The legality of legacy admission

In the light of the “Operation Varsity Blues” college scandal last week, a lot of people were complaining about university admissions generally. I learned that a lot of people:

1. Think university admissions are hopelessly corrupt across the board, and that these cases were not “a few bad apples.”
2. Are super grumpy about “legacy admission.” 

I knew about court cases  about affirmative action (including the current one at Harvard), but I got curious as to whether legacy admissions had ever faced a legal challenge, and if so, what was the basis for keeping it.

I found one case that concerned legacy admissions: Rosenstock v. The Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina. This is the relevant bit about legacy admissions:

Plaintiff also attacks the policy of the University whereby children of out-of-state alumni are exempted from the stiffer academic requirements necessary for out-of-state admission. Again, since no suspect criteria or fundamental interests are involved, the State need only show a rational basis for the distinction. In unrebutted affidavits, defendants showed that the alumni provide monetary support for the University and that out-of-state alumni contribute close to one-half of the total given. To grant children of this latter group a preference then is a reasonable basis and is not constitutionally defective. Plaintiff's attack on this policy is, therefore, rejected.

The questions raised here are, in large part, attacks on administrative decision-making, an area where the federal courts have not and should not heavily tread. Plaintiff has not shown a constitutional reason for abandoning this judicial policy.

The court is saying legacy admissions are okay because the university can make money. And it’s not up to courts to change administrative decisions.

Regardless, I kind of suspect that legacy admissions are going to come under increasing pressure because they are, as the pundits say, “a bad look” for universities.

External links

Six of the top 10 universities in the world no longer consider legacy when evaluating applicants—here’s why

What we know so far in the college admissions cheating scandal

All scholarship is hard

Nicholas Evans wrote:

The solution levied by synthetic biologists is to get more biologists doing ethics. That this is always the suggestion tells me a) you think it’s easier to think about ethics than synbio; b) you want to keep the analysis in house. Neither are good.

Seconded, confirmed, and oh my God yes. I’ve been through several iterations of this in biology curriculum meetings, where I or others have suggested incorporating some non-biology class into a degree program, or even just an elective students funded by a training grant have to take. And the reaction is just what Nicholas describes:

“Why don’t we just do it ourselves?”

The single exception seemed to be chemistry. Maybe there was less suspicion because of the blurry line between molecular biology and biochemistry. Or maybe it was because their department was right above ours and we knew the people better. But when it was ethics or writing or statistics: nope, we’ll develop out own class taught by our own faculty in our own department.

I get a lot of variations of “Is is easier to do this or that in academia?” questions on Quora, too.

In an institution, this attitude of “We know best” is made worse by administrative measurements. Departments are evaluated by how many credit hours they generate. So when I suggest students might take a course taught by the Philosophy or Math or Communications or Psychology department, the response is, “We’re just giving credit hours away.” Since credit hours are one thing that are looked at to determine resources, it’s an understandable reaction. It’s Goodheart’s law in action. The measure becomes a target and changes what the measure does.

Nicholas notes:

The vast majority of people talking synbio ethics have almost no training in ethics. You wouldn’t accept that in the technical side of synbio, so don’t accept it in ethics.

Exactly. We often complain about how people don’t respect expertise on many controversial subjects, like evolution, climate change, or vaccination. But we see the same disrespect within universities for scholarship in different fields. Scholarship in every field is hard, and “My field is better than your field” is a shitty game.

Hat tip to Janet Stemwedel.

The University of Loisiana at Monroe is run by vandals

This is shocking.

From the University of Louisiana at Monroe Museum of Natural History’s Facebook page:

Dear Friends,

It is my sad duty to report to you that the ULM administration has decided to divest the research collections in the Museum of Natural History. This includes the 6 million fish specimens in the Neil Douglas fish collection and the nearly 500,000 plant specimens in the R. Dale Thomas plant collection. They find no value in the collections and no value of the collections to the university. The College was given 48 hours to suggest an alternate location for the collections so that Brown Stadium can be renovated for the track team. With only about 20 hours left, we have found no magic solution yet. To add insult to injury on what was a very hard day, we were told that if the collections are not relocated to other institutions, the collections will be destroyed at the end of July.

While we weep that our own institution would turn its back on 50+ years of hard work and dedication, we will not abandon the collections to the dumpsters. They did not have the courage to inform us face-to-face, but we have the courage to persevere through these dark times.

Oh, in other sad news, we were informed that there will not be any expansion of the public displays in Hanna Hall.

I understand that sometimes universities need to change what they do. And I’ll say that it’s not reasonable that universities support athletics and student athletes. But come on. Giving 48 hours notice over the fate of millions of specimens is ludicrous.

This is the exact opposite of what universities are supposed to do. Universities are supposed to be institutions that preserve knowledge for future generations, not chuck it in dumpsters.

