GenX women in higher ed from around the globe

Posts Tagged ‘Higher Education’


TedX: The Speaking Equivalent of Blogging

In Afshan's Posts on 2012/06/02 at 03:32

Afshan Jafar, writing from New London, Connecticut in the US. 

When three of my students approached me a couple of months ago to participate in a TEDx event, I balked. The students sent me a very well-organized folder with information about TED, some of the speakers already lined up, links to their favorite TED talks and then they set up a meeting with me. The event was in the middle of April. As many academics know, April is not a good month for us. The semester, at least for me, picks up like a roller coaster and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down for the end.

I had so much to do in April. I had taken on an extra course in April (part of a gateway course for another program), so I was teaching four courses. That means I was grading for four courses. I had over 65 proposals to review for my new volume, and I needed to put together a proposal for the (possible) editor. All of this would be happening the week of the event itself. There’s no way I can or should take this TEDx event on, I thought. I decided I’d meet with the students, but that my response would probably be a “thanks for thinking of me, but I really am very busy and I just can’t fit this in to my schedule”.

But then I had the meeting with the three students. They were so excited and working so hard to pull off an event of this magnitude all on their own!  They had put their hearts and souls into trying to organize this event and now they wanted to line-up speakers.  I was torn.  I told them I’d think about it over the weekend and let them know.  “Of course I know I should say no”, I kept saying to myself. “But if I were to do this, I would probably go with this topic” would be the next thought. And so back and forth I went.

When I finally sat down to talk to my husband about why I was so torn, I realized that part of it had to do with my schedule. The other part had to do with the fact that this was completely new territory for me. This was no academic talk at a conference. Far from it: I would actually need to be concise (what academic knows how to get their point across in under 18 minutes?), entertaining, and intellectually stimulating at the same time! I had never spoken in front of such a large audience before, and then the thought of being video-taped… to be honest, that was intimidating. This will be around forever! What if I screw up? I feared the exposure: my thoughts will be out there in the form of a video, I won’t have control over this “product” once I put it out there.

Not so different from blogging after all is it?

By the end of the weekend I decided I couldn’t let this opportunity pass. TEDxConnecticutCollege took place on April 14, 2012. The theme was “Rethinking Progress” and I spoke on “Women’s Bodies”. So, what do I have to share with my fellow academics and bloggers about the experience? You know the thrill that you get when your blog post is about to go live? Now multiply that by about a hundred and you’ll get a good idea of what this kind of public speaking is like. It was an exhilarating experience. It gave me the same sense of freedom that blogging does. You can be funny, even if you’re discussing something serious; you don’t have to worry about quoting important scholars endlessly to prove to everybody that you know what you’re talking about; and you can (and should) leave the audience thinking instead of providing them with neat little conclusions that they must accept because you bombarded them with data and evidence.

Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that just as we, as academics, feminists, thinkers, have turned to blogging because “we have something to say”, we should also consider using public speaking opportunities to say what we want to or need to say. It’ll help us reach a wider audience than any academic conference we’ve attended, especially, as in the case of TED/TEDx when those talks are made available to anyone with a computer connection.

What are you waiting for? The world is waiting to hear what you have to say . . .

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Love the Teaching, Hate the Grading, and Other Institutional Paradoxes

In Melonie's Posts on 2012/05/26 at 02:31

Melonie Fullick, writing from Hamilton, Ontario in Canada

April is the cruellest month in (Anglo-North American) universities, given that the yearly academic cycle reaches its peak with final exams, which are in turn preceded by the crushing weight of major end-of-term assignments. Some students, worn out by the demands of the season, lapse into a state of caffeine-fuelled zombie-like vacancy. For those of us on the receiving end of their work, there is the prospect of a mountain of marking that forms the final obstacle to a brief breather before the summer term begins.

Based on the feelings expressed regularly by many professors and graduate students, I don’t think grading is something many people see as a form of genuine and enjoyable engagement with students–unless it is a case where the course director has been creative with the assignments and/or most of the students are motivated to work hard.

Instead, professors and teaching assistants tend to experience grading as a chore (or in some cases, an ordeal) that must be completed so that marks can be submitted–a technocratic necessity rather than a pedagogical one.

This makes sense for a few reasons. Grading is not an inherently meaningful activity, but more a function of a massified hierarchised institution. A letter or number grade assigns a relative value to a student’s performance, which is then used as a measure of his/her value within the educational system overall. Outside of this system, assigned marks have little relevance.

