Student activism is integral to the mission of academe.
This new study from Denmark is a doozy, describing detail how men skirt around the responsibility for academic service/leadership and leave this labor to their women colleagues, who pay a substantial professional price. This is a well known phenomenon, but what is described here is extremely stark, and it’s important that everybody understand what’s going on here.
McSweeney’s has had some good ones recently, including” “I’m the draft list at this brewery, and no, you can’t have a light beer” and “my comments are in the google doc linked in the dropbox I sent in the slack,” which is so spot on that I am taking it personally. And also, “We are not a ‘school’ — we are a hospital system with a football team.”
You know what professional goalkeepers are putting on their gloves to help them grip the ball better? Vaseline. For real. what now? how does that work?
It’s not your fault that academic life is getting harder.
A profession, if you can keep it.
Can you imagine being that one guy at UCSD who was so delinquent on his final reports to NIH that all grants to the university got frozen? Yowza. (no paywall, but you might have to register for free if you’re not logging in from a .edu)
The power of mistakes is often underrated.
The goalposts aren’t moving, you’re just shooting at the wrong target. Supreme wisdom here about grant writing from Drugmonkey. It explains how your job when writing a grant is not to patch every hole and address every possible criticism, but instead to develop a project that is exciting enough and credible enough that reviewers won’t feel the need to find every little thing to criticize. Reviewers will overlook small issues if they’re excited about the big picture, and if reviewers are focusing on a bunch of small issues to the point that it’s fatal, that’s because the big picture isn’t exciting or conceptually tidy enough. (One of my best-read pieces was centered on this idea: Lessons from serving on NSF panels)
So the style guide for Nature won’t allow us to refer to The Global South as a proper noun?
Ending “domestic helicopter research.”
More journalism on safety and sexual misconduct in Antarctica. “Jane Willenbring was the first to blow the whistle on sexual harassment and assault in Antarctica. Years later, women are still coming forward with tales of horror as a government investigation unfolds.” (content warning is at the top of the piece)
“Before this backlash worsens, DEI advocates, the scientific community, universities, and federal agencies need to collectively call out the dangers of setting aside DEI and come up with robust ways to demonstrate its value to society.”
Speaking of which, have you followed any of the weird stuff going on by one disaffected old white guy at NPR, who has gotten bent out of shape because they’re covering the news from a broad variety of perspectives? Here’s a good take on it from his former colleague, who seems to get it.
Another excellent thing from our current federal government: now the Bureau of Land Management’s new Public Lands Rule is designed to ensure the protection of clean water and wildlife habitat, conduct habitat restoration, and use evidence-based decision making.
This video has really made the rounds (over a million views) about one person’s trajectory in their science career, that resonated with a lot of people.
This is extremely niche but I found this so important and valuable that I’m sharing it anyway. You probably wouldn’t know this unless you have an visible institutional role that features entomological expertise, but for those of us who do, we periodically get contacted by members of the public who are experiencing delusional parasitosis. These folks are convinced that they are experiencing infestations in their skin caused by insects or similar organisms, but in fact there are not insects causing this problem. This is a really difficult issue to deal with as working to properly support these people as entomological experts is beyond our realm of expertise, considering that they believe that it is indeed within our expertise. This article in the American Entomologist provides some guidance and perspective for those of us who find ourselves in this circumstance. I might add that it also provides guidance for any academic who ends up interacting with people who are seeking out support that we are not capable of providing.
I grew up in the 1980s when there was a completely absurd panic in the media and from authority figures about things allegedly “Satanic.” It was really wild and completely idiotic. Here’s an obituary of the a guy who fueled a lot of this. I had no idea.
In Florida: the unraveling of New College as a dry run for other, much larger, public institutions.