Tenure/Snake Dilemma

Last week's post on Tenure and how certain media outlets choose to portray the issues related to tenure reminded me of an incident and made me wonder about the role of tenure in our daily lives.

My decision to write about this incident and cast it in a tenure context also made me wonder whether I may have finally reached a pinnacle of bizarreness with this blog, but I shall not let such concerns deter me from presenting, for discussion, a Tenure/Snake Dilemma. My secret desire is that this anecdote will one day become part of the "ethics" training most of us must now endure.

Some context: Numerous media outlets seem to like to portray the Pursuit of Tenure as a very delicate undertaking, possibly undermined by the slightest of slights against a senior (voting) colleague. If we don't laugh at their jokes, share their hobbies, agree with their opinions on topics of debate in and beyond faculty meetings, and do their bidding when it comes to committee work, research collaborations, and/or teaching, our chances for tenure are doomed, or at least seriously imperiled. If tenure can be denied for such petty and political reasons, tenure must be a flawed concept that is harmful to so-called 'academic freedom' that is frequently mentioned as the reason why professors need tenure.

This view of tenure does not match my experiences nor that of any of my close colleagues at a wide range of institutions. Perhaps it happens somewhere (in fact, someone I know in an education-related field is having tenure-pursuit experiences that would be surreal in my department or related science/engineering departments), but I don't think such situations are the norm.

Even so, before we get tenure, we do make decisions about our activities and speech in the context of being as-yet tenureless. Even though we know that we don't actually have to sit and politely listen to a senior colleague tell us how tanned and muscular he looks without a shirt [true story], and we would still (probably) get tenure even if we retched on his (leather) shoes, we may nevertheless be a bit more polite, quiet, and nice before tenure is secured.

With that in mind, consider the following real but not-entirely-serious situation, and decide whether you would make the same decision about the given scenario before vs. after tenure:

A particular person, who is professor of a non-biological science, is extremely phobic about snakes.* This person is terrified of snakes and, although appreciating from afar the valuable role they play in the ecosystem, does not ever want to see one or knowingly be within 50 m of one, not even if the snake is secured in some sort of escape-proof snake habitat. This person cannot even look at pictures of snakes without shuddering and feeling sick.

This same person is very fond of cats.

This snake-o-phobe, felinophile has a senior colleague who is also a neighbor. That is, these two people work in the same department at the same university and also live near each other.

They occasionally trade cat-care when one of them is away. The snake-o-phobe adores the colleague's cat and is happy to take care of this very affectionate and charismatic beast.

Imagine that at a particular time in the summer, the colleague planned to go away on vacation and needed some cat care. The felinophile agreed to take care of the cat.

Then, almost as an aside, the colleague sends an e-mail that says: "Oh by the way, we also now have a snake. You will need to change his/her water** and you may also need to go to the pet store and get a freshly killed mouse to feed the snake."

Question for discussion, keeping in mind the intense level of snake-phobia of the person in question and imagining that this is you, even if you think snakes are beautiful and interesting and you long to get a pit viper as a pet (and/or you already have one):

Do you take care of the snake despite your horror of it? Does your agreeing vs. declining to take care of the snake have anything to do with your tenure status and your wish to be agreeable to your senior colleague?

Is there anyone who would say yes if you did not have tenure and no if you did? Or would you say no, even if untenured, because you don't believe that the tenure system is so warped that refusal to take care of a colleague's snake would make him turn against you in the tenure vote?

Sorry, but saying yes because you are really eager to work on your snake phobia and/or you just want to be a good neighbor is not a realistic or acceptable answer in this situation. You can, however, say yes and then find someone else to do the job for you, but that answer would be boring, even though it is what the person in question actually did.


* As a youth, this person did not mind snakes and even sought them out, thinking they were kind of cool. This person then had a sustained experience living in a place with many many poisonous snakes, some of which entered the home of this person on a routine basis so that s/he never knew when there would be lethal snakes under the bed or sitting on a chair, as happened from time to time. A snake phobia, acquired during this time of extreme snake interaction, became well entrenched through multiple terrifying encounters with snakes and the observation of horrifying things that happened to friends and neighbors who were bitten by snakes, and it has not abated over the years.

** This is not some weird "let's not specify the gender of the snake" thing; the neighbor-colleague wrote "his/her" because he does not know if the snake is a he or a she***.

*** Comments explaining how to tell male from female snakes are not welcome.

Assorted Infants

Not long ago, a colleague at another university asked me for advice about being the parent of an infant. He is about to become the parent of an infant. I am the parent of a teenager who was an infant about a thousand years ago. My first reaction was "I have no idea. You are asking the wrong person for advice."

Then I realized that my reaction was kind of strange given that I often write about "academic infants" and children. When my daughter was a baby, I was an assistant professor, so why, if both stages of my life were equally distant in the past, was I be more reluctant to give advice about babies than about assistant professors?

Perhaps I shouldn't even attempt to give advice about either. Or perhaps I should start dispensing baby advice. Or perhaps the fact that I spend my days surrounding by assistant professors and even more youthful academics, whereas I don't spend much time with babies anymore, makes one more of a remote experience than the other.

