Sausages being made

The horror…if you’re at all squeamish, you may not want to read this article by an editor at a textbook publisher on how public school textbooks are made. If you’re curious about why Texas has such an absurd weight in the world of textbooks, though, it will explain all.

It’s a system that needs to be fixed. The article has some interesting suggestions, too, although the plan — more modularity and flexibility in curriculum materials, and a move away from reliance the massive all-in-one tome — also has potential for abuse. (I’m picturing the creationists producing little, slim ‘supplemental’ pamphlets for the schoolroom, and getting them approved by school boards. We also need some standards on what is not acceptable in the class.)

(via Nic)

Temporary full-time job opening in cell and microbiology at UMM

Full-Time, One-Year Faculty Position in Biology

University of Minnesota, Morris

The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in undergraduate education, to fill a full-time, one-year position in biology beginning August 17, 2009. Responsibilities include: teaching undergraduate biology courses including an introductory level cell biology course for majors (with lab), an upper-level microbiology course for majors (with lab), and contributing to other courses that support the biology curriculum. Excellent fringe benefits and a collegial atmosphere accompany the position. The standard teaching load is twenty credit hours per year.
Candidates must be at least A.B.D. in cell biology, microbiology, or a closely related field by August 17, 2009. Experience and evidence of excellence in teaching undergraduate biology is required. (Graduate TA experience is acceptable). Preference will be given to applicants having the Ph.D. in hand. 

The University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM) is one of the top public liberal arts colleges in the nation. As one of five campuses of the University of Minnesota, UMM has a unique mission and offers the best of both in the world of higher education–a small, close-knit campus complemented by the power of a world-renowned research University system. UMM is located 160 miles WNW of Minneapolis in a small (5000) rural community.  Our student body is diverse (16% students of color) and academically well-prepared, with 63% earning an ACT comprehensive score of 25 or higher and over 50% drawn from the top 25% of their high school classes.  Our faculty have received 33 of the University system’s highest teaching award and are very active in research and publication.  To learn more about the University of Minnesota, Morris visit our website at http://www.morris.umn.edu.

Applications must include a letter of application, resume, transcripts, a teaching statement with evidence of teaching effectiveness, and three letters of reference. Send applications to:

Biology Search Committee Chair
Division of Science and Mathematics
University of Minnesota, Morris
Morris, MN 56267-2128

Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Screening begins April 17, 2009. Inquiries can be made to Ann Kolden, Executive Office and Administrative Specialist, at (320) 589-6301 or koldenal@morris.umn.edu.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.  We are committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status, veteran status, or sexual orientation.  To request disability accommodations, please contact Sarah Mattson at 320-589-6021.

Replace me!

Look up. The next thing I’m going to post is a job ad…you need a job, right?

I’m going on sabbatical next year, leaving a small hole in our staff that we need to plug up with someone as clever and resourceful and pedagogically exciting as me. Don’t be intimidated, though! We’ll take someone who knows cell biology and microbiology well, would like to join our team at a university that values education highly, and doesn’t mind a little spatio-temporal isolation in our remote corner of the universe. It’s a good career step for new graduates to take, too — a year spent here looks very, very nice on the teaching section of your résumé.

By the way, you won’t actually be replacing me (I like to imagine I am irreplaceable). My colleagues have juggled their schedules to cover the essential courses I teach, and we’re also trying to fill the job of a retiring faculty member…so you’d actually be taking the place of two faculty members and helping fill the gaps left by my colleague’s shifting of schedules. Think how important you’ll be to us! (Don’t worry, though, it’s still just a 1.0 FTE position. We’ll try not to overwork you.)

Flagrant anti-gay discrimination in a Canadian nursing college

Uh-oh. There is evidence that the damning email might have been faked. The “from” field of the message looks to have been crudely pasted in, and this whole story may be a product of a slighted student’s imagination.

This is an astonishing example of homophobic bigotry in a nursing college. A student was basically flunked out of a key course in the curriculum for a reason you will find hard to believe — here’s a letter from a nursing faculty member to the student:

Nioska, I’ve been thinking about the meeting in rita’s office and I feel that maybe Nursing is the wrong career for you. As a nurse, I have to advocate for my patients, and i feel that female patients will be uncomfortable having a lesbian nurse caring for them. You do not provide a sense of security to patients when you keep important information from them. Your sexual orientation is something important that patients have a right to know so that they can decide if they wish to have you as their caregiver. I myself am not homophobic at all, but I would not want a lesbian nurse caring for me when I am vulnerable. I would just not feel comfortable with that.

