Sabbatical Epistles

Field Trip

2011-05-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

No, I am not dead, just trying to move an NMR, finish the semesters classes, create an online course for the continuing education college, get three Masters students to thesis, write annual reports for student development grants, and attend all the end of year celebrations, and dire budget meetings on the agenda. Actually writing that fills me with a mixture of exhaustion and panic as I still have much to do.

Those who think I need a break convinced me to go to the Huntington Library and Museum yesterday. Being a science book collector I was looking forward to the exhibit on the Regency period in England (1810-1820). I was not let down as they had one case on the science of the period which included one of Davy’s coal damp papers and two books by Frederic Accum.

The regency period was one of significant advances in science and industry as it was the beginning of the industrial age. The people’s interest in science was great and the middle classes would read scientific literature of the day.

Out of this period came the practice of public lectures where you could subscribe to lectures on chemistry by Davy himself. It was in such lectures that an apprentice bookbinder named Michael Faraday came; being gifted the lecture tickets by someone who was not interested in attending after the first couple of lectures in the series. He wrote up the notes he took and bound them, which earned him a meeting with Davy and ultimately a place as a dishwasher in the lab. The rest of this digression is history.

In looking at a case focused on the theater of the period I noticed something interesting in a diary entry for an Anna Mararette Lapent. Apparently she was quite a theater maven and wrote volumes about the plays she attended and books she read. At the bottom of the open page about February 1814 in the case at the Huntington is the following; “During the week read two lectures of Davy’s on agricultural chemistry." There was something written after that which I could not make out.

If only my students were reading two of Hall’s lectures on organic each week, what new flowering of science might we see.

T.S. Hall

Watch Out Angry Birds

2011-04-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

One of the things that my students always have trouble with is recognizing that a collection of reagents in a flask will not react with each other. They automatically assume some reaction must occur, and will come up with some crazy product. The thing is, in vivo many functional groups and reagents can coexist. It can be important to the chemist or biochemist to recognize the potential for reactivity or coexistence.

With this and many other issues in mind I have been trying to think of ways to help my students master organic chemistry. One thought was to have the students make 3x5 cards of solvents, reagents, and molecules with one, two, three, etc. functional groups and families present. The students would then draw from the decks to create collections of contents in a hypothetical flask. They would then have to determine the possible reaction and the products that would be produced.

Realizing that 3x5 cards are so last century, I wonder if this could be done as an organic chemistry application. Perhaps as T.S.Hall's Organic Reactions slot machine where the flask contents would be on the wheels. Once the student has pulled the lever or pushed the start button, the wheels would turn to a random set of reagents. The student could accrue points by predicting the correct products, using a drawing program.

Who knows, it might make organic even more fun than it is now!

T.S. Hall

Narcisissma is the pride of the faculty

2011-04-07T08:27:00.000-07:00

(Let's start with an apology to Don McLean. Having learned the word narcissism from his song back in my childhood, the concept always reminds me of the song.)

One of my colleagues has stated at faculty meetings that, "students come and go, but the faculty are always here, so the university should be run for the benefit of the faculty." This way of thinking has always bothered me. Recently my department chair chose to publicize the publications of faculty members and a scholarly activity award for another faculty member. Aside from not mentioning the student co-authors, the chair at the same time completely ignored that one of our seniors earned a NSF Graduate Fellowship, and our students took three of four university awards for scholarship and service. The specifics of these cases are not important but serve as examples of the insidious ways departments shift away from student focus and towards faculty focus.

It's not that faculty don't care about students. With constantly increasing class sizes, pressure to graduate more students regardless of achievement, budget cuts that reduce the resources for teaching and research, pay that even the state's consultants say is below national averages, and leaders who tell the public that budget cuts will be covered by reduction in the pay and benefits of faculty and staff, faculty can come to feel that no one cares about them. The faculty need to bolster there self esteem by drawing attention to their successes. I can't fault that.

The thing is, at PUIs and MCUs the faculty must remember that those who control the resources see our main products as educated students. Most of the public don't get the connection between the faculty member's publication or scholarly activity award and what they perceive that they are paying for. The connection must be made through the students.

Every argument, and the foundation laid for every argument on budget must be based on the quality of education our students receive and the value that quality represents to the community, the taxpayer, and the parent or student who is paying the tuition.

It's the students, stupid! Love yourself a little less, love your students a little more, and the community will view you with higher esteem!

T.S. Hall

What we cover

2011-04-05T08:45:00.000-07:00

When the economy is tight and education budgets are being cut, the public generally turns to the idea of higher education as technical training rather and a broad training of the mind wedded to a training in a specific field. As has been noted in this blog on several occasions, this is in line with the interests of many college students who could care less about anything that they think is unimportant to their getting the job they desire. Rather than comment on the value of classes like "Comic Spirit,"it might be useful to turn this discussion toward my favorite class, organic chemistry.

After the recent ACS National meeting I was discussing "real world" organic chemistry with one of my former students. I had a standard organic text open when my former student arrived. The visitor immediately noted that the chemistry shown on the pages was never really used in modern industrial laboratories, to which I noted that few academic labs would use that particular chemistry. The truth is that much of the chemistry in standard organic texts is not used today. My early career med chemist commented that one of the challenges of the first year in industry was learning all the chemistry that they never encountered in their academic training.

With the advances of transition metal catalysis over the last couple of decades many of the chemistry's we teach in our organic classes are, form a practical standpoint, only marginally better than teaching students blowpipe analysis. From a pedagogical perspective, these older chemistry's have value in training the mind. My concern is that we must balance the training of the mind with the practical skill training that students need to be successful.

Some will argue that the practical training is the function of research in the curriculum. The problem is that in the modern funding scheme of higher education, research and small lab classes are being defunded, as they cost the university a considerable amount per student. In many systems research required of faculty and students, receives barely token funding. Faculty and departments are expected to raise the needed funding themselves.

It may be time to convert those third semester organic classes to "real world organic" courses. There is a need for textbooks written at a junior class level that make the transition from the basic organic course to modern practical organic chemistry. I would be interested in suggestions and ideas on the subject.

T.S. Hall

Lab course credit units

2011-03-22T09:04:00.000-07:00

While I am sure that this blog has become too higher ed policy wonky for many, some policy issues have more impact on the day-to-day lives of academics than others. Today's issue may be one of those.

The federal government, in an effort to more evenly assess the value to the level of instruction, academic rigor, and time requirements of course work is pushing toward a clearer standard for the academic unit. The main goal is to define the unit for purposes of financial aid.

The proposed standard relies on the Carnegie classifications in which the minimum requirement for one unit is defined as an hour of direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week for approximately 15 weeks for one semester or trimester, and adjusting for quarters or differing amounts of time. For labs, internships, practica, etc. and "equivalent amount of work" is required.

Between my student days and my faculty days I have been associated with six different institutions. Five of those institutions assigned the organic lab courses one unit for a three hour lab. The other university assigned 1.5 units. Under the definition of a unit, assigning one unit to three hours of lab suggests that in terms of time, the minimum for a unit has been met by the in lab activity only in the organic lab course. Those extra minutes preparing prelabs and lab reports represent effort beyond the minimum. When one considers research units and all the lab courses a science major takes, the effort expended to earn a science degree is substantially greater than the minimum.

Our students often complain about the workload of science degrees. I believe that the workload discourages some students from pursuing STEM degrees. It also makes it more likely that a STEM student will take longer than four years to complete their degree, particularly if that student must work to pay for their education. Additionally, the nerd stereotype, which also discourages STEM focus among students, suggests that our students have no time for social lives. A unit analysis supports the stereotype, if our units require more effort than those of other disciplines.

I doubt that many of us would suggest lowering the workload to earn a STEM degree. Increasing the number of units would also increase the time to a degree. With the public expectation being that a college degree should be only four years/120 units makes increasing the units for a degree is problematic.

If we want to improve our STEM recruitment and graduation rates we may need to rethink our approach to educating STEM students. This may require touching third rails of higher education, such as the general education curriculum and our lower level core courses which occupy a large portion of our units.

T.S. Hall

Organic Chemistry A & B - Why?

2011-03-16T10:33:00.000-07:00

I just finished grading my second exam of the semester. Teaching a Chem and Biochem majors organic course has advantages and disadvantages, both of which are clear upon grading an exam. The are a few students who really care and show a clear desire to understanding of the material and go beyond it. There are also a uncomfortably large number of students who make me suspect that they have never heard of general chemistry let alone organic chemistry. (I am not sure how this can be the case in the second semester of organic, but it is.) This later group are only chemistry majors as a stepping stone to pharmacy school or are biochemistry majors who believe that biochemists don't need to know organic chemistry.

During the bout of mild depression that follows grading I find myself struggling with the balance between a life-of-the-mind approach to education and technical training. In the life-of-the-mind approach I try to teach my students to think like scientists, with an emphasis on applying that thinking to organic chemistry topics. In the technical training approach I try to give the student just those tools they need to move forward in their careers.

The technical training approach is very much in vogue today lead primarily by those who appear to believe that we have reached the end of scientific advancement and our graduates will never see anything that is not already known. Obviously, I see this, in its purest form, as a shortsighted and detrimental focus to education. I don't understand how scientists can embrace an approach so antithetical to the idea of the scientific method. This mode of teaching creates good technicians, not good scientists.

The life-of-the-mind approach is demeaned in our anti-intellectual society as being an ivory tower perspective, which it is, in its purest form. Often I find myself wondering why we are covering some of the outdated and, for practical modern day purposes, useless chemistry we see in organic courses. I can see a rationalization that points toward a training of the mind, although I am suspicious of such arguments. This method creates people who can think-tank a problem, without dealing with the practical realities.

As I am sure many readers will agree, I think the key to a good educational system is to balance the two views. This leads me to a questions for which I have no answers. In a fundamental sense, what is the balance we trying to convey to students in the two semester organic course? Do our texts and examination methods reflect that balance?

With the increased reliance on multiple choice exams and larger class sizes I fear that we are moving increasingly toward credentialing to the technical training side. I don't believe that this approach will make either our graduates or our economy competitive in the future.

I look forward to the thoughts of readers.

T.S. Hall

No Compromise America

2011-03-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

Every time I have started to write a blog entry over the last few weeks I have found myself drifting back to the same off topic issue, so I am just going to get this off my chest and move on.

A few weeks ago I was listening to an interview with a member of a state legislature talking about budget issues and how to close a large budget gap. This elected representative stated that the source of budget problems is "compromise". He then went on to argue that there should be no compromise. He suggested that the only solution is to silence all who disagree and have one party (his) make all the rules. No surprising for today's politicians, but increasingly we see evidence of politicians acting to silence all who disagree.

Being a radical moderate, I don't care and won't tell, which party this person was from. It does not matter. The movement to the extremes is a recipe for destruction. When we refuse to negotiate, when facts don't matter, when we salt the earth of our enemies in a civil war, we have sown the seeds of the end of civil society and at some future time will see revolution in our own land.

In my life I have see revolutions and genocides. They begin when one group holds power and wealth and dictates to those who think or look differently that they will have no voice or power over their lives. Look at Egypt and Libya, the populace are wage slaves who must suffer in silence as all power and wealth go to a few.

I was taught in elementary school and have always believed that part of the genius of the founders of the United States of America was that they set up a system requiring that even the minority opinions would have a voice and would be heard in the court of public opinion. When politicians act specifically to pursue a permanent majority by legislating the destruction of any means that those who disagree with them might use to have a voice, they undermine the foundations of the nation.

I am hopeful that the pendulum has reached the zenith of its swing and more sensible voices will soon speak up, but when I hear leaders like the legislator who is anti-compromise speak without fear of rebuttal or retribution I worry about the our collective future.

T.S. Hall

One Semester General Chemistry and the Brain Attic

2011-02-24T12:15:00.000-08:00

There is currently a discussion on the Council on Undergraduate Research list serve about one semester general chemistry courses designed and targeted to specific degrees and/or careers. One view of the debate is that students should not waste time on anything that is not specifically needed on the job, day one after graduation. The issue is timely for me in that I was involved in a debate this week about transfer credit for organic courses to serve our bio majors. The argument was put forward that we really shouldn't be testing the transferring students competency through an ACS exam, because the ACS exam covers material not needed in biochemistry.

I am not sure to what extent this attention to minimalist education is a consequence of the current economic and political climate, or something else. Rather than give in to addressing those issues, I will play my traditional role of cautionary observer.

Many students either don't know or only have a vague idea of what career they hope to enter, or they are deluded as to what career they have a shot at, based on their capabilities. Also, even if a student knows and is able to achieve a specific career, that does not mean that they will be secure in that career over a lifetime. A broader knowledge base might aid them in changing careers. How many articles have been written about how today's students will have multiple careers rather than a single one like their parents or grandparents. Add to all of this the need to be able to work effectively across disciplines that ally with ones chosen career and we really do need to consider if ten different general chemistry courses, each focused to a specific career makes sense.

In the larger picture, while narrowly focused training may be appropriate for technician based careers, we must consider if it is appropriate for true higher education. I have often thought that as the percentage of American high school graduates going to college has increased the percentage that really want a higher education has remained about the same. The difference is the number of students who really only want and/or need a technical training. We need technicians, so why not offer that minimalist and focused training separate from the bachelors degree. This might address some of the grade inflation pressure educators feel from students who argue that they don't really need to knowledge, just the degree.

T.S. Hall

Left Hand, Meet Right Hand

2011-02-17T17:06:00.000-08:00

The California Legislative Analyst has called for guaranteed access for California students to their local California State University campus. This is in response to the increases in campuses declaring themselves impacted, which allows them to ignore local access priority and then pick the best qualified students from anywhere in the state. Setting aside the meritocracy issues, the CLA report says, "We believe that ensuring local access to all eligible students is more important than maintaining equal admissions criteria for all applicants."

One must keep in mind that admissions are a less-than-zero-sum game in this system, where budget cuts and space limitations have left the system unable to accept all qualified students.

On the other hand, the system Chancellor of the CSU, Charles Reed, has stated that given the impact of budget cuts, "We can no longer justify offering practically every major at every campus . . ." The targets for program cuts would be based on lower enrollment programs. With state funding cuts for next year predicted to be on the order of eighteen percent, one wonders what the definition of "lower enrollment" might become.

What happens when both plans come together? If a prospective student lives near a campus where the program they are interested in is cut, but outside the region of the campus where the program survived, should they change career aspirations? Should we put out maps of regions of the state where physics or geology are still studied for parents to move to for the benefit of their children who want to study in those areas? It should be interesting to see how this works out.

T.S. Hall

Gainful Employment - Part II

2011-02-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

Last week I began this topic by discussing the issue of the potential for "gainful employment" requirements in higher education. These requirements would demand that the incomes of graduates cover the costs of the education students receive. The emphasis so far is on for-profit colleges and universities, but they may well trickle down to those of us in the non-profit education business. As promised, today I will look at some possible ways gainful employment might be measured.

Option A: Average income of the institution's graduates - The simplest option, this would spread out the highs and lows of degree cost over the entire student population. So long as the average income is acceptable, high cost degrees in the STEM fields would be covered by the lower cost degrees in other fields. This will encourage forming larger institutions where income averages can remain more steady. Of course this will do little to improve smaller individual programs which are shielded from the gainful employment standard by the mass of student outside the program.

Option B: Global average income per specific degree - This would involve determining the average pay of the newly minted degree holder nationally, regionally, or state and then assessing the cost of the degree at the particular institution. If the tuition/income ratio is acceptable funding would be made available for that program. The advantage would be that schools would be encouraged to get rid of degrees that really don't pay for themselves. Of course, since in some fields boom and bust cycles are common some leeway would be be needed so that programs are not opening and closing with the boom and bust of the economy.

Option C: Institutional average income per specific degree - The Option A funding scheme does not allow for assessment of the value added by a specific school's program. If my school's graduates are highly sought after and earn above average salaries post graduation, my tuition/income ratio should not be evaluated based on average income in a specified geographic region. Of course this means that tracking of individual students would have to be accomplished. Those of us involved in student development grants know how difficult this can be. Schools would need to add to their costs by hiring people to track students. The advantage of this option would be that the individual program would reap the rewards of producing a higher valued product.

I am sure there are other options, but I think my point is made that the practical issue of "gainful employment" standards is worth considering and discussing before it is imposed on higher education.

T.S. Hall

Concealed Weapons

2011-01-28T07:07:00.000-08:00

There have been many words dispensed on the issue of campus violence and allowing concealed weapons on campuses. An then yesterday the story broke of a disagreement between faculty members that got really ugly. A faculty member at Cal. St. Northridge has been arrested for repeatedly urinating on the door of a fellow faculty member who he disagreed with.

Really?! That's what we have come to. Getting pissed off and then pissing on one another's doors?

Certainly it is better than gunplay at faculty meetings, but we should be able to set an example for how people trained in higher order thinking handle their disagreements.

T.S. Hall

Gainful Employment - Part I

2011-01-26T08:30:00.000-08:00

Over the course of the last eighteen months the number of articles questioning the value of a college degree have been increasing. Federal and state governments are suggesting that they might apply some sort of "gainful employment of graduates" test to educational institutions in considering funding levels.