When my daughter was little, big kids, especially teenagers, were rather terrifying. Now that we are in the teen zone, it's the teenagers who are rather fascinating and the little kids, especially babies, who are strange and terrifying.

Middle schoolers are very complicated creatures, but they definitely have their charms -- kind of like associate professors.

No Gap

A graduating high school senior recently told me that she is taking a "gap year" before going to college or doing whatever comes after next year. "Gap year" is a nice, all-purpose term that can be used to describe a post-high-school, pre-everything-else year that some young people take before diving back into school or starting a job. The term makes the year seem rather alluring, possibly filled with adventure and personal growth experiences.

I have no worries about this particular young woman. She is very dynamic and involved in many activities. I am sure she will end up doing something interesting.

I applaud her gap year plans, even though I am not personally a gap year kind of person. I would have hated taking a gap year. I am too impatient for such things; actually, "impatient" is a nice way to describe what I am. I have never taken any "time off" to do anything else but be in academia as a student or researcher or professor, and that's exactly the way I have wanted it.

Oh, perhaps I would have benefited in some way from doing something outside academia for a while: volunteering in a school, standing on a street corner asking people if they have a minute for the environment, working on a cat ranch (they exist!). But I didn't want to. Once I took a course in my field of science during my freshman year of college, I knew what I wanted to do and I have never wanted to do anything else.

I reject the hypothesis that I would be a better person or adviser had I worked outside of academia, although I agree that it's good if a department has some faculty who have done so.

My personal rejection of the gap year concept doesn't mean that I look down on those who do take time off. I have advised students who had a gap year or six. That's fine. That's just not me. And I don't think I will freak out (too much) if my daughter decides to take a gap year when it is time for her to make decisions about her future.

The closest thing I had to a gappish year was a year spent abroad as a student. I did the backpacking through Europe thing for weeks at a time, living on $5/day, sleeping on trains, eating bread and cheese, meeting lots of interesting people, and realizing that traveling alone in some places was a really bad idea. I had a great time.

In between adventures, I went to my classes, of course; some were really good and some were really awful, but the entire experience was so exotic (big university in international city vs. small liberal arts college in the US), even the bad things were kind of interesting. [One exception: On the first day of a literature course, the professor announced that rape was the most heroic deed known to mankind and was much misunderstood throughout history. He was going to be our guide through rape scenes in literature, to explore the heroic elements of this act. I walked out of the class, dropped it, and took a course instead from a kindly old professor who loved architecture, art, and literature.]

So, I have been gapless, unless you count term leaves and sabbaticals. I guess these are sort of gap year-like in that they are for recharging and doing something different, in some cases in a different place. At the same time, they are not as open-ended as a "gap year" in which you don't really know what you'll be doing when the gap closes, so the comparison kind of falls apart there.

I think there are gap year kinds of people and non-gap year kinds of people. What is an excellent idea for some people would be torture for others. Whichever kind you are, I think it is important that we not make assumptions about the "other" kind: gap year people are not necessarily less serious than non-gappers, and non-gappers aren't necessarily one-dimensional monomaniacs who don't want to live in the "real" world.

Unchanging

An ancient post that still gets comments from time to time, in many cases from non-academics, concerns the topic of whether a woman chooses to change (or hyphenate) her name when she gets married.

The most recent comment was from a smug and delusional person who seems to think that women who don't take their husband's last name are more likely to get divorced. Somehow I think the commenter was expressing their own insecurities rather than making a statement based on fact. Somehow I doubt that, after ~ 20 years in a marriage in which neither one of us at any time wanted me to change my name, the name issue is going to break up my marriage.

In this blog, I try to examine issues from various points of view, recognizing that we all have different experiences and priorities in our lives. But sometimes I make an unequivocal statement. This is one of those times:

Whether or not a woman changes her last name to her husband's has nothing to do with how much they love and respect one another. It has nothing to do with the strength of their bond. It is a personal decision that should be respected, no matter what that decision is.

I am now quite used to seeing the CVs of women who changed their names after first publishing under a different last name. In fact, this week I am spending a lot of time gazing at CVs for yet another committee that does this kind of thing, and have seen good examples of this. The change in name is easily and efficiently explained in a footnote to the CV. I completely don't care whether/why a woman changed her name. And I have no regrets about not changing my name. To each her own.

Merry Christmas Happy Birthday

According to Google, I remain at the top of the page for the phrase "Christmastime birthday". That's nice, and I am also strangely pleased that the little blurb that appears with the googled phrase is:

In fact, I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for the creator of "For Your Christmas Time Birthday" cards.

Although that sentiment is a bit extreme, it sort of captures the mood of how I used to feel about my birthday, which was seen as an inconvenience by some members of my family.

For a professor, though, it is a truly excellent time of year to have endless celebrations. The grades are in, the "I can't possibly have gotten a grade other than A" e-mails from students have subsided, and the next term is not looming too considerably large quite yet.

