How are we supposed to teach in the Plague Years?

Yesterday, I got all my grades turned in, meaning Fall semester is all done…oh, wait, I had to write a bunch of student recommendations and get those sent off. OK, that done, now the semester is behind me, I’m care-free and can go dancing in the streets, or whatever I want for a little while. So what do I do? I opened up my calendar and started planning my schedule for next semester, sketching in lab protocols and exam dates, assembling the information that’ll go into my syllabus. I had some ideas for revising the content/pedagogy of the course, and I wanted to map them out.

It was kind of pointless.

Universities elsewhere (not the University of Minnesota, which will drag its heels to the last moment) are noticing this Omicron variant, and how quickly it may potentially spread, and are scrambling to adjust their schedules, just in case. Four California universities are switching to online only instruction for the first few weeks of the spring term; the University of Washington is going online only for the first week. This is bad news. If you’ve paid any attention at all to university management for the last few years, you’d know that they are always reluctant to adjust to reality, and are never pro-active. If this is what the UW and UC are doing, the situation has to be far worse than anyone is telling.

UM is doing nothing new. Not even a whisper of concern. You’d think, given the fact that our governor and his family just tested positive for COVID-19, that maybe there’d be an alarm bell ringing faintly in some neglected corner of the administration building. For that matter, you’d think Governor Walz might wake up and realize that his lackadaisical, half-assed approach of doing the bare minimum to contain the pandemic wasn’t working, but I don’t expect that to happen, either.

I realized then that next term might be more challenging than I expected, especially since I’m now required to teach all of my classes in-person. Brilliant. Maybe that will change, but I think the faculty and students are now sacrificial lambs laid out on the altar of an optimistic sense of normalcy. It’s all on the shoulders of the faculty to figure out how to flexibly cope with the changing situation.

I made a decision as I was drafting my syllabus. I am required by my employers to be there in Sci 1020, the genetics classroom, but I don’t have to demand that students be there. I’m making attendance optional. I’ll record all my lectures and post them online. Exams will all be take-home. I’ll hold office hours on campus (you better be vaccinated & wearing a mask if you show up in person) and held simultaneously on Zoom.

The lab is a problem. Actually doing the data collection and analysis of independently acquired data is kind of the core purpose of doing a lab, and it’s going to require using on-campus facilities. I have a plan for that, too. The first week of lab will be online: it’s all preparation in basic probability and statistics to get ready for the actual work, and I have exercises in coin-flipping and die-rolling they can do at home. That one is manageable.

Subsequent labs are all about working with flies, and most people would rather not breed thousands of fruit flies in their kitchen. Once again, I am required to teach in-person, so I’ll go in, record myself doing the procedures and showing the students who show up how to do them, and make that available online. Then I’m throwing the lab schedule out the window: the genetics lab will be open from 9am onwards, students will come in when they’ve got available time to do the work on our incubators and microscopes, and I’ll be on call to help out from 9-whenever. That should help spread out attendance. If the university shuts down (I hope the severity of the pandemic isn’t so great that that is necessary), I’ll do the experiments alone, supplemented with class data from previous years, so the students will at least have numbers and phenotypic data to analyze.

It’s going to be a lot of extra work, but I’ll do it. The university administration better be prepared, too: so help me Dog if any of my students die of COVID-19 because of the mandated university environment, I’ll be preparing my letter of resignation and will take my retirement right now, thank you very much. I am so damn tired of irresponsible, incompetent responses to the pandemic, not just from my university, but from every level of government.

My illusory award of two days of vacation

Last week, I mentioned this odd “gesture of appreciation” my university was making to thank us for all our hard work and sacrifices during these pandemic years. We could take two days off in the coming semester. I was baffled…no, I can’t. I’m in a salaried position with daily responsibilities to my students and colleagues — unless you’re telling me that I can send the students home, this is a meaningless, useless gift.

I said as much to one of our administrators, and whoa, I got a straight answer from them. They admitted that “the days off are not as meaningful a gift of time for faculty as for others.” They’re a good thing for staff with regular 9-5 working days, I agree — of course, I suspect that they’ll get eaten up with sick days, or days spent caring for kids who’ve been sent home for school. Then I was told I “can take a day off formally, in the system when you are not teaching”, which is great, except that teaching is something I have to do every day, and is my primary job responsibility. So basically this is a promise of a little extra free time that I’m not allowed to take, but hey, the administration at the Twin Cities campus gets to feel good about doing a little something which is actually nothing.

