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te the review panels around the winter break it s an all hands on deck situation where people who don t operate the program are brought in to support the program who gets to decide where the line is on what constitutes overt bias i think there is probably a philosophy at work where transparency is valued and the idea that the occasional overtly biased review might be preferred to the idea that someone behind the scenes is tainting reviews by removing content that was intended by the reviewer in my opinion in a perfect world all of the reviews with overtly problematic bias would be simply deleted from the process before anybody on a panel would be exposed to them but there a lot of this is a big grey zone the howlers are very obvious of course but that s just the long end of a tail and who s going to draw that line maybe it s better that no line is drawn so that we can see the reviews when they are a problem i think there is the prevailing philosophy which i admittedly don t radically disagree with though i m not sure if i agree with it that overtly biased reviews are best addressed by not squashing them but instead by giving them sunlight i ve been involved in enough of these kinds of situations where i ve seen problematic statements in reviews either get entirely ignored and that these statements just obviously devalue the weight of the review in general and sometimes it s brought up and discussed in the way you hope it would be discussed then again sometimes it s me bringing up the issue and i don t have knowledge of rooms when i am not in them i think it s worth asking is it better to just delete these reviews and move on or is it better to share them so that everybody can see these horrible statements for what they are i think how you answer that question might be connected to your level of trust in the idea that most panelists find these horrible comments to be truly horrible i sure do hope that they find who these people are and make sure that they never participate in the review process again according to a current rotating program officer who took to twitter about the review process though not explicitly about the grfp getting the content of a review redacted is quite a big deal one way to ameliorate this problem is to have a deeper reviewer pool that s a thing i ve long been talking about of course this doesn t fix the problem for what it s worth i ve mentioned on occasion the idea of limiting the number of applications from a given institution based on enrollment of course you ll have several dozen undergrads from mit applying each year and relatively few from say csu dominguez hills so if you think that there s a problem with representation in the pool then you can change the composition of the pool by making sure that you re increasing representation from universities that have more representation anyhow if you re wondering why nsf lets these bad reviews happen be a part of the process i m wondering right along with you but i also know enough about how bureaucracies work and how simple fixes to big problems are often not that simple i think part of the accountability here is to make sure that when there are problems that they get exposed to daylight for those of you who have had the courage to be vocal about the bias you ve experienced thank you for your service and i m sorry that you have gone through this you and our entirely community deserves better i suspect most everybody at nsf agrees with this too but they aren t well positioned to come out and say it for themselves date 18 april 2023 author terry mcglynn recommended reads 207 standard higher education s other diversity crisis the article is about oxford but really it s about everywhere insect decline gets the elizabeth kolbert treatment in the new yorker american teens are unwell because society is unwell confidence highlighted read women have been misled about menopause the intersections of identity and persistence for retention in ecology and environmental biology with personal narratives from black women yes this is an article that you can cite when you re putting in your grant why you need to provide more support for black women in field sciences but more importantly it s a paper to read and digest available evidence still points to covid originating from spillover what up with certain us government agencies saying that covid was a lab leak but without providing any evidence for this so weird anyhow here s the take from a couple virologists that explains what we know and what we don t know did you know how extraordinarily out of date california water laws are maybe you can imagine but if you want to know the details here you go i think it was well established that pablo neruda was probably killed by poisoning but now there s more data for this this entry was tagged recommended reads date 17 march 2023 author terry mcglynn undergraduate research course credit vs getting paid standard undergraduate labor powers many university laboratories many of us faculty in primarily undergraduate institutions simply would not be shipping much product without this source of labor and even in phd granting institutions undergrads are often the labor that makes dissertations possible oftentimes this is unpaid labor but in the eyes of many this form of unpaid labor is not uncompensated you see the students doing this work are getting paid with course credit the financial magic of this arrangement in which faculty wave a curricular wand want to convert graduation requirements into research effort is deeply embedded among our accepted traditions it s the way the world works students and faculty just acknowledge that this is the way things have been and the way they are continue reading this entry was tagged academic credit equity fairness labor research student pay date 15 march 2023 author terry mcglynn recommended reads 206 standard the loss of bodily autonomy is making prospective college students rethink where they ll go off to college the great forgetting on the teaching tenure track about positions in some university systems that have full time positions with security of employment that are focused on teaching continue reading date 10 february 2023 author terry mcglynn good bad and worst dates for academic conferences standard looking at social media today i have developed an unambiguous case of fomo because i m not at the sicb conference in austin but did i even give any thought to attending this meeting heck no a meeting during the january break count me out have i ever been to one of these meetings nope this time is just too valuable for personal time and or research for me granted there is never a good time to hold an academic conference we are busy people which is not inherently a bad thing and taking time away from family work and basically all other commitments to go to some distant place all for the pleasure involved in listening learning and connecting with with science friends and colleagues is quite a luxury finding that window of time when everybody is most available is impossible once an organization picks an annual time frame for that meeting then people who are regulars at this meeting plan their calendars around them continue reading date 04 january 2023 author terry mcglynn the slac job market and disappearing jobs standard just in case you thought blogging was dead i read an interesting blog post that i want to share with you and comment on it in my blog this post was about disappearing