Convoke Me Not

I am grateful to my colleagues who are willing to don academic regalia and march in a crowd of similarly-attired professors and administrators in the fall convocation ceremony. The sight of professors in their academic robes and caps no doubt inspires students with awe, thereby igniting intellectual fires and whatnot.

I did the convocation thing once and will likely not do it again. The one time I agreed to do it, I did not have tenure and I was made to feel that it would be a really good thing for me to participate in this ritual. I was also curious about what it felt like to be on the 'other side' of a convocation ceremony. When I was an undergraduate, I liked going to the fall all-college gathering; it was a nice way to start the academic year.

The one time I marched in a convocation as a professor, I rented academic robes etc. that had the right colors, stripes, glyphs, and cap for the institution that granted my Ph.D., put the silly things on, and went to find my place in line with the other professors. As I walked past the other professors, all similarly and absurdly attired, a number of them smiled at me. I smiled back, thinking that perhaps the wearing-of-the-robes was a sort of professorial bonding experience. But no.. One of the smiling professors said to me "We all love it when PhD's from your university march in convocation. You have by far the most hideous academic robes and it makes the rest of us look good." Strong words for a man in a velvet beanie. I just smiled back and said "I specifically went to that university so that I might one day wear this spectacular robe." So there.

I told my daughter this story last year when she was upset that friends at her elementary school had criticized her attire. I was glad that she thought the story was hilarious rather than demoralizing. I am also glad that marching in convocation is voluntary, and that I have tenure.

Linked

I keep getting requests from friends in Business to be LinkedIn or added to other e-networking lists. I always say yes to the invitations just to be polite, but I have a feeling I'm mostly opening myself up to more junkmail. Perhaps these sites are professional MySpace-type sites, so it looks good for someone to have lots of links (friends)?

The invitation to link that I accepted today informed me that I am now 3.7 times more likely to find a new job. Cool.

Last day of major travel for me..

Professor/Shopping Fantasy

I am still on the road, though have finally found a good internet connection. For the past few days, my only option was a coin-operated kiosk with a sort of keyboard that wasn't really meant for typing words.

During our travels, my daughter and I talked about how we will have to do some very quick back-to-school shopping for her, and somehow this led to our constructing a fantasy scenario of back-to-school shopping for professors. We imagined a special clothing store, just for professors, with different departments: Science Women, Science Men, Humanities Women etc. It would have all the latest fashions. What are the stylish Chemistry Professors wearing this year? What cannot you absolutely not wear at the next big international meeting?

We later told my husband about this idea, and he mused about whether the different departments might need further subdividing. We are fairly sure that the physical sciences could probably share one department of this store, but it may well be that engineers will need their own section, and the humanities might need some very significant subdividing. Do philosophers dress the same as historians?

Another feature of this store for professors is that you get a discount on a new item of clothing if you turn in something that you have worn since graduate school, with the discount greater the longer you have been out of grad school.

Transformative

NSF wants some (most? all?) of the research it funds to be "transformative". I don't know exactly when this word became central in NSF-speak, though I first became aware of it during an NSF committee meeting a few years ago. Those of us who recently completed an NSF questionnaire, the results of which are now out and being discussed in science/news forums, had to answer questions about how much of our own research is transformative, how much of the research in proposals we review is transformative etc. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of us think we are doing transformative research, but see it less often in proposals we review.

Now this word is creeping out of NSF and into proposals. I just reviewed a proposal that proclaimed the described research as transformative. Alas, using the word in a proposal does not make it so, though I suppose this raises the question of whether I would know it if I saw it. And this raises the question of just what "transformative" means, and whether it is a definite state that can be predicted from a proposal.

Girls Only Internet Access

For the past couple of days, I have been wandering around having adventures with my daughter while my husband does conference-things, and hence posting and comment moderation have been sporadic. For the past 2 days, my internet options seemed to be confined to smoke-filled storefronts with all computers continuously occupied by young men. I thought it might be interesting to post feminist women-in-science thoughts from one of these places, but I never got the chance at a computer.

At my current location, I read about an internet site with a 'girls only' room, and my daughter and I are very intrigued by this. From what I've seen of internet centers recently, I can see why such a room might be nice/necessary, but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. For now, I have found another (expensive) option that is most convenient for the moment, and am scrambling to finish some reviews.

Double Interview

Earlier today, my husband encountered the chair of a department at a large private university. This chair said that he had heard that my husband and I were thinking about leaving our current university, and that he would like his university to be 'in the mix' along with the other places we are considering. OK, that's fine, the more the merrier etc.

