So you’re in academia and you think you have it rough. First of all, remember how lucky you are to have the opportunity to spend your days working with a bunch of smart people who are passionate about the same arcane things that keep you up at night. Then, think about your chair. Click on the image to visit Sad Chairs of Academia.
Susan Fiske is a very well known and very well respected social psychologist. This is the opening paragraph of her Wikipedia biography:
Susan Tufts Fiske (born August 19, 1952) is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at the Princeton University Department of Psychology.[ She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice. Fiske leads the Intergroup Relations, Social Cognition, and Social Neuroscience Lab at Princeton University. A recent quantitative analysis identifies her as the 22nd most eminent researcher in the modern era of psychology (12th among living researchers, 2nd among women). Her notable theoretical contributions include the development of the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, power as control theory, and the continuum model of impression formation.
She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, and she is a past President of the Association for Psychological Science. You may have heard that the current APS President, Susan Goldin-Meadow, invited Fiske to share her thoughts on “the impact that the new media are having…on our science [and] on our scientists.” The draft column provoked heated responses from, among others, Andrew Gelman, Sam Schwarzkopf, and Neuroskeptic. Fiske favors judging throuh
monitored channels, most often in private with a chance to improve (peer review), or at least in moderated exchanges (curated comments and rebuttals).
Gelman, Schwarzkop, and Neuroskeptic prefer open forums. As Gelman puts it,
We learn from our mistakes, but only if we recognize that they are mistakes. Debugging is a collaborative process. If you approve some code and I find a bug in it, I’m not an adversary, I’m a collaborator. If you try to paint me as an “adversary” in order to avoid having to correct the bug, that’s your problem.
There’s a response to the responses on the APS site. It reads, in part,
APS encourages its members to air differing viewpoints on issues of importance to the field of psychological science, and the Observer provides a forum for those deliberations, Goldin-Meadow notes.
“Susan Fiske is a distinguished leader in the field and I invited her to share her opinion for an upcoming edition of the magazine,” she says. “It’s unfortunate that many on social media view her remarks as an attack on open science, when her goal is simply to remind us that scientists sometimes use social media in destructive ways. APS fully expects and welcomes discussion around the issues she raises.”
Of course scientists sometimes use social media in destructive ways. We’re human after all, and we sometimes make mistakes. But we also sometimes – I would argue more often – use social media in constructive ways. It was a blog post by Rosie Redfield that started unraveling the fantasy of arsenic life (in which NASA-sponsored scientists claimed that arsenic could substitute for phosphorous in the DNA or an unusual bacterium). Arguably we wouldn’t be talking about the replication in science at all, or at least we wouldn’t be talking about it nearly as much, if it weren’t for blogs that published some vigorous critiques of widely reported scientific results that turned out to be much more weakly supported than it initially appeared.
Put me in the Gelman, Schwarzkopf, Neuroskeptic camp. It behooves us to behave respectably if we use social media to critique a study. All of us are human. All of us make mistakes. Making a mistake isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s to be expected if you’re pushing forward at the edges of knowledge. As Schwarzkopf put it:
I can’t speak for others, but if someone applied for a job with me and openly discussed the fact that a result of theirs failed to replicate and/or that they had to revise their theories, this would work strongly in their favor compared to the candidate with overbrimming confidence who only published Impact Factor > 30 papers, none of which have been challenged.
P.S. I notice that Goldin-Meadow’s column in the September issue of APS Observer is titled “Why preregistration makes me nervous.”
The Board on Science Education of the National Academy of Sciences convened a committee to build the conceptual framework for indicators that can be used to document the status and quality of undergraduate stem education.
The quality of undergraduate education in the STEM fields is receiving increasing attention. There are a growing number of initiatives aimed at enhancing the STEM experiences of undergraduate students, some on a national level, some among multi-institution collaborations and some on individual campuses. In addition, improving undergraduate STEM education is one of the priority areas called out in the Federal STEM Education 5 Year Plan.
Recognizing the need to document the current state of undergraduate STEM education at the national level and track improvements over time, an expert committee will develop a conceptual framework for an indicator system. These indicators will focus on the first two years of undergraduate education, document the status and quality of undergraduate STEM education at both community colleges and 4-year institutions, and be used to track improvements at the national level over multiple years.
An interim report and an opportunity to provide feedback is available from the National Academy website. In addition, there is a public meeting on 6 October at which public comment is welcome.
his meeting will provide an avenue for the public to comment on the preliminary draft report from the Committee on Developing Indicators for Undergraduate STEM Education. The committee was tasked by the National Science Foundation to outline a framework and a set of indicators that could be used to monitor the quality of undergraduate STEM over multiple years. The draft represents the first phase of the committee’s work and contains goals and objectives for improving the quality of undergraduate STEM education. The committee requests input on the draft to assist it in developing indicators in the second phase of the study.
