You wanted the evil cat? You can have her!

I was just busily transcribing all of the scores from the final exam onto the grading site, when Evil Cat decided that prowling my desk was exactly the right thing to do, and she flung all of the papers in my tidy stack into a scattered mess on the floor.

I got my revenge, though. She’s usually pretty cunning about avoiding photography — probably to make it difficult to identify her in line-ups, or to get her photo on wanted posters — but for once I acted quickly while she was gloating atop my wrecked work, and got a closeup.

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So now you know. Beware. If you see her, contact the FBI, Interpol, and Homeland Security.

But what about my evil reputation?

I got interviewed for an article on all us scheming left-wing zealots on the Professor Watch List, and this is what I get? The Minnesotans on the ‘Professor Watchlist’ are disappointingly unthreatening.

Oh, well. “Disappointing” and “Unthreatening” are going right onto my CV.

And yes, I have to agree — it’s a buncha mild-mannered Minnesota professors, dontcha know!

Course design: a prelude

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How do you design a new course?

First message: don’t. It’s a lot of work, and we professors are already underpaid and overworked. You do not get a bonus for teaching more, you are a salaried worker and you get paid whether you teach one course or five courses. You should be compensated for your labor, but you won’t, and in fact many of the institutions of university governance will conspire to discourage compensation for taking any initiative.

For instance, my university has a precisely defined formula for calculating workload: we plug in the number of lecture hours and lab hours we teach, and it spits out a number of credit hours we’re teaching, which is supposed to be right around 20 (different universities will have different expectations). We all know each other’s number. We strive to keep everyone’s workload equal, because that’s only fair, right? Of course, there are many assumptions built into the formula — the weighting of labs vs. lectures, for instance — and there’s nothing about the difficulty of courses. I could teach nothing but introductory freshman courses with no labs, while someone else could be assigned a set of new, advanced upper level lab electives, and we could have exactly the same number, but you know which of us would be working much harder. We informally try to balance that kind of load, but that magic number is really only a rough guideline.

It’s also a fiction for another reason: we fudge it to keep from breaking the system. For example, we have a whole course and other workload obligations that are not plugged into the formula, because to do so would increase the number, and require us to stop teaching other courses that we require. Or for the administration to hire more faculty to distribute the load, and we know that is not going to happen. We can’t break our obligations to students, and the administration can rely on our sense of responsibility to compel us to do more work with no extra pay.

Which brings me to more terms of art, ones the students know well: required courses vs. electives. We have a set of core courses in the discipline which every student in biology must take in order to graduate, which means we must teach them. If we just declared that we don’t have enough faculty to teach cell biology this year, for instance, it would hurt the students, because it would basically add an extra year to their graduation time. Which would make their parents unhappy. Which would make the administration unhappy. These courses are required in more ways than one.

These required courses also tend to be standardized across all universities. The cell biology course you take at Harvard is going to be very similar to the one we teach at UMM. There are pedagogical variations, of course, but the content is a kind of shared understanding among biologists everywhere. There isn’t a lot of latitude in what you teach in these courses, but there is space for revising how you teach them, which makes them fun. However, you’ll only rarely have the opportunity to design a required course. Most likely, you’ll be assigned one and then the challenge is to teach a known quantity well.

Electives are more complicated. Some also have a fairly standardized body of content — anatomy is an elective in our department, but it really hasn’t changed in a century or more. Others are about more recent innovations, or reflect the instructor’s research interests, or synthesize different areas. These are the courses we live for! Teaching a course is more than just a way to pass on known knowledge to younger people, but also a way for us to learn. The discipline involved in learning how to teach a new course requires us to stretch our brains and master new material.

That leads us to our dilemma. We don’t get monetary rewards for teaching new classes, but there are great intellectual rewards, and it’s good for the students to learn what’s new and exciting in our discipline. So we inflict this extra effort on ourselves.

