Hold your nose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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