I hold in my hand a letter from our Provost informing me that my sabbatical leave for academic year 2008-2009 is awarded.
Of course, this is contingent on:
Category Archives: Academia
Two scientists (‘we’re not ethicists’) step up to teach research ethics, and have fun doing it.
In the latest issue of The Scientist, there’s an article (free registration required) by C. Neal Stewart, Jr., and J. Lannett Edwards, two biologists at the University of Tennessee, about how they came to teach a graduate course on research ethics and what they learned from the experience:
Both of us, independently, have been “victims” of research misconduct – plagiarism as well as fabricated data. One day, while venting about these experiences, we agreed to co-teach a very practical graduate course on research ethics: “Research Ethics for the Life Sciences.” The hope was that we could ward off future problems for us, our profession, and, ultimately, society.
Why I teach.
PZ tagged me with a teaching meme. The question is “Why do you teach and why is academic freedom critical to that effort?”
Unlike PZ, I knew I had a thing for teaching long before I had a clue what discipline I would end up pursuing. (My first official paycheck for a teaching gig was issued in 1985.) But at this stage of my life, my reasons for teaching are a bit more complex than “I like it,” “I’m good at it,” and “It’s a requirement of my job to do so.”
They’re complex enough, in fact, that I’m going to subvert the question a little and talk about why I teach the two main courses I regularly teach, “Philosophy of Science” and “Ethics in Science”.
Noticing class privilege.
Via Bint Alshamsa, this is a version of a “social class awareness experience” used in the residence halls (and possibly also classrooms?) at Indiana State University by Will Barratt et al. In the classroom, students are asked to take a step forward for each of the statements that describe them; they don’t talk about the exercise (and how they feel about it) until after they’ve gone through the whole list.
Doing this online, I’m bolding the statements which describe my background. Also, I’m including a second list that Lauren added based on the suggestions Bint’s commenters made as to other markers of class privilege.
A few thoughs on conferences.
It’s been pretty quiet here. Not only have I been engrossed in preparations for the Spring semester (classes start today), but I also went to the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference. So it seems like a good time to ruminate a bit on how conferences fit into the patterns of (my) academic life.
Is a fake university a step up or down from a diploma mill?
Saying you’ve seen everything is just asking the universe to do you one better. So I won’t. Still, this story nearly required grubbing around the floor on my hands and knees to find the location to which my jaw had dropped:
Bogus university scam uncovered
Investigation
By Nigel Morris
BBC London Investigations Producer
An international education scam that targets foreign students who come to study in the capital has been exposed by a BBC London investigation.
The bogus Irish International University (IIU), which offers sub-standard and worthless degrees, has been allowed to flourish in the UK – virtually unchecked by the government – for the last seven years.
Let me pause here to note that these are not “sub-standard and worthless degrees” by the lights of your parents (who warned you not to major in philosophy or English or whatever discipline it was they deemed suitably flaky or disreputable) — they are actual fake degrees.
On the slings and arrows of the philosophical job market.
Over at Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott has an essay questioning the wisdom of the “convention interview” in the academic hiring process. As he notes, it is a fairly standard practice for philosophy departments to schedule a round of preliminary interviews for job candidates — those who make the “long list” of applicants still in the running for the position — at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting. Among other things, scheduling interviews at the APA means that the job candidates are getting themselves to the conference on their own dime, and that there’s some likelihood that the candidates will be interviewing for other positions there as well. I suppose the thought is that with everyone coming to the same place at the same time, there’s an increase in the efficiency of the interviews both for the job candidates and the hiring departments.
Of course, there’s a catch: the Eastern APA always falls around December 26 through December 30.
This holiday scheduling is part of what strikes Elliott as inhumane about APA interviewing. He writes:
The ethics of performance enhancing drugs in academe.
In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there’s a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled “Professor’s little helper,” this commentary explores, among other things, how “cognitive-enhancing drugs” are starting to find their way into the lifestyles of professors and students on university campuses, a development which raises some interesting ethical questions.
The questions are sufficiently rich here that this post will just serve as my first attempt to get some of the important issues on the table and to open it up for discussion. (There will also be an ongoing discussion of this commentary on the Nature Network website, in case you’re interested.)
Department of poetic justice.
Grades are due this Friday. Last Friday, the grader assigned to one of my courses was supposed to get me the grades for the online reading discussions that he was weeks behind on grading.
He didn’t.
Tenure decisions.
In light of the ongoing flap about Iowa State University’s decision to deny tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, I thought it might be worth looking at an actual university policy on tenure — the policy in place at my university — and considering the sorts of judgments required by policies like this. The take-home message is that tenure can’t be taken as a “sure thing” if only you produce a certain number of publications.