"Lack of critical thinking in strike"

In college I avoided English classes like the plague. After my first year writing course, I only took one English course and it took place during Interim with the topic covering protest in American literature, comparing and contrasting literary authors and American singer-song writers (i.e. I listened to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and analyzed how their lyrics spoke to themes found in Steinbeck and Ellison). When approaching a critical analysis of any piece or idea you can generally take one of two tracts, a surface level and a deep level. Although not always true, the track you take is often dependent on your experience with the piece or idea. In a recent article in The Star on the strikes occurring at York University and University of Toronto, the author comments on a lack of critical thinking, but appears to come at the issue so far removed from it, that in their analysis citing a lack of critical thinking, they miss all of the deeper issues that with critical analysis would be revealed.

I've never heard of the author of this article before, Martin Regg Cohn, but he is a political commentator for the Toronto Star. Wading through the article, its hard to find his point. Under the title is a subtitle: "Labour strife has exposed fault lines in university faculties — byzantine hierarchies where part-time teachers toil in classroom sweatshops." while a caption for the included photograph says: "While a hardy band of low-paid contract lecturers bear the brunt of teaching, a coddled elite of tenured professors are among the best-paid on the planet — while teaching fewer courses than ever, and sloughing off research duties." and the article concludes: "But as other sectors adjust to upheaval — from manufacturing to media to hospitals — we should demand greater accountability and clarity from universities. It’s not just students who deserve a better deal, but part-time teachers, too. Listen to the canaries in the ivory tower." What I pull from these comments is that Mr. Cohen believes that Universities have created two classes of workers with tenure-track faculty riding high hogs with no teaching responsibilities and zero cares about research output while contract faculty perform all of the teaching. He cites a "hallowed" rule that tenure-track faculty divvy their responsibilities 40-40-20 among research, teaching and service, that some professors hadn't published or received funding in 3 years and were well compensated. Taken together I understand this piece as a diatribe against tenure-track professors, however, as the title suggests, Mr. Cohn lacks critical insight into the issues underlying the environment from which these strikes are arising.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I've written about these issues before (here and here) with the gist suggesting that we need to re-think how we evaluate and reward research output and reconsider or come to an agreement on the roles of universities/colleges, in particular research universities in society. Without the private sector respecting a PhD for the general skills it provides (similar to the general skills that a liberal arts education provides), there will continue to be a glut of PhDs who are hoping to work towards a tenure-track position, with few other options. As long as there is pressure to enroll as many PhD students as possible in order to produce as much as possible, we'll be unable to escape the cycle of enrolling more students and turning out too many PhDs. Mr. Cohn and others deride faculty for their apparent unwillingness to teach, but faculty at R1 institutions receive little to no reward for teaching (in the narrow sense of teaching in classroom). Even outside of Universities, few people talk about the best teaching institutions unless they're high school guidance councilors. Most of the time that colleges are mentioned for their prestige or impact, the reference is to their research output not how many classes their professor taught that semester or how high their ratemyprofessor.com ratings are.

We can look at these strikes on the surface and make very little contribution with our comments, tenure track professors don't teach enough, tenure track professor only work 9 months a year and are paid too much, TAs, contract faculty are only working part-time, why are they expecting full-time wages. Or we can look past these surface issues and try to understand why colleges and universities value research output from their tenure faculty, why they rely on cheap options to teach every expanding classes and why little will change without massive overhaul across the private sector, government funding and the research culture.

International Women's Day

Yesterday was International Women's Day and like most of society, I'm late to recognizing women. IWD is meant to empower women and raise awareness about the prejudice and hardships that women implicitly face based on their sex. In science and academia women face a number of issues that are slowly and hopefully successfully being addressed.

My wife and I have a unique perspective on these issues as we have the same educational background albeit slightly different research agendas. When I finished my PhD and went to take a postdoc, there was implicit belief that she would move with me and finish her final year of her PhD from afar. When we said that she wouldn't do that the next question was whether she was looking for postdocs or jobs in Toronto for when she finished. Finding a job in academia is hard, finding jobs for academic couples near each other is very difficult and finding jobs for academic couples in the same field is likely impossible. With these issues if we look into these couples and their difficulties we likely see that for women have the more difficult job search in the couple.