Shame on you, ULM. Shame on you. You’re acting like vandals, not scholars.

I think the only hope for this collection is that enough people draw attention to its plight on social media that the university administration will change its course.

Hat tip to Terry McGlynn.

Update, 29 March 2017: The original Facebook post is gone. Now there’s this one:

Press Release: ULM to donate two collections from Museum of Natural History

By mid-July the fish and plant collections of the University of Louisiana Monroe Museum of Natural History will hopefully have a new home, according to Dr. Eric Pani, Vice President for Academic Affairs.

Several factors led to the decision to donate the collections, which have been stored in Brown Stadium since the museum was moved to Hanna Hall last year. Many of the specimens are preserved in flammable liquid and must be kept in a facility with a fire sprinkler system.

“Unfortunately, the fiscal situation facing the university over the years requires us to make choices like this. We can no longer afford to store the collections and provide all of the public services we have in the past,” Pani said.

Last week Pani told leaders of the College of Arts, Education and Sciences, which manages the museum, of the decision. He met with them again this week. He said the collections, except for some of the teaching specimens, will be donated and relocated by mid-July. The CAES people asked for 48 hours to determine if space on campus could be found and the entire collection retained.

Tuesday posts on social media could have been interpreted that the collection would be destroyed in a few hours.

Pani addressed other statements on social media, including that there would be no expansion of the museum. He clarified that expansion will be postponed for about two years while another project is underway.

The collections in Hanna Hall are open for public viewing; the specimens in Brown Stadium are for research.

Pani said renovations and improvements to the track at Brown Stadium are slated to begin in the summer. The work will raise the track to sanctioned status, allowing meets to be held there and other schools to host track and field competitions. Thus, it will provide an economic development boost for the region.

“It would be an honor for the university to donate the collection to an organization with the space to preserve and display it, and we fully expect to find such a facility as soon as possible,” Pani said.

I’m still kind of gobsmacked that a provost would argue that a stadium should take precedence over a museum because money. A museum represents a university’s primary mission. Sports does not.

This press release is nowhere to be found on the university’s news center.

More additional: Gizmodo features the story and has more comments from the VP for academic affairs, Eric Pani.

Because state appropriations have been cut more than 50% since 2008, we have struggled to provide public services. The collections have not been used for research by our students and faculty much in the last few years but are being used in class. Research use has largely been done by others from loans we have made to them.

Given that, I asked that Biology pare the collection down to something that would fit into a space typical of a classroom and would meet their teaching needs. The rest of the collection needed to be moved.

I asked that they begin to seek other institutions willing to accept our donation and transport it to their new home. As I further explained to them, this work needed to be done by mid-July because of the construction timeline involved in the renovation of the space. The 48-hr period mentioned in the Facebook post was based on their request to locate other space on our campus where the whole collection could be moved. Given what I know about campus space, I doubt they will find anything, so it would be better for them to spend the time looking for someone to accept the donation. However, I am willing to listen if they can find oncamous space. I just don’t want the search dragging on.

Christopher Dick shares an email from Pani. It’s basically the same as the Gizmodo statement.

As the Gizmodo article notes:

You can’t spell Pani without pain.

Still more additional: Andy Farke lays out the problems of trying to find a home for abandoned museum collections.

Without $$$, it's asking the impossible. It costs a lot to transfer even a well curated collection from one place to the next, even under the best of circumstances. ... Space, cabinets, databasing, archival materials, staff time, etc. It adds up fast! This is also the reason why museums are often very picky about what we take as donations or accessions.

External links

ULM Museum of Natural History Facebook post

How a catchy title bit me in the butt

At SICB, the committee I chair, the Student and Post Doc Affairs committee, SPDAC, has a noon event every year. It’s usually some sort of workshop. This year, I wanted something that would complement the society’s incoming Code of Conduct for the meeting ,and wanted more of a roundtable than a presentation.

The title I came up for the roundtable was: “Low on the totem pole: power structures and power struggles in academia.”

I was pleased that I had not used the phrase, “Low man on the totem pole.” It’s an often used phrase (as the picture at right demonstrates), but does exclude half the population.

But the title was called out on Twitter as “cultural appropriation.”

It isn’t great considering that the Society is pushing for more inclusivity, and even has a Broadening Participation Committee (which I was encouraged to attend). And inclusivity is something I try my best to support.

The gist of the argument, as I understood it, was that the use of the phrase was inaccurate: the position on a totem pole in First Nations cultures didn’t indicate anything about power or status.
 My first reaction was to clench up and want to say, “I didn’t do anything wrong!” But after a few seconds thought, that didn’t seem to be a particularly helpful reaction.

The first thing I did was to make clear that the title was entirely my choice, and therefore my fault. That way, if anyone was going to be mad about it, they knew to be mad at me, and not the Society in general or the Executive Committee or anyone else. It was my decision, and I had to live with it.