I will be traveling and relaxing and recreating and working intermittently on a proposal and some papers, will post an interesting but disturbing photo tomorrow, and otherwise will be back with the results of the Letter of Reference* contest in a week or so.


* Don't forget to send your entries to me by email (femalescienceprofessor@gmail.com) on or before 24 December.

The Third Wave

For me, the first wave of friending via Facebook involved science friends from various post-collegiate stages of my life, the second wave was college friends, and the third wave was high school friends. (I have written before that I have decided not to friend current students.)

Reconnecting with high school friends has been great, but a bit of a culture shock for me. I only kept in vague touch with many of them, so I sort of knew who was where and what they were doing, but not in detail.

I suppose that as we progress through academic careers, we end up being surrounded by people who are quite a lot like ourselves in terms of education level, career goals, lifestyle, and so on. Of course we do occasionally interact with people who don't have PhDs, but for the most part (except when I get my hair cut and my teeth cleaned), I don't hear the details of people's non-academic lives like I do from my high school friends via FB.

All of my female friends from high school have full or part-time jobs (none in academe), and as far as I can tell, all of them also cook the family meals and clean the house and do the laundry and take care of the kids. The husbands mow the lawn and occasionally take charge of grilling food. I am sure they do some other household tasks as well, but it is incredible how much my friends work after they are home from work. They are doing all the things our mothers did in addition to having jobs outside the home.

No, I have not been in a deep cave for decades -- I know that this phenomenon has been documented, and the hours that men and women devote to various household tasks have been tallied and analyzed, but reading about it in a study or a news report is somehow different from having the details of these lives in my face(book) every day, from people I know. People I grew up with.

Stuff like this:

Hubby gets back from his fishing trip today. I can just imagine how much laundry I'm going to have to do!!!!!!!

A friend who lives near her commented: At least you won't have to mow the lawn yourself anymore, but you did a great job with it this week!

There is a FB option to "like" things, but I wish there were also an option to "dislike" things. FSP dislikes that her friend is doing hubby's fishy laundry and wonders why hubby doesn't do it. My friend worked all week and took care of a sick kid and drove another kid to and from soccer camp every day and cooked all the meals and so on. She is superwoman. I would have let the lawn grow for a week.

My wish for my friend is that hubby gets back from his trip and says "You have been working so hard all week while I was out with my buddies, why don't you just relax while I do this big pile of laundry and fix us a nice meal?"

In fact, I never comment on these things my high school friends write in FB. I am sure there are many things about my life that my high school friends find appalling and strange and they are too polite to opine about these. But I will say this: however challenging and time consuming my science professor job is, these high school friends seem significantly more exhausted than I am. And no wonder, they have more jobs than I do.

Texting the News

During my recent travels, I had limited internet access. I have trouble breathing and feel a bit faint if separated from the internet for too long, and this sporadic internet access was particularly difficult for me because I was waiting to hear news of a proposal. Whenever I did have internet access, I quickly scanned my inbox hoping for (good) news about the proposal. I last checked my email at the equivalent of about 1:30 pm on a Friday in the program officer's city. Nothing.

Later that night, after I'd turned out the light to try to sleep, my phone vibrated with a text message from my co-PI: "xx funded!". My daughter woke up, I told her the news, and she offered to roam the city with me looking for an internet connection so I could get more information. This was kind of her, and I was briefly tempted, but I decided that would be a bit too insane.

I replied to my co-PI and sent a text message to the postdoc whose funding depended on that grant.

I was very happy and relieved. Even so, I had anxious dreams that night:

- Maybe I had misunderstood the text message? The 'xx' in the text message was a 2-letter abbreviation that had seemed unambiguous when I first read it, but what if my co-PI meant something else?

- Did "funded" really mean "funded" or was it a "I hope this proposal will be funded" kind of message?

- Would the budget be cut substantially? What if the email from the program director actually said "I am going to fund the research except for the postdoc." I had already texted my postdoc with the great news. What if that was premature?

And so on. I am not an extraordinarily anxious person under normal circumstances, but I was very worried about this proposal for various complex reasons that had nothing to do with the intrinsic merit of the research proposed.

I also thought that this proposal was one of the 2-3 best proposals I had ever written. If it had been turned down in this year of supposedly abundant $$ for research, I would have been more devastated than usual at the rejection of a proposal.

Proposal anxiety certainly did not ruin my family vacation, but it was always there at a low to moderate level, not far from my mind, with occasional spikes of more intense anxiety.

Checking email the next day confirmed that the proposal really will be funded at close to the requested level. Now I know that the grant really will exist, the postdoc funding is intact, and all is right with the world. And now I have a new idea for another proposal.

In Which I Discover That I Am A Parasite On Society

My daughter's class is learning about Jobs People Do. The class has created an imaginary city and, after being presented with a list of possibilities and job descriptions, each child gets to choose 3 jobs they think they would like to do in their city.

