April 2013 – Small Pond Science (2024)

Here’s a specific example, from my own work, of how the avoidance of mathematical modeling led to a fundamental discovery that eluded modelers and experimentalist for decades.

At least, that’s how I see it when I’m not feeling humble. It’s about resource allocation in ants, not the grand unified theory, after all.

For context, for those newer to the site, consider this post as a coda to an ongoing series (and discussion of sorts with Dynamic Ecology) about approaches to designing a research program. I have advocated that exploration by tinkering with unexplained curiosities within natural systems often leads to the best discoveries as well as the most consequential research programs. This post from a few weeks ago provides a good summary of that series. Another precursor to this post is a discussion about the relationship between mathematical modeling, hypothesis development, and how much math you need to become a scientist. That is also a precursor to this post, though it is a “long read,” for those averse to verbiage.

The subject of this post — the scientific discovery — came out in a paper last year (go read it if you wish), which I wrote with Sarah Diamond and Rob Dunn. In short, we discovered a fundamental pattern that could have been obvious to everyone, if anybody just looked in that direction. This pattern explains many unanswered ideas, going back to theories that E.O Wilson developed in the 1970s, along with George Oster.

Oster & Wilson set out to understand what regulates the varying levels of investment into the different members of ant colonies. Most inhabitants of ant colonies are functionally sterile, and in some species, there are multiple physical castes of sterile ants.

The genus Pheidole is the most species rich ant genus, and they’re found pretty much everywhere. All Pheidole (aside from a few exceptions) do something that isn’t found in many other lineages: they have two discrete sterile worker casts. They make big-headed soldiers and tinier minor workers, both of which do a variety of work for the colony. Some think that this dimorphic worker caste, and potentially the flexibility tied to its production, has enabled these ants to not only become ecologically successful but also to diversify.

Anyhow, Oster & Wilson made a number of predictions about the adapability of the ratio of soldiers to minor workers in Phediole colonies. One of their big testable predictions, or perhaps it could be seen as model to be falsified, is that the colonies actively adjust the ratio of soldiers to workers in response to environmental challenges.

It entirely makes sense. If a Pheidole colony is in an environment that requires more soliders, they would make more soldiers. Right? The problem is, despite a lot of looking carefully at Pheidole colonies, this wasn’t found. Finally in the mid ’90s it was found in the lab of Luc Passera, that P. pallidula colonies made more soldiers when they were exposed, without contact, to neighboring colonies. When I say it was found in the lab of Passera, I mean it happened physically in his lab. These were captive colonies.

A similar thing was found in the field in 2002, when I and Jeb Owen published a paper showing adaptive soldier production in another Pheidole species. (Also, my labmate Samantha Messier did the same thing before the Passera group, in a field experiment involving Nasutitermes termites and a machete.) Our studies were done in the field. In my experiment, when I put clumps of supplemental food in the field for months on end, the food was defended by soldiers, and in a short time colonies made more soldiers.

One thing I didn’t mention at the time, though, was that I didn’t find adaptive soldier production in a whole bunch of other species. However, I had less statistical power, and it was the most common species that showed this pattern. Maybe the less common ones did, but it was harder to detect.

If you were to ask around and dig into the literature, you’d see that it’s pretty clear that most species of Pheidole actually do not overtly shift their caste ratios when you mess around with their environment. Not every colony produces the same ratio, but a systemic environmental manipulation doesn’t cause an increase. Other than the two papers I just mentioned, I don’t think anybody else has found adaptive caste ratios in Pheidole. Others have looked, but it hasn’t emerged very clearly.

So, if most species just don’t ramp up and ramp down soldier production in response to the environment, what controls soldier production? For decades, there has been a consistent amount of work asking this question from behavioral, physiological and developmental angles. In the course of all of this excellent work (a lot of it being done by Diana Wheeler, Fred Nijhout, and their associates), we’ve made a lot of progress in understanding how colonies regulate their activity and how development is regulated through genetic, biochemical and physiological mechanisms.

One thing that I’ve always wondered about is, why do some species produce more soldiers than others? I’ve cracked open lots of twigs, and the numbers of soldiers are highly variable. And my experiments have shown that most species don’t obviously change their soldier production in response to environmental changes. There has been lots of great work to understand variation within a single species, but interspecific comparisons have been scant.

I can understand why there hasn’t been much comparative work. Measuring caste ratios of entire colonies can be hard. Find a Pheidole colony in the back yard and compare the number of soldiers and workers. See, not easy, huh? You’ve got to dig them up. Unless, of course, your backyard is a rainforest. In that case, you just pick up twigs. Over the years, I estimate that I and my students have picked up over 10⁶ twigs over the years. Thousands of these have had Pheidole colonies inside. The rainforest is diverse, so I have data on many species. How do they compare?

Well, I learned that the caste ratios were different among species. Some species produced way more soldiers than others. Considering that we know so little about the natural history of these species, there wasn’t a great basis for comparing many of these species to one another. But one thing we could examine, quite easily, was body size. And, as it turned out, that was super-duper predictive of solider investment. Smaller species produced more soldiers than larger ones. When this pattern emerged on my laptop, it was one of those moments of elation that are very cool, but then you don’t have anybody with whom to share.

Then, I dug through the literature so see if the information that we had about caste ratios and body size shows the same pattern that I found in my rainforest. It turns out that the relationship is as identical as you can get. Our local scale pattern recapitulated Pheidole from around the world, and across the phylogeny.

Now, if you ask someone, what controls soldier production in Pheidole? You can say the answer is quite clearly body size. How and why does body size control this? There is some cool work that’s been done on this intraspecifically, that presumably is a mechanism that works more broadly.

How did my discovery of this generalized relationship come about from avoiding models? If you look at the work on soldier production, ever since Oster & Wilson published their monograph in the 1970s, there’s been a strong emphasis on modeling the mechanisms that trigger and regulate soldier production. Meanwhile, nobody before me bothered to step back to look at the big picture and ask, “how are species different and what is predictive of that?” If they did, then they would have found the caste ratio data in the literature as I had, and looked at the most obvious predictor: body size. Others were modeling solider production. I was merely trying to find a pattern.

I’m not claiming that the discovery of this pattern is earthshaking or that it explains mechanistically how colonies make more or fewer soldiers at the proximate level. The main take-home message from this paper is that many of the differences we find are driven by constraints rather than by adaptation, or that selection on body size is coupled with selection on soldier production. This leads to a lot of exciting thoughts about community structure, which we’re now working on.

This work by no means diminishes all of the careful experiments that others have done over the years on Pheidole. Though I’m not a developmental biologist nor as much of a behaviorist, I was able to find something that will be (or at least, I think should be) at the basis of future conversations about the evolution of caste ants.

This is why my choice is to keep asking “What is the pattern?” rather than attempting to model patterns.

Getting tenure at a teaching university might be harder than getting tenure at a research institution.

If you don’t like that concept, then try this similar concept on: what you need to do to get tenure at a teaching-centered institution is far more ambiguous than what you need to do at a research university. One could argue that it’s easier to get tenure if you know specifically what you need to do. At most teaching schools, exactly what you need to do to get tenure is vague at best.

In one, you need to convince the faculty and administration of a teaching university that you are excellent at teaching. In the other, you need to convince the faculty and administration of a research university that you are excellent at research.

At research institutions, when you interview for a job, it is typically spelled out exactly what you need to do to get tenure: grants, publications, and train doctoral students. At most places, you’re given a neighborhood of a dollar amount, or a certain set of grant agencies and number of grants you need, and a number of publications in journals with a certain tier, as first and senior author. There may be some subtleties, but when you’re coming up for tenure, it’s clear based on the numbers whether you’re approaching that threshold, and you should be well aware if you are shy of the mark or have well exceeded it. If you’re marginal, then you know that you’re marginal.

The notion that teaching counts in hiring and tenure decisions at research universities is a sham, as recently pointed out by Alex Bond at The Lab and Field. If you’re at a research institution, being a horrible teacher won’t hurt your chances at tenure and being a fantabulous teacher won’t help your bid for tenure. (If you are unliked or extremely popular, however, and your case is marginal, then teaching performance could be inserted as a surrogate variable to help swing the review one way or another.)

At teaching institutions, the story is entirely different.

At your on-site job interview, I wish you luck trying to get a wholly quantitative description about what it takes to get tenure. Typically, you need to be “excellent” at teaching, and “excellent” at either research or service, and mighty good at the third. I think that’s the answer I got at every single one of the 10 or so teaching campuses where I’ve interviewed over the years.

You know how teaching doesn’t matter at research schools? Well, the converse isn’t entirely true. Research does matter at teaching schools, though there may be a lot of flexibility about what counts as research. At lower-ranked institutions, “research” might not necessarily involve publications or external funding, if you really like someone’s teaching. It could just involve keeping students busy in your lab outside of the curriculum and having some of them get into grad school.

Some teaching campuses put specific numbers on publications, which in my experience has ranged between 0-6, with no real specification of impact factor. The expected publication rate before tenure is negatively associated with teaching load, but this relationship has only a moderate correlation. Most places expect you to submit a grant but aren’t horribly put out if you aren’t funded. The research criterion is pretty clear-cut at teaching campuses, and there is also fudge room because it’s not the primary criterion.

Then, what constitutes excellent teaching? Most campuses go with a Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart kind of definition.

Knowing excellent teaching when you see it isn’t a good way to decide whether someone gets tenure, is it?

How do most people judge excellent teaching, when they are required to make such a judgment? A student of human nature would suggest that it is identified by how much it resembles the practices of the observer. I’ve never met a full professor who didn’t have a moderately high opinion of their own teaching. And we’ve all met plenty of full professors who couldn’t teach their way out of a bag. This does not bode well for effective tenure decisionmaking. (By the way, is the Bush neologism ‘decider’ now a replacement for ‘decision-maker’?)

In practice, there are many factors that are included in the quantitative and qualitative measures of teaching performance at a teaching campus.

The drawback to all of these quantitative and qualitative measures is that they all suck, or at least have poor resolution.

Let’s go over them one at a time. Keep in mind that no school uses all of these measures in concert.

Teaching evaluation forms There is a whole subfield in education research on this topic, and I’m not going to let this site devolve into a bitch session about teaching evaluations. Really horrible instructors get horrible eval scores, and amazingly perfect instructors get high scores. What happens for most of us, the professors in the middle — ranging between not-so-good and run-of-the-mill excellent — is really murky.

At my university the forms are called PTEs: Perceived Teaching Effectiveness evaluations. The key word here is “perceived.” Are students good at knowing whether their instructor is effective? Often, yes. However, there are a huge number of systematic biases that go along with these forms, suggesting that we need to avoid using the numbers in a comparative fashion. Upper division courses have higher scores than lower division courses, which have higher scores than non-majors courses. This might be independent of teaching effectiveness. There are age and gender biases that affect student perceptions of effectiveness, and associations between the grades received by the students and the perceived effectiveness of the instructor are not necessarily causative. How you dress in the first weeks of class can really matter, too. From discipline to discipline, mean evaluation scores are quite variable. If you want to measure improvement in the same course, with the same professor, with the same student demographic (including time of day the course is taught), then this might be a good measure, at a coarse resolution.

If your tenure case is being evaluated at the level of the college or the university, and your scores are being compared against colleagues in other disciplines, or who teach different kinds of courses, that isn’t fair. I don’t know of a campus that specifies a specific threshold score for evaluations (at least officially), and that is a good thing. However, unofficially some campuses or committees are expecting scores to be above a certain level. If that’s the case, then faculty need to learn the little tricks to make sure they don’t do things that cause students to lower their scores. (That’s a whole other set of posts.)

Written remarks by students The voluntary responses by students on evaluation forms are potentially telling. Students can offer specific and useful praise, and also tell damning stories that very clearly can explain instructor performance. Recurring similar comments by multiple students are particularly valuable. However, most student responses are idiosyncratic and it’s very difficult to distinguish between a student with a legitimate grievance and one who is bitter about their own performance.

Classroom observations Faculty members in the department may be requested or required to sit in on a certain number of hours or lessons before offering a recommendation. These observations are effective so long as the observer is capable of identifying effective instruction. This is heavily subjected to the biases of the observer, especially as scientists typically have no training in teaching methods. For example, when I was a junior faculty member, I made sure to implement the methods of active learning in science instruction that I learned as a graduate student in the College Teaching Certification program and as a Preparing Future Faculty fellow. So what happened when I was observed by my senior departmental colleagues sizing me up for tenure? I’ll always remember this, word for word: “You need to be less Socratic and lecture more. You should be using powerpoint and use more detailed information.” Never mind the fact that all of the current research on science education told me to do the opposite of what they said. After all, these professors were the ones evaluating my tenure file. So, when they were in my classroom, I had to lecture, even though I knew this was an ineffective approach.

How could classroom observations be effective? The people doing the observing could know what they hell they are doing and could be well trained in evaluating effective teaching. This happens in public schools. In the state of California, to be come a fully credentialed K-12 teacher you need to go through an evaluative induction process, the Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA, pronounced “bitsa.”) To be a BTSA evaluator, you need to be trained to observe and score the performance of teachers, and this training process involves a calibration of standards and a long list of specific criteria. One BTSA evaluator observing one set of instruction comes up with a score very similar to any other BTSA evaluator; that’s the way the system is built.

What about teaching-centered universities, how do senior faculty do their observations? They show up, if they care to spare the time, and they then may fill out a cursory form if one exists, and then include whatever observations they choose to include or not in their letters. I can’t think of an evaluation that is more subjective nor disconnected from whatever objective measure that could exist. (I’m not saying that I’m any less guilty than anybody else, mind you. Of course, most faculty would be peeved at the notion that they need to be trained to recognize good teaching.) Regardless, in some teaching schools, classroom observations aren’t a required or even optional component of the tenure portfolio. Oftentimes, the only thing that tenure committees know specifically about what happens in the classroom is by hearsay from students.