I suspect some out of touch bright MBA in the marble halls of the central administration wracked their brains really hard to come up with a sop to the workers that would look really good on paper to outsiders, yet wouldn’t cost the university a penny.

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I could be worse

I know many of my readers shudder in dread whenever I mention “sp*d*rs”, but just imagine if Arthropleura hadn’t died off a few hundred million years ago — I’d be growing them in my lab right now and posting photos of my cuties for you to see. This is in the news now because they just found a third fossil.

Sadly, not only have only a few of these humongous millipedes been found, but they’re all fragmentary. All we have are chunks — chunks that are several feet long — of the beast. Nobody has yet found a fossilized Arthropleura head. Just imagine all the eyes, and the nasty great mandibles, and the hungry expression on their face, if you can figure out the various bits of what passes for a face in a giant millipede. I’d show you, if I had a picture!

As long as your imagination is cranking away, here’s a visual aid.

I think his cousin is living in my bathroom shower right now.

My new vicarious pleasure

I have discovered a subreddit called Abandoned Porn. This is very much my kind of porn : photos of old, crumbling, abandoned buildings. Very romantic. So tempting. I made a kind of Homer gurgle when I stumbled across it.

Imagine the spiders in there! I want to go exploring…this summer, I hope. I have to get over this annoying tendinitis (I can walk without pain now, I’m just at the stage of having to be very careful not to worsen anything), and then start casing a few joints in the region. Then, new spider survey! In empty buildings where a pandemic can’t bring everything to a screeching halt! I’m going to have to put this in my to-do list:

  • Get strong.

  • Wait for the snow to melt.

  • Rummage through the wreckage of ancient days.

I’ve got a couple of hardhats with helmet lights, and a collection of bright portable LED lights. I should probably get some nice steel-toed boots with good ankle support.

I should also stake out some sites that aren’t abandoned ruins for comparison.

Who is doing the silencing?

Oh dear. Those poor authors of that dreadful argument for bad policy, the Great Barrington Declaration, are complaining that they’re being silenced. You know where this is going, right?

In fact, these individuals are rather omnipresent figures in the COVID-19 media landscape. They have been on many large podcasts. They have given many TV interviews. They have been interviewed by and written many editorials in large newspapers. They’ve been profiled by the New York Times and Medpage Today. They have a large presence on social media. They have made a truly remarkable number of YouTube videos (Dr. Jay Bahattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Marin Kulldorff), some of which have been seen by millions of people. They have testified before Congress and in courts regarding COVID-19 policy. Some have gained new funding sources or found new employment in right-wing think tanks. They’ve met with and influenced powerful politicians, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. They held a “medical experts roundtable” at President Trump’s White House. Dr. Gupta met with and influenced UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Journalists rightly say the’ve become “famous voices” this pandemic.

Please, don’t hurt them any more. Poor babies.

You know who’s actually getting silenced? Nebraska.

Nebraska plans to stop reporting coronavirus numbers online after Wednesday.

The state Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday that it plans to retire the online dashboard that it has used to report statistics on the coronavirus pandemic for more than a year. The current state virus emergency is also set to expire on Wednesday, and along with that Nebraska is eliminating the last few social distancing guidelines that remained in place.

It’s OK. Don’t you know the pandemic is over?

The state also said that 48.2% of Nebraska’s population has now been vaccinated against the coronavirus. The pace of vaccinations has slowed significantly since April

Over the past two weeks, the seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in Nebraska has risen from 29 new cases per day on June 14 to 43 new cases per day on Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Sexual harassment…in my own back yard!

A sexual harassment case brought by a student against a professor at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities — my back yard is 150 miles long) has finally been closed with a settlement.

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights announced Friday a settlement agreement with the University of Minnesota Board of Regents after a Humphrey School professor sexually harassed a graduate student.

The settlement requires the Humphrey School of Public Affairs to take steps to prevent sexual harassment, pay a graduate student $75,000 and allow the student to complete her degree tuition-free, according to the release.

Well, yay. He was an egregious offender.

According to the release, “the professor made sexual comments in front of her, told her about sex he had with other women, and commented on her appearance in front of her classmates.” The professor also told the student he wanted to be her boyfriend and live together in his home.