The other day, my daughter told me that she was interested in being mayor, attorney, or DJ, and she listed for me what her best friends chose as possible professions (reporter, gift shop owner..). At some point I interrupted and asked "Didn't anyone want to be a scientist?" She told me that this was not an option. Scientist was not on the list of possible professions. "Why not?" I wondered aloud.

My daughter said she asked her teacher (yes, the same teacher) this question and he replied:

"Because scientists don't contribute to the economy or society."

OK..

The next day my daughter told me that she had narrowed her employment choices and had decided to run for mayor. I asked her what her main issues were, and she said "Well, for starters, we will restore science to its rightful place."

I would vote for her. A kid who quotes Obama, supports science, and knows exactly what her constituent/mother wants to hear would surely make a good mayor of an imaginary city.

Out Dated

A post over at See Jane Compute about Things That Make Us Feel Old reminded me of a phenomenon I wanted to write about:

when students see a reference to a paper by someone with the same last name as their professor and assume that the paper was written by the person they know, even if the paper was published decades before the professor became a professor.

So far, this has only happened to me twice, but it may happen more often as time goes by. The reasons it has thus far been a rare occurrence include:

1 - There aren't that many other Scientists with the same last name as me, so students don't encounter non-me references much.

2 - The few Scientists with the same last name haven't published much.

3 - I have only recently started looking my age, so it used to be obvious (to most people) that I couldn't have published a paper a long long time ago.

The first time a student thought I had published a paper in the early 1970's, when I was in elementary school, I thought it was very funny. I said "Yes, although I was only 9 years old that year, I felt it was time to start publishing", and then I walked away, not sure whether to hope that they would believe me or that they would realize how absurd their assumption was.

This mistaken assumption may become less amusing with time.

I know that it is difficult for young people to gauge the age of old(er) people: anyone over 40 might as well be 50 or 60 or whatever, but it might be a good idea to do the math before verbalizing an assumption that a middle-aged person was publishing > 30 years ago. Just a suggestion.

Invited Wife

There are many professional situations in which I am comfortable being the spouse of another professor in a similar field of Science. For example, if my husband gets an award, I am happy to accompany him to a ceremony and be there, not as a professor or scientist, but as a partner.

And then there are situations that are a bit more odd. For example, my husband recently got an invitation to attend a special faculty dinner in honor of a Famous Person, and the invitation notes that the person hosting the dinner (a colleague of ours) "would like to invite you and your wife to join [list of names of Scientists and wives] at dinner to celebrate this [event/Famous Person]."

I saw the invitation when my husband showed it to me, and I didn't really think anything of it at first because I assumed that I would also get my own invitation, since the dinner party will consist of scientists celebrating another scientist. My husband is being invited because he is a scientist.. I am a scientist.. ergo..

But then later my husband asked me if I'd gotten my own invitation, and we realized that because I hadn't gotten one yet, I wouldn't be getting one. Other faculty (and their spouses) in the department have been invited, but I am not one of those faculty. So, I am either being invited as a spouse, but not as a scientist, and I would not otherwise have been invited; or our colleague hosting the dinner assumes that I don't need a separate invitation because he's already invited me as the wife of someone else he invited.

When we realized that I was an Invited Wife, I just shrugged, but my husband said "Well that's really obnoxious of [our colleague]". Kind of.. but this person is not known for his social skills, so I see no point in being offended.

I was relieved to notice, however, that the special dinner is for a date when I am out of town (doing sciencey things) and so I cannot not attend and wear my special Wife Suit. I don't think I will bother to send my regrets, though -- I will let my husband do that for me.

BFF Colleague

This blog post is in honor of the birthday of the best colleague on the planet. Everyone should have a colleague such as this one. If everyone had a colleague like this, the academic world would be a happier place for all.

If you were to make a list of the absolute best qualities that you could wish for in a colleague, what would be on that list?

Some things would probably show up on many lists: smart? nice? sane or at least functionally insane? doesn't extend the length of faculty meetings with useless drivel? an excellent and prolific writer but not one who is obnoxious if you don't write as quickly or as well?

Some things might vary from person to person in terms of their idea of the most perfect colleague. For example, someone might want their perfect colleague (PC) to be someone with whom they can spend a lot of time discussing things, whereas someone else might prefer a PC who doesn't talk much but gets things done quickly and well. Someone might want a PC who shares many of the same interests and expertise, and someone else might want a PC who has very different interests and expertise. You and your PC can have similar personalities, or very different. There are many possible combinations that work well.

My PC, the real person whose birthday is today, is not like me at all in many ways. Others have commented on how strange it is, if you consider our backgrounds and personalities, that PC and I work so well together. In fact, we have been called an "unlikely duo". Yet we are similar enough in our approach to life and science that we work together easily and happily.

Sometimes it feels like PC has the other half of my brain. PC is also the only one I have ever worked with in any capacity whose writing I don't feel the urge to edit. When we are writing a paper or proposal together, the parts PC writes and the parts I write are essentially seamless. When one of us is stuck for a word, sentence, or paragraph, the other one can usually come up with just the right word(s). Some of the most fun I have had in my academic career has involved writing and brainstorming with PC: bouncing ideas back and forth, trying out different possibilities, writing, rewriting, thinking some more, and finally coming up with something good. We are very different people with different backgrounds in Science, but somehow in combination we complement each other well.