I was impressed that once, my all-time favorite dean chose to sit in on my classroom for half an hour, and when he wrote the letter for my file he referenced specifics from what he saw in my classroom. He didn’t do this for lack of being busy, and I appreciate the time he spent in directly evaluating me.

Assessment data Perhaps we could look at student performance using assessment data, looking at student knowledge before and after individuals pass through your course. These kind of assessment data aren’t common, and anyway, most science faculty are in full rebellion against regional accreditation agencies that are requiring assessment in curriculum design, and using assessment data like this could actually annoy some faculty members who might think that you’ve gone over to the dark side of assessment. I suppose you could use these numbers but just not call it assessment and maybe get away with it.

Student letters I think few campuses do this, but it happens in my undergraduate institution. I was asked by my college to write letters of evaluation for faculty members in whose courses I was enrolled. The college requests letters from some students who are listed by the faculty member, and also randomly (or perhaps haphazardly) selects other students from rosters of recent courses. I imagine that these letters would be a lot more informative than whatever would be in student evaluations. They do this for both tenure and promotion to full professor.

Hearsay It is stunning how students are willing to discuss my colleagues in front of me, as long as I’m not involved in the conversation. Just the other day, I was in my lab sorting ants, and some of my research students were going on and on in great detail about an instructor in our department, who is a close colleague of mine. There was a mix of criticism and praise. They were talking like movie reviewers or restaurant critics. I wasn’t involved in the conversation, but I was sitting easily within ear’s reach where they were saying all kinds of things about my colleague that they would never say directly to this person. This kind of overheard conversation happens all the time, especially if you’re teaching lab sections. It’s unprofessional of the students to do this in front of other professors, but I guess they’re not professional. I arguably have more indirect information about my colleagues’ teaching from this route than any other. If I believe most of what I hear, by the way, then most people in my department are incredibly awesome. Regardless, this isn’t a valid source of information for evaluating teaching performance, though I imagine that in some environments this is probably the source of information with the greatest sway.

External evaluations Research universities require external letters from experts in the subfield of the tenure candidate to evaluate their tenure file. So, teaching universities must get outside experts to evaluate the teaching of candidates in their subfields of expertise, right? Ha! That’s a good one!

–

What it takes to be “excellent” at teaching is being able to convince the other faculty in department that you fit that label. Faculty use a variety of information sources, including not not limited to the information above. Ultimately, the assessment is a holistic gestalt-based system. Kind of like how honey bee colonies use guard bees size up the pheromonal composition of bees landing at the nest to decide if they belong, academic departments work the same way. If you don’t fit in, then the guard bee will pounce on you.

The biggest way to not fit in is to not teach well.

However, another way is to teach well, but teach differently.

It’s often said that tenure is about “fit.” Some people say that’s vague: how do you define fit? It’s nothing that needs any special definition. Either you fit in or you don’t. Either you have the same values and the same approaches with respect to education, or you don’t.

This is why it’s sometimes hard to get tenure in a contentious department (read: snakepit) in a teaching institution. Even if you’re careful to not take sides in any weird departmental politics, everyone involved in the tenure process will be called upon to assess your teaching. This is going to involve a meeting where your teaching is discussed. If the department has divisions about teaching philosophy or approaches, this will emerge in the criteria used for evaluations. If one side really likes what you do and explains why, then the other side might end up in disagreement. This is not good. You can ameliorate this by how you sell your teaching approach in your tenure file. You don’t want to make the mistake of arguing that you have worked hard to find the most effective approaches to teaching and that your assessments show that students learn effectively. What you want to do is communicate that your teaching fits in with your department, and that you have worked collaboratively with your colleagues so that you have learned how to teach well from them. You don’t want to say anything that is overtly contrasting existing practice, because, ultimately, the people in charge of deciding whether your teaching is excellent will compare your work with the template of their own work. Just like guard honeybees that use their own smell to decide whether to reject outsiders.

Even if you have a history of demonstrating teaching excellence at a teaching institution, a fresh pair of eyes with a different perspective, or a different agenda, could look at the same record and come up with a credible argument that the record fails to demonstrate excellence. Without anything changing, the environment can shift so that what is perceived as “excellent” in one year might not be acceptable the next year.

This is different than research institutions, I think. It’s harder to argue against grant dollars and a list of publications on a CV. You could argue that the journals aren’t of a high enough impact or that the grants are from the wrong agency, but the research bar at a research institution is far, far more tangible than the teaching bar at a teaching institution.

I would guess that if you are unambiguously above the bar that’s been set for you for research productivity and funding, and you haven’t entirely botched something else, you should be golden. Even if there are academic disagreements about your work, if you’ve got the grants and published in the right journals, then that is likely to be fine. This is particularly the case if you’re at a unionized institution, in which the tenure process is more transparent than at an institution with an opaque process with secret information, because the faculty lack the power to make sure that the process is fair.

Of course, at nearly all universities, tenure rates are quite high, except for a few Ivies that have a de facto policy of hiring Assistant Professor positions as glorified 7-year postdocs. When people don’t get tenure, it might be because performance is not up to snuff, but it can also happen because the department is toxic or incompetent. Other crazy stuff can happen, too. Regardless, the lack of specific quantitative criteria in the teaching criterion create an element of hap into the process that makes it less predictable, which makes it a source for anxiety if not a source of difficulty.

In short, the amount of work it takes to be an excellent teacher doesn’t necessarily correspond to the amount of work you have to do to get tenure at a teaching institution. To do that, you (most likely) have to be an excellent teacher and you also have to do the work to convince your colleagues that you are. In some places, this is harder to do than others. In some places, you don’t even have to be an excellent teacher, as long as you are able to create that perception. There’s the rub.

In some humanities fields, when you present a paper, that’s exactly what you do. You stand at a microphone and read your paper, word for word. I’m glad that none of those conferences are in my plans.

Nevertheless, scientific conferences are more formal than our normal teaching milieu. People dress up a notch nicer than usual, and there are people being paid to do things on your behalf, like set up A/V equipment.

One of those slightly formal things about conferences is that every presentation space has a lectern and a microphone. The convention site that sets up the rooms for the conferences assumes that all speakers want to stand at a lectern and use a microphone for their speech. For all the organizers know, the presenters might be those people who go up with a manuscript and read.

But we’re not those people. We have no reason to stand at that lectern and speak into the mike. It’s as formal as we want it to be. Why don’t we ditch the formality?

Keep in mind that these rooms are not that much bigger than the larger lecture halls on your campus. It’s just a fancier affair at a conference, so you get a superfluous lectern and a superfluous microphone.

As I teach plenty, I have experience holding forth to a crowd. At a conference, why don’t I apply what I’ve learned from that part of my job? I do find it heartening that people sometimes mention after my talk, “I can tell that you must teach a lot.” They don’t mean that in a negative way, I think it’s a way of saying that I was engaging and at ease. I appreciate the compliment when it happens. I’d rather talk about the science, but it’s still friendly.

When speakers are introduced by the moderator, they see the lectern, and the microphone at the lectern. The default mode is to stand up there and speak into the microphone. The next speaker follows the example of the prior speaker. It befits the formality of the occasion in some way.

But, really, it’s absurd. Nobody is being done a favor by using a microphone in a space that doesn’t require it, and acting like what you’re doing is the most important thing in the world. It’s just a 15 minute presentation. Make it fun, explain why what you did is awesome, and talk about it casually. You want to be professional and show that your work is of high quality, but you also don’t want to be uptight. The entire genre of conference presentations is uptight. You don’t have to be a part of that.

Standing at the lectern with microphone is inherently awkward, because none of us are used to standing at microphones and talking for extended periods. You have to try hard to not be awkward in those circ*mstances. Why not give your talk in a way that doesn’t necessitate the avoidance of awkwardness?

I’m not the kind of guy that is typically invited to give a keynote or headline a large symposium, so I’m not speaking in cavernous spaces. I think I’ve only spoken twice in venue in which a microphone actually was needed for everyone to easily hear me. Granted, I’m not a quiet guy.

Other than that rare circ*mstance, I ignore the lectern, ignore the mike, and get up and talk just like I’m teaching a class. (The only difference is that when I’m teaching, I try to not talk, because when someone is talking to you, learning is less likely to happen. Which is probably why a few weeks after a conference, I couldn’t explain one of the talks with any detail.)

Get up, move around. Instead of a laser pointer, walk up to the screen and point with your finger. It’s more engaging. You don’t want to present your research, you want to teach the audience newly discovered information. Talk about it like you’re talking to your own class about the latest finding in the news. This starts with ditching the lectern.

I mentioned earlier that I sometimes start classes with short ungraded written quizzes.

Now, I’ll tell you how I sometimes end class: a ‘Muddiest Point Evaluation.’

If I have one minute at the end of class, I ask everyone to take out a piece or shred of paper. I ask everyone to write the ‘muddiest point’ in class – the single thing that happened in the class period that made the least amount of sense or had the biggest unanswered question. If any students say that they are 100% hunky-dory with the entire lesson, then I ask them to write that fact down and turn it in.

I try to do a muddiest post especially when we’re going over conceptually abstract material, or if the lesson is more densely packed than usual.

After browsing through the muddy points that I received, I spend some of the time in the next class clarifying things, doing a new activity to clear up something that I thought was done but wasn’t. Sometimes there are just very quick questions that I can answer in five seconds. Recurring trends in the muddy points among several students might indicate that part of the lesson was unsuccessful and needs a new approach.

This is important for me to do once in a while, because sometimes I find out at the end of class that some concepts that were obvious me went entirely over the heads of my students. It’s better to learn this right away, rather than find out while grading an exam. If it’s important enough to bring up in class once, it’s important to make sure that people actually learned it. (If it’s not, then perhaps you shouldn’t mention it and reduce the amount of pointless content in your class?)

–

This activity, including the name “muddiest point,” is taken straight up from the Angelo & Cross Classroom Assessment Techniques book. Some of the many techniques in there work for me, and some don’t, but it’s a great browse. Some techniques in the book are far more efficient than others, but they’re all good food for the mind.

If you have undergraduates who are thinking about doing a Ph.D., they may be seeking advice about how, or whether, to do an M.S. first.

I’m in a field in which the M.S. is entirely optional. Some people have ’em, and many don’t. (I don’t.) Many folks have strong-ish opinions about whether or not doing a Master’s is good. Some say it’s good because it helps you hone your experience, get into a better lab for the Ph.D., and results in a higher quality dissertation research. Others will say that an M.S. could be an unnecessary, financially and temporally expensive detour that might result in a subpar experience. In addition, sometimes students get trapped in M.S. programs for a long time, as many M.S. granting institutions like to treat their graduate students like the Ph.D. students that they can’t train.

Here’s my suggestion for those who are about to advice a promising undergraduate for or against the M.S.:

Throw your experiences and biases out the window.

There is no generalized reason why an M.S. degree is, or is not, a valuable precursor to a Ph.D.

The reasons that a Ph.D.-bound student should pursue or avoid an M.S. are entirely individualized, based on a given student’s experience, aspirations, and opportunities.

The things you need to take into account in this calculation are many, but they pertain to the student and not any generality that you might have to proffer. These include:

• How difficult it is to get into a good lab for the PhD
• Whether professional success in the subfield is associated with having an MS
• Whether the student can afford the MS financially
• Whether the experience of the MS would alter the decision to do the PhD
• The specific program and lab that the student would go to for the M.S.
• Whether the student has temporary geographic constraints
• Whether the student has a realistic idea about what life is like in a PhD program
• The presence, absence, or specifics of the student’s career plans
• Whether the student’s probability for success in the PhD would be altered by having the experience of an MS
• and I’m sure there are may more

You know your students well, or at least you should know them well. Dispense your advice on what they, in particular, need and what is in their best interest. Everybody is different, and the landscape is constantly evolving. What worked for us, just a few short years ago, can’t be used much to inform contemporary decisions.

When you are sizing up the teaching part of your job, what is the role of student quality?

I often hear other scientists talking about how they enjoy the teaching part of their job when they have high quality students. They are successful teachers when they have high quality students.

I also hear professors sympathizing with other professors who report that they have poor quality students in their classes.

These conversations make me want to barf.

What the hell is a “quality student?”

I won’t say anything about a person behind their back that I wouldn’t be willing to say to their faces, admitting that at times it could be an uncomfortable conversation. Would anybody be willing to say to their own students that they are of low quality? Clearly, students can do low-quality work and have a low-quality investment. (Actually, I just said this last week to my class after slogging through some lackluster exams.) Are these students, themselves, poor quality? I feel like I shouldn’t have to say so, but maybe I do: of course they aren’t.

When people are talking about student “quality,” they could mean a variety of things. They might be thinking about how smart the students are (whatever that is), how hard working they are, or how motivated they are to learn.

All of those variables change given the context. Some students will not work hard at all in some classes, but work hard in others. Some students will be disinterested in some classes but be fascinated by others. I suppose the “high quality” students are the ones that will work hard and be fascinated regardless of the context.

In other words, high quality students are the ones that would learn even if they had a poor quality instructor.

If you have traditionally “high quality” students, it doesn’t matter if you teach well. Do you really want that kind of job?

Clearly, if our classrooms are filled exclusively with bright, hard-working and inquisitive students who are always willing to learn, then our jobs would be really easy. In fact, the students wouldn’t need us other than to assign readings, play videos of lectures and have labs set up for them. We wouldn’t be required as teachers because they would be all ready to learn whatever is put up in front of them. I guess that’s a high quality student – one who is the least amount of work. The one who always understands and always does perfect work.

If that’s the case, then I don’t want these high quality students who are easy to teach. I want to be the person that made a difference in the life of another person. I want the students who come into my classroom to be the ones that don’t think that biostatistics matters, or not really caring much about the mechanisms of climate change. When I am successful at the end of the semester, which means that my students are successful at the end of the semester, I want it to be because of the quality of my work. I don’t want to preach to the converted, and I don’t want to spend an hour in class on a lesson that the students could have learned for themselves. I want the students who couldn’t just sit down in a MOOC and take it all in.

