Foobaww first!

A former Texas public school teacher has sent me some stories from their career there. It’s not pretty. The situation is what I also recollect from my long-ago days in a Yankee high school, though, so I don’t know that we can just blame Texas, but it’s true — the system is often set up to give athletes (including cheerleaders) academic privileges that other students don’t get. Student athletes were expected to always pass their classes to maintain eligibility, no matter how poorly they did, and teachers were chastised if they compromised athletic eligibility.

Here’s a letter that was sent out to all teachers at a Texas high school, gently reminding them of what they must do — either pass students or give them an incomplete — so that the football team doesn’t suffer.

Teachers, please remember that we have over 1500 students involved in extracurricular activities who work very hard to have academic success as well as compete or stay connected to the school through their commitment to their organization or team. These students strive to do the right things and have adult coaches or sponsors who support you by working with any student who is not meeting your standards for conduct or academic success. The eligibility status of these students is very important to them, their parents, and to this campus. Please review six weeks grades of 68 and 69 to ensure that those grades accurately reflect student effort, test/assignment reliability and accuracy, and objectivity that can be explained. Please also remember that any student who you are going to allow to make up work or do additional work should be given an “I” instead of an assigned numerical grade.

From the UIL Side By Side
Rules:

Q: Can a student’s grade be changed for eligibility?

After a failing grade has been recorded, the situations in which a student’s grade may be changed to passing and eligibility status restored are only as follows:
(a) an examination of course graded issued by a classroom teacher is final and may not be changed unless the grade is arbitrary, erroneous, or not consistent with school district grading policy as determined by the board of trustees. The board’s decision may not be appealed. (This is also known as teacher or calculation error.)
(b) Extra credit work or work (including re-test) turned in after the grading period or evaluation has ended may not be considered when determining a student’s eligibility for extracurricular activities except in the case of an “incomplete” grade.

Thank you for your support.

Why are they telling the teachers that they have students active in sports? We all know this. We shouldn’t care. The job of a teacher is to make sure the students understand the material, and if their afternoon head-butting practice interferes with learning, students shouldn’t expect special exemptions. Why are they telling the teachers to make sure that “grades accurately reflect student effort, test/assignment reliability and accuracy”? We all do that, too, and not just for the student athletes. An accurate assessment of a student who doesn’t do the classwork should be FAIL.

I love how the administration blithely informs teachers that they should give incompletes to students so they can make up the work they should have done during the term later. That is not right. That is expecting teachers to put in extra work beyond the grading period, to help out the boneheads with extra time and instruction…but I suspect there is no talk of extra pay for teachers who do that.

Hey, I have this brilliant, amazing, completely non-intuitive idea: how about if our schools emphasized academics, not sports, and that extra-curricular activities were regarded as an optional side-issue, completely orthogonal to the goals of the school?

(Also on FtB)

Paul Knoepfler has a blog

Hey, this is good news: Nature included a short opinion piece from a stem cell biologist on his experiences blogging, writing the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog — I’ll have to start following it. He has some good general advice for scientists starting to blog, although I have some reservations about the first bit.

Here are some tips for beginners. Start slowly; wait a day after writing and reread your draft before posting. Try to avoid discussing your own institution, and critique papers or theories in the field in a constructive manner. It is important that you include your own opinions, but do not use your blog to broadcast your opinions about issues that are unrelated to science.

Update your blog regularly, because readers will not visit blogs that they perceive as boring or ‘old news’. Read and comment on other blogs, which will lead people to yours. Get a Twitter account to promote it and dabble with search-engine optimization. And do tell your colleagues about your blog.

Savvy scientists must increasingly engage with blogs and social media. A new generation of young researchers has grown up with an ever-present Internet. Publishers have been quicker than academics to react to this new world, but scientists must catch up. Even if you choose not to blog, you can certainly expect that your papers and ideas will increasingly be blogged about. So there it is — blog or be blogged.

I have to disagree with the suggestion that you avoid discussing anything but the science (obviously!) If you want to engage readers, you’ve got to go beyond the narrow domain of your field — you don’t have to embrace controversy, like some of us do, but blogs are a personal medium, and if you aren’t expressing yourself freely you’re not going to get a wide readership.

Knoepfler implicitly admits this: he has a low traffic site with a niche audience (and there’s nothing at all wrong with that; it’s a model for how most scientists would want to operate their lab blogs, I think).

In an entire year of blogging I have had to censor just six inflammatory or defamatory comments. Despite my blog taking on the anti-stem-cell community in the United States and the misinformation its members peddle, such as the meme that adult stem cells are a panacea that make embryonic stem cells redundant, I have received remarkably few personal attacks from them. I am grateful for that, if puzzled.