One time, many years ago, we were sitting next to each other on a plane on the way home from a conference. We hadn't seen much of each other at the conference, and had both had many separate experiences and conversations related to a certain topic that we had been discussing before the conference. We compared notes, realized that we were each more convinced than ever that we were on to something interesting with our initial idea, discovered through discussion that we each had a piece of an intellectual puzzle, and started outlining and sketching these ideas in a notebook. Then we started writing, right there on the airplane. When the plane landed, we saw that another colleague had been sitting in a seat directly in front of us. This colleague said to us "Did you two just write a paper on this flight?" and then we realized that we had in fact written a paper (which was later published in an excellent journal).

Having a PC is a lucky gift in many ways, but it can also be important for various practical reasons. I suppose a colleague doesn't have to be Perfect for this purpose, but if you have someone looking out for you, you don't mind the jerks so much. You also don't mind so much the inevitable setbacks and other difficult times that occur now and then -- problems with students, proposals, papers, administrators, whatever -- because at least there is one person in your professional life who likes and respects you and will try to cheer you up.

My PC is a cheerful, kind, charming, and fascinating person who likes to laugh, drink coffee, and do science with me and who is one year older (and wiser) today. Happy Birthday!

Fear/Not

This is not the most cheerful of topics, but I recently had a scare and it made me think about what steps we take to be safe on a daily basis and how I can/should teach my daughter about being brave but careful in a world that is not always a safe place.

The two of us were home alone one night. My daughter was in her room sleeping and I was poring over some documents related to yet another committee task, when I heard a strange sound from the back of the house. I could think of various reasonable explanations for the sound, so I ignored it for a while, but eventually, as the sound continued, I got curious and looked out an upstairs window that overlooks the back of the house.

A large man I had never seen before was hurling himself again and again at the back porch door. The door was locked, but a large part of the door is comprised of glass.

I called 911 and the operator and the police responded rapidly. The operator insisted on keeping me on the line until the police came, and she kept talking to me as the man continued to hurl himself against the door. I provided a description of him; first question: race; second question: clothing; third question: age; fourth question: height. The police came quickly, confronted and restrained the man, asked me whether I had ever seen him before (I had not), and took him away.

It turns out that my daughter had awakened and heard my urgent conversation with the 911 operator and heard the man slamming himself into the door. She stayed in her room, calmly waiting for me to come and tell her what was going on. When I went to check on her and found her awake, we talked about what had happened, and she was more curious about it than scared or anxious.

I am glad that she was not terrified or upset, but I also want her to understand the importance of taking basic steps to be safe. Ideally, these basic steps will be minimally intrusive in our lives, but nevertheless effective. Locking doors and windows is a basic step that doesn't interfere with most people's daily lives too much, but what beyond that should we do to be safe in routine situations?

In 2007, I wrote about how the campus police told me I should keep my office door closed at all times, even during the day, but I have ignored this advice. During the day, my door is open most of the time that I am in my office. If I work in my office at night, however, I close the door, even if the building is supposed to be locked.

In fact, the building doors are not always locked when they are supposed to be. There used to be a problem of students leaving the door propped open for friends, but this problem has entirely disappeared owing to the ubiquity of cell phones and ease of communication. Now if the door is unlocked when it is not supposed to be, it is a mistake by the people who are supposed to lock the doors at a particular time. There is a phone number one can supposedly call and report problems such as this, but I have never found it to be a particularly effective or rewarding experience to call this number late at night.

Working late at the office requires walking through campus at night. I could call for a security escort to walk with me, but I never do. My main reason for not taking advantage of this option is that I do not want the inconvenience of calling and waiting for someone to come to my building, but I suppose another reason involves my somewhat delusional reluctance to believe that my immediate environs are so unsafe that I can't walk alone across a well-lighted area of campus alone at night.

Perhaps I am making the wrong decisions about my personal security. Perhaps I should sit in my office with the door closed at all times until someone knocks and identifies themselves to my satisfaction. Perhaps I should install a webcam and/or retina scanner to screen visitors, including the department chair.

Or maybe it's OK to have my office door open during the day, but I shouldn't work in my office at night and/or walk alone on campus at night.

Or maybe it's (mostly) OK to walk alone on campus at night as long as I stay in well lighted areas and keep my phone on and at hand (as I do).

Or not. Random scary things can happen, even in one's own home. Even so, I don't want to live in fear, and I don't want my daughter to be fearful either. It's just a matter of finding the right amount of caution to take in our daily lives. It seems, however, that the right amount may only be right until something happens.

Invertebrate Time

In the novel Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, the protagonist's wife and son move to London, leaving him in New York:

My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.

Although my situation is not so sad and dire -- my family is away on a short visit with the in-laws -- I can relate to the feeling of being adrift in time, lacking the usual spine of my days.

