Antidoes to cynicism creep in academia.
“Are you visible?” from the perennial Drugmonkey.
And more from him about what it means that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is no longer paying publication charges. Which I think makes sense in a lot of ways. (Because when well-funded people are able to pay APCs, that just props up the for-profit funding model that prevails.)
And speaking of which PeerJ was just sold to Taylor & Francis?!
What do prospective college students think of this moral panic about free expression on college campuses and fascist attempts to stop “woke” education? This piece from Tressie McMillan Cottom gets it.
Open season on scholars of race.
And another SLAC closes: Birmingham Southern College.
Publisher Neon Squid has chosen to not publish a forthcoming book from a science communicator after multiple accusations against the author of sexual assault. I saw this on social media (I linked to twitter, but saw it on bluesky) and I hope there will be some journalism about this? Nothing pops up in the news but it’s been on the socials for days.
A bunch of local newspapers are owned by the fossil fuel industry? Really? Guess how they cover the climate crisis, or rather, how they don’t.
Those “just walk out” grocery stores being run by Amazon? They’re shutting down that feature because, well, it was never an automated process — it relied on 1,000 employees (located in India) monitoring videos of shoppers in these stores. It was a mechanical turk the entire time! My gosh. (By the way, the story of the Mechanical Turk is really wild, if you’re not familiar with it.)
Class is cancelled until further notice while I do my job. I think satire cuts most deep when the blade is fully the truth? This one requires sutures.
The Chronicle published a longer and more detailed piece about the persecution of Dr. Priyanga Amarasekare in the EEB department at UCLA. It’s been almost two years since the university kicked her out of her lab, kept her from coming to campus, took away her pay, and kept her from interacting with her students. At last we have a piece of journalism that offers an official explanation for what she allegedly did wrong. To be specific: “reputational damage” by “breaching confidentiality about personnel matters and for ‘making evaluations of the professional competence of faculty members by criteria not directly reflective of professional performance’.” Also they said she made “unfounded public accusations against her colleagues, failed to cooperate with efforts ‘to correct her behavior,’ and treated those ‘who tried to bridge the gap between her and some of her colleagues with contempt’.”
In other words, she was being uppity. The story told in the Chronicle is consistent with what I have already had heard. Which is: She was being difficult for good reason. She actively pushed against a culture that devalued students and scientists of color, and in the context of institutional changes catalyzed in 2020, she spoke some difficult truths to people who were resistant to those truths. So her suspension from UCLA was a retaliation engineered by her colleagues who felt threatened when she explained in stark terms what structural racism looks like in their own department. Ultimately, Dr. Amarasekare’s treatment became yet another direct piece of evidence. Ultimately, on the basis of her identity as well as extraordinary scientific achievement, she doesn’t “fit” into that community. That is not a fault of hers, it is a fault of the community. What does it say when a person who can receive the top awards in their fields, have a huge amount of power in the international research community, and and gets punished by pushing for change in their own institution? If someone with all of the privilege accumulated through her achievement is not positioned to make a difference because of their identity, then how can institutional culture improve? Anyhow, here’s a twitter thread that spells this out with some more depth and inside awareness.
This is absolutely horrific, two weeks ago, two grad students from Louisiana State University were at an entomology conference in the region (in Augusta, Georgia) and were shot by some unknown person who remains at large. The injuries were serious, and thankfully both of them are recovering. As their health plan doesn’t cover all of their needs (another reminder, this is America, folks), their colleagues are fundraising to support them.