I think it might be best if you see student services to explore other career options that do not involve physical interaction, and intimacy. It wuold look better if you left nursing out of your own accord, rather than get kicked out.

i am just being honest. at the beginning of the rotation you asked me to be honest in my feedback, and i am doing just that.

Tassy

Notice: the student is a lesbian, and she does not trouble her patients with her sexual orientation … and the faculty member is penalizing her for being discreet! She is actually insisting that her students declare their sexuality, a completely irrelevant characteristic, to all of her patients.

If I were in the hospital, and my nurse walked up to my bed and cheerfully announced, “I am a heterosexual!”, I can guarantee you that my wife would march up to the administration and demand an immediate change of the nursing assignment. The sexual preferences of nurses may be a staple of porn films, but it is not the reality of health care.

And look at that classic disclaimer…she’s not homophobic, oh no — she just wouldn’t want a homosexual giving her injections and changing her bedpan.

This is absolutely outrageous. Even worse, the college is dragging out the investigation, has hurt the student’s prospects, and shows no sign of actually wanting to address the issue, preferring to try and place the blame on the student. The college also outed the student to all of her fellow students in the course of ‘investigating’ the problem. I’ve got a full account from the student below the fold.

[Read more…]

Eroding our intellectual infrastructure

One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we’re also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It’s an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective. The faculty get a pay freeze; we tighten our belts. The universities lose public funds; we raise tuition a little bit. A few faculty are lost to attrition, and the state decides to defer their replacement for a year or two or indefinitely; the remaining faculty scramble to cover the manpower loss. We can continue to do our jobs, but behind the scenes, the stresses simply grow and worsen.

I can testify to this from personal experience. My biology department struggles every year with the routine business of retirements and sabbatical leaves — we have absolutely no fat in this group, with every member playing an essential role in the curriculum, so every departure, even temporary ones, increases the strain. We have to frantically rearrange schedules to cover our deficits, we have to drop courses for a year (so the students have to juggle their schedules as well), and we hang by our fingernails waiting for the administration to do basic things, like approve temporary hires or allow us to do a search for replacement faculty. Since the state is contributing less and less every year, we will soon reach a point where we simply won’t be allowed to replace essential personnel, and then the whole system is going to break down.

The University of Florida has reached that point. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has been told to cut 10% from its budget. Since the biggest chunk of any university’s budget is salaries, that means a lot of people are going on the chopping block — and the administration has decided to simply get rid of entire departments wholesale, including geology. Think about it: a college of science that simply cuts off and throws away an entire discipline. Is that really a place that is supporting science and education? The partitions we set up with these labels are entirely arbitrary, and we are all interdependent. My own discipline of biology is dead without mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and yes, geology is part of the environment we want our students to know. Now it’s true that if all we aimed to do was churn out pre-meds, we could dispense with geology; heck, we could toss out all those ecologists, too, and hone ourselves down to nothing but a service department for instruction in physiology and anatomy.

But we wouldn’t be a university anymore. We’d be a trade school.

The United States is supposed to take some pride in its educational system — at least, we’re accustomed to hearing politicians stand up and brag about how our universities are the envy of the world. It’s a lie. We’re being steadily eroded away, and all that’s holding it up right now is the desperate struggles of the faculty within it. We’re at the breaking point, though, where the losses can’t be supported much more, and the whole edifice is going to fall apart.

Here’s what you need to do. Write to the University of Florida administration and explain to them that what they’re doing is debilitating, and is going to irreparably weaken the mission of the university. Unfortunately, their hands are probably tied; they’ve got a shrinking budget and have to cut somewhere, and they will do so, but at this point all we can do is ask them to hold off on completely destroying a scientific asset.

The next layer of the problem is the state government. They keep seeing the educational system as a great target for saving money with budget cuts, because the effects will not be manifest for several years — and so they steadily hack and slash and chop, and the universities suffer…and now they’re at the point where they begin to break, and they keep cutting. Write to the Florida legislature! Tell them that we need to support higher education, that as a scientific and technological nation, we are dependent on a well-educated citizenry!

It’s not just Florida, either — your state is blithely gutting its system of higher education, too. Minnesota, for instance, has cut investment in higher ed by 28% between 2000 and 2007, while raising tuition 68% over the same period. We haven’t been given less to do, either — our workload increases while salaries fail to keep up with inflation. This is happening everywhere. We are all Florida.

Another part of the problem is…you. Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via “academic freedom” bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It’s been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.

Shhhh. Don’t tell the students.

