How is your alma mater holding up?

This is news to make a professor shudder: a university closing its doors.

A Massachusetts liberal arts college is set to close permanently due to low enrollment and financial problems.

The board of trustees of Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Amherst founded in 1965, pointed to “financial pressures” that have been “compounded by shifting external factors”.

Universities have been under attack for decades, thanks to our ‘friends’ in the Republican party. Authoritarians and conservatives hate new ideas and helping people rise up out of poverty, and they’ve been whittling away at support for universities, throwing so much debt onto the shoulders of our students. The pandemic hit many colleges hard, too.

Hampshire College hits a little bit close to home. It was a little smaller in enrollment than UMM, my school, and was founded a bit more recently. It was also a liberal arts college, like mine. It differed in some significant ways. According to Wikipedia:

The college utilizes an alternative curriculum, with an emphasis on progressive pedagogy and self-directed academic concentrations, a focus on portfolios rather than distribution requirements, and a reliance on narrative evaluations instead of grades and GPAs.

That’s interesting and I appreciate innovative education, but it does make the work of that university harder. UMM has a more traditional curriculum, but we’ve also struggled over the past few years. Our enrollment bottomed out about two years ago — which is why my senior level genetics course has only 8 students this year, rather than the 30-40 I used to see. (We’re working ourselves out of this hole right now — my fall courses are fully enrolled already, and we may have to pack more students into the class.)

The situation of Hampshire College is a reminder that the situation of all universities in this country is precarious.

What’s an atheist to think?

Here’s a conflict in human thinking in general. It’s revealed in this old exchange between Mehdi Hasan and Richard Dawkins.

Hasan is a believing Muslim, and Dawkins asks if he believes that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse. Hasan says he does, that he believes in God and in miracles. Dawkins is incredulous.

My position, as a hard atheist, is that I agree that those are ridiculous beliefs that contradict reality and reason, and that it is very silly to believe in gods. I’m going to side with Dawkins a little bit on this one.

At the same time, though, I’m also going to side with Hasan a little bit…maybe a lot. He concedes that he could be wrong, which is a position I will always favor; he’s demonstrating tolerance for ideas that differ from those of his faith. I’ve never heard Hasan proselytize for Islam, and he says that he’s teaching his own child about Islam, which is fine with me as long as he’s also introducing that child to his principles of tolerance and a willingness to concede the possibility of error.

I also believe that everyone holds silly beliefs. Many people will go into the world of a movie or video game and suspend their strict adherence to the rules of reality for a while; I don’t think they go insane while doing that. Humans have an amazing capacity for stretching their minds out of congruence with nature, and that’s a good thing — we’d have no art, no music, no literature, if we didn’t have that ability. Some people might believe that the Minnesota Vikings are the greatest football team in the world, or that they’re a great cook, or that the sound of church bells is esthetically superior to the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. We don’t condemn them for that, as long as they’re willing to tolerate the existence of church bells and the muezzin. I’m comfortable with a Catholic church down the street from me as long as they aren’t trying to compel me to revere a cracker.

The big question in my mind is always going to be what are you going to do about it? You can disagree with me about evolution, for instance, and I’m going to think you are a very foolish person, but I’m not going to have you arrested or burn down your church. On the other hand, I don’t trust a religious fanatic to not try to make my university illegal, or censor the things we teach — we’re already seeing that happening. You can’t police a belief or an opinion!

I’m afraid I don’t trust Richard Dawkins to not be authoritarian. He has strongly held beliefs of his own, about how science is the only acceptable approach to understanding the world, or about how people’s perspective on gender should be tolerated, and I think he has already been abusing the respect he earned for his science and writing to advocate for oppression and intolerance. Don’t give him any more influence.

So far, Mehdi Hasan seems to be mainly advocating for human rights for all people, and is acting as a positive influence in the world.

I could be wrong. I hope I’m not.

It’s official

I just submitted the official university paperwork resigning from my appointment as of April 2027. One more year, and then I’m outta here.

Don’t ask me how I feel about it yet. Ask me a year from today, when it gets real.

Right now I’m mainly stressed about the fact that Boeing sent me a letter saying they overpaid on my mother’s death benefits, and they want $5000 back right now. On the one hand, that’s peanuts for Boeing, they can go overcharge the government for a bolt to get that money back; on the other hand, do I really want to get in a fight with Boeing?

Penalize ALL the TikTok psychics

One of the worst things I can imagine happening in my world is the death of a student. These are our charges, we get to know them and feel responsibility for them, and the pain of loss is deeply felt. Even worse is when students die violently. They’re young, and should have a long life ahead of them.

The second worst thing would be for a teacher to be falsely accused of killing a student, especially when there is no evidence suggesting such a thing. It’s more than a civil and criminal accusation, it’s morally villainous.

In 2022, four students at the University of Idaho were brutally murdered. This was a heinous act without excuse. The man who did it was arrested, confessed, convicted, and was sentenced to life in prison. In the wake of the murders, though, a woman named Ashley Guillard was riding high on social media, claiming to know who the killer was on the basis of her psychic powers and making TikTok video after TikTok video declaring that the tarot cards told her that a history professor at the University of Idaho, Rebecca Scofield, had been having an affair with one of the victims and had had them all killed.

Before authorities arrested Kohberger in late December 2022 in connection with the victims’ brutal stabbing deaths, Guillard published videos on the TikTok platform baselessly alleging Scofield had engaged in a romance with one of the four people slain.

Guillard – who is a resident of Houston, Texas, and described herself as a psychic crime solver on her TikTok account – accused Scofield on camera of ordering the quadruple murder to hide her relationship with one of the victims. She cited tarot card readings as evidence to support her unfounded theory.