As such, in an increasingly competitive environment students may see grades more as tokens of exchange than signifiers of acquired skill or learning. That’s partly because it’s so hard to assess those things and link them to an objective “standard”. Students may (rightly) see grades as flexible, and act on this assumption, possibly encouraged by the consumerist tendency that comes with attaching a price tag to education–conflating payment for access with payment for an outcome.

Another issue is that we’ve institutionalised the way in which grading is un-enjoyable. The process and schedule of the academic year ensures this: grading tends to happen all at the same time, there’s usually quite a lot of it–and because students are fatigued and under pressure, what we see might not be representative of their potential.

In the past I’ve also felt as if I have little influence over the outcomes I see when I’m grading assignments. I remember this was among the first issues that alerted me to “something rotten” in the state of academe, years ago when I started working as an undergraduate teaching assistant. It wasn’t that I didn’t care–I cared a lot; I wanted then, and still want now, to help students to learn and write well and earn the marks they desired. But I didn’t have the time and energy (and skill) to provide the level of help they seemed to require. Later, it was both relieving and distressing to realise I was working with all their past and present educational (and life) experiences, not just my own inadequacies.

Grading is just one of the experiences I’ve had, inside the classroom and out of it, that’s led me to look at the institutional frame in which university teaching takes place. To make the larger connections, why would excellent professors be limping along on contracts without job security? Why did undergraduate TAs make only half as much as the graduate students who did the same work–who, in turn, would later make less as contract workers than on the coveted tenure track? It was clear from early on that teaching in the university could be downloaded with impunity on to those with little or no experience or training (or control), and who were willing to work for lower wages.

Can these problems be addressed in a context where more and more people are being told to get a postsecondary education? Not only do we have more students now, but the students themselves must juggle their involvement with education with other demands on their time and energy. We must also find ways of engaging with, and helping, students from more varied educational backgrounds, without making unreasonable demands on those doing the teaching (and grading). And somehow, as teachers in this system we must become more “efficient” given the perpetual economic tightening in the context of managerialist governance of education.

This is where governance meets (and clashes with) pedagogy in the institutional context of the massified university; it is why the conditions of postsecondary teaching demand attention at the level of the egg timer often used to ration each minute of essay marking. Grading and the feelings and problems associated with it show us only a few of the ways in which the long-term devaluing of teaching in the academic economy is both experienced and perpetuated in our everyday lives.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Emotional Labor

In Janni's Posts on 2012/05/18 at 00:57

Janni Aragon, writing from Victoria, British Columbia in Canada

I sat on a pedagogy round-table at the International Studies Association in March, and one of the speakers referred to the high cost of emotional labor for the Women’s Studies instructor. Many heads nodded around the room. I do think that emotional labor does not discriminate and that many women faculty, faculty of color and other marginalized groups put in more time with emotional labor. Anecdotally, I perform as much or more emotional labor in Political Science compared to my years in Women’s Studies, but this might be influenced by the fact that I am an Undergraduate Advisor. Now, I know that some readers will agree and a small number might comment, “Show me the data.” Well, there is a genre of higher education literature dedicated to women in academe and other groups noting this phenomena. I am certainly not the first or last to speak to emotional labor.

Last year my teaching observation date was slated for a lecture on violence against women. I had already given the class a trigger warning via email and verbally noted that the array of readings might trigger emotions from students. My colleagues sat at the back of the class, while I lead lecture and facilitated discussion. I ended the class about five minutes early and thanked everyone. The reason for ending the class early was that a student was in the back of the class quietly crying. We chatted and walked back to my office. I will say that I had the appropriate office numbers nearby so that I could give her the referral. This was not the first time in my teaching career that I’ve dealt with this issue and had to help a student in need.

I’ve accompanied students to the police department to report a sexual assault and listened to students explain that the readings or discussion in class triggered old memories for her or him. This is part of the emotional labor of the job. Granted for some students, it’s not issues of violence, but issues related to coming out, finances, a bad break up, eating disorders, and more. My degrees are not in mental health, so I know that it’s best if I listen and then make a referral. Here is the thing – I had never attended a professional development seminar about students and mental health until I was more than 10 years into my career! I am not qualified to help the students with the array of issues that they might have, but I can listen and then find the right person or office that can help them.