I suppose I could go shopping today, supposedly the biggest shopping day of the year, but I have gotten this far in my life without feeling the urge to get up before dawn and lurk in a mall parking lot so as to rush into a store when it opens and immediately fill a shopping cart with on-sale electronic devices. Instead, I will enjoy my quiet invertebrate time by writing and thinking at home and at the office.

I plan to spend much of the day in my office, working on an interesting paper and trying to make progress on a proposal. There might be one or two other colleagues around, and a few grad students and postdocs, but the corridors will be empty and dim. It can be very pleasant working in a peaceful department building for a day or three.

I find that on the rare occasions when I have time alone with no teaching, no meetings, and no family responsibilities, I immediately revert to the working-eating-sleeping schedule I followed in earlier, less evolved stages of my academic life. I work long hours, eat at random times, and stay up most of the night. This isn't so great as a long-term lifestyle, but when you only get to do this once or twice a year, it can be quite fun being temporarily invertebrate.

The other day, my husband wondered if, years from now, we would revert to our pre-child academic lifestyle once our daughter grows up and leaves home, or whether we won't be interested in working such long hours again. In our pre-child life, we knew which near-campus restaurants were open all night (or at least very late), and our cats never knew when to expect us home. Our felines and our future grad students probably hope that we will not adopt a 20/7 work schedule.

In the meantime, I am enjoying my few days of invertebrate time, and then will be happy to resume normal life, especially since the term is almost over.

Talking to the Plumber

Following on yesterday's post about talkativeness, another issue related to communication skills involves the ability (or lack thereof) of academics to converse with non-academics. I suppose some would replace the word "academics" with "intellectuals", but intellectuals (sensu stricto*) can inhabit both academic and non-academic environments, and highly intelligent people are found in all social and economic classes.

There has been much discussion of this general topic, particularly this summer, owing to the publication of the article by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar, "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education".

In the essay, there are statements with which I agree, e.g. that those who attend elite universities are not necessarily "better" people (or even smarter) than those who do not, and there are aspects of it with which I disagree, e.g. that an elite education renders one unable to converse with anyone who had a different educational experience.

So Deresiewicz is unable to converse with his plumber. I do not believe that that is because Yale brainwashed him to believe that he had nothing to say to plumbers because he is intellectually superior to such people. If he's right, though, I find it puzzling that his subsequent life experiences gave him no conversational fodder whatsoever.

In general, I do not easily converse in a chit-chat kind of way with people I don't know, whether or not they are professors or plumbers, but this condition pre-dates my elite college education. Even so, I am capable of talking about the weather, pets, or children if the situation requires. I am even capable, particularly under torture, of talking about Sports. I know nothing about how any team in any sport is currently doing at any given moment, but I can ask questions, thereby maintaining a semblance of a conversation. Again, this applies to conversations with academics and non-academics alike.

My ability to converse with non-academics also varies depending on the other person's conversational skills. A professor-plumber communication gap is by no means exclusively the fault of the professor. For example, I do not typically have good conversations with home-repair people who patronize me or assume I know nothing about electricity or other "guy things" (e.g. The electrician who was distressed when he realized that he had to talk to me instead of my husband, saying "Oh great, I don't suppose you even know where the fuse box is."). In contrast, I always enjoy chatting with a certain handyman who does random repairs on our house. He is a nice and interesting person (and he thinks my cats are beautiful).

I think that for most people, everyday communication is a complex process that has many variables related to personalities, mood, context, weather, and so on.

So far I have been discussing one's ability to converse across the academic/non-academic boundary. Another (related) issue is one's interest in doing so. I must admit that I avoid certain situations (in fact, two: haircuts and appointments with a particular dental hygienist whose conversation about her church and son easily adds 20 extra minutes to routine appointments) because I find the conversational aspects of them excruciating (literally so in the case of the chatty dental hygienist).

How is this different from Deresiewicz's inability to converse with his plumber? There may be some similarities stemming from an academic/non-academic culture gap, but any conversational shortcomings on my part are not because my educational background has failed me in some way. I think I can take responsibility for this all by myself.

[possible topic for next week: Deresiewicz's comments on the "indifferent bureauocracy" of non-elite academic institutions]


* Use of the Latin in this context represents an attempt at humor.

Does She Have Teeth?

Thanks to all who left nice comments on the post yesterday about science blogs vs. academic culture blogs. I still feel like I don't understand why, given the number of science blogs in existence, some people think that this particular blog should have more scientific content. Does it mean this blog is less rigorous? Scientists should write about Science? And so on.

But today I want to talk about something else. I recently encountered an extremely talkative colleague, and this conversation, combined with an event during my summer visit to the ancestral home, made me think about the issue of Talkativeness.

During my visit to the home of my youth, my father made a brief appearance and gave me a photocopy of a page of notes he took at Parents’ Night at my school when I was in 9th grade.