There are a few problems with the settlement, though. Free tuition is nice, except the student hasn’t attended classes since 2018. One might guess that she’s less than enthusiastic about returning to the scene of the crime, where the university was so slow in responding. It also doesn’t help that after the professor resigned, the dean of the business school sent out a university-wide email praising him as an “accomplished scholar“ who contributed “substantially” to the school’s global policy classes and research agenda.

Also, there’s the little matter of the student getting $75,000, and the professor getting $190,000 as an incentive to resign. Also getting 3 other pending cases against him dismissed. Also getting an agreement that the university would not publicize his firing…oops, resignation. Also, they initially let him back on the faculty, without notifying students of the results of the investigation that found him guilty.

Hey! It looks like the professor, James Ron, is back on the job market, and he used some of his settlement cash to hire someone to build him a cheesy, generic website to advertise has availability.

James Ron is a dynamic, creative, and adaptable senior research professional with deep and broad experience defining research approaches and methods, managing large, diverse global and domestic project teams, developing policy recommendations, and reporting results. James is respected as a published scholar, author and thought leader.

It mentions his employment at the University of Minnesota, but for completely understandable reasons, fails to mention why he left a job that pays $170,000 per year (Huh…I get less than half that, and I don’t harass my students.)

His colleague, Jason Cao, was also found guilty of violating university policy. He’s still working in the Humphrey School of Business, with restrictions on who he can advise.

Lest you think these are just the sins of those over-privileged wankers in the business school, take a look at the UMN biochemistry department, and the seedy reputation of Gianluigi Veglia. There’s a nice short summary at that link.

After enduring years of sexual harassment, two members of biochemist Gianluigi Veglia’s lab filed complaints with the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Investigators corroborated their accounts and recommended that Veglia be fired. University administrators decided to impose lesser sanctions instead. The university kept the decision quiet until a Minneapolis newspaper revealed details. Universities often don’t disclose information about harassment cases, but sexual harassment experts say this practice is harmful. The lack of transparency about the sanctions against Veglia, who continues to work at the university, catalyzed reforms intended to protect against sexual harassment and improve decision-making. But distrust continues among faculty and graduate students.

It wasn’t a secret. Veglia was openly harassing his students.

Veglia also regularly harassed Soller about the fact that she was married. He said, “Why are you missing out on all of these experiences you could be having in grad school because you’re married?” Soller says. “I was also told that I couldn’t be a successful scientist and also wife.”

She also recalls one time when Veglia commented on a lab mate, saying something to the effect of, “I bet she’s a devil in bed.”

Veglia referred to the female graduate students in his lab as “Veglia chicks,” Soller says. “When you’re constantly being referred to as that, and you’re trying to be taken as a serious scientist in the field, it’s degrading.”

Dicke, who joined Veglia’s lab in 2012, says he would frequently tell her that the only reason he hired her was for her looks.

“At one point he told me that I was very beautiful and that I was going to be sexually harassed and that’s why he said inappropriate things to me—because I need to be desensitized to it,” Dicke says. “At some point he told me that I just want to be dominated. He meant that in a sexual way.”

Another time, “he tapped my arm with his elbow and said, ‘Don’t order anything with garlic so we can get close later’ in front of this other professor. The other professor responded by saying that we should order more wine because the ladies need to loosen up,” Dicke says. The other professor was not from the University of Minnesota, Dicke says, though she declined to give C&EN his name.

Don’t worry, though, the faculty had a “vibrant” discussion about him.

“Given its egregious and repetitive nature, Dr. Veglia’s conduct created an intimidating, hostile, and offensive working environment,” one of the reports says. The parts of the reports that included Veglia’s responses to the complaints were redacted.

In a separate letter, the EOAA Office recommended that Veglia be fired, according to several of C&EN’s sources.

“A very vibrant, protracted discussion” ensued to determine Veglia’s fate, according to one administrator, who asked not to be named because the person was not authorized to talk about the proceedings. According to the administrator, the people involved had different opinions about the facts of the case, as well as whether firing was an appropriate punishment for the harassment. Everyone directly involved in the discussion was a man, except for EOAA representatives.

It is reassuring in a way, I suppose, that the university will do their darndest to shield me, and the university, from embarrassment if I should go on a sexual rampage. It is not at all reassuring that I might have to work with assholes, or that my students are vulnerable to this sort of thing. Fortunately, my colleagues here at the Morris campus of the UMN all seem to be decent, good people…but then, how would I know? The university likes to conceal this information from everyone.