Now, thanks to my role as the Chair of the Academic Women’s Caucus, I sit on more committees than I care to count and I have had ample opportunity to go to workshops related to mental health, inclusive work environments, dealing with difficult situations, and other important issues. I do feel better prepared for these moments and here I am, mere months from celebrating my fifteenth year teaching. What I long for though, is more honest conversations about emotional labor in our work. I also want more training on how to deal with the weight of emotional labor, as it is a heavy burden to carry some days.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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An Academic’s Lament

In Afshan's Posts on 2012/05/17 at 00:59

Afshan Jafar, writing from New London, Connecticut in the US.

I’ll be honest with you. I read Mona Eltahawy’s piece, “Why Do They Hate Us?”  with quite a bit of aggravation. I am tired. I am tired and resentful of being put in the position of constantly having to bring nuance to a discussion like this. I am tired, as a Pakistani and an academic, of taking one step forward, two steps back. Of constantly having to tell people that gross generalizations, sweeping statements, and titillating pictures, don’t make the argument any more solid or acceptable, even when used by a “native”or “local” person.

Perhaps the most astounding characteristic of Eltahawy’s piece is that it ignores one of the very first lessons that students of Orientalism are or should be familiar with. There’s a simple exercise I use in one of my segments on women and religion in my courses. When we get to a discussion of Islam and “Muslim women”, I ask my students to fill in the blank for me: “Muslim women are  _____________________”. The students come up with many, many responses, which I won’t get into here. The point is that they have no trouble at all coming up with immediate responses. Now I ask them to imagine if I had asked them to finish this sentence: “Christian women are ______________.” They look utterly confused. What country am I talking about? What race? What kind of Christian? Am I referring to Evangelical Christians? In short, they realize that the category Christian woman is really meaningless unless I provide them with further specific details.

You see my point? Whereas we accord complexity, diversity, and yes, nuance to our understanding of other religions, when it comes to Islam it all seems to be painted with one big brush stroke and usually in the color black (see the pictures which accompany Eltahawy’s article). That Eltahawy talks about “women in the Middle East” as one large, undifferentiated group, and in the same paragraph talks about women being “covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian’s blessing — or divorce either”, gives the impression that the above rules apply to every woman, in every country in the Middle East. That is, of course, not true. And Eltahawy knows that. This is the kind of sloppy and sensationalistic journalism that has made the work of academics who study and teach about the region much more difficult. And then, when we have to spend time setting the record straight or bringing in “complexity” to the issue, we are accused of being “defensive” and not wanting wash our dirty linens in public.

As an academic and a teacher, I am also tired of the stifling opposition between cultural relativism and universalism.  Each position, if adhered to staunchly, is problematic.  And we all know that, so we use these labels to quickly undermine someone’s position without engaging in the particularities of their argument. If you believe in universal rights you’re ethnocentric or imperialistic; if you believe in cultural relativism you are willing to excuse all kinds of abuses and oppression. We leave no possibility for complexity: that it is possible to criticize without being a ethnocentric and it is possible to ask for contextualization without being an apologist.

The idea that “political correctness”, as Eltahawy says, prevents people from critiquing Muslim countries is, well, ignorant and downright dangerous since it encourages an all out, unapologetic attack on Muslims. Islamophobia is alive and well and you don’t have to go very far before you run into it. I recently had a boy in my daughter’s first grade class (on my first day volunteering in my daughter’s class) tell me outright that “people from Pakistan kill other people” and that they “drop bombs”. When a six year old has absorbed these messages about Muslims, a call for an unleashing of sorts is the last thing we need to be doing. And journalism, like Eltahawy’s recent piece, make academic considerations of the issue more urgent and more necessary than ever.

But it leaves me resentful still that I have to do so much repetitive work, constantly “responding” to sensationalistic and over-simplified analysis. I know I am not alone in this. Any academic, who belongs to a stigmatized minority has to deal with the issues of balancing criticism while not further reinforcing damaging stereotypes in the larger culture about “Us”.  We realize that there are different layers of oppression and we can’t focus on one kind alone (gender, for instance) while ignoring, or worse, reinforcing, another kind (racial, for instance).

It’s not easy but at least we try.  Eltahawy on the other hand, has given up that pursuit all together.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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The Problem With EdX

In Bonnie's Posts on 2012/05/16 at 01:05

Bonnie Stewart, writing from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada.

Since it started last fall, I’ve heard the 36-week experimental #change11course referred to – half tongue-in-cheek – as “the Mother of All MOOCs.”