In the midst of the difficulties applying for jobs I recognize that as hard as it is for me, my wife faces a number of biases both within and outside of academia. All of her thoughts and actions carry certain connotations that are generally viewed negatively. It also seems like she has to work twice as hard to get half as much back. With a full competitive fellowship, multiple first author publications (with a clear research plan that can be carried out with undergrads) and experience teaching at two different small liberal arts colleges, she seems like the perfect candidate for a tenure track position at a liberal arts college, or as visiting professor or as a teaching postdoc. I don't think about it too much but I wonder if I had been a female if my experience through grad school would have been different, would have applying for postdocs been different and would apply for tenure track jobs be different.

In my own supervision of research and some of my engagement work I have worked to advocate for women in science. I'll continue to fight for the rights and treatment of women in science and recognize my own implicit biases and advantages as a male scientist, while doing my best to not discount that differences in sex are leading to two very different experiences in science.

Roman Research Institute 25th Anniversary Conference

The conference began a little slowly on Monday morning so I guess it wasn't just the attendees with a case of the Mondays. Sitting in one of the meeting rooms I was surrounded by hundreds of professors, clinicians, postdocs and graduate students and although the print was tiny and it was difficult to read, I found few if any community groups or members represented amongst the crowd. As the introductory speaker began I couldn't help but wonder what the cause of the lack of community members was. Was there a lack of interest from the public, was the registration fee too exhorbinate, or are conferences one of the last bastions of the ivory tower where we academics can hob nob with each other, speaking in our jargon and buzzwords without the care or need to translate our speech. As I look to the next three days of the conference I'll think about the role of conferences in academia, in science and in society at large.

Conferences were originally a way to exchange thoughts and ideas and bring academics together to debate and collaborate. In the 21st century, conferences feel like an outdated and outmoded function. Communication across the globe happens continously and instantly, waiting to get together on a specific day in a particular place doesn't fit with our capabilities today. However, that might be symptomatic of what I suspect conferences are actually for, the amorphous term, networking. Gathering people in fun or exotic locations with the excuse of a meeting allows big players in science to get together and meet outside of the conference itself. It allows them to introduce their trainees to their colleagues and protect their inner circle. Trainees at each level are either in the game and trying to figure out a way through networking to claw their way to the next notch on the totem pole to tenure or out of the game and trying to have fun at the bars or local attractions.

Since networking is likely why conferences still exist in their antiquated form and the exchange of ideas is just a consequence, I can understand why community members are not present. As science begins to turn to the public directly for funding (i.e, crowdfunding), perhaps science needs to reconsider how much they value how conferences are run in their current form. Taking money from the people and not working to make conferences accessible will lead to the public abandoning science and leaving scientists stuck like Rapunzel in their ivory towers. Even though I'm guilty of the problem of one way communication with this blog, my twitter and if i start my podcast, we have to figure out how to communicate with and listen to the public as we look to the future of science.

Reviewer Etiquette: Just because you're anonymous doesn't mean you need to troll

scienceblogs.com

Peer-review may be the cornerstone of the scientific process as it is the gate through which both forms of scientific currency (publications and grants) must pass. Peer-review serves as the quality control system in which all scientific discoveries and ideas are scrutinized and and vetted by other experts. Peer-review is meant to make scientific communication trusted, but peer-reviewed work isn't necessarily correct or conclusive, even if it has met some standard of science. After the peer-review process is over and a paper/grant has passed through the gate, it doesn't mean that the process is over, science must deal with it somehow either through responding with commentary, other related studies or replication attempts. However, it often seems as though peer-review is treated as the final say, that flaws are magnified and if the paper doesn't meet some arbitrary standard or give the anonymous reviewer enough citations then it is the end and that idea or that study is stopped dead in its tracks right then and there.

