First thing in the morning, a knife to the heart

I read webcomics for light entertainment, not for painfully piercing and accurate descriptions of the modern university.

Jesus. It wouldn’t hurt so much if it weren’t so true.

OK, Zach does describe an alternative.

Yeah, sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes. Not so much the last few years when the whole idea of public gatherings is anathema to your health, and when there’s always some Nazi or conspiracy theorists who is going to rant at you.

Also, wow, that’s a talky strip.

That’s an interesting way to lose tenure

Michael Palmer was an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Waterloo who was promoting some seriously cranky conspiracy theories. Here he is explaining that the pandemic was fake, that the virus was artificial and was supposed to be more lethal, that the tests were all fake, the vaccines are toxic, and that the entire scientific/medical literature has been corrupted. He’s a loon.


Palmer.mp4 from Joe Smith on Vimeo.

But, you know, professors are allowed to spout nonsense — it’s all part of the principle of academic freedom. Sure what he’s saying is complete bullshit, but you can’t get fired over that.

On the other hand, announcing that you will not follow any of the safety regulations set by the university is substantive grounds for concern.

This letter is to inform you that I categorically refuse to comply with any of the COVID vaccine-related mandates imposed on its employees by the University of Waterloo:

  1. I will not declare my COVID vaccination status, although you may be able to guess (see also point 3 below).
  2. I will not attend any of the virtual COVID re-education camps organized by UW’s or the province’s quack doctors and public health shamans in-chief. As an MD with board certification in medical microbiology, I consider myself sufficiently informed on the subject.
  3. I will not let myself be injected with any of the ineffective and poisonous concoctions that are misrepresented to the public as COVID vaccines.
  4. I will not ask for any “accommodation” or “exemption,” because doing so would only legitimize the lawless measures imposed by UW officials.
  5. I will not play for time by asking for medical leave due to distress or anxiety. I thankfully am in good health and retain my usual capacity for work.

I fully expect that my decision will result in sanctions against me, as spelled out in the weekly reminder so thoughtfully sent out by “UW Communications:”

Expectations met: he has been fired. Good riddance!

Also, an interesting addition from Jeffrey Shallit:

Palmer wrote a whole book on it, which you can read online. I don’t understand why it would have been faked, since we clearly had the technology, horrible as it is, and the US had clearly shown no hesitation in creating massive civilian casualties. I skipped to the end of his book to find his rationale…and it’s all a gigantic failed conspiracy to create one world government, just like the 9/11 attacks, which, by the way, were actually perpetrated by the CIA and Mossad. Did you know Oppenheimer came from a Jewish family, but he seems to have been preoccupied with oriental religious ideas? Also, Japan colluded in the effort to fake the atomic bomb.

Firing Palmer was clearly a win:win for the University of Waterloo. Again, you can’t fire a tenured professor for writing a schlocky book about an imaginary conspiracy theory, but when you proudly announce that will flout all health precautions, it’s goodbye Michael. He’s not going to get another job as a chemist anywhere, but at least he has now achieved martyrdom and will be hopping on the grifter’s gravy train.

What is a job at UCLA worth?

Turns out it’s a little less high-status than you might imagine.

I’ve seen this sort of thing a few times before. They’ve created a soft money position for someone — they’re going to provide lab space or an office to someone who is then expected to write grants for their salary. The only difference here is that they were probably compelled by university policy to publicly advertise the position, thereby exposing one of the dirty underhanded secrets of academia to the whole world.

This ought to be criminal, except…this is a way to give someone an opportunity to work in a university for the status, the facilities, and — dare I say it — the exposure. Sometimes it’s done as a way to give a spouse a position.

Is it conspiracy thinking to wonder what the CIA is doing in academia?

Soon, the meetings will resume (I hear that phrase as “soon, the beatings will resume”). I do believe meetings at the university level have been infiltrated by CIA moles, because these instructions sure look familiar.

Our biology discipline meetings aren’t bad — we’re a small department, I don’t think we’ve been given our CIA plant yet, so they usually get down to business reasonably efficiently. As soon as we get into larger groupings, though, all of the above kicks into action, especially #2 and #5. Meanwhile, I tend to just sit quietly, thinking more productively about the work I need to get done.

I do wonder what the CIA’s intent with poisoning academia with these tedious bores might be, though.

Behold my mountain of digital papers!

All the final exams have been turned in, so now it’s time to sit my butt down and read them all. I’ve got two classes with about 25 students each, so here’s what I am to complete this weekend. These were all due on Friday, yesterday.

Comprehensive Final Exam for Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development. This is the monster, 7 pages of questions in different formats that cover the topics in the title of the course and also a bit of the history and philosophy of science. FunGenEvoDevo is a first year overview course that doesn’t dig too deeply, but prepares them with the general background (there is also another intro course, Evolution of Biodiversity, that hits them with evolution again and also basics of ecology and systematics). I started on this one yesterday, and am a bit more than halfway through; I plan to finish it by this afternoon.