Back when the course started in September, it seemed like a reasonable description. #change11 was designed and run by Massive Open Online Course pioneers George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, and had 36 separate facilitators lined up to cover everything from soup to nuts in the grand scheme of instructional technologies and 21st century learning.

Apparently, however, George and Dave should have kept the crystal ball from their Edfutures MOOC a few years back.

Because in thinking about the Mother of All MOOCs, it seems none of us in #change11 were thinking big enough.

Today, the New York Times announced that Harvard has paired up with MIT in a new non-profit partnership called EdX, which will offer free online courses from both universities, following the MITx model begun over the winter.

The New York Times called EdX a MOOC.

#change11, I think you’re gonna have to give that “Mother of All MOOCs” tshirt back.

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It’s too early to say what EdX is going to mean for higher education in North America. That two of the most prestigious universities in North America, however, have seen fit to join forces to go down this road of free and open online courses means the rush to figure that meaning out? Is on.

And the stakes – in a time when universities & colleges are already struggling with smaller demographics and tightened purse strings – are high.

For a while now, MOOCs have been hailed as “the Great Disruption” in education.

EdX is staking out serious ground in this new model of course delivery, framing itself as a clearinghouse platform on which other institutions can offer their own courses under the EdX brand. It’ll be open source, enabling other institutions to host their own courses if they wish, without having to pay for or license for-profit software. This challenges not only the traditional pay-for-learning model of academia, but the growing encroachment of startup edupreneur-style companies into the territory of higher ed.

EdX is clearly setting out to be the mothership.

And it may well succeed: reputation has always carried a lot of weight in education. When you combine two of the biggest names in academia with unlimited access to courses, you get interest. People want to affiliate themselves with what carries cache: in network theory, this tendency to connect to hubs that are already well-connected is called “preferential attachment.” If EdX turns out to be good at what it does, it will have the potential to take over the market in terms of massive open online courses.

It doesn’t stop there. EdX also has designs on research, not just teaching and learning. Its stated intent, according to today’s press release, is to “research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online. The EdX platform will enable the study of which teaching methods and tools are most successful.”

And this is where I begin to itch.

It’s not that I don’t think free learning is a great idea. Or that I don’t welcome Harvard & MIT’s interest in the enormous and interesting task of researching effective online learning.

We live in a time when frictionless sharing of information makes massive open courses possible. And when learning analytics make massive amounts of data available from any online venture. These things are going to affect academia, make no mistake, and our current institutional models – our business models, our learning models, and our research models – are all going to have to adapt in response.

Until this sudden explosion of major institutional interest in the idea of Massive Open Online Courses, I’d thought the adaptation might actually move in the direction of – gasp – complexity.

The original MOOCs – the connectivist MOOCsa la Siemens & Downes, and the work of David Wiley and Alec Couros and others – have been, for the most part, about harnessing the capacity of participatory media to connect people and ideas. They’ve been built around lateral, distributed structures, encouraging blog posts and extensive peer-to-peer discussion formats. Even in live sessions showcasing facilitator’s expertise, these ur-MOOCs have tended towards lively backchannel chats, exploring participants’ knowledge and experiences and ideas.

They’ve been, in short, actively modelled on the Internet itself. They’ve been experiential and user-driven. Their openness hasn’t stopped at registration capacity, but extended to curricular tangents and participatory contributions and above all, to connections: they’ve given learners not just access to information but to networks.

They’ve been messy, sometimes, but they have definitely not been business as usual.

The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions.

Those who complete the courses will get a certificate of mastery, and a grade. Their data will be harvested to determine what learning methods help them succeed.

I see value in this, and suspect that for many it will open doors. But.

If you want to deliver mass courses to enormous numbers of people, and mastery and measurable, extrinsic success are your aims, you will be inclined to keep your offerings to the concrete and the certain.

Some types of knowledge are privileged in this kind of decision-making climate. Experimental, experiential knowledge tends not to be.

Particularly when the course delivery is itself an experimental undertaking to which sizable reputations – in this case, the good names of Harvard and MIT – have been attached.

Big reputations make careful, strategic changes, not great disruptive ones that go against self-interest. And thus the courses that EdX will offer and the research that EdX will produce are not likely to be modelled at all on the messy, distributed, peer-to-peer versions of knowledge production that the internet and the original MOOCs encouraged.

Words change with usage, of course. And “MOOC” certainly fits the EdX model, perhaps better than it did the original connectivist offerings: EdX will be more massive and far more a traditional course than the originals.

