If memory serves, today is the day that the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association draws to a close. That meeting, always conveniently scheduled to fall in the interstices between Christmas and New Year’s, and more often than not located in some East Coast city with nasty winter weather (this year, Philadelphia), is traditionally where philosophy departments from U.S. colleges and universities (as well as a few from elsewhere) conduct preliminary job interviews.
Except this year, apparently, a great many job searches have been frozen or canceled, owing to the fact that exploding economic markets have depleted endowments and state budgets and probably baskets of puppies and kitties and bunnies and chicks. There’s some higher-than-average probability that a lot of the people at the Eastern APA this year actually spent most of their time giving and listening to papers. I can’t even guess whether that would be more fun or less fun spending four days in the dance of presenting yourself as the ideal candidate (or, on the search committee side of the dance, of trying to discern from how those you are interviewing present themselves who might in fact be a good fit for your position and a good colleague in your department).
Since I’m not in Philadelphia but in sunny Los Angeles County at the moment, this is mostly idle speculation. However, during one of my infrequent sabbatical visits to my departmental mailbox a couple months ago, I retrieved a letter soliciting my application for a position in a philosophy department not my own.
Category Archives: Academia
Faculty unions: organizing when your day-job is a labor of love.
In spring of 2007, after nearly two years without a contract, the faculty of the 23 campuses of the California State University system (of which my university is a part) voted to ratify a contract. Among other things, that contract included raises to help our salaries catch up to the cost of living in California. (Notice the word “help” in that sentence; the promised raises, while making things better, don’t quite get the whole job done.)
The negotiations for this contract were frustratingly unproductive until my faculty union organized a rolling strike that was planned as a set of two-day walkouts at each of the 23 campuses in the system. For most classes, this would have meant losing one instructional day, which would minimize the impact on individual students. As well, a two-day rolling strike would make it pretty pointless for the administration to try to bring in replacement workers. Even with syllabi in hand, our courses are not easily staffed with subs on short notice. (Reasonably, someone would need my notes — some of which are pretty darned cryptic — and if I’m walking a picket line, I’m not going into my office to dig out my notes and hand them over to a scab.)
When strike dates were announced (and, we are told, with some serious political pressure behind the scenes to avert a strike that would have garnered national and international media coverage), the administration came back to the bargaining table with a contract the negotiating team deemed reasonably good (a judgment with which the faculty showed its agreement by voting to ratify the contract).
The staggering thing to me is that we went almost two years without a contract before we could bring ourselves to the point where we were ready to strike.
Now, because California is in the throes of yet another budget crisis, the Chancellor’s office is making noises about revisiting the contract currently in force and renegotiating those promised raises. (Apparently, the state might not be able to afford them, even though we seem to be able to afford raises for administrators.) So the faculty may find themselves in the position of having to fight to get what was promised in the last round of fighting.
There are certain features of a good many faculty members that seem to make it hard for us to embark easily on a job action. Because we’re back in negotiation mode a lot sooner than expected, I think it’s worth examining them.
Excuses for discounting people.
In a comment on another post, Alex gently reminds me that what counts as a leak from the science/technology/engineering/math pipeline depends on your point of view:
Students plagiarize, professor publicizes.
… and the university, in turn, fires the professor.
You’ve probably already seen this story. Loye Young, an adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, warned his students (as we all do) against plagiarism. Indeed, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, he included this statement in his fall course syllabus for his management information systems course:
No form of dishonesty is acceptable. I will promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating, or stealing. That includes academic dishonesty, copyright violations, software piracy, or any other form of dishonesty.
While grading an assignment, Young discovered (at least) six students taking the course had committed plagiarism. Then he followed through on what he had promised in his course syllabus and publicized the names of the six on his (public) blog for the course.
Permanent budget crisis.
There are some newspaper stories that must be pretty easy to write at this point because it seems like they’re essentially the same year in and year out. California is having another budget crisis, and the Californians who are going to take it in the teeth are students — especially students in the California State University (CSU) system, to which the university that employs me belongs.
Access rare books without being made to wear white cotton gloves.
It turns out that the session on electronic scholarship I mentioned didn’t really get into the defining characteristics of electronic scholarship, nor how it might differ from “digital media”. (Part of this had to do with trying to fit spiels from nine speakers into a 75 minute session while still allowing time for discussion. You do the math.)
Anyway, one of the panelists, Stephen Greenberg, is from the National Library of Medicine, and he gave us a peek at some digital materials that warm my old-timey, hide-bound heart. Specifically, I am ga-ga for the Turning The Pages project.
What I’ve learned so far at the PSA.
This is not an exhaustive account of my experiences at the PSA so far, but rather what’s at the top of my Day-Quil-addled head:
My Oxbridge interview.
Drawing on the Guardian article on the sorts of interview questions being deployed by Oxford and Cambridge to “identify intellectual potential” in prospective undergraduates:
How do you organise a successful revolution? And, given the present political climate, why don’t we let the managers of Ikea run the country instead of the politicians?
As a university professor (and one paid by the people of the State of California), I’m pretty sure if I answer the first question my name will go on some list that will make me an unattractive prospect for palling around, at least for those who aspire to elected office.
From the other end of the pipeline: views of science from Yale’s MB&B entering class of 1991.
There’s an article in the 19 September 2008 issue of Science (“And Then There Was One”) [1] that catches up with many of the 30 men and women who made up the incoming class of 1991 in the molecular biophysics and biochemistry (MB&B) Ph.D. program at Yale University. The article raises lots of interesting questions, including what counts as a successful career in science. (Not surprisingly, it depends who you ask.) The whole article is well worth a read no matter what stage of the science career pipeline you’re at (although it’s behind a paywall, so you may have to track it down at your local library).
Because there’s so much going on in the article, rather than try to distill it in a single blog post, I thought I would point out a few thought-provoking comments contained in it:
A drug company, a psychiatrist, and an inexplicable failure to disclose conflicts of interest.
Charles B. Nemeroff, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist at Emory University alleged by congressional investigators to have failed to report a third of the $2.8 million (or more) he received in consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies whose drugs he was studying.
Why would congressional investigators care? For one thing, during the period of time when Nemeroff received these consulting fees, he also received $3.9 million from NIH to study the efficacy of five GlaxoSmithKline drugs in the treatment of depression. When the government ponies up money for scientific research, it has an interest in ensuring that the research will produce reliable knowledge.
GlaxoSmithKline, of course, has an interest in funding studies that show that its drugs work really well.