at a university is the diversity of academic pursuits. I have a liberal arts background and I teach courses that merge science and the humanities. Some of my best friends are humanities professors..

Even so, I know there is a huge gulf between the experiences and cultures of faculty and students in the sciences and the humanities, especially at a large university. I sit on university-wide committees in which I interact with my non-science colleagues, and I am always struck by these differences and how difficult it can be for each of us to understand the other no matter how much we interact professionally and socially. At a large research university, professors of science and professors of humanities exist in very different worlds.

But there are significant similarities, of course, and that is why it is disappointing when a fellow academic takes a cheap shot, like using the obscure topic of a dissertation, to argue that universities are too hyper-specialized and need to change. We are supposed to be experts at something, and that something, at the graduate student level, can be quite specific. It is not a sign of the horrific state of graduate education that dissertations and journal articles and many books are highly specialized and have titles that appear boring to the vast majority of humans, academics and non-academics alike. Some of these titles even win awards.

Being highly specialized does not preclude one from having a broad view and does not disqualify one from being involved in interdisciplinary research. There are many opportunities to do multi-inter-transdisciplinary research during, but especially after, the PhD. Most of my colleagues participate in various initiatives of this sort, and many of these are organized to benefit graduate education (e.g. IGERT). The stereotype of the ultra-specialized professor working alone to produce scholarly works that 5 people will read is not something I encounter, and I publish just as many articles with obscure titles as anyone.

In fact, many of us live and die by citation indices. One can argue about whether that is better than not caring whether anyone reads our work and whether it is a good thing that we know our h-index and the impact factors of journals, but it would be difficult to make a reasonable case that we don't care about the audience of our scholarly works and are content to send our scholarly works off into obscurity.

And what of tenure? Tenure is either seen as the major cause of stagnation in academia or the key to academic freedom and therefore the ability to be creative and take intellectual risks. That's because it is the source of both and that is why I prefer that tenure live on, but with a post-tenure review process that has sharper teeth and real consequences. It should be possible to create (and implement) a post-tenure review system that is carried out in a constructive, humane way that minimizes political and personal issues and allows for shifts in the research : teaching : service equation over the course of a career.

That said, I think mandatory retirement might be a good thing.

I am not against major, dramatic changes in our universities. For example, I was recently sitting in a large auditorium filled with hundreds of scientists and engineers, and as I looked around and realized that there were about 10 women present (mostly students), I could think of one particular major change I wouldn't mind seeing in my lifetime.

It Takes a Village Idiot

An essay titled Want to Engineer Real Change? Don't Ask a Scientist appeared in the Washington Post on 25 January, but I just saw it today.

The essay by a distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, Dr. Henry Petroski, highlights examples in which science was useless for progress, but engineering was transformative. People didn't need science to invent steam engines or airplanes, only engineering. Thermodynamics might explain how things work, but it hasn't been necessary to understand thermodynamics to make important engineering advances. And so on.

I am sorry that Professor Petroski's feelings were apparently hurt that President Obama mentioned science and not engineering in his inaugural speech, but that doesn't seem sufficient justification to attack science.

The essay is remarkably narrow-minded and short-sighted. Or perhaps I am the one who is narrow-minded and short-sighted, as I would have thought that it was obvious that we need both science and engineering.

A world with scientists but no engineers would be just as limited as a world with engineers and no scientists. It is pointless to set the two communities in opposition, as if one has been important throughout history and one has been comparatively useless.

The essay doesn't deserve any more discussion, but I will just mention that when I showed it to a colleague and said something along the lines of what I wrote above, he said that my conclusion that we need both scientists and engineers was like saying that everyone is special and so I must be an it-takes-a-village-ist who thinks that we should all have a seat at a nice round table etc. etc.

OK.. maybe.. I get the point (and the H Clinton reference), but I don't think that recognizing the importance of both science and engineering is a uniquely feminine point of view.

My colleague went on to say that my everyone-is-special philosophy betrayed my liberal-artsy roots. OK.. maybe.. and maybe my colleague will now be inspired to write an essay about how science has been responsible for many major advances in civilization but poetry has gotten us nowhere. Or he could write about how the second law of thermodynamics has been more important for civilization than the collective works of Shakespeare. The possibilities are endless.. and idiotic.

Public Rejection

Save your rejection letters for manuscripts. Maybe you can get the letter published in The New York Times. Example: A rejection letter for a scholarly article was published in The New York Times, Saturday, February 7, 2009.