It’s ironic, though: this brand-new Mother of All MOOCs is, in the end, likely to do as much preserving of the traditional structures of education – especially in terms of learning – than it is to disrupt them.

This post was first published at http://theory.cribchronicles.comand was cross-published with permission from the author.

Bonnie Stewart is a Ph.D. student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. In higher ed since 1997, Bonnie has lived and taught on all three coasts of Canada and in Eastern Europe and Asia. Her research explores social media identity and its implications for higher education. Published at Salon.com and winner of the 2011 PEI Literary Award for creative non-fiction, Bonnie blogs ideas at  http://theory.cribchronicles.comand identity and parenthood at  http://cribchronicles.com. Find her on Twitter at @bonstewart.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Massive Open Online Courses: How “The Social” Alters the Relationship Between Learners and Facilitators

In Bonnie's Posts on 2012/05/10 at 08:34

Bonnie Stewart, writing from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada.

We’re getting close to the tail end of the 36-week-long experiment called #change11, or “the mother of all MOOCs.”

How can I tell?

First, I’m getting ready to facilitate my week, exploring Digital Identities. I’m second-last in the lineup, so the fact that I’m on deck means the whole undertaking is drawing to a close.

But it’s also clear we’re winding down because the #change11 conversation hubs have begun to resemble, uh, ghost-towns.  Once there were lively debates and intense exchanges. As the winter wore into the spring of the year, though, the tumbleweeds began to tickle.

Note to self: next time you facilitate a MOOC module, pick Week #2, not Week #35.

Any course that runs from September through May requires stamina. When that course is voluntary on the part of both learners and facilitators, and runs as a series of totally separate modules, the drop-off can be fairly significant. Erm, even my own participation as a student has crawled to a stop over the last month or two.

I find myself wondering if the other learners will be keener than I’ve been? Am I going to throw a MOOC and have nobody show up?

I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m a teacher at heart. I’ll put the work into developing my one-week course whether there are going to be 3 students or 300. But as I’m preparing, I’m thinking about what it means to facilitate in a truly social, networked, voluntary environment like #change11.

Or the internet.

As the awareness of the MOOC experiment grows, the term is being increasingly applied to grand-scale enterprises like the Stanford AI course and MITx. While heady, this blurs some very important distinctions.

The MOOC model from which #change11 originates was built on the connectivist learning theory of George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Highly social in format, these courses tend to be experimental, non-linear, and deeply dialogic and participatory. Contributions from participants frequently direct the course of discussion, and the connections and ideas built between learners can be considered as valuable as the knowledge expounded by the facilitator.

On the other hand, the MOOC models offered by the big universities tend towards formalized curricula, content delivery, and verification of completed learning objectives.

Far more embedded in traditional paradigms of knowledge and teaching, these courses only harness the connectivity of social media insofar as they enable masses of people to link themselves to the prestige of a big-name institution. They offer discussion boards, but their purpose is content-focused, not connection-focused.

If I were teaching in an MITx-style course, I’d have a very different module ahead of me, one far more familiar to me as a higher ed instructor.

I’ve been teaching for eighteen years. I profess to be in favour of learner-centered classrooms. But until this MOOC module, every single course I’ve taught has on some level obliged the students to be there. I am accustomed to having the institutional powers of status, credentialism, and grading backing me in the classroom.

In the connectivist MOOC model, I don’t.

There is no bonus for learners who participate in my week of #change11. They won’t get a badge at the end, and there is no certification announcing they completed anything. There’s nothing specific for them to complete, unless I design an exit goal as part of the week’s activities. But that would be MY exit goal: not theirs. They don’t get to put the word MIT on their CV. And while some weeks of the #change11 MOOC have allowed participants to connect with leaders in the learning and technologies field – Howard Rheingold, Pierre Levy – I’m among the less well-known of the 30-plus facilitators in the year’s lineup. They won’t even get the relational perk of engaging with somebody famous.

Nope. But what they will get – in addition to what I hope will be a fascinating exploration of the idea of  Digital Identity – is hands-on practice in what it means to learn and connect and simply be in this networked, distributed age.

And I will get the opportunity to practice what it means to lead in the age of the internet: to share what one knows in a way that invites others to engage, to contribute, to participate.