In general the responsibilities of reviewers are to:

• Comment on the validity of the science, identifying scientific errors and evaluating the design and methodology used
• Judge the significance by evaluating the importance of the findings and how/where the findings fit in the literature (including identify missing or inaccurate references)
• Determine the originality of the work based on how much it advances the field
• Recommend that the paper be published or rejected. Editors don't have to heed this recommendation, but most do (this also varies by the number of reviewers rounded up - sometimes the decision needs to be unanimous, sometimes if the reviews are split another is brought in to break the tie and sometimes the editor makes the decision regardless of the reviewers)

In single-blind (where the authors don't know the reviewer identities) and double-blind (where neither reviewers nor authors know each other's identities) post-hoc (as opposed to pre-registration) review tend to have a few problems. 

1) Focusing on methodology when the study has already been completed

Pre-registration would seem to solve some of the most frequent reviewer requests, methodological issues, including adding new conditions, new controls or becoming obsessed with the fact that an experiment was run a particular way that they don't quite like. This change would take care of the first responsibility of reviewers, correcting errors in the design and methodology before the study even takes place. 

2) Lack of responsibility/accountability for reviewers

The removal of reviewers being blinded to the authors and readers may help change the level of constructiveness of the comments made in reviews. A tumblr aggregates some of the reviews that don't appear to fall into any of the responsibilities I mentioned above. Removing the veil of anonymity should help to improve the dialog and impact of the review process (here and here). We may even give more significance and value to reviewing. Review is a service and valuable contribution, but given little value in the eyes of the determination of your impact as a scientist. Often it seems as though review is passed off to trainees whose only experience evaluating the literature comes from lab meetings and reading groups where group think causes everyone to dump on the papers and nitpick the papers into oblivion. By naming reviewers (as the Frontiers family does) we give reviewers acknowledgment and accountability. We could go even further and note what they contributed to the study and figure out ways to evaluate the impact that individuals make as a reviewer similar to how we use authorship on papers to evaluate impact.

In the end, peer-review is not the end of the process but just a part of the process that extends far beyond a paper being published. By giving more responsibility and reward for review we should improve the process and remove the "me against the world" feelings shared by both authors and reviewers.

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Is a Strike == a "Labor Situation" == a "Labor Disruption"? Only when they're framed the same

globeandmail.com

I've recently noticed I use a lot of parentheses in writing and I think its a side-effect of years of academic writing. Sometimes I wish I could represent parens in speech outside of talking under my breath. One place I recently noticed a lack of verbal parens where there should have been has been in the discussions of the strikes by CUPE 3903 and CUPE 3902 at York University and University of Toronto. Cheryl Regehr, Provost and Vice President of the University of Toronto, recently wrote in the Huffington Post (with a great response from a UofT graduate TA here) that teaching assistants rejected an offer of raising their hourly wage to $43.97 but forgot to add that with that increase in hourly pay their total hours changing (decreasing from 205 to 180). Without the information in that paren we can only see the TAs/contract faculty as greedy, unappreciative and spoiled brats. When you do the math the TAs suddenly don't look so greedy. Now TAs make $42.05 with a 205 hour cap for $8,620.25 while the proposed package is equal to $7,914.60, otherwise know as a $700 decrease! 

globeandmail.com

Regardless, the point the TAs/contract faculty are making is that UofT could offer $15,000 with a 1 hour cap or $60,000 with a 0.25 hour cap, or $247,355.32 (the pay of Provost Regehr) with a cap of 0.06 hours, but the problem is not the pay per hour. The problem lies in the cap of $15,000 in funding which is less than the poverty line for a single adult in Toronto. But I also suppose this $15,000 funding package is where the real problem lies. A number of people question whether a "part-time" job really deserves to be paid at a "full-time" rate, especially when the TAs are already being paid to go to school.

