Category Archives: Academia

Tenure-track faculty and departmental decision making.

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Chad got to this first (cursed time zones), but I want to say a bit about the Inside Higher Ed article on the tumult in the Philosophy Department at the College of William & Mary that concerns, at least in part, how involved junior faculty should be in major departmental decisions:

Should tenure-track faculty members who are not yet tenured vote on new hires?
Paul S. Davies, one of the professors who pressed to exclude the junior professors from voting, stressed that such a shift in the rules would protect them. “If you have junior people voting, they have tenure in the back of their minds, and that would be a motivation to hire someone less impressive than yourself,” he said. In any department with disagreements, Davies added, junior faculty members would also have to worry about offending (or would seek to please) the people who would soon vote on their tenure.
Davies also linked his views to a concern about “standards.” Davies and George W. Harris, the other philosopher who raised the issue of junior faculty members voting, have charged that the department as a whole is reluctant to push nice people to work harder. The two have also raised questions about whether politics and gender enter in some hiring choices, although they have not restricted those concerns to junior faculty members.
“There has to be a check on conflicts of interest between those doing the hiring and the future of the institution in terms of maintaining or even raising standards when standards are at stake,” said Harris. “Here there is no oversight, nor is there in many other places.”

I am tenure-track but still untenured (although I hope to be tenured by this time next year), and I would like to offer some reasons for letting junior faculty vote on new tenure-track hires in their department.

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Extra benefit of the growing ‘green chemistry’ movement.

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There’s an article in today’s Inside Higher Ed on the building momentum in college chemistry courses to make the labs greener — that is, to reduce the amount of hazardous materials necessary in the required student experiments. What grabbed me about the article is that it looks like the greening of the chem labs may not just be good for the environment — it could be better for student learning, too.
First, consider a chemist’s description of how to revamp laboratory experiments to make them greener. The article quotes Ken Doxsee, a chemistry professor at University of Oregon:

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The death of an administrator.

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Zuska reminded me that today is the one-year anniversary of the suicide of Denice Denton, an accomplished electrical engineer, tireless advocate for the inclusion and advancement of women in science and, at the time of her death, the chancellor of UC-Santa Cruz.
I never met Denton, and a year ago my feelings about her were complicated. On one side was her clear public voice against unexamined acceptance of longstanding assumptions about gender difference; from an article dated 26 June, 2006 in Inside Higher Ed:

She was in the audience when Lawrence H. Summers made the controversial comments about women and science last year and she was among the first to speak out against them, telling The Boston Globe of Summers: “Here was this economist lecturing pompously to this room full of the country’s most accomplished scholars on women’s issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day.”
Any gathering of such scholars would indeed have included Denton, who was then dean of engineering (one of her many “first woman” accomplishments) at the University of Washington and was about to become chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Throughout her career in research (as an electrical engineer) and administration, she was known for being a mentor to women — in the public schools, in graduate school, at faculty levels. Last month, she was named this year’s winner of the Maria Mitchell Women in Science Award — named for the first female astronomer in the United States and given to a person or organization who does the most to advance women in science.

On the other side, shortly before her death, Denton had been the subject of a San Francisco Chronicle story about the amount of money the UC system spent on administrator salaries and perquisites.

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And while we’re admitting you to college, let’s throw in the Ph.D. program too!

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Another article from Inside Higher Ed that caught my eye:

The chancellor of the City University of New York [Matthew Goldstein] floated a unique approach this week to dealing with the long lamented problem of low enrollments in the sciences: Offer promising students conditional acceptances to top Ph.D. programs in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) as they start college. …
In a speech Monday, Goldstein envisioned a national effort in which students identified for their aptitude in middle school would subsequently benefit from academic enrichment programs that their own local high schools might not be able to provide (The chancellor described the proposed program as one that could have a particularly strong impact on increasing woefully low minority enrollments in the STEM fields).
Upon entering college, students would be offered a spot in a top Ph.D. science or math program, provided they meet certain performance requirements throughout their undergraduate years.
“It sends a very strong statement to students who have not necessarily had the encouragement … that very elite places genuinely believe in them and, at an early age, they are prepared to make an investment to serve as an incentive for those students to continue to do very good work,” Goldstein said.

