When I told you about the infuriating tactics extreme animal rights activists are turning against Dario Ringach for even daring to express his view that animal research can be important, a number of you asked in the comments, “What can we do besides signing petitions and writing blog posts?”
David Jentsch offers some concrete ideas about where to start making your stand:
Time to get mad. Time to speak up.
I need to share with you a situation that is infuriating.
It’s infuriating to me, and I believe it should be infuriating to anyone who values a civil society worth the name.
Harassment drove UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach out of primate research in 2006. This was not just angry phone calls and email messages. We’re talking about people in masks banging on the windows of his house in the night, scaring his kids. Without support on this front from other scientists or from UCLA, Dario abandoned research that he believed to be important so that he could keep his family safe.
Since then, there has been more violence against researchers who work with animals. UCLA started to stand up for its researchers in the face of incendiary devices. Scientists started calling for an end to violent tactics in their journals, and in petitions, and in demonstrations.
As someone with experience being on the receiving end of such tactics, Dario stood up to decry their use against other scientists.
Intelligence, moral wisdom, and reactions to the University of Alabama-Huntsville shootings.
From a recent article in the New York Times considering University of Alabama-Huntsville shooter Amy Bishop’s scientific stature and finding it lacking, this comment on why so many denizens of the internet think they can understand why she did what she did:
Why did people who knew Dr. Bishop only through reading about her crime make excuses for her?
Joanathan D. Moreno, a professor of medical ethics and the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks reactions have to do with a long tradition that goes back to Plato. The idea, he said, is that someone who is very intelligent is assumed to be “morally wise.” And that makes it hard to reconcile the actions of Amy Bishop, with her Harvard Ph.D., her mantle of scientific brilliance.
“There’s a common-folk psychology,” Dr. Moreno said. “If you are that smart, you know the difference between right and wrong.”
“That is what’s going on,” Dr. Moreno said. “In cases like hers that contradict the framework, we look for excuses.”
Ask Dr. Free-Ride: True love waits (until the end of the semester).
By email, a reader asks for advice on a situation in which the personal and the professional seem like they might be on a collision course:
I am a junior at a small (< 2000 students) liberal arts college. I got recruited to be a TA for an upper division science class, and it’s going swimmingly. I’m basically a troubleshooter during labs, which the professor supervises. The problem is that I’ve fallen for one of the students, also a junior. Is it possible for me to ethically date her? The university’s handbooks are little help–sexual harassment is very strictly prohibited, but even faculty are technically allowed to date their students–and my instincts keep flip-flopping. On the one hand, teacher-student relationships are automatically suspect, but on the other I’m not sure that it’s significantly different from TAing the close friends that are in the class.
I obviously have no intention of changing grades or doing anything resembling sexual harassment, and I’m pretty good (sometimes too good) at being objective and keeping work and my social life separate. The grading is also pretty objective, and the professor goes over it to be sure my grades are reasonable. If it is possible, what do I need to look out for? Do I need to inform the professor (she knows I’m friends with the subject of my infatuation)? And in the event that we do go out, do I have to tell her that I grade her tests and labs (it’s unusual for a TA to grade in upper division courses in our department)? It seems like it might be easier if she didn’t know, but it would be at least lying by omission.
I know this probably sounds like it ought to be addressed to Dan Savage, but I’d really appreciate your advice and any advice your readers might have.
Thanks so much,
“Forbidden Chemistry”
I’ll allow as how Dan Savage knows a lot, but when was the last time he thought about the ethical challenges of power gradients in educational and training environments?
Ethical use of student labor.
MommyProf wonders whether some of the goings on in her department are ethical. She presents two cases. I’m going to look at them in reverse order.
Case 2: Faculty member is tenure-track and he and I have collaborated on a paper. He was supposed to work on the literature, and sends me a literature review. It reads a little strangely to me, and I check the properties and find that it was actually written by an undergraduate in one of his classes. I write back to him and ask if that undergrad should be an author on the paper, since it would be a fairly major contribution, and he says yes, he forgot. This faculty member is assigned a graduate student each semester. This semester, the faculty member’s graduate student comes to me and said his work has included collecting and analyzing all the data and writing substantial portions of the lit review, but the student is not being credited on the final paper.
This case embodies a number of problems of which we have spoken before, at length.
Indeed, it bears some striking similarities to a case we considered a couple years ago. (In that case, an undergraduate research intern was helping an advanced graduate student in the research group to round up the relevant literature background for their research project … and the undergraduates summary of that relevant literature crept, word for word, into the graduate student’s dissertation.) Here’s what I wrote about that case:
Video of the UCLA panel discussion on animal-based research.
As promised, here’s the video of the February 16, 2010 panel discussion at UCLA about the science and ethics of animal-based research, sponsored by Bruins for Animals and Pro-Test for Science.
UCLA Panel on Science and Ethics of Animal Research from Dario Ringach on Vimeo.
The video runs for about 2.5 hours, so you might want to grab a glass of water or a cup of coffee before you launch it.
Friday Sprog Blogging: more on pseudonymity.
Although I swear that the Free-Ride offspring have not read the relevant prior posts!
While walking home from school:
Younger offspring: From now on, in the sprog blogs, can you call me “the small, silent one”?
Dr. Free-Ride: Why? You’re neither small nor silent.
Elder offspring: Definitely not silent. I live with you, I know.
Some preliminary thoughts on the UCLA panel discussion on animal-based research.
The panel discussion took place, as planned, on the evening of Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at UCLA. The hall was well-populated, if not completely packed, with members of the UCLA community. (Honestly, for week 7 of a 10-week quarter, during a spell of lovely weather, I’m impressed they had such a high turnout of students.) There was also a serious security presence (which the university felt was needed in light of past instances where strong feelings have been displayed in more than just words).
Both Pro-Test for Science and Bruins for Animals deserve huge props for all the work they put into planning and coordinating the event. For their troubles, Bruins for Animals had to put up with a fair amount of abuse from people who were nominally on their side. Nonetheless, they stuck to their guns and worked very hard to create an event that was a dialogue, not a debate.
The event itself was videotaped (from two cameras), with the hope that the picture and sound quality will be good enough that the video can be posted online. When it is, I’ll post a link to it so you can see it for yourself. In the meantime, I’ll give you my impressions as a participant (which is to say, you shouldn’t count on my for an account that is complete in all its details or even very objective).
Impediments to commenting worth typing into a text box.
On the post where I asked you what made you feel welcome to comment on blogs and polled you on what would make you unlikely to comment on a post, friend of the blog Eva notes in a comment:
One of the bloggers at nature network is currently polling (silent) readers about what makes them not comment. Registration requirements are in first place at the moment, followed by the mysterious “another reason”, so I’m curious to hear what the other reasons were, and whether they overlap with anything from your poll!
So, in the interests of sharing the information gathered by my (decidedly unscientific) poll of my readers, here are the responses people who picked “other” in my poll typed into that text box:
Collegiality matters.
Abel has a thoughtful post on the horrific faculty meeting shooting at University of Alabama Huntsville this past Friday. New information seems to come out every few hours on the shooter, Dr. Amy Bishop, a biologist at the university who had been denied tenure, and I’m nowhere near ready to weigh in on the particulars of the case (at least, not with anything smarter than my viscera). But I do want to say just a little on a pair of questions Abel posed in his post:
- Do you think that lack of collegiality is grounds for denial of tenure for a candidate that otherwise meets the basic quantitative criteria outlined in university guidelines?
- Do you feel that collegiality – or whatever you want to call it: teamwork, cooperation – should be an important factor in making academic tenure decisions?