Both models of the MOOC serve a purpose, but it is the connectivist one – for all it is less massive and far less a traditional course – that teaches both teachers and learners new ways of coming together to explore ideas.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Why Women Leave Academia

In Guest Blogger on 2012/05/08 at 08:06

Guest blogger, Curt Rice, writing from Tromsø , Norway.

Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as Ph.D. candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, (ii) the impediments they will encounter are disproportionate, and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great.

This is the conclusion of The chemistry Ph.D.: the impact on women’s retention, a report for the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET and the Royal Society of Chemistry. In this report, the results of a longitudinal study with Ph.D. students in chemistry in the UK are presented.

Men and women show radically different developments regarding their intended future careers. At the beginning of their Ph.D. studies, fully 72% of women express an intention to pursue careers as researchers, either in industry or academia. Among men, 61% express the same intention.

By the third year, the proportion of men planning careers in research had dropped from 61% to 59%. But for the women, the number had plummeted from 72% in the first year to 37% as they finish their studies.

If we tease apart those who want to work as researchers in industry from those who want to work as researchers in academia, the third year numbers are alarming: 12% of the women and 21% of the men see academia as their preferred choice.

This is not the number of Ph.D.s who in fact do go to academia; it’s the number who want to.

88% of the women don’t even want academic careers, nor do 79% of the men!

How can it be this bad? Why are universities such unattractive workplaces?

Part of The chemistry Ph.D. discusses problems that arise while young researchers are Ph.D. candidates.

Improving the Ph.D. experience requires taking account of these problems, including too little supervision, too much supervision, focus on achieving experimental results rather than mastery of methodologies, and much more. The long-term effects, though, are reflected in the attitudes and beliefs about academia that emerge during this period.

The participants in the study identify many characteristics of academic careers that they find unappealing. The constant hunt for funding for research projects is a significant impediment for both men and women. But women in greater numbers than men see academic careers as all-consuming, as solitary and as unnecessarily competitive.

Both men and women Ph.D. candidates come to realized that a string of post-docs is part of a career path, and they see that this can require frequent moves and a lack of security about future employment. Women are more negatively affected than men by the competitiveness in this stage of an academic career and their concerns about competitiveness are fueled, they say, by a relative lack of self-confidence.

Women more than men see great sacrifice as a prerequisite for success in academia. This comes in part from their perception of women who have succeeded, from the nature of the available role models. Successful female professors are perceived by female Ph.D. candidates as displaying masculine characteristics, such as aggression and competitiveness, and they were often childless.

As if all this were not enough, women Ph.D. candidates had one experience that men never have. They were told that they would encounter problems along the way simply because they are women. They are told, in other words, that their gender will work against them.

By following Ph.D. candidates throughout their study and asking probing questions, we learn not only that the number of women in chemistry Ph.D. programs who intend to pursue a career in academia falls dramatically, but we learn why. (See also Why go for a Ph.D.? Advice for those in doubt.)

This research and the new knowledge it produces should be required reading for everyone leading a university or a research group. The stories surely apply far beyond chemistry. Remember that it’s not just women who find academia unappealing. Only 21% of the men wanted to head our way, too.

Universities will not survive as research institutions unless university leadership realizes that the working conditions they offer dramatically reduce the size of the pool from which they recruit.

We will not survive because we have no reason to believe we are attracting the best and the brightest. When industry is the more attractive employer, our credibility as the home of long-term, cutting edge, high-risk, profoundly creative research, is diminished.

The answers here lie in leadership and in changing our current culture to build a new one for new challenges. The job is significant and it will require cutting edge, high-risk leadership teamwork to succeed. Is your university ready?

An earlier version of this post was also published on Curt Rice’s blog, Thoughts on University Leadership.

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Curt Rice is Vice President for Research at the University of Tromsø in Norway. He is hosting the webinar How to get more women professors on May 2nd.

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I Am an Academic’s Computer

In Under the Rain With No Umbrella on 2012/05/05 at 03:11

Itir Toksoz, writing from Istanbul, Turkey

I hate it when she does that.

Why does she have to hit my keys so hard and so fast? It’s as if her brain is running to break the Olympic record in Academic Writing, or as if she would forget her next thought if she waited one more second to write the last one (to be honest from the way she looks so blankly at my screen from time to time, I sometimes think this is the case; she forgets what she’s going to write because obviously her brain is faster than her fingers).

