Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

I’m at a small conference on biomedical optics.  The code at these conferences is to not reveal specific conversations or presentations, so I won’t do that.  What I will say is that when people can write down arcane symbols and get a machine whirring and make a flash of light and then see through skin, see things that were too small to see before, reveal the presence of hidden toxins, or make a tumor glow green so the evil thing can be cut out, is that not magic?  If somebody can administer a drug, then shine light on your skin so that a tumor dies (photodynamic therapy) is that not so different from a magician administering a potion and then waving a wand to heal your ailment?

It’s just plain exciting to see this stuff and realize that we live in an era of magic that would impress even Gandalf.

By Thoreau

The only reason that so many Americans are unemployed is that 9.5% of Americans can’t explain where they see themselves in 5 years.

By Thoreau

The people who organized the brilliant Comic Con counter protest against Fred Phelps should go to NYC and organize a counter-protest against the idiots protesting the Ground Zero Mosque.  It would be a sight to behold, I’m sure.

By Thoreau

A proclamation from Dr. Thoreau:

As a duly-appointed blogger at UO, and as a professor of evil fiziks, I hereby declare that

Whereas dhex is awesome, and,

Whereas dhex is the only URKOBOLD blogger to not threaten to wither my taint, and,

Whereas dhex coined the term “Generation Veal”, which continues to yield parmesan-covered goodness in my blogging, and,

Whereas I am a blogger who enjoys Rachel Maddow AND also has a sense of humor about things,

Therefore, I proclaim that on this day, the Twenty-Seventh of July in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Ten, the phrase “beckmaddowian axis” is allowed into the UO lexicon, except under such conditions as disallowed by Mr. Henley.

That is all.

By Thoreau

Discussion from the left and the right [link added] of how conservatives need to start acting like grown-ups.  I especially like this from the Salon article, regarding the downside of having to run against (and crush) Palin in 2012:

But if you think it’s bad now, wait until you see what happens if the plurality of NN attendees see their wish granted. Palin has already demonstrated a disturbing willingness to frame even minor political squabbles in terms of “tyranny” versus “liberty,” and to make her a major party’s presidential candidate would only do more to throw the spotlight on that sort of incitement. Perhaps, as Kevin Drum prays, the GOP would then, “go down to such an epic defeat that they finally get some sense knocked into them.” But in the meantime, we would be facing a long, protracted campaign in which both a major political party and the mainstream press would treat violently anti-democratic positions as existing within the confines of reasonable political discourse. We’ve already had quite a bit of that over the past few years; accommodating and encouraging it could potentially make things much, much worse.

Not to mention the possibility, however remote, that she could win.  Hey, stranger things have happened.  I’d rather not roll the dice on that one, no matter how weighted they are.

Also, this from TAC:

The Cult, as we know, is where people believe the President is more than just the leader of the Executive Branch of government, as embodied in the Constitution. They believe he embodies all their hopes and dreams and personifications and can also win wars and stop oil spills in a single bound.  It the Cult that led to the Clinton-bashing years of the right from 1992-2000 where, despite accused of murder, theft and rape, Clinton is still an important figure politically whose wife is Secretary of State while the Right suffers from lack of new ideas because activists, think tankers, pundits and writers spent most of their time, money and energy on hunt for the White Whale rather than offering coherent critiques on Clintonism.  (The exact opposite took place in the last decade as the Right spent most its time acting as the Bush Administration’s Praetorian Guard.) Sadly, the same phenomenon is happening again and the fact Obama is half-black make such attacks even more difficult because the boundaries are even more narrow.

I want a responsible, mature Republican President, and I want one sooner rather than later.  Partly because I don’t want the Democrats to have too long of an uninterrupted stay in power (a long run in power is the sort of thing rarely ends well) but mostly because I suspect that a Republican President will be elected in the next decade (probably not 2012, though) and when that happens I want that Republican to be a responsible grown-up.

Doug Mataconis and Glenn Greenwald smack a couple of CNN spokesmodels around for badmouthing “anonymous internet bloggers” in the wake of the Shirley Sherrod pogrom. And they’re not wrong! But neither of them notes what I find the really galling misdirection perpetrated here: Andrew Breitbart is a lot of things, but “anonymous” is none of them. The Sherrod lie got as far as it did because, in CNN-spokesmodel circles, Breitbart is a celebrity. A trusted brand. That’s why everyone from the Emm Ess Emm to the Obama administration jumped on the lie so quickly. It’s as if CNN spokesmodels reacted to the news of the murder of Sherrod’s father by a white farmer by explaining to their audience that, “This really shows the danger of violent Negroes.”

By Thoreau

The non-academic blogosphere is taking notice of tenure.  Whenever people talk about tenure and the alternatives, the question always comes up “Why not multi-year contracts that provide some stability and moderate security but also accountability?”  Hey, I’d gladly sign off on that.  I don’t really believe in tenure as anything virtuous.  Give me a multi-year contract for some mix of teaching, research, and service, and a higher salary to compensate for the loss of a chance at permanent security, and I’ll go for it.