This is my situation. I identify as a developmental biologist. I was specifically hired as a developmental biologist, with a focus on evolution. But I haven’t taught either of those things in years! Due to the usual inevitable faculty changes, retirements and departures and so forth, I’ve had to take on two major courses that eat up most of my allotted work load: in the fall, every fall, I teach cell biology, a required core course in the major; every spring, I teach genetics, another big lab course, a standard elective, but one that is required for our pre-professional students. We can’t stop teaching either one, and in a very small department we don’t have the slack to swap in an alternate instructor now and then. My developmental biology course is a lab course, and simply adding it to my load would bump me well above our magic workload number, as well as leaving me exhausted and drained and unable to teach well. So I’ve found myself in a rut of cell biology-genetics-cell biology-genetics, etc., etc., etc., with a few low-credit supplemental courses around the edges.

I decided last year to put together a new course in developmental biology with a twist, that I could wedge in the scant space in my workload. But I’ll write about that tomorrow.

P.S. A few hints for you brand new academics applying to enter the professoriate. We don’t get permission to hire new people because we tell the administration we’d like to offer an exciting new elective. We get permission because we tell them we need the support to teach a required course or courses. That means our job ad will say we’re hiring someone to teach Course X, which is a necessary part of the curriculum, and which is typically a common course taught at many universities. If you don’t have teaching experience in that course already, you damn well better do your research and figure out precisely what kinds of things should be on the syllabus for it. We always ask questions to probe whether you understand what the obligations are (and we also like it if you have creative ideas about pedagogical innovations to make it more interesting to teach). We also want to know that you’ve thought about what is appropriate for the students — one big mistake we see all the time is when we ask about how the candidate would teach a second year course and they enthusiastically gave us an outline of a graduate level course in their specialty.

We also typically ask about what kinds of electives they would like to teach. Again, an outline of a graduate level course is not what we want: we’d like to hear about a course you find exciting that would integrate well with our existing courses, and extend them in new directions. That means…do your homework and find out what electives we do teach and propose something that fills a gap in our curriculum and also goes one step beyond what we offer. For instance, we have core courses in ecology and molecular biology — think about what we teach already, and propose something that an undergraduate who completed molecular biology would want to take, or something that would be a natural progression from our ecology course, or something that related the two. And show some passion and enthusiasm, and that you’ve actually thought about what you’d love to teach.

Also, we try not to throw new faculty directly into the challenge of designing a course from scratch in their first semester, so don’t panic.

Plans

Here are my holiday plans: I’m staying home, alone, with an evil cat, while my wife is off gallivanting with the distant family. I’ll probably say “humbug” a lot. Maybe Christmas dinner will be a microwaved bean & cheese burrito washed down with whisky. This is my life for a while.

You might be wondering why I would willingly choose to live the life of a lonely misanthrope. It’s because I’ve got to finish developing this new course I’ll be teaching in January, and while I’ve got the skeleton done, I’ve also got to get ahead of the game, because I’ll be teaching genetics again at the same time, so Spring term is going to hit me like a truck.

I was thinking, though, that while I’m occupied with work, I might try logging all the stuff I’m doing to create a new course sort of from scratch (I do have a good textbook that does quite a bit of the heavy lifting for me). Would that be at all interesting to readers here? It’s the gruntwork of teaching, so it’s a bit different from my usual raging.

It would also be interesting to me to hear from other teachers who have to go through this process.

I’m not home yet

Today involved getting up at 4am to take a cab to the airport, a couple of connections, and then landing at the Minneapolis airport — where I now await the shuttle back to Morris, which doesn’t leave for a few hours, will take a few hours, and if it’s anything like the shuttle we took to get here, will be an icebox that will threaten me with frostbite all afternoon.

But it was all worth it! I got to spend a day in balmy New York City, and I spent most of my time with Iris, who took me on a tour of vegan restaurants on Manhattan. Turns out there are a few. (Don’t worry about the squirrels, since this was a vegan tour we eschewed giving them their deserved reward, this time).

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Then we realized that alcohol is vegan, so we stopped for a little warmup. It was a phenomenal way to savor the big city.