I also said that I was happy to talk about it. The SPDAC had a booth in the conference vendor room, so I did have a place anyone could come and find me. There was a little more discussion on Twitter, but no face to face conversation.

I had some conversations with some people I trust about this to try to judge just how badly I misstepped.
Having thought about it, I realized that I could have used several other turns of phrase to get the same point across (like, “Bottom of the heap,” say). And when someone makes a polite request that you not use a phrase, and you can think of another one that makes the exactly point with only a few seconds thought, there’s no point in trying to argue that you were justified in using the phrase.

Constant improvement is the samurai way.

Campuses as sanctuaries

My campus is about 85% Hispanic, and we are one of the closest to the US/Mexico border. So we have an unusual perspective on a lot of issues concerning immigration. I’m mostly just quoting this story because I think it’s going to be an interesting one in the next few months.

The Faculty Senate of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley unanimously passed a resolution Friday endorsing the idea of a sanctuary campus. ... The resolution was passed in response to a recent petition signed by more than 1,500 students that asks President Guy Bailey to prohibit campus police or immigration authorities from asking students about immigration status.

My prediction is that President Bailey will do nothing. Because:

Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted in opposition to “sanctuary campuses” Thursday vowing to cut state funding from any state institution that assumes a sanctuary status.

As far as I’ve been able to observe, money seems to be President Bailey’s major motivator for doing anything as an adminstrator. Even the threat of losing state money will probably be enough to ensure compliance from institutions.

The Vice President of Young Republicans at UTRGV Jaime Garcia called the petition reckless.
“We could have stayed UTPA and UTB but we merged to get access to the funds that the bigger schools get here in Texas,” Garcia said.

Non sequiter. I don’t see how the merger is related to any of these issues. It’s also frustrating to see a petition – names on a piece of paper – one of the most notoriously sedate forms of political activism there is, being branded as “reckless.”

Update, 5 December 2016: Called it.

“There is no problem right now, and so, you stand a much greater chance of creating a problem if you make that declaration,” (UTRGV President Guy) Bailey said in an interview Wednesday.

Let’s not take a stand because something might happen. Gah.

Additional, 5 December 2016: In an email to faculty, the faculty senate noted of its resolution:

We do not use the term “University Sanctuary”, but do support our students, faculty and staff. ... We felt that we needed to step-up and not wait until later. We want everyone to know where we stand on this issue.

Well... they do use “Sanctuary campus” to describe what other institutions have done. Here’s the text:

WHEREAS the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) has a mission to “Transform the Rio Grande Valley” through an “accessible educational environment;”

WHEREAS, UTRGV has a goal to foster sustainable community-university relationships and lists “Diversity, Access, and Inclusion” as values;

WHEREAS the Senate and our academic community and peers across the country are concerned about the recent increase in hate crimes and inflammatory language around the United States since the presidential campaign;

WHEREAS there have been repeated examples of threats against women, LGBTQIA-identified individuals, specific ethnic and religious groups, and immigrants during and after a divisive presidential election;

WHEREAS President Bailey sent out a memo on 11/16 that stated, “Please join me in ensuring that all members of the UTRGV community embrace our commitment to a diverse, inclusive, safe, and supportive learning and working environment.” He referred to this list of University policies that support this commitment:
http://www.utrgv.edu/en-us/about-utrgv/office-of-the-president/presidents-message/2016/october-31-2016/

WHEREAS the U.S. president elect has openly discussed eliminating the DACA program that supports our undocumented students and has championed the rapid increase in the deportation of undocumented immigrant community members which could negatively impact our community, our students and their families, our staff and their families, our faculty and friends;

WHEREAS UTRGV has a goal to “Cultivate a welcoming, inclusive, and nurturing climate for all faculty and staff” including a commitment to “foster a supportive family-friendly climate;”

WHEREAS the internal 2011 memo indicates that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are subject to certain restrictions upon entering college campuses should be affirmed post-election; https://www.ice.gov/doclib/ero-outreach/pdf/10029.2-policy.pdf

WHEREAS the president-elect has campaigned on banning Muslims from entering the United States and his cabinet members have in the past suggested a registry of Muslim American citizens;

WHEREAS UTRGV has a focus on Globalization with a goal to “Foster a globally-connected university culture” with an initiative to “Increase the number of global partnerships that align with university priorities;”

WHEREAS UTRGV and its students have benefitted from the 2001 decision signed by Rick Perry that allows undocumented students to establish residency and enjoy in-state tuition, and later he and the Texas legislature allowed these students some access to the Texas Grant program, decisions which increased access to educational opportunities in our community;

WHEREAS over 28 university campuses have declared their campuses Sanctuary Campuses and many more (over 100) in the process of declaring;

WHEREAS UTRGV has the highest number of Senate Bill students in Texas;

THEREFORE, be it resolved that UTRGV be designated an All-Inclusive Campus, where all Vaquer@s are welcomed and supported.