It was a ludicrous accusation. Flipping cards in Texas will not tell you who the perpetrator of a crime in Idaho was, but apparently making inflammatory accusations without evidence was Guillard’s only claim to fame, and she profited off the attention she got for lying about people. Her slanders finally caught up with her, though: Scofield sued and won a $10 million award from her.

In a June 6, 2024, order, a federal judge sided with Scofield, ruling that the internet personality’s statements were defamatory and based “only” on her “spiritual intuition about the murders” — not “any objective basis.”

The judge also noted that Guillard’s social media posts continued even after the Moscow Police Department issued a press release in December 2022 stating that Scofield was not a suspect in the murder investigation.

Now Guillard is crying and calling the ruling Unfair!. Too bad. Slap her down hard, teach her that you can’t profit off false accusation. If she wants to complain about anything, it’s that TikTok has incredibly lax policies about enforcing rules and rights online. If you enthusiastically charge into a wild wild West of lawlessness and you get gunned down in a shootout, you don’t get to blame someone else.

Let’s extend the verdict. Anyone making factual claims on the basis of tarot cards, psychic powers, or Bible prophecy are charlatans who ought to face the full weight of the law when their claims harm people. Stupid people babbling on social media are small potatoes — go after the people who claim that politicians have divine favor because a god whispered in their head that they must be supported in even their most damaging actions. Prosecute those who claim to wage holy war first of all.

Losers

I am encouraged by the defeat of Victor Orban in Hungary. I’m happy for the people of Hungary throwing off the yoke of fascism and having hope for the future, and for the people of Europe as a whole building a stronger alliance.

But I’m selfish. I’m also happy to see JD Vance flop hard; it was unbelievable to me that Republicans from America were campaigning for Orban. Vance was politicking for Orban just recently, as part of his personal campaign to appear ‘presidential,’ and many right-wingers have been on the Orban train for a long, long time. The Hungarian election was a harbinger of the American elections to come, and the message is clear: Vance is a loser. Republicans are losers. Trump is a loser. They should be nervous, because they’re all just waiting for the axe to fall.

Down, down, in the dark

Shirtsleeve weather, the sun is shining bright, and there are stirrings in the darkness. I prowled about my yard, searching for spiders, but the best I could find was spider-sign — they’re out and about, leaving strands of silk in crevices and corners, but I saw none.

That is, until I turned to the ever-reliable compost bin. I found even more silk everywhere in there, but to find an inhabitant I had to bend over and stick my head upside down deep into the bin, way down low until I was look just above the edge of the decaying plants, and there at last I found one, a familiar old friend, Steatoda borealis.

S. borealis is entirely black in body color, and she was on the side of a black bin, in shadow, deep in darkness, so getting any kind of photo was difficult. But there she was, my first Theridiidae of the new season.

This compost bin is a favored spot. I think they snuggle down in the layers of rotting glop and overwinter there, and then they’re the first to reappear once the weather well and truly breaks. It’s kind of sweet to think of them sleeping down in the dark, in the mulch, all winter long, waiting to reemerge.

I’ve got homework for you

OK, gang, help me out here. I’m swamped today — my morning is destroyed because I have to go in to the clinic for my annual thorough extensive physical check-up, and I get out just in time for my afternoon class, and then I’m free, sort of. Except that I have to compose a 10 question online quiz on chromosome variations.

So give me some good questions on deletions, duplications, inversions, and translocations. Preferably questions that can be easily machine-scored, but I do throw in an essay question or two.

Get to work. I’ll expect them in the comments section here when I get back at 1:30.

Don’t disappoint me.

Genetics progress

Today was a lab day, and I’m happy to report that the students have achieved perfection. Every fly bottle was beautiful, full of maggots and pupae, and not one hint of contamination among them all. And so many pupae already! This is excellent news, because next week swarms of adult F2 flies will emerge and the students will have to score and count them all to finish this mapping cross.

Score. And count. ALL. Next week’s lab will require extra time to complete, and I let them know that today. It’s been typical to count 10-15,000 flies in the final cross in this class, but I don’t expect that many this year (it’s a small class of only 8 students*), and I don’t grade them on raw numbers but on how well they analyze and interpret the numbers they do get. I think this experiment will be ending on a high note, at least, and the maggoty-side will be over next week, leaving them two weeks to put together a lab report.

I also committed the students to a specific in-class presentations on the 27th of April, the last week of class. We really are winding down.

*8 is an unusually low number of students — we hit a trough in enrollment numbers a few years ago. I wouldn’t mind classes this small every year, but I suppose we need a larger enrollment to sustain the university. I see good signs for the future**: my cell biology course in the Fall is nearly full, and registration isn’t quite over yet.

**I would like to have my final year here, the 2026-2027 academic year, be a bountiful year. I’d like to exit with a good term.

Not funny

I did not like this Far Side cartoon for obvious reasons.

This could do real harm, burning the victim’s neck, and if I caught anyone doing this they would be immediately expelled from the lab. Not funny.

Additionally, I have a personal memory of my first year in general chemistry. I had a lab partner who was a total klutz — I carried her through that lab, in spite of her inability to titrate anything. She was a danger with a pipette, and every week I’d go back to the dorm to discover that somehow the back of my pants and shirt had been spattered with acids — when I’d do my laundry I’d discover all these holes in my clothes, which was also not funny.

I’ve wondered for years if my lab partner really disliked me, or if she was trying to get my attention because she liked me, or she was just ridiculously incompetent in the lab. It happened so often that I suspect the first possibility.