Lab Final for Cell Biology. Another longish exam, this one emphasizes basic quantitative skills they should have learned in the lab. So lots of questions about unit conversions, calculating concentrations, interpreting data, etc. For instance, they get some measurements of reaction rates, and they then have to calculate enzymatic Km and Vmax. There are a lot of parts to this one, too, but most of the answers are short, specific, and numeric, which are relatively easy to grade.

Required Final Essay for Cell Biology. Oh boy, this will be challenging. I gave them a paper to read (“How energy flow shapes cell evolution” by Nick Lane) and asked them to summarize it and relate it all to the content of the course. On this one, I demand high writing standards and coherence in addressing the subject, so we’ll see how that goes.

Optional Final Exam for Cell Biology. Another big ol’ comprehensive exam, but this one is optional for the students: whatever score they get on the final will replace their lowest midterm score. Everyone has a bad day, so this is their opportunity to vindicate themselves. It’s a long exam, but grading it might not be too bad — only about a third of the class has opted to do it.

So that’s my weekend! This is all I’m doing for a few days. I hope to get it all done by Sunday evening and get all those grades submitted to the registrar early.

Then on Monday I have one more class to grade, Biological Communications II, in which students spend the semester writing a 10+ page review paper under my tutelage, so I already have a good idea of what they’ve done — I just have to go over what is supposed to be the final polished draft of the paper. And then I’m ALL DONE!

I guess I better buckle down and get to work now.

10:45 Saturday: FunGenEvoDevo done! Grades submitted! Students mostly did OK, but a few of them may have learned that skipping an exam or two is a good way to fail a course.

3:45 Saturday: Lab final done! Starting on the required final essay.

1pm Sunday: Required lab final done! Now to polish off the optional final.

WTF, UM?

I just got an email from the president of the University of Minnesota. They’re going to ‘compensate’ us for the efforts we’ve made.

Throughout the most fluid, uncertain, and challenging days of the global pandemic, you have consistently responded with an unequaled focus to serve our students and support your colleagues. Your personal and professional excellence is undeniable and your sacrifices have been significant, including for many, a reduction in pay.

As a gesture of our appreciation for your service and commitment, we have proposed, and the Board of Regents has since approved, a one-time plan that would award each of you two additional personal holidays that may be used at any time through June 30, 2022. As a result, all eligible full-time employees will receive two days added to their paid time off inventory, and all eligible part-time employees will receive time away proportional to the hours they work. Faculty and P&A staff on 9- and 10- month appointments who currently receive personal holidays will receive this additional time away.

This time is effective for any employee on active payroll as of December 6, and it also follows a similar approach to that used by a number of our peer institutions. You will be able to find this noted in MyU, within your “My Time” tab effective late Monday, Dec. 20, 2021.

I extend my sincerest appreciation for everything you’ve done for our University these past 20 months and all you will do in the weeks and months ahead. I hope you are able to use these days to relax, recharge, and reflect on the difference you have made in the lives of our students, your colleagues, and our great state and beyond.

I’m happy for the staff who will benefit, but I had to screw up my eyes to try and interpret what this means for me. I have a salaried appointment. I do not currently receive any personal holidays. I won’t get any extra days to relax. I will not get any extra pay. The university is giving me…diddley squat, and similarly, nothing to all the other regular faculty.

I think I’m insulted. I sure don’t feel grateful.

I really needed to read this as I was working on my spring syllabi

I know my syllabi are mostly ignored, and I expect to see more examples in the next week: some students will read it at the last moment as they desperately look for loopholes and ways to scrape up more points, and I will get letter-of-the-law emails attempts to justify why they should get more credit. But Professor Kenyon Wilson of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga came up with a more direct test: he put a fifty dollar bill in a locker and inserted directions to it in his syllabus. He wasn’t subtle about it either. It’s an explicit set of directions to the locker in a parenthetical sentence.

It wasn’t even cryptic or clever! Nobody had to decode anything! And the result…

The Tennessee music professor slipped a $50 US bill into a locker on his campus, and buried the location and combination in the syllabus for his performing arts seminar class.

The semester is over. The students have gone home. The cash remains unclaimed.

His syllabus is only 3 pages long!

Wilson says he’s long suspected his syllabus goes mostly unread, even though he always tells his students to read it through. It’s an online document, about three pages in length, outlining course expectations, grading scales and other bits of what Wilson calls “boilerplate language.”

Mine is 5 or 6 pages, making it even worse. I blame that goddamned “boilerplate language.” Every once in a while, the administration tells us that we ought to include X, Y, or Z in our syllabus, and they helpfully send us a paragraph or three that they’ve written in fluent bureaucratese, and I obey, so the bloat grows and grows. I don’t think I’ve read most of my syllabi myself — I just copy and paste what I’m told ought to be in there. I am not surprised that the students have learned that the bulk of our syllabi are mind-numbingly irrelevant repetitious hash.