The strange thing is that this place wants us both to visit at the same time. We would presumably meet with faculty individually, but would give consecutive talks and would attend social functions (meals) together. I'm not sure what we'd do with our daughter -- maybe they want her to give a talk too? -- but we can probably figure something out for a quick trip.

I'm not sure how I feel about this double visit. All the other departments have brought us in separately - both public and private universities - and have made it clear that we would each be valued as individuals. Perhaps a double visit is just an efficient way to take care of the situation. Or perhaps it means that this place thinks of us as a 'package' (which we are, I suppose). I will keep an open mind, see if the visit actually occurs, and if so, how it goes.

Scenes From a Meeting

Regular readers may recall my encounter earlier this summer with a man who was surprised, upon meeting me, to realize that I am a FemaleScienceProfessor rather than a MaleScienceProfessor. His astonishment stemmed from the fact that he had heard of me, read my papers, even had one of his own papers reviewed by me. Anyway, as I wrote, he finally got over his disbelief that a female could have accomplished the scientific things I have accomplished, and we spent an amicable week at a small conference and had numerous conversations about Science.

This morning I went down to breakfast at a hotel, and there he was! I smiled and said good morning, and he stared at me, at first blankly, then with a confused expression. He did not return my greeting. Oh well.. maybe he's one of those people who isn't good with names/faces, even for someone he just met a month or two ago? But no, once again, I had the opportunity to shift his universe. The reason he couldn't believe I was me yet again? This morning I was accompanied by a young child, my daughter. He was surprised that a mom-type person with a kid was greeting him at the hotel, and thought I was just a friendly person saying random good mornings to people at breakfast. After all, HE is here for a conference.

Maxed Out

Every other year I teach an "elective" class that is specifically for freshmen, on an interdisciplinary topic that combines my interests in science, history, and culture. Typically, 2-4 of these freshmen classes, which are distinct from the giant 100-level intro courses, are taught each term. I like all the classes that I teach, but this is one of my favorites.

Over the summer, I have been somewhat obsessively monitoring enrollment in my course. Because it is a freshman course, most of the enrolling occurs over the summer rather than in the spring as for other fall courses. A month ago, I was very pleased to see that my course was full. Every time I have taught the class, it has filled to the maximum number of students allowed, but every term the numbers and topics of these courses change, and there's always a chance that a more thrilling course will come along and capture enrollment.

My reasons for being curious about the enrollment are not entirely pure. My particular freshman class is always given lowest priority by the department administrative assistant in terms of time and classroom. In fact, this year (as well as 2 years ago), I wasn't even given a classroom in the department. The other 2 freshmen classes this term, both taught by senior male faculty, meet in classrooms in the department. One of these classes currently has 5 students enrolled and may not be taught, and the other has 8 students. I am not glad that the other courses have such low enrollment, but I may bring it to the attention of my chair (if he has not noticed on his own) that my course has filled yet again.

A similar situation happened 2 years ago. My course filled but a senior professor's attracted only 2 students and was canceled. The department chair at the time mused to several people, including me, about how strange he thought this was. He wanted to know what it was about my course that made students want to take it. Hmm. I don't know. Interesting topic, perhaps? He decided it was a random event with no obvious explanation, but it wasn't the first time my course filled and now it has happened again. Methinks there is too much data for the Random Hypothesis to be viable.

In any case, I have been working on my syllabus this week and getting excited about teaching this course again. I am not ready for summer to be over, but there is much to look forward to in the new term.

Laptop Grief

The hard drive of my trusty laptop just crashed, the day before the start of a major trip. Fortunately everything important was backed up. Even so, I am feeling bereft and out of sorts without my computer. Fortunately I have an ancient but still functioning laptop to take its place temporarily, but I find it irritating and aesthetically unpleasing to use an old, slow, battered laptop.

There is no good time for a hard drive to crash, but it would be far far worse to have the computer die during the trip rather than immediately before. That is my lame attempt to be positive about the situation.

Two of my students recently had hard drive crashes. Perhaps it is contagious. Both of these students completely shut down in terms of progress on papers they were writing, although they had their manuscripts backed up and could, in theory, have continued writing using one of the many other computers available to them. Although I can appreciate the emotional pain of a hard drive crash, it does seem possible for life to go on in some form, albeit with a decrease in quality of life and aesthetic computing pleasure.

Anyway, I'm off on another trip. Posting and comment moderation will continue, but may be sporadic for the next two weeks.

Mini-Victory

This particular post is difficult for me to write because I am going to boast, and maybe even gloat, both unpleasant characteristics, I know. Even so, here goes: I am awesome at miniature golf. I don’t know why I am, but I am. I play mini-golf once a year when I visit my family at the ancestral home, and that is quite enough for me, so perhaps I shouldn’t quit my day job just yet and go on the professional mini-golf circuit.