To that end, the Faculty Senate of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, call upon the university administration to take the following actions and/or make these assurances, to the extent legally possible:

1. that the university assign a specific administrative office to assist our DACA students and other students who lack the protections of citizenship on a strictly confidential basis.
2. that the administration send a clear, public message that UTRGV will not tolerate xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, Islamophobic, and racist comments and actions on campus, and that we as a university will not tolerate religious persecution or the trivialization of sexual assault.
3. that the university continue its efforts towards being an allied campus and continue its trainings and inclusivity initiatives for LGBTQIA-identified students, faculty, and staff.
4. that the university avoid compliance with a registry of Muslim citizens, and that the university carry on with its pre-election (11/8/16) processes for admitting international students.
5. that the university make a public commitment to continue protecting student privacy and announce an assurance that it not release any records regarding the immigration status of students and their family members to institutions or authorities who would restrict a student’s opportunity for a quality education.
6. that the university publicly advocate for the continued resident tuition designation for undocumented students and Texas Grant consideration for Dreamer students at the forthcoming state legislative sessions.
7. that campus police will not question anyone’s immigration status or religious affiliation, nor will it enter into systematic partnerships or agreements with outside agencies, including ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, to question the legal status or religious affiliation of our students, faculty, or staff.

*We use Vaquer@s to include all gender identities.

This document was aided greatly by the Petition sent by UTRGV’s Minority Affairs Council, LUCHA (La Unión Chicanx Hijxs de Aztlán), Center for Mexican American Studies, Mexican American Studies Program, Center for Bilingual Studies, Muslim Students’ Association, WAKE-UP (Women Artistically Kollecting Experiencias-Unidas Prosperando), Voto Latino, and BESO (Bilingual Education Student Organization) to President Bailey on 11/17/16.

Credit goes to the University of Oregon FS resolution on the same issue for some of the format and language of this resolution.
http://senate.uoregon.edu/2016/11/15/notice-of-motion-declaring-uo-a-sanctuary-campus/

Update, 13 December 2016: On 9 December, President Bailey sent around an email that basically affirmed that he would do nothing except the stuff the university was already committed to doing.

This message is a response to those concerns and is meant to make absolutely clear that UTRGV is committed to placing student success and safety at the heart of the institution. The UTRGV community includes students, faculty, and staff of many backgrounds, and UTRGV welcomes and celebrates what each person brings to campus.

The following are current practices at UTRGV. We reaffirm these practices as part of our commitment to an inclusive campus community: [snip]

External links

UTRGV faculty senate unanimously backs 'sanctuary campus' campaign
Bailey: Not a good time to declare UTRGV a sanctuary campus
UTRGV not likely to be deemed ‘sanctuary’ campus
UTRGV not a sanctuary institution fit

Competition

Question and answer originally posted at Quora.

Q: If a university were to be created today, how could it compete with MIT, Harvard, and other top-tier schools?

New universities can’t compete with established universities.

I’ve thought about this question a lot, because the university I now work at may be the newest university in the world. It was established September 2015, so is currently about 15 months old as I write this. It has aspirations to become an emerging research university.

One of a university’s major resources is prestige. Prestige attracts students and faculty. Prestige attracts donors. Prestige attracts attention. Prestige gets you the benefit of the doubt.

You cannot create prestige. Prestige is something others bestow upon you.

People perceive universities as prestigious because they are old and have a proven track record. Prestige has very little to do with the education of students or skills of faculty. I’ve met students and faculty from all kinds of universities, and their abilities and skills are not different enough to explain the huge differences in how their institutions are perceived.

Lists of new universities don’t have a 5 or 10 year window; a university 50 years old is still considered “new” (e.g., The 7 best US universities founded in the last 50 years or The World's Best New Universities).

There is no way a university created in the 21st century can amass the prestige of a university created in the 17th century. Age probably stops mattering when you get a century out from the establishment of the institution.

That said, you can certainly do a better or worse job of establishing a research university. You do that primarily giving faculty resources (particularly doctoral students to provide cheap labour) and keeping them as far away from undergraduate students as possible. Professors at research intensive universities might teach a class or two a year; colleagues in my university are typically teaching three courses a semester. This means research universities cannot admit lots of undergraduate students, meaning they are more selective, further feeding into the perception of prestige.

A memo of understanding is not neutrality

Seen on Twitter this morning, from Moosesplaining Max:

A neutral stance on a contentious person is an implicit endorsement, stop kidding yourself.

The moose is right. It reminded me of this quote:

“We understand that there were two sides to this,” he said. “The students that [are part] of that certain student group is opposed to LNG and I hope you understand that there are those who are for it as well. We can’t get involved in either of those sides. We’re simply focused on providing the best educational opportunities for our students.”