The idea of a value added assessment for degrees is not anathema to me. I do, however, wonder how such a system might work. There are several options that come immediately to mind. None of them are perfect, but discussing them within the academic community might enable us to become partners in crafting the end result rather than the victims of another poorly thought out funding strategy.

The advantage of such a policy could be to help curb grade inflation and ensure a quality of product (graduate), since producing lots of poorly educated students with high grades will induce a Yugo Effect where lots of cheap poor quality products is economically unsustainable to the producer.

Of course this means that colleges and universities will have to do a calculation of the cost of producing a product of value verses the payout they get from the graduates. Degrees with small numbers of students and/or high costs of education will be difficult to sustain. The STEM fields could suffer through one or both of these issues.

There is also the question of when gainful employment begins. Does postgraduate education count as gainful employment? Again, STEM fields could suffer depending on how "gainful employment" is defined.

The effect of the cost-benefit analysis might be the closing of many degree programs and, if handled with forethought, the consolidation of some degree types at specific universities. The STEM fields might find themselves consolidated into poly technical colleges and universities where larger numbers of students would make the accounting work. The downside of this is that some regions just don't have enough students to support such programs so technical education could become something geographically distant for many students and therefore unattainable.

Another problem of this system of funding is that it will reduce degree flexibility so that the boom and bust cycles seen in some disciplines will be exacerbated. As degree values fluctuate, so can departmental funding, making it difficult to manage programs.

A gainful employment policy will also make it increasingly important that educational institutions act as employment agencies. While this in not in itself a bad idea, it will demand increased resources to support the new Dean of Employment infrastructure. This will take resources away from the educational enterprise.

In Part II of this commentary I will look at ways "Gainful Employment" might be defined.

T.S. Hall

Salted Student Evaluations

2011-01-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

The results of the Fall Semester student evaluations should be in mailboxes any day now. Before opening them and starting the Spring Semester in a funk make sure to apply a healthy grain of salt.

In a study released by a University of Northern Iowa professor in early December, one-third of students surveyed admit that they stretch the truth in evaluations, including lying on the comments section (20%). As hard as it might be to believe, most often they do so to punish professor's they don't like.

The evaluation literature is replete with studies that show factors that have nothing to do with education play a significant role in student's evaluations, yet universities continue to place weight on this flawed tool in assessing faculty.

One of my colleagues from a private institution reported that his school sent a memo to faculty before final exams indicating that students would not be allowed to file the online evaluations for classes until after faculty had submitted grades. No doubt, if asked they will swear that there is no connection between student evaluations and grades.

I am not saying that we should not have student evaluations, just that we should recognize that they poorly measure faculty competence. In my own case I have found some very useful comments in evaluations. I also find comments stating how unfair it is that I don't give practice exams that contain all the questions likely to be on the exam, that even though the front row is empty students hiding in the back can't read the board well enough, etc.

If are not yet a tenured full professor print a copy of the UNI study and send a copy anonymously to your Provost or Academic VP.

T.S. Hall

Laws of Power - Laws of Productivity

2010-12-01T08:29:00.000-08:00

As happens all too often I recently found myself in the middle of a petty power struggle. The childishness of the actions and comments that were part of the debate made me wonder why anyone bothers to try to do anything for the good of the university, college, department, or the students.

In talking to someone outside the university about the events and results I was advised to read the "48 Laws of Power" so that I could avoid having my civic spirit crushed in the future, by crushing those that don't agree with me. My advisor suggested that I was being too open, honest, and welcoming of the thoughts of others and that through the Laws of Power I could learn how to bend everyone before me to my will.

My first thought was that controlling people and crushing those who will not bend is not who I am. On reading the Laws of Power I am sure of this. I am not interested in power, I am interested in productivity. I want my energy to go into making the department as a whole stronger rather than being wasted on positioning myself to keep others down.

I wonder if the pursuit of power for the sake of having power isn't a large part of the problem in many of the dysfunctional departments I have been associated with. Would be chairs focused on accumulating power and crushing people with other ideas and the faculty members spent too much time counting heads and currying support over minor issues rather than joining together to raise everyone up and improve the entire department. People interested in a department focus rather than the intestine wars within the department can never get traction in leadership votes because they avoid taking sides in the power plays and get crushed by the power players.

My department, the Statehouse, Washington, etc. It does not matter where we look, power rules over productivity. At least so long as we chose to allow it to. If enough people opt out of the power plays but stay in the decision making process we could all avoid having to take sides in a destructive cold war with our departments. The power players only have the power we give them.

T.S. Hall

The end of casual leafing

2010-11-30T08:29:00.000-08:00

This morning I received the E-mail from the Organic Division of ACS informing the membership that we will no longer receive the annual Organic Synthesis paperback at part of our membership. I knew it would happen sooner or later, but I still felt a sting.

No mater how hard we try, keeping up with the literature is always a challenge. Each year when Org. Syn. would arrive I would put it on my "leafing pile". This is a pile of stuff that I leaf through when I have a few moments to kill between meetings or that I take for plane trips. Back in the olden days this pile included paper journals, but my access to those went digital long ago.

Leafing is a great education. I would catch chemistries that helped in my research or gave me new research ideas. It helped me recognize new conceptual and experimental trends in the science which I would then make a point to read about. To the extent that I keep my knowledge of the latest organic science fresh I attribute a good bit to leafing through journals and looking at papers that I would never have looked at based on a title or graphical abstract.

I guess I need to find new ways to keep up and watch for trends. Thankfully, in the mean time my annual copy of Annual Reports in Medicinal Chemistry arrived last week from the ACS Med. Chem. Division.

T.S. Hall

Research on a Budget

2010-11-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

In addition to my unexplainable curiosity about mechano-chemistry (which includes sonochemistry and grinding or ball-mill reactions, none of which I do), papers that key on low cost research tend to catch my eye. I suppose it's because my group runs on a shoestring. With this in mind, I will draw attention to a recent Tetrahedron Letters paper on the use of animal bone meal (ABM) as a catalyst of the crossed-aldol condensation. This is actually the second paper from this group, but I don't have access to Letters in Organic Chemistry papers, so I missed the original report.

In the recent paper, the authors did not go into the conceptual leap that inspired this research area, which I am curious about. But, I do love how the mostly Moroccan authors spent no dollars, or dirham, with Aldrich or Acros for their catalyst. They invest some column inches on how to prepare ABM and Na/ABM from animal bones "collected from nearby butcher shops." (Na/ABM is ABM impregnated with sodium nitrite.) Now, that's research on a shoestring!

So, as you gaze upon the carcass of the once golden Tom Turkey upon your table give Thanks that the catalyst of a new research venture lies before you. I can see the series of papers now; Turkey Bone Meal catalyzed . . ., Free Range Turkey Bone Meal catalyzed . . ., Wild Turkey catalyzed blog writing in organic chemistry, etc.

Happy Thanksgiving!

T.S. Hall

On-line Scandal to Come

2010-11-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

I am currently working on creating an on-line Introduction to Regulatory Affairs course for our College of Continuing Education. Aside from the course material itself, which I will go into at a later date, I have been assigned a minder to "help" ensure that all the university on-line content rules are followed. In the course of my initial meeting with the continuing education folks a conversation on ensuring the security of courses ensued.

There are people who will take on-line courses for students and/or will take on-line examinations for the student. With the increasing push toward on-line education educators need to get ahead of the future scandal when this issue comes before the public. A widely publicized incident where a public figure or a group of pseudo-public figures are caught which unearned on-line credentials will cause a backlash that will have the public throwing out baby and bathwater. This endangers what promise on-line education has.

One potential solution to the problem of credentialing the on-line student is to enforce identity checks in on-line testing. This could be done through a little cooperation between institutions. In a state like California where you can't spit without hitting a community college, Cal. State or Univ. of Cal campus there could be testing centers where the on-line student can come with their ID to take tests. If we add in public libraries and public high schools this type of cooperative sharing of resources could actually facilitate the development of on-line education in a form where the credential actually has some value.

For those in the physical sphere of education, it should be pointed out that similar checks might be appropriate in your courses too. As class sizes have grown, how many of us really know all our students. I am reminded of a case from over a decade ago where a colleague discovered at the last exam of the semester that one student taking his organic course, and earning an A, was not in fact the student of record, but a family friend dentist who had been in the classroom and taking tests all semester.

I also have a colleague in the business college who checks photo ID at every exam.

I have stated it before; As the internet makes content freely available the job of institutions of higher education will increasingly become one of credentialing and training in technique where on-line learning is not sufficient.

T.S. Hall

The George Molecule

2010-11-08T07:23:00.000-08:00

My undergraduate organic instructor and research mentor loved the nonstandard names given for organic molecules, including George, Housane, Pagodane, etc. They bring a little whimsy into the subject. In those days common nomenclature was the primary type of naming used in the course. In the intervening decades IUPAC nomenclature appears to have taken the drivers seat in most texts.

This semester I have been teaching for the first time from the organic text by Jones and Fleming. While the students really like the writing style, I have found that the use of common nomenclature is driving me to distraction. IUPAC nomenclature is brought in, but common nomenclature is used the vast majority of the time. One bit of irony for me is that the authors write about "bling" in talking about diamond, but still use amyl and appear to think that the name ethylene is IUPAC nomenclature.

While common nomenclature is necessary as it is still used, systematic nomenclature offers the opportunity to train the student's mind to build a body of rules that can be applied to systems they have yet to see. It fits well into the idea of building the capability to predicting the products of reactions between reagents one has never seen.

One problem in the use of IUPAC nomenclature in text is that most of us don't know all the basic rules, so many text include errors in their IUPAC naming. Taking a page from days gone by when there were texts on organic nomenclature, perhaps we need a primer on IUPAC nomenclature for organic faculty. Something like a Oxford primer soft cover book.

T.S. Hall

Stop the Slaughter! Please! I'm begging here!

2010-11-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I should not have given an exam the Friday before Halloween. The students were in a particularly blood thirsty mood. The wanton destruction put me in mind of Timur (Tamerlane) standing on a pile of the heads of his 100,000 captives during the conquest of Delhi. It made no difference (to the students, not Timur) what Lewis acid was on the oxygen, the carbon-oxygen bond was almost always broken.

I warned the class several times about decapitation of alcohols and alkoxides, to no avail. Appeals to consider electronegativity differences did not sway this group of students. When asked, they remembered the picture of the decapitated alcohol, which they thought was funny. To bad that they did not remember the concept behind it.

I often try to bring in analogies that will make them laugh to help them remember concepts, particularly those that they commonly trip up on. The lesson, I suppose, is that being entertaining is not the same thing as educating.

So, back to the drawing board.

T.S. Hall

Hold your nose

2010-10-31T20:49:00.000-07:00

Thank God the elections will be over in a couple of days. If the campaigns have demonstrated anything, they have demonstrated that the nation is full of people who are diametrically opposed to working with anyone other than their clones. This does not bode well for our future.

Similar kinds of self destructive things happen in our departments. For instance, my department is currently discussing the prospects of writing a grant to replace our research NMR. This will require all our NMR users to work together in the effort. Some are withholding any activity toward the grant until the university promises to hire an NMR technician. Do we need an NMR technician? Perhaps, but holding up any progress toward resolving our NMR needs problem, which is real, does not serve the faculty members withholding their effort or the department.

A department needs to be a community working together for a common good. Even with budget problems and administrators who care more about six year graduation rates than education and the careers of our graduates. The department faculty need to work together to use with the budget they have and educate administrators and students alike. Stamping our feet and saying, "It's our way or no way!" is never appropriate in an academic department or a state house or congress. Our students deserve better, colleagues deserve better, our state deserves better, and our nation deserves better.

T.S. Hall

Celebrating Chemistry

2010-10-29T06:58:00.000-07:00

In case you did not notice, last week was National Chemistry Week, and last Saturday was Mole Day. If it slipped by without you contributing to the festivities don't worry, next year is the International Year of Chemistry. The goals of the International Year are to spread the good news of chemistry to the citizenry. Now is the time to start thinking about how you will contribute.

While I am thinking about how to celebrate chemistry I am also thinking about the all important Department Halloween Party.

I am thinking that this year I will really terrify and go as an Organic Exam. Baby blue sheet enblazened with the text normally found on a Blue Book including the bar code on the back lower corner. Make sure to fill in the student name and the all important course info. You could have the family go as labware, but DO NOT suggest that your spouse go as a pear flask. (You will get no treats.) I recommend suggesting a stirring rod complete with a nice rubber policeman hat. Better yet, a white sheet can become the organic exam questions. Put questions on the front and back.

Just remember that celebrating is about having fun.

T.S. Hall

Our Ailing Infrastructure

2010-10-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

My father and mother lived in a homeowners association once the chicks had left the nest. One of the interesting things about homeowners association living is that while they are non-profit, associations they set up a "reserves account" to cover those non-annual costs. Things like resealing the parking lot or replacing roofing. The carried over reserve funds are not considered profit. They are a sensible mode of covering costs that are not regular annual costs. The association adds a basic level of funding to build the account each month.

What does this have to do with chemistry? Repair or replacement of instruments has become an impossibility given the lean years we have faced and see into the future. Immediate needs get covered in lean times and infrastructure can go to hell in the mean time. Just look at the nations bridges.

Our institutions generally don't have anything resembling a reserve account for our infrastructure. My department has not had a state funded operating account in years, so adding money to an infrastructure reserve is out of the quesiton.

Looking for another option, I have brought this issue up in our development committee only to meet with the response that donations for repair and replacement of infrastructure is not something people will donate to. Scholarships, yes, instrumentation, no. Is this a problem of not making a strong enough case? Without the resources to train the students with modern functioning equipment, scholarships only support training graduate for jobs in the last century. Hardly a value added degree.

And what of our institutions and our statehouses. If we are supposed to be training the high tech employees of the future, how are we supposed to do it without of date and nonfunctioning equipment. Yes, it will mean that the increase in costs of education will outstrip the rate of inflation. But should we expect that the up-to-date technology will cost nothing. This is how we get into an infrastructure hole that you can't get out of.

T.S.Hall

Billable Hour

2010-10-12T19:39:00.000-07:00

In a few weeks the 2010 elections will be over, and the advertising for the 2012 elections will begin. As part of the anti-intellectualism of today's political candidates, the faculty at institutions of higher education will be identified as welfare queens who only work 12 hours a week. It's annoying and to the extent that it effects the resources we have to do our jobs, not to mention feed our families, it aggravating.

To address the issue and head off the politicos I suggest that we academics declare a "billable hours week". The week of the elections would be good. We can use technology to remind us every hour to assign the work of the previous hour to "accounts" that reflect our duties.

The accounts list might include the following.

In class work: teaching, class preparation, preparing assessment activities, grading assessment activities, office hours, E-mail and other student communication
Scholarly activities: grant writing, grant administration, supervision of students, writing papers, communicating with collaborators, your own lab work
Service: departmental meetings, college meetings, university meetings, meeting prep, servicing university facilities, reviewing grants and papers, department and student development

If the exercise does nothing else, it should help us individually determine where the hours go. I know I have been wondering.

T.S. Hall

What to do when your magnet quenches

2010-09-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

Yup, it happens!

My department's research NMR was installed in 1993 and the magnet has not be overhauled in all the years since. Well, even borrowed time runs out. For us this happened some time between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. The magnet quenched and this morning when I came in the top and bottom of the instrument were covered in frost ice. After seeing if the magnet was gone I called the company that helps me with service. Since I could not find this info on the web I offer this list of things to do if your magnet quenches if it is going to be a while until you can come up with the scratch to bring it back up. (California still doesn't have a budget when the year started July 1.)

1. Shut down the console.

2. Pull the probe from the magnet if you can. If it is frozen in place, don't force it.
One thing I should have thought about is that it would be freezing cold. I darn near frozen my hand to the side of the probe when pulling it.

3. Pull the shim stack from the magnet.
I have pulled it before to clean the spin assembly. There is a ring clamp that holds it at the bottom and three long screws that hold it from the top. It has generally been pretty snug and required some pressure to pull it down. Well, with everything frozen the bottom clamp does not hold it. It almost dropped to the floor when I took out the three screws at the top of the magnet. Fortunately I had someone there "just in case".

4. Last, I removed the upper stack.

Now, I need to find the money to replace the seals and bring back the magnet.

T.S. Hall

Education for all

2010-09-06T07:12:00.000-07:00

In the first week of the semester a substantial part of my non-teaching time was spent in meetings and dealing with the overflow of students trying to get into one of my classes.

With the California budget over two months overdue the university based its fiscal planning for the fall semester on last year's budget. Without the pay furloughs (there was no work furlough) we experienced last year the number of sections was cut as lecturers were let go. Class sizes went up to the limit of the size of the room for this semester.

On day-one of the semester my 8:00 AM organic lecture was already five percent oversubscribed since the classroom had that many more chairs than the course was designed for. When I got to the classroom there were numerous students standing in the back and on the sides of the room. If all students wanting to take the class were admitted the class would swell to one-third over the original design size.

