I don’t usually go looking for a fight, but there are some cases where I’ll make an exception.
You know, of course that I’m a big fan of DonorsChoose. And you’ll recall that PETA’s tactics make them a problematic organization as far as I’m concerned regardless of what your views on animal welfare or animal rights might be.
So, when PETA takes a swing at DonorsChoose, of course I want to jump in off the ropes and swing back. What’s PETA’s issue with DonorsChoose?
Category Archives: Politics
If you enter a dialogue, do you risk being co-opted?
On my earlier post, “Dialogue, not debate”, commenter dave c-h posed some interesting questions:
Is there an ethical point at which engagement is functionally equivalent to assent? In other words, is there a point at which dialogue should be replaced by active resistance? If so, how do you tell where that point is? I think many activists fear that dialogue is a tactic of those who support the status quo to co-opt them into a process that is unlikely to lead to any real change because the power is unevenly divided.
Dialogue, not debate.
At the end of last week, I made a quick trip to UCLA to visit with some researchers who, despite having been targets of violence and intimidation, are looking for ways to engage with the public about research with animals. I was really struck by their seriousness about engaging folks on “the other side”, rather than just hunkering down to their research and hoping to be left alone.
The big thing we talked about was the need to shift the terms of engagement.
A concise synopsis of a comment thread exchange.
Yesterday Dr. Isis put up a post that seems to have bugged many of the people who subsequently posted comments on it.
I have no idea whether the commenters on the post intended to convey it, but here’s what’s coming across to me as a reader of the exchange:
Keep holy the furlough day.
In case you hadn’t heard, the State of California is broke. (Actually, probably worse than broke. This is one of those times where we find ourselves glad that our state does not have kneecaps.) As a consequence of this, the California State University system (one of whose 23 campuses is my own fair university) is now dealing with a $585 million reduction in funding. (At my own fair university, the cut is about $40 million.)
None of the options for addressing the budget cuts are wonderful. They have included yet another round of student fee increases and layoffs of significant numbers of lecturers (although they aren’t being counted as layoffs because the lecturers were classified as “temporary” workers, this despite the fact that many of them have been teaching here for a decade or two). And, this academic year, they also include furloughs for the remaining faculty and staff.
A furlough is a period of time for which the employee is not paid, and on which the employee performs no work. Thus, an immediate consequence of a furlough is less pay (for CSU faculty in my bargaining unit, 9.23% less pay for the academic year). However, a furlough is distinct from a salary reduction — it does not effect our health benefits, retirement benefits, and the like, and, at present, the reductions in pay cover only the year from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010. Despite getting less pay during this period, the furlough doesn’t reduce anyone’s base salary. As well, the assumption is that our taking these furlough days (for faculty in my bargaining unit, nine days per semester, 18 for the academic year) saves enough money overall to save some jobs.
We’re shouldering our share of the pain. But, we’re not shouldering an inordinate share of the pain by working on those unpaid furlough days. If the State of California cannot pay for a full academic year of teaching, research, and service activities from us, the State of California will not receive a full academic year of teaching, research, and service activities from us. This is what sharing the pain is about.
In discussing the general issue of faculty and staff furloughs before, I noted the tendency to assume that academics will figure out a way to do the same amount of work (or more) with fewer resources. This is just the kind of assumption that can lead administrators to regard furloughs as a de facto salary cut that needn’t do much to disrupt the operation of a university. Academics unwittingly feed this kind of thinking by prioritizing the needs of others, like our students, over our own needs. But working for free just isn’t sustainable, especially when faculty workload has consistently ratcheted upward and hard-won increases in compensation have never been in proportion to the increased workload.
When the budget is broken, being honest about what kind of faculty workload is sustainable is essential to fixing it.
And here, we’re actually in a reasonably good position because our furloughs are the result of an explicit agreement between the CSU administration and the California Faculty Association. This means that there are clear parameters, accepted by both sides, for how we are to honor our furlough days. Especially helpful is the Furlough FAQ which the CFA has compiled. Among other things, this FAQ emphasizes that furlough days are not workdays with no pay:
Unscientific America: Are scientists all on the same team?
As promised, in this post I consider the treatment of the science-religion culture wars in Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. If you’re just tuning in, you may want to pause to read my review of the book, or to peruse my thoughts on issues the book raised about what the American public wants and about whether old or new media give the American public what it needs.
In the interests of truth in advertising, let me state at the outset that this post will not involve anything like a detailed rehash of “Crackergate”, nor a line-by-line reading of the contentious Chapter 8 of the book. You can find that kind of thing around the blogosphere without looking too hard. Rather, I want to deal with the more substantial question raised by this chapter: Are scientists all on the same team?
Unscientific America: Give the people what they want, or what they need?
In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I’d have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say — so much that I’m breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I’m going to start here with a post about the public’s end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I’ll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I’ll take up the much discussed issue of the book’s treatment of the science-religion culture wars.
Never fear, I’ll intersperse these posts with some that have nothing to do with the book, or the framing wars. Also, there will be new sprog art.
One of the tensions I noticed within Unscientific America has to do with who bears responsibility for the American public’s disengagement with science. Do we blame scientists who have been so immersed in doing science that they haven’t made much conscious effort to communicate with members of society at large? Wretched science teachers? The American people themselves for being too dumb or lazy or easily distracted to “get” science and why they should care?
Book review: Unscientific America.
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.
by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books
2009
In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy — they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public’s broad disengagement with scientific knowledge and with the people and processes that build it.
A conference paper I didn’t see coming.
I thought I’d share a snapshot of my morning with you. For some reason, the internet seems like a good place for it.
The paper promised to be about the evaluation of evidence in understanding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What follows are the notes I took during the approximately 25 minute conference presentation, edited to clean up typos. I’m not naming names; Google will provide if you really need to know.
Coming Monday: our discussion the case of a halted international clinical trial in Cameroon.
Almost a month ago, I told you about a pair of new case studies released by The Global Campaign for Microbicides which examine why a pair of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of antiretrovirals in preventing HIV infection were halted. In that post, I also proposed that we read and discuss these case studies as a sort of ethics book club.
Next Monday, June 15, we’ll be kicking off our discussion of the first case study, “Research Rashomon: Lessons from the Cameroon Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Trial Site” (PDF).