Publication Star

I have been blogging about conference posters for fourteen years. Many people have told me that my blog helped them win a poster award.

Today, I finally shared a poster award!

This certificate is for an encore presentation of our poster, “Are conference presentations accessible? Insights from an online survey to improve equity.” This is a project I was invited to work on last year. It’s been shown at a couple of meetings of the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals.

The “Publication Star” award is for the poster that the judges most want to see written up in  a manuscript and published in a journal. That award category is the most academic thing ever. “You win an award! Your prize is... to get back to writing, you layabout!” 😶

You can read the poster at the conference website. This version has a seven and a half minute video by lead author Emily Messina explaining the works.

The poster is also part of our FigShare collection of material related to this project. You can compare and contrast versions 1 and 2 of the poster, presented at European meeting in January and the American meeting this month.

External links

International Society of Medical Publication Professionals

Poster awards for 19th ISMPP meeting

Texas in lead to be first state to eliminate tenure

The Texas senate passed Senate Bill 18 a couple of days ago. If approved, the law would eliminate tenure in Texas public universities starting fall of 2024.

This is deeply disappointing. Both the bill itself and the weirdly limited reaction from higher ed. Higher ed leaders should be on every news channel, every talk show, writing op eds about why tenure is valuable. The response is nowhere near what it needs to be.

Is the loss of tenure on par with states that are allowing kids to work in factories again? No. But it’s part of the same small minded and regressive mentality.

Anyway, you can check the progress of the Texas bill on the Texas Legislature website.

Related posts

Tenure in US higher education is under threat, and I’m not sure it can be saved

Tenure in US higher education is under threat, and I’m not sure it can be saved

Texas, where I used to work, is considering legislation that would end tenure in its universities.

Needless to say, I think this is a horrible idea. Texas already had post-tenure review (every five years). I know, I went through it.

As much as I am concerned about the legislation, I am even more concerned about the apparent lack of reaction to it. This should be the five alarm fire for American higher education, all hands on deck emergency type of reaction. And I’m not seeing that.

How did we get here? I’ve long has a suspicion that tenure was becoming increasingly vulnerable to attack because the job market for academics has been so tight for so long. When I’ve seen moves to curtail tenure, universities usual response is, “We won’t be able to attract talent, people won’t come to a place without tenure.”

Well, when the educational system has been churning out far more qualified candidates than jobs for decades, that threat rings hollow. A lot of people will take their chances at a job without tenure, because people have to eat and people want to work in the fields they trained to work in.

I hope these bills will die in committee, as many do. But I’m not feeling optimistic.

External links

A Texas trilogy of anti-DEI, tenure bills

New Texas bill would end tenure for college faculty

How Republicans’ threats to tenure and diversity might undercut their own efforts to advance Texas’ universities

Tenure was already in decline. Now some Republicans want it gone from colleges for good.

I think that “intelligent design” bill died

I’d been occasionally checking the West Virginia bill tracker for the progress of the “intelligent design” bill (Senate Bill 619) that made it out of the Senate’s education committee. Every time, I saw the bill still in the House Education Committee, so I thought it was still possible that it might move forward.

But the legislative session ended last month. The bill tracker makes no note the end of the session, which is why I missed it. The bill never make it out of committee for a vote.

I think that means the bill in its present form is done?

Related posts

That “intelligent design” bill hasn’t died yet