Category Archives: Academia

Hey, where’d that gravy train go?

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From Inside Higer Ed, there are reports that the end of regular increases in NIH funding (such that there will soon be a double-digit decline in the purchasing power of the NIH budget) are stressing out university researchers and administrators:

At Case Western Reserve University, a decline in NIH funds contributed to a budget shortfall of $17 million below projections for the 2006 fiscal year. NIH funds are key at Case — and at many institutions the NIH is the largest outside source of research support.
While NIH officials have touted the fact that the number of new competitive grants will increase next year, they are slower to point out that a decline in the number of renewals for existing projects more than offsets the increases. Some projects that researchers thought were shoe-ins for refunding, such as the university Alzheimer’s Center that had been supported by NIH since 1988, are among those that lost NIH funding.

Why are officials always slower to point out the bad news?

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Women and science: cultural influences.

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Regular readers of this blog know that I periodically muse on the question of why there aren’t more women in science. But since I’m not, say, an anthropologist, my musings have been rooted mostly in my own experience and the experiences of people I know.
Well, the Summer 2006 issue of Washington Square, San Jose State University‘s alumni magazine, has an article — including interviews of an anthropologist and a sociologist — entitled “A difficult crossing: Obstacles that keep women from science” (pdf). Some evocative anthropological insight from that article after the jump.

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Education gaps.

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I want to note three recent articles about science education. They may be dots worth connecting to each other, or they may not. I welcome your hypotheses, well grounded or tentative.

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Regalia retrofit.

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I have a soft spot for commencements. And, as I get on in years, that spot gets even softer.

Part of it, undoubtedly, is because recognizing the hard work and accomplishments of the new graduates is so much more fun than the grading that immediately precedes it. But for me, part of what grabs me is the feeling that what I’m doing — the notion of education and its larger value that I’m trying to impart — connects me to a tradition that is hundreds of years old. One visible sign of that connection is the academic regalia that graduates and faculty alike wear to commencement ceremonies. In the medieval universities, when education was recognized as a calling (and was generally undertaken to serve the church), the students and the teachers wore clerical-looking gowns all the time. While some of us get away with wearing blue jeans and smark-alecky T-shirts in our teaching, the academic gowns we wear at graduations and convocations connect us to this tradition.

But I’ve had issues with the academic regalia I purchased on the occasion of the conferral of my Chemistry Ph.D. **cough** 12 years ago:

  1. The gown wouldn’t stay closed.
  2. The hood wouldn’t stay anywhere near where it was supposed to (translationally or rotationally).

My pet theory on this is that the makers of academic regalia for purchase hate professors and want them all to look like fools. (Rented regalia tends to come equipped with zippers and other such conveniences.) But no longer will I be using binder clips to keep my regalia in formation. In preparation for this year’s commencement ceremonies, I have undertaken a regalia retrofit. Details (and photos) after the jump.

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