And then it was time to go to Cooper Union, where we speechified and organized to RefuseFascism.org. It was a great event: a diverse and ferocious crowd — you could hear the rage out there — and I gave a short speech and Iris was asked to read a message of support sent by Gloria Steinem. The whole thing was recorded, so you can watch it right now if you’ve got a few hours to spare. I was one of the first speakers, and once you get past me, it just kept getting better and better. I recommend Jeremy Scahill‘s scathing denunciation of the whole damn system if you want to get your blood boiling.

Look! I glow!

Look! I glow!

And then we went out for beer, as all revolutionaries do, and made a few plans that will emerge later. Finally it was a scant few hours of sleep, and here I am, about to climb into an ambulatory freezer. I’d do it again!

Damned history, quit repeating yourself

caligula

Once upon a time, I took a couple of upper-level courses in Roman history. I had a professor who spent a whole quarter on just Augustus, and it was revealing: there was no one moment where you could say that the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, and even as it was happening the Emperor (who was just the Princeps, just another guy among all the other guys, he was just first in all things) was able to point to all these wonderful examples of the continuity of tradition. For example, the tribune of the plebs was important: he was elected by the plebeians to represent their class, and he had all these abilities, like being able to propose legislation directly to the people for a vote, and he had the power to veto legislation. The position was a key check on the power of the aristocracy.

Augustus didn’t get rid of it. He just adopted the tribunician power for himself. So you could go looking for a tribune of the plebs to represent you if you were plebeian, and still find him…he was just the Princeps himself, which kind of defeated the whole purpose, but literally, one could argue you hadn’t lost anything. The fall of the Republic took decades, as all the diverse checks and balances got consolidated into granting absolute power to one individual.

Paul Krugman has been reading some ancient history lately, too.

But the ’30s isn’t the only era with lessons to teach us. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the ancient world. Initially, I have to admit, I was doing it for entertainment and as a refuge from news that gets worse with each passing day. But I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell.

Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade.

On the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rules. Here’s what Adrian Goldsworthy’s “In the Name of Rome” says: “However important it was for an individual to win fame and add to his and his family’s reputation, this should always be subordinated to the good of the Republic … no disappointed Roman politician sought the aid of a foreign power.”

I’m sure historians will look back on the recent history of the American republic and find lots of similar concerns — the gradual aggrandizement of power in the hands of the executive, with the willing help of a senatorial aristocracy (and in our case, a subservient press). It seems like a good idea when you’ve got a competent leader, a Caesar or an Augustus or even dour old Tiberius, but then a Caligula takes the reins and you realize your mistake.

But don’t worry. You can eventually get rid of a Caligula with assassinations, calling in the Praetorians, and treason trials, which of course fixes everything.

Live! In New York! It’s…me!

I’m joining a forlorn hope to call for a refusal to accept our electoral nightmare tonight, at 7pm Eastern. Do I think we’ll succeed? No. Do I think maybe we’ll be part of a movement that might nudge history a little bit? I hope so. All I know for sure is that I can’t just sit back and watch it happen with a stunned expression on my face.

I hope you’re all doing something to oppose this doom that we all seem to be knowingly hurtling towards, while reassuring ourselves it’ll all be fine. Because it won’t.

I accused someone of making a non sequitur

It made him very angry and he started calling in all of the heavy artillery: known bozos who hate SJWs and feminists and leftists. And then, to really teach me a lesson, he went to work and created a potent meme that will probably follow me around on the internet for the rest of my days. Here it is.

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Catchy.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live it down.

Voltaire keeps reaching out from the afterlife to try and make me believe in a god who truly loves me. It’s getting kind of embarrassing. Stop it, Voltaire. And go home, God, you’re drunk.

Natural selection is not the only mechanism of evolution

T. Ryan Gregory makes an important point about how evolutionary biologists should approach problems.

I will avoid the political aspect of this discussion and focus on the science involved in the debate, because I think it highlights an important issue: namely, the need for evolutionary biologists to consider and test alternative hypotheses, even if they are not as intuitively plausible as the main hypothesis. This is one of the reasons that evolutionary biologists often take issue with claims from evolutionary psychology — because evo psych often tends to present a plausible hypothesis but does little to critically evaluate its underlying assumptions and even less to present and rule out alternatives. In particular, evolutionary biologists should know better than to restrict the list of hypotheses ones based on selection, because there are usually viable non-adaptive hypotheses as well. Natural selection is not the only mechanism of evolution.