And that would be Guy Bailey, our university president, arguing with a straight face that signing a memo of understanding with an energy company, NextDecade, is “not taking sides.” What rot. That’s not even an “implict” endorsement, that’s an explicit endorsement.


I also don’t buy the “We’re just focused on education” argument, either. Why do we have a South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Center? It’s not just to educate people about that; it’s an active effort to improve health in the region. This university does all kinds of things that are not related to education.


The president’s office got over 200 calls about the university’s memo of understanding with NextDecade, and almost all were against it.

I hate the crummy arguments. I wish that administrators would keep it a hundred: say there is a real controversy. Talk about the pros and cons of partnering with corporations. But I so wish they would stop kidding themselves.

Related posts

Is there any money you won’t take?
External links

LNG agreement concerns continue

Is there any money you won’t take?

Here’s a picture of UTRGV president Guy Bailey from a little over a week ago, doing what he’s doing in a lot of pictures: agreeing to take money. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration. There wasn’t a cheque from NextDecade, the other party in this agreement. Instead, the press release says this is a:

(S)trategic partnership to foster STEM-based (science, technology, engineering and math) education programs,facilitate research and job training opportunities for UTRGV students, and promote collaboration between academia and industry(.)

This is not just yesterday’s news, it’s last week’s news. Why am I blogging about this now? Because I missed it. It wasn’t on the university’s home page. It wasn’t in the daily news email we all get. No administrator – not my chair, not my dean, nobody – mentioned it, even though, as a STEM faculty, I should be one of the people potentially affected, nay, benefiting from this partnership, because it’s for STEM education, right? It snuck past my radar, almost as though the university isn’t proud of this partnership. Hm...

The partnership is with NextDecade, a company proposing to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in the region. Here’s how the Sierra Club describes it:

If built, the Rio Grande LNG export terminal would be the largest single source of air pollution in Cameron County, according to its expected emissions. Its construction would require filling in hundreds of acres of wetlands in an area that is critical habitat for the endangered ocelot and Aplomado falcon. There are also concerns that the view of the industrial landscape and associated pollution could threaten the Valley’s beach and nature tourism industries.

The Brownsville Herald reports (my emphasis)

UTRGV declined to address the controversial aspect of local LNG projects. In an emailed response to The Brownsville Herald’s request for comment on that aspect, university spokesman Patrick Gonzales wrote only that “UTRGV is excited about the education opportunities this NextDecade LLC partnership provides, especially in the STEM fields, for our students.”

UTRGV is going to deal with community controversy by pretending it doesn’t exist. That is not the way to build trust with your community.

Calling this partnership a boon for “STEM education” is too generous. This will be a partnership for TE education. I doubt there will be anything for science or math students or faculty. This might be for engineers.

It’s also coming at a time when many other universities are divesting from fossil fuels.

Is there any money our president won’t take?

Bailey has more or less said that he sees money as the solution to all the university’s problems. When he started, he accepted money from the food industry for diabetes and obesity research. That’s a conflict of interest. This NextDecade partnership is also rife with potential conflicts of interest. I wonder what would happen if biology faculty started doing research on those endangered species whose habitats could be affected by the LNG export terminal?
 A lot of old UTPA signs were swapped out for UTRGV ones last week when the semester started. Maybe they should have looked like this:

Related posts

Show me what you value
H.E.B.’s donation to UTRGV: the gift that keeps on conflicting

External links

NextDecade partnership with UTRGV aims to stimulate STEM-based learning and boost local economy
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Makes Agreement with Rio Grande LNG. Students, Community Leaders Wont Have It
Students, environmentalists, criticize UTRGV education agreement with LNG firm
UTRGV and NextDecade sign MOU

Administrator calls our students “products”

In a recent document, one of our adminstrators was talking about student learning outcomes (SLOs), and wrote (my emphasis):

Identifying which SLO a course addresses is not a huge task. It only ensures that students learn what they are required to learn so that we send a product out that we are proud of.

Wait. Did this administrator just call our students, “products”? Pretty sure the answer is yes.

When I first ran across this, I was surprised and disappointed. The more I’ve thought on it, the madder I’ve gotten. Our students are not “products.” They are people.

This is just horribly dehumanizing. I only hope the administrator who wrote this will feel a little shame for writing that when this is pointed out.

It’s such a revealing glimpse into the model of education that administrators long to have, which is an industrial model.

As few professors, oops, lecturers, oops, adjuncts, oops, workers, oops, online tutorial programs as needed to churn through as many products with as little variation as possible.

Many others have pointed out this is a trend in North American higher education. But I’ve worked under a lot of administrative teams here. These are attitudes that are specific to this administrative team now, that I have not seen under previous administrations.

Related post

Show me what you value

Campus carry day

August is rarely a happy month for academics. Summer is more than halfway gone, we haven’t done as much research or as much writing as we wanted, and classes are going to start gearing up again very soon.