In discussing the issue with my Chair and Associate Dean I was told that I needed to take the graduate students who need remediation since they would be held up in their graduate careers by not being able to remediate their deficiency. I must take the transfer students since they might get off track to degrees if they have to wait until next semester to take the class. I must take the second and third repeaters since they are already behind and holding them up further would slow their progress to a degree further. (The university has set a priority on increasing the six-year graduation rate.) Only I noted that increasing the class size by one-third would necessitate a change in my pedagogical plans for the semester as I am in the process of teaching. Also, increasing the workload without additional resources is unfair to both me and to the students. More students should necessitate more office hours to support the students, and I can't offer more office hours without shortchanging my other duties. It took five days, but by week's end I was assigned a new room that will hold the larger size class and got no other resources to support the student's education or my work.

Routinely, when we complain about class sizes it is pointed out that at RO1s class sizes can be 500 students, as it to imply that we faculty are slackers. We don't have classroom that will hold half that number on our campus, and one 500 student class many actually be the entire load of that RO1 faculty member. We must remember though that the RO1s on this area have 500 student classes and a score of discussion sections run by graduate students. The students get the opportunity to ask questions and get face time with an instructor in a small group setting. Since my graduate students are taking the class for remediation that would be difficult here. Also, the RO1s take the cream of the student population. The public comprehensives and PUI's take the second tier students who are more likely to benefit from more one-on-one education. This is why large classrooms were not built on our campuses.

I like teaching, but like most people I want a fair shot at being successful at what I do. Without resources and with impossible demands a career that might be fulfilling becomes a life of futility leading to burnout. I believe that this has a lot to do with the low retention rates in K-12 teaching and the frustrations and burnout of many PUI and MCU faculty trying to compete in laboratory research.

Anyway, got to go reorganize the pedagogy of my course. Happy Labor Day!

T.S. Hall

Things to come

2010-08-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

At last week’s university convocation the charges for the year where laid out. The priorities for the 2010-11 academic year are increasing graduation rates and grant support. On a similar vein the nation’s politicos are pushing to increase graduation rates based on the presumed increased need for people with college degrees over the next 10-15 years. The logic appears to be that by the 2020s almost no one in the US will make anything or do any physical labor and we will all be in the knowledge business.

I am somewhat skeptical of this. As a society, we don’t appear to have realized yet that knowledge is fungible. Of course those working in the pharmaceutical industry recognize this already. The flat out replacement to a vertically integrated economy with monocultural knowledge economy has the potential to do the same thing for this country as happens in ecological monocultures. Assault by a single contagion can bring down an entire monoculture ecosystem. The closer we get to a pure knowledge economy the greater the peril we put our future in.

Aside from the idea that we will all be knowledge workers in another decade I am also concerned that in all the talk about granting more degrees and increasing graduation rates no speaker mentions educational quality. When the politicians and the university administration tell faculty that the two things they care most about are the graduation rate and external funding many faculty will listen to the demands of the student evaluation and let the grade float up to where all those paying the bills are happy.

When the knowledge bubble deflates, in part because the knowledge is not there, there will be tearing of hair and a search for someone to blame. So, in another ten years when the congressional hearings begin, someone please point out that we dug the holes our leaders demanded we dig.

T.S. Hall

More Miscellany

2010-08-23T20:10:00.000-07:00

In today’s installment of my pre-semester desk cleaning of articles that looked like blog prompts we find a couple of cases of post graduation evaluations.

The first is actually about sociologists, but could apply to any of us. According to the article in Inside Higher Ed, among the 2005 graduates in sociology 70 percent were satisfied with their major, and by 2009 only 40 percent of the same group was were satisfied. Such satisfaction loses can result from many factors including poor job prospects that make one question the value of the degree. From my minimal experience, sociology collects its share of premed types, so they have something in common with us chemistry folks. Not getting into medical school could account for some of the satisfaction gap. Particularly when one recognizes that very many of these graduates were unsatisfied by the level of career advising and graduate school advising.

Many of our own departments are guilty of not paying enough attention to student career development. Many of our programs are not flexible enough to change with the needs of the graduate schools and employers of our products. With increasing attention to outcomes and the value of degrees we would be well served to consider the value of career development within departments.

The second article is from the NY Times. It is a story about public institutions of higher education in New York City giving detailed reports to the local schools of who needed remedial courses when they got to college. At a time when nearly every high school graduate is being pushed to college it would be a useful service to provide such information to our feeder schools. Linked to standardized test scores and performance evaluations, such post graduation performance review could help high schools get past memorizing the material for the test and don’t worry about long-term education.

As I have written before, our primary product is our graduates. Preparing them for the next steps in their careers should be a priority.

T.S. Hall

Prompt Miscellany

2010-08-20T23:19:00.000-07:00

The blog prompts are starting to pile up, so let's clear a few from the list.

The high school in Mount Olive, New Jersey has declared itself a D-free zone. On the logic that a D is really a failure, the school will only give A’s, B’s C’s and F’s. To this logic I quote from Matthew B. Crawford’s book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft.”

Pedagogically, you might want to impress on a student the miserable state of his mind. You might want to improve the students by first crushing him, as then you can recruit his pride to the love of learning. You might want to reveal to him the chasm separating his level of understanding from the thinkers of the ages. You do this not out of malice, but because you sense rare possibilities in him, and take your task to be that of cultivating in the young man or woman a taste for the most difficult studies. Such studies are likely to embolden him against timid conventionality, and humble him against the self-satisfaction of the age, which he wears on his face. These are the pedagogical uses of the “D.”

What’s a dedicated slacker to do? Well, if figuring out if it is worth going to class taxes your brain a new website -- The Should I Skip Class Today? Calculator offers the solution. Of course if you need a website to figure out if you should go to class, you should probably just go.

Of course if you have been skipping class pretty often, Ultrinsic is the new off campus betting parlor for academia. Students can bet on their grades in individual courses or the semester GPA. They can even buy grade insurance against receiving a lower grade than they bet on. Apparently, education is not it’s own reward, and it takes too long to reap the benefit. Today’s students need the nearer-term payback of a cash payday for grades. Of course if you get the insurance maybe you don’t need the grades.

I wonder how not having a D option would effect Ultrinsic's business model.

T.S. Hall

An the Emmy Goes To

2010-08-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

Last year, I reviewed script for an episode of the television series "Understanding Chemistry in Our World". I also portrayed a talking head in the episode. Well, the show has won an Emmy for Best Instructional Series, and about ninety of us get recognized as part of the team. The Emmy statuette will look nice on top of my pile of questionable student evaluations.

T.S. Hall

Two weeks to the new year

2010-08-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

One of my research students, BP, just dumped 200mL of silicone oil into the sink thinking that it was "cloudy water". He did not even notice that it floated on top of the water in the sink. It was only when I asked him why the oil bath reaction setup was missing the oil that he even knew he did anything wrong. Perhaps, I should rephrase that since the he indicated that he doesn't think he did anything wrong. From the look on his face he is quite puzzled by my cursing, which I generally don't do in front of students. This is a student who I can't trust to do anything without my standing over him. Several times I concluded that I might as well do the work myself, for the sake of the equipment, the environment, my budget, and everyone's safety, but I have continued to try to teach him. To make matters worse, this student wants to teach chemistry in a high school setting.

BP has offered to leave the group. To which I thought, "Gee thanks BP, but do you think you could clean up the mess you made before you go." But then my conscience got me, which is why I am writing this rather than wishing young BP good riddance.

I see my job as educating, and while I have expressed disdain for those "students" who don't want to an education, I feel an obligation to those who actually want to learn. The problem here is that I am not sure if BP can. Here he is ready to graduate, as soon as he get his research credit, and he can't balance equations, calculate limiting reagents, differentiate silicone oil from water, etc. He has been failed by the system that has allowed him to get this far. And when he graduates and starts teaching chemistry he will fail a new generation of students. If I let BP go to another lab my laboratory life will be easier, and I will feel that I failed as an educator.

With two weeks until the new academic year begins I find myself wondering how I can face another class of students when my goal is to prepare them to become contributing members of society and the new purpose of higher education is to provide degrees to as many students as possible in six years or less. At least that's what the public and the politicians are telling me. My friends and colleagues have been telling me for years that I should just teach my classes and seek positive affirmation in those students who are successful and in my research. For the vast majority of students who don't care my peers suggest not wasting energy on them. I have never been able to do this. All I know is that with two weeks until classes start, I should not be wondering if I really belong in modern higher education.

T.S. Hall

Leisure College

2010-08-07T23:09:00.000-07:00

According to the new "Leisure College, USA" study by the American Enterprise Institute, college students today spend only about fourteen hours per week studying, as opposed to twenty-four hours fifty years ago. In case you forgot, the recommended number of hours of studying is thirty hours per week.

Looking at the usual suspects for decreased study time, the authors are able to discount a higher percentage of students working, gender demographics, differences in types of institutions (although I did notice that MCU students study the least) and improvements in teaching and information technology. In the end they express concern that the decreasing level of rigor of college education connected to pressures related to the change to a student as customer mentality are to blame.

One factor that was not mentioned was college as lifestyle. Look at every movie and television show about college. In them college is publicly and/or parentally funded time of parties and irresponsibility. Learning is something that gets in the way of these activities. Students vote with their choice of college and their course/faculty evaluations. Faculty and colleges that try to fight the trend only hurt themselves. As stated in the report;

We are hard-pressed to name any reliable, noninternal reward that instructors receive for maintaining high standards—and the penalties for doing so are clear.

I am not sure if there is a way to turn back the clock on this issue. Students have told me that because it is grades that matter to them they must avoid faculty who maintain high standards. One must wonder what an educator dedicated to the mission of higher education is to do.

T.S. Hall

Piling on For-Profits

2010-08-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

In the slow news time of August we have been treated to a series of reports of increased attention to community colleges and for-profit higher education on the grounds that the public is being ripped off. The main charges against the for-profits are of enticing the public to sign up for student loans for high priced degrees (higher than the underfunded public sector) that are never finished or if they are, the career pay is not commiserate with the degree costs. Students default on loans, hurting both the graduate and the public who guarrenteed the loans.

It appears that a large part of the problem many in Congress and in the public have with for-profit education is that it is capitalist. In my duties as Devil's Advocate I have to point out that it is a bit ridiculous of us to get outraged about for-profit publicly traded companies doing everything legally allowed to maximize profit for their shareholders. That's what you wanted when you were demanding a business model and saying that the private sector could do it better. In defunding public education we are going back to the days of first century of this nation when most education was private and we had a pretty clear class system.

While I do have my doubts about the ethics of some of the business models I have witnessed, I can't stand with the tar-and-feather crowd in the current instance of lumping all for-profits together as scheming evil-doers out to bilk students and the public out of their hard earned dollars. As the pendlum swings we start by deciding that some previously public activity is costing more than we would like to pay. The public then complains about inefficiency and "waste, fraud, and abuse" by public employees. Then we complain that the public entity should be run more like a business. Then we start turning it over to private business, followed by the complaints of "waste, fraud, and abuse" in the private sector, particularly that someone is making profit from something we see as a fundamental right. In the end we try to close excess profit loopholes. Eventually we notice that the costs really don't change that much from when we started and the quality of work is about the same, so we move to the next thing of outrage.

I can't defend the most outrageous money making conduct of some for-profits, but I can't find fault with the majority trying to be for-profits. The common cause of outrage appears to be anyone making a good living at something the public sees as a right. (Right to health care: doctors and pharmaceutical companies make too much money. Right to higher education: faculty are paid too much and have too generous benefits, textbooks cost too much, organic is too hard.) If freedom isn't free, neither are our other rights. Our leaders need to remind us of this, but our elected officials only give voice to our childish demands for something for nothing. If you don't want to pay taxes for public education, you will pay for private non-profit and for-profit education, as least until the public stops supporting education at all. This may well bring us full circle back to the class systems of the founders.

Be it defense contractors or education businesses we must remember, caveat emptor. It's what capitalism is all about.

And let's not forget that nobody is really looking at the value of non-profit degrees. Not the earning power but the ability to generate value for a business or the community that the degree holder gained with the degree.

T.S. Hall

More medical school organic

2010-07-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

The "newspaper of record" this morning has an article titled "Getting into Med School Without Hard Sciences" in which they report on an article from Academic Medicine. The story is about a program that Mt Sinai has run for the last 20 years that offers slots in the medical school to students from the humanities who don't take organic, physics, or the MCAT. Only the last six years of students are used in the analysis.

Well, actually if you read the Academic Medicine article they do take an eight week principles of organic and physics in medicine course at Mt. Sinai, the summer of their junior year. The course get six units of credit for the organic part and two for the physics. I would love to see the syllabus of the summer course to learn what topics they cover and to what depth.

The authors also write:

We acknowledge that these disciplines have educational value for future physicians and scientists, but we contend that admissions committees pay them too much attention and that far too much time is devoted to them in the undergraduate premed curriculum.

Of course the Times article does not mention the summer course or the acknowledgement that these courses have any value. This abridged version of the article will no doubt be used to pressure changes in the programs at undergraduate institutions and at medical schools.

One thing that the articles and their authors don't address is the fate of students who don't get into medical school and took this limited curriculum. One argument for breadth in an undergraduate curriculum is the recognition that those that fail to make it to medical, pharmacy, or dental school should still have skills to earn a living with their degree. I would be very curious to see what happened to those who did not make the grade.

T.S. Hall

The endangered teacher-scholar

2010-07-28T20:21:00.000-07:00

The International Changing Academic Professional study results were announced this month. The study is really about the morale of the professorate and the life of academics world-wide as they see themselves. In the brief report in Inside Higher Education the last line caught my eye.

Locke also highlighted an increasing "division of academic labor” and speculated that UK academics who undertake both research and teaching may now be in the minority, as they already are in the U.S.

The teacher-scholar model is the one that traditionally has been applied to MCU and many PUI faculty hires. In recent years, I have noticed that faculty are being put into teaching slots or research slots with little or no room for the teacher-scholar. Folks like me who went into the profession to be teacher-scholars find ourselves torn to pieces as we try to avoid being put into one slot or the other.

Teaching feeds my desire to help people achieve their dreams through thoughtful work and acquired skill. Research feeds my desire to solve puzzles and add to the field of knowledge that I teach. To the extent that teacher-scholars are being asked to choose, they are often being told to become teachers only in order to give limited research resources to the newly hired people in the research slots. I know a number of teacher-scholar types who lament that they are no longer supported to be teacher-scholars and have become second class citizen in their own departments because their focus is not primarily research. With the increase in lecturers on many campuses, particularly at public institutions, I wonder if we are headed the way of the RO1s where many undergraduate lectures are taught my lecturers with security and the tenured faculty are only the research faculty.

I do believe that teacher-scholars add something to the classroom, in that they bring in the scientific process of questioning assumptions and showing how our ideas are based on best evidence to date, but subject to new ideas. Being engaged in research keeps these things in the front of your mind and brings the excitement of discovery and passion for moving the field into your face and talk. Teachers who are disengaged for the processes of scholarship just can't do this as well. Perhaps having more teacher-scholars would reignite some interest in science careers.

So, cheers to the teacher-scholar. May your value be appreciated before you are gone.

T.S. Hall

MR5 - What Med Schools Want

2010-07-26T17:09:00.000-07:00

I recently received the MR5 report from the American Association of Medical Schools showing the results of their study of what in the opinion of medical school faculty, residents, and medical students is of importance in the undergraduate courses. Organic as a general topic falls in the category that is between "Somewhat" and "Moderately" important. Physics, General Chemistry, and Biochemistry are all viewed as being of greater import.

The "organic" topics considered "very" to "extremely" important were Nucleic Acids, Lipids, Amino Acids and Proteins. Between "Important" and "Very Important" are Carbohydrates and Phosphorous Compounds. The next group of topics, in order of import, are Molecular Structure and Spectra, Covalent Bond, Carboxylic Acids, Alkanes, Alcohols, Amines, Acid Derivatives, Separations and Purifications, Aldehydes and Ketones, Sulfur Compounds, and Phenols. Every other chapter in the organic book is on the low end of the "Somewhat Important" category.

Given that Biochemistry was the highest rated general topic (above both Biology and Cellular/Molecular Biology), it should be no surprise that the biochem topics at the end of the organic text are rated as being of the greatest import. The thing is most of the faculty I know give cursory, at best, coverage of these topics.

There are three reasons commonly cited for this:

1) Just because some of the students are premed, does not mean that they or the rest of the class will make it to med school. These folks may be glad to know the rest of the material.
2) It's an organic class, not a biochem class! We are here to build the foundation, not the roof.
3) By the time we get through all the other material, there isn't much time left to do more that introduce these topics.

It will be interesting to see how this survey influences to the MCAT, organic textbooks, and our teaching. The medical school bound have held the organic lectures hostage for some time. Perhaps it's time to do as some neighboring institutions have done and split the pre-health professions majors off into their own bio-organic class.

T.S. Hall

Colorado leads the way down

2010-07-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

The state of Colorado is about to put into law the most important legislation ever seen in our effort speed up the nation's educational race to the bottom. The Colorado law will be copied by other states until we eradicate all thinking and science from the educational process. The law will tie teacher pay and their continued employment to the progress of students on achievement tests.

Now, I am not against students making progress, but the achievement tests don't measure anything but short term memorization. That's not educational progress! So, my first issue is that the law is based on a false premise that the tests have actual value.

My second argument, and the basis of my belief that this is a significant step toward eliminating the type of education that will make America competitive in the world marketplace, is that if your pay and career are dependent on getting the kiddies to do well on the test you will teach the test only. Hammer away at memorizing the material for the test and forget about teaching thinking, or science, or any of the other things that are not on the test.