There are two reasons why this won’t happen:

1)  Did you notice the part where I said I’d want a higher salary to compensate for having less security?  Yeah.  See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange for a shot at the tenure lottery.  Dilute the value of the prize, and suddenly people start wanting more money in return.  A lot of smart, highly-educated people will start looking at other white collar career paths if academia doesn’t provide a shot at life-long security, or at least higher pay than is currently on offer.  Take away tenure, and not only do you pay more for the people that you ultimately hire for full-time positions, you also have to pay more for all of the grad student TA’s and research assistants and postdocs and adjuncts who are trying to claw their way to a full-time position.

Why, pray tell, would the administration go for that bargain?

Put it this way:  Suppose that tomorrow the NBA drastically reduced salaries.  A lot of college kids would still be willing to play basketball, but they might also want to spend more time studying, even at the expense of practicing, because the expected return from practicing basketball would go down relative to the expected return from studying.  Schools could still get student athletes, but they couldn’t get as many student athletes who are willing to utterly forsake the “student” part.

2)  The choice in academia isn’t between tenure and long-term contracts.  It’s between tenure and cheap part-timers with no security.  Why convert my position to a multi-year contract with higher  pay when they could wait for the next 2 retirements and replace them with cheap part-timers?  And keep just enough tenure-track positions around so that the people earlier in the pipeline are willing to accept low wages in exchange for a shot at life-long security.

That’s not to say that tenure-track positions will disappear completely.  Although part-timers are often excellent (not always, of course, but the same could be said for certain tenured people on my hallway), they don’t usually get involved with student advising, student activities, research with students, curriculum development, service, etc.  Now, some of these tasks could be assumed by full-time specialists or administrators, but not all of them, and they’ll still need a “farm team” of permanent faculty to train for some of these roles.  So, the future of academia is a smaller and smaller corps of tenure-track faculty being groomed as management trainees and a larger and larger cohort of cheap part-timers.

One might say “OK, you make the case for keeping some full-timers, but why give them tenure?”  The answer to that is “See Point 1 above.”

Now, in the academic blogosphere, as soon as the topic of teaching vs. research gets thrown into the mix, somebody invariably asks “Why not full-time faculty positions that are teaching-only, with no research expectation?”  The answer is that many schools have a few of these, and often even give these people some form of job security.  Usually they have titles like “Lecturer” or “Senior Lecturer” or “Lecturer with Security of Employment” or whatever.  However, in general these positions are rarer than the tenure-track positions OR the adjunct positions.  Why?  Because the tenure-track faculty do the research that brings prestige (and may or may not bring money), and the part-time adjuncts are cheap.  The full-time lecturers aren’t as cheap as adjuncts and aren’t as prestigious as tenure-track faculty.

So, tenure won’t disappear.  It will just shrink.  And that’s a shame, because I’m confident that I could do an excellent job that would justify the higher salary associated with a multi-year contract.

ADDENDUM:  To the extent that all the “We need to get more Americans into grad school!” talk is actually grounded in evidence of “not enough” American grad students, perhaps the suckitude of the long training path and the low odds of winning the tenure lottery are contributing to that?  Yeah, yeah, grad students aren’t fully informed of what they’re getting into, but even if they have only partial information, the worse it seems the fewer people they’ll find to play that game.  Getting rid of tenure will not scare everyone away, but it will reduce enrollments.  The system will have to pay more for trainees in order to persuade them to pursue advanced degrees.

Ugly Overload.

By Thoreau

To over-simplify a bit, this is a speech by a black woman who discusses resentments that she had, and an episode in her life in which she ultimately learned to see the commonality between her struggles and those of a poor, rural, Southern, white couple.  If you were to tell me that a white guy took this speech out of context to make political hay, I would guess that you’re talking about some white guy who wants everyone to know that racism is not the real problem these days*, and won’t somebody think about poor rural whites?  I’d expect to hear the white guy holding her up as an example and asking people to stop talking about race.

I must admit that if I had read the speech before this story broke, I never in a million years would have predicted the subsequent course of events.

*My own take on this is, perhaps not surprisingly, somewhat squishy:  The color of money certainly matters more than most other colors, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only color that matters.  Nice, green cash may be the best thing to have, but if you get stopped by a cop you’ll want some white skin as well.

By Thoreau

Oakland is doing the utterly predictable, and contemplating factory farming of a taxable crop.  When politicians view something as a revenue source, they want more of it, and they are prepared to get in bed with any businessman who can make that happen.  Most significantly, if it’s a source of tax revenue they are perfectly happy to provide security for those businessmen, which means that you get the sort of businessmen who don’t have their own street gangs and hitmen.

This isn’t about drugs.  It’s about taxes.  If tomorrow somebody decided to tax fennel (which grows like weeds in much of SoCal) city councils would be falling all over themselves to approve large-scale fennel farms.