And then he does precisely what we should do: he lays out a series of alternative explanation for size differences between males and females, and includes non-adaptive explanations. I know way too many boosters for evolutionary science whose brains would explode if you tried to tell them Trait X, which they think is important, doesn’t necessarily provide a selective advantage.

This is why I like to foist Elisabeth Llloyd’s book, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution on my brighter students: each chapter lays out an evolutionary explanation for female orgasms, and shows the evidence pro and con…and often the evidence con is so strong you have to marvel at the psychological appeal of adaptive explanations, that people would advance and promote such poorly evidenced ideas.

Gregory also points to a good post by Jesse Singal that highlights these fallacious explanations. He highlights arguments made by Holly Dunsworth that are particularly good. She’s not very happy with the adaptive just-so stories that reinforce bogus ideas about male dominance.

They’re all criticizing a post by Jerry Coyne that makes a standard complaint from the conservative side of science.

After providing some more evidence that “the larger size and strength of males is reflected in their behavior … and was almost certainly promoted by sexual selection,” Coyne bemoans the fact that so many on the left refuse to acknowledge it. “To deny that the differences between human males and females in size and strength are evolved is to deny at the same time that differences in behavior between males and females is evolved,” he writes. “Only the blinkered ideologue would do that. Sadly, these ideologues continue to promote antiscientific ideas on the Internet.”

Apparently, the “blinkered ideologue” he’s sniping at is…me. Unfortunately for his case, I don’t deny evolved differences between men and women — it would be rather difficult to do so with the evidence in such plentiful supply. What I reject is the notion that a) these are all adaptive, and b) that all of the differences are biological. There is a tendency to extrapolate unwarrantedly from the fact that many women have distinctive lumps of fat on their chests, to a sweeping judgment that therefore, their brains must be completely different than those of men. Worse, they then abuse evolutionary biology to claim that these differences are necessary and intrinsic, and anybody who thinks differently is one of those awful “blank slaters”.

But you can’t do that!

It’s taking a statistical property of a group, which is the product of both biological predispositions and cultural influences, and saying that Trait X must be biological in nature because Trait X exists. It’s nonsense. It takes hard work, which usually hasn’t been done, to tease apart environmental and genetic influences, and too often we fail to appreciate that the trait under consideration is a product of both.

Unfortunately, Singal also makes a statement that annoys me.

There really are people who deny there are any innate, evolutionary driven differences between men and women, and as Coyne points out this belief tends to come out of certain political movements who don’t view such differences as compatible with feminist or progressive beliefs and goals.

Who are these people? I’ve read a fair bit of feminist and scientific literature, I’m friends with a number of people who are labeled as ‘weird feminist extremists’ (usually by the kind of ignorant people who think “cuck” is a cogent insult), and I don’t know any who hold this view. Most feminists start with the position that men and women have differences, but these are unfairly and inappropriately extended to apply to every behavioral property, and fairly consistently to the detriment of women.

What’s usually going on is that some anti-feminist has made a bizarre, unbelievable, and often incorrect claim about feminism (they hate men, they want to rule the world, they think my penis is tiny, etc.), and people agree — yes, that is crazy — without checking to see whether any one of them actually said that. I’ve got people ranting that I don’t believe genes or chromosomes or hormones have any effect on humans, for instance, which is flat out crazy talk. But hey, vilifying your ideological opponents with lies is fair game, right?

A very ugly read

The full EOAA report, and the police report, of the University of Minnesota football team scandal, have been released. It’s 80 horrible pages.

I can see now why the police aren’t pressing charges — the victim would be crucified in court, because she went along with some of the activities that went on in that apartment, out of fear or drunkenness. I can also see why the university is taking action against them, because the football players who participated were awful, ghastly, horrible, rotten young men. I am even less sympathetic with the other team members who are supporting them.

One bit of good news: the other players have ended their threatened boycott. It’s not clear whether it’s because they read the EOAA report, or because UM just got awarded a bowl game.