| I was having a conversation with a buddy who was recruiting a grad student. Departmental lines for grad students are shrinking all over, and our Federal Situation has turned everything upside down. There are fewer slots for grad students. Each slot is precious, not just for the applicants but also for the mentors. Faculty in research institutions are under pressure to advance their careers by leveraging the labor of one's grad students. The world shouldn't be like this, and it wasn't like that when I went to grad school¹, but here we are². When research faculty are being evaluated for tenure, departments tend to not focus on the quality of mentorship, long-term success of trainees, and the advances in justice and equity for the field. This stuff should count for a lot, but let's be real, it doesn't. They're looking at the quantity of publications, the exclusivity of the journals where they are published, and grant dollars. In an era of declining resources, in terms of grant dollars and access to labor, it's tempting to go down the conservative road to make sure that you can successfully cross the finish line in academic science. (Not that there is any single finish line. There's getting into grad school, then finishing, then postdoc, then tenure-track, then tenure, then some awards, then promotion, then higher status, then whatever else you're comparing yourself to.) With the continuous need to make sure that things work out well, can we afford to take chances? With respect to the science itself, groundbreaking science is often risky science. In NSF panels, a reviewer might say, "This is a risky proposal, in the good sense. If their idea is right, and if this project works, it will be spectacular and this work is definitely worth supporting." But what you will are unlikely to hear is, "This proposal has guaranteed success because it takes no risks at all and I am excited about the science." Exciting science is risky science. In the International Baccalaureate program, one of the positive characteristics of an IB learner is "risk-taker." Transformative science requires taking risks. I posit that we also need to take risks (in the good-type-of-risk way) to transform the composition of our community of scientists. Yes, the Bad Guys defunding DEIJ work are doing their best to subtract people of color from the scientific enterprise, and working against this movement constitutes a risk. Aside from publicly speaking against the current regime, what is the risk involved? It turns out that prospective grad students who look like sure bets as successful grad students are the ones who have had every advantage handed to them, and they mostly turn out to be white folks. Students who have a ton of research experience because they have less personal and financial challenges in their way. Students who have already had the chance to author papers as an undergraduate. Students who did their undergrad in prestigious and exclusionary Small Liberal Arts Colleges and Research Institutions because of the zip code that they grew up in. Students who weren't working 20-30 hours per week all through college. Students who had parents and grandparents who graduated college – heck, students whose parents are professors. It turns out that being a professor is one of the most heritable jobs out there. When you choose to further that heritability, you're not taking a risk. And you're not helping transform our field. What to do about this? It's up to all of us to change the culture of our field, so that we stop valuing people purely on their h-scores, and instead we pay close attention to how they mentor, and who they mentor. That starts with hiring criteria. This starts with tenure criteria. This starts with how we recruit members of our lab. This starts with how we prioritize when, how, where, and with whom we publish. As Toni Morrison said in 2003: "I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game."
You're in this job? Take your risks to free somebody else. ¹ Recently when I was doing the grad-student-pizza-with-visiting-speaker lunch thing, I flabbergasted the bunch when I mentioned that my dissertation papers were sole authored. My advisor turned down authorship, because he said he didn't earn it and because it was better for me. Do they make them like that nowadays? ² That said, the advent of AI has already changed this dynamic in a big way. In the past month, I've talked with so, so many friends and colleagues (more than I can count with my fingers) who have all basically said the same thing. These are all folks who are held in high regard by our peers and are running highly productive labs at universities that sound impressive. Nobody said these exact words, obviously, but this really captures the essence: "Because I am able to do modeling, stats, and data visualizations with the support of AI [most of them using Claude Code], I literally have less need for postdocs and grad students. Writing papers with grad students usually takes more time in mentorship than just doing it myself, so really when I choose to work with students, it's all about their mentoring and professional development. Which I love to do and is a priority. But also, when I have certain things that need to be done, I don't have to rely on junior scientists like I used to. While fieldwork and benchwork require labor and supervision, once the data arrive, I feel like I'm not as reliant on them to get projects over the finish line, because the coding has been the rate limiting step." Seriously, it's eerie how many people have been telling me this same thing, over and over. Maybe they're more comfortable saying so since I essentially said the same thing about my undergrad-focused lab on here. There's a strong minority of folks who are absolutists about not using AI for anything, and there is reluctance to unnecessarily draw their ire, so they aren't broadcasting that this is how they're working. But it's happening all over. Just so you know. |
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