It's call survival. If you lose a job under this law, who will hire you. Your career will be over. You have to make sure you meet the numbers or you wasted all that time in college getting as education degree.

But I am open minded. I will agree to support the bill with the amendment that members of the state legislature and the Governor be held to the same standard. If the state does not make progress toward achieving utopia each year the elected officials pay will be cut and once their terms end they will be banned from participation in any elected office for life.

Hell, lets throw the parents into the amendment to. Kids not up to snuff for a couple of years, we have to cut you off from having more kids.

(No budget in California by the constitutional deadline every year? Banned from public office for life and cut of from having kids.)

What's that you say? Elected officials can't control all the factors that might hinder the achievement of a Utopian society. Parents don't have complete control over their kids development. Well neither can teachers control all the factors that effect student progress. Parents and state governments continue to dump more requirements on teachers and provide less resources, yet have the audacity to complain about the results they get.

One of our nation's biggest problems is our constant blaming of others, while we ignore our own complicity in the problem. Another is that we want everything for no cost, but want to get paid richly.

T.S. Hall

Student Cheating

2010-07-14T11:34:00.000-07:00

I have been reading a lot lately about plagiarism and student cheating and the extent to which campuses and faculty are going to identify and stop cheating. Interestingly, some campuses and some faculty have come out against the routine use of programs that search submitted work of plagiarism, such as turn-it-in, on the basis that the use of these programs presumes that cheating is going on and treats the student as someone who can't be trusted.

First of all, over 60 percent of students admit to plagiarism at some point in their academic careers. So, students are cheating! To not look for it on the basis that doing so suggests that students can't be trusted is to deny reality. Doing nothing also encourages the activity. It's a wink and a nod.

I have previously pointed out that some of my local institutions that use on-line coursework do nothing to ensure that the students taking on-line tests are actually the students registered for the course or are not being helped my a battery of friends siting behind them as they take the test.

We need to recognize that our failure to ensure the quality of our product diminished the value of that product. Ensuring the value of our course grades and degrees will cost us money, and may mean that not everyone gets a college degree, but having over half the students cheating also has a cost. Can we accept the cost of lower productivity or incompetent action by people who passed classes and got degrees without having to master their field of study. I think not.

T.S. Hall

Degree Economics

2010-07-13T17:58:00.000-07:00

A colleague was lamenting today about the dearth of freshmen at new student orientation who have any interest in chemistry or biochemistry. I am not talking about the entire university freshmen class. I am talking about the chemistry and biochemistry majors.

Yes, when asked to raise their hands if they were interested in a career in chemistry or biochemistry, none of the future majors aired an armpit. Digging deeper my colleague discovered that the students are not interested in science or a life of the mind. They indicated that what they are interested in is MONEY. They are only chemistry and biochemistry majors in order to gain access to pharmacy school, medical school, etc.

I don't blame them in this economic climate for being concerned about jobs and career security. The lesson here is one for our political and scientific leaders. If we believe that we will need more graduates in the sciences un order to remain competitive as an economy, we need to recognize that the current economics in our society don't send this message to our young scholars.

T.S. Hall

Thesis Reading: MS vs PhD

2010-07-10T16:23:00.000-07:00

Recently I was reading thesis/dissertation chapters from both my own MS candidates and a PhD candidate from a local RO1. The RO1 thesis chapter had previously been approved by the PhD mentor and the candidate was asking me to proofread and make sure the science was clear. The differences between the two readings may say more about the individuals involved than the general differences between MCU's and RO1's, but they may be worth exploring.

The most striking thing I noted was a general tendency in masters thesis to place emphasis on how the study fits into the larger picture of the science, while the PhD dissertation writing assumed that the context within the field need not the elaborated upon and that the relevance would be clear to the reader.

Being in the midst of inviting speakers for the Fall seminar series on my campus this dichotomy in presentation style reminded me of the differences in presentations given by RO1 faculty and MCU and PUI faculty who come through my department. Many RO1 faculty, including those coming through specifically on graduate student recruiting trips, blow the undergraduate and masters students away early in their presentations by not making the contextual issues clear or by coming back to the context during the lecture. MCU and PUI folks generally show less of this tendency. One could make the case that such differences owe something to the much greater focus on undergraduates that MCU and PUI faculty have in their day-to-day work. These faculty have a better knowledge of were the audience is intellectually coming from.

I wonder if the difference may also owe something to the stage of science most MCU and PUI faculty are forced to practice by the resources at their disposal. Given the difficulty in competing at the basis research level we tend to move toward application to justify our work in grants and to attract students into the lab. Once indoctrinated into this way of thinking about our scholarship it begins to color all our output from how we present our own work to how we train our students to present their thesis. I suppose that in a sense we are back to the hammer problem where our thinking becomes focused by the environment we are in, for good or ill.

As we extend and accept seminar invitations to/from our colleagues it would be good to keep in mind the environment in which the talk will be presented and the our goals in hearing or giving the talk.

T.S. Hall

Note from the ODA

2010-06-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

As noted in my Defense of Marriage post, in my opinion bad arguments are the bane of good science and should be exposed to the light of day as part of creating a scientifically literate society. At the same time I am hesitant to get on a soapbox that diverts attention from the purposes of this blog. But, hey, it's my blog! So, I will warn readers with the label "Office of the Devil's Advocate" when I venture into this territory.

What does the Devil's Advocate have to write about today?

In the last couple of weeks folks effected by the Gulf Coast oil spill have become more vocal about the perceived unfairness of the way BP funds will be distributed to compensate for lost income. Specifically, these folks have noted that they have been deriving a large part of their incomes from cash business transaction for which they keep no records to avoid taxes. There is even some talk about having congress change tax law so that these folks can get an amnesty from their tax law violation and make claim on the oil spill funds.

Lets see, people working in an underground economy, not paying taxes, demanding and getting government services, and asking for an amnesty from their illegal acts because "those were in the past" as one person stated in a radio interview I heard yesterday.

Does this mean that the Gulf Coast communities universally support immigration reforms that would give amnesty to all illegal immigrants currently in the country? There certainly appear to be parallels. I am sure the tea party movement and libertarian and conservative media will be all over this demanding these scofflaws be dealt with the same fervor they show for Arizona's ID check law.

We would all be well served to remember that our own illegal, immoral, or ethically questionable actions that we justify by saying that we are just ensuring that our families or businesses are able to make do are no more legal, moral, or ethical than those actions of others. BP and company cut corners to save money or effort, which they thought was justifiable. Fishermen and an apparent entire Gulf Coast community used a cash economy to avoid taxes to take care of their families and businesses. Illegal immigrants cross the border for their families and quality of life.

T.S. Hall

Catfish a jumpin

2010-06-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

Veteran academics, particularly we scientists at PUI/MCU institutions, know that it is best to avoid the neighbors during the summer. I have even thought about having a red, white, and blue, flag emblazoned t-shirt made for the neighborhood 4th of July picnic that would carry the logo;

No! I work every day, all year! I just don't get paid in the summer.
Yes! I will take another beer!

The neighbors think that we have the summers off and envy our long "vacations". We PUI/MCU faculty know that summer can be the best time to get research accomplished. In synthetic labs where technique training is key, the summer with long uninterrupted days are ideal. Since the new students need to be trained, it frequently falls to the faculty member to do this. Since I am rebuilding my group, this summer is full of new students and devoid of continuing students to help out. This means that all the training falls to me. The month of June has been filled with twelve hour lab days, and evenings of SOP writing and analysis of data. This explains why my blog prompts list is the longest it has ever been and the number of posting in June the lowest since starting this blog.

June may be the hardest summer month because the new students don't start getting results until the end of the month when their technique skills start to click. With any luck July will bring armloads of data and a publication or two.

Since a research experience is central to the education of today's undergraduates perhaps colleges and universities should allow faculty and students to bank for use in the fall or spring semester of the following academic year three units of undergraduate research course training for every student working through ten or twelve 40 hour weeks. At least then the students and faculty would get some credit/pay for their labor.

T.S. Hall

You Call That a Defense of Marriage?

2010-06-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

Anyone how has taken a class from me knows that their arguments for anything will be parsed for quality. Sloppy arguments come from sloppy thinking and sloppy thinkers make poor scientists, politicians, and citizens. Sometimes I wonder where my students learned such sloppy thinking.

Today I heard a news report about the arguments being put forward before the court looking into the constitutionality of California's proposition 8 which is supposed to "defend marriage" by defining marriage as being between one man and one woman only. My position on the issue does not matter as the point of today's blog is ineffectual (and unintentionally humorous) arguments.

It appears from the radio news piece that the argument by the "defense of marriage" lawyers is that the purpose of marriage is to create children and raise them in a household containing a mother and father. Ignoring the circular argument, this view also allows for the invalidation of numerous marriages between heterosexuals.

Based on this argument, people how can't have children for medical reasons can't married or are not married. If one partner or the other has rendered themselves incapable of having children, they dissolved the marriage, with potential legal liability for breaking the marriage up.

Hey guys, wife reaches menopause and kids out of the house, you don't need to divorce. If she can't have kids the "defense of marriage" folks have just dissolved your marriage. Marry that 23-year old without alimony to the former wife. You will be defending marriage because you can now start family 2.0.

Be it our national dialogues or our teaching of the next generation such obviously flawed arguments should not be allowed to stand, and should be ridiculed publicly. If I were the judge I would have to find against the "defense of marriage" argument with the admonition that gay marriage has nothing to do with the decision. If the "making babies" argument is the best argument they can come up with they should pay all the court costs for wasting the time and money involved in the case.

Getting back to the pedagogical point, in class this means that my students get one point for making an argument but don't get the rest, for making a logically invalid argument.

T.S. Hall

It's better to never leave

2010-06-04T10:47:00.000-07:00

With the start of the summer many PUI and MCU faculty are welcoming new research students into the fold. In my case, just as my new students are starting I need to go out of town to a conference. This leaves me with a half-dozen new faces and only a couple of students with less than a year's experience to oversee them. This will require that I organize and write out in detail everyone's training and research plan for the week before I go. It's a bit daunting when the new students have not had technique training yet. It is hard to do research this way.

I am not bringing this up to instigate a pity party. I am lucky to have six new research students. When discussing the issue of not wanting to leave so I can stay a train my students my RO1 friends laugh. In general they have not worked in the lab in years. The current PhD students and postdocs train the new students. Leaving town has almost nothing to do with the schedules or training of student workers. While there new students are being trained they are writing papers and grants.

I find that when the summer comes my days are no less busy that during the academic year. In some ways they are more busy. Maybe this is why I wanted to punch my neighbor in the nose yesterday when they asked me what I was going to do now that I am on vacation for the summer.

Thankfully, with skype and e-mail i can at least touch base with the students each day.

T.S. Hall

Undocumented Groundswell

2010-05-31T15:59:00.000-07:00

While I have a longstanding interest in political issues, I generally try to avoid spouting off on subjects political that are outside research and academic funding. That said, the issue of undocumented students is hitting me in the face these days.

Just after the Arizona undocumented alien issue hit the fan I was contacted by a prospective graduate student. The student even came to campus to talk about my research. His spoken and written English where not great, but in California that applies to many people born in US, and more than a couple of faculty members. Interestingly, the prospective student told me that their family was paying for school and that he was not interested in being a TA or GA. Of course the idea of an MS student who would actually spend all day in the lab had visions of publications dancing in my head.

Later when discussing the prospective student with the department's graduate advisor it was pointed out that the undocumented are not interested in being TA's because they would need to provide a social security number in order to get paid. The student in question had indeed noted that they are undocumented on their application.

In the second slap, a regional community college has recently announced an endowed scholarship in the name of a student who was killed in an automobile accident. The requirements of the scholarship are that recepients must be undocumented. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher blasted the school for sending a message that encourages people to enter the country illegally. He noted that they put their public funding at risk by such actions.

Putting these two things together with the mood of the community, I wonder how a faculty member dedicated to lifting people up though publically funded education should balance their responsibilities. For me, living in California, I can't win. No matter what I do, people will be upset and someone will not be served. For me this brings home the need for some resolution of our immigration debate.

T.S. Hall

Getting Lost

2010-05-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

Hi, I'm Thomas and I'm a "Lost" addict.

The show "Lost" reminds me of my research. Just when I think I have locked down the variables and understand something, I am proven wrong. And, the Smoke Monster has also made a few appearances with disastrous effect.

With the show coming to an end, I am going to go out on a limb and put forward my speculation on the putting things together. You can all laugh a what complete crap this is on Sunday evening. On Monday we can all go back to the lab were we belong.

I think the key is, "Live together, die alone." The coming face off with the smoke monster will turn on the individual characters putting their own issues aside and coming together. I think this is also the key to "getting of the island."

All the main characters arrived lost in the sense that they were all inside themselves. Charlie, Sun, and Jin may have died on the island, but they all did so at the point when they let go of themselves and committed to another, or to each other in Sun and Jin's cases. Remember, Juliet said "it worked" after her selfless act of setting the bomb off. Sayid was even selfless in his last act. Bernard and Rose have in a sense already escaped in that they found their peace in each other.

The man with no name (not the character played by Clint Eastwood in the Leone films), before he became the smoke monster expressed disgust with living with the other people on the island because they were venal and self absorbed. I have speculated the Jacob was bringing other people to the island to prove to the smoke monster that people were capable of more. The Darma communal project might have been such an attempt. The monster has been trying to prove otherwise to Jacob by his interactions with people and his attempts to manipulate them to kill Jacob.

Desmond through his experiences with EM fields has recognized the need to connect the part of each character in the parallel "sideways flash" existence with themselves in on the island. In a sense to reconnect them with their souls. This is critical to getting them to come together to face the smoke monster. Once the castaways have faced down the smoke monster, Desmond can be revealed as the name at 108 degrees, and as the replacement for Jacob. Having put others ahead of themselves the Oceanic 815 folks who have stood together can leave to their sideways existence, now knowing how they are all connected and taking the lesson of "Live together, die alone".

OK, back to grading.

T.S. Hall

Stages of Science Evolution Part II

2010-05-21T10:34:00.000-07:00

I wrote yesterday about Alexander Shneider's "Four stages of a scientific discipline; four types of scientists" article. Just as Shneider cautions us about the effects of mismatch in stage of scientist and stage of reviewer, should we not also consider the possible disconnection between the expectations of those who support our departments and the faculty that do the work of the department?

I have been thinking about my department's "Friends of the Chemistry and Biochemistry" group. This group is made up of alumni and regional industry representatives who advise us on direction and curriculum. Our friends of the department (FODs) group frequently chastises us for not training our students in the specific topics they feel students need to succeed in industry. Many blogs written by industry types mirror the same sentiments. If industry scientist are generally stage four types, while faculty are in stage one through three, the disconnect is understandable.

At RO1 institutions there is an expectation from those on the outside that faculty be at stage one, two or three, but at PUI and MCU campuses the expectations often differ. In some cases, by State mandate MCU and PUI campuses are discouraged from research in the first three stages. Our mission to train students to meet the needs of the community places emphasis on stage four thinking. At the same time, the expectations of granting and publication activities overseen by stage three scientists demand that faculty be in the stage three.

In trying to envision how a forward looking university administration might deal with this problem the answer might be to develop faculty hiring to ensure that faculty who represent all stages of scientists are employed. In this fashion there are representatives in the program for all constituencies. Then one must encourage and enforce a collegial respect among the faculty at different stages so that they respect the value each person brings to the department as a whole.

I think I just went a bridge too far. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I have been thinking about all of this while plowing though exam grading. It makes one crazy.

T.S. Hall

Stages of Science Evolution Part I

2010-05-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

I was giving a final exam in my graduate class yesterday and elected to use the time to clear up some of the items in my to-read pile. Near the top was the May issue of "The Scientist". The magazine is described as being for life scientist, but even an organic chemist like me can find in every issue at least one item of interest. In the current issue there was an article titled, "Evolution of Science" about a 2009 article from Trends in Biochemical Sciences by Alexander Shneider.

Shneider's article is rather interesting. It reminds one of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which Shneider does make note of. He builds an argument for there being four stages of development of a scientific discipline and four stages of scientists. Mismatches of stages of scientist and science, or stages of grant or paper author and stage of reviewer can result in problems staying in the field or with getting funded or published.

Stage one is a conceptual idea stage where someone sees something not previously recognized and adds new objects or phenomena to the discipline. In stage two, new methods and techniques are developed to move the new discipline forward. Stage three is where most academic scientists reside and where new methods and techniques are applied to the new discipline to define and expand the discipline. In stage four the science is institutionalized as the knowledge generated in the first three stages is applied and in many cases makes the science "real world".

In dealing with the STEM pipeline and retaining students one might consider the stage our students reside in. As Shneider suggests, if a student is attracted to science by stage one ideas and is funneled into a stage three or four science career they will tend to become unhappy. Students might be better served by recognizing the stage of evolution they are attracted to and guiding them to a field at a similar stage.

The thought I had on reading this is that many of today's students in my classes are really stage four folks, looking for careers and institutionalized knowledge rather than the stage one-three thinking of their faculty mentors. In trying to make them into stage three scientists we may be contributing to the pipeline problem, by chasing these students out of the profession. In a related fashion, much of our NIH and NSF STEM resources are focused on encouraging creation of stage three people. Again, by placing emphases on a single stage of evolution we may chase those in the other stages away from the professions.