At my university, and public universities across Texas, today marks the start of an even less happy month. Today, 1 August 2016, is the day Texas’s campus carry law goes into effect.

The sign above, on the door leading to the research labs, including mine, went up Friday. The law permits university administrators to set “reasonable rules” for “campus safety.” (Yes, the wording is vague, which caused no end of difficulties in drafting policy, I’m sure.) Consequently, there is a long list of exclusionary zones on UTRGV campus, including labs.

University administators, and many others, lobbied harder against this law than any other I have seen in my time here, but to no avail. It’s telling that private universities were given the option to opt out of the law, and 36 out of 37 did.

Not surprisingly, the #CampusCarry hashtag on Twitter shows the usual split of rote political talking points, just adding more fuel to me desire for blogging to be my main social media outlet for a while.

And because fiftieth anniversaries matter more than usual to me this year, I can’t go without mentioning that this law is going into effect 50 years to the day after the first major mass shooting in an American university at the University of Texas in Austin. <sarcasm> That was extra classy, Texas legislature. </sarcasm>

I don’t feel safer today. Quite the opposite.

External links

Campus carry goes into effect at UTRGV

Research underemployment

In general, people in science get doctoral degrees because they want to do science. But the opportunities to do so after grad school and post-docs have shrunk dramatically.

Karen James wrote about the prospects of being an unsupported scientist. Shortly after, Terry McGlynn talked about the prospect of self-funding research. Both are expressions of a common frustration: more people are getting trained to do science, but after that “training period” is over, there’s less money for research per scientist than there used to be. It’s getting tighter and tighter, with no end in sight.

While I was turning this over in my mind, two questions came to me.

Who is to blame?

The answer, of course, is nobody is to blame. Funding agencies, states, and universities each have their own, often contradictory, sets of goals and incentives. On science social media, most of the talk rotates around the policies federal funding agencies, neglecting the role of the states, incentives for institutions, and that some trends occur with no help from funding agencies. (For instance, those agency policies don’t seem to account for the growth in master’s degrees.)

The last one – institutional incentives – is is not looked at enough. If I were a university president, even knowing the oversupply problem, if I had a chance to create more doctoral programs, I would do it. There are just too many advantages. You get higher university rankings and more money.

For instance, look at the Carnegie classifications of universities. Their first pass on classifying universities as research (R1, R2, R3) is based on the number of doctoral programs. In my state, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board groups universities by the number of graduate programs, number of graduate students, and research expenditures. (The last is another potentially corrosive influence.)

Why is number of graduate programs and students used to measure research output? It assumes that faculty perform no research outside of supervising doctoral students. Why not number of publications or scholarly products? Universities collect that data. Heck, I’ve lost count of the number of times my university has asked me for my CV.

Obviously, there are potential pitfalls in systems intended to measure academic productivity. But consider what would change if universities were classified more by what research they put out instead of how many training programs and students they have.

Using the number of doctoral programs as a proxy measurement for amount of research capacity of a university is like using the Impact Factor as a proxy measurement for the quality of research articles: deeply, if not fatally flawed for most purposes, but survives because it’s convenient. The difference is there’s no shortage of researchers, editors, and others writing articles and editorials pointing out that the limits of Impact Factors.


Why are there so few solutions suggested to address these problems? 

Everyone likes to support “training.” Nobody’s going to get fired for putting money into training, since education is one of those rare areas that pretty much everyone wants to be seen supporting.

People with doctorates have some of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S. There’s very little concept of underemployment and no balance sheet for missed opportunities. That makes it a tough sell to convince politicians that people with a Ph.D. are a group in crisis.

Like the weather, everyone talks about Ph.D. oversupply, but nobody know what to do about it besides dressing for today and hoping it’ll chance to something nicer soon.

External links

Karen James’s Twitter rant
Self-funding your research program
Refusing to be measured
In the future, all research will be funded by Taco Bell

DoctorZen.net moved

My home page, DoctorZen.net, has migrated over to a new institutional server. The old site will be up for a while until I get a redirect notice up, but it will eventually close as website support for my previous institution (The University of Texas-Pan American) transitions to my new one (The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley).

If you visit the site by a directly typing in the URL into a browser, you should see no difference.

If you bookmarked the homepage, take a moment to check that it links to the new URL:
http://faculty.utrgv.edu/zen.faulkes

You can let me know if there are any problems by emailing me at zen.faulkes@utrgv.edu.

“Hey, did anyone win a Nobel?”

Earlier this week, I got one of those emails that had been forwarded through the administrative chain (Provost’s office to dean to associate dean to department chair to faculty).

“Our Strategic Analysis office need to know what awards our faculty have won!”