It means that all of the time and preparation that I put into my lessons actually matters.

Perhaps, some might think, that with classic “high quality” students, highly effective teachers can take things to extraordinarily high levels so that their students excel far beyond what any lesser “quality” student could ever imagine. If you are thinking that way, then please stay away from the classroom. You need to enter the room thinking that every person has unlimited potential. If you start out assuming that some students aren’t capable of extraordinary achievement, then you’re never to going to expect or get it from them. You need to expect the outstanding if you’re ever going to get it. And you need to expect it of everyone. Once in a while, I get outstanding from students that who have already been written off by everyone else. Now that is a quality student. And I have that opportunity every time I enter the classroom.

By the way, why is it that some of the most famous experts on science teaching come from universities that only admit students who earned top notch grades in high school, and mostly from private schools and public schools in wealthy school districts? Do their experiences with white middle- and upper-class students really reflect how education works for everyone else?

Almost none of the students in my university would be able to land admission to a highly selective institution, in part because of their social class but also because of their performance and preparation.

How I do I feel about teaching students who could be labeled as “poor quality?” I love it. There’s nothing better. I have unlimited opportunity to make a difference, and every day I am challenged to inspire and create a need for understanding. If you want to teach well, then how do you know you’re even capable of doing so if all of your students are pros at learning?

If you are teacher by profession, and all you want to do is teach “high quality” students, then you’ll never master your craft.

People who aren’t used to writing and running federal grants aren’t probably that familiar with how overhead works. For every dollar you bring in to do work with your grant, your institution gets an additional percentage from the federal agencies, which covers all of the indirect, or overhead, costs of running the grant. So, a project that directly costs $200,000 actually will bill the feds $320,000, if your overhead rate is 60%. There are additional complications, but that’s the gist of it.

At research institutions, overhead rates are typically > 50%, and sometimes much much higher. Teaching schools typically have lower indirect rates. My campus’ indirect rate is 42%. My previous university had an even lower one, which was only applied to salary. That’s a relative pittance compared to the 67% rate of Caltech, which also includes hefty salary fringe rates on top of overhead.

This money isn’t trivial. Most research institutions use it to stay afloat. Which is why universities value, or at least don’t eliminate, faculty members who bring in big grants.

In theory, overhead pays for lab space, equipment, maintenance contracts, electricity, computers, printer toner, photocopies, technicians and stuff like that. It’s entirely reasonable, at least in concept.

When funding gets tight, like it has been for a long time, some PIs gripe that high indirect rates make it harder for grants to be funded and result in smaller budgets. A good rebuttal comes from Prof-Like Substance. He points out that a lot of complaints about overhead are overblown, and no matter how you slice it, the money comes out of your grant one way or another.

Where does the overhead go, and who makes these decisions? Does it just enter some university general fund? No way. It gets divvied up among various fiefdoms. The president and the heads of financial stuff, who pull in unreasonably huge salaries, decide who gets various pieces of the pie, and the different sizes of those pieces. From the perspective of the scientist, how the pie is cut is entirely non-negotiable. You’ve got to wear a suit, drive a luxury car and work 9-5 to buy into that kind of conversation.

When comparing how the overhead pie is cut across different campuses, I’ve found that there are remarkable inconsistencies, and that some indirect allocation rules are very idiosyncratic.

Despite the differences among campuses, the entities that get a piece typically include:

• The Campus office that runs awarded grants (post-award)
• The Sponsored Research office that works on getting grants (pre-award)
• The President
• The Provost/Academic Affairs
• The Dean/College
• The Department
• The PI who landed the grant

Everybody loves these indirect costs returned from grants because they have few or no restrictions. I’ve got a returned indirect account and I can spend it on pretty much any research-related need I have. That’s a good idea to get indirect back to the lab of the PI, because so much of the research that happens in the lab can’t be paid out of grants, which aren’t supposed to be spent on office supplies, for example. This isn’t a minor issue. There is no budget within my department that can be spent on toner for the printer in my research lab. And I’m not allowed to spend NSF money on stuff like this. It has to come from overhead, or some other creative source.

Under the salary of the university, our administrators send us out to compete for our share of federal funds to make our labs run. Getting the grants – the direct costs themselves – is merely part of our job and we are always expected to do the research, as that’s part of our job. However, the grants that we land also come with indirect, which funds the university to make it run.

Indirect is a kind of addictive gravy that comes poured over research grants that makes universities even more hungry for grants. I’ve never met a person in charge of stuff that didn’t love it when a grant comes in. Tell your administrator that you just two big-time publications and won a big non-monetary award. You’ll get a nice smile. Tell them you got a big grant. Then, they’ll be over the moon, and then ask for reassurance, “that comes with full overhead, right?” Administration can get bloated feeding on this gravy, if they don’t spend those calories where they need to be spent.

A similar phenomenon occurred within the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars a couple hundred years ago.

The allocation of indirect costs is surprisingly reminiscent of how the British Navy divvied up the spoils of war.

Whenever the Navy captured a vessel from another navy at war with England, the contents of the ship, and the ship itself, would be sailed back to England and sold. They also did this to any merchants allied with enemies, as well as privateers commissioned by enemies. In a short timeframe, the British Navy was at war with the Dutch, the French, the Spanish and the Americans. That’s potential for a lot of profit. Just like Halliburton makes a mint when the United States goes to war, so did the leadership of the British Navy in those days. War meant profit. For these men in the upper echelons of the Navy, news of peace was bad news.

Meanwhile, the captains of these ships-of-the-line were paid a modest living wage to do their job, and were provided the minimal provisions to get the job done. They were only given enough gunpowder to be used in case they were engaged in battle, and only the most spartan foodstuff were provided for the entire crew, including officers. Many captains, who often rose to that position through social connections, came from families with independent means and were able to purchase livestock and other comforts — and politically necessary entertaining — for their time at sea, and were able to purchase additional powder from their own funds that could be used to train their crews to become accurate and rapid with cannons and carronades. That accuracy and rapidity is what won battles at sea. Winning battles at sea is what brings money.

So, when a ship’s captain takes over an enemy’s ship, he sends over a portion of his crew to sail it back to England, where the ship and its contents are appraised and sold. Then, this prize money gets divvied up. Prize money was awarded even when the enemy’s ship was sunk. The Admiralty decided how this pie is divided. Who gets a piece?

• The Admiralty
• The Captain
• The Senior Wardroom officers (lieutenants, master, and captain of the marines)
• The Senior Warrant officers (carpenter, chaplain, gunner, purser, surgeon, several more men)
• Junior Warrant Officers (a greater variety of men with various jobs)
• The rest of the crew

How did the Admiralty divide this pie among all of the combatants? The Captain himself takes 1/4 of the prize money. Another 1/4 of the prize money is split among all of the regular crew on the vessel, with more senior members getting a bigger cut. The other categories listed above get 1/8 of the prize money.

That means that 7/8 of the prize money is going to the men that risked their lives in battle, and sailed at sea in often perilous conditions. And 1/8 of it goes to the admiral that issued the order. This money doesn’t go to run the Navy. That 1/8 of prize money from every ship captured or sunk goes into the pocket of the insanely wealthy admiral that sent that ship out to sea. (If there were no Admiral’s orders, by the way, then that eighth went to the Captain as well).

How is this system similar to, and how is it different from, how indirect costs are allocated in universities?

In this analogy, the PIs landing grants are the captains who capture ships. The officers and crew of the vessel are the students and staff of the PIs lab that make the project possible. The Admiralty is represented by the string of administrators that are above the PI in the administrative food chain.

I see a few key differences between the Royal Navy and the university. A Captain who does his job successfully becomes wealthy and actually climbs into new realms of social prominence associated with that wealth. PIs who land big grants don’t get paid more by the university, other than perhaps getting 2/9 summer salary. At my institution, if a PI of multiple federal grants were to approach the Admiralty administration for a raise in salary, this PI wouldn’t get yes for an answer. All the PI gets from landing a grant is the ability to keep one’s job, or the ability to fund the research that is expected of the PI. The PI also gets a little pat on the back. At least, that’s what happens at my university.

Here’s another difference. In the Royal Navy, 7/8 of the prize money goes directly to the individuals performing the task to enable the work to take place. In universities, even if you include direct costs into this measure, far less than 7/8 of the total award is controlled by the PI. A good chunk of the spoils of successful battle grantwriting aren’t reinvested back into getting more grants and supporting the projects that landed the grants.

In universities, the Admiral’s take is overwhelmingly greater than 1/8 of the prize money. It sure is at mine, at least.

Is that a fair comparison to make, considering that overhead really needs to be spent on things that the PI needs, to keep the lights on, equipment maintained and all that? I can’t speak for what happens at other universities in any detail, but in my university, the overhead doesn’t flow downhill. Almost none of the overhead gets back to the PI or the Department.

At my university, as rumor has it, all of Academic affairs is lucky to get 25% of the overhead. That’s just a rumor, mind you. The college gets a small bit of that fraction, and the department gets an even smaller piece, and the PI gets a pittance. (I don’t know the exact percentages. I’ve only overheard things at a meeting or two, and our last administration was entirely opaque about finances and the new administration this year is still busy cleaning up the mess left behind by the last one.) It’s not as if the overhead is being used at higher levels for startup packages for faculty, or support faculty research in some other way. I doesn’t even make it over to the academic side of the university budget.

You know that overhead account that I mentioned that I can do whatever I want with? It’s got a few hundred bucks in it. I’ve yet to spend any of it, and it’s less than 1% of the overhead than I’ve generated. (Up until a couple years ago, none — nada – – zilch — of the overhead came back to the PIs). I have to admit it’s hard on the administration to get overhead back to the college and below, because some of the biggest grants that come into the university (mostly education grants) only allow about 10% overhead costs, which I hear is what it takes just to keep the post-award office running. Some of my grants from NSF fit that description, too, because they don’t allow overhead on “participant support costs” often which are the bulk of my awards.

That said, I haven’t observed anything to suggest that indirect costs over the past several years have been spent on any kind of infrastructure to support or facilitate research. Before our new president has started cleaning things up, it’s very clear that the Admiral’s Cut, which was something like 80% of overhead I could guess, was being spent on anything but academic affairs. It looks like this is changing with our new administration. I’ll feel better when I see the trickle that just came through isn’t just an intermittent springtime creek, but a genuine perennial creek. The cartridge in my lab is only going to last out a little while longer.

If you take a step back to look at the big picture, it is stunning.

When Admirals were greedy for even more wealth, they worked to perpetuate the wars so that more prize money would come their way. In the process, they made their successful Captains wealthy and powerful in the process, and allowed for a comfortable living for the crews of victorious vessels.

Administrators of universities that pressure faculty to bring in more and bigger grants have larger amounts of overhead that they can use to fulfill their plans, and they get a boost in salary when promoted to a higher administrative levels as a result of their success, which is built on the grant-garnering skills of their faculty. What do the faculty members get when they bring in these grants? They get to keep their jobs.

When you look at the funds raised from the exploits of Naval Captains and Scientific PIs, who would have thought that the Royal Navy,with only an eighth of the spoils going to the figureheads, would end up looking more equitable than one’s own university?

–

Hat tip to good friend and master artist Tony Millionaire, who once left on my doorstep a fresh copy of Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander.

It’s now the 10-week mark since the launch of this site.

I wasn’t sure to what expect when I started, but I’m pleased at the early, and evolving, outcome.

I want to thank the scores of you that have helped out one way or another, as well as consistent readers, especially those of you who have chatted up the site with colleagues and more broadly shared posts of particular interest.

I’d like to specify thanks to a few who gave me a great push in my first moments. If I had to make a list of only three, in alphabetical order, it would undoubtedly be:

Chris Buddle of Arthropod Ecology, Jeremy Fox of Dynamic Ecology and Alex Wild of Myrmecos. Thanks, guys.

These three gents have distinct and engaging approaches to science that are useful and enlightening. If you haven’t clicked on over to their sites, please do (though odds are you’ve found this site because of them). And buy some spectacular prints from Alex, as he’s got a great sale going on at the moment.

The rest of this post is something like a state-of-the-blog address, in case you wanted to know more about the site and its trajectory. If you want a detailed look under the hood, read on.

Bloggers seem to keep their viewership numbers tight to their chest, maybe like how people don’t openly specify their weight or their salary. I don’t know if I’m violating a tacit code of honor, but here goes: To date the site has been viewed almost 20,000 times; on a run-of-the-mill day, as of this week, a few hundred people are visiting. I imagine that’s a blip compared to many other blogs, but I also expect that it’s uncommon for a blog that’s only 10 weeks old. I’m fortunate for what I think is early rapid growth. Each day, several people find this site by specifically seeking it out on search engines, which suggests some word of mouth. That’s encouraging. (There was one day when a post made the top of Reddit Skeptic. That was fun.) I’m in this for the long haul, and as long as I continue to invest, then I hope to continue growing.

In my first post, I tried to identify five characteristics of a successful blog. I think on all five marks, I’m doing well. First, I work to maintain a clear focus with a useful perspective. Second, I have maintained frequent entries, with one per day, and aiming for an absolute minimum of one substantial longer-form post per week. Third, I am steadily building a community of commenters, which is a diverse crowd with all kinds of academic backgrounds. Fourth, I think I have built up a much larger group of consistent lurking readers (I suspect), and lastly, I hope that I have maintained a high standard of writing quality. It feels that way, at least, because whenever I proof a piece I always catch screwups and typos. (I might write parenthetically too often, but that is better than David Foster Wallace’s copious use of footnotes, right?) Do I still think those five things are the properties of a successful blog? I’m not sure. My views on blogging, and this site, have evolved a lot in the last ten weeks.