This bizarre discussion of mini-golf is not entirely off topic for this blog. At the mini-golf course where my family and I recently played, the best scores for men and women are listed separately. I think this is strange because mini-golf isn’t like real golf, in which strength is relevant. Even so, during my recent visits to this particular course, the men’s score was typically better than the women’s score. That is, until I played an incredible round, got numerous holes-in-one, and came in well below par for the course. I was just happy to have beaten my brother, but when my name was written on the board as the woman with the best score, and my score was significantly lower (i.e. better) than the men’s, my daughter was ecstatic. She danced around, singing “You’re better than all the men!”. Mini-golf is very quantitative and unambiguous, so this statement could not be disputed within its context. So much, however, for the simple thrill of having gotten a little purple ball past a windmill, a fake stalactite, and some boulders: perhaps I also inspired female mini-golfers on that course for at least a day or two. Female Science Professor Sans Frontieres..

Why I Am A Scientist (according to my family)

Perhaps because there are no other scientists or professors on my mother's side of the family, my mother and her sisters have constructed an explanation for why they think I became a scientist. This family legend involves some childhood experiences provided by my maternal grandparents and other relatives. Now, every summer when I visit the ancestral home, the legend is retold. Someone will say to me "Do you think you are a scientist because ...?" and then the story is retold. I always respond with some variation of "possibly".

I think they have created (and often repeat) this explanation to find a way to connect my strange life to my family more. For this reason I never dispute the story, despite its being somewhat bizarre. Also, I don't necessarily have a better explanation. I didn't have any important science mentors or other early influences of that sort. I always liked my science classes in school, but I was, if anything, more inclined towards literature, languages, and history. My family was shocked when I discovered a passion for a particular field of science in college, and it wasn't long after that they started developing the family legend for Why I Am A Scientist.

This past week, I heard variations on the story at least 4 times. I replied "possibly", "perhaps", "maybe", and "I suppose that could be it".

Island of the Uncles

I was recently imprisoned on a remote island with lots of relatives, including the men that my mother and her sisters married. Through an open window, I heard a conversation between two of these men, both ministers in different Protestant denominations. One of them described to the other a recent training session he had to attend for ministers to be aware of and sensitive to the issue of sexual harassment and to learn to recognize and avoid it in their churches. The conversation was very crude and involved ridicule of the very concept of sexual harassment. Apparently, that’s what women are for, and they (i.e., women) just have to realize that men will never see them as anything but [expletives deleted]. Soon after, we all gathered around the dinner table to eat the food the women had prepared -- perhaps proving that women are good for more than one thing? -- and I had to sit next to this man and hold his hand while he led the family in prayer. I felt so nauseous. This man is an apparently devoted husband, father, grandfather, minister. Even if the conversation was some sort of male ritual kind of thing, I think there is something twisted about a person who would say those things, even if there was a level of insincerity in the sexist posing.

Getting Academia Wrong

[note: there may be a gap in posts, as I go off the grid - reluctantly - for a few days]

I suppose that academic scientists are just as likely as humanities professors to make generalizations about academia based on their own experience, but I was struck yesterday by a glaring example in the Sunday NY Times Magazine by Michael Ignatieff. The article ("Getting Iraq Wrong") is about Iraq, the war, and the experience of a war supporter changing his mind. It is written by an academic turned politician, and contains musings about the difference of perspective of an intellectual/academic as compared to a politician. For example:

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with.

The author is writing about his experience as a political science professor, but it struck me that few science professors could write that sentence. Even those of us who do research that is not immediately applicable to society are aware that what we do is not completely disconnected from the world. I can appreciate that even 'false ideas' can be interesting to discuss intellectually, but obviously false ideas are quickly abandoned in science (though I may be quickly proved wrong by diligent commenters who can think of counter examples).

This essay therefore interested me, not only for its discussion of the Iraq situation, but for how it made me think about academia. I tend to think of science professors as disconnected from society because what we do can be so difficult for other people to understand. Yet, when I read about the difference between intellectuals (i.e., political scientists) and politicians, I wondered if the difference wasn't even greater for some fields of the humanities.

I don't have time to develop that thought further -- I am sitting at an airport gate during a flight delay as I type.

In closing, for now, I will add one more thought, so as not to disappoint those who like to accuse me of twisting everything through a gender filter.. here is an Ignatieff quotation that caught my eye:

An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead.