Of the 55 sexual misconduct cases substantiated in the university system from 2013 through 2017, more than half ended in the shadows. In 23 of the cases, the responsible employee left the university either through “resignation, lay-off or non-renewal” after the finding but before being disciplined; their names and case files are not publicly released.

In nine other cases, the employees remained at the university but weren’t disciplined. They may have received letters of expectation, been directed to complete training, or received coaching or monitoring, but these consequences are not severe enough to meet the university’s definition of discipline. Their names and case files also remain private.

I’d like this place to hold higher standards.

If the virus doesn’t get you, the cultists will

Isn’t it odd how people will refuse to get vaccinated, because they “don’t know what’s in it” (while in reality, the contents of a vaccine are precisely specified and measured down to the last nanogram), but then they’ll turn around and slurp up toxic goo mixed up in a church basement by a kook?

The family of a Dallas’ QAnon cult member is sounding the alarm.

Multiple members of the Leek family confirmed that their relative, who left her husband and children behind in Delaware to follow a fringe QAnon cult leader to Dallas last month, has been drinking a chemical cocktail containing chlorine dioxide, an industrial disinfectant, among other substances.

Their relative has been drinking this cocktail alongside her fellow cult members and has been the one to mix it up and distribute it amongst the group as well, says family, who have declined to reveal the name of their relative in the group.

“She was proud to tell us that she was the one mixing it up and giving it to everybody,” a family member said.

The cult leader in this case is the same guy who prophesied that assassinated president John F. Kennedy was going to appear in downtown Dallas and make Trump president again. I guess if you believe that, you’re also ready to drink poison from the same guy.

Yes! Grades done!

Fall Semester 2021 is done, except for the inevitable stress of dealing with unhappy students complaining about their grades — I’ve already got two of those, I’m sure more will be coming.

So what next? How should I celebrate? I’m kind of at a loss here, with my poor narrowly strictured brain turning immediately to thoughts of getting started preparing for next term, but there must be something better to do.

I guess I could put up our Xmas tree, but it seems a little bit pointless. We’re not doing anything for the holiday, not getting together with other family, no social events, nothing. I’m tentatively penciling in watching the The Muppet Christmas Carol with my wife on Xmas eve, if she approves. Is that festive enough? Because otherwise, I’m not feeling it.

The cork is about to pop

Just in case you think my last post was too pessimistic, here’s the latest news from Antarctica.

This week, ice scientists meeting in New Orleans warned that something even more alarming was brewing on the West Antarctic ice sheet – a vast basin of ice on the Antarctic peninsula. Years of research by teams of British and American researchers showed that great cracks and fissures had opened up both on top of and underneath the Thwaites glacier, one of the biggest in the world, and it was feared that parts of it, too, may fracture and collapse possibly within five years or less.

Thwaites makes Larsen B look like an icicle. It is roughly 100 times larger, about the size of Britain, and contains enough water on its own to raise sea levels worldwide by more than half a metre. It contributes about 4% of annual global sea level rise and has been called the most important glacier in the world, even the “doomsday” glacier. Satellite studies show it is melting far faster than it did in the 1990s.

Thwaites is worrisome, but there are many other great glaciers in Antarctica also retreating, thinning and melting as the Southern Ocean warms. Many are being held back because Thwaites acts like a cork, blocking their exit to the sea. Should Thwaites fall apart, scientists believe the others would speed up, leading to the collapse of the whole ice sheet and catastrophic global sea level rises of several metres.

The Thwaites glacier looks so small in the satellite view. All the white icy stuff piled up behind it looks even more ominous now.

Satellite view of Antarctica with the Thwaites glacier marked in red.

Don’t panic! Governments around the world are leaping into action…or not.

Yet just one month after Cop26 ended in Glasgow, the warning that the 300-metre thick, 50-mile wide Thwaites glacier has started to crack up has been met with silence from governments preoccupied by Covid-19 and the return of normal politics. The danger is that the many actions pledged in November to address global heating will be shelved for another year, to become just one more risk in an increasingly dangerous world.

Thwaites underlines that global heating and glaciers do not wait for politicians, and every year action to reduce climate emissions is delayed only accelerates global disaster.

Isn’t it reassuring that no matter how dismal I sound, reality is so much worse?

The most important civics lesson they never taught us

I was this many years old before I learned this extremely important civics rule (forgive me, I’m a little slow):

The laws don’t apply to the people on top.

