The only university that counts

It isn’t mine or yours, it’s only Harvard, as far as the New York Times is concerned. Read this thread to see what I mean.

It’s depressing. I’ve talked to so many people who consider Harvard the sine qua non of academia, when I’ve never been particularly impressed with the institution. Not that it’s bad, but this country, and other countries, have so many worthy universities that contribute far more to science and other disciplines…but the NYT, and other media, have created this myth of the superiority of one over-priced private whose primary, notable qualification is that rich people go there. See how skewed the headlines are:

Also telling:

In 2019 35% (7.7 million) of college students attended community colleges.

The New York Times mentioned “community college” 100k fewer times than it mentioned Yale University which enrolls approximately 12k students.

This is a vivid illustration of the problem:

(If you’re not up on the lingo, “HSI” is a Hispanic Serving Institution, “MSI” is Minority Serving Institution, and “HBCU” is a Historically Black College or University. I’m at a public and primarily regional college. Not that NYT readers would get exposed to any of that riff-raff. Really, unsubscribe from the New York Times, don’t bother reading it, it’s a bastion of all the inequity and elitism that is wrong with the US.)

(Also, seriously, they still pay David Fucking Brooks to write drivel?)

I hope you aren’t expecting the universities to fight back

Florida is leading the way in wrecking the American university system.

In his efforts to remake higher education in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed laws that alter the tenure system, remove Florida universities from commonly accepted accreditation practices, and mandate annual “viewpoint diversity surveys” from students and faculty.

DeSantis (R) also pushed through legislation he dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act” that regulates what schools, including universities, and workplaces can teach about race and identity. The legislation — which went into effect Friday — already faces a legal challenge.

Just wait until professors all across the country scramble to organize and leap into action! Just wait! Really. Keep waiting!

We have historical precedent on how universities will deal with the situation. Just look to Germany in the 1930s. How did the professoriate handle Hitler’s transition to power?

If you look at how that transition worked within specific institutions—universities, most notably—you see that in many cases that it took no coordination or controlling attention for it to happen. Sometimes it was that an ambitious existing faculty member within the institution who had already achieved some measure of respect or notability saw an opportunity to move into a leadership position, leveraging some kind of re-alignment towards Nazism. The classic example might be Martin Heidegger, who already had a strongly established international reputation and had taught an extraordinary series of students at Marburg and then at Freiburg, where he had been appointed as Husserl’s successor. In April 1933, Heidegger was appointed Rector at Freiburg; two weeks later he joined the Nazi Party. There’s still an ongoing argument about whether Heidegger’s philosophical thought led him to Nazism as a doctrine well before he became Rector or whether his personal ambition led him to calculatedly join the Party and then to calculatedly back its doctrinal preferences (at which point the debate ends, because he was and acted as a Nazi for a time).

In any event, it happened similarly elsewhere. In institutions and associations, someone stepped forward to make the outward look of the institution favorable to Nazi interests. That in turn required gradual and then sharply forceful remaking of the inward life of the institution for that someone to hold their place and stay on the safe side of power. In short order, faculty were forced to retire, to quietly recede and become as close to invisible as possible, or to at least outwardly pretend support for the new values and culture of the institution. Or to flee Germany altogether—and failing any of those, to eventually face persecution and death at the hands of the Nazi state. In other places, like Poland, the Nazis didn’t waste any time destroying an existing intelligentsia.

The example I usually use is Hans Spemann, probably the most famous embryologist of the era. He won the Nobel Prize in 1935 for an experiment his student, Hilde Mangold, did*, and rapidly rose up to a position of great influence in German academics. Don’t get me wrong, he had a long history of good developmental work, so it wasn’t entirely undeserved, but he also benefited from being not-Jewish. When the National Socialists came to power, he didn’t exactly rush to defend Jewish scientists — he instead sent lists of Jewish faculty to the party, and blocked their promotion. He was a ready collaborator! He gave the Nazi salute at his Nobel ceremony!

Curiously, his association with the Nazi party is not mentioned in his wikipedia entry or his embryo project entry. There was no price to pay for leading German universities into a disgraceful hell.

So watch this space! What will happen is that Florida will use those diversity surveys to promote Republicans into administrative positions, and they’ll use that power to obstruct and fire academics who don’t buy into the conservative worldview, and universities will meekly acquiesce. Professors aren’t rewarded for bucking the system. They’re rewarded for enabling whatever the administrators want.

*By the way, Spemann signed his name as an author on Mangold’s thesis, despite her opposition. That’s the thesis that won the Nobel. In our emerging new academic regime, expect the assholes to rise to the top, as always.

Spring 2022 semester is officially over!

I just submitted all of my grades to the registrar, and guess what? Everyone passed! Not a single F in the bunch! All the seniors can graduate now.

I’d like to celebrate, but right now I’m soaking in the soothing vapors of my drugs, and I don’t want to get up, even though there are spiders waiting for me in the wide world of everywhere.

Why would anyone hire Sabatini?