I’ve evolved into some patterns that work well. Each weekday, there will be a single post, unless I feel hugely compelled to write something fresh that can’t wait (such as trying to make sense of why E.O. Wilson would tell young scientists to not worry about math). I aim to have at least one substantial and longer-form piece each week, and to make sure that every post introduces or revisit a concept that matters, even if not on a large scale. I’ll save Friday afternoons or weekends for additional posts that might be more relevant to dedicated followers to discuss things about the site (like this post). I’m planning for an ‘efficient teaching’ post weekly, and there are some other plans in the works. I’d love to hear from you via comments or email about what is working and what isn’t.

Summers will be quieter. Come late May, when I’m away doing fieldwork and on some extended travel, posting frequency will drop to 1-3 per week, but will pick back up in late August when the academic year starts back up again. I imagine that a lot of these posts will be about travel, fieldwork, student mentorship, conferences, and writing. Because that’s what I’ll be doing this summer.

If you want to be notified when a post comes out, you can subscribe to the blog with your email address, or sign onto tweet face. (In addition to the blog’s official page on facebook, you can connect with my personal facebook profile, too, using my email address. I don’t do much there and keep is mostly professional, but it’s been good for staying in touch with people.) Or you could just check in at some point in the day or week and get caught up. Or you could do a crossword puzzle instead.

Blogs are, perhaps by definition, a personal medium. I use the pronoun “I” frequently, but notwithstanding that fact I am intent on making this site about ideas, and not about myself. When I insert my own stuff into the picture, I’m doing it to serve the mission of the blog.

Broadly, my mission is to make sense of our jobs as scientists and teachers. Specifically, the mission is to represent, advocate for, support and provide a venue for researchers in teaching institutions. I’m not pleased to hold myself forth as a model, but I recognize that this is a necessary consequence of creating such a site.

Because we at teaching institutions inherently lack credibility with those at research institutions, I couldn’t have done this blog pseudonymously because part of the credibility is derived from the fact of my actual existence. Someone at a teaching school could claim that they’re a researcher, but people at R1 universities wouldn’t put much stock in it without looking at that person’s CV. It’s no accident that the CV on my lab website is being scrutinized a lot more closely now than it was 10 weeks ago. It’s not a strong CV by many R1 standards, but I hope it does show that I am a genuine researcher at a genuine teaching campus. I’ve yet to receive negative feedback for being uppity or self-centered, but the site is young. The challenge I have to face, then, is to live up to my own expectations for what a researcher at a teaching institution should look like. I won’t always live up to this, I realize.

I am aspiring to build something that is rare among academic blogs. There is clearly a niche for researchers in teaching institutions. More importantly, there is a niche for a substantial journalistic approach to writing about the relationships among research, teaching and academia. This is particularly true since Female Science Professor scaled back to a few posts per month.

I want this blog to be read by people who don’t typically read blogs. Most academics in many fields don’t read blogs, or at least don’t admit to it. I don’t know how to reach that audience. I imagine it just takes time and word of mouth. I’m reluctant to say something crazy or argue unnecessarily just to get temporary eyeballs. I realize that might slow my growth rate, but it will also help me to attract an audience that may otherwise be deterred by the general tenor found in most blogs.

I hope that this site can, at least by raising awareness, enhance the underappreciated role of teaching universities in research and academic life. If all kinds of researchers visit this site, they can examine their options and form a realistic view of what is possible (and yes, what isn’t possible) at teaching institutions. They also can adopt a more informed view of their colleagues.

The reason that I want to reach out to people who don’t typically read blogs is not (just) to gain a bigger audience. The hard-working and researchers and teachers in teaching institutions are overlooked, and this community that I want to represent doesn’t live in the internet. We work on campuses, publish in journals and make valuable academic contributions to our own fields. If I’m successful in this blog, then the conversation only starts on this site and makes a difference elsewhere, including campuses, professional societies, editorial boards, and funding agencies. Is that ambitious? Yes, it is. Is it overambitious? Time will tell. One measuring stick would be if we see an emergence of academic bloggers at teaching campuses, who choose to join the community of bloggers that now are mostly in research institutions. We’re all equivalently busy and overworked, in different ways. I want those of us at teaching schools to realize that we belong as much as everyone else.

I’m working towards that goal, of reaching out to many, by providing a broader value and respect for your time than I find in most blogs. I am working to do this by maintaining quality, focus, an absence of in-jokes, and emphasizing constructive engagement with whatever issue is at hand. I may have plenty to gripe about, but I don’t want to spend your time, nor mine, that way. I rarely have the answers, but I want to ask the right questions and get people to think about issues that might not have occurred to them before.

I suppose I should have photoshopped a picture of an ant standing at a podium with an American flag, flanked by Joe Biden and Boehner. But this is the best I could find.

The base teaching load at community colleges is typically five lecture courses per semester. They teach nearly as much as K-12 teachers (who have the most challenging and most important job ever).

Faculty in community colleges aren’t expected to do research.

That doesn’t stop some community college faculty members from doing some research. Heck, there’s a book about it that you can read online.

As a “best practice” in undergraduate education, engaging students in research in the context of the curriculum is thought to be a very effective teaching tool. It’s much better than assigning a term paper, or doing a cookbook lab, or having a classroom discussion. Having students engage in original investigations to learn something new about the world actually helps them learn more of the information that they’re supposed to learn in their courses.

Some community college faculty have moved into the job sideways even though they were pursuing job at a 4-year campus that includes research. I know a number of faculty members that, after a postdoc, and then years of adjuncting as freeway flyers from one teaching gig to another, took a full-time position at a community college. They did this for financial and personal stability, and (I surely hope) because they like teaching. But they didn’t give up research by choice. They just wanted a steady gig and were tired of the postdoc/adjunct turntable. So, it makes sense that they’d pick up a permanent teaching slot, so if they could, especially if it was beneficial for the students.

While some research-interested faculty end up at community college, most in this profession actively chose it as a passion. These folks, if they do research within the curriculum, have the primary purpose of enhancing student learning, I would think.

I’m thrilled about the idea, if only because we get so many transfers to my university from excellent community colleges. I’d love for students to be exposed to research before arriving to us, to help us identify the ones to work with more closely.

Here’s something else to chew on. The teaching load at community colleges is a 5/5. On my campus, it’s a 4/4. That’s not really that different from a community college. This makes you wonder how our university can reasonably expect substantial scholarship from its faculty if they’re teaching nearly as much as faculty who have no such expectations of them at schools just next door. (And those campuses have more technicians running things, with bigger budgets, too.) Are public comprehensives with a 4/4 load not that different from community colleges? Well, with respect to teaching loads, sure, that does seem to be the case. The philosophy, approach, facilities and acceptability of research might vary, and these differences might make or break research programs in the long run.

One principle in teaching is that students need consistent feedback on their performance. They need to know how they’re doing, and use these data to adjust how, and how much, they are studying for a course.

The obvious drawback is that frequent assessments take plenty of your time as the instructor — whether in the form of quizzes, exams, homework, or even clicker questions.

How can you get the benefits of frequent assessments without the drawback of having to do it?

You have ungraded quizzes in class. That is, quizzes graded in class not connected to points.

How does that work? You have a few quiz questions (multiple guess, fill-in-the-blank, short response, whatever). Write them on the board, project them, read them out loud. Make the students write down their responses on sheets of paper.

When the quiz is over (it should take no more than 3 minutes), ask the students to exchange their quizzes with their neighbors. (If they don’t want do, explain that it’s not necessary, just a good idea.) Then, just tell them the answers and have them grade it. Now, tell the students to read over their quizzes then recycle that piece of paper. Let them know that exam questions will look very similar to those questions, and some of them might even be identical.

What makes this different from a clicker question, is that by committing it to paper and having it graded by another person, the evaluation of their performance by someone else feels more formal and it takes the perception of their work outside their own brain.

The students are getting what you need them to get out of a quiz: that they don’t get it well enough. Being able to follow a storyline isn’t the same as being able to explain the story. These quizzes are an immediate reality check for students who might be overly confident before exams.

I also explain this to my students. I explain what metacognition is, and how we have to conscious to think about what we’re thinking about (sensu David Foster Wallace), and that this kind of external check for understanding will give them what they need to know to do well on the test.

I usually do this right at the start of class, because there’s something else that takes 2 minutes that I tend to do at the end of class. More on that another week.

A related factlet: this is a book that lives on my shelf about measuring student performance that I have consulted periodically over the last 12 years. It has lots of good ideas.

Words matter, because words dictate how we think. Our brains think using words to organize ideas. Language and reasoning are coupled together. (Yes, I know some linguists that disagree.)

Here’s a example from our own realm that matters to me.

Faculty members can have their responsibilities partially shifted away from teaching to other obligations. For example, one might be the chair of the academic senate, or serve as departmental chair, run a campus center, or conduct externally-funded research. These responsibilities result in a reduction of the teaching load, to make time available to fulfill other service or research obligations.

I usually hear this shift of effort called “release time.”

That terminology bugs me. This phraseology implies that faculty are being released from a responsibility. That is not the case. The responsibility is being shifted partly away from teaching and partly towards service or research.

Nobody’s getting “released” from anything. Nobody’s getting away with anything.

In fact, in nearly all so-called “release time” assignments that I’m familiar with, the amount of time and effort required for the new task well exceed the teaching assignment from which the faculty member was “released.”

This is why I use the term “reassigned time,” because it more accurately reflects the arrangement at hand. If we give in to the term “release time,” then this gives a false impression to those who have the power to grant or deny this reassignment of your time. While we all rationally know that “release time” is still just as much — and typically more — work, the terminology works in insidious and subconscious ways.

So, when you’re negotiating for time to do an externally funded project, don’t call it release. Call it reassignment. It’s not only more accurate, but it might even increase the chance of a favorable decision.

The academic publishing environment is being undermined by a bunch of extrinsic and intrinsic forces.

One such force is the genre of academic glamour magazines. They have massive impact factors that allow you to make a big splash when you land a spot inside one of them. Sometimes genuinely huge discoveries and advances end up in Science, Nature, Ecology Letters, or Cell. But most of what appears in these venues is a big sexy idea that doesn’t have any real lasting value. If science were nutrition, then this is junk food. It’s yummy, and it is dressed up with everything to make it exciting and yummy, but rarely is there substance.

For those running labs in research institutions, the perceived wisdom is that you should be publishing in a glamour magazine once in a while.

For those of us at teaching campuses, the perceived wisdom is that you should be publishing once in a while.

There are increased calls for principled stands against glamour mags. For those who stand too firm on principle and avoid any whiff of careerism when choosing a journal, Physioprof pointed out last year out that you’re probably in a position of privilege if you’re saying that. I like Drugmonkey’s attitude, to subvert the system by being entirely reasonable. Among these reasonable ideas: don’t cite glamour mags unnecessarily; don’t not publish a result because you can’t get it into one of them; as a reviewer, keep the standard crap out of them and support excellent work by your colleagues when you get it for review.

At teaching institutions, we approach this issue from an entirely different perspective. We rarely review for those venues, and typically don’t submit to them either. (I’ve submitted to Science/Nature a few times and reviewed a few times.) This suits institutional expectations. Landing a paper in a Science or Nature would be an immense coup. Few, if any, on campus would ever think of this as a gimmicky paper, though the rarity of it wouldn’t be fully appreciated. (The only person that I’ve ever worked with at a teaching campus who had one of these papers during my time actually has an overall below-par publishing record.)

These are glamour magazines because they are a flashy thing that impresses, because of the rarity itself. Gold and diamonds are valuable because there isn’t that much of them, or because they are difficult to access. Likewise, it’s hard to get into glamour mags, so that’s what makes them flashy. These papers themselves don’t communicate the value or prestige of a research program, they’re just the flashy pieces of ornamentation that are necessary.

What, then, is truly glamorous on a teaching campus? The answer is publications. Lots of ’em. The reason that this is glamorous is also because of its rarity. While many people publish on teaching campuses, status and glamour comes from doing it in high volume, because so few are able to do this. This is true even if the venues are not highly regarded, and even if the papers don’t end up being cited. If you want to show off your bling on a teaching campus, five papers in obscure regional or highly specialized journals actually seem more impressive than one paper in a top-notch journal. The people who are arbiters of your reputation on campus might not be able to assess publication quality, but they sure can assess publication frequency.

I make a point to publish in which I consider to be venues appropriate for my work. I avoid merely descriptive or confirmatory work without introducing substantial new ideas, so I try to avoid journals that mostly include this kind of work. I could change my focus and crank out many more papers than I do, in lower-impact journals, but that would harm my credibility in among my scientific peers even as it would increase my profile on campus. Some other scientists manage that tradeoff in different ways, of course. I’m not overly concerned as long as people work on their passion, and make sure that it gets shared with the world.

What is the distinction between publishing for glamour and publishing for genuine impact? It’s probably the same distinction between measured “impact factor” and and long-term citation rates.

When it comes to reform, and “reform,” it seems like most people think they know the fix, regardless of the problem that needs to be fixed.

For example, many people have strong opinions about how to solve the public education crisis in the U.S. What most of the people pushing for “reform” have in common is that they have little experience or success in public education. Solutions to a problem might involve fewer taxes, more taxes, more investment, less investment, more regulation, fewer regulations. It all blurs together.

It’s not too often that you hear someone in a position of ignorance say, “I’ll defer to the education experts.”

For some problems, there are self-evident partial fixes that don’t need any discussion, because the people who are wrong on the issue are straight-up ignoramuses. For example, if you want better schools, then you need to confer more respect, support and money to teachers. You can’t have good schools if the teachers don’t receive respect and support. That’s just obvious. If you want If you want children to stop dying at the hands of madmen, then you’ve got to restrict access to guns. You can’t get more sensible than that, and it’s a fact that other developed nations have figured out long ago.

