Category Archives: Academia

Intelligence, moral wisdom, and reactions to the University of Alabama-Huntsville shootings.

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From a recent article in the New York Times considering University of Alabama-Huntsville shooter Amy Bishop’s scientific stature and finding it lacking, this comment on why so many denizens of the internet think they can understand why she did what she did:

Why did people who knew Dr. Bishop only through reading about her crime make excuses for her?
Joanathan D. Moreno, a professor of medical ethics and the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks reactions have to do with a long tradition that goes back to Plato. The idea, he said, is that someone who is very intelligent is assumed to be “morally wise.” And that makes it hard to reconcile the actions of Amy Bishop, with her Harvard Ph.D., her mantle of scientific brilliance.
“There’s a common-folk psychology,” Dr. Moreno said. “If you are that smart, you know the difference between right and wrong.”
“That is what’s going on,” Dr. Moreno said. “In cases like hers that contradict the framework, we look for excuses.”

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Ask Dr. Free-Ride: True love waits (until the end of the semester).

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By email, a reader asks for advice on a situation in which the personal and the professional seem like they might be on a collision course:

I am a junior at a small (< 2000 students) liberal arts college. I got recruited to be a TA for an upper division science class, and it’s going swimmingly. I’m basically a troubleshooter during labs, which the professor supervises. The problem is that I’ve fallen for one of the students, also a junior. Is it possible for me to ethically date her? The university’s handbooks are little help–sexual harassment is very strictly prohibited, but even faculty are technically allowed to date their students–and my instincts keep flip-flopping. On the one hand, teacher-student relationships are automatically suspect, but on the other I’m not sure that it’s significantly different from TAing the close friends that are in the class.
I obviously have no intention of changing grades or doing anything resembling sexual harassment, and I’m pretty good (sometimes too good) at being objective and keeping work and my social life separate. The grading is also pretty objective, and the professor goes over it to be sure my grades are reasonable. If it is possible, what do I need to look out for? Do I need to inform the professor (she knows I’m friends with the subject of my infatuation)? And in the event that we do go out, do I have to tell her that I grade her tests and labs (it’s unusual for a TA to grade in upper division courses in our department)? It seems like it might be easier if she didn’t know, but it would be at least lying by omission.
I know this probably sounds like it ought to be addressed to Dan Savage, but I’d really appreciate your advice and any advice your readers might have.
Thanks so much,
“Forbidden Chemistry”

I’ll allow as how Dan Savage knows a lot, but when was the last time he thought about the ethical challenges of power gradients in educational and training environments?

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Ethical use of student labor.

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MommyProf wonders whether some of the goings on in her department are ethical. She presents two cases. I’m going to look at them in reverse order.

Case 2: Faculty member is tenure-track and he and I have collaborated on a paper. He was supposed to work on the literature, and sends me a literature review. It reads a little strangely to me, and I check the properties and find that it was actually written by an undergraduate in one of his classes. I write back to him and ask if that undergrad should be an author on the paper, since it would be a fairly major contribution, and he says yes, he forgot. This faculty member is assigned a graduate student each semester. This semester, the faculty member’s graduate student comes to me and said his work has included collecting and analyzing all the data and writing substantial portions of the lit review, but the student is not being credited on the final paper.

This case embodies a number of problems of which we have spoken before, at length.
Indeed, it bears some striking similarities to a case we considered a couple years ago. (In that case, an undergraduate research intern was helping an advanced graduate student in the research group to round up the relevant literature background for their research project … and the undergraduates summary of that relevant literature crept, word for word, into the graduate student’s dissertation.) Here’s what I wrote about that case:

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Collegiality matters.

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Abel has a thoughtful post on the horrific faculty meeting shooting at University of Alabama Huntsville this past Friday. New information seems to come out every few hours on the shooter, Dr. Amy Bishop, a biologist at the university who had been denied tenure, and I’m nowhere near ready to weigh in on the particulars of the case (at least, not with anything smarter than my viscera). But I do want to say just a little on a pair of questions Abel posed in his post:

  1. Do you think that lack of collegiality is grounds for denial of tenure for a candidate that otherwise meets the basic quantitative criteria outlined in university guidelines?
  2. Do you feel that collegiality – or whatever you want to call it: teamwork, cooperation – should be an important factor in making academic tenure decisions?