Fortunately, I was just yesterday poking at my genetics syllabus, half-heartedly adjusting a few dates to bring it in line with 2022, totally uninspired but needing to take advantage of my few days of respite before the grading slams me in the face again this weekend. But now I have a goal. I’m going to rip out all the boilerplate and stuff it into a separate document so it’s available, but also easily ignorable. Then I’m going to write a short punchy summary with only the essential stuff, and get that down to under a page. I can do it. I know what the students need to know, and I also know what other professors need to know if they’re looking at my course to evaluate it for transfer credits.

I’m not going to repeat the trick of hiding a treasure map inside it, though. Sorry, students!

While we’re all waiting for the University of Austin to die…

And it is fading. The early ebullience from people like Bari Weiss is diminishing, and the only news about it I can find is that Niall Ferguson seems to be frantically touring right-wing podcasts to claim it’s really going to happen, which it isn’t. But I still see the occasional lefty chortling over the ridiculous concept. Like this one:

That those too-hot ideas—among them the celebration of free-market capitalism, eugenics and white supremacy, xenophobia, and transphobia, per the résumés of some of UATX’s founding trustees and advisors—are also cultural hegemonies championed by the richest and most powerful people and institutions thriving today in the Western world does not seem to be a problem for these self-styled revolutionaries. And why should it? This dippy bunch is not actually engaging in a genuine paradigm shift in the ivory tower; think of it more like the University of Pity Party at Austin.

Of course this project is silly. It’s brought to you by a group of wealthy—some of them mind-blowingly so—elites who are mostly known for whining about “cancel culture” and being rewarded handsomely for it. The very premise of UATX is preposterous, predicated on a subset of highly successful and privileged people’s unseemly thirst to be cast as victims in a grand narrative of—hilariously enough—intellectual and economic oppression. This scrappy underdog “university’s” board of advisors includes Larry Summers, former secretary of the treasury and president emeritus of a little college in Boston called Harvard (perhaps you’ve heard of it?). Other founders and advisors are professionally affiliated with Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, and UATX’s seed money flows forth from tech bro Joe “paternity leave is for losers” Lonsdale, a venture capitalist who co-founded the creepy surveillance/data-mining software company Palantir.

“Pity Party University”…that’s about right. But then, getting serious about it, the author says:

In contrast to the sharp rebuffs of my peers, I rarely experienced anything but the mildest pushback from left-leaning faculty. Far from being pressured to conform to left-wing groupthink by a socialist academic cabal, I got excellent grades and I was encouraged to share my ideas—offensive and ill-considered as they undoubtedly were—in class discussions. Oh, I had brilliant professors who planted seeds that would flower years later, but at the time, my own views hardly shifted. To the contrary (I was, after all, a contrarian) I dug in harder, sure that I was a powerful voice for the preservation of good old-fashioned American ideals, a bold defender of capitalism and the free market.

That’s the thing about the conservatives’ claims about those darned liberal universities. You read this blog, you know that I’m pretty fiercely partisan and that I despise Republicans with all my heart, but that doesn’t translate to how I manage a classroom. Like she says, your typical lefty professor encourages students “to share [their] ideas—offensive and ill-considered as they undoubtedly were”. We’re not interested in silencing, but in exposing.

The idea that we’d shout down conservatives and not let them speak is simply right-wing projection. That’s what they do.

Why are private schools?

You know, the word “school” (and “college” and “university”) ought to have some kind of protected status, where you can’t call your institution one of them without meeting certain rigorous standards and qualifications. Get some other word for your propaganda outlet, and if you abuse the terms and mislead the people you are trying to lure into your scheme, there ought to be some kind of legal penalty. It’s not that you can’t rent a room and offer instruction to the gullible in whatever hogwash you’re peddling, but you can’t legally claim it’s a “school”.

Case in point: religious institutions that claim to be, for instance, a university, like Patriot “University”. Or private schools in general, which seem to be set ups for charging excessive tuitions and fees for information that’s better served by a true public school (goodbye, Harvard!) (OK, some private institutions have adopted good standards for education — this is a complex problem in taxonomy, I won’t pretend it’s easily solved.)

But then, there are other situations where the boundaries have clearly been crossed. Like the Centner Academy, “the brain school”. Maybe we can get them on false advertising, since there don’t seem to be any functional brains inside.

In April, a Miami private school made national headlines for barring teachers who got a coronavirus vaccine from interacting with students. Last week, the school made another startling declaration, but this time to the parents: If you vaccinate your child, they’ll have to stay home for 30 days after each shot.