[yes, I know, it is awkward to interrupt a beautiful sentence with 'his or her'..]

It's About Me

Is it OK (ethical) to help write a letter of reference for yourself? (for example, for jobs, promotions, awards)? From what I've seen, these situations are not uncommon. Perhaps I am ethically challenged in this respect, but I think it is OK if a candidate supplies information/text for a letter, as long as the ultimate letter writer agrees with the information and supplies additional information/text.?

You Can't Take Me Anywhere

A colleague recently told me that he was "taking" his wife on a vacation. [He also mentioned that it was her idea and he'd rather work.] I couldn't help picturing him picking his wife up like a piece of luggage and carrying her to the airport. I tried to recall whether I have ever "taken" my husband anywhere, and I really don't think I have. I don't think he has taken me anywhere before either. We have, however, traveled together many times. Even if the trip is specifically the idea of one of us and/or one of us does the planning etc., neither of us would think of it as "taking" the other person. It's a curious phrase to use for a significant other.

Men Are So Special

For those who know me, the title of this post is a clear signal that I am gearing up for a visit with my family, in which the men are special and the women live to make the men happy and comfortable. I will enter a world in which the women spend endless hours cooking and cleaning, and the men sit on the deck drinking and talking about war and sports. Every once in a while, a man will be asked to do something manly, like carry something heavy.

Last year, I watched incredulously as my mother asked an ancient and decrepit male relative to carry something heavy that I knew would be difficult for him but easy for me. I said “I can carry that”, but this bizarre and emasculating suggestion was met with frowns and then ignored. Will I never learn?

And no, I don’t wish I could sit out on the deck with the men. Most of them are boring. Some of them are scary. I’d rather chat with my mother and aunts and cousins in the kitchen, but I can never stop feeling angry about the extreme gender role segregation in which the women are servile and the men are Men.

In recent years, my mother has been increasingly involving my daughter in the Women’s Chores, and I don’t think my daughter has yet realized that her male cousins aren’t expected to do anything.

It might be easier to endure these family visits if I could get away once in a while and take a break from making sandwiches for my uncles, but our family get-togethers occur on an island, in a house surrounded on 3 sides by tall trees and on the fourth side by a cliff. I think it would be easier to escape from Alcatraz.

My husband does not come on these trips. He is still traumatized by previous trips when he had to sit on the deck and drink with my insane male relatives. I in turn do not accompany him on visits to his family, and this mutual avoidance of visits to our respective ancestral homes pleases us both. His family is even stranger than mine.

My mother has already started to prepare for the big family get-together by asking me to do all sorts of tasks that will make my brother’s visit easier and more comfortable for him. My brother visits the ancestral home once a year. I visit the ancestral home once a year. Yet, somehow, his visits are more special than mine, and I have to make accommodations for him, not at his request (he is oblivious) but at my mother’s request.

In her most recent communication, my mother told me that it was really nice of my brother to arrange his schedule to make this visit at the same time that I will be visiting, and so I should do X, Y, and Z to make sure that his visit does not require any difficulties for him with regard to parking his giant SUV, having the food he most enjoys, and spending time the way he most wants to. If I don’t do these things, he might not visit again for several summers and it would be my fault. Is it too late for her to read a parenting book that explains that this type of behavior is really not appropriate? I have tried talking to her about this, to no avail.

Between my family and my career, I encounter a wide variety of sexist beliefs and behaviors, and I still fundamentally don’t understand any of it.

Back Burner

I don't know if this story will inspire or depress..

Many years ago when I was a graduate student, I got interested in a certain 'side project'. It was just something that captured my interest, but I knew it wasn't important enough to make a major focus of my work. For about 3-4 years, I occasionally worked on this project with 2-3 other friends from grad school, slowly collecting enough data to start figuring things out. When I became a professor, I advised an undergrad student for a senior thesis on the topic, and we wrote a paper together. That was good, but that paper just scratched the surface, and I felt strongly that there were more things to investigate. But again, it was never a priority.

Over the years, I never quite gave up on the project. I kept thinking about it, acquiring new data, and writing bits and pieces of a manuscript. The work sort of became a joke with some of my grad school era friends. They would ask "How's Project X going?" and I would say that it was still going.. slowly as ever. But not long ago, I finally finished the manuscript with help from a few grad school friends, it got pretty good reviews, and last night (late of course, as is fitting for a manuscript that took insanely long to construct), I resubmitted the revised version.

One of the things I like most about this paper is that all my co-authors are friends from grad school, even though we now work on different research topics. I told one of my former professors from grad school about the paper, and he was very pleased. It made me realize that I would also find it thrilling if some day a group of my former grad students get together and write a paper, independent of anything they ever worked on with me.