The scientific publishing industry is a mess in several different ways, and this mess is stifling research progress. There are not many overt direct solutions. Perhaps scientists should be able to retain copyright of their own work, butthis is a complex issue.

There is one component of the academic publishing mess that can be quickly and easily changed by us authors.

If you want more confidence and fairness in the integrity of the publication process, then you need more transparency.

There is one massive thing that we can do to increase the transparency of the publication process. We can publish our reviews.

Here are some upsides to releasing your reviews:

• There will be fewer doubts about the integrity of journals and the quality of peer review.
• There will be more doubts about the integrity of journals that should be subject to doubts.
• Reviewers, even though they are anonymous, may tend toward producing more civil and measured reviews, with fewer requests for citations to their own work, if the reviews end up being published.
• Specific concerns about the scientific content of that paper which were addressed during the review process will be publicly available, increasing the ability of readers to critically evaluate the science of the publications.
• Taxpayers who are paying for research will be more even more informed about the process and consequences of publicly-funded projects.
• People will learn that the quantity and quality of peer review may be independent of the impact factor, prestige or ranking of a journal.
• The academic glamour magazines will look a lot less glamorous if the reviews and editorial evaluations associated with those venues are seen in daylight.

How does this work? Just put ’em on your website. I’ve been doing this since 2009. Go ahead and ‘read ’em! (and, feel free to cite them)

It takes a very short time to do this. I just take the reviews as they come in and copy-and-paste them into a word processing document, redacting the names of my correspondents. Then I make it into a pdf, and upload it right next to the paper itself on my website.

To my knowledge, I’m the only person who ever does this as a regular course of action.

I haven’t often mentioned it while chatting with colleagues, even though I know plenty of folks are downloading reprints from my site. Perhaps nobody mentions it because they think it’s a supremely risky or unwise thing to do. If you read through the files, you might notice that one or two good journals come out looking rather silly. It might have resulted in a grudge on their end, though, I don’t think that’s the case. Obviously it’s not wholly positive about me, to show evidence of rejection after rejection for some papers. I think the benefits of transparency outweigh publishing negative reviews that result in rejection.

How do the journals feel about this? Nobody’s ever said anything. It hasn’t come up.

I do look at this from the perspective of an editor, too. I have handled my share of manuscripts. I doubt that any of the authors whose manuscripts I handle are publishing their rejections and acceptances online (and rejections are far more common than acceptances). Nevertheless, I work for quality and fairness, which is clear enough so that if the documents were public, and my name were on them, that I would be proud of the work and not feel as if I would have to make any excuses. I do include the names of journals, but not the names of any particular individuals. You could infer editors-in-chief based on the dates in the correspondence, but it’s a different matter for handling editors.

I approach editing with the philosophy that I would want to be sure that I would be able to handle public scrutiny if it all was published on the front page of the newspaper. I also have the same policy for how I conduct myself in the classroom, and how I correspond over email. I honestly wouldn’t be bothered if my reviews of a manuscript and my remarks as an editor were publicly revealed with my name. I certainly wouldn’t mind if they were released without any name attached, which is what I do with the reviews I share with the world.

I don’t think people are too particular about the content of these reviews. They want to see the final paper, and few want to look into the sausage factory. It is probably of greatest interest to students who don’t know about how the process works.

One thing that you’ll see is the rigor of peer review associated with PLoS ONE. I’ve only published one paper in this venue so far, and when you compare the process there to the quality of editorial work in the other publications, and in the submissions of that paper to other venues first, you have to respect what happens under the hood at PLoS ONE.

Do you think this is a great idea to share your reviews? If everybody shared their reviews, would it destabilize the publication process, result in no change, or make things more fair? Would the level of hap involved in the process, and the importance of salesmanship, become more evident?

I’m not suggesting that this is a major fix, but from the way I’ve seen the angles so far, I see a lot of positives.

There was a diversity of visceral reactions to EO Wilson’s op-ed piece, which argued that you can be a great scientist without being good at math. The lowdown can be found at Dynamic Ecology (with 15 updates as of this writing!) I wrote my own take on it here.

Before we go any further, I’m curious about all of you, what’s your take on the op-ed piece? Compel yourself to make a choice. (If you have caveats, put them in the comments section of the post, but please pick one or the other).

–

One common reaction by scientists who teach and train students was, “Thanks, Ed, for making my job harder.” That was my first thought, as I regularly teach Biostatistics.

Another common reaction was, “That’s not the message to send students early on as they still are developing their skills in all aspects.”

With these ideas in mind, I brought the op-ed piece to a bunch of high school teachers. They read it and we discussed it for about half an hour. How did the discussion go?

First, let me tell you more about the teachers. I regularly meet with this crowd as a part of an NSF-funded Noyce Master Teacher Fellow program that I run with education faculty. They all have their Master’s degree (most in education, some in science) and were competitively selected for this program as a result of their experience, excellence and continued commitment to teach in high-need urban schools in South Los Angeles. These teachers work in rough schools, with kids who have the deck stacked against them even before they enter the classroom. They were picked for this program because they are the ones staying at their schools even though most new teachers leave after a very short time.

These teachers are talented, dedicated, overworked, and mentors to new teachers. I tell them so often how much I respect and admire they work they’re probably sick of hearing it. (I have learned a lot from them about teaching over the past couple years, no surprise there.) One of the reasons I try to praise often is because they hear it so little elsewhere. The newspapers and the mayor and the school board and anybody who has a loud mouth will say that these teachers are the problem that need to be fixed. Let me tell you, that’s entirely backwards. These teachers are the solution to the problem. Free these teachers to do what they were professionally trained to do, with the resources to do it, and you’ll see the positive changes that have been so elusive. (Making this change, sadly, is politically complex).

These teachers know their stuff. Moreover, they teach exactly the population of students that NSF is trying to hard to recruit into the sciences: “underrepresented.”

The opinion of these teachers about the requisite math skills for becoming a scientist matters, more so than anybody else in the whole of the USA.

What did they say about Wilson’s piece? Immediately after we all read it, I did an informal survey: thumbs up or thumbs down, just like in this post. (Rest in peace, Roger Ebert.)

All I saw were thumbs up, or neutralish waves of whatever. I asked, why is that?

The general consensus was that being good at the process of science isn’t inherently mathematical. You don’t want to dissuade someone who is interested in science, after all. Of course, you need to use math, but that shouldn’t stop you from pursuing science and the math can come along for the ride. That was the initial response.

Then, one person (the only physics teacher in the bunch) disagreed, and a biology teacher joined in. They said that to be good at the practice of science, in real life, you have to be able to do math. You can’t really understand some fundamental principles in science unless you can grasp the math. There were some disagreements, that this was endemic to physics, but then plenty of examples throughout the sciences were brought up. It was also raised that engineering is growing in importance and will be a key feature in new state educational standards soon to be adopted.

The discussion then turned to the fact that specific skill sets are required not just to be able to do science, but also to land positions, perform your job, and be able to adapt to evolving requirements of these jobs. Not all scientists can choose to work on whatever they want, even though E.O. Wilson has that option, and we need to train students to be prepared for the opportunities that rise before them and to be able to use their skills to create the opportunities that they want, or need.

If you’re E.O. Wilson, then you don’t need math, we decided. But if you’re not Wilson, with National Academy mathematicians available for collaboration, then sophisticated math is a very practical skill that will serve you well in the sciences more than almost any other resource. Especially if we are training students from disadvantaged backgrounds, we want to be able to confer upon our students every possible advantage, and being analytically and mathematically adept is key. It’s genuinely a key. It opens doors.

In the end, we agreed that Wilson was right on the fact: It’s possible to be a great scientist and not be great at math; this is a possibility.

We also agreed that this was a downright destructive choice to communicate such an idea.

Wilson’s article lamented that he had a hard time recruiting Harvard students to become scientists because of their math phobia. Nearly all of his students are archetypes of privilege, who also received strong preparation in high school before winding up at Harvard.

Meanwhile, the students in the classes of our master teachers who are lucky enough to graduate and then go to college, are likely to need remedial math. At my university, it’s been normal for a majority of entering students to require remedial math courses right off the bat because they don’t pass the stunningly basic placement exam. Do we want to tell them that math isn’t important to become a scientist? Should we tell them that this remedial math doesn’t matter, and that the calculus course required for our major is pointless?

Perhaps Wilson would like to visit us, and tell my students that they don’t need to worry too much about developing math talents to further their careers as scientists.

Far too often, my students have heard while growing up that they don’t need to work hard at something difficult. They have heard plenty enough that they should just slide into tasks suited to their inherent abilities, whatever they may be, rather than kick it up a notch and genuinely improve one’s talents. If you’re the first one in your family to go to college, expectations are paramount.

Maybe Wilson should limit his don’t-sweat-the-math message to his Harvard students. That way, our students will get jobs over their underprepared Ivy League competitors.

And then I woke up.

It’s unsatisfying to be told that college students are learning “how to think.”

You don’t need to go to college for that. While the lack of teaching critical thinking in the curriculum is problematic, that’s not what the primary outcome of college should be.

You go to college not to learn to think, but instead to discover what to think about, said David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, including this 687-karat sized gem of wisdom, was reprinted in the Best Nonrequired Reading series. Since then, it’s been abridged and put into a cute book that you can give to a graduating student, if you don’t want to gift Dr. Seuss’s Oh the places you’ll go. I think it’s better to hear his talk than to read it. (He’s such a good writer, that you can tell that he wrote his address to be heard and not to be read.)

We need to think about the right things. For the past several years, when I get annoyed with minutia, I’ve told myself to focus on what matters. I don’t leave notes for myself, though that’s a great idea. I non-verbally tell myself, “This is water.” If you haven’t yet taken the 23 minutes out of your life to listen to this, I heartily recommend it.

When you’re done, if you’re still excited about the E.O. Wilson v, Math kerfuffle, then you could listen to David Foster Wallace with this perspective: how do you think about ecology? Are you thinking about their organisms and their interactions with the environment, or thinking about how math describes the interactions of organisms with the environment? Both are great. I lean towards the former, but to each their own.

Current events (E.O. Wilson saying that scientists don’t need to be good at math) give me a great reason to introduce what might be my favorite scientific paper.

I have three reasons for choosing this paper to share with you. One minor reason is that, from one ant man for another more illustrious ant man, I’d like to be one of the few scientists to publicly say something nice about E.O. Wilson this week without any kind of caveat.

Second, the content of this paper, and the fact of its existence, frames Wilson’s message about science and math that dovetails with my recent writing on how to design a research program.

Last, since this paper was published it has been a source of inspiration to me as a scientist.

Without further ado, here’s the paper:

Wilson, E.O. 2005. Oribatid mite predation by small ants of the genus Pheidole. Insectes Sociaux 52: 263-265. There is a paywall – email me if you’d like a copy.

Here is the abstract of this three-pager in its entirety:

Using “cafeteria experiments” with forest soil and litter, I obtained evidence that at least some small Neotropical species of Pheidole prey on a wide array of slow-moving invertebrates, favoring those of approximately their own size. The most frequent prey were oribatid mites, a disproportion evidently due in part to the abundance of these organisms. The ants have no difficulty breaking through the calcified exoskeleton of the mites.

What is the deal with this, and why is it inspirational? Please humor me by reading on if I haven’t lost you already.

This paper was published in the year 2005. In 2003, after several decades of effort, Wilson had published a monumental revision of the most species-rich genus of ant, Pheidole. Any taxonomist can appreciate the sheer enormity of this effort that had Wilson’s attention over the years. Clearly, it’s a work of love. Most Pheidole are tiny in size. They’re charming little ants, if nondescript, and not really different from one another in obvious ways that could account for their richness.

Like most years, 2005 was a good year for Wilson. He wrote three PNAS papers, two with his long-time friend and colleague Bert Hölldobler. He also wrote a controversial paper in Social Research arguing that altruism doesn’t principally arise from kin selection, a precursor to Wilson’s now full-fledged group selection posture. He had a book chapter come out, oh, and also he published a big book introducing the concept of gene-culture coevolution. And then there was this little paper, one of my favorite papers ever, in Insectes Sociaux.

If you want to understand and measure the diversity of ants, the first place to start is to sample the leaf litter. A whole book has been written about how to do this, actually. That’s where the action is, in terms of functional and taxonomic diversity. Pretty much wherever you go on the entire planet, the most common thing that you’ll find in the litter is Pheidole. They’re cosmopolitan, if not sophisticated. If the importance of a taxon is measured by its diversity, abundance and distribution, then Pheidoleare the most important ants. (I guess you could argue for carpenter ants, too. But why? They’re so boring.)

Wilson has argued time and time again that ants are really important, they rule the world, they have the same biomass as people, and all that stuff. So, since Pheidole are the ants that rule among the ants, then we’ve got to really have figured out these ants, right? After all, they’re easy to find, they show up at baits, they’re easy to work with.

So what can we, as the community of ant biologists, tell you about the natural history, life history and habits of these Pheidole that live in leaf litter? Here’s a quick list of features:

• _
• _
• _

That’s only a slight underexaggeration. Okay, so, I can at least tell you what they eat.

No, I can’t.

Actually, I can. Why? Because E.O. goddamn Wilson, at 79 years of age, after reaching the pinnacle of his career twenty different times and receiving every honor you could invent, decided to do the little experiment to figure this out. He wrote it up as a sole authored paper in a specialized journal.

It turns out they love oribatid mites. Now you know.

(This is not insignificant, actually, for the field of chemical ecology. Two years after the Wilson paper, Ralph Saporito sorted out that mite alkaloids end up in ants, which end up in poison frogs as their chemical defenses. The frogs also eat the mites directly, too.)

Wilson had spent decades slowly churning on the revision of Pheidole. After spending all that time at the scope and in the museum sorting out the genus, he can’t be blamed for thinking, “what do we know about these ladies after all?” Instead of just wondering, he did the experiment. You gotta love that spirit.