nationaladjunct.tumblr.com

Last week brought us National Adjunct Walkout Day and was quickly followed by these strikes highlight systemic problems in academia. Its hard to find data for attaining tenure-track positions that encompasses R1 institutions, primarily undergraduate institutions and community colleges, but the figure is likely much lower than how many want to. Although I don't have the exact figures, it seems like the number of students who think they can "go pro" and those who actually do are in line with college athletes' perception of their ability to go pro and those that actually do. Although a PhD should not only be seen as a path to working in academia, it is often the carrot used to attract students and outside academia a PhD is generally not viewed overwhelmingly positively. Broadly, the goals of Universities are to create and disseminate knowledge and that occurs through three avenues, research, teaching and engagement. Previously, I discussed some of the misperceptions of the goals of Universities and I see some of those issues creeping up in the strikes. 

1) We're training too many PhDs

Early booms in research funding drove up the need for labor to complete research grants which spiraled into the need for a large number of cheap trainees to put out ever higher and higher amounts of research in order to compete for more grants in a shrinking pot of money. Or put another way, we've created a system where tenure-track faculty, in order to be competitive for grants and tenure, need large labs of highly motivated trainees because without high output their labs can't progress.

In a similar vein, reduced funding at the federal and state(or provincial) levels increased the need for Universities to find alternate avenues of funding which led to increases in the number of students, in particular foreign students (as well as an increase in their tuition costs). This led to the increased need for more cheap instructors to teach the increased number of students. With the number of tenure track positions holding steady and an ever increasing pool of PhD graduates, with few equivalent positions outside of academia we've created an underclass of highly educated individuals with no where to turn except for part-time teaching work while holding out for a tenure-track position. 

2) What is the role of Universities and Colleges and what are students hoping to get from a college education

In Scott Walker's latest brush with education in Wisconsin we see some of the misperceptions of what college professors do. As I stated earlier the role of higher education is to create and disseminate knowledge. The triumvirate of higher education, research teaching and engagement map onto those rules with research to creation and teaching/engagement to dissemination. Across the scope of higher education we see the emphasis of creation and dissemination skewed to smaller or greater extents towards one role or the other with R1 institutions skewed towards creation and primarily undergraduate and community colleges skewed towards dissemination (with a number of institutions not fitting into this broad generalization). At large research institutions, teaching, defined narrowly as teaching a course, is generally viewed as a secondary responsibility. From the outside, that might be surprising, but when you look at how tenure is assessed (emphasis on research productivity, i.e., papers/grants) and how administration assigns instructors to courses (with over 60% of courses taught be non tenure-track faculty) we see why faculty at large research schools focus on research (which also involves teaching). 

While we recognize the value of a highly educated populace, a number of people question whether college is simply expensive job preparation. We're less than a week into the strikes at UofT and York and if you check the strike related hashtags on twitter (#WeAreUofT, #YorkUStrike, #CUPE3903, #CUPE3902) you find a mix of support from the TAs/CF and others in solidarity with a number of undergraduates either posting that they're mad about the strike and want to go to class or posting about the fun things they are doing in their "time off." Like the misperceptions of what Universities/colleges are for there are misperceptions about what students should be doing in college. If you go to college and simply attend class, take exams, write essays and work a part-time job then yes, college is simply job preparation, but in that case, probably not very good preparation. If on the other hand going to classes seem like a small part of your college experience because you're working, taking internships, participating in extracurriculars (whether its sports, music, drama, or student clubs) and challenging, stressing and growing, then college is both (excellent) job preparation and for creating a highly educated populace. 

In the end, both of these issues come down to how we as a society value higher education. Do we feel that investment in the research of colleges/universities and in the education of our populace as a whole is a worthy investment? If we don't value the research or Universities/colleges or feel that private industry will make up the difference then we should continue defunding higher education. If we think that our populace attaining higher education is not a worthy investment then we should pass the costs of attending both secondary and post-secondary onto only those who choose to attend. However, before we make those decisions we have to get everyone on the same page and understand what higher-education does and why it does it as well as agree what attending secondary and post-secondary schooling actually does for students.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of satire. In the tradition of A Prairie Home Companion, this ad, among others, will form the backbone of the underwriting and sponsorship of my podcast.