Blatant Bias

This will be a bit controversial, but I have wondered about it for years.

My understanding of employment law is that an employer may not require candidates to have a skill which is not required to fulfill the job responsibilities.

A PhD is a research degree.  Lecturers are not allowed to have research programs.  So how can we post an ad for a lecturer and give preference to the candidate who has a PhD?  For that matter, if a college or university does not support research programs of tenure and tenure track faculty, how can they require a PhD of T/TT candidates?

The course requirements for a MS and a PhD are essentially the same in the US, so if the faculty candidate is not going to engage in research, is there a difference that would hold up in court should a jilted candidate file papers?

T.S. Hall

Science Blog Award

Obviously I am a fan of science blogs.  If you are too, you might be interested in nominating your favorite blog entry from the last year for the science blog award being offered by 3 quarks daily.  The timeline is pretty short, so get to it today.

No, I don't consider this to be a science blog, so I am not looking to be nominated.  Now if there is a award for blogs about higher ed written by people who got a D in freshmen English, go ahead and nominate.

T.S. Hall

Teaching Science as Fact

Previously, I commented on the "Can a mechanism be known" issue.  Today I return to the topic of teaching science as a known.

Long ago when I was a graduate student I wrote a letter (Stamp and all.  It was that long ago.) to my Grandmother about what I was doing in the lab.  My grandmother wrote back that she found it interesting that I was trying to discover new things in chemistry.  She thought that earning the degree meant that I would memorized all the combinations of reagents and conditions to make everything.  She continued to explain that she thought we already knew everything there was to know.  I remember thinking that if her conception of science were true I would never have entered the field.  It is precisely the unknown, the puzzle, the opportunity to create new knowledge and advance the human condition that ignites the passion of many to become scientists. 

I always figured that this was the difference between the BA and BS in chemistry.  The BA focus on the known art and the BS on the science.  One is technical the other is the exploration of the frontier.  For me the teaching of science as fact is technical training, not a scientific training.  

Don't get me wrong here.  We need both!  Much of the world of chemistry is technical and many of our students will find themselves in a technical job, or in an allied chemistry or biochemistry field.

Much of the progress of any field comes from the person looking for the solution to a puzzle, pushing the envelope of the known.  My fear is that if we do not teach the idea of unknowns and the potential inherent in mastering of the unknown the science and associated technology will stagnate.  Fewer will enter the field in favor of careers where the passion to discover is still alive.

T.S. Hall

Head Clearing Time

The state budget is a smoking ruin and the only thing we know about next year's budget is that there will be cuts.  Good people will have to be let go.

In the lab I have been trying to perform a resolution on a material that has only trace solubility in every normal solvent I have tried.  It has been a couple of weeks of trying things without success.  I need the resolved material to get the results to finish the paper I started writing.  I am so frustrated that looking in the hood depresses me.  While my PhD mentor would frown on it I think I need a break.

I also have about a dozen half finished posts in the queue.

Then I had a dream the other night about a bridge I was building from some far off land.  I had the bridge done all the way to a island just off shore.  For some reason I could not accomplish the last portion to the mainland I was standing on.

Clearly, the dream is about drinking and/or gambling.  I think I will go the Vegas for a couple of days.

T.S. Hall

Another Difference

I was taking about proposal ideas with one of my RO1 friends when he put forward a plan to explore a bit of chemistry.  The project would require developing a library of data to demonstrate a trend, which would then be explored more deeply and exploited in synthesis.  I made the comment that it sounded like an ideal undergraduate project, since generating the library was something that mainly required a good pair of hands.

My friend looked at me like I am insane (I have seen this look before, so I know.).  He expressed that he might consider having an undergraduate work with a grad student or postdoc, but he was not interested in saddling himself with the intellectual work of taking the undergraduates results and working through the trends and doing the daily direction of the work.  And thus, I have another blog topic.

In the subsequent conversation, I explained that doing the intellectual work is pretty much my job in my MCU type group.  The research students are at the beginnings of their careers and need to be trained in connecting the intellect to the hands, since many course labs are only designed to be accomplished by a literate chimp.  The research students who demonstrates an ability to do the intellectual work by the time they finish get the best recommendations for graduate school or jobs, but they don't generally come in that way.  This disconnect between the intellect and the labor contributes to the slow progress of our work and explains why when in the summer I am in the lab with my students, they more get done since they can talk to me about the work and I can point out things they are doing wrong in the hood.