The American Historical Review rejected an article about omissions and mistakes in “Abuse of Power,” Stanley Kutler’s collection of transcripts of Watergate tapes, on Friday. In a response to Peter Klingman, a historian who submitted the essay, Robert Schneider, the review’s editor, wrote that the piece, “despite its intrinsic interest, is too narrow in focus for this publication.” He added: “Essays must therefore reach beyond the issues, concerns or jargon of a particular sub-field and speak to larger theoretical, methodological, or substantive issues. It seems to us that your essay is more appropriately placed in a more specialized journal.” The screening report for the review, which is the profession’s premier journal, also stated, “This submission is too short (4,868 words) for consideration by the AHR.”

[NYT article by Patricia Cohen]

Editors for most journals are presented with a template email for sending editorial decisions to authors. There is a template for each category of decision (accept, minor revision, moderate revision, major revision, reject and resubmit, reject and take a hike etc.). The templates that I use when sending editor email to authors are editable, and this is fortunate because the templates were written by a robot with stilted diction and a penchant for vague and convoluted prose.

Particularly when rejecting a manuscript, I always try to edit the template sufficiently so that it is clear that I have actually read the manuscript, thought about it, and have specific, substantive reasons (which I list) for rejecting the manuscript.

I don't know anything about the American Historical Review and of course have no idea whether the manuscript was rejected for inappropriate or unstated reasons, but that rejection letter screams TEMPLATE to me, even though the editor kindly inserted the specific word count for the rejected manuscript.

The line about "more suitable for a specialized journal" is a classic one. In some (many?) cases it is an appropriate comment, and I suppose it must be said somehow. It says "Your work is narrow and provincial" and "Send your manuscript to a journal that only a few people read" or possibly "The editor is narrow and provincial and is unable to appreciate the brilliance of your work, possibly because it is so poorly written and possibly because the editor is a dolt.".

If I am making a negative decision about a manuscript that I perceive to be too narrowly focused for the journal of interest, I provide some brief but specific information about this in my own words, and I omit or rewrite the "specialized journal" sentence from the template email. Maybe I deal with many fewer manuscripts than the AHR screening committee, but it only takes me a minute to de-templatize this aspect of the letter.

Another intriguing aspect of the rejection letter in the NYT article is the problem of the manuscript's being "too short". Many journals have strict limits on the maximum length of a manuscript, but I didn't know there were journals that had a minimum length. I can imagine that an article that consisted of very few words might not be appropriate in some cases, but I would hope that journals to not mindlessly adhere to a strict minimum number of words. It should theoretically be possible to make a very concise but compelling case for something important enough to be published.

(word count = 589)

Zincists

Next week I may pursue further the topic of Who Should Organize Department Seminars: Faculty or Students? but today is Friday and I want to talk about zinc.

An oft-quoted remark by Tina Brown, upon becoming editor of The New Yorker in the early 1990's, relates to her decision to destroy The New Yorker's classic tradition of publishing articles such as a "50,000-word piece on zinc." When my husband read that quotation many years ago, he promptly canceled our subscription and wrote a scathing letter oozing with contempt.

I remembered this eventoid when I saw a headline in The Onion this week: Candidates Annoyed to Have To Take Stance on Zinc Mining

What is it with zinc? Why has zinc become code for obscure and insignificant, or even boring? Why not antimony? Why not vanadium?

Before continuing with this discussion, let me first say that I have no particular stake or interest in zinc, scientific or otherwise. I have never taken money from zinc lobbyists or zinc special interest groups, I do not take zinc supplements when I get a cold, and I am equally fond of many other elements.

I have a hypothesis about the zincists, though. First of all, the former editor of The New Yorker may well have been anti-science in general (and/or anti-essays involving topics other than celebrities) and, when she needed to articulate her new editorial philosophy, she mentioned a sciencey-themed article on a topic that sounded obscure to her. Zinc as a topic has the power of being not so common that people won't get your point (e.g. imagine how ineffective it would be to rail against iron, oxygen, silicon, calcium, sodium, potassium, gold, silver, or carbon etc.). Similarly, some elements are rather infamous, so being anti-uranium, anti-arsenic, or anti-mercury, for example, has other implications and therefore these elements don't serve the purpose of signaling that a topic is irrelevant and uninteresting.

There has probably never been an article in The New Yorker on yttrium, and perhaps not even gallium, though I have not checked the archives. That doesn't leave much choice in terms of elements, if that's your choice for a code word category to equate with boring. Zinc is perfect in this respect because everyone has heard of it, but it's not too common. It also has a very succinct and zippy name. For that reason, the element praeseodymium is less effective as a rhetorical device.