The only time that parents met teachers was during an evening at the school, typically in the late fall or early winter, after we’d been in school for months. On this one night, parents went to the school en masse (and sans kids) to walk the halls of the school, gaze at our desks, and meet the teachers. Parents talked for a few minutes with each teacher while other parents milled about nearby, waiting their turn.

I don’t know for sure of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me if no other parent took notes at these events. (background info/abridged history of my father’s career: Navy → seminary/ministry → engineering). He had already morphed into an engineer when he took the notes in a little pocket notebook, no doubt using one of the many pens he carries around in his front pocket.

Here is what my father wrote down about me during one of these meet-and-greet events with my teachers in 9th grade:

SCIENCE, 97%: Good work. Gets along with other kids. Doesn’t talk much. Doesn’t appear to be afraid of teacher. Will answer direct questions.

ENGLISH, 99%: Very quiet. Highest grade. Excellent writing. Doesn’t talk much to teacher. Talks to friends.

In 7th or 8th grade, a teacher asked my parents: “Does she have teeth?”, wondering if my reluctance to speak in class related to a dire dental problem.

Seeing these notes reminded me of just how annoying it was that everyone focused so much on my quietness, assuming it was unhealthy. I loved school, I had friends, and I was involved in numerous activities (school sports team, school newspaper etc.). If a teacher initiated a conversation with me, I had no trouble conversing.

I was quiet, but (in my opinion) not in a dysfunctional way. In the opinion of my teachers, however, I was too quiet. I know this from what my parents told my teachers, as duly recorded by my father in his notes, and I know it because my teachers used to try to bring me "out of my shell", a phrase I have always loathed. The attempts typically involved public humiliation, and I found them counterproductive.

My youthful experiences as a quiet person taught me a few things:

- Many people assume that quiet people are stupid and/or disturbed. Quiet people are not necessarily stupid or disturbed; they may be or they may not be, just like people who talk easily and/or a lot. The lack of correlation between intelligence and talkativeness has been important to remember during my experiences teaching and advising, especially in classes that require student participation or when advising a quiet/shy student in a research project.

- As long as someone can communicate at some level, there is no need for extraordinary measures to make them talk more. Humiliation is not a good method for encouraging a student (or anyone) to talk more.

- People who are quiet are not necessarily bad teachers or bad speakers. There may be no correlation between ability to speak in social settings and ability to speak to a class or professional audience. I have always enjoyed public speaking, even during my most intensely shy years. In contrast, some very outgoing people may be terrified of public speaking.

- Being quiet/shy as a child may actually be good preparation for later life, contrary to what teachers, parents, and others typically assume. I think it made me somewhat stubborn, or at least reinforced that trait. In my youth, I preferred to be quiet -- it felt right to me, and didn't seem like something that needed radical alteration. Over the years, I've been told that I needed to change things about myself to succeed -- my personality (not aggressive enough), my appearance (not old/serious/tall/well-dressed enough), my voice (too soft, too female) etc., but I always felt that I could succeed by working hard, caring about my work, and being smart enough.

I have learned that it's OK to be quiet and/or shy, as long as the shyness is not so extreme as to make all human interaction painful and difficult.

Something else I (re)learned on my recent trip to the ancestral home:

- My mother married a man who is even more strange than the men her sisters married, and this gives me pause.

A colleague recently told me that my posts have been rather long lately, so I will stop here for now, but I have more to write (but not say aloud) about this topic.

Data Fiend

Tonight at dinner my husband referred to an incident from ~ 10 years ago that he described as "the most fascinating psychological window into your soul", meaning my soul. I hadn't really thought about it that way, but I can kind of see what he meant. So here it is:

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had a very severe case of gestational diabetes. This was a big surprise because I had no apparent risk factors. I wasn't overweight and had no family history of diabetes. Doctors were also surprised by the severity of the diabetes. I had to take rather massive doses of two types of insulin by injection twice a day. I followed an extraordinarily strict (boring, depressing) diet exactly, but it took weeks of monitoring and ever-increasing doses to get things under control.

At various times of the day, I had to prick my finger and do a blood sugar test with a small monitoring device at home. Between these jabs and the twice daily injections for 10 weeks, I was a total pin cushion, and I was not always very cheerful about it.

I had a little booklet in which I recorded my blood sugar level, but I also started keeping track of the results in a spreadsheet and I graphed the results every day. I got interested in the shape and magnitude of some of the blood sugar highs and lows, but my initial sample spacing (in time) was too rough to get a satisfactory graph of these spikes, and there were other aspects of the data that I didn't understand when I did the minimum number of recommended tests.

So, despite my loathing for jabbing myself in the finger with a sharp object, I started collecting more data. I tracked the blood sugar spikes so that they were defined by more than one point and I could really see their shape and I was certain of their maximum values. I collected data day and night. I dreamed of a device that could provide a continuous readout of my blood sugar and make perfect graphs. Even with my primitive data collection techniques, however, I made beautiful graphs and I did things with the graphs in terms of how I analyzed them over different time periods and how I displayed the data. I was obsessed with these graphs.