Some readers might find fault with my friend's attitude, but I don't.  Yes, he is not training his undergraduates himself, but at an RO1, his job is to bring in grant money and send out cutting edge research results.  Being the intellect in the room would occupy so much time and energy he would not be able to do his job.  In my friend's case, he carefully matches the undergraduates with a graduate student or postdoc and does watch over their progress and results, just not in a day-to-day fashion.  I think he does an excellent job with his undergraduate students who consistently impress me at group meetings.

For those considering careers at PUI's or MCUs where they are involved in research, keep in mind that you need to be the intellect until the student's is developed.  For you PUI and MCU administrators who want more research grants and scholarly activity output, recognize that the faculty need to be in the lab working with the students, so that 1/10th of a unit you give per undergraduate is meaningless.  For you granting agencies, funding for teaching postdocs would help the PUI and MCU faculty be more productive and would help train the next generation of PUI and MCU faculty who need to develop their students in the future.

T.S. Hall

Teaching Evolution

As it is spring and near the end of the semester I have been cleaning up my office, and organizing the books.  A collector of chemistry texts, my collection included books dating from as early as the 1790's.  My organic chemistry specific texts date from the 1870's.  

One of the things that I find most generally interesting about organic texts spanning the last 130 years is how alike they are.  Sure we have more figures and color pictures, but the basic approach is very similar.  The functional group approach appears to have been used since organic chemistry became a unique subject.  Hot topics come and go in texts, usually associated with Nobel Prizes.  (Some day I will determine the number of years to appearance and the half-life of a Nobel Prize based on the coverage in an organic text.  It might make an interesting piece for the Journal of Chemical Education or the Bulletin for the History of Chemistry.)  The only major change in my opinion was the introduction of mechanism into the texts, which in spite of some notable efforts has never really caught on as the fundamental organizational feature of textbooks.  

This brings me back to the point of these musings, evolutions in teaching are very slow.  Part of this is because we tend to teach the way we were taught.  You can add to this the reluctance of text publishers to invest in texts which fundamentally diverge from what is already in the marketplace.  This can be a good thing in that radical sudden changes in a system generally lead to mutated entities that lack the features necessary for long term survival.  Slow mutation leads to smaller evolutions some of which are beneficial and get incorporated into the species.

There must be some evolution though.  Change is all around us and if we don't evolve we will be left behind.  This is increasingly evident in the STEM fields, where decreasing numbers of students come into the career path.  There are many reasons for this, but our modes of teaching contribute to the problem. 

With the radical changes in higher education ahead, owing to funding issues and moves toward distance learning, now is the time for organic chemists to rethink the organic curriculum from scratch.  Since we do tend to teach the way we were taught I trust that the changes could be fundamental but not radical.  If we don't evolve we risk our own future.

T.S. Hall

Basic and Applied Research

One of the differences between Research Universities (RO1) and Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUI) and Masters Comprehensive Universities (MCU) is the type of research undertaken.  The non-RO1 schools tend to lean toward the more "applied" research.  Some states have codified the distinction.  In Pennsylvania they have the state owned system of higher education built on the old Normal Schools, and the state related research universities.  In Texas you have the Texas State system, separate from the A&M and UT systems.  In California the University of California system has a state mandate to be the home of "basis" research.  The California State University system on the other hand has a state mandate to undertake "applied" research only.  Anecdotes indicate that the UC system fights against allowing the CSU becoming too research active or research friendly lest we compete, but those rumors are not the point of this post.  (I am not convinced they are true.)

In my opinion, in order to get funding there must be some application to your research.  If the application is far enough removed from the actual experiments you get to call it "Basic" and pundits will complain about all the money spent on your work for which the public gets "nothing".  If the application is quite close to the experiments you might have difficulty finding funding as some agencies will tell you that industry should be studying such direct applications of the science.  This is when you should look for funding agencies that are extremely focused, or seek some type of industry grant or contract support.  

For PUI and CMU campuses, working with trainee scientists and other issues I have covered (whined about) in previous posts  makes the progress of the project slow, making the timeliness to progress slow which can scare off research driven industry.  I suggest a tactic where the PUI faculty member establishes a partner relationship with the small to medium size local industry where the real world puzzle is fodder for student research.  Support could be in the form of student scholarships to work on the project and some access to materials and instruments.  The initial projects must be general and not time critical.  Since many small local companies are not engaged research, anything that helps the bottom line of the company will be a plus.  Your local water company or metal finishing plant may have a puzzle that you can contribute a solution to.