We might be better served by recognizing the value of having professionals of all stage types and encouraging the development of professionals of all stages. Of course this will require that we faculty are open enough to appreciate those stages other than our own.

T.S. Hall

Seasonal Affected Disorder College Edition

2010-05-17T20:12:00.000-07:00

Those from northern climates know that in the Winter the short days and dreary weather cause Seasonal Affected Disorder, also know as SAD. It is characterized by depression, lethargy, and a longing for Spring as February drags into March. In academia we feel it too, only just as Spring arrives the end of the semester and finals creep in to lay a blanket of overcast on us. With this year's budget crisis, and furloughs combined with the national economy that leaves our students worried about what they will do after graduation it has been hard to find Spring. But Spring will come in a few weeks after the finals end.

This year I find my students worn out long before the final exam. They are a good group and I wish I could offer them some Spring. While faculty may decry the sorry state of today's students and their poor work ethics, I was fortunate. My students took the challenge I put before them to go beyond memorizing and master the logic of the science.

So for all those writing exams and those about to take them, keep your chin up, Spring will come.

T.S. Hall

Lower-Learning Skills

2010-05-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

As I prepare to write and give final exams I have been thinking about the ACS Standardized Exams. In my department, we give them to provide some assessment in our courses. This means that my two semester organic class will take the ACS exam as their final. The problem I have had with the ACS exams for organic majors courses and higher level courses is that they are multiple choice only. Even Wikipedia recognizes the disadvantages of multiple choice exams the major of which is noted in the quote below.

Multiple choice tests are best adapted for testing well-defined or lower-order skills. Problem-solving and higher-order reasoning skills are better assessed through short-answer and essay tests.

As we are pushed to standardized assessments we move away from the very concept of "higher" education. Multiple choice standardized exams are about lower order skills. Most importantly we need to spread the word that these tests are not really appropriate by themselves for high school let alone college.

If we are going to train true scientists capable of addressing fundamental questions in graduate school or in careers as science professionals we need to get beyond the multiple choice exam. The SAT, MCAT, and GRE exams all have non-multiple choice parts. We could create our own non-multiple choice questions, but with the ACS exams coming in at 2 hours and the typical final exam time at 2 hours there is no time for the non-multiple choice exam component. If the ACS exams were designed to be something more on the order of 75 minutes we would have the ability of go beyond lower order skills testing.

T.S. Hall

The Other Gulf Coast Oil Spill

2010-05-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

At one point in my life I spent some time living at that avernal entrance to hell that is the northeast gulf coast of Texas. During my time there I absorbed much butadiene into my lungs and some local history into my brain. With the current oil well blowout in the gulf I have been thinking about one bit of largely forgotten history.

The gulf coast of Texas is prone to oil seeps where crude oil seeps up from the sea bed. In many parts of the beaches you will find tar balls on the sand, which people often assume is pollution from the refineries, although at least part of it is from oil seeps.

Historically there was a "oil pond" off the coast west of the Sabine River estuary (The border of Texas and Louisiana). I am talking about a major oil spill that lasted for centuries. In the 1890s through 1910 it was described as being a mile wide and four miles long. Dating back to spanish colonial days ships would shelter there during storms.

It "disappeared" in 1910. Many people believe that this corresponded with the tapping of the salt dome that was the Spindletop oilfield. Spindletop was the largest single oil producer in the world when it came in on 7 Jan. 1901. (If memory serves, it produced something like ten percent of all the oil in the world that year.) When oil was struck, the well blew out and the gusher of oil estimated at 70,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil a day for 9 days formed a lake of oil in the surrounding countryside before the workers invented the first device to cap a well blowout. Imagine to pressure in that salt dome. This well is responsible for the start of the Mobil, Gulf, and Texaco oil companies, and making Texas an oil state. The salt dome oil fields also were a source of sulfur, which was produced by the Frasch process.

I have always wondered what we might learn about the effects of oil spills from this chronic spill and the recovery of the coast since the end of the oil pond. Of course the presence of multiple oil refineries in the Sabine pass area would complicate any such research.

T.S. Hall

Journal Reviews

2010-04-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

I have been reading some organocatalysis papers lately to try to get a better sense of the field. The chemistry appeals to my generally poor background in organometallic chemistry and my interest in understanding how enzyme catalysis works.

Publications in the field of organocatalysis range over a wide range from the very concept-to-application publications of some of the founders of the field, (MacMillan, List, Jorgenson, etc.) to me-too chemistry where a known catalysts is applied to previously un-organocatalyzed systems or a small change is made to a know catalyst without any hypothesis development that moves the field forward. It's a newer hot field so this range of application will work it self out.

Unfortunately, as in the case of other "buzzword" fields a lot of shaky stuff appears to be slipping through the cracks. In the last couple of days I have seen two papers, one in Org. Lett. and one in Syn. Lett., that have such problems that I can't see how the reviewers did not send them back to the authors for at least a rewrite. An example problem from one the papers is:

Sure organocatalysis has yet not matured enough to work out a consistent terminology (ie. what does "bifunctional catalysis" mean) but the basics of the science of organic chemistry must still apply.

T.S. Hall

Career Ready Course Work

2010-04-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting conversation today with a student about the coverage in my major's organic lecture. Specifically, we were discussing the relative coverage of synthesis verses mechanism in the course. My friends at the local RO1 institution offer a very synthesis focused course, which is reflected in their exams which generally offer less opportunity for partial credit than my more mechanism focused exams. Since graduate students grade the exams there is some value in being able to present reaction and synthesis questions which will have single correct answers rather than sorting through the mechanism arrows and rationalizations about relative reactivity.

Since I have been reading a lot of articles about demands for a more career-ready graduate from community colleges and four-year schools I have been thinking this afternoon about my course and the career readiness and biochemistry course readiness of my students. The biochem issue comes up since this is the next course on the sequence to the degree.

An understanding of mechanism serves the student in moving on to graduate school, but does it have value in the career world? Synthesis has value if you are working in organic synthesis and helps in the biochem cycles, but does it have value beyond that? Lets face it, many of the reactions we cover in the one-year Organic are not used in the real world of chemistry.

Since the semester will be ending soon and I have the summer to reorganize for the Fall, and I am using a new text I will be reorganizing my course anyway. So, I pose the question for the audience. What should we cover in the majors one-year organic course lecture and lab? Or, what knowledge should we impart on our students in such a course.

I am interested to know your thoughts.

T.S. Hall

Last-in-first-out

2010-04-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

There have been a number of articles lately about the movement to eliminate seniority in education layoff policies. This idea has been primarily focused on K-12 for now, but with higher education funding equally at risk it may not be long before it comes to higher ed. For those out of the loop in this, traditionally, the most recent faculty hires are the first to get pink slips when funding gets tight. When hiring back, those with seniority are the first brought back in. Education administrators and politicians see the weaknesses of this system and some want to eliminate seniority rules.

Those in favor of eliminating seniority have argued that seniority rules ignore efforts to make teachers accountable for their student's grades. Some have gone so far as to point out that newer teachers cost less, so getting rid of senior teachers would save money.

My concern with regard to the "accountability" issue continues to be that the easiest way for a faculty member to give the perception of performance is to inflate grades and teach the test, and only the test. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the tests we currently give don't measure the ability to think or come up with new ideas. They are not about long term education. If the point of education is to build for the future our current testing regime fails miserably. Having little or no job security will mean less innovation and less education that last a lifetime, since faculty can't afford to have poor evaluations. It's like those banks who were only looking at this quarter's results and not thinking about the long term consequences of their actions. How did that work out for us?

For those looking only at the bottom line, I would point out that this can be seen as age discrimination under a euphemism. The court cost could wipe out much of the savings.

Another "bottom line" issue is that tenure and seniority have a monetary value. Eliminating these will require that you move that monetary value into the paycheck, again wiping out the savings. Not being a stable career, will people really be interested in going into teaching? If not, we will have to entice them with something, like perhaps money.

Opposing elimination of seniority are those who believe that just because someone has grey hair does not mean that they are not effective teachers. They also worry that personal grudges will influence who gets the axe.

Having a few grey hairs myself, I am sympathetic to those fearing that they will be let go in those years when they are "too old" for professional positions outside teaching. Having spent 20 years as a teacher will have some arguing that their background and skills in teaching "Watership Down" to 13 year olds don't really translate into anything but Walmart greeter positions. This will be all the more reason to teach the test and give high grades.

Certainly there is deadwood in education. We should have better means to remove the accumulating deadwood before the wildfire of poor performance burns down the entire school. But, again, we need a better means of measuring performance than those we have now. The deadwood is teaching the test and giving good grades. They know how to game the system.

On the personal grudge issue, many times I have seen this payout, where sexual orientation, differing ideas about pedagogy, or a perception of an incorrect balance between teaching and scholarly activity were the underlying issues behind evaluations of poor faculty performance. Yes, I know this happens in the non-academic world, but in our public entities our society has held itself to a higher standard. As a community we tend to believe that if our public sector does not act fairly in its employment practice, how can we be assured that it will safeguard activities in the private sector.

In conclusion, there are pros and cons to seniority. Just because we are in hard economic times today we should not rush into actions that will be counter productive to our longterm best interest. There is a middle ground here and we must strive for that.

T.S. Hall

General Education Rigor

2010-04-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, Inside Higher Education published an article on the case of a biology faculty member who was removed from teaching a non-majors class mid-semester for being too rigorous. There is much to the story that did not make it into the article and it generated a tremendous amount of feedback. I won't get into the case specifically, rather I will comment on some of the responses it engendered.

One of the issues raised was if the standards of a non-majors or general education course should be on par with those of a majors course. An example of a comment is:

"In this case, however, the professor was teaching an introductory course for NON-MAJORS. Students take this type of course either because its required or because they want to sample an academic field for its own sake. Mastery of the body of knowledge is not--and shouldn't--be a goal. The point of such a course is to "taste" the material. And, yes, it should probably be possible to slide by with a "C" in such a course pretty easily."

It does not matter if a course is required or taken to sample a field. The point of a course is always to master a body of knowledge. Certainly the level of mastery will differ between general education, lower division, and upper division courses, but the goal is still mastery at some level.

The point of a grade is to provide some measure of the student's mastery relative to the required level of mastery. If sliding by with a "C" is "easy", the value of the grade is pretty minimal. Should such courses really receive the same weighting in the graduates grade point average as courses where a "C" grade is based on some less "easy" standard? Should the "easy" courses get a lower unit load count than the "non-easy" courses?

There is a fairly commonly held belief among students that general education courses are not real courses, but are there for easy grades to boost GPAs. To the extent that we faculty contribute to this mentality we undermine the benefit of a liberal arts education. The next time we decry the scientific illiteracy of the general population we might ask ourselves if our own general education courses are "pretty easy Cs" or if they emphasize mastery that leads to a populace that has the ability understand the science upon which their lives depend.

T.S. Hall

Outside Class Time

2010-04-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

I was just reading an article on course planning in which the authors indicated that one should plan their course to include the three hours of outside class time work your students will do for each hour of in-class work. This three-to-one ratio is pretty commonly cited as the amount of out of class time students should spend for each in class hour. Since studies in the University of California show that today's students report putting in about one hour of outside class work for each hour of in class work, what should one do in planning their course?

I alway thought there was some fantasy in the three hour number since our degree programs often require fifteen units per semester. This would mean that a student taking a full lecture load would be studying 45 hours per week in addition to the fifteen hours of class time. With the average student working about 20 hours per week, and allowing for travel time, eating, sleeping, etc one quickly runs out of time in the week. Its no wonder students don't hold to the three-to-one ratio, particularly if they are going to work in a research lab.

Education folks advise that we should "teach the students we have, not the ones we wish we had". If the ones we have only study one hour for each hour of class, should we back off on the idea that students should be putting in about nine hours per week of study time for each three unit organic lecture class?

I ask this because I increasingly hear from organic colleagues who have given up and are backing off on their course requirements "because the students just won't do the work". These faculty fear their student evaluations and defend their behavior by saying they are teaching the students they have.

I don't have an answer to this issue, but I would be interested in hearing the opinions of readers.

T.S. Hall

Happy Birthday TJ

2010-04-13T08:18:00.000-07:00

I have always been a fan of Thomas Jefferson and today is his Birthday. So, I will offer up some words of wisdom from the founding father.

In arguing for a tax to support public education in a time when education was largely private and only available to the wealthy, Jefferson argued that public education would ensure that the upper classes would not overthrow American democracy and create a class system to the detriment of the working classes. And so he wrote to a friend;

"If you think that education is expensive, try ignorance."

The issues today are different, but there is still a worthwhile warning in the statement.

T.S. Hall

Alternate Careers

2010-04-10T12:24:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been barely keeping up with my many responsibilities, yet I did take a moment to read an article on time management and getting more done. I was intreged to learn that there are folks out there who are professional naggers you can hire to call, e-mail, or put the kitchen garbage in front of the door to the garage to help you get past those things you are procrastinating about. (Oh Wait! That last thing is a service provided by semi-pro spousal naggers.) It is amazing what services people need today.

I wonder if there is a place in the university to offer the service to students, and faculty (not to mention bloggers). Tired of nagging your students about assignments, farm it out to the Office of Professional Educational Nagging (OPEN). They will contact your students every day asking them if they did five organic problems, finished their lab report, and made progress in their research project.

I would write more, but I just got a text indicating that the next organocatalysis lecture is not going to prepare itself.

T.S. Hall

Jaime Escalante

2010-03-31T20:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Jaime Escalante, who you may know as the teacher who's life and work were the basis of the movie "Stand and Deliver" passed away. He was a proponent of seeing the potential in all students and helping students see the potential in themselves. He also stressed to his students the import of something he called "ganas" which is something like "desire that makes a person take on the difficult challenge". He inspired his students in ways all of us could should wish to emulate.

T.S. Hall

ACS Meeting Final

2010-03-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

To wrap up on the Spring National ACS meeting (yes, it ended last Thursday), I will make some general comments.

I am not sure what the official attendance was, but I suspect that it was lower than usual. Other than the first morning, the exhibit hall was not particularly crowded. Even the book vendor booths were open compared to the usual crowds. Of course the book vendors seemed to have brought less books than usual. I also noticed that some vendors were gone Wednesday morning when I went through.

The talks I went to were generally very good. There was only one where I could not understand the speakers accent to the point where I had to just go by the slides. It was interesting that some groups appeared in force over the week. I think the entire Smith group from St Andrews came from Scotland to present. Over the course of the week I got a very clear picture of that group's work, which I found interesting.

I did find myself thinking that the organizers from each division might offer a service to the attendees by suggesting a pre-meeting reading list of articles that might bring those from the hinterlands up-to-date on the hot areas that will be covered at the meeting. I certainly was glad that I have been reading a lot about organocatalysis lately and wondered if I would have found the meeting as enjoyable had I not.

An ACS meeting his like that old fashion activity of leafing through a paper journal. I pick up new useful stuff and doodle about my own projects in the margins when something does not capture my attention. I still find it a useful activity, luddite that I am.

T.S. Hall

Pre-Spring Break Lecture

2010-03-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

Being in the middle of spring-break season and with Easter on the horizon I make my annual admonition to my students on the proper use of spring-break. To this end, I tell them of a 18 year old student of organic chemistry at the Royal College in London who used his Easter Break to undertake in his parents home the synthesis of a compound of great importance to the health of his nation and the world. He failed to synthesized the drug, but discovered a compound that would change the world.

Of course I am speaking of William Henry Perkin. The drug was quinine and the compound he discovered was mauve or aniline purple.

I point out to my students that young Perkin quit school, against the advice of his faculty mentor, and started a dye works, where like today's internet entrepreneurs, he became extremely rich. So rich in fact that he retired at age thirty-seven to devote the rest of his life to the study of organic chemistry.

Of course the dye industry begat the modern synthetic pharmaceutical industry and modern organic chemistry, so Perkins 1856 Easter-Break serves as the model of what the break should be. Kind of makes the bellybutton shots most student have planned seem like a wast of time, doesn't it!?

T.S. Hall

ACS Meeting 3

2010-03-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

Going to ACS meetings during the semester requires getting others to cover your classes and labs. At PUI/MCU campuses this generally means calling on your colleagues. As the Expo closes at noon today and I need to grab up my thank you gifts before noon. Do any readers have suggestions for good things to bring back. What's the oddest thing anybody brought back to thank you for giving an exam or teaching a class? I already have a propeller beanie from CEM and Nerf football from Frontier Scientific, a bunch of pens and coasters.

T.S. Hall

ACS Meeting 2

2010-03-23T12:42:00.000-07:00

Monday - I spent the morning in New Reactions and Methodology and the afternoon at the Corey Award Symposium. The morning contained more chemistry of the organocatalysis, inimium ion, and allyl palladium chemistry variety they appears to dominate the sessions I have been to. Of course the Corey talks were much the same.

Eric Jacobsen gave a nice talk on his group's work. It gave a sense of the thought process, challenges, insights, and overall path of the development of the work his group has done over the last 10-15 years. He showed mechanistic rational and application to synthesis in a nice balance. In a symposium, where there is no question period this is nice. His talk stood in contrast to some I have seen at the meeting which are a litany of examples of a reaction observed in the first five slides.