This is certainly not because my blog goes unnoticed. True, I started with just five readers a day, but one year later, traffic has increased more than 30-fold and continues to rise. The blog averages 150 visitors a day and sometimes up to 500 a day, made up of a veritable Who’s Who in stem-cell science, and beyond. How do I know? Senior figures in the field tell me in confidence that they read and enjoy the blog, although none has publicly contributed on it — perhaps a sign that there is still a way to go before scientists stop being nervous about blogs.

He shouldn’t be puzzled. I’m not trying to be disparaging, but 150 visitors a day is very low, and what it means is that he’s seeing a very small and specialized slice of the world — he’s got a quality audience, not a snapshot of the general public, and that’s why he’s not getting much pushback. The mention in Nature will get him more visitors, but largely of the kind that won’t disagree much with him; the mention here on Pharyngula will get him a broader audience, but without red meat for argument most of them probably won’t stay.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think there is a qualitative difference between a blog aimed at a specialized audience, and one aimed at wider public engagement.

Do Iowa State football players need to be converted to the Christian faith?

Athletics are a fine part of the college tradition — students come to our universities, and some of them want to participate in sports, others like to watch, and others like to enjoy a non-academic social event. I think some support for our students’ extracurricular interests is a good idea. What I detest, though, is the overpaid coaches and the tendency to set the small group of college athletes apart as something special, deserving of special consideration. Even at my small university, there is a constellation of special programs to serve the college athletes, and it gets rather annoying that this one group with no unique academic ability is granted privileges other groups do not receive.

UMM isn’t too bad in this regard, but then we’re small and everything is on a tight budget. Larger universities are more prone to excesses and waste and the promotion of a separate tier of students (I attended the University of Washington; the football team members were treated as small gods there). Now look at our neighbor to the south, though: Iowa State University hired a Baptist chaplain to minister to the football team. This was opposed by 130 of the faculty, who signed a petition asking that sectarian counseling not be given this privileged access to students, but the coach seemed to take it for granted that he could add another lackey to his retinue.

Much like we have offered our student-athletes access to drug and alcohol counselors, sports psychologists, nutritionists, hypnotists, physical therapists, learning specialists, chiropractors, physicians, etc., we are now going to also provide access to a spiritual advisor.

Well, the chaplain would fit right in with the hypnotists and chiropractors. But I read that litany and wonder why the football team gets such special treatment over other, apparently less important students.

But that’s a different question. The issue here is whether it is appropriate to bring on a Baptist minister as a full-time chaplain to the team. It looks like there are two tiers of privilege: if you’re on the football team, you are a big man on campus, but if you’re a Protestant ball player, you are exalted beyond that. It’s also not exactly clear what this person would do: pray for victory? Lead the team in prayers? Reassure everyone that god really loved Iowa State? It’s a pretty damned useless sinecure.

Except we know one thing this chaplain would do: as a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, his job was to “use the powerful medium of athletics to impact the world for Jesus Christ”. He was a professional proselytizer brought on to evangelize a narrow faith to the football team. The coach basically hired a local shaman to convert a subset of ISU students to his faith.

This chaplain has revealed all in a talk to the FCA titled “Overcoming Adversity”. What adversity, you might ask? His. The entire half hour talk is about he was so oppressed because so many people, including that wicked atheist Hector Avalos, opposed granting him this ride on the gravy train.

FCA Chaplains 2010 – Kevin Lykins Session #4 from Name Brand TV on Vimeo.

Notice that one of his mechanisms to “overcome adversity” was to simply lie about his motivations and purpose in the job.

Kevin Lykins is no longer employed at ISU, but he set a precedent and there is now an empty slot for a chaplain to the football team, and there is push to fill it with yet another useless bozo. I hope ISU alumni will write in and protest — this is an entirely inappropriate attempt to couple an extracurricular activity to sectarian religious belief.

Oh, look. One of the local radio stations has a poll on the issue.

Are You in Favor of College Football Teams Having a Life Skills Assistant/Chaplain?

Yes
60.53 %
No
39.47 %

The video has been abruptly yanked — I wonder why? — but it has been captured and if you really, really want to watch it, you can download it here. I don’t recommend it. It’s incredibly boring, consisting of nothing but self-righteous evangelical babble, but if you really want to see what kind of tedious tool Kevin Lykins is, you can.

How convenient

Gary Bradley, a professor at the Seventh Day Adventist college La Sierra University, has been under fire because he teaches evolutionary biology competently — he doesn’t accept the young earth creationism that SDA dogma demands. The battle is over, though, and he and several others have been asked to resign for great crimes.