The email from Centner Academy leadership, first reported by WSVN, repeated misleading and false claims that vaccinated people could pass on so-called harmful effects of the shot and have a “potential impact” on unvaccinated students and staff.

Yeah, that’s patently false. There are no viruses in the vaccine. There might be dead fragments, but nothing that can proliferate and infect.

David Centner, one of the school’s co-founders, repeated the debunked claims in a statement to The Washington Post, saying the policy is a “precautionary measure” based on “numerous anecdotal cases that have been in circulation.”

Listen to yourself, David. Do you know what “anecdote” means? You are making a policy decision based on stories and rumor — and you’re getting it all backwards! You’re blocking the people least likely to carry the disease from your “school”, and encouraging the unprotected students to attend!

The people who do attend this “school” are selected for wealth + gullibility, I guess.

Centner Academy is in Miami’s ritzy Design District, and tuition ranges from about $15,000 to nearly $30,000 per year. The school has become a haven for anti-vaccine parents because it does not require any immunizations for enrollment, citing a parent’s “freedom of choice” and falsely claiming there are “unknown risks associated with vaccinations” that could harm children.

Apparently, you go to this “school” to get a degree in ignorance and dishonesty.

A similar sentiment was shared in an email to parents last week regarding the coronavirus vaccine. School leadership referred to the shots as “experimental,” WSVN reported, and encouraged parents considering vaccinations for their child to wait several more months until the school year ends.

“We ask that you hold off until the summer when there will be time for the potential transmission or shedding onto others to decrease,” Centner Academy leaders wrote.

The school has a history of spreading inaccurate information about the vaccine and penalizing those who choose to get the shots. In April, Centner Academy employees were told they had to notify Leila and David Centner, the married co-founders of the school, if they received a vaccine. Vaccinated school employees were told they would not be allowed any contact with students “until more information is known” about the vaccines. School leaders also told those wanting the vaccine to wait until the summer to get the shots.

About a week later, a math and science teacher told students they should not hug their vaccinated parents for more than five seconds, the New York Times reported, referencing the same falsehoods the school communicated in its email about vaccine components “shedding” onto others. Some parents threatened to pull their children out of the school over the comments.

The Centners are a pair of rich kooks with egomania. Centner is a rich entrepreneur who sold code for monitoring toll booths — he has no background in education at all. They shouldn’t be allowed to pretend to be educators.

A grading epiphany!

As has become increasingly typical, I was up late last night grading exams, rather than reading a good book or watching a movie or going for a walk, like normal people do, and I was getting a little bit frustrated. This was an exam for an introductory biology course, all first year students, and it was fairly straightforward: about 40% multiple choice questions, the rest being short “essay” style questions that had to be answered with a coherent paragraph. I had questions like, “explain the difference between methodological and philosophical materialism” (yeah, there was some baby philosophy in this course) and “summarize the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant”, all stuff that we’d discussed in class, and if they’d missed class, it was there in the lecture notes I’d posted online, and which they should have studied.

You will be shocked and surprised to learn that some of them had not studied.

What annoyed me, though, and ate up a lot of my time, was when desperate students who had not studied tried to bullshit their way through an answer, throwing out vaguely recalled terms, hoping that some of them stick. The Grants, for instance, who actually did work on finch beaks and adaptation, were assigned to have worked on Galapagos tortoises or iguanas, and seemed to have compiled a taxonomic catalog of random, memorable animals on the islands. You don’t even want to know what kind of inventions they created to explain away the philosophy or history of science, or how the Cambrian was after the Cretaceous. It was ludicrous errors of fact and random word association games, and worst of all, I had to carefully read it all to see if there was a glimmering of an echo of a shadow of comprehension in there, and give them points for it. Ick.

I think I was muttering to myself something like “why don’t you just admit you didn’t know the answer” when I had my idea. In the very first lecture in this course I had talked to them about the value of asking good questions, and how it’s acceptable for a scientist to say “I don’t know” when they don’t have a good answer, and I thought, I should encourage them to admit when they don’t know the answer, especially since I have a pretty good bullshit detector. So I’ve invented a new policy I’ll announce to them.

If you don’t know the answer to an exam question, just write “I don’t know” and I’ll give you 25% of the points. It’s that easy! It’ll save me the agony of trying to interpret word salad, which generally earns 0 points anyway, and you’ll get a few points for honesty. Everyone wins!

Of course, 25% is not adequate to pass the course — 50% earns a “D” grade — so you can’t expect to slide through by answering “I don’t know” to everything, but if you hit one or two questions you’re drawing a blank on, it’ll spare you some anxiety and suffering, and me some exasperation, if you can just dismiss the question and move on. It’s also fitting with a major theme of the course, which is about how scientists do science and how we came to understand principles of evolution, genetics, and development.

I’ve only been teaching for a few decades before I thought of this simple solution to a chronic problem.