Academic Mixtape 3

Good stuff that you might have missed

Sep 2

A bunch of academic societies (including ASN, who publish American Naturalist) have issued a Statement on Scientific Publishing that states a clear set of priorities and values which, in my assessment, is a useful lodestar in this time of disequilibrium in the current publishing environment. They specify a set of society-level goals and recommendations for individual scientists. It’s very brief and it’s good stuff. If you’re involved in an academic society, maybe think about bringing this up to see if they’re willing to sign on and walk the talk.

Insights and strategies for improving equity in graduate school admissions. We’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time and this is a high quality codification of a lot of key issues. And it’s a peer-reviewed paper in Cell that you can cite and bring to your university asking them to change policies and allocate resources! This is good stuff based on insights from the Cientifico Latino mentoring program (similar to the Mentor Match programs).

It’s bad in Antarctica for women scientists. This is well known and the subject of major journalistic reports and research studies. How bad is it? This bad. Content warning, this is a difficult read.

You mean you can’t fix in the rat problem in New York City by just trapping and killing as many rats as you can? Nice to see evidence-based work from a scientist who wrote an essay for the NYT.

The College Board has been giving students’ GPAs and SAT scores to Facebook and TikTok. This story shows how it went down, with the journalist confronting The College Board with evidence that of their bald-faced lie, and is hilarious. [To be clear, this is a very serious privacy issue. That said exchange between the journalist and the lying media relations person from The College Board remains hilarious.]

On a related note a college down the road from me has a 97% rejection rate. This place just dropped a long-standing admissions requirement for students to complete calculus, chemistry, and physics while in high school. Now they’re going to let kids do this through Khan Academy. A start, I guess. I think this might be the biggest single step for equity by them since they decided to start admitting women. In 1970. Keep in mind that more than one third of high schools in the country don’t even offer calculus and up until now these students had no path to admissions at CalTech. Also keep in mind that if you know how public education works, tracking starts in middle school and basically affects the math you can take in your senior year. And the practice is classist and racist big time. It’s well established that tracking favors wealthier (and whiter) kids in general. More on this from Edutopia.

I only now just caught wind of this detailed and expert-laden feature in Undark about the persistence of “race science.” Looks like a great teaching resource.

The folks at Jacobin decided to write a story about my pay disparities between administration and faculty in my university system . Rightfully pointing out how high-level admins have been getting big raises but when it comes time to give similar raises to the people who are teaching the students and doing the research, oh, look, we find ourselves at an impasse and a strike is looming. (I think most members of my union might choose to believe our Chancellor’s office that they can’t afford a 12% salary increase if they walked back all of the recent salary increases to the chancellor, presidents, provosts and deans because they realized they couldn’t afford those, either.)

Simone’s Maxims (1999) about how institutions work are ostensibly about Academic Medical Centers but many are broadly applicable. I’m surprised this isn’t more heavily cited. Also I find it really interesting when journals publish editorials that are, in essence, blog posts.

This front page from the Daily Tar Heel:

Here’s a story in Nature how many of us are cutting back on twitter. (I recently deleted the app from my phone because I have no trust they won’t access data they shouldn’t be having. And I locked my account and am not really using it anymore as Bluesky really takes off. It currently has the vibe of early twitter in a good way. Also, this article encapsulates quite well my feelings about the loss of twitter, which for me is definitely a loss. Meanwhile I’ve somehow gotten locked out of my instance at mastodon because I lost access to my device for 2FA and the admins of scholar.social aren’t resetting it for me. So mastodon is clearly not the answer, for me at least.)

This is an adorable story on NPR worth a cleansing listen.

NIH just published a short article with the bizarre outcome of a case study involving that PIs subjected to sanctions for harassment, discrimination, and hostile work environments. These people are not allowed to supervise staff or trainees, but they still are allowed to serve as PIs of awards [that essentially require staff or trainees to get the work done]. As the author says, “Wait, what?” This doesn’t make sense in terms of basic compliance, does it?

A database of university parental leave policies for academics.

I thought this story was super cool, in a make-the-best-you-can-of-our-American-dystopia kind way. A bunch of people got together to raise $15k and used it to purchase $1.6 million of medical debt on the secondary debt market. And then they torched the debt.

What happened to Jon Stewart? This article came out a year ago but I just saw it. I think this was around the time when he starting pushing the COVID-19 lab leak propaganda, which I thought was dismaying and unfortunate.

Every small city has that one dictator chic house.

Best wishes for a lovely labor day weekend.

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Friday, 1 September 2023