Professor Denis Rancourt of the University of Ottawa has taken a radical step in his teaching practices: he tells all the students in his classes that they automatically get an A+. For this, among other infractions of convention, he has been suspended with pay from his teaching position pending institutional review.

Prof. Rancourt’s suspension is the most serious step in a long series of grievances and conflicts with the university dating back to 2005, when, after researching new teaching methods, he first experimented with eliminating letter grades. He also altered course curriculum with student input – although not the approval of the university – an approach he calls “academic squatting.”

A well-published and politically outspoken scientist who revels in hashing out theories on napkins at conferences, Prof. Rancourt’s unconventional teaching style has generated both an ardent following among a core group of students, and the rancour of many of his fellow faculty members, one-third of whom signed a petition of complaint against him in the fall of 2007. In the letter, which he provided, the complaints stem largely from a series of critical e-mails he distributed about their “paternalistic” teaching methods – a criticism he still expresses, with little restraint, today.

Well, I have to say that what he proposes actually sounds cool and interesting, and that I’d have to see a lot more information before I could say whether the suspension was warranted or not. Grades are a pain and sometimes an obstacle to real learning, and sometimes they are a crutch — a whip we use to motivate when we can’t get the students excited about a subject. I think that one of the things tenured professors ought to be able to do is experiment and innovate in their teaching.

However, there are two potential problems. One is that sometimes innovation doesn’t work — if you’re going to experiment, sometimes experiments fail. The article doesn’t say whether there was some objective assessment of the outcomes of his classes. Do his students actually come out the other side of the term with him with more knowledge and understanding? If they do, bugger the objections, let him keep at it. If they don’t, and the university is actually complaining that he is ignoring the assessment of his experiments to keep doing stuff that doesn’t work, then goodbye Professor Rancourt.

The other problem is that a university education is not the product of a single instructor, and we must respect the whole of the curriculum and work together with our colleagues. I rely on other faculty to teach our students cell biology and molecular biology, for instance; if students showed up in my upper level elective courses with the expectation that they’d learn some developmental biology, and I discovered that they knew nothing about those foundational subjects because their instructors had decided that they’d teach philosophy and political science instead (something I know they wouldn’t do), I would be screwed, and more than a little upset. I’d like to know how far he deviated from the course curricula…a little flexibility is good, but if he was ignoring the needs of the whole discipline’s program, then that’s also reason to say bye-bye to Rancourt.

Snubbing degrees as a new kind of snobbery

There are days when you just want to slap a few journalists. The latest absurdity comes from the LA Times, in which an ignorant reporter waxes snarky over the fact that the vice president’s wife is addressed as “Dr. Biden”, since she has a doctorate in education, and snootily claims that:

Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific “Dr.” unless the person in question has a medical degree.

And then she trots out Bill Walsh of the Post and the vapid little god-bunny, Amy Sullivan, to agree that you only call medical doctors “Dr.”

Yeah, right. How many appendectomies have Dr Kissinger, Dr Condoleezza Rice, and Dr Martin Luther King done, huh?

They claim that this is the convention. Step onto any college campus. Look at the directories and ask around. You’ll find that the formal title for faculty and staff with doctoral degrees is “Dr.” (although you’ll also find that many of us prefer not to be addressed quite so formally). All I can assume is that these lazy journalists are completely unfamiliar with higher education…and I am not surprised.

You can find more reactions from Mike Dunsford and Wesley Elsberry. I anticipate more — this is a fine example of media contempt for intellectuals.

For the UMM students taking my class next week

Classes start next week, and I’m teaching genetics again. I’m getting lots of questions from incoming students that I will answer right here, just in case there are a few of you reading the blog.

  1. There will be no labs the first week of class — first lab is on Tuesday, first lecture is on Wednesday, and I hate dragging students into a lab completely cold.

  2. Yes, you can use back editions of the textbook. Current edition is the 9th, but I’ll give out reading assignments and problems with numbers from the 7th, 8th, and 9th editions. It’s a pain in the butt, but the books are ridiculously expensive, and they don’t change that much from edition to edition.

If you are a UMM biology major in their junior year, I have another important announcement: I’m going to be on sabbatical next year. We are having a serious surge of enrollments that is making our required course in molecular biology into a major bottleneck, and we had to decide whether my temporary replacement would be someone to take over my genetics course, or someone who could offer a second section of molecular biology. Molecular biology is the priority right now.

That means that if you were counting on taking genetics next year, you can’t, and you’re going to have to rejigger your schedule and take it this year. Contact me soon, I’ll be very, very generous in squeezing more students in this term.

We now return Pharyngula to topics of more global interest.