Or, rather, the laws were written by the people on top to provide them with loopholes, but also the minions who enforce the law do so at the bidding of the people on top.

I know, it’s obvious, and has been obvious all of my life, but as a white man I have been given enough benefits that I could overlook that aspect of reality. Events of recent years have made it so conspicuously overt that it is an unavoidable conclusion. Why do you think so many white men are rushing to join white supremacy movements, or voting Republican, or writing desperate op-eds defending the latest horrific act? It’s because they’re panicking about losing their privileged status in the inevitable upheaval. They’re shoring up the dikes, but the waters are rising fast, and they’re afraid they’ll drown in the flood.

There are only two possible outcomes here: either we get a total fascist crackdown to armor up the inequities of the ex-Republic, or we are going to see the Ancien Régime demolished for its excesses. I’d rather be on the side of the latter process.

What finally hammered the lesson home to me? There have been so many things. The Supreme Court has become transparently political, and I can no longer regarded it as an impartial arbiter of the law. It’s stacked. It’s rigged. It’s laws can no longer be regarded as fair and just.

The police…I remember when they were portrayed as Officer Friendly in PR campaigns. Nope. They are militarized enforcers for the status quo, committing murder at will. Have you noticed that the blue of the boys in blue has become progressively darker over the decades, until now it’s just black? If this were a fantasy novel, we’d call it blatant, over-the-top foreshadowing. Any day now they’re going to redesign the badges to be just silver skulls. Oh, too late — the police themselves think that would be awesomely cool.

We’re only just now becoming widely aware that the US Senate is an undemocratic institution that privileges wealthy landowners. I know, that’s what it was explicitly set up to be, but all we were taught is that the power was distributed among three branches so no one could dominate. Well, the judicial branch is dead, and the Senate is a place where minority views by octogenerians get total power to block legislation.

We still have the house, right? Nice populist institution? Forget it. The House Speaker thinks it is a branch of the “free market economy”. The real reason Jimmy Stewart as Mr Smith goes to Washington is to sell out and get rich. He’s going to filibuster to make sure coal and oil companies can continue to destroy the environment.

We can still respect the distinguished office of the presidency, though. Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Presidents make clowns look dignified.

Now we know that…

The Trump administration engaged in “deliberate efforts” to undermine the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic for political purposes, a congressional report released Friday concludes.

The report, prepared by the House select subcommittee investigating the nation’s Covid response, says the White House repeatedly overruled public health and testing guidance by the nation’s top infectious disease experts and silenced officials in order to promote then-President Donald Trump’s political agenda.

He is responsible for the deaths of thousands, and further, he helped sow the seeds of conspiracy theories and bogus quack medicine that will kill thousands more. He pressured the head of the NIH to endorse hydroxychloroquine and other quackery — fortunately, Collins refused (shockingly, there are some tiny specks of integrity in the political landscape, although Trump followers will probably be chanting about killing him now).

Trump still walks free, and is planning his next run for office. The media is eagerly awaiting the exciting, spectacular news and the frenzied PR circus that will follow along in the trail of wreckage it leaves behind. Everyone is dithering, because…because…because, well gosh, he’s the ex-president! We can’t arrest him for conspiring to overthrow the government and being so incompetent that he let citizens die for political gain! Why, if he fell, then congress would have to after their colleagues, like the rapist-enabler and the coke-snorting party boy and the incompetent conservative loony (I know, that one describes a lot of Republicans), and they won’t do that. That could disrupt the party money machine. And then, who knows, the UK might wake up to how wretchedly stupid Boris Johnson is, and the whole edifice that props up idiot privileged assholes all around the world might crumble.

That could lead to principled politicians taking office, and next thing you know, reform. The well-established money making game might get shaken up, the tables flipped, and suddenly everyone in office would have to work for a living.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that isn’t going to happen.

Hey, remember the good old days of George W. Bush, when idealists would fantasize about how his crimes and corruption and wholesale murders would culminate in him being put in handcuffs and perp-walked out of the White House? It never happened. The war criminal is in a prosperous retirement in which the media occasionally publishes a puff piece about his cheesy amateur paintings. Henry Kissinger is still alive, has a net worth of tens of millions of dollars, and still has journalists begging for interviews. Donald Trump might just be the next president of the United States.

Burn it all down. The American republic is a failed experiment.

The world will sigh with relief when we’re simultaneously hollowed out by the pandemic (facilitated by our own idiot policies) and torched by climate change, which we will do nothing about.