I am an academic’s computer. My job is not easy. You may think that it is fun to accompany the intellectual journey of an academic. From one side, you are right. Although I don’t have direct access to her mind and cannot read minds, I am the closest thing there is to know how her brain works. But I swear that sometimes, I just wish I belonged to some kid who would endlessly use me for playing games. That would be boring, yes, but would be an easier life for a computer!

Normally, as a machine, I am supposed to work in an organized fashion.  Files, folders, categories, tabs, they are all invented to make life easier for my users. But nooooo, she is determined to confuse that system.  She’s interested in too many topics at the same time. She thinks it’s important, as she values interdisciplinary research. Then she creates files here and there, leaves them in unrelated folders, replicates them under different names such as “last version, final version, final-final version”. She uses the desktop as if it is some kind of a staging area where the files have to wait for a certain time until they can be properly (I wish) categorized under sections where they belong to.

Then, when she’s surfing on the internet,  how many tabs can one open on one browser at the same time on average? I am confident that there as well, she is after another Olympic record, this time in Academic Surfing.  Yet her surfing is not always academic; since she wants to keep up with the modern times, social media is also on oftentimes.  Her favourites is a long list. There one can see the variety of things she is interested in which she never has the time for, as she spends most of her time with me!

She often eats and drinks as she works. She’s generally good at keeping the drinks away from me. So far I have not had a flood over my keyboard, but I cannot say the same thing for food crumbs. Although she tries to keep me clean, I could occasionally use a more aggressive cleaning procedure on my keyboard , something like the back scrub you would get if you ever went to a Turkish bath!

Emailing is another issue. She keeps two email accounts: one personal and one professional,  trying to separate these two spheres of her life. But from the amount of emails she forwards from one address to the other, one can see that she’s not very successful at that. The amount of emails she receives from her contacts, groups, listservs, etc. is enormous.  She hardly reads them but she doesn’t delete them either, for who knows why!

As if the people at her university and in her own country are not enough, she’s so enthusiastic about making foreign contacts and being a part of transnational academic networks that her sleeping routine is oftentimes disrupted and along with hers, mine. As she waits online to chat or Skype with a colleague in Sweden, USA, Japan, Australia or Argentina, of course I am working overtime again. And don’t even get me started with all this traveling involved where I must accompany her to countries she goes to and conferences she attends!

The worst is, as she is no businesswoman, nor does she have a rich husband, she cannot always afford to update her technologies. Once you become her computer, you have to stay with her at least for the next 4-5 years. You cannot retire as easily as other computers, your memory becomes insufficient for the new generation programs, your hard-drive is always full, she can only support you with external hard-drives where she copies many documents and then spends hours figuring out which one was the latest.

Actually, she is not all bad. At least she likes technology in general and computers in particular and values the work the we do.  But if I wanted more information about her, I would also consult her cell phone and see what it has to say!

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Dreaming Away in the Winds of Change

In Ponderings of a Peregrine Pinoy Professor on 2012/05/04 at 01:46

Rosalie Arcala Hall, writing from Iloilo, Philippines

During the ritual of Strategic Planning that my University holds every time a new President is put in place, a new “goal” was announced: we were going to become a research University. Accordingly, a flurry of new programs were created to support publication-driven research projects, particularly targeting ISI-listed journals and reputable publication houses abroad. Publish or perish, which has been the mode since the 1990s just got deadlier and at the same time, more lucrative. Multiple monetary rewards await those who labor and toil according to these new rules (e.g. $1200 per published article in an ISI-listed journal; 3-year Scientist designation with a $10,000 bursary; foreign travel support to disseminate research findings, etc.) and those who don’t likely are confined to the dust of humdrum teaching unable to cross ranks.

To me, this is welcome indication of a new work ethic. My previous U Venus blogs have been mantras about scholarship being a key element in the academy and how some University policies (e.g. teaching overloads, not requiring publication as an output to research grants, etc.) create disincentives to building such a culture of scholarship.  As Division chair, in particular, it is an added boost that the current crop of University officials support efforts at my level to curb teaching overloads, provide funding for mentoring initiatives in research proposal preparation and journal article writing workshops, and generally push the faculty to re-focus their energies.

I rejoice in the fact that I am not a lone wolf among my colleagues. Recently, I have been invited to collaborate in an interdisciplinary, inter-campus, multi-year competitive research project on water governance involving 4 Philippine sites. I was also involved in crafting a new research program called Mentoring Initiative which will pair Scientists like myself one-on-one with a junior colleague to do a publication-driven research project on a smaller scale. Through this window, I hope to continue my work on civil-military relations in the Philippines, with the end view of inspiring another colleague to follow on my research interest.

