Academics

20 years ago Ron Nief, emeritus Director of Public Affairs, at Beloit College created the Mindset List. Every August since then the Beloit Mindset List has been a feature of higher education in the US. It’s been maligned (http://www.beloitmindlessness.com/2018/08/19/more-of-the-same/,http://www.beloitmindlessness.com/2018/08/21/here-we-go-again/) and it’s been parodied (https://www.theonion.com/a-look-at-the-class-of-2019-1819592320), but as I wrote a couple of years ago “I always get a kick out of looking it over. It reminds me of how old I am.”

I’m a couple of years older now than I was a couple of years ago, and I still get a kick out of looking the list over. Here are a few of the items that I found especially striking:¹

• Among the iconic figures never alive in their lifetime are Victor Borge, Charles Schulz, and the original Obi-Wan Kenobi Alec Guinness. That last one really hurts. I remember seeing the original in a movie theater.
• They have grown up afraid that a shooting could happen at their school, too.
• Presidential candidates winning the popular vote and then losing the election are not unusual.
• There has never been an Enron.

It you want to read all 60, here’s the link: http://themindsetlist.com/2018/08/beloit-college-mindset-list-class-2022/.

1. The comments in bold italic are my commentary. ↩

In my Spam folder this morning…

Dear Dr. Kent E Holsinger ,

Greetings from  WCEOGPE-2018.

On behalf of the Organizing committee, we are delighted to invite you to be a speaker at 3rd World Congress & Expo on Oil, Gas & Petroleum Engineering (  WCEOGPE-2018) on April 16-17, 2018 which will be held in Dubai, UAE which brings well versed scrutinizers at one place. It provides a platform to have open discussions, knowledge sharing and interactive sessions with field experts. WCEOGPE-2018 will focus on the theme Pioneering Revolutionary Technologies in Oil, Gas & Petroleum Industries .

This is our humble request to join us in the WCEOGPE-2018 to up-skill your next generations to protect and continue our valuable innovations.

For more information about the conference, Please have a glance at PS:  http://scientificfederation.com/petroleum-engineering-2018/

For questions about topics, registration or other enquiries, please do not hesitate to contact me.  I will be happy to go into further details regarding any concerns you might have.

Awaiting your swift and favourable reply.

Best regards,
Rohith Rao
WCEOGPE Summit-2018
P: +91-779-979-0002
E: WCEOGPE-2018@scientificfederation.com

If you don’t want to receive any further e-mail from WCOEGPE Summit-2018, please revert back with a subject Unsubscribe.

Are there people who accept these invitations? Who in their right mind would invite me to a meeting on oil, gas, and petroleum engineering?

I was recently looking something up in Evernote, and I ran across a post by Eric Rauchway on Crooked Timber from July 2013. The post concerns the American Historical Association/s proposed recommendation for an embargo on dissertations. The AHA adopted a Statement on Policies Regarding the Option to Embargo Completed PhD Dissertations on 19 July 2013. It begins

The American Historical Association strongly encourages graduate programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years.

There was a lot of debate about the wisdom of dissertation embargoes before and after the statement was announced. Rauchway finished his post with a comment that all of us should think about.

When we find ourselves trying to make scholarship less readily available – however good our intentions – we should probably ask ourselves if we can solve our problems some other way.

Last December I saw a fascinating talk by Julie Posselt.¹ She described work deriving from her PhD dissertation in which she sat in on meetings of doctoral admissions committees in a variety of disciplines at several different (and anonymous) elite private and public research university. She described how overreliance on “cut points” for GPA, GRE scores, or both led to admissions decisions that favored applicants from relatively privileged backgrounds. Even though the faculty making those decisions were almost uniformly committed to ensuring that they admitted doctoral students from a wide variety of backgrounds, the pool of admitted students was far less diverse than the pool of applicants. As she put it in a piece for Inside Higher Ed earlier this year: “Despite their good intentions to increase diversity, broadly defined, admissions work was laced with conventions — often rooted in inherited or outdated assumptions — that made it especially hard for students from underrepresented backgrounds to gain access.”

Why does this happen? Partly it’s because faculty aren’t aware of advice from the Educational Testing Service on how to use GRE scores properly.² Partly, it’s because there are so many applicants to high-quality doctoral programs that admissions committees often use numerical screens to identify the small number of applicants worthy of close scrutiny.

Athene Donald points out another way in which relying on strict numerical criteria may be harmful to everyone, regardless of what their demographic, economic, social, or cultural background may be. She argues in the context of evaluating academics that in addition to the usual metrics of publication or creative activity and grant dollars (for those in fields where external funding is important), success as an academic should also include “building teams, seeing their students thrive and progress, working with people who sparked them off intellectually and seizing opportunities to try out new things and make new discoveries.”

The challenge, of course, is that you get what you measure. If we only measure publications and grants, that’s what we’ll get. If we want to encourage team building and student support, we have to measure those things and give them as much weight as the things we traditionally measure. If we can’t find numbers with which to measure them, we still need to find ways to assess them, because helping others gain the skills they need is what education is all about.

(more…)

Several years ago, Dr. Acclimatrix (@Acclimatrix) published a list of “Handy tips for the male academic.” I just happened to run across it again this morning, and I thought I should pass it along. The advice she offers is as timely now as it was then. As she says:

Gender equality has to be a collaborative venture. If men make up the majority of many departments, editorial boards, search committees, labs and conferences, then men have to be allies in the broader cause of equality, simply because they have more boots on the ground. And, as much as I wish it weren’t so, guys often tend to listen more readily to their fellow guys when it comes to issues like sexism. I’ve also found that there are a lot of guys out there that are supportive, but don’t realize that many of their everyday actions (big and small) perpetuate inequality. So, guys, this post is for you.

The list includes 20 distinct pieces of advice. I’ve tried to follow all of them, but these are the ones I’m working on hardest right now:

3. Don’t talk over your female colleagues.

5. Make sure your department seminars, conference symposia, search committees, and panel discussions have a good gender balance.

6. Pay attention to who organizes the celebrations, gift-giving, or holiday gatherings.

7. Volunteer when someone asks for a note-taker, coffee-run gopher, or lunch order taker at your next meeting.¹

15. Don’t leave it to women to do the work of increasing diversity.

19. Know when to listen. (more…)