Brown went on her anti-zinc spree in the pre-zinc supplement days, so perhaps her statement wouldn't pack quite the same punch today as it did more than 15 years ago. Maybe today people would want to know where their zinc comes from. Maybe today people are more aware that, alleged cold remedy aside, zinc is essential for life.

Maybe, maybe not. I am feeling cynical about this now that The Onion, a venerable publication that is actually only worth reading for the headlines, is taking a swing at zinc.

As long as the presidential candidates themselves don't actually go negative on zinc, I suppose the situation is not so bad. It's a slippery slope, though, from being against studies of DNA in bears in Montana to being a full-fledged zincist.

Professorial Reserve

Barack Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago, so it makes sense for his professorial past to be part of discussions about his experience(s), but not all Obama/professor references in the media are direct references to his work as a professor. In fact, this post was motivated by hearing Obama's recent debate performance described as "too professorial", an oft-repeated phrase in reference to Obama.

An internet search for "Obama" and "professorial" yields several phrases highly favored by the mainstream media and bloggers. I have color-coded these in the examples below, not because I think my readers are stupid and unable to understand complex concepts without having everything simplified for them, but for ease of viewing and for dramatic and aesthetic effect.

Obama struggles to feel voters' pain because of his ..aloof, professorial side.

But whether out of professorial reserve or budding political caution..

Democrats Worry That Obama Is Too Professorial.. In Debate Settings.

Obama's professorial style didn't keep him from scoring quick points.

The intellectual Obama professorial style doesn’t work for most Americans.

Obama's professorial approach to Iraq..

..many people - maybe because of Obama's professorial nature .. seem to think Obama talks down to them.

When he’s not giving Teleprompter speeches he comes across as quite professorial and far too analytical.

But I think Obama, who has had the problem in the past of being too professorial..

..ability to channel enough charisma to overcome his professorial reserve.

That’s him, exhibiting typical Ivory Tower Professorial reserve.

..those that are anti-Obama will say that the cool, calm and reserved demeanor is Obama just being aloof or too professorial.

Obama already suffers from coming across as too professorial ...

Obama is considered by some to be too professorial, too distant..

Obama is too professorial in his convoluted explanations.


Question: Is it OK to be professorial, as long as you aren't too professorial?

In the above examples, there are three professor-themed descriptions that appear again and again:(1) Obama is too professorial; (2) he has/shows professorial reserve (a concept clearly associated with being aloof, distant); and (3) he has a professorial nature, style, and/or approach.

What do these descriptions mean? I think they are bizarre. Nonsense. Stupid. That said, I will now elaborate using complete sentences and perhaps also obscure words and multiple relative clauses that few people can understand.

I get the fact that these descriptions are shorthand for someone who gives complex explanations (= convoluted, not simple) and who does not have a warm and fuzzy personality (= distant, aloof, reserved). What I don't get is what this has to do with professors -- as in, real-life professors that one actually encounters at the nation's universities and colleges -- and why professorial is synonymous with condescending.

Has anyone done a study on this?: What % of professors are aloof? In my personal niche in the academic ecosystem, the number is exceedingly small. In fact, to succeed as a professor these days, the ability to communicate in a clear and compelling way (e.g. to a classroom of students, to a proposal review panel) is essential.

The % of professors who are condescending is larger, but still by no means even close to a majority. I have more commonly been condescended to by doctors and home repair people, but for some reason this description is more typically applied to professors.

I don't spend a lot of time hanging out at the law school so I don't know what things are like over there on a day-to-day basis, but I serve on university committees with law school faculty and know law school professors socially. The words "too professorial" or "professorial reserve" or even "condescending" do not come to mind at all as accurate descriptions of the law faculty I know. Perhaps some law professors glide silently through the halls in their personal space bubbles and over time forget how to be anything but aloof.

I do not believe that professors are statistically more reserved than the average American. In fact, speaking as someone from a part of the country where people are rather well known for not being particularly forthcoming in friendly conversation, it seems to me that the personality of a reserved person, professorial or not, might resonate quite well with ordinary Americans in this and many other parts of the country.

To me, professorial describes someone with deep knowledge of a topic or even someone who can explain things. These are not obviously bad things. It is clearly time to eschew uses of the term professorial that imply a cold, condescending person who is unable to think or speak clearly.