In Charette's talk, he may have provided me with a solution to a major nagging problem in my own work. Unfortunately the solution is not new, the basic chemistry having been published a few years back. Back in the olden days I would leaf through paper journals when I had a few minutes to kill and would often find new and useful chemistries I might have missed if I just scanned the abstracts. Now I have mainly find such gems at department seminars or at local symposia and at ACS meetings.

Well, back to the afternoons talks.

T.S. Hall

ACS Meeting 1

2010-03-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since the last post. Primarily because, in addition to the pre-spring break rush I was preparing for the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco. But, I got the exam to be given in my class written and my talk prepared and was off to SF on Saturday morning. My hotel has internet access, but it is so slow that until this morning when I got up at 6 I was unable to really get much interneting done. So, lets begin reporting.

Sunday: I attended the Aromatic and Heterocycles talks in the morning and New Reactions and Methodology in the afternoon. The morning talks were very diverse in nature which created an interesting situation where the audience appeared to be having trouble connecting to many of the talks. Often there were no questions after the talks.

I may be odd in my opinion but, when I give a talk I want questions. For me, the point in presenting my results is to elicit feedback. If you can't think of a question because my logic is impeccable and the work so complete that there is nothing left to do, stand and applaud while shouting "genius" and throwing wads of cash. (Sorry, slipped into my fantasy life for a minute there.) My point is that it disappoints me to spend the time to craft a talk only to be met with crickets afterward. I felt sorry for those this happened to. Of course, I couldn't think of a question since their work was so far from my experience that I was not sure I really appreciated the material, which goes back to the diversity of talks issue.

One interesting PUI/MCU issue that came up was a speaker who lamented the lack of some final data to make his case. He noted that he is performing much of the multistep synthetic work himself and had not had the lab time to complete the final steps. I am with you brother! As organic chemistry has matured the skills necessary to create new science just don't come from the one-year organic lab. By the time students have the skills to move a synthesis forward they are leaving. This means that we faculty must step into the lab. With our schedules and responsibilities getting something to publication requires heroic effort.

A recent seminar speaker commented to me that in her MCU organic faculty are the only faculty who still go into the lab. Everyone else just has there students do the work. She suggested that we are all crazy, killing ourselves trying to be laboratory scientists in an environment which clearly doesn't match our needs.

I will leave you to think about that, as I need to head to this mornings sessions. More from the ACS meeting when I can get back on the web.

T.S. Hall

And I want a Pony

2010-03-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

On Thursday students, parents and faculty across the nation marched to protest cuts to public education funding and increasing tuition. In one report I heard of students who handed a letter to the system chancelor demanding increased class sections, decreased class size, more faculty, decreased tuition, and no new taxes. What I can't understand is that no one asked for a pony too.

Our society in general has reached a point were we act like children who have no conception of the cost of things, and that if we individually don't pay someone else is going to have to. It doesn't make a difference if we talk about health care, education, or infrastructure, we refuse to admit that if we want something it will cost us to get it and to get something of quality. I certainly feel that we as a society should be investing in our future wellbeing by investing in education. At the same time, we must acknowledge how pays.

On a similar vein, the University of California system recently did a survey of their undergraduate students and discovered that the students in the physical sciences spent an average of 15.1 hours per week on out-of-class academic work. This means that they are spending one hourSomehow this does not discourage my students from complaining that my course it too much work. Again, one must wonder about our willingness to invest in our individual or societal future.

Any argument for education funding, health care funding or any other public funding becomes a false argument when the individual making the argument suggests that they individually should give no more, but should get more. If we can't come up with better arguments we shouldn't be arguing at all.

T.S. Hall

Watching what we say

2010-03-04T08:34:00.000-08:00

A faculty member at East Stroudsburgh University in Pennsylvania has been suspended for comments she made on her Facebook page. Her own page settings made the comment to her Facebook friends private, but when received by her Facebook friends, whose pages were not private, the comments were public.

While the university is concerned about there "brand" and what they perceive as a threat to students, this case demonstrates how we faculty are never out of the public eye and must watch what we say and do. Many of us have had the experience of going into a local bar only to find a student or former student who must come up and ask us what we are doing there as if they just discovered a nun in a bordello.

Interesting that the converse does not apply. If the university suspended every student who made an exasperated threat on me after getting back a graded exam, I could hold the last few classes of the semester in my closet of an office. But, I recognize hyperbole when I hear it and thankfully so do my students.

I write this blog under a nom-de-plume and have thought about if I really need to. Would the English Department faculty really attack and put me on trial for crimes against the written word? Would my writings be used against me if I should again pursue a Chairperson position?

T.S. Hall

The Organic Textbook

2010-02-25T08:10:00.000-08:00

Waves of publishers reps, with regional sales managers in tow, have washed up on my office doorstep in the last ten days. With the current textbook edition cycle being about three years it seems that we are always reviewing texts. Other than the time cost, I don't mind this.

I have a collection of organic texts that goes back to the 1870s. I even have the original hand written 1878 class notes of a UC Berkeley student. From this perspective, the teaching of organic really has not changed that much except for the gradual introduction of spectroscopy and physical organic and mechanism into the subject. In many respects the vast majority of textbooks are still teaching the modern equivalent of Type Theory.

For those who don't know, from the late 1820's there was the Theory of Radicals in which there were fragments which were interchangeable on a center. This is where the use of R to represent some undefined carbon chain comes from. Type Theory developed in the late 1840s and early 1850s and followed the Theory of Radicals. I think it was Gerhardt who pushed the idea of Type Theory starting with the Water Type. Alcohols and Ethers are water types, in which the hydrogens are replaced by "radicals"(R groups). Hoffmann later developed the Ammonia Type to discuss what we know as amines.

Anyway, to ask the question that was on mind when I began, if you could start from scratch in creating an organic textbook, how would you organize it? Don't worry about the marketplace. I want to know what your perfect text organization would look like. I don't care about the format of being an e-book or distribution on rolls of toilet paper, it's the content that I am asking about. Textbook price does not matter for this discussion, so please let's not go there.

My mechanism bias comes out in my thoughts about this. After the basics of what organic molecules are, I would start with physical properties ending the section with solubility. Then I would move from water solubility to pH and pKa and then to reactivity starting with the systems with the greatest bond polarity. I would leave the less reactive hydrocarbon systems to the end of the course.

My logic is that if students can appreciate the chemistry of a polar system like a carbonyl first, when one goes to alkene, allyl, or even aromatic systems they can see that the fundamental reactions are the same, with the added wrinkle that you no longer have the same level of bond polarization.

I am curious to know what others would do if they could create their own book just by thinking about it.

T.S. Hall

Lessons from Toyota

2010-02-24T09:36:00.000-08:00

I have been teaching so long that I find myself looking for the teachable moment in just about any experience. This morning I found myself looking for lessons in the Toyota hearings.

The message from Toyota is that they now recognize they grew too fast in recent years by focusing on sales volume over safety and quality. They admit to having lost sight of their mission.

I am not surprised. For many stockholders the purpose of business is to make as much money as possible this quarter. Worry about the next quarter when it comes. This short-term thinking leads to a focus on sales over quality and reputation, because quality will not effect reputation until some future quarter. The banking and real estate collapses also fit this pattern.

What does this have to do with higher education? In much of higher education the focus in recent decades, particularly in public higher education, has been increasingly on enrollment growth and degrees granted. But what of the quality of product. When your institution has 20K or more students there are just too many factors influencing how students advance that a school can't control.

Many schools have begun to emphasized quality and quantity of research scholarship rather than quality of graduate. After all research quality is easier to build and control than graduate quality. It's easier to take the smaller population of faculty and using tenure, lab space, etc as a cudgel, get research productivity. If you then focus on research products, rather than your graduates to represent yourself you can send a reputation message that has little to do with the quality of the product the public is primarily paying for. The research faculty can bring in postdocs and graduate students and ignore the education of all but the best undergrads.

As the pundits and politicos cry about the the nation's place in an increasingly science and technology oriented world they may one day come to recognize that the focus on numbers of students and degrees granted over quality of graduate is a contributor to the problem. This is a drum I beat regularly in this blog. I do so in the belief that just like the pundits and politicos if I make the case often enough others will pick up the banner and the question of graduate quality might carry some weight in the discussion of the future of higher education.

T.S. Hall

Program Survival

2010-02-22T20:14:00.000-08:00

I see that the State of Pennsylvania is developing a plan to eliminate degree programs that have low numbers of graduates in the major from within the State System of Higher Education. They are not alone as campuses all over the country reconsider the value of disciplines with low numbers of graduates. This type of thing results in panic on the quad for both faculty and students.

I can see the business rational behind such cost cutting, particularly in a State like Penna. where there are scores of State funded and quasi State funded campuses. There are at least sixteen campuses of the fourteen schools of the State System of Higher Education, the multitude of campuses of the four “State Related” schools (Univ. of Pittsburgh, Penn State, Temple University, and Lincoln University), and the fourteen State community colleges. You can’t throw a rock in Penn’s Woods without hitting a state supported campus. Should all of them offer every degree?

There will be considerable pain in this process, and I predict there will be little discussion of using the quality of product produced as a means of selecting the winners and losers. So, since I am in a trouble-making mood today (I gave a test this morning). I am going to propose a radical idea.

A statewide competition for existence.

All of this year’s graduates from each degree program will take a single or a series of standardized examinations related to the discipline. The average grade for the class will be compared from among all the programs receiving state funding. The bottom programs below a minimal threshold go. The top programs stay.

This puts educational quality first and allows programs that are doing the best job to stay around regardless of the quality of the school’s football team and other factors that may affect the size of the program. Faculty would be in the position of standing behind their product.

Well, I better go some deep breathing before I start grading those exams.

T.S. Hall

"WE! WANT! ... Oh, wait. WE! DON'T! WANT! ..."

2010-02-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

This morning's scan of the "newspaper of record" uncovered an article noting the public's discontent with colleges because they "believe that colleges today operate like businesses".

Hey American people, didn't I date you back in the day? You complain for years about how higher education should be run more like a business and then as soon as we are forced to be more business like by your defunding of higher education you complain. What's next, dumping American higher education for that sexy exotic international new kid on the quad? (Wow, I just realized I got outsourced back in college.)

According to the NY Times article, in 2000, 31 percent of Americans believed that college was essential to success. Today that number is 55 percent. This change is indicative of a change in mindset that has made higher education a Human Right in the minds of many. The thing with the perception of something being a Human Right in American is that, like with health care, the populace does not believe that there should be more than a token cost to the individual for such rights. Of course we also don't appear to want to pay taxes to cover the costs of these things either. Since health care is largely private that industry can still control their cost to a large extent. Higher education, on the other hand, is stuck with little ability to control it's cost.

In the higher education case if the public wants us to be less business like it would mean reversing the recent public funding trajectory and going back to a more socialized model of funding. I am skeptical that this will happen. So, for us this means being pulled apart as the public demands lower tuition and fees while providing less public support. And in a short time we can look forward to complaints about the quality of the product we produce, which will not acknowledge the something-for-nothing attitude of our funding scheme.

Hang on folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

T.S. Hall

Underrepresentation

2010-02-15T13:31:00.000-08:00

I'm a PI on a funded grant, and co-PI on another grant currently under review both of which are designed to encourage members of populations "underrepresented" in the physical and biological sciences to come into science and math degree programs and to pursue PhD degrees. Between writing the grants and administering them I tend to think a lot about pipeline filling and efforts to change the demographics of populations.

Connecting to the population demographics issue (at least in my mind) is the analysis of political demographics of college faculty, or as some call it, "Faculty Liberalism" (insert ominous soundtrack here). In this case, some complain that academia is filled with liberals who are out to destroy our way of life. I wonder if in loudly decrying the perceived problem such pundits do little more than make the problem worse. By constantly shouting that academia is the bastion of liberalism don't we suggest to moderates and conservatives alike that academia is not the place for them, that they will have to fight every day for their place on the field.

Likewise, when we shout about certain populations being "underrepresented" in the sciences, don't we tell the average young member of those demographics that they will be standing alone should they enter the field. Sure, the strong willed and confident will enter in spite of the "underrepresentation". The average student, however, does not want to to stand out either in their school/work environment or in their community, where we have told them they will become an outsider by becoming a scientist. How many people in the population want to carry the mantel of role model for our entire community.

I believe that in these arguments we would be better served to make non-demographic based cases for people with suitable interests and abilities to enter the field. Focus on what attributes make a good faculty member or good scientist and invite all interested parties to join the community. By this I and not talking about young potential scientists who have memorized the periodic table, which is somewhat a measure of the depth of the prior education. I am talking about possessing an inquiring mind and an ability to recognize patterns and interpret their significance. Basically, I am suggesting that the content of ones intellectually ability and character should be considered, and those with the potential to succeed should be encouraged and supported to pursue science degrees. We should place more emphasis on providing resources to those for whom resources would mean a difference in completing and succeeding in the discipline based on financial need and/or a need to help overcome weak background training than we do in pigeonholing everyone into "represented" and "underrepresented" camps.

T.S. Hall

U of A Huntsville

2010-02-13T06:49:00.000-08:00

All of us in the academy are touched by the news of the shooting of six members of the Biology department of the University of Alabama Huntsville. Having gone through the tenure process at more than one university, having seen people both succeed and fail in the tenure process, having served on retention, tenure, promotion (RTP) committees, and having been on a committee that wrote a departmental RTP policy I am particularly impacted. The tenure process, perhaps more than anything we do in our university work, has the power to change the lives of people.

For today I only wish to express my heartfelt sympathy for the injured, and the families and friends of the injured and dead. I also express my sympathy for the friends and family of the shooter, who must be in their own particular hell wondering if they might have done or said something different that might have kept this tragedy from occurring at all.

T.S. Hall

Techno- fixes

2010-02-03T10:36:00.000-08:00

I have a very quiet class this semester. These folks don't talk to one another and it's been hard getting them to respond to questions is class. I thought a little levity might break down the walls and open the lines of communication. God knows my attempts at humor so far have not worked.

Today in class I noted the alternate application of Clemmemsen Reduction conditions in TV and movies where hydrogen gas is generated with acid and metal, as when the steel wool pad is place in a cup of acid in the microwave on a timer. The bad guy enters, the timer starts, the hydrogen in the microwave explodes destroying the room and killing the bad guy, who is felled by a flying toaster strudel.

Silence! Not even a chuckle!

Thus an i-phone app or Powerpoint app development opportunity for you technical folks out there. I want a cricket app, where with a push of a button I can have the sound of crickets emit from my i-touch or my laptop when my class queries (or jokes) are met with silence. As an improved app we could offer other noises from nature: chickens clucking, doves cooing, whale song, horses neighing, cows mooing, jackasses braying. OK, never mind that last example. They might think the instructor had gone back to lecturing.

T.S. Hall

Exam anxiety

2010-01-28T14:01:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I read about a University of Manitoba case in which a PhD candidate in an unnamed program was reinstated after twice failing their comprehensive examination because the student suffers from "extreme" exam anxiety. A senior administrator indicated that the student's PhD will be determined solely on the basis of the thesis. I bet there are many chemists out there who wish they could have availed themselves of this option when they were in graduate school.

According to the article, the Anxiety Disorders Association of Canada claims that 7% of college students report symptoms of anxiety disorder. Hell, in my organic class only 7% don't have test anxiety and those people are generally the ones who should have test anxiety.

I am not without sympathy, but I also am a lift yourself by your bootstraps guy too. Will a student who has been accommodated throughout college get the same type of treatment in a career? Are we awarding a degree which they will not be able to use? Are we really helping the student by not asking them to address their disability and find the personal or community resources needed to overcome their disability?

Perhaps we should make accommodation for disability to the extent that students are making an effort to deal with their disability. Have test anxiety? We will accommodate you during exams so long as you attend weekly counseling to deal with your anxiety.

I have seen many students over the years who got extra time on exams due to disability and had very high grades. Yet on quizzes, where they got the same amount of time as everyone else, had no apparent problem. For some of my students the disability designation is a crutch. I can't help but wonder if we should be tougher and help our students stand on their own to the limits of their ability.

T.S. Hall

Testing to the Teach

2010-01-26T17:19:00.000-08:00

Today I spent a half-hour completing the on-line survey for the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is being conducted as part of the fifth comprehensive review of the MCAT exam. The stated purpose of the survey is to assess the "science content that the future MCAT exam should test."

Here I thought that the MCAT tested students on what skills and knowledge are necessary to succeed in medical school, not on what we teach. I clearly remember people discussing how changes in the MCAT dictate changes in organic textbooks and teaching. How did I get this backwards?

A fairly common topic of discussion around here is what we should be teaching in the organic class and lab. Often these discussions come around to ensuring that the student is prepared for their future endeavors, be they biochemistry classes, work, or graduate or professional schools. The MCAT carries a lot of weight in those discussions. The idea that the test is on what we teach rather than on what medical schools students need changes the game a bit.

For one thing, it changes the answer when students ask if a topic will be important on the MCAT. My physics friends suggested that they will be putting more emphasis on the physics of transporting your professor from place to place in a sedan chair. I bet there is a lot of good organic chemistry associated with washing and waxing my car.