It’s rare for a midcareer PI of a typical lab to do a little experiment of one’s own like this and take the time to write it up. And then there’s EO Wilson doing his own experiments, among a string of high-profile papers, books, gala appearances and being a reliable stand-up mentor to junior colleagues. This communicates an unabashed love for these ants, for discovery, for natural history, and for answering unanswered questions wherever they lead you. Wilson is the consummate tinkerer.

This paper is by no means an outlier. Studies like these pepper his CV, sandwiched with his major theories and findings. To me, these are the actual meat of the sandwich. (Or tofu or something. I don’t eat meat.) To those of us who study ants, that’s what makes Wilson a rockstar. He’d be super-awesome without any of the books and big theories formulated by collaborations with mathematicians. His productivity, keen sense of natural history, an eye for observation and an interest in discovering questions as well as answers has been a trademark of his ant-centered work. The man loves ants, and it shows.

When this paper had come out, I had been working on the ecology of litter-nesting ants in tropical rainforests for about ten years. There were many ideas that I was pursuing, and I’m proud of what I’ve done and excited about what lies ahead. This has been rewarding because so little is known about the biology of these animals, despite their abundance and diversity.

After ten years, if you had asked me, so what do they eat? I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. How many zoologists do you know who can’t tell you the diet of their study organism?

Isn’t that odd that I didn’t know what these ants eat? That nobody knew, at all? Hell yes, it’s odd. Wilson saw it was odd. And he did something about it. The publication of this paper was but a speck, if a speck at all, on the face of his career. For those of us who study litter ants, this was very important. Any one of us could have done it. But you know what? We didn’t, while Wilson did.

That’s what badass science looks like, in my book. And it doesn’t require partial differential equations.

Footnote: You might be wondering, by the way, how can you not know what they eat if you work with them all the time? The answer is, essentially, that these are really small ants. A massive colony fits in a microcentrifuge tube, and a smallish one can fit in a 2 cm piece of straw. You won’t see what’s between their mandibles in the wild, and can’t make out the refuse in nests, either.

Update 10 March 2014: Since I published this post, I’ve been made aware of an alternative agenda in Jeffrey Beall’s crusade against predatory publishers. His real crusade is, apparently, against Open Access publishing. This agenda is clearlyindicated in his own words in an open access publication entitled, “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access.” More information about Beall’s agenda can be found here. I am not removing this post from the site, but I am disavowing its contents as positive coverageof the work of Beall may undermine the long-term goal of allowing all scientists, and the public, to access peer-reviewedpublications as easily and inexpensively as possible.

Earlier on, I lamented the annoying – and predatory – practices of pseudojournals. I wished that someone could do something to identify and contain these parasites.

I just learned someone is. Meet Jeffrey Beall. This guy is awesome. He’s an academic librarian at UC Denver. He’s taken on the herculean task of identifying, calling out, and investigating all of these non-journals that try hard to look like real academic outfits.

He calls these pseudoacademic entities “predatory journals” and “predatory publishers,” which is an apt label.

He runs the blog Scholarly Open Access, which I just discovered last week.

A column by him ran in Nature Magazine about this topic and his blog six months ago. I’m not a guy who regularly peruses Nature (unless EO Wilson goes all group-selectionist and my colleagues go all doctrinarian), so this slipped my attention.

It’s definitely worth a visit to Beall’s site. Not only does he keep an up-to-date list of publishers and journals that are “predatory” in nature, he also shares much of his investigation into particular circ*mstances, such as this one guy who is the “Editor in Chief” of several “journals.”

These journals have all kinds of fake information and corrupt financial arrangements, often done in a hilariously inept manner. It’s entertaining to spend some time on this blog. I’ll be regularly visiting, for entertainment of the drive-past-an-accident-scene-and-can’t-not-look-while-passing-by kind of variety.

Of course, it’s of practical use too, in the event your institution also has people who use these fake journals as a way to boost their CV, in case they need an external opinion to validate your own. Mr. Beall is doing some spectacular work and we should all express some appreciation for delving into this muck on behalf of the rest of academia.

By the way, right after I prepared this post, the New York Times came out with a profile of Beall’s efforts, focusing on not only pseudojournals but also the pseudoconferences that are hosted by the same or similar organizations.

In complex societies, tribes inevitably emerge when individuals with similarities band together, to promote and defend their own interests. I’m not going to go all Jared Diamond on you and pretend to be an anthropology scholar. But I can go so far as to claim that like individuals gravitate to like, and then things have the potential to get ugly.

Scientific tribes are based on ideas. These often track one’s scientific lineage, but ultimately your own ideas — and the people with whom you associate — become your tribe.

Like in any social group, membership in a tribe offers a blend of benefits and costs. Tribes can expand your influence and power, though mostly only as far as the reach of your tribe. The leaders of tribes might be propelled into a greater role beyond the tribe, but the rank-and-file members of the tribe are stuck in that group.

In science, you can join a tribe, but you don’t have to. If you’re research active and collaborate, it takes some work to avoid drifting into one.

The problem with these tribes is that most people haven’t learned how to play nice. What’s worse, is that people have trouble separating out criticism of ideas from personal attacks. Some people conflate the two together. Others use personal attacks when they aren’t necessary or warranted.

On an unsettled topic, I occasionally do enjoy me a good argument, if I think it’s going somewhere and I have the capacity to learn or make a difference.

That’s a rare opportunity, because it seems that most interlocutors are not entering into discussion to genuinely convince another person, or with a mind that is adequately open to change. Instead, people enter an argument to win. I’m open to being convinced, but instead of getting a convincing argument, I usually get an attack on my ideas rather than a sales job on more attractive ideas.

That’s no good. That kind of discussion isn’t worth my time. I’d rather be exposed to something that has the capacity for a positive change, either on myself or others.

Those polemics used to be something I used to like, I think, though it was a while ago. I went to one of those liberal arts colleges where it’s not uncommon to find yourself staying awake into the wee hours of the morning discussing politics, history, religion, science, sociology and the nature of existence, and where all of these ideas intersect. I loved it. At the time, the school was as diverse as a privileged expensive school could possibly be, so there was always someone to disagree with you. It was an intellectually challenging environment, and I loved it. I learned a lot about how to disagree with people but still maintain respect for, and from, others. I wasn’t always successful, but I learned that this respect this is a priority. One model for this kind of collegiality is the late Paul Wellstone.

It turns out that most people haven’t developed that skill, even scientists with PhDs. Perhaps they have the skill but not the patience to exercise it. Or, maybe, they have the skill but have decided that winning an argument is more important to establish social dominance within a tribe. Social dominance within a tribe is important, because in a tribal environment you can only get ahead unless you’re leading the tribe.

This is why scientists often engage in pointless arguments in which nobody changes their minds.

One example is the recent kerfuffle when E.O. Wilson was the author of a Nature magazine article with a complex population demography model that purportedly supported group selection over kin selection in the evolution of eusociality. (I have to admit that, despite a few careful reads, I mostly but not entirely understood the technical merits of the paper.) The massive backlash from the kin selectionist tribe was not based on the actual science in the article, but instead at the inflammatory (and factually incorrect) statements within the article directed at the other tribe. Wilson designed the paper to start a hissyfit, and it did. There were several letters published in response to the article, which essentially were designed to punish Wilson for offending the tribe which he used to lead.

Both sides wanted to win the argument. Meanwhile, in all honesty, I can’t think of a single person who was an author to any of the articles or rebuttals that has deliberately and publicly sought to reconcile the ample contradictory evidence that exists. I think most of the people involved really wish to understand the science of how eusociality has evolved so many times, and under what selective forces. But nearly everything published is tribal in nature. Why is that?

I suspect that the benefits of the tribe outweigh the costs and limitations. it’s easier to lead a tribe than forge your own way. It’s not only easier intellectually, it can be better for one’s career. Ecology is filled with a history of feuds among tribes, and I’m sure other disciplines are the same way. The leaders of these tribes now have named professorships, big salaries, and are revered as great elders within their subsubfields. That’s what you get for leading a tribe.

To ascend to leadership of a tribe, you have to have certain attributes. One prerequisite is that you need to have an academic position at well-known research institution. Since I work in a small pond, that rules me out of tribal leadership. Unless I pick up and move to a place where I have PhD students, a big lab, and larger grants, I’ll never get past the status of beta male.

Since I can’t ascend to tribal leadership, why would I want to join a tribe? There are benefits to being a member of the tribe, but there are also costs and limitations. The benefits are small enough for me that I don’t want to incur those costs. A few years ago, I stuck my neck out to publicly support a well-established member of a tribe who was attacked by a rogue journalist, and at the first opportunity he disavowed my support, by lying to me, in a major public diss. It seems I’m not able to join that tribe, after all. (I don’t mind bringing it up here because, after all, I was already totally dissed as insignificant by this guy.) You won’t see me doing that again.

As the proprietor of this blog, I have to be particularly conscious about how tribalism works, as heavily expressing an opinion here or there could easily shift me towards a tribal affiliation, even though I wouldn’t get much benefits from the tribe. I can’t think of many scientific issues on which I feel the need to choose one side or the other. (Of course, I’m not counting non-controversies that make it into the media as controversies.) On the other hand, I am inclined to call out the ridiculousness of arguments when both sides aren’t listening to one another well enough.

I’m a member of a few clearly defined social groups, reflecting who I spend my time with in the sciences. These mostly include social insect researchers and also those who work in tropical rainforests, mostly at one particular field station. That group numbers easily in the hundreds to a few thousand. It’s a good crowd. But I stay out of arguments, like the silly one about Wilson that I mentioned above. I’m not an ant tribalist, or a La Selva tribalist. But those are the people with whom I run.

Which brings me to the current events that prompted me to write this post.

The latest tribalist kerfuffle started this weekend, yet again with E.O. Wilson, the gentleman rabble-rouser. He wrote an op-ed piece run by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, in which he argued that you didn’t have to be good at math to become a great scientist.

I agree with his idea, with some caveats. His supporting arguments weren’t that robust, mostly trumpeting his own success and ability to collaborate with top-notch modelers.

This didn’t stop some people from taking huge exception, yet again, like clockwork. There’s a good discussion over at Dynamic Ecology about Wilson’s notion that math isn’t important for generating new ideas.

It’s no coincidence that Wilson’s position on math comes not too long after he used some very sophisticated math to make an argument that got aroused tribal anger. The incongruity of the position that “math doesn’t matter but complex math is the main support of my controversial stance” is sending some people into fits.

Of course, this had to have been entirely calculated by Wilson, who wanted to start this argument. I think it’s a good discussion for us to have, broadly speaking, about the attributes that we need to develop to make creative scientists. That’s where this discussion is going, I suspect he hopes, once the outrage passes.

What are the tribes engaged in this argument that was prompted by Wilson? It’s one as old as the field: the empiricists vs. the theoreticians.

Yawn.

The theoreticians essentially have ruled the roost for the last fifty years in ecology. There’s always been a place for work that is driven by empirical investigation, which in fact occupies far more pages in journals that the more math-intensive theoretical work. Despite being outnumbered, the theoretically-focused researchers are the ones who tend to fill up the editorial boards, publish in the highest-impact journals, and attract the biggest crowds at conferences. There clearly is a celebrity culture in the field, and the top theoreticians mostly rank higher than the top empiricists.

Keep in mind that this is an artificial dividing line. Few are wholly theoretical or empirical. However, for those that have clearly identified affiliations, the theoreticians are in charge. They’ll probably tell you that their status has emerged because their work is more valuable. When David Tilman received an award from the Ecological Society, the main point of his address was that you should do theoretical work just like he does because other work is less valuable. That’s gutsy.

If theoreticians are so in charge of affairs, then why are they so upset when someone says that mathematically-driven theories are a footnote to science rather than the heart of it? That op-ed piece, after all, isn’t going to change what the theoreticians allow to be published in the top journals in the field. Why get so upset?

They’re upset because it came from Wilson. This man built his fame, in part, using theoretical models using somewhat to very fancy math, with collaborators who were good at math. He essentially wrote that he was the ideas man and that the math collaborators are easy to come by. If he mentioned Robert MacArthur by name as one of the easy-to-come-by-theoretical-collaborators, then all hell would have broken loose, considering MacArthur’s status as a tribe leader before his untimely death.

For an empiricist who built his reputation with the help from more analytically minded coauthors who often did the rhetorical heavy-lifiting, it’s pretty brutal for Wilson to overtly suggest in the Wall Street Journal that his contributions were the important ones. He was the man with the vision and those other guys with the math could have been anybody.

Now that’s gotta hurt.

If I was a theoretician, you’re damn right I’d be pissed off.

I’d be pissed off because I ‘d have difficulty separating the logic of Wilson’s argument from the personal nature of his message. What’s Wilson’s argument? That you can have great ideas, and make those ideas come into reality and make scientific progress happen, without being particularly good at math. You need to be okay at the math, but you don’t have to obsess on it.

Is that true? Well, partially. But it’s not true if you’re going to become a theoretician.

So why are theoreticians so offended, if Wilson says that there’s another valid route to become a scientist that isn’t driven by math-heavy theories? I think it’s because many of the them think that the central ideas in the sciences nowadays are mostly mathematical.

Are there major progresses to be made without a lot of math? My initial thought is: hell yes there are. We’re still in the wild west of scientific discovery, with huge frontiers yet to be explored. Not everybody agrees with that, though.

That is an interesting debate, in my view.

As I’m not in the theoretical tribe, I can look at this with some distance. I can do that because my contributions weren’t directly insulted, and I am in a position to separate the concept of his argument from the people in the argument.

Wilson, in a rhetorically inelegant fashion, just reignited the ol’ empirical vs. theoretical fight. I think if he were rhetorically elegant, it would have passed unread. It would have been too intellectual for Fox News The Wall Street Journal. And it’s such an old saw that typical venues wouldn’t be interested in hearing it. I wonder if the WSJ was his first choice.