David Sabatini, the molecular biologist who sexually harassed students and faked data, was first fired from HHMI and the Whitehead Institute, and then resigned from MT as his behavior was exposed. We’re done with him, right? He’ll go get a job in construction or pharmaceutical sales and we won’t have to worry about his unpleasant influence on academia anymore.

Wrong.

NYU wants to hire him.

The New York University (NYU) Grossman School of Medicine is in discussions with biologist David Sabatini about hiring him as a faculty member, according to multiple sources at the school. Since August 2021, Sabatini has been forced out of or fired from three leading institutions for sexual harassment or for violating workplace or consensual sexual relationship policies. The hiring discussions have been taking shape over several weeks, according to NYU sources.

Note: “forced out of or fired from three leading institutions for sexual harassment”. I would have thought that would be a colossal black mark on your record that would have made you permanently unemployable, but no, I guess not. Why does everything I learn about academia leave me feeling more and more disappointed?

In part, this is because there are assholes at the top.

In an email to faculty and staff last week, the medical school’s dean decried what he called “cancel culture.” And last month, a prominent research philanthropist defended Sabatini to a crowd of elite medical researchers in New York City.

Hey, Mr Grossman, what you ought to decry is that your medical school is apparently the refuse bin for biomedical waste, and you are under the thumb of billionaires? Shouldn’t the faculty there be up in arms at being the dumping ground for MIT’s discards?

They are.

More than 200 students and employees staged a walkout to protest the NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s potential hiring of biologist David Sabatini outside the school’s Kimmel Pavilion on Wednesday, April 27. Sabatini, a former tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resigned on April 1 following a student’s allegations of sexual harassment.

Grossman students, staff, faculty and postdoctoral students demanded that Grossman protect its students by ending the employment consideration at the rally, which took place across from the NYU Langone Medical Center at 30th Street and First Avenue. Kritika Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Grossman, said she attended the walkout because she believes that hiring Sabatini would contradict the ideals that the school claims to uphold.

Reject the idea of offering a known harasser and fraud a position. While you’re at it, fire Dean Grossman for being an out-of-touch stooge who doesn’t mind damaging the reputation of NYU.

The Florida brain drain begins now

Not content with denying the existence of gay people, or policing the kindergartens, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is going after the universities. He wants to abolish tenure.

Every five years, he said, tenured faculty would be required to go before their university’s board of trustees, which could part ways with them. The text of the bill does not give that level of specificity but rather states a five-year review would take place to be determined by the state Board of Governors. Each state university already requires tenured professors to take part in an annual review.

“Tenure was there to protect people so that they could do ideas that may cause them to lose their job or whatever, academic freedom — I don’t know that’s really the role it plays, quite frankly, anymore,” DeSantis said. “I think what tenure does, if anything, it’s created more of an intellectual orthodoxy. For people that have dissenting views, it becomes harder for them to be tenured in the first place and then, once you’re tenured, your productivity really declines, particularly in certain disciplines.”

House Speaker Chris Sprowls called the legislation a way to prevent “indoctrination.”

Here we go. Here’s where they reveal their real agenda.

He also said it would increase transparency with a provision that would require course syllabuses to be posted online, preventing attempts by professors to “smuggle in ideology and politics.” Sprowls said it would prevent students from signing up for a class on “socialism and communism” when they thought they were signing up for “Western democracy” and classes about “what it means to be an actual American.”

How dare those professors “smuggle in ideology and politics”…into political science courses. How dare they teach about other political systems than Republican-approved ideologies! That’s what this is really about, not to protect dissenting views, but to enforce their ideology.

The tenure system as it currently stands absolutely does not allow one to be denied or stripped of tenure for political reasons — you cannot fire someone for voting Republican. DeSantis plans to change that so you can fire someone for being a Democratic activist, or for teaching about “socialism and communism”. Tenure is specifically about keeping political biases out of the hiring & firing process. Florida Republicans are aiming to inject those biases back in.

Florida faculty are trying to fight back.

Currently, the boards of trustees must approve all faculty who receive tenure, Gothard said, adding it is not a lifetime appointment. Faculty can still be fired with cause.

”Tenure allows for due process and a hearing and has typically protected people from being fired for political reasons,” he said. ”From where we stand, the only indoctrination happening right now is coming from Tallahassee.”

Tim Boaz, president of the University of South Florida’s faculty senate, said he believed the legislation resulted from misconceptions about higher education.

The Republicans are also trying to jigger the accreditation agencies, forcing the universities to change agencies every few years. That is insane. Accreditation is already a bureaucratic nightmare, with outside regulators demanding a complete accounting of every detail of the university’s machinery — which is a necessary nightmare, and making universities accountable is good practice. But right now we go through the cycle and we get suggestions from the agency about what needs to be improved, and get goals to implement before the next cycle, and we can use prior recommendations in our next review to show that we’ve been addressing the criticisms. Pull the rug out from under us and change agencies, and you’ll be greatly increasing that bureaucratic workload.

Also, you know where this is going: suddenly switching in the American Bible College Accreditation agency for a secular agency is going to wreak havoc.

Good luck, Floridians. I wouldn’t recommend taking a tenure track job in Florida to anyone anymore. The universities are going to be packed with Liberty University graduates from now on, and they suck.

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.