I keep wondering why individual faculty are being asked to for this information through email when our institution subscribes to a service called Digital Measures that tracks this stuff. Faculty enter their achievements in the system, and people can pull reports from it at any time. I also wonder why this information can’t be pulled from the annual reports faculty have to submit every year.

Although I hadn’t won any awards, I opened up the spreadsheet to see what they were looking for. First line of the spreadsheet:

Nobel prize.

Eyebrow raise.

I keep looking down the list. Pulitzer prize. McArthur award. Awards that get international coverage.

If a faculty member won a Nobel prize, most universities would have press releases sent to every major news outlet and announcements up on their website out before the first morning coffee break.

The thought that adminstration has to ask, “By the way, did anyone on our campus win a Nobel while we weren’t looking?” makes adminstrators look like they’re isolated in some alternate universe bubble that only rarely connects to our own, and they occasionally manage to break through for a brief peek at what’s happening in the reality of faculty, staff, students, and major media outlets.

The role of caprice in academic careers

Most faculty members get just two promotions in their entire life: from assistant to associate professor, and associate to full professor. Our promotion guidelines (which are pretty standard) say you have to have six years of experience to move up a level. So, you need twelve years to become a full professor.

As I’ve mentioned recently, I had a slow start at my current position. This resulted in me spending a year longer at the assistant professor level than normal. Things picked up for me substantially as an associate professor. I was confident that I had exceeded what was needed to qualify for promotion to full professor.

When I hit my twelve years in my job (two years ago), I asked if I could apply for promotion.

I was told not to try. The way our promotion guidelines were worded, you needed six years experience at each level, not a cumulative number (twelve total). Following the letter of the guidelines, I would have been going up for promotion a year early.

Administrators at the time had told faculty repeatedly that they did not like to people to go up for promotions early. You needed an exceptional reason to get early promotion, though that was never specified what that was. Maybe a Nobel prize or something.

I was okay with that. I generally agree with the idea that early promotion should be exceptional and not routine. I waited until last fall, put in my folder, was reviewed, and had no problem getting promoted.

Then I found out that one of my colleagues applied for early promotion, also from associate to full professor, and got it.

I’m very happy for my colleague, who went for the brass ring and got it. It seems, though, that the main reason this person got an early promotion after I was told not even to try was due to the administrative changes that occurred leading up to the formation of UTRGV. A lot of administrators changed jobs, and we were left with a bunch of interim administrators.

That happenstance difference in administration set my promotion, and the associated $10,000 raise^* back a year. I could have done something with that money.

The loss of money isn’t the thing that bugs me, though. It’s the blind, stinking, clueless luck part of the process that bugs me. One year, one adminstrator says, “No.” The next, someone else says, “Sure.”

Universities have a (deserved) reputation for being inflexible, rule bound bureaucracies. But there is still a lot of room for your career to be affected by unpredictable decisions made by a small number of people.

* My salary is public record, so no point in being coy about it.

Photo by Pascal on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

What does an institution brag about?

There are times it feels like my university is focusing on all the wrong things.

I may be a grumpy prof, but I’m still a prof. I wondered if it was just my confirmation bias. Is there more coverage of stuff that annoys me, or do I just remember the stuff that annoys me?

I decided to do a little survey. I went to my university’s news site. It had the last four months of press releases up. I went though each one, and categorized the press releases into a few categories. (Click to enlarge.)

It’s understandable that the most common press release was to promote upcoming events. Plays, exhibitions, public lectures, and the like.

I was pleasantly surprised to see student success coming up in second place. Showcasing our students is one of the most important things an institution should do. The plugging and cheering for the other members of the university community – faculty, staff, administration, alumni – was surprisingly even in representation.

Some of the things that I thought was getting more attention than they deserved (those who know me can probably guess) weren’t anywhere near as high on the list as I expected them to be. I probably was indulging in a little confirmation bias, but I’d almost like to do a breakdown of other venues, like tweets and media coverage, before I completely chalk my annoyance at news coverage up to my grumpiness.

This time frame (February to June) included the end of the school year, a time when there are lots of “end of the year” awards. I wonder if the distribution of news would be different in the fall semester.

Updating, updating, and updating some more

I’ve had four papers published in the last seven days.

I’m pretty sure this is a record for me. Three came out as part of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology symposium collection I co-organized with Kelly Weisnersmith (two papers open access), and the fourth is a short note about a crab that has been seen further south than ever before (full paper on DoctorZen.net!).

The publication of that last paper, however, robbed me of about half a day. Of course, I tweeted and posted about it. Until it came out yesterday, I did not know the publication details, like the volume, page numbers, and DOI. I started updating my information. That meant typing in information for...

1. My CV.
2. My own website, DoctorZen.net.
3. ImpactStory.
4. ORCID.
5. Academia.edu. 
6. ResearchGate.
7. Mendeley.
8. My institution’s “digital measures” website.
9. Update: Doh! I forgot Google Scholar!