Here, is the essence of the disagreement:

Are the central concepts in science based on equations and mathematical relationships, or are they built on broader principles that do not have to be described by mathematical models?

Here is how I reconcile the disagreement: All relationships can be described with math. To fully understand any phenomenon, math is the language of nature and the language of science. Math is key to understanding patterns and relationships, as math essentially the only way they can be expressed in a specific form, other than using logic. However, in order to be able to write the equations that describe the patterns, we must first be able to know what the variables are, and how they might be able to relate to one another. Wilson’s point, though written inelegantly, was that many of the potential relationships that might exist haven’t even yet come to our attention. You can’t build the model without knowing which variables to put into the model.

The fundamental divide between empiricists and theoreticians is a disagreement about whether we know what the most important variables are. Empiricists are in search of the variables, and theoreticians are seeking to develop the specific patterns among variables. When empiricists do experimental and observational research, they’re testing whether specific things matter, and if so, how.

A few times in my career as an empiricist, I think I’ve come upon new variables, or shown in a very clear way that the relationships between a few variables matters in a way that wouldn’t compel theoreticians without theoretical evidence. I am not as personally interested in working out the specific relationships between key variables as I am sorting out which variables matter.

I think the same could be said about Wilson. He thought that the size of an island, and its shape and distance from the mainland (and so on) would be very predictive of the species richness on an island. Then, he buddied up with MacArthur who worked with him on the details. I think they both were important – perhaps essential – in the development of the Theory of Island Biogoegraphy. I don’t know the history enough to know whether this is something that MacArthur would have, or could have, done without Wilson. Wilson didn’t invoke this example in his piece. Instead he invoked George Oster, who worked on social insect caste theory with Wilson. In this case, Wilson was clearly the social insect ideas man and Oster was the modeling man. I do think that Wilson is correct in this case – that Oster couldn’t have done it without Wilson in particular, but that Wilson could have found many modelers to work with him on this monograph. It was inelegant for Wilson to point out this fact. I hope I’m more gracious when I hit that stage of my life.

To slightly rephrase, here’s where the divide lies: does the world still need people who are envisioning these variables in the broad sense, or do we all need to learn how to do the complex math to model relationships?

I think we all should learn the math, we all should learn how to model, and this would inform our world view. However, there are only so many hours in the day. It so happens that some of the most visionary people are the ones that have focused on things other than modeling. It also so happens that some of our visionaries are excellent modelers.

As David Foster Wallace has pointed out (stay tuned for a post later this week): what we learn in our studies is not how to think, but what to think about. Should we think about models, or should we think about what belongs in the models? These are somewhat mutually exclusive, I think. We do need people who think about the latter more than the former.

In my experience, when I spend to much time trying to model relationships, I lose sight of the forest – both in metaphorical and in actual terms. If my projects lead to developing and testing models, I’m all over it. But right now, I’m still trying to identify which relationships matter, because there is so much that remains unknown. (In the coming month, I’ll take the time to write another long post about how avoiding modeling led to a discovery, oddly enough in one of Wilson’s pet genera.)

So yes, I think Wilson is right. You can be a visionary without being a modeler.

Modelers themselves are also visionaries. That’s where Wilson is wrong.

I can get a little jealous of people who have research systems in their labs, or do fieldwork nearby. You can just run experiments year-round if you want. A manuscript needs a more data for the revision? Go ahead and knock that experiment out. If you want flexibility when you get to do research, then having research right at home works quite well.

Then, why is it that some of the most successful researchers that I know have research systems that are geographically far away from the university? And the people — at teaching institutions — with the most tractable, easy-to-use systems can have trouble getting stuff done? (I think there’s a whole other set of problems with model systems on small campuses, but that’s a whole other diatribe post.)

Being far away from your research system can be a recipe for success. Among people I’ve known, a marine ecologist might have to drive eight hours to the rocky coast. Some physicists have collaborative projects at big national or international labs on the far coast of the US, Europe, and Japan. Anthropologists have sites in Southeast Asia and Central and South America. Humanities researchers rely on archives that are in libraries in distant cities. Others might study ephemeral events that occur locally, with no control over the timing of the events.

There are also successful people who work locally, too. Regardless, it is very clear that having your research system on the other side of the world doesn’t preclude success, even if you’re based in a small pond. That strikes me as counterintuitive.

In my own circ*mstance, I think having all of my fieldwork based out of Costa Rica has been a great boon for my productivity. If I was able to do research in the local mountains or desert, I don’t think I’d really get anything done. I’d never compartmentalize the time that it takes to fully focus on the work.

I’ll consider this with a social insect analogy.

Some of the most “advanced” social insect societies (as some call them) have workers that demonstrate temporal polyethism. That is: workers are born as nurses, then are promoted to guard duty or nest maintenance, and then they spend the last phase of their lives doing the most risky task, foraging. It’s well described in a variety of species.

This temporal division of labor makes for higher productivity, as a result of higher efficiency and organization of labor. (This is at least true in large colonies with a lot going on. The jury is still out on species with small colonies.) A big ant colony would be in disarray if all individuals tried to do everything at the same time. And so would I.

If I tried to run a field research program while doing every other part of my job, I doubt I’d be able to get high quality fieldwork done. I’ve figured out, in a clearly suboptimal fashion, how to juggle writing, teaching, analysis, mentoring during the year, service, and all that stuff. I can’t imagine adding “data collection” to that list of things to juggle during the academic year.

(And, of course, my greatest responsibility and source of joy is being a parent. But this isn’t a Daddy blog, even though I wish such a genre existed. Even though I spend my time writing here about research, don’t be mistaken. I’ve already established thatparenting and spousal duties are more important than everything else.)

When I finish a field experiment, it’s over. One project might build upon the other, but I work with discrete ending points, and that’s when I pull the flags from our field sites and pack things to go home. I’ve hired people to do things in my absence for bigger projects, but for most work, I don’t have the option of just returning to do more. If an editor or reviewer asks for another sample, you know what? They’re out of luck, and I’m out of luck. They can buy their own plane ticket to Costa Rica to get that additional data point, if they don’t want to publish the paper without it.

This finality of data collection helps me to get stuff done. I have no doubt when I need to start analyzing and writing the manuscript. It’s as soon as I leave the country.

I never think to myself, “Here is a little something which is missing from this project to make it complete.” Instead, I tell myself, “I have to package this as a complete project, and accept the fact that there are some missing holes.”

There’s another reason that working far away lets me get more work done. When I go to my field station, I’m in 100% data-collection mode. We’re running experiments full time, and I’m usually working my butt off. And I’m working my students’ butts off. There’s no way I could give so much focus to work like that while I’m at home, because I’d have to get home and cook dinner, and I’d choose to hang out with my kid at times. When I’m in the field, my responsibility to home is an evening video chat date, which is sometimes missed on one side or the other.

There’s also no way that I would be able to get so much dedication and effort from the students in my lab, without taking them to a kind-of-remote rainforest. When you plop people down in a place where there is nothing to do but fieldwork and labwork, and that’s mostly what you get. (If you bring the right people. I’m getting better at that over the years, but there are always flukes. Flukes, you know, are a kind of parasite.)

I’d guess that work happens by students on site about 12 hours per day, in one form or another. You don’t get that kind of consistent work at that level for an extended period at home. (I lament that the internet has gotten faster on station, because those with an internet addiction have a hard time fully dedicating themselves to their work.) So, at the end of a field season, we have a relative ton of data, much more than I’d have than if I tried to work locally or in the lab.

Some lab work does happen during the academic year, mostly dealing with samples that we collected during the summertime. However, we reserve the academic year for writing manuscripts and preparing for the next field season. Data only gets collected in intermittent bursts, and that has been more than enough for my lab. The fact that I can’t collect data except when I fly to Costa Rica forces me to spend my time writing up the results. That gives me a lot of time to write without any other research-related distraction.

If I block away time during the academic year, it’s usually not to do lab work, it’s only to analyze and to write. When I do research while abroad, it’s only to collect data, and not to write. This temporal polyethism is what allows me to get stuff done.

Last year, a new field course on ants launched at the Southwestern Research Station, in Portal, AZ, USA called Ants of the Southwest. It got rave reviews, and it’s happening again. Are you interested in going?

Here’s how to sign up!

The course is designed to provide a generalized hands-on approach to the pragmatics about research with ants. How do you observe and manipulate behavior in the field and in the lab? What kinds of ecological experiments are possible, and how do you do them? How do you collect, identify and maintain a collection of ants? How do you keep colonies in the lab?

There is a diverse set of experienced and talented instructors (in addition, I’ll be there for much of the time).

Don’t mistake this course with the long-running and superb Ant Course run by Brian Fisher from the California Academy of Sciences, which focuses on identification, taxonomy, systematics and building a collection. The Ants of the SW course is a complement to the Ant Course as a different introduction to ant biology, emphasizing ecology and behavior. It’s targeted towards graduate students, but is accessible to folks with other levels of experience.

If you are thinking about using ants as a model system but don’t have years of experience with them, this course would be a great place to figure how to do things, what works and what doesn’t, and will give you the chance to spend time in a community of myrmecologists in a hotbed of ant diversity.

If you have any questions about the course, you can contact me or leave a comments, and of course you can follow the link to the course page and contact the station. I hope to see some of y’all in July!

I wish Richard Dawkins stuck to writing science books.

if you’re concerned that religion too often interferes with rationality (as I do), then being a petulant booby about it won’t do much good. Frans de Waal is more my kind of speed.

And, They Might Be Giants are too. This one song is probably going to make more change than the collected writings of Dawkins, Coyne and Myers. Just because you’re correct about the absence of a god doesn’t mean you should be annoying about it. You can’t win hearts and minds that way, you got to be a little more lighthearted about it. Start with the kids.

(song starts at 0:20)

I gained an education about the politics of rape on college campuses while I was still an undergraduate, coincidentally during the Clarence Thomas nomination disaster. (If you were unaware, he is not only a wholly demented Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, but also a big-time sexual harasser. The Senate knew this, and confirmed him anyway, in 1991.)

I was one of fifteen or so people who signed up to be trained as a “Sexual Harassment Advocate.” There was one other man. I received several hours of training over multiple sessions, and then my contact information was provided to anybody who had questions or concerns about campus sexual harassment policies and incidents. Though not by design, victims of sexual assault also might have contacted sexual harassment advocates.

Within a short period of time, the program was renamed “Advocates Working Against Sexual Harassment.” There were plenty of jokes that preceded the switch.

As you might expect, as a man, I didn’t get contacted often. I think it was twice, and once was by someone who was concerned about a report against him. During the same time, there were plenty of harassment incidents as well as sexual assault cases, that were not widely known on campus but definitely occurred. I graduated a year later, and I suspect the program didn’t last much longer after that time.

I didn’t realize, until much later, that this entire program on campus was essentially designed to circumvent legal channels of action. The campus was complying with the law, and genuinely concerned about its denizens, but also didn’t want people to contact external authorities.

More than 20 years later, it seems that things haven’t changed much.

What I find stunningly shameful is that some people think that students shouldn’t have the option to handle rape as a criminal matter to be handled by the justice system. What I find even more appalling is that plenty of college administrators actively discourage students to seek legal action against sex offenders. I have seen this too often, and I find it sickening.

When I was still learning the ropes as a faculty member, a student in one of my intro classes stopped attending, and she then took a leave of absence for the rest of the semester. As this was happening, I learned that another student who was also in the same class had (allegedly) sexually assaulted her. The campus was taking action to keep her from having to interact with him, but then stopped doing anything on her behalf as soon as she pressed charges. The campus wanted to punish this rapist on their own terms, by holding a little campus hearing and having some kind of little disciplinary action that would have no real consequence for him.

Meanwhile, if the accusation against him is correct, he deserved serious time in prison. Anything else would have been a miscarriage of justice. Yet administrators at my private, tuition-driven university actively sought to keep the case out of the criminal justice system and out of the public eye. As far as they were concerned, the less attention towards rape on campus, the better off the university is. That would only be true if the university were not the vehicle that allowed rapes to occur by letting the perpetrators get away with it.

In this particular case, this student transferred away from the university and never returned, and I heard indirectly that there was a criminal trial, though I never heard about the outcome.

This incident was an outlier. Most rapes that take place are never reported. Those that are reported to campus safety may or may not result in criminal charges. What affects how this happens?

Some campuses have real cops, and others have campus safety. On private campuses, the campus safety officers may be well trained, professional, and effective at their jobs, but they lack the authority of sworn police officers. They can’t issue traffic and parking tickets that are enforceable off campus, and they can’t arrest people when they do things wrong. They have to call the cops for that.

On public campuses, campus safety officers are typically real cops. Unpaid parking tickets can result in a genuine warrant off campus, and they can give you real traffic tickets that have the same legal effect as if you were pulled over by the cops off campus. They also can arrest you. They also are empowered to conduct real investigations when sexual assaults occur and are prepared to cooperate with the justice system when victims seek prosecution of their attackers.

My current campus has real cops, empowered by the State of California. We have a very safe campus, according to the statistics, and when a violent crime does happen on or near campus, we are notified about it very promptly. As far as I am aware, victims are fully empowered to go after their attackers with the full extent of the law. There’s no administrator trying to keep students from seeking the full consequences of the law off campus.

That doesn’t happen at some public universities, and I’m not aware of any private university where that happens. Private schools typically want to sweep it under the rug. It’s always been that way, and even when big incidents happen that make campuses demand more transparency and justice, I get the feeling that gains are ephemeral. Image management is paramount at private schools.

The astute administrator will realize that people concerned about sexual assaults on campus are aware that this kind of thing is far too common, everywhere. The public evidence of consequences for rapists is a good thing, because that shows the campus cares about its community. If you don’t see any talk at all about rape and its consequences, that means it’s being swept under the rug. No college is entirely safe, but there are some colleges where the criminals can actually get in trouble. It’s safer where you hear about these rapists, because that means that they are getting in trouble and aren’t shielded by the campus image police.