Some of my initial reactions to this proposal:

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What ought to be driving college admissions decisions?

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Recently Inside Higher Ed had an article about a study (PDF here) coming out of the University of California on the predictive power of the SAT with respect to grades in college courses. The study, by Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Santelices at the UC-Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, followed the performance (which is to say, grades) of students at all UC campuses for four years and found that “high school grades are consistently the strongest predictor of any factor of success through four years in college”. Indeed, the study found high school grades a stronger predictor of grades past the first year.
The SAT turned out to be not such a great predictor of college grades, but a dandy predictor of socioeconomic status of the kids taking the SAT.
What interests me about this story is not the perennial debate about whether the SAT tells admissions officers anything useful about applicants, but the larger question of what admissions officers — and folks in society at large — imagine should be the guiding principle in deciding who ought to win the competition for scarce spaces in a college class.

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Reliance on professional integrity and personal ethics shouldn’t mean letting the rascals get away with it.

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Zuska sent me an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (behind a paywall, I’m afraid) that’s more than a little connected to the thought experiment I posed earlier in the week.
The article was written (under a pseudonym) by an assistant professor whose nomination for a university award was torpedoed. By a member of his own department. Who was blocking the nomination of the author not out of any particular animus toward the author, but as a way to attack the department chair who had made the nomination.
What fun things must be in that department!

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A few words on names and expectations.

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You’ve probably seen the posts (here, here, here, here, here, and here.) responding to the University of Florida study claiming that women’s names affect the social support or discouragement they’ll get for pursuing technical subjects. (Those with the more “feminine” names will tend to be discouraged from “manly” activities like math, although apparently a frilly name won’t hurt their performance in those activities.) Since the above-linked posts give the reasonable critiques of the research, I’m going to veer immediately to personal anecdata:

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Credit where credit is due (a thought experiment).

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Because not every ethical matter involves serious misconduct, or even conscious efforts to grab someone else’s credit, I thought I’d describe an utterly mundane scenario and canvass your reactions.
Let’s say you’ve worked very hard on a project. You’ve been part of the organizing from the outset. You’ve done a lot of thinking and writing and rewriting. You’ve worked hard to build consensus. You’ve done loads of personal outreach to try to build a community around the project (including “cold-emailing” people you don’t know personally). You’ve been the dependable facilitator. You’ve even shelled out your own money to laminate a sign.

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Summertime thoughts on final exams.

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While our exams were weeks ago, I know that some folks (especially high school students) are just finishing up. So these observations sent to me by a reader may be timely:

I believe that if students are passing their classes with a B and above they should not have to take final exams.
Most students drop letter grades when taking an exam that is an accumulation of material that they have to dig out of the crevices of their brain from 5 to 6 months ago. I cannot remember what I had for breakfast last week; how can we expect our students to try and remember what they learned in January by the time May or June comes?
Students have to take final exams in all classes and spend hours trying to study, just to stress themselves out and end up not doing well.
Yes, this is good opportunity for the student that has slacked off all year to try and bring their grade up, but let’s not punish the students that put in the effort all through the school year, let’s reward them with not having to take finals, in any grade.
I know some schools do this for Seniors, but to me it just makes sense to do it for all grades. In addition, it would be easier on teacher, less stressful on families. (My house was nuts for one month before finals and my Senior took them two week before my Freshman, and I have how many more years of this to look forward to?)
As an example my Freshman had a “B” average in Science before the exam, received a “D” on the exam and wound up with a “C” for the class, and in the midst of all this we had a death in the family. Talk about stress………
Why are final exams given, what is the purpose and what does it really tell you about the student? It should be about what they do all school year, and not one moment in time.

My response after the jump.

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