I can hear some of you expressing concern about the purity of academia.  I need to point out on the purity front that my collaborating with local industry feels a lot less like whoring than getting on my knees to beg for donations.  Because collaborative research involves research and teaching, I am actually using my time doing what I was hired to do, instead of going hat in hand to local industry to beg.  The yield is better too, in that the industry folks may actually get something for their "donation" to support the department.  I should also point out that this relationship binds the industry to the local university intellectually and financially.  When the legislature or system office questions why they should support our programs, I will line up my industry partners to testify how we are doing exactly what the state suggested local campuses would do to help the economics of the region.

For the student and future graduate, they get practical training they can use to get a skilled position.  This may not be as important for the graduate school bound (although it does not hurt), but it is very important for the majority of majors who will not go to graduate school.  They also get to network with "real world" scientists and find out how that environment works. 

It is hard for those of us at PUIs and MCUs to compete in basic research, but applied research can have benefits for our students, our programs, and us.  Rather than kill ourselves trying to be "transformative" perhaps we should try to be supportive.  PUI and MCU campuses should lead rather than follow on creating rules that encourage contracts with industry and government agencies.

T.S. Hall

The Granting Game

Over at Totally Synthetic (A good blog to add to your list) there is a posting this morning concerning a plan in the UK by the EPSRC to blacklist grant applicants for two years who apply for funding unsuccessfully more than 75% of the time.  I am sure there are details to this proposal that I am unaware of, but it is symptomatic of the mentality of funding and publishing today.  Forget "Publish or Perish", its "Fund or Perish".  

Fund or perish has been the law of the land for some time.  At RO1s, if you lack funding you lose lab space and resources, like instrument and graduate student time.  Your teaching load creeps up, taking your time away from research.  If you don't get funded early enough you don't get tenure.  Lacking funding puts you into a research death spiral that is very difficult to pull out of.

At PUI's and MCU's as pressure to increase external funding increases, to make up for general budget shortfalls, the fund or perish mentality is increasing.  I have seen this at my home institution where resources continue to decrease, yet demands on faculty research to support tenure or promotion continue to rise.

I know some will point out that this is just the normal process of competition and a recognition that when resources are limited, the resources will go to the most able to produce.  We already evaluate the PI's potential to achieve the goals of the proposed work on every grant.  We knock people down for not publishing enough, for having a high teaching load, or for lacking physical or personnel resources.  If you can't play in the big leagues, you have to go to the minors or get out of the game.

The problem is, lacking funding handicaps researchers and reduces their potential to get back into the game.  If the funding failures occur following tenure (as they do for many of us) departments are stuck with faculty who can't get funded and who fill faculty spaces.  Universities will have to become more strict on research requirements for tenure to increase the potential that the faculty member will never be without funding.  

The whole thing seems a bit like professional sports where you are only as good as your performance in the last few games/matches.  Would we get better play in baseball if any player whose batting average fell below 0.275 had to bat with one hand for the next two months.  And, as with tenure, the team could no cut them.  Of course, if we were payed like baseball players . . . .

Lastly, I wonder what effect a blacklist of unsuccessful funders will have on the risks people are willing to take in granting.  It will be fine line to walk when one must propose to move the science forward but make sure that the reviewers will not find your ideas too far out and deny your application.

T.S. Hall

More Hats Than Stetson

One of the biggest differences between PUIs, MCUs, and RO1s is the number of hats a faculty member must wear.

We are all educators, although teaching loads vary widely.  PUI faculty appear to typically carry 12 to 15 semester unit loads.  For the uninitiated, this means 12 to 15 "contact hours" with students per week.  Contact hours are not clock hours.  I would say the typically lab hour is worth about 2/3 of a contact hour.  The theory being that labs have less students and require less work than lectures.  Undergraduate research students are worth very little in contact time.  In my experience they count for nothing to 1/3 of a unit per student.  MCU's appear to have about the about the same loads, although MS students will teach some of the labs and in some cases act as graders in the lecturers.  MS research students count for about nothing to 1/2 a unit per student.  This helps lighten the number of real contact and grading hours.  At RO1s the teaching loads appear to be about 6 to 9 units per year.  In all three cases faculty may "buy out" teaching time with grant funds that basically pay for lecturers to cover the teaching the tenure-track faculty would be doing.  Since PUIs and MCUs have less ability to earn such funding many of these faculty carry most or all of their loads.

