Ha ha! Missed me again, God!

We’re doing this again, only this time I’m planning ahead a bit more. At 3pm Central, I’ll be hosting a few more of the bloggers on this network — exactly who will be a surprise.

We’ll go live at 3 or thereabouts. I think you can also do a text chat here with us.

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Our guest was Matt Herron of Fierce Roller, and we talked about the evolution of multicellularity (a very cool subject — he works on Volvox, which is right there on the boundary between colonial and multicellular organisms), a little bit about weird creationist ideas, and a bit about social justice in the science community. Check out his blog!

The key quote from the recently deceased Adam West:

“You can’t play Batman in a serious, square-jawed, straight-ahead way without giving the audience the sense that there’s something behind that mask waiting to get out, that he’s a little crazed, he’s strange.”

Exactly!

Tom Hardy’s dog died, as you’ll discover in his strangely punctuated stream-of-consciousness description of life with Woody Woodstock Yamaduki Hardy. It’s nice. He really loved that dog.

We did a “meet the bloggers” hangout tonight, so if you’ve wondered what Great American Satan and Iris Vander Pluym are like in conversation, now you can find out!

Well, probably. Not most of you anyway.

We stealthily migrated to a new host server in the dead of night, and everything went smoothly except for a few minor glitches…one being that our comment whitelists kinda got lost. If you posted something and it did not get automatically approved, give it a little time and we’ll get around to whitelisting you again.

If we like you, that is.

I did not know this at all until now, but color printer manufacturers have collaborated with the government to include imbedded secret codes on all of your pages. It’s how they caught the recent NSA leaker.

Remember, you’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you.

Freethoughtblogs is moving! We’re not getting much help with the bugginess from our current hosting service, so we’re packing up the ol’ collection of data and moving it to a new site. This’ll be mostly invisible and painless, but there might be a brief lockout tomorrow or the day after as the transition is made. The pattern of glitchy interruptions should end early this week.

If you read these tales of the horrifying reality of the academic job market, you will learn that adjunct professors are paid a pittance, and often have to do piece work, teaching multiple classes at multiple colleges to make ends meet. They’re getting paid next to nothing for what ought to be the central work of the university. So the money isn’t going into their pockets.

And then you learn that many universities are relying almost entirely on adjuncts to do their teaching.

It is insane to see that my department has only 3 FULL TIME PROFESSORS and 20 ADJUNCTS!!!

So the cash must all be flowing into the pockets of those 3 professors? Nope. Most tenured professors are making a comfortable middle class income, but aren’t getting rich. Tenure means stability, not wealth. If you’re looking for a profession that will give you opportunities to rake in fabulous sums of money, don’t look to the professoriate.

The students must be laughing themselves to the bank with all of their cheap educations, right? No, you know that’s wrong: skyrocketing tuition costs have been the order of the day, and students are graduating with legendary debts, debts that would have been unheard of for my generation. Money is pouring in, but it’s not going to the educators.

It’s going to academic parasites like Elsevier. It’s going to academic bureaucracies that have lost sight of what their institution is for: we have big advertising goals that are not necessarily in alignment with making the best damn university we can. We sink cash into college athletics, without assessing whether it actually benefits our mission. The highest paid state employee in most states is the college football or basketball coach, which is utterly nuts.

If you look at the methodology behind college rankings, it’s all stuff like graduation rates (here comes the pressure for grade inflation) and class sizes (hiring lots of cheap adjuncts actually benefits your rankings) and peer evaluation (them that has a good reputation gets a good reputation). It would be really interesting if US News & World Report announced that they were going to multiply colleges’ final score by the full-time/part-time faculty ratio; a lot of schools’ much sought after rankings would tumble down rapidly.

But there are many vested interests that are working hard to avoid having anyone gaze at the teacher-student interactions that ought to be the center of any evaluation of a university’s quality.