T.S. Hall

Seminars Part III: Hosting

2010-01-23T12:33:00.000-08:00

For the last part of this series on developing a seminar program I have reserved the most commonly overlooked part of the program; hosting seminar speakers. While often overlooked it may be the most important if you want your program to thrive.

If your program is going to succeed you must have something to offer to the speakers. If the experience is excruciating for the speaker the word will get around to the detriment of your department's reputation and your seminar program. You want them to find your faculty and students engaged and excited about the field. If they are not, the speaker will be wondering why you invited them in the first place.

A successful seminar program requires buy-in from your faculty and your students. Student buy-in could be provided by requiring attendance, but keep in mind that just as you can tell when you have lost your students interest in class, a speaker can tell when the audience comes in disinterested. If your students are going to impress potential graduate programs and employers they should be available to have lunch with the speaker and should ask a question or two at the seminar. They should be able to talk about their research and see the interaction with the speakers as something that will be of value to them in their careers. Make sure every student thinking about graduate school at least looks at the campuses who have visited you. This positive attitude in students must be developed by the faculty in talking up the speakers, the program and the value to students. Ask some questions of the speaker during or after the talk. If you can connect to work being done on your campus the students will see what shared ideas can produce.

If the faculty are engaged in expanding their perspectives on chemistry and biochemistry a seminar program will not work. A sure sign of a weak PUI/MCU department and a weak seminar program is when only the faculty within the sub-discipline of the talk speak to the guest or come to the talk. This also sends a message to students that they can narrow their focus to the point of ignoring any chemistry but that of the lab they are working in. Putting such blinders on early in a career limits the intellectual flexibility of the student, and their career prospects.

Face time with speakers should be about a half to three-quarters of an hour. The faculty should have something other than the weather to talk to the speaker about. Research active faculty don't generally want to talk about the merits of intro-organic books in the half hour they might have with you. Talk about students and courses can be reserved for casual conversation over dinner. Talk about your scholarship. Talk about the successes and the places where there might be overlap with the speakers work or facilities. You don't have to be publishing in Science, you need to be trying to move science forward with a clear plan to answer a question. Opportunities to collaborate will enhance the guests funding potential and will give you the chance to get access to facilities you lack.

When I speak at another institution I want to hear about what they are doing and how it might relate to what I do, or what my colleagues do. I want to see my hosts as scientists engaged in a thoughtful exploration of their field. It may not be exactly my field and but if the question and research plan seem to have been thought out, and show signs of some progress I am happy. I also want them to bounce their ideas off me and I want to bounce ideas off them. If there is potential for collaboration I want to know I can contact them for collaboration opportunities in the future.

Lastly, after the formality of the day is over, schedule some time to relax and have a friendly conversation over a drink and/or dinner. Make sure a couple of faculty attend and participate in the conversation. If the seminar was the last thing on the days events bring up those collaboration ideas then.

Hosting faculty should want the speakers to walk away thinking about the potential of the students and faculty at your institution and do everything they can to make it happen.

T.S. Hall

Seminars Part II: Bring them in

2010-01-17T12:47:00.000-08:00

I once taught at a PUI where the meager library resources and virtually nonexistent seminar program made me feel that I had lost contact with the current state of the chemical sciences. This feeling influenced my choices on where to apply and what offer to take when I chose to leave. Off the beaten tract locations or urban locations where there is little regional chemistry or biochemistry going on can really hamper a career. The inability to get people to go a day or two out the way to come in for a visit makes developing a seminar program difficult. In continuing the train of thought on seminars, let's consider what can be done to bring in speakers.

On the RO1 campus putting together a seminar series somewhat takes care of itself. Many of the faulty at research universities know and work with other research university faculty in grant review panels, etc. and the seminar programs allow for many interactions and sharing of seminar invites. The rates of research productivity are generally higher, allowing for frequent return visits and more importantly useful discussions on issues of research.

On the PUI/MCU campus, you have to make it worth while to come in to visit and give a seminar. In making seminar offers, remember, your most valuable commodity is your students. Many universities have graduate recruiting budgets to send faculty out to bring back the cream of the regions campuses. If you don't get mail form these campuses, reach out. Start with the campuses that your graduates have attended. If there are other PUI/MCU campuses on our area, work with them to set up a circuit that visiting faculty can come through to hit several campuses over a few days. These types of visit are usually in the Fall, so make your requests in July or August.

While you are working with regional campuses, how about setting up a seminar exchange. Make a list of seminar speakers and titles or topics available from your campus and share it with the other regional campuses. If your productivity rate is low you might not want to revisit a campus more often that five years.

In the Spring reach out to your past graduates who have gone on to graduate school, and who may be finishing up. If schedules allow, and they are from the local region and can work in a visit when they are visiting family, they generally are happy to come back and show how far they have come. They also become role models for your current students.

Anytime of year, find those regional PUI/MCU faculty who are nearing tenure or promotion. The visit will become part of their service portfolio. Don't forget to send a note on letterhead commenting on the specific types of insights they brought to the faculty in students through their seminar or conversations after the visit. In a large department there may be member of the RTP committee who don't know exactly what a junior faculty does in their research. I invite my own campuses faculty who are coming up for tenure or promotion to give a seminar so they can show what they are doing in their labs.

Look for regional industry or government people working in the field to a closely related field. You will want to work with them to make sure the talk is of value to your students and faculty. What do they get out of it? They are helping train the next generation and they get to connect to the community. Folks how are involved in the local ACS section are good candidates for this.

There may be other ideas out there, but these will help get a program started. In the last part of this series I will share my thoughts on hosting seminars and how to keep the program going by not chasing away speakers.

T.S. Hall

Seminars Part I: Why

2010-01-14T09:34:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of seminar series at PUI and MCU institutions. I am not talking about the internal seminar were the students talk about chemistry or biochemistry in some capstone discipline specific communication course, which has its own value. I am talking about the seminar series where outsiders come to campus visit with the faculty and students and give a professional presentation.

To the students who get to see other ideas and chemistries played out in the presentations and to potentially interact with faculty members from PhD institutions and regional employers there is great value in a seminar from outside. There is also great value in their seeing professionally presented presentations so that they can see the good and bad of that art.

In their ideal form the seminar series also gives the hosting faculty an opportunity to interact with outsiders. Faculty hiring priorities at PUI and MCU campuses sometimes place emphasis on making sure that the panoply of chemistry is covered by a faculty resulting in only a modicum of overlap in their scholarship. Many PUI faculties are small, but even with a fairly large faculty the diversity of scholarship can make you isolated. For example: if you have four organic faculty and one is a polymer type, one is bioorganic, the third is a physical organic mechanism inspector, and the last is a methods development/synthetic type, they can talk about organic chemistry, but their diversity means that they generally don't challenge tho other's "expertise" in their research conclusions. Well chosen outside speakers can provide valuable opportunities to bounce ideas off someone who is in a position to challenge our assumptions and conclusions. The seminar series can help fight the isolation that sometimes can occur at the PUI/MCU institutions.

Research universities seem to be more focused in their hiring. They often develop areas of expertise within a department or college to help attract funding resources under shared instrument programs, etc.

The difference between the PUI/MCU and the RO1 may reflect the difference in the focus of the institutions, where the hiring emphasis at teaching focused institutions is on being able to provide expertise across the field in the lecture halls. This ensures that students are in a position to select an area of focus and appropriate graduate program or career upon graduation.

If the outside seminar series has value this still leaves the question of how to implement a program, which will be the subject of a future post.

T.S. Hall

Beware of Rationalization

2010-01-05T11:15:00.000-08:00

It has been almost a year since the start of this blog. In this, the one hundredth, post I want to draw attention to one of the things I encountered during my sabbatical and its bigger picture lessons which don't fit neatly into the paper I am working on. I won’t go into the specifics as I am working on the paper and my point here is bigger picture than this specific case, however illustrative.

The research I have engaged in involves a stereoselective condensation reaction to form a heterocycle. A number of years ago the major player in the field proposed a mechanism for the condensation as a rationalization of the observed stereochemistry in one of their papers. That mechanism has since been used, or more commonly the proposed stereo-setting transition state geometry has used, by many others to rationalize observed stereochemistry in this type of heterocycle formation. The systems to which the mechanism has been applied have become increasingly complex and people have generally added groups onto the original transition state structure without revisiting the mechanism itself.

In our study we found that the proposed transition state geometry not only fails to predict the major isomers observed but also predicts that our major product isomer can not be formed. This made me reconsider a number of the prior studies. It appears that the transition state of the rationalized mechanism was applied by many without considering other transition states in that original mechanism, or other mechanisms. When I looked at the other transitions states available in the original mechanism in the more complex systems it was clear that the energy differences of the various transitions states don't justify the observed stereoselectivity. Over the last two decades authors appear to have never gone back to the point of considering all the possible transition states, or to reconsidering the mechanism in the face of additional data and systems. For my part I am proposing a different mechanism for the reaction. Of course this is the nature of the scientific method in practice.

The author of the original mechanism did not suggest that the mechanism was more than a rationalization to explain the observed stereochemisty. The point of this story in the context of today's blog is that while the original rationalization was reasonable in the context of the original work, the practice of assuming that it was correct as the system became more complex passed muster with authors and reviewers over the past twenty odd years. People have made their names on this work and earned major awards. No-one appears to ever have asked if the original rationalized mechanism still held in the face of additional data. The rationalization became dogma for reasons that may have more to do with lethargy and bowing to authority (the name of the author of the original mechanism) than because the scientific method was applied. The original author did no in depth study to support the proposal. It was only a rationalization, yet over the last couple of decades it has become so much more. As research scientist and educators we must question what we believe and ask ourselves if we believe because it is dogma and to do otherwise is to blaspheme, or if on reconsideration in light of all currently available data we should revise some of the base assumptions of our field.

T.S. Hall

Being a Responsible Educator

2010-01-02T09:22:00.000-08:00

When part of your life's work is to educate it is some times hard to not correct people when they are mistaken. It is especially hard when almost everyone is mistaken and some simple thinking would correct the problem. Normally this is just a problem at family reunions/holiday events and in the classroom. Sometimes it goes global and you must weigh the value of trying to correct the mistake verses grinding your teeth.

Today's case on point is the temporal confusion about the decade. Everywhere you are hearing wrap ups of the decade and projections for the next decade. Too bad the decade does not end for another year.

There was no year zero! This means that the first decade was from the start of year 1 through the end of year 10. The first millennium was from 1 Jan year 1 to 30 Dec 1000. The second millennium did not end until 30 Dec 2000, not 1999 as most people incorrectly think. Likewise, the first decade of the millennium does not end until the end of the day 30 Dec. 2010.

Happy End of Decade Year,

T.S. Hall

Be it resolved

2009-12-31T08:03:00.000-08:00

I don't actually believe in New Year's Resolutions. In a life focused on constant learning and teaching I figure we are always picking up new or improved ideas and methods and setting aside outdated and failed activities. But, a little introspection could not hurt.

Research:
I was talking to one of my former students about their PhD work recently. My alum indicated that their PhD mentor has a file of papers written that only lack the empirical data to make them publications. While it makes me a bit uncomfortable to challenge the lab spirits in such a way, I see some value in this for my undergraduate and masters students and to my publication and granting record. The research experience for my students could become more focused, and hopefully more productive.

Teaching:
I noticed this semester that my students don't know how to answer a question that requires justification. Ask a student to pick between route A and route B and justify their choice and you get a mechanism for one route only. As a class they don't understand how to support their answers. I see this as a key skill for scientists, so I am going to spend some time on how to answer a question at the beginning of the semester and in our programs to help recruit and retain students in the sciences.

Service:
In bad economic times the service level of faculty increase more and more every day. It's hard to say no to the needs of students and the university, but at some point you are spinning too many plates and all you are doing to running from plate to plate to keep them all spinning. You need to determine which plates to let go of, finish the jobs that can be accomplished and not pick up new ones until your resources will allow you to.

If you don't have hope for the future academe is not the place for you. The entire enterprise is about taking potential and making it into reality.

So, as we close out 2009, I wish all of you a better 2010 full of challenges and rewards.

T.S. Hall

One Last Rant for 2009

2009-12-31T07:34:00.000-08:00

This the season of the year end review. From the local paper to C&E News we are all taking a long look at our successes and failures in 2009, with an eye on 2010. In academe it seems that this process in ongoing and unceasing. We review our courses each semester/quarter, our research students and programs each quarter/semester and at the end of the summer.

In academics the 2009 calendar year was one were funding was front and center. Actually, in higher education funding is always near the top issues every year. The global financial crisis pushed the fiscal situation of universities to the breaking point. Even at RO1 institutions money has become the major issue of concern.

I have always believed that when crisis comes we learn what really matters. This year has shown the disconnect between the cost of a diploma and the cost of an education. To the public, education has become the fundamental right to the receipt of a diploma, which magically imbues the recipient with career skills. Our political leaders proclaim that everyone should be able to get a post-secondary degree and demand that institutions of higher education improve retention and degree completion without any connection to providing resources or ensuring educational quality. Their theory appears to be that an educated populace is one where everyone has a diploma. It then follows that all these diploma carrying voters will attract business into communities and create new businesses, filling the state house with tax money. As in so many things in our society today, we no longer understand the difference between perception and reality. Indeed for most people perception is reality.

What of 2010 you ask?

Well, in 2010 the states will realize that since perception is reality the solution to the state's economic problem is to speed up reducing the cost of education to zero and still provide everyone with a diploma. Starting in 2010, diplomas from public universities will be laminated onto the back of all drivers licenses. Renew your license, get a degree. High school diplomas will be printed on the back of all birth certificates. With 100% college degree attainment the state will become the land of milk and honey (Our new motto in 2011).

T.S. Hall

P.S. You just got to clear this kind of stuff out of your head before the new year.

Race to the Bottom

2009-12-29T14:55:00.000-08:00

Before I begin, I warn readers that this post is going to make some people see red. I ask before you vent you spleen that you only do so if you are proposing an alternative that ensures that education is delivered with those grades and diplomas.

The Higher Education Commission of Indiana has recommended cutting funding to state colleges and universities at least partially based on what is euphemistically call "performance based funding." By "performance" they mean retention and completion rates, not skill mastery, employability, etc. Yes, you assume that retention and completion are welded to skill mastery and employability, but they are not in a academic community where student evaluations carry more weight than performance on standardized examinations.

The message of these types of actions, however well meaning, is that faculty challenge students at their own peril. Students who face no real challenge to their intellect will be retained, give excellent course evaluations, and complete degrees. Faculty will get tenure, schools will get money. Well, at least until the realization hits that degree holders incapable of delivering goods or services that support the economy also don't fill state tax coffers.

I think the point of public education is to ensure that there is an educated populace capable of maintaining, and building an viable commonwealth by investing in the population of the state. To succeed, education at all levels must challenge and measure. Some will disappointed. Some will fall behind and even fail. If institutions of education can't be free to challenge and measure worthless diplomas will be awarded. An unskilled populace incapable of meeting challenge will be reduced to the dole to live.

Surely, we must find ways to balance our state budgets, but printing diplomas on the back of birth certificates instead of funding education that educates only gets you a population with a high percentage of degree holders.

T.S. Hall

Public vs Private

2009-12-28T20:29:00.000-08:00

From time-to-time I try to focus here on the differences between RO1 and PUI/MCU programs. Today the NY Daily News brings us a story about the difference between public and private universities.

It seems that the former NYU chemistry department budget coordinator had over a period of five years, submitted 13,000 receipts culled from the garbage of a local liquor store to support requests for petty cash. The university forked over $409,000 to cover these bogus expenses until a student delivering the expense report paperwork questioned the deal. Those of us at publics shake our heads as we stand in line at the local staple depot buying our own whiteboard pens out of our 10% lower paychecks so we can teach class.

Public colleges and universities are so afraid of one penny being misspent that they spend large sums of money to make sure fraud does not occur. I am sure some still does occur, but having no state funded department operating budget and needing all the dollars we can get in donations just to pay to operate the program keeps the amounts available for fraud pretty low. Hell, $409,000 would cover our entire department operating budget for something over five years. And at NYU it's part of the petty cash budget.

Oh yea! And publics generally won't even let you use donations for liquor.

T.S. Hall

Year-End Giving

2009-12-17T07:32:00.000-08:00

As I have spending all my time grading quizzes and labs, and writing and grading finals I have been listening to the local public radio station and checking e-mail to break the grading up. In the course of this I keep hearing and reading multiple appeals for year-end giving.

A recent seminar speaker colleague from a California public university told of his university's plan to take $100 per key from the department for every key not returned by a student when they graduate. Since the department has no state provided operating budget this means that the money will come from money brought in from summer offerings, grant overhead, and donations to the department. While I encourage giving to your alma mater, you probably don't expect it to go to gauging by the campus key shop.

Particularly for those of us from PUI/MCU institutions we owe much to our alma maters. So how do we give and make sure our giving goes to help bring up the next generation of chemists?

I suggest giving directly to the department of your choice, or to the faculty member of your choice by attaching a letter to your check which designates the uses to which the money may go.