Academic Ex

This week's installment of "Dear Prudence: Advice on manners and morals" at slate.com has the sad tale of an academic couple's relationship that ended acrimoniously. They are in the same field, so encounter each other at meetings and have many colleagues/friends in common. This particular difficult situation is an occupational hazard for academics, and the potential for it to occur is perhaps especially likely for women in science/math/engineering because it is so common for us to be in a relationship with someone in the same field. If a break-up is accompanied by hostility, immaturity, indiscretion, and/or a tendency to gossip, the result could possibly harm the career of one or both members of the ex-couple.

I have been somewhat fortunate that most of my pre-marriage relationships involved men who have subsequently either left academia or have a very low profile, so I seldom, if ever, encounter them. There is really only one I greatly dislike seeing at conferences. I could certainly do without that, but at this point, he is so irrelevant to my life that it is mostly just irritating to run into him at a conference.

FAQ:

Q. What does your husband, who is in the same field, think about all this?
A. In general, he doesn't have a problem with the fact of my academic ex-boyfriends, and in the particular case of the loathsome one, he feels sorry for the guy and is very polite to him when they run into each other at meetings.

Q. Does your husband have academic ex-girlfriends, thereby making conferences a minefield of ex-'es for the two of you?
A. He had accumulated a number of ex-girlfriends by the time we met, but none of them are academics.

Job Hazards

At a recent medical check-up, I was asked if my job or hobbies involve any 'hazards'. I said no, though of course my job involves hazards (and I don't just mean from crazy colleagues, students, and random people). These hazards, such as they are, didn't seem relevant to mention specifically. My profession is listed in my medical record, and that seems like the essential information.

Some of my colleagues who deal with very scary materials have notified their doctors so that appropriate steps can be taken in the event of an accident, but my days of working with the scary stuff are long over. There are some other unusual potential hazards involved with my research, but I couldn't see any reason to mention them.

My department is very good about making sure we keep our health and safety training up to date, though mostly this involves watching videos that are so bizarre that I'm never sure if the people who made them were serious.

Perhaps one of the biggest hazards of my work is related to frequent travel, but that's not a medical issue (unless one's doctor is a terrorist? - sorry, bad joke, I know, but I was in certain UK airports earlier this month and that was not fun).

At my check-up, I was also asked if I am ever harassed or 'made uncomfortable' by people in my work place because of my gender. It's good that doctors and nurses ask these questions so that serious situations can possibly be dealt with or averted, but again, I didn't see any point in answering yes. I suppose the most accurate answer would be "Now and then, but no more than most women in my job deal with routinely".

Recently Cited

The topic o' the day is Citations, as in one's personal citation record. The topic was inspired by a conversation with a colleague earlier today about citations, a topic of great interest/obsession in the corridors of academe, at least among scientists and engineers -- perhaps humanities people are not so afflicted by this(?).

When we talked, my colleague was en route to the library -- the actual physical library on campus -- to read an ancient (1993) article. He mentioned a hypothesis that was discussed at a recent conference he attended: namely, that the likelihood that pre-mid-1990's papers will be cited is lowered because many journals do not have their entire archive available online. Perhaps online publishing has contributed to the precipitous decline of citations of papers published before about 1996?

There are of course 'classic' papers from days of yore that are cited again and again, in some cases because they are great papers and in some cases because it's easiest to cite the same papers (snowball effect). Some 'old' papers are no longer relevant, and that just shows the exciting pace of science, but it would be tragic if the wisdom of pre-1990's papers is lost just because the articles aren't available online.

I checked my own citation record just now, making one of those zippy graphs that you can do in Web of Science, and there is an abrupt upward spike that corresponds to the year after which electronic articles are widely available. No, I'm not going to conclude anything from this one anecdotal record that doesn't contain nearly enough data to evaluate. There are other explanations for the spike exactly at that time. Nevertheless, it's intriguing how neatly it matches the hypothesis my colleague described.

Some of my colleagues could tell you their citation statistics very exactly and give weekly updates. I seldom check my citations, though when I do, it is typically for one of two reasons: (1) to see if there are new papers that would be of interest to me on certain topics and that I want to be sure I haven't missed in my perusal of journals; and (2) to check on a certain paper of which I am particularly fond.

I know the latter reason doesn't sound too sane, but there is a paper of which I am particularly fond because it was so much fun to write. It's a fairly short paper, so it doesn't have all that emotional/psychic baggage that some longer papers have. Fortunately, it is doing fine, so I will have to put off for now any brooding about how misunderstood my work is.