Contrary to what the folks who argue that faculty are overpaid and under worked might think, the job does not begin and end with a class bell (although few colleges have class bells these days).  Of course there is class prep, writing and grading quizzes, problems sets,  and exams.  There is also "shared governance", known to faculty as "service".  The public wants every dollar of tuition to be spent on education, so colleges and universities learned to play a game where faculty run the university through committees.  This way the university could say almost all the money was going into the teaching faculty while the faculty must spend a fair amount of their time administrating the university.  In modern times the administration of universities has been "professionalized" and administrations have grown at a far faster rate then faculty numbers, but committee work still fills too much of my week.  Service demands appear to be about equal at PUIs, MCUs and RO1s.

Scholarly activity comes next with this being the major activity of many RO1 faculty.  This includes writing research grants, writing papers and presenting your group's work, directing the research of your graduate students and postdocs.  For the MCU and PUI faculty you can replace the postdocs with your own lab work.  This takes considerable time from your day, but since postdocs are hard to find funding for and MS candidates typically know little more than BS students, you must train everyone and do the heavy lifting and hazardous chemistries in the lab yourself. 

A hat PUI and MCU faculty wear that RO1 faculty generally don't wear is instrument technician.  Generally there are no instrument technicians and little or no money for repairs so the faculty perform all upkeep and maintenance of lab equipment.  Since instrument replacement funds are also minimal, if they exist at all, you can end up locked in the death spiral of instruments that the manufacturers stopped supporting some time ago.  (In my career I have built GC's from salvage parts of  three or four derelict instruments, I have change pistons on HPLCs, cleaned sources in GC-MS, gone into the electronic  and pneumatic guts of various NMR's, rewired stirrers and hotplates, and fought with a number of different defunct software packages for which I had no documentation.  Thus I escaped to an RO1 for my sabbatical.)

Lacking office support staff PUI and MCU faculty must take care of their own accounting and ordering.  Since our stockrooms generally are only concerned with teaching labs, if you need it for research you need to get it yourself so ordering includes all items that might be needed to get any research done.

Lastly there is the unofficial service we all do.  These things are expected but not actually listed in our paid activities.  I would put in physiological and career counseling to lost and distraught students from lectures and in my research group.  Outreach to high schools and incoming freshmen and transfer students, particularly to underrepresented groups with the goal of filling the STEM pipeline and keeping my department viable so we don't get our meager budget cut more.  Department and university development efforts, by which we try to bring in money to support our students with scholarships and get money to replace our inadequate or nonexistent operating and expense budgets.  There are more, which I will allow others to add.

There are many days when I look back to see what was accomplished and find that the most I can say is that I kept all the balls in the air.  While juggling seven or eight things is impressive, in the end it does not make for forward progress.  One of my very successful RO1 friends tells me that looking down on PUI and MCU faculty makes no sense, since most RO1 faculty would never be able to make a name for themselves under the same circumstances.  Being able to focus on research enables the RO1 faculty to make the forward progress they do.

Some people call for a bifurcated system where faculty are split into either teaching or research groups.  More on this in a future post.

T.S. Hall

Son of Joe Btfsplk

I you are old enough you know Li'l Abner and Joe Btfsplk, a character who was always well meaning and always a jinx.  Disaster followed him everywhere, visible in the form of a small black rain cloud over his head.  

Every time I tried to write this week Joe came to mind.  Talking to my faculty friends and colleagues in California I get the feeling that the state is full of Joe Btfsplk PhDs.  The sense of inevitable doom hangs over my friends like Joe's cloud.

With massive cuts to spartan budgets in place already the state prepares for a special election designed to mortgage its soul and future in exchange for the illusion of having solved the states budget problems.  If the ballot initiatives pass the temporary cuts already in place that have zeroed out operating and expense budgets for many departments will become permanent.  The funds from the state lottery which have become the only available resource for science departments to replace teaching lab equipment will go away.  And there will still be an eight billion dollar hole in the state budget for next year.  If the initiatives fail, as it appears they will, the budget hole opens to sixteen billion dollars, which due to mandated spending in the state constitution will be impossible to fill without additional draconian cuts to education.