ImpactStory had far and away the simplest process: paste in a DOI. This, to me, is exactly how is should be. Because it is a unique identifier, a DOI should be everything needed to get information about a paper, like authors, the journal it was published in, etc.

I also learned that ImpactStory will automatically import projects listed in ORCID. Meanwhile, many publishers will be collecting ORCID information as part of the submission and publication process, presumably allowing profiles to be updated automatically when new papers come out.

The remaining websites all had many boxes and somewhat clunky interfaces. Academia.edu and ResearchGate require you to enter data over multiple screens.

By far the worst was – perhaps not surprisingly – my institution’s digital measures website. These sorts of “enterprise” software packages always seem to end up being barely functional, butt ugly to look at, and a pain in the butt to use. Instead of a single field (DOI), it has about 24 separate data fields. The exact number depends on how many authors you have to enter (click to enlarge). This makes me glad I don’t publish in large groups where the number of authors can run into double digits.

It asks for a lot of strange information, like institutional “themes” and “city of journal / publisher.”

And this one screen is only for publications! There are similar screens for our presentations, committee work, teaching, and so on. I have no doubt they are probably as complicated, if not more so.

Despite my whinging about the amount of duplication, I don’t think I can just walk away from these sorts of sites. I know I get people who find my stuff from those sites, so I think it is useful to have a presence on them.

Photo by Marcin Wichary on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Top down hiring decision

Faculty searches at universities are usually driven by the faculty. Even if a dean or other administrator usually makes the offer, the search is usually run by faculty, who vote and make very strong recommendations for who to extend the offer to.

Which is why this is a surprise.

The University of Texas Board of Regents has, apparently, hired Dr. Abdullah (Faiz) Rahman as faculty member to join our department. It’s on page 355 in the meeting minutes.

And they’ve awarded him tenure, at the full professor level, up front.

And at a salary 66% higher than any other full professor in the department; about double the average for our tenured full professors (budget data here).

Dr. Rahman interviewed as part of the Valley STARS program, described here:

The ValleySTARs program will permit UTB and UTPA to request funding to cover faculty salary and benefits for no more than three years in support of their recruitment efforts for new “star” faculty to teach in STEM fields. Recruited faculty will be appointed to full-time, tenured positions. It is essential that the quantity and quality of teaching and learning in STEM fields is enhanced by state of the art teaching concepts and technology employed by scholar teachers.

The thing is: the faculty in our department never voted on this. We never voted on whether he met our tenure requirements. Apparently, neither did our equivalent department at University of Texas at Brownsville, who will also be part of the UTRGV in a little over a year.

It’s a very unusual move. And perhaps not one that will build bridges and engender the most good will.

External links

Faiz Rahman

Asking about awards

Just got an email from our administration. They are asking faculty to list awards they’ve won. Awards like being names a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators, MacArthur Foundation Fellows (the so-called “genius award”), being elected to the National Academy of Sciences, getting a National Medal of Science, a Pulitzer prize, or a Nobel prize.

Because, apparently, our university wouldn’t know if a faculty member won a Pulitzer or Nobel unless they specifically asked. “What was the trip to Stockholm in your travel request for, anyway?”

I find it a touch offensive. But I was told I’m being thin-skinned about it.

Things that are always “in the future”

Things that are always being talked about as being in the future, but never seem to arrive:

• Clean, sustainable energy from nuclear fusion.
• A safe, simple male contraceptive pill.
• A doctoral program in biology at my university.

When I  interviewed for this job, I was told a doctoral program in biology was probably about 5 years away. I’ve started my third “five years” here, and the goal seems further away than ever.

SARS a decade on, with a lesson about administration

There have been a few retrospectives the last couple of weeks about the tenth anniversary of the emergence of SARS. There are several articles in the current issue of Science magazine and on their podcast.

A story from that time. This was at a time when the Regional Academic Health Center (RAHC) was not up and running yet. I distinctly remember in a faculty meeting, our then department chair announced that the plans for the RAHC were that researchers there would be doing research on diabetes... and SARS.

All the faculty in the room laughed.

This was so obviously something an administrator said because he or she latched on to what was in the news right then, with no idea of the biology. Lots of epidemics are fleeting. The people in charge were fishing for ideas. I remember someone saying something like, “SARS will burn out before the building ever opens.” And he wasn’t far wrong.

This has remained a great example of why research initiatives should rarely be started by top-down directives. The gap between ideas and practical problems can be too large. There’s too much risk of people on the ground saying, “We need bullets and body armour” somehow being turned into the higher-ups saying, “We’re winning the war on terror.”

Related posts

Who ya callin’ “small”!?
Oh boy, here it comes...
A beautiful white elephant?

External links

The SARS wake-up call
A decade ago, SARS raced round the world; Where is it now? Will it return?