Until the people on all sides of the issue realize that public shaming and prosecution of rapists is a good thing, there will always be malfeasance in the guise of protecting the campus mirage of a safe environment.

Here’s a guiding principle: Don’t write a grant to do a project, if you don’t have the time to do the project that you proposed.

There are a substantial number of corollaries to this principle, especially at a teaching institution. The corollary I’m focusing on now is:

Be sure to get time assigned to the project by your administrators before you submit a grant.

Funding agencies spend most of their money at research institutions. Even if they claim to understand the role of research at teaching institutions, they do not back this understanding up with dollars. It’s tacitly understood that, if you land a grant, that you’ll have the time to work on the project. Even if the program provides for some salary for the PI, that salary isn’t enough to fully fund your effort on the project.

If your teaching load is two courses per semester, then you’re probably already expected to spend some serious time on research. However, if your load is much more than this, then most of your time is spent teaching, and the teaching would be substantially harmed if you’re trying to do a major project on a timeline at the same time.

If you are currently spending most of your time teaching, then you need to make sure that when you land a grant that you’ll be able to get the project done. The time to do this is before you submit a grant. After that, you won’t have much leverage in asking for time.

A number of my colleagues ultimately got fed up with, and left, their jobs because their administration wouldn’t give them the time to work on their externally funded projects. There has been some good discussion about this in the comments in an earlier post. These situations emerged because these scientists found themselves in a position in which they weren’t given the opportunity to do research that was expected of them by a federal agency. You don’t want to be in that position.

To avoid that situation, you need do talk to your chair, dean and provost up front about preparing and submitting a grant. Explain that you want to write a grant for X dollars to be submitted to Y agency that would accomplish Z. This project would bring in aX dollars of overhead and hire M students, and send some of them to grad school. However, you can only include bX dollars of salary for yourself, and to do the project would require more time if you’re going to do it right. Ask them what kind of support they could provide to make this project happen.

Negotiation is based on finding mutual interests. They administration wants a positive student experience, productive faculty, and external recognition of excellence. Grants can provide this for them, and they should be putting some money behind this. If they don’t want to reassign any of your time away from your teaching to work on the grant, then, frankly, you don’t want to waste your time writing that grant. You would be between a federal agency and a hard place if the grant came in and you couldn’t free yourself to get the project done right.

If your university can’t fund your time once your grants are funded, then your time spent writing grants might be better spent writing job applications. If your ambition is to do research, and your institution can’t support it, then you might well have some irreconcilable differences.

Teaching institutions have lower overhead cost recovery rates. Your provost and dean might not get enough overhead back to fully cover your reassigned time. If they do, then the decision for them should be a no-brainer. If they don’t, then they’ll have to find the money in other parts of their budgets to subsidize your research. If they value the research, and the opportunities it affords students, they’ll find the money. Remind them that you’re only asking for their support if the grant comes in, and that most grants are not funded.

On your end, you need to deliver product for the investment. If I’m ever asked to explain what I’ll deliver, I will promise to deliver a peer-reviewed paper in a well-recognized journal for every reassigned course (though not necessarily a first-authored paper). I’ve never been asked about this, though. My institution hasn’t ever funded reassigned time for more than 25% of my teaching load, so this hasn’t been a difficult benchmark to meet.

Most teaching campuses have their grant funding incentives bassakwards. There are plenty of grant incentive programs that help faculty get the time to write grants. I get that it’s cheaper to pay for time to write grants than it is to pay for faculty to work on funded grants.

Far less common is systemic support for faculty who are externally funded. This is what would really get grants rolling.

The last thing you want to do is pay an unfunded faculty member to write a grant. They’ll take the money, and might submit a grant, but if they do, is there any reason you should expect it to be competitive?

If faculty members are getting paid for their time to write a grant, but they won’t get any additional time when the grant comes in, then why would they want the grant to be funded?

When a faculty member really wants to do research, then a single reassigned course to write a grant isn’t goint to make a project happen. Those that want to do the research without reassigned time probably are already doing it.

For example, about a score of us on our campus just got funded a single reassigned course , plus some extra funds, to submit a grant within the next two years. I’m grateful for this time, and the additional funds to hire students to collect preliminary data, which’ll help me get a proposal out next January.

I was probably going to submit the grant in January regardless of whether the university gave me the time for it. I think most researchers who are earnestly wanting to get a grant funded would write the proposal without the time. Don’t get me wrong, the time helps, but it’s not making me write a proposal that I wouldn’t have otherwise written.

I am glad that I don’t have to squeeze it in so tightly, and it probably will be a better proposal because I’ll be less stressed in getting it together. I greatly appreciate the institutional investment. I really want the grant that I’m submitting to get funded. However, is that true for all of the other faculty who received these funds? It would not be rational for these faculty members to want to get the grant, because that just means more work without any time to make it happen. We’re already maxed out just teaching, so how are we going to add in more research?

Our university is paying for our time up front to submit a grant. And, once the grant comes in, do we have any time to do the project? The majority of the people who got funded are working in fields that won’t allow you to use much, or any, of your grant funds to buy your time to work on the project. (NIH is liberal about this, but there’s not much help for those in non-NIH fields. If you did buy enough time with the NIH grant, though, nothing would be left for the project.)

One thing to keep in mind is that writing a grant by no means indicates that you’ll get funded. Even R1 researchers are used to writing a ton of grants in order keep funding rolling, as most submissions aren’t funded. Check out the comments in Dr. Becca’s post showing how many grants folks submit to stay funded.

I don’t want to be put into the position of telling a federal agency that I will deliver on a project if I can’t create the opportunity to get the project done. If I got a standard NSF grant to do a research project, there’s no way I could get a project done to the level of NSF expectations without having the time in my schedule assigned to the project. I expect to get several publications out of a single external grant. That’s pretty standard for an NSF award, I think. How would I get the work done, much less write it all up, unless my institution gave me the time? NSF would let me buy out a course or two per year, or some summer salary, using the grant, but that might not be enough to meet NSF expectations.

So, now I’m in an awkward position. My institution is giving me time to write a grant, but as things stand, there’s no current policy in place about what will happen if it gets funded. So, before then, I’ll need to sit down with my new dean (my fourth in six years), and my provost (my fourth in six years), and have to ask, “I know you are helping me write this grant, but could I have some more?” Their answer will definitely reflect how I excited I am about the proposal that I’m writing over the next six months.

I’ll probably have to max out my salary in the budget of the grant, to the extent that I can’t fund students, and then it’ll get trashed in review for being topheavy. On the other hand, if I ask for only modest salary along with a time commitment from my institution, along the lines that you find from proposals originating from R1 campuses, then my proposal will look far more competitive. So, whether the administration realizes it or not, there are mechanisms that will prevent me from doing a project if I don’t have the time for it.

The phone has no respect for your time. Other means of communication happen on your own terms, but this only happens with the phone if you ignore it.

Email is only reliable when the reply is important to the recipient. If it’s not important to the recipient, then it goes on the backburner, and may slowly carbonize.

You can email about some convoluted topics, but the email can be used for the sole purpose of scheduling a two-minute phone conversation. A scheduled phone conversation can make the phone less annoying.

Here are a couple scenarios in which the phone can easily trump email or texting.

A: Last month, I got a phone call from a colleague in another department, who I have not yet met, about some university service. We chatted for about five minutes. If we even came close to having the same conversation over email, it would have taken 30 minutes of back-and-forth typing and I wouldn’t have even come close to establishing the working rapport that happened in the conversation.

B: You can harness the dislike of the phone to work in your favor. Use the phone to avoid unnecessary interactions. Students will make all kinds of imprudent requests by email, that they’d never dare do so in person or over the phone. When this happens, email back one sentence: if you’d like to discuss this give me a phone call during my office hours. They probably won’t call or drop by. But if they do, it’s easier than the email. If you need to respond to this request with substance promptly, then you can call the student. Their phone number is on record. They probably won’t pick up because they don’t know the number, and then you leave a voice mail and you’re done. That’s faster than crafting an email that has the balance of politeness, concern, and firmness that you need to portray when responding to a peevish request in writing.

Caveat: do not leave a voice mail for me, unless I already contacted you and asked for something specific that requires a voice mail.

When I was applying for faculty positions, I had a number of reasons for focusing on small liberal arts colleges and other teaching institutions.

Among those reasons was that I didn’t want to have to worry about grant pressure at a research institution. I didn’t want to have to constantly think about keeping the money train rolling, as a constant source of anxiety. I think I was prepared to write a lot of manuscripts, but I wasn’t too confident that I’d be able to the land the grants that would be required to convert a tenure-track position to a tenured position. And, even if I did get those grants, I didn’t want to be in a position of “running a lab” instead of “doing research.” I wanted to be a small-town grocer instead of Wal-Mart.

At my field station, I saw that PIs swing through, give orders to grad students, get a token couple days in the field, and then move on. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be out there taking part in all of the stages of science.

With the grant thing and the not-being-a-manager-but-being-a-scientist thing, a teaching school seemed the way to go. And, oh, yeah, I really liked teaching.

I was naïve.

Here’s a related story that puts it in perspective. A couple weeks ago, I went to an evening coffee at the house of someone I didn’t know, to talk about a middle school in my local school district. Within the next year, my family will have to decide among middle schools for my kid. So, I’m starting to do my homework. A great-hearted nonprofit in my town is built to educate parents about school options, and sets up evening coffee discussions among prospective parents and current parents.

The coffee would have tolerated a boost of scotch, but alas it was a dry event. Sending your kid to middle school is freaky and scary for a number of reasons. Parents of elementary school kids have all kinds of concerns and worries about what their middle school is like, and they ask all kinds of questions to address their concerns. There was a lot of talk about certain worries regarding safety and supervision.

One parent made an excellent point, far too late in the discussion, that helped put people on track. She has been involved in a study addressing the concerns, strengths and weaknesses of the middle school experience in the area. One recurring theme, she reported, was that both elementary parents and middle school parents had big concerns about the middle schools. However, the concerns of the current middle-school parents had little to do with the concerns of the prospective middle-school parents. Once their kids actually started school, all those early concerns faded away and were replaced with entirely different issues on the ground.

Picking your middle school on the basis of your concerns as prospective parents won’t do too much to result in a good choice. Your concerns as a prospective middle school parent, that affected your choice of school, seem to fizzle once you get there and you’re dealing with the actuality of being in middle school. You realized that the factors you used in picking a school were mostly superfluous, and you should have looked at the process differently.

I don’t think I need to explain how this story can be modified to produce more generalized advice for scientists choosing among career options.

I’ll never forget the observation from one of my undergraduate professors that has been a model and mentor for me. Just as I was telling her about my concerns and grant pressure and all that stuff, she told me:

It’s not easier. It’s just different.

I asked her to amplify on this, and she did. She explained how the regular day-in and day-out demands of a faculty position at a teaching institution are not any easier than the demands of a high-profile position running a big lab at an R1 institution. She explained the various responsibilities pulling her in different directions, and claimed that her job was just as much work. In addition, it was not only an equivalent amount of work but it also was just as stressful, and the demands of getting grants and keeping a lab up weren’t substantially easier than everything that she was juggling.

It was just stressful in a different way, but not in an easier way.

I was skeptical. After all, one of my reasons to work at a teaching campus was to avoid the grant pressure. So, I wasn’t glad to hear that I was just trading one stress for another.

It took several years of experience for me to really understand what she meant. She’s entirely correct.

Your PhD advisor might disagree, and other faculty at research institutions might also be skeptical of this notion. Skepticism is fine, but belief without knowledge isn’t.

In my community, white middle class families have harbored a fear of public schools ever since forced desegregation in 1970. That was before I was born, so many things have changed. Our neighborhood school isn’t okay, it’s amazingly great. It is a shameful display of ignorance when 1/3 of all of the families in my city insist on sending their kids to private school, mostly out of fear of the demographics of the population in public ones. (Whereas I’m afraid of the private schools because of the demographics of the population in those schools. That, and the underpaid and undertrained teachers. I have lots of experience with these schools, so this fear isn’t based on ignorance.)

There’s plenty of old money that can only be spent on fanciest prep schools, but there are a lot of middle-class families going broke to send their kids to those same prep schools, mostly out of fear.

Among the public school advocates in my town, there’s a truism: don’t talk smack about the public school until you’ve visited one.

I’ve talked to so many people who say, oh, the public schools in our city have so many problems, I couldn’t send my own child there?! Then I ask, in feigned naivete, really, what have you heard? When you visited the schools what did you see that was wrong? That usually switches the conversation to a topic that involves less ignorance on the part of the public school vilifier.

By corollary, if you want to know what the daily life of a science professor at a teaching institution is like, you aren’t going to learn about it from a professor at a research university. Your concerns about the job before you head in are going to be inevitably very different from those when you are in the position.

All of the reasons that I had for picking a teaching school over a research school weren’t really that good. It is true that I am glad that I don’t have to worry about funding a lab of employees by bringing in grant after grant. However, the machinery that I do keep running, in various aspects, also requires constant fuel and lubrication. I’d be just as happy trading in those stresses for the need to get a big grant once every few years, or more often. It’s more complex than that, of course.

Should I have listened more to my mentor when I was choosing a job? I don’t think so, because at the time I did listen to her and valued her perspective. I didn’t think she was wrong at the time, I just didn’t adequately understand her. That’s because understanding required experience.

I accept the fact that when we make decisions – about schools for our kids, about our own careers, and most other things – the bases for these decisions don’t pair up with the functional positives and negatives once we’ve committed. You should still try to assess carefully when making decisions, but the assessment will be more effective if it emphasizes the actual experiences of others over your best guesstimate about what your priorities might be in the future.

Being naïve means that you don’t have experience. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you just need to know that when you do make decisions, you have no choice but to be naïve to the consequences, because after all, they haven’t happened yet.