faculty positions at small liberal arts colleges slacs on a blog for early career philosophers it points out enrollment declines in slacs and a notably substantial drop in the number of new tenure track positions being offered at these institutions the comments section in that post are quite illuminating and it communicates the precarity of being a tenure track or tenured professor in an institution that may have trouble with enrollment and keeping the lights on continue reading date 07 december 2022 author terry mcglynn the adjunct hiring process is ridiculous standard once in a while i get an email that sounds like this hi everybody i know who is driving distance from campus we re looking to hire an adjunct to teach something for us before the semester starts in a few weeks ideally this person has a phd related to this topic and some teaching experience but if you know of a grad student who is looking to gain experience teaching a course of record and would appreciate a few thousand bucks for a ton of work please send them to us sincerely an overburdened departmental chair meanwhile let s contrast this with the emails i get for tenure track faculty positions hi everybody in the entire galaxy our department has opened up a tenure track search in the area of specialization please encourage everybody to apply because we want a really deep pool that way we can pick the candidate who has the most publications in the most impressive journals has the biggest chance of bringing in big grants and we need a large pool to convince hr that we are following their lightweight compliance process for equitable searches the search will take several months and the position starts about one year from now we anticipate spending a good amount of money on startup there will be reassigned time from teaching for this person to launch well and we work hard to support this person to make sure they earn tenure we re a great place to work so send us your best sincerely an overburdened departmental chair i think we all appreciate the factors at play in our system that result in this dynamic when we hire non tenure track positions the process is slapdash whereas tenure track searches are whatever the opposite of slapdash is i think it s worth thinking about hat this slapdash hiring of non tenure track ntt faculty means for communities adjuncts are hired with little to no vetting because departments looking to hire these instructors are often in great need considering the workload and compensation associated with these semester long gigs when you find someone who is willing to take on a section then many folks are positioned to be too picky as far as i know at most universities the hr process for ntt faculty is wafer thin because it appears to be very common at some places for adjuncts to be hired literally moments before a class starts or maybe during the first week of classes i think in many departments chairs are tasked with not only creating a schedule but also hiring all of the people to teach those courses there s no hiring committee the search process is whatever the chair decides it to be if there s anything in the process designed to create a fair and equitable outcome then in every department that i m familiar with that s entirely at the discretion of the chair who has to fill those slots but this usually is little or nothing because there are a lot of slots to fill and this search process is probably about 1 of the workload of the person who is responsible for filing these posts i have not yet been in this position but i can t imagine fitting in a full and proper search for every ntt position that needs to be filled in the midst of all of the other job duties i think due diligence often consists of a phone call or two to check references to make sure that they re not horrible and maybe that s as good as it gets i once knew a department chair who joked not joked on occasion that hiring ntt faculty is just like hiring day laborers at the home depot parking lot but that the pay and working conditions for the day laborer construction jobs was better is this a problem yes it is what kind of problems does this cause first of all does the absolute lack of any kind of fair hiring process for ntt instructors mean that you might be increasing the fraction of bad teachers i don t think so i think you re just as and perhaps more likely to bring bad teachers on board when you have a huge process of hiring a professor into a permanent position most of contingent faculty that i interact with are passionate about teaching and put a ton of effort and concern into their course are ntt faculty phoning it in i would say that s a bigger problem with tenured faculty at least ntt faculty know that they re being paid albeit poorly to teach whereas tenured faculty might be under the impression that teaching is not necessarily the most important part of our jobs and behave accordingly while some ntt faculty are duds let s be honest here and recognize that there may well be a higher fraction of duds among the tenure track and tenured professoriate even if you wanted to argue that the lack of a formal process results in more faculty who aren t good at teaching i don t think that s the biggest problem we have so then what s my problem with the process if it doesn t result in the hiring of bad teachers gosh it s hard to know know where to start while our institutions are exploiting ntt labor to some extent and that extent varies greatly among institutions we still are hiring for professional positions and there should be a transparent and equitable process think about all of the time and trouble that gets involved into hiring undergraduates for reu positions big applicants statements letters of reference a committee all for a position that pays a few thousand dollars over the summer and then ends the amount of money for ntt positions is not smaller and all of those concerns about equity justice and representation matter if the opportunity to become an instructor of record is one of the major stepping stones to becoming a professor and in many places it is then how come the process providing access to such an opportunity is so darn inequitable i don t know about your university but at mine there is a sizable community of ntt faculty who are very important on our campus not only do they do so much teaching they contribute in a lot of other ways even if their employment contracts do not expect such a a contribution they serve on our academic senate and help make big decisions about the institution they help run our student research conference and are advisors to student clubs and so much more not all ntt instructors have this level of engagement but it s been several times where i ve worked with someone for months only to discover that they re not tenure track and that they re doing this stuff even though they don t have to but only because they want to there are many folks who are making a career out of this role the people who evolve into this position come at it sideways usually by getting hired by a departmental chair in a slapdash manner and then they stick with it over the years i think it s a problem that we have parallel professional pathways for university faculty with one pathway getting more support scrutiny and respect it s been a while since i ve written about how tenure track faculty are essentially parasites of non tenure track faculty but that situation still is exploitative even if ou...
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