According to the Spectrum article, Darnell met up afterward with Beach, Bradley, and Kaatz at a private home, where they watched a National Basketball Association playoff game and discussed the meeting. The recorder kept running, unbeknownst to the four men. It captured “foul language, references to alcohol consumption and unflattering comments being made about board members, administrators, and church leaders,” according to the article. Darnell then sent the recording to a number of key members of the Adventist community, including The Spectrum, reportedly without knowing that it contained more than just the audio of the meeting. Eventually, the recording made its way to Ricardo Graham, chair of the board of trustees.

I think they’re all better off getting out of that crazy place. The absurdity of being pressured to teach lies in the classroom ought to have been reason enough to leave, but that they have employers who want to control what they do after hours in their own homes ought to convince anyone that it’s time to leave.

Synthese scandal makes the New York Times

You may recall the furious debate among philosophers about a philosophy journal, Synthese, that made a tacit rebuke of critics of Intelligent Design creationism in an editorial added after acceptance of a number of papers on ID; it’s not just that they caved to creationist pressure, but that the editors-in-chief went over the heads of the working editors who assembled that issue of the journal to criticize excellent work by rational philosophers like Barbara Forrest. There has been a boycott of the journal; links to various commentaries on the issue can be found on a status page.

Well now the furor has hit the big time, with a summary article in the New York Times.

It’s clear from that article what the problem is: Francis Beckwith, weasely creationist apologist, got his butt hurt by a discussion of his role as a public enabler of bad science. I have long rolled my eyes at every mention of Beckwith — he’s a disingenuous creationist who struggles mightily to pretend that he’s a serious scholar arriving at serious conclusions, despite the fact that his conclusions always agree with those of professional liars and academic frauds. Did Barbara Forrest call him out on his history of baloney? Yes, she did. Is this a problem in an academic journal? I should hope not.

What’s your online reputation?

When I fly off to give talks, I’ve got three basic categories that I choose from: there’s the “science is godless, and here’s why” talk for atheist audiences, there’s the “development and evolution go together like peanut butter and chocolate” talk for atheists or scientists, and finally, there’s the “you better pay attention to the online world, and here’s why” talk for scientists, who often don’t have a clue about blogs and twitter and facebook. Now Nature gets in on the latter act, with a feature on managing your online reputation. It turns out that most scientists, especially younger scientists, are already fully aware of how important it is to have an identity on the web.

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I was interviewed for the article and podcast, but one thing I didn’t really pick up on was one focus of the article, on professional companies that manage online reputations. They give the example of a cancer researcher who has been purportedly lying about his background, is currently under investigation for research misconduct, and who commissioned a company to patch up his reputation (or more likely, bury the ugly rumors under a mountain of inanities).

Online Reputation Manager, headquartered near Rochester, New York, is a company that uses search-engine optimization strategies to repair the online image of clients who have been besieged with unfavourable press. These include flooding the Internet with positive messages to drown out the negative. A company representative confirmed ownership of the e-mail address, but could not say whether Potti is a client.

Ugh. This doesn’t work. Anyone searching for information on Dr Anil Potti who discovers blithering press releases like “Dr. Anil Potti Likes Spending Quality Time With His Wife And Three Daughters” is going to sniff out the scent of a stinker. Not to mention that Dr Anil Potti, his misconduct investigation, and his pathetic attempts to cover it up, have now achieved prominent mention in both Nature and Pharyngula.

You want a good online reputation as a scientist? First rule: be honest and forthright.

Biologists, looking for work?

Bluefield College is looking for someone to teach general biology. They have a few requirements before hiring you, though. It always amazes me how they can get away with this.

The individual must be a committed Christian and have ability to integrate faith and learning, ability to foster critical and creative thinking, ability to work cooperatively within the campus community to advance the mission of the college and demonstrated excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Bluefield College is a private, four-year liberal arts college located in the scenic Virginia highlands. The college is Christ-centered in its mission, global in its outlook, and is in covenant with the Baptist General Association of Virginia. The institution does not discriminate on the basis of national or ethnic origin, gender, or race.

Imagine if we godless folk could set equivalent requirements — it would freak the fanatics out.

The individual must be a committed atheist and have ability to integrate reason and learning, ability to foster critical and creative thinking, ability to work cooperatively within the campus community to advance the mission of the college and demonstrated excellence in undergraduate teaching.

My Imaginary Secular University is a private, four-year liberal arts college located in the scenic Arctic wastelands, in an underground bunker beneath a skull-shaped mountain. The college is science-centered in its mission, global in its outlook, and is in covenant with the National Academy of Sciences. The institution does not discriminate on the basis of national or ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, or race.

Hey, wait, I’d sign up for that in a heartbeat! Why don’t we have any godless universities anywhere? (And don’t try to tell me they all are — even my secular state university goes tippy-toes around religion.)