When I give to my alma mater I designate that the funds must go to the corpus of the Synthetic Organic Chemistry Research fund they set up some years ago. Giving to the corpus builds the perpetual nature of the fund, so my dollars continue to give long after I am gone.

If there was no fund I would do as the Friends of the Hall Group do and designate that the funds may be used to support the purchase of materials needed to advance the laboratory research and teaching program of a specific professor or group of professors. In my case I use these funds to cover outside analysis costs, purchase of reagents, travel by students to present their work, printing of posters, student scholarships, and other such things.

So, as you plan your year end giving you might consider support the work of your mentor, who has seen support from the university for his research program slashed over the last couple of years.

T.S. Hall

Sommatropic Examinations

2009-11-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

No matter how long you teach new things happen.

Today during my examination I noticed a student sleeping. He was in the middle of the classroom where it was impossible to get near him without climbing over the bolted down rows of chairs and their occupants. Concerned for his grade I made a largely unnecessary announcement to wake him. A few minutes later he was off to dreamland again. After my third announcement I gave up and let him sleep.

Any other odd exam behavior stories out there?

T.S. Hall

No Gripe Wednesday!?

2009-11-25T07:02:00.000-08:00

I suspect that Rep. Emanuel Cleaves of Arizona has had his fill of Sarcastic Wednesdays. He is trying to get a bill into congress to create Complaint-Free Wednesdays. Well in the spirit of Thanksgiving maybe I should take note of a few things I am thankful for this semester.

1) There are a few really good students in my classes, but more importantly there are a bunch of average students who are hanging in there and striving to become more than average.

2) Sure research is part of the institutional mission, but without outside funding I still need to buy reagents out of my own pocket. And just as I realized that bromine is a regulated substance that you can't purchase on a personal credit card an unexpected angle donated to the university a kilobuck for my research program. A great unforeseen gift with great timing.

3) While research can be a struggle I still love the puzzles of the lab and the technical work involved. Every once in a while I see something with the beauty that is found in the details and in everything falling into place in a nearly perfect or truly perfect way.

We live in interesting times. Sarcasm and griping may help us get through the day, but we must take the opportunity to fix our system ourselves, and be thankful for the opportunity.

Happy Thanksgiving

T.S. Hall

Cutting Edge Science and The Oldest Profession

2009-11-18T11:51:00.000-08:00

OK Profies, the next time the grad students are complaining about their stipends you might remind them how lucky they are to not be in grad school in Britain.

In case you missed the news, the author of blog and memoirs that have become the cable TV show, "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" has come clean and identified herself as a PhD research scientist who worked her way through grad school with a night job.

Given the laughable salaries for MS graduate students at MCUs, I wonder if this explains why I can never find my research students when I go into the lab looking for them? And the fishnets hanging by the lab coats!?

T.S. Hall

Humility Aside

2009-11-17T12:34:00.000-08:00

I have learned that my abstract submission for the Spring National ACS Meeting on San Fran has been accepted. I hope these last few experiments work out so I don't have to fill the time with the description of the great tragedy of Science.

"The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." -- Thomas Henry Huxley

Cost Savings

2009-11-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

It's radical idea time in trying to fix Higher Education. Since I believe that we can't just bitch, we must offer solutions, here are a few that should get some dialogue going. These comments may only apply to California, but might be true in other states.

Radical Idea 1: Privatize remedial courses and use the money going to them now for college level courses.

All remedial courses would no longer be supported by state funds. The Taxpayers paid for the student to learn basic math, English, chemistry, etc when they covered the cost of the K-12 education. Students can still get these courses, but they must pay the non-student rate cost.

Radical Idea 2: Limit state support toward a student's education in all State supported institutions to 150 semester units attempted.

This number of units would allow the student to search around a bit and get a dual degree if it fits their career plan, but make the students take the opportunity they are being given seriously. I have seen students come from community colleges with 80-90 units of course work and then take another 100 or so at a four-year institution. Some CSU campuses have instituted rules in which they award degrees once they student is eligible regardless of if the student has requested, just so they can clear space for the next students.

Radical Idea 3: Any attempt at a course after the second is not supported by the State.

This connects to the two suggestions above.

I hope these at least get some of us talking.

T.S. Hall

Something for Nothing

2009-11-14T08:31:00.000-08:00

From the Public Policy Institute of California we have a new study on Californian's views on higher education in the state.

Key conclusions are that Californians see budget cuts (70%) and overall affordability (58%) as major problems at the community colleges, CSU, and UC systems. At the same time, 68% oppose increasing student fees (called tuition in most places) and 56% oppose paying higher taxes to fund higher education. About half (52%) believe that a combination of better use of existing state funds and increased funding is the answer to the problems of higher education. Thirty eight percent say just using existing funding more wisely is best.

I find this last idea somewhat humorous in that with a 50% reduction in state support for the CSU over the last 3 years people actually think there might be fat left to cut. California's major problem is that the taxpayers demand services with no costs and the politicians are too busy being ideologues to actually bother with the practical mater of governing. But I doubt it is that much different in other states.

T.S. Hall

Tomorrow's Steep Decline Part III

2009-11-12T07:32:00.000-08:00

So, what do PUI and MCU folks do in the face of the decline in majors I have suggested will come?

In my opinion chemistry and biochemistry departments have historically been focused largely on two groups of people. They are would be professional chemists and biochemists and would be health professionals. Others are relegated to general education science courses that often don't really teach much chemistry or biochemistry, or science. As a consequence we make ourselves an elite and separate community who spends much time decrying the scientific illiteracy of the general population and trying to entice people into the STEM pipeline so they will become professional chemists and biochemists. There is not much middle ground in our programs.

There are many students who have a level of science interest and ability that is strong but not sufficient to make a career as a chemists, biochemist or health professional. Our departments lose these students to other majors every semester. But should we? There are many allied careers where a background in chemistry or biochemistry would be of value. In my opinion we should offer the degree options that would give the "lost" students the opportunity to channel their science interest into an allied science career. Doing so would retain students in our departments and would make for a more scientifically literate society. Greater science literacy could lead to greater interest in the "pure" STEM fields, solving our pipeline problem.

If I were in a leadership position in a department, we would institute BA degree options that provide a minor or double major in areas like business, regulatory affairs, pre-law, science communication, public policy, etc. Having a variety of options that serve the students and needs of employers would make us less subject to the vagaries of public interest (which TV shows are popular) and high school guidance counselors. There are already some models out there in schools with Chemistry Business and other allied options. Important in this effort will be ensuring that these degree options are treated as equal to the traditional options and receive the same level of recruitment activity.

The time to start such initiative is now, before the decline begins.

T.S. Hall

Tomorrow's Steep Decline in Majors, Part II

2009-11-01T11:17:00.000-08:00

Felix posted a comment on the original post suggesting that I update it in light of a recently published study by researchers at Rutgers and Georgetown. Derek at In the Pipeline has already touched on the issue twice . Given how far behind I am in reading, I thank Felix for his prompt.

The Rutgers/Georgetown study "Steady as She Goes? Three Generations of Students Through the Science and Engineering Pipeline" was released last Wednesday. I have not read all the details yet, but the gist of the report is that over the past 30 years the supply of STEM graduates has remained about the same rather than shrinking as most people believe. One of the points of concern raised in the article is that, since the late 90's the best students in the pipeline are opting out of the STEM fields in greater numbers. The authors suggest that the most talented STEM graduates are being lured away from STEM careers by better pay and benefits in other fields. The suggestion is that we need less, rather than more, STEM graduates to drive up the wages of STEM professionals so that youngsters will be attracted to STEM fields and will then save America from its decline as a leader in the world.

In my original post, I put forward my concern that we chemistry faculty must prepare for a sharp decline in majors in the near future as the guidance counselors of the nation come to the realization that ten years of pushing students into pharmacy has filled the pipeline. I wrote this realizing that even as our numbers of majors have doubled over the last decade, about half the chemistry and biochemistry majors in my department list pharmacy as their career goal. Suggesting that we need less STEM graduates will only make matters worse for chemistry departments if the guidance counselors read the report summary and opt to chase students from STEM careers.

There is much in the study to comment on, but I will focus on two things that immediately concern me. As others have noted, this study covers all of STEM and such a broad brush does not really paint the kind of nuance that would provide a clear picture of the future. Also, the economic theory behind the study makes no sense to me. It appears to me that the researchers are using an outdated economic model where countries are isolated and labor and services from other countries have little or no effect on wages and demand for trained professionals in this country. Outsourcing and Insourcing have contributed greatly to the pay and job prospects of graduates in this country. Producing less graduates will not raise wages. It will raise outsourcing and insourcing, in my opinion.

What should we PUI and MCU academics do? More on that later, as I just got a long awaited good lab result and I can't type while doing my happy dance.

T.S. Hall

Oh GATTACA

2009-10-29T06:35:00.000-07:00

(A Late Sarcastic Wednesday)

As I navigated the highways on my way to work this morning I heard a story on the radio about the "Bad Driver Gene". Apparently our colleagues at the University of California Irvine have identified a protein called brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) which is secreted in the area of the brain associated with with a task at hand, like driving. According to this very limited study about thirty percent of Americans have a gene variant which they have associated with bad driving, due to limited secretion of BDNF.

According to the researcher, Dr. Steve Cramer of UCI,

"These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away."

Now, I will leave it to others to warn of the consequences of this discovery on insurance rates and to opine about banning certain people from behind the wheel for the sake of public safety. We in academia will need to get ahead of the curve on this one. People who make errors from the get-go and who forget more of what they learned after time away sit before us in every class. I see two potential directions this story could go for us.

Option one is that in the future Low BDNF will become a recognized learning disability. The consequences for faculty will be requirements to adjust curricula accordingly. With thirty percent of Americans suffering we will need to stop expecting students to know material which they have spent some time away from. No more prerequisite courses!

Option two is that we genetically pre-test potential students and limit public support for those, that owing to genetic predisposition, are less likely to succeed in education or careers that require BDNF.

On the plus side, Biochemists with friends in Education, there's a couple of grants in this. Let's correlate BDNF genetic mutation to major and alternately to grade received in courses or to graduation rate.

T.S. Hall

Whose fault is that?

2009-10-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

I am going to try to avoid making this a rant.

I was talking to one of my colleagues, who also teaches at a public comprehensive university program, as so often happens we were discussing organic chemistry students. The experts in medical education are calling for us to move away from rote memorization and toward demonstration of competency. We were lamenting the problems that students have when required to go beyond memorization and show that they can think their way around or through a problem.

To underscore his point that memorization rules the land, my colleague indicated that one of his fellow organicers publicly stated that their B grade organic students were generally better scientists than their A grade students. This is because, lacking memorization skills, the B students must think their way though the course, but the A students just memorize.

Thus, the title of this epistle. If we value the ability to go beyond memorization the course grades should reflect this!

Whew! I better stop before the ranting escapes and my head explodes. What's that I hear? Tis the siren call of the Dalwhinnie.

T.S. Hall

P.S. The distillers of Dalwhinnie Single Malt Scotch in no way supported a plug for their product. (Although if a couple of bottles of 15 year double maturation found their way to my door I would provide them a good home.)

Lab Stabbing At UCLA

2009-10-09T06:27:00.000-07:00

It has been a bad year at UCLA. First there was the tragedy if a death in an organic research lab due to a t-BuLi fire, which drew international attention, and then yesterday there was a stabbing in an organic teaching lab. The facts of the latter case are not yet clear, so I will reserve commentary on the case.

In the last few years I have had a handful of students whose behavior in lab made me wonder about their stability. We faculty walk a fine line when we encounter a student whose behavior is troubling. Is the student just a bit strange or is what we are seeing a warning sign of future danger.

In one case the student had gone off his medication. After he verbally attacked and threatened with physical harm one of my colleagues in a class and the university became involved in the case the parents expressed upset that we had not alerted them to the situation. Explaining to them that we were not able to violate the students rights by contacting them until something happened that we could use to justify an emergency contact did not help. Faculty get trapped between the rights of the student as an independent adult and our en loco parentis (in the place of the parents) responsibility.

In another case, the student's only came alive when explosions or fires were discussed and placed his folding knife on the lab bench at the start of every lab in spite of my telling him every meeting to put it away. He never turned in a lab report all semester and was very hard to engage in conversation. After the end of that semester he did not come back to school and I often wonder what happened to him.

Every time there is an incident on a college campus right after I say a prayer for the victims and the faculty who will wonder if they could or should have done something to avoid the event, I think "There but for the grace of God go I".

T.S. Hall

Unblocking Pubs

2009-10-08T08:08:00.000-07:00

I have always been bad about publishing. Partially because I never feel I have enough to make the paper worth reading. Being at a PUI, I don't get asked to frequently to give talks on other campuses, so I toil away always feeling that I short of publishing by a semester's worth of results.

One of the requirements of being on sabbatical is that upon returning to my home campus I am required to report out to my colleagues on what I accomplished. With this in mind I am preparing a seminar.

Going into the writing process I was lamenting how unfinished the sabbatical work was and how I was not sure if there was enough to talk about. After I prepared the first forty slides by stream-of-thought without getting to the end of what I had done I realized that the seminar might approach three hours in length. It was not just a matter of being more concise. There is just too much to say. At this point I recognized that I have two or three talks depending on the point of focus taken.

Perhaps those of us who are research active but not research productive (in the sense of publications) should get out more. Lacking that, in spite of the flashbacks of ritual torture, departments wishing to advance their research profile might require that all research active faculty who have not published in the last year should file a Research Report. It might help us get unblocked on publications.

T.S. Hall

Tomorrow's steep decline in majors

2009-10-03T18:04:00.000-07:00

In my current class of organic students I conducted a poll asking about their career plans. Interestingly 50% of the chemistry and biochemistry majors plan to go to pharmacy school. I have been watching the numbers of would-be pharmacy students over the last decade as high school guidance counselors have sold the career to every student who got a C or better in Algebra I, and their parents.

In my opinion, guidance counselors commonly come in late when there is a shortage and stay too long when the supply is filled. Ask any nurse about this. On the point of pharmacy, has anyone looked at the pharmacy pipeline? When the current crop of students graduate will there be jobs for them.

How much longer should we push large numbers of students into pharmacy? When the pharmacy career door shuts, in what I suspect is the not to distant future, the guidance counselors will discourage students from the career and the numbers of chemistry and biochemistry majors will nosedive. We will do what we always do and panic.

This is a normal market cycle, but we should be preparing for it, since in the current funding climate declining enrollment could also mean that shrinking C&B programs get closed.

T.S. Hall

The Scientist Sabbatical Advice, Part 2

2009-09-28T14:26:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long delays between posts. A month ago I started a post about an article from The Scientist on Sabbatical Advice. Since I need a break from grading I am back to finish what I started.

Tip: Think outside the box

Tip: Home improvement

All of this tips from the original article made me think about how the sabbatical I took made me think about the direction my research projects and career had taken before the sabbatical. I did a lot of reflecting on were I was in research over the months I was away from my home institution. As I wrote early on (The Hammer Problem) I realized that I had become a slave to the limitations of my institutional resources. If was limiting the experiments I was doing and my thinking about the problems I would pursue. Getting away got me out of the box I was in and helped me think outside the box. I have made contacts who can make available to me the resources I lacked. I returned to my home institution with new ideas and new directions to my research program. My discussions with my RO1 colleagues helped me reprioritize my time and monetary resources toward being more productive in publications and grants.

Tip: Absorb new approaches

Related to the above. I may be old, but I still got hands. On those techniques that I mastered in graduate school and used since I am as good or better than the youngsters working on PhDs or postdocs. But I do still do things in old fashioned ways. My young colleagues taught me much about modeling and advanced NMR and MS techniques that were not around when I was last at and RO1. Sure I had read about these things, but there is nothing like doing them to bring them home into your toolbox of approaches to problems.

Lastly, my own advice. The sabbatical is about renewal. In my case it was about renewal of my research program. To renew one must begin with reflection. I designed my sabbatical around building from the program I have to a stronger, more productive (papers and grants) program. I associated myself with successful people and their students who are also trying to become successful. I did lots of chemistry, but not day went by that I did not ask myself how I was going to bring back to my home institution a more productive program.

Time will tell how successful I have been.

T.S. Hall

Timing is everything

2009-09-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

I got back from class this morning to find the daily e-mail from The Scientist including an article titled "Can Unresponsive Brains Learn".

Based on the level of class participation this morning, I guess we will find out on next week's exam.

Monkey See

2009-09-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

The news wires are abuzz about the use of gene therapy to correct colorblindness in a monkey named Dalton. Yes, named after the famed chemist, who in addition to inventing the miners safety lamp, training Faraday, being the first to isolate a few alkali metals, writing books about his travels and fishing, also studied colorblindness. (And I can't teach, do research, do some service, and keep this blog up!)

Way back when I took quant my colorblindness was a challenge that cost me more than a few points on precision. The one titration I could do was Bromocresol green. A bear of a titration for most people since the endpoint is at the green point between yellow and blue colors. Not being able to see the green I could titrate from color to clear to color. Unfortunately my instructor suggested that no one could achieve the precision and accuracy I attained and failed me on the lab anyway. I pointed out my colorblindness advantage and offered to titrate a sample of her choosing any time she wanted to test me but she never took me up one the offer.

I wonder when the human gene therapy for colorblindness trials start.

T.S. Hall