There is a silver lining to this cloud of optimism. University officials are counting on the new pool of money available from within to entice faculty members to research and publish. The tagline “who wants to be a Philippine millionaire?” brandied about by one official may not work given the even MORE lucrative research and training consultancies that many of my better-positioned colleagues are involved in. The financial rewards for consultancies from foreign NGOs and institutions like the World Bank are ridiculously high; but with no added value to the University. Colleagues who do this don’t publish scholarly works, nor do they have proprietary claim on the data they gather. Sadly, this line of work is the typical money trail where pandering to funder themes and goals is the name of the game. To this group, the push for a new research ethos by the University has no effect.

There has never been a better time, at least for me, to be at my University. I could get more monetary rewards for the work I do without prostituting myself to the whims of donor-driven projects. I also am providing a better template to my junior colleagues about what being a University Professor is all about: scholarship NOT money for money’s sake. Doing research to make a contribution to the body of scholarly work; participating in the discipline or specializations conversation via peer-reviewed publication. The money is incidental, not the primary goal.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Open Access

In Sarah's Posts on 2012/05/03 at 21:39

Sarah Emily Duff, writing from Stellenbosch, South Africa

Over the past few weeks,  I’ve been avoiding the inter library loans sections of my university’s library. Guiltily, I’ve been clicking ‘delete’ on the several emails they’ve sent me to remind me to return about twenty books borrowed from other South African libraries.

Like many academics, I am a forgetful borrower of library books, but I do return them promptly when another user requests them. I’m stalling on these sources because I’ve just started writing a few articles based on my research project. I’m working in, what is for me, a relatively new field, which means that I am more than usually reliant on these texts to ensure that I produce rigorous and useful scholarship.

I also feel a little resentful about being loaned these books for a relatively short period of time. These sources – all published fairly recently by mainstream academic publishers – are standard historical texts which a university library should stock. Mine, though, does not. In fact, with the exception of its excellent archive and Africana collection, my university’s library’s history section is not particularly good; it lacks significant works, and does not reflect new trends and new fields in the discipline.

I think that part of my annoyance is the result of the fact that I wrote most of my PhD in the British Library where I was able to order every book which I needed. Given that my dissertation was on a fairly obscure aspect of South African history, this was particularly impressive. Returning to South Africa has made me realise how important it is for academics to have ready access to the secondary sources they need to do research.

There are some excellent university libraries in South Africa, but books here are expensive, largely because they are taxed as a luxury item. Despite lobbying to reduce or eliminate the tax, our Government remains loath to do so. Also, ordering books online can be fraught with anxiety, as our postal service is terribly inefficient. In fact, for a while Amazon ceased posting orders to South Africa altogether because of the number of packages which simply disappeared.

It’s here that ebooks become extremely useful to South Africans, academics and otherwise. This week, an edited collection of essays on mass education and citizenship, to which I contributed a chapter, was published. The publisher is posting complementary copies to authors, which is great, but what’s even better is that they’ve made the Kindle edition immediately available. Both editions cost roughly the same, although without postage, the ebook is a cheaper option for academics here.

I was lucky enough to be given a Kindle for my birthday last year. Like many academics and bookish people, I had mixed feelings about Kindles: part of the pleasure of reading is the tactile nature of books. Also, the demise of bookshops dismays me, and I like to support them as much as I can.

But, equally, I need to have access to the sources I need for my research. So I made a promise to myself: my Kindle is for academic books only and over the past few months it has proven to be invaluable. Not only are ebooks frequently cheaper than hard copies, but they arrive almost immediately.

It’s here that I think that universities in the developing world should consider the usefulness of ebooks in allowing academics and students to keep in touch with international scholarship. I don’t argue for the abolition of university libraries – particularly because librarians can be so important in helping us and our students to do research – but, rather, for a rethinking of how we access research produced abroad.

Moreover, ebooks and the Internet open up the ways in which we share our research. There is a gulf between academics and the public in the developing world. Bridging this requires us to be creative in communicating our research. In sub-Saharan Africa where access to the Internet via mobile technology is increasingly widespread, this offers researchers an opportunity to make contact with a public who would not normally be aware of our work.

Instead of seeing Kindles and other devices as a threat to the book – and, even, as some have suggested, to literacy – we should think of them as allowing us to open up access to our research to a far wider audience.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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