This Btsplk flu weighs down departments, particularly at  at the PUI and MCUs where, barred from RO1 type research and the funding it provides, state support is critical to their operation.  The research universities can and do milk funds from the research enterprise and have faculty pay for copies for classes or university business phone calls on their own, which means out of research funding.  This provides the RO1 with a cushion the the PUIs and MCUs don't really have access to.

I know I have caught the contagion, so please excuse a down beat assessment.  

It is time to rethink the strategy of higher education funding.  If the public sector is not willing to pay the real cost, perhaps it's time to face the consequences to our way of life and consider if we should get out of the game entirely.

T.S. Hall

Impediments to Change

I recently heard a lead administrator of a major public research institution address a group of STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) faculty.  In the comments there was a lambasting of the teaching of general chemistry and general biology.  The speaker's suggestion was that the problem of the shrinking numbers of students in the STEM pipeline would be resolved if the Chemistry and Biology faculty were not chasing students away in the introductory courses. 

While I think the speaker is overstating their case, there is some value in discussing the issue from a number of perspectives.  There is much finger pointing in calls for change in pedagogy.  I am reminded that back on the playground it was noted that when you point a finger at someone, three of your other fingers are pointing back at you.

It is easy to blame the faculty for not radically changing course content, but what happens when they try?  An introductory course is a prerequisite for subsequent courses.  How does the change effect those courses?  To radically change an entry level course demands that were reconsider, and possibly adjust, the entire curriculum that rests on it.  

Once a curriculum has been changed, what effect is there on accreditation of the program?  On this regard I must acknowledge the positive changes made in the last few years by the Committee on Professional Training of the American Chemical Society to make the accredited curriculum less rigid.

Textbook publishers will not publish texts that diverge too much from those currently available because a radically divergent text may not find an audience among textbook committees.  It will then not recoup the investment made in bringing it to market.  So, if we radically change the course, we are on our own to create both course content and a textbook.

Course and program development for the most part do not bring in external money, although there is some available.  In research active departments pedagogy is not considered scholarly activity unless you where hired as a science education specialist.  (My Retention, Tenure and Promotion committee would not count a J. Chem. Ed. paper I wrote as scholarly activity because I was hired as an organic chemist).

Lastly, calls for change in how we teach are hindered by transferability demands.  The senior administration, if not the state legislature, often demand that we accept courses from other universities and junior colleges funded by the state.  If we radically rewrite courses we lose transferability, either outbound to other campuses or inbound to our campus. 

The effect of all this is to make change to courses and in the curriculum occur at a glacial pace.  

I do believe that we should reconsider how we prepare students for a life in science.  There are days when I would like to gather a group of interested parties to start with a clean slate and redesign the chemistry curriculum in light of the mature science it has become.  But, then I think about the time it would take from the research that "counts" and the difficulty in putting it in to action with no transferability or accreditation, or university support.  As Archimedes noted, to move the world requires a big enough level and a place to stand.  If we really want to reconsider how science is taught, university administration must become part of the team and work with faculty to redesign the courses and curriculum and implement them.

T.S. Hall

E-Mail Virus Alert - Forward to Everyone

Be forewarned!  There is an insidious virus being spread via web mail.  

It incapacitates logic filters and renders the reader incapable of recognizing spin, faulty logic, false extensions of trends, and other tell tail signs that the authors are raving crackpots.  These messages can take the form of far right or far left political speech, appeals to patriotism and/or nationalism, environmental and/or health warnings, economic conspiracies, moral causes, crazy virus alerts suggesting that if you open your mail your toaster will attack you, prayer chains, etc.

A secondary effect of this virus is the compulsion to forward the virus containing messages to everyone in your address box thus suggesting to your friends and children that you are indeed loosing it.  

There is a cure!  Don't forward any e-mail unless you have first checked the facts contained in the e-mail.  If you still feel compelled to share the wacko-doodle nonsense show some self control and start a web blog like a normal person.

T.S. Hall

P.S.  (Not that is has anything to do with this post) Hi Pop!

Science Supreme

With the announcement of an opening on the US Supreme Court every person with a opinion will weigh in with advice for the President on a selection.  

With the ever increasing technical nature of issues of intellectual property and environmental law that come before the court there is a case to be made for someone with a science or engineering background to sit on the high court.  Not having a law background I don't have specific recommendations, but I raise the issue in the hope that it will gain traction among the science community.

T.S. Hall