This public comment session will feature speakers providing: insight from community college perspectives, STEM reform imitative reflections, institutional perspectives, implications for using data to improve teaching and learning, and challenges of measuring progress toward increased equity in STEM.
This public comment session will also provide time for comments from participants present and includes comments gathered from the online questionnaire.
If you are interested in attending the public forum, here’s a link to more information: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DBASSE/BOSE/DBASSE_174122.
I just received an e-mail from Rob Dunn (@RobRDunn) telling me about four faculty positions that are open at North Carolina State University. As he says,
It is getting to be a fun time for cool science around here.
Over at the Daily Nous (a blog with “news for and about the philosophy profession”), a post last Wednesday invited graduate students to leave anonymous answers to the question
What would you like to tell your professor(s) right now, but can’t?
There are a few answers like this
Thank you. I had a great education with you and with the whole department, and I wouldn’t be where I am now without you.
or this
Dear Professor,
you were one tough cookie, relentless and unforgiving. Sometimes it really hurt. Thank you for all that – were it not for the growing pains, I would not have grown. And thanks for all the time you spent on me – being a professor myself now, I can just ask – when did you sleep?
but more of them are like this
To my advisor:
You couldn’t possibly ever understand how much your care, friendship, and ability to consistently challenge and push me philosophically means to me. Thank you so much. And special thanks for being pretty much the only man in my life who I feel like I can trust, intellectually and emotionally, and for being interested in me for philosophical and friendship reasons and not weird sexual or fetishy or emotionally weird reasons.
…
To (nearly) everyone else in my department: it’s totally transparent that you don’t care about grad students.
Some amount of angst and conflict is inevitable in pursuing a PhD. I’ve never met anyone, no matter how smart or talented she is, who finished a dissertation without facing (and surmounting) at least one significant obstacle. Most encounter two or three. In the midst of those challenges, it’s completely normal for a PhD student to think that no one, including her advisor, cares about her or isn’t willing to give her the support that she needs. What I find so depressing about many of the comments in this post is that they were made by students after they received their PhD. I hope that when my students finish their PhDs, they look back and realize that the times when they were most discouraged and most disheartened were among the times when they learned the most about science and themselves.
Smart teachers use struggle to enhance learning and deepen engagement with their subjects. They call it productive struggle. Why would you encourage students to struggle while learning? (These answers focus on classroom teaching, but the principles generalize easily.)
I’ve tried to use these principles in advising my graduate students, and I hope I’ve been successful. But you’ll have to ask them how they’d respond to the question at the top of this post if you want to know the answer.
Graduate students are very creative, and I recently learned about an anonymous graduate student in her/his sixth year at a private, West Coast university who is more creative than most – @legogradstudent. I’ve been out of graduate school for more years than I like to admit,1 but I can still relate to the feelings @legogradstudent captures in her/his tweets. S/he has just short of 2600 followers now, but I’m sure that number is going to grow. Inside Higher Ed described her/him this way in the article that brought her/him to my attention:
Lego Grad Student has fans across disciplines, who often use some variation of “devastatingly true” to describe his experiences. Indeed, his tableaux focus not on the intricacies of his research but rather on the human experience of graduate school: feelings of being on a treadmill to nowhere, being beaten to the intellectual punch by colleagues, using sophisticated avoidance techniques during a class discussion and the horror of seeing free food disappear before his eyes at departmental events.
If you’re in graduate school, if you have friends or relatives who are in graduate school, or if you’re just interested in graduate school, you owe it to yourself to follow @legogradstudent on Twitter or Instagram.
134 years last June, if you must know.
I recently learned of a new website that is worth putting in your bookmark list or adding to the subscription list of your RSS reader: Letters from graduate school. Here’s what they say about themselves.
For every graduate student, graduate school is a different experience filled with ups, downs, failures, and successes. The goal of Letters from Graduate School is to build a collective of graduate school experiences—your experience, in your own voice! (http://lettersfromgradschool.org)
There are four essays in Issue 1 (August 2016)
If Issue 1 is any indication, Letters from Graduate School will be a valuable resource for graduate students and graduate advisors. I look forward to reading the essays in future issues.
Every year Beloit College releases its Mindset List. Although the list has its critics (http://www.beloitmindlessness.com/must-be-destroyed/) and it’s been parodied by The Onion, I always get a kick out of looking it over. It reminds me just how old I am. Here are a few gems from this year’s list:
Last Friday, the American Sociological Association released a subcommittee report entitled What counts? Evaluating public communication in tenure and promotion. It suggests that public communication of research can be assessed along three axes:
Amy Schalet, Director of the Public Engagement Project at UMass Amherst, argues that public communication should be included in faculty evaluations, because when we include it, “we encourage [faculty] to share their knowledge with the members of society who could most benefit from it.”
I agree, but as always, the devil is in the details. Among the questions I wrestle with are:
The University of Connecticut has been recognized as a “Community Engaged” campus by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching since 2010 (ref). These are clearly among the questions that we need to answer.