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Good riddance to a pair of academic pretenses.

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Following DrugMonkey’s lead, I’m going to play along on the meme proposed by Female Science Professor:

What tradition or other general characteristic of academia would you like to see eliminated completely?
According to the rules, which I just invented, the things to be eliminated have to be of a general nature. So, for example, the answer “my department chair” or “my university’s moronic president” are unacceptable unless you want to eliminate the general concept of department chairs or university presidents.
The candidates for disposal can be anything to do with academia, from the most momentous of traditions (tenure) to the most bizarre but inconsequential (academic gowns).

It actually took me a little while to think of a candidate for elimination, but once I did, it really grabbed my viscera. (Actually, technically, what I want to eliminate may be two distinct general characteristics of academia, but at their root they’re so closely related that I think they ought to get the heave-ho together.)

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Some reflections on my fifth blogiversary.

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Five years ago today, I put up the first post on a blog that was mean to capture the overflow of discussions and ideas from my “Ethics in Science” class. Back then, I wasn’t entirely sure that I’d manage to maintain the blog through the end of the semester.

FifthBlogoversary.jpg

It just goes to show you that you can’t always tell which of the things you try will become sustainable practices (although maybe the ones that don’t involve exercise equipment have better odds).
On the occasion of my fifth blogiversary, I’m reflecting on a question posed by BlogHer upon BlogHer’s 5th anniversary:
What are five opportunities you’ve gotten because of blogging?

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ClimateGate, the Michael Mann inquiry, and accepted scientific practices.

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In my earlier post about the findings of the Penn State inquiry committee looking into allegations of research misconduct against Michael Mann, I mentioned that the one allegation that was found to merit further investigation may have broad implications for how the public understands what good scientific work looks like, and for how scientists themselves understand what good scientific work looks like.
Some of the commenters on that post seemed interested in discussing those implications. Others, not so much. As commenter Evan Harper notes:

It is clear that there are two discussions in parallel here; one is serious, thoughtful, and focused on the very real and very difficult questions at hand. The other is utterly inane, comprising vague ideological broadsides against nebulous AGW conspirators, many of which evince elementary misunderstandings about the underlying science.
If I wanted to read the second kind of conversation, there are a million blogs out there with which I could torture myself. But I want to read – and perhaps participate in – the first kind of conversation. Here and now, I cannot do that, because the second conversation is drowning out the first.
Were that comment moderators could crack down on these poisonous nonsense-peddlers. Their right to swing their (ham)fists ends where our noses begin

Ask and you shall receive.

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In the wake of ClimateGate: findings of the misconduct inquiry against Michael Mann.

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Remember “ClimateGate”, that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and widely distributed? One of the events set in motion by ClimateGate was a formal inquiry concerning allegations of research conduct against Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor in the Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University.
The report (PDF) from that inquiry has been released, so we’re going to have a look at it here.
This report contains a lot of discussion of how the committee pursuing the inquiry was constituted, and of which university policies govern how the committee is constituted, and of how membership of the committee was updated when members left the university for other positions, etc. I’m going to gloss over those details, but they’re all there in the ten page report if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
My focus here will be on what set the inquiry in motion to begin with, on the specific allegations they considered against Dr. Mann, on how the committee gathered information relevant to the allegations, and on the findings and decisions at which they arrived. Let me state up front that committee decided that one allegation merited further consideration in an “investigation” (which is the stage of the process that follows upon an “inquiry”), and that to my eye, that investigation may end up having broader implications for the practice of science in academia.
But let’s start at the beginning. From the inquiry report:

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Ask Dr. Free-Ride: The university and the pirate.

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Recently in my inbox, I found a request for advice unlike any I’d received before. Given the detail in the request, I don’t trust myself to paraphrase it. As you’ll see, I’ve redacted the names of the people, university, and government agency involved. I have, however, kept the rest of the query (including the original punctuation) intact.

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Ask Dr. Free-Ride: How should I address multiple doctors?

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I have, of late, received a number of emails asking advice on matters somewhere in the territory between ethics, etiquette, and effective communication with members of the tribe of science. While I’m no Ann Landers (as has been noted before), I’ll do my best to answer these questions on the blog when I can, largely so my very insightful commentariat can chime in and make the resulting advice better than what I could generate on my own.
Today we have a question from a reader struggling with the question of how to address one letter to two doctors. He writes:

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