Today Chad has an interesting post about attitudes among academics toward math and science versus the humanities and arts. The general attitude Chad sees on display in his academic milieu is that a gappy knowledge of art history or music or literature is something to be embarrassed about, but when it comes to innumeracy or scientific ignorance, intellectuals have no shame.
Chad writes:
Category Archives: Academia
All that’s left standing between me and my sabbatical.
I’m on sabbatical for academic year 2008-2009. This being summer, you’d think I’d consider the sabbatical officially begun.
Not quite. But I’m getting closer. All that remains:
The system as it currently exists.
Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf delivers a mission statement:
Our purpose here at DrugMonkey is to try to help people identify and cultivate the tools required to succeed within the system of academic science as it currently exists. We did not create this system, and we are not in a position to to “take it down”. We do the best we can to help the people we train in our own labs to succeed within this system, and we try to share some of our insights here at the blog.
In a winner-take-all system like this, there will always be people who do not succeed through no fault of their own. People who are smart, talented, dedicated, hard-working, articulate, persuasive, and who do all the right things sometimes still fail. This is the nature of a winner-take-all system: there is an intrinsic randomness that influences to some extent who succeeds and who fails. It is the same in professional sports, law, medicine, performing arts, entertainment, comedy, business, entrepreneurialism, journalism, engineering, and most other professional career enterprises.
Many of us may not like this situation, but this is how things currently work. Academic science is not a … Care Bears tea party, and wishing that it were is not going to make it so.
I think this is a fine statement of purpose for a blog. But I think the community of academic science could — and should — set its sights higher.
Considering an ethicist’s ‘questionable behavior’.
The press covering the story of bioethicist Glenn McGee’s departure from the post of director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College is hungry for an ironic twist. For example, Scientific American titles its article “An Unethical Ethicist?” What more fitting fall than some self-appointed morality cop going down on account of his own immoral dealings?
Believe me, I’m familiar with the suspicions people seem to harbor that ethicists are, in fact, twice as naughty as other folks. But from the evidence laboriously assembled in the SciAm article, I’m just not buying the picture of McGee laughing maniacally while twirling his mustache and plotting all manner of evil. (To be fair, despite the headline, I don’t think the SciAm piece is arguing that McGee is a villain, either.) Rather, I’m inclined to think that he made a few bad calls, but that the most likely explanation for his departure is good old fashioned academic politics.
Science, motherhood, and the Nobel Prize: have things gotten harder?
In a follow-up to her review of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women scientists speak out by Emily Monosson, Alison George decided to investigate how many women who won Nobels also did the motherhood thing:
I started at the first Nobel prize awarded to a woman: Marie Curie, in 1903. To my surprise, she had 2 children (as well as 2 Nobel prizes). Her daughter, Irene, only managed one prize in 1935, but also produced two offspring. And so it went on. Gerty Cori (Nobel prize for in physiology or medicine 1947, 1 kid), Maria Geoppert-Mayer (Nobel prize for physics in 1963, 2 kids) Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Nobel prize for chemistry in 1964, 3 kids), Rosalyn Yolow (Nobel prize for physiology or medicine in 1977, 2 kids – Yolow writes in her Nobel autobiography that they had sleep-in help until their youngest child was nine – thanks for the tip!)
After this, something strange seems to happen. Five women were awarded Nobel prizes in the 1980s, 1990s and in 2004, but there is no mention of children in their Nobel biographies. Did these women have kids and just not mention it? Or didn’t they have any? Further research revealed that three certainly didn’t have children, but I still don’t know the answer for the other two (and, frankly, it’s none of my business).
Of course, we’re dealing with small numbers here, but this does look like a trend. I don’t know what underlying forces might be responsible, but here are some hypotheses that might be worth investigating:
Blogging and academic research.
As I emerge from my fever, I ponder the latest “Ask a ScienceBlogger” question:
There are many, many academic bloggers out there feverishly blogging about their areas of interest. Still, there are many, many more academics who don’t. So, why do you blog and how does blogging help with your research?
I started this blog as a way to remind my students (and myself) how my subject, the ethical conduct of science, is relevant to lots of things happening in the world right now. Some of those things involve scientists caught misbehaving, or scientific communities trying to figure out what sorts of behavior are productive or destructive. Some of the connections are less obvious, spilling over to issues around education, politics, or the marketplace.
Work-life balance: not seeing integration as intrusion.
For the June edition of Scientiae, Zuska notes:
Taking up space in the world is a Bad Thing for women to do. We waste a lot of energy and time worrying about whether or not we are taking up too much space. …
How do you want to take up space? How do you want to let yourself sprawl, in your professional or personal life?
In the wake of the letter informing me that I had been awarded tenure, I’ve been thinking about sprawl and containment a lot.
A few thoughts on female academics and children.
Since I read it last Friday I have been meaning to say something about this article in Inside Higher Ed about why female academic appear to have lower birthrates than male academics and than female professionals in other fields. Of course, between work and family obligations (and grinding fatigue) it’s taken me until now to get to it.
Is this a clue of some sort?
Who are you calling funny looking?
Yesterday, heading out to lunch with some colleagues, I noticed some of the other people out on the street were … oddly attired. We saw these folks as we were passing by a cinema, so our first thought was, “Maybe this has something to do with the Speed Racer movie?”
And then we remembered the banners, and last year’s Memorial Day weekend in downtown San Jose.
The letter.
In my faculty mailbox today:
After a review of the tenure evaluations and recommendations of the appropriate committees and administrators … I am pleased to inform you that your service to the University merits the award of tenure. I am also pleased to inform you that you have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, effective August 21, 2008.
One less thing to worry about while working through the grading.