Part of what fascinated me about all this was the fact that I had so much control over the data. In my research, acquiring data can be a very time-consuming and expensive process, and it is not always immediately clear what the results mean. With my blood sugar data collection project, I could get as much data as I needed and the only cost - other than a bit of pain and some scarred fingers - was the price of the test strips.

The first time I brought my graphs and spreadsheet to a doctor's appointment, the doctor was stunned. He called all the other doctors and nurses over to look at it. He asked my permission to make copies and fax them to other doctors. He asked me to start sending him my graphs between appointments. He stopped talking to me like I was a slow child and started discussing with me what the data might mean. He gave me suggestions for ways to get more useful data. All of this helped get me through a difficult time.

Although the anxious and painful aspects of having severe gestational diabetes are not something I want to remember, I very clearly remember the excitement of acquiring and graphing the data. I think that is what my husband meant about the "window into my soul", which I suppose must be a scientific soul.

My daughter was born completely healthy at 7 pounds 10 ounces, although there were some difficult moments at the end. I've heard that most women forget the pain of childbirth (and hence are willing to have more children, ensuring the survival of the human race), but it is difficult for me to forget because my daughter was born at exactly 5 pm and the doctors were listening to NPR news in the delivery room. My daughter arrived as the NPR top-of-the-hour theme song snippet played, so every time I hear this song (i.e., almost every day), I am reminded of that moment.

Moms, Jobs & Fun

The other day, my daughter and I were walking and talking.

Daughter: Do you remember when I did that profile of you for Mother's Day for a school assignment?

Me: Of course I remember. You drew a picture of me and you wrote a very kind of description of me and my life. I especially liked the part about the "laugh lines".

D: When we were writing about our moms, our teacher told us to stop writing so much about our mother's job. She said that was boring, and we should write instead about our mother's hobbies and what our mom did for fun because that was more important.

Me: What did you think about that?

D: I thought it was stupid so I ignored it.

Me: Why? Because I don't have hobbies?

D: You have hobbies, they are just strange hobbies, but that's not why. I told my teacher that you love your job and so it is an important part of you. You do your job for fun, and so it's not just a job, and I wanted to write about that.

Me: What you wrote was great. I wonder why your teacher thought that mother's jobs weren't interesting or important to write about. She clearly loves her job, and she's a great teacher.

D: Yeah, it was weird.

Twisted Sister

This is about balancing career and family, but in this case family does not refer to one's offspring or spouse, but to the rest of one's family. This is a complex topic that includes difficult issues such as caring for aging/ailing parents or siblings, but today I will mention two other issues that have thus far impacted me more directly:

1. Collision of important Career Activities and important Family Activities. Recent example: A month or so ago, I wrote about how I had agreed last fall to give an invited talk at a conference in the summer. In fact, I also made plans for students, postdocs, and me to visit international colleagues to do Research directly after this conference. Months after making these plans, my brother got an awesome new job involving being in charge of some major military stuff. There will be a party. The party will be exactly during my conference and international travel.

My family thinks I should go to my brother's party/ceremony, but to do so would require backing out of several commitments involving the conference, not to mention research travel and activities that require my presence and active participation. If I had known about the ceremony/party thing last fall, I would have made different plans, but by the time the party was announced, I felt it was too late to change plans. Because I refuse to cancel or change my plans, my family thinks I am making a statement that my family is less important than my career.

None of the women of my mother's generation or older ever had a career, so I suppose they can't imagine making this choice, nor can they imagine that for me it isn't as simple as Career > Brother. Even if I say that's not the case, actions speak louder blah blah blah.

I tried to convince a friend to go to the party and impersonate me. All she would have to do is stand around and make the occasional sarcastic comment, and no one would notice she wasn't me. Alas, the opportunity to go to a party with my family on a military base was not alluring.

Earlier this spring, my travels brought me to my brother's city of residence, but he was out of town on business so I didn't see him. No one (including me) suggested that he change his plans, but one relative remarked at my poor planning to schedule my visit while my brother was away, as if I had a choice. In my family, men have Careers and women work if they want to, but it's kind of an optional activity that somehow isn't as serious as what the Men do. The fact that I do this bizarre professor/science job makes it even harder for my family to understand what I do.

I know that my relatives are proud of me for having a Ph.D. and being a professor, but then something like this recent event happens and these feelings of pride are overridden by more fundamental feelings about how things should work in a Family.

So, I am not going to my brother's party, though I will think of some appropriate way to congratulate him. For his last promotion, I got him a chainsaw woodcarving, so I have set the bar pretty high for myself in terms of gifts. In contrast, my brother, who has not similarly acknowledged my advancement in my career, has set the bar pretty low in terms of his gifts to me, so I am not too stressed about this. (though I will accept suggestions, as long as they are bizarre yet tasteful)

2. My so-called career has taken me away from the region of the country where the rest of my family lives, so I really must not care about them all that much. I suppose there are many places in the country/world like this, but few people move away from the place where I am from. I am sure more young people leave it now than 20-30 years ago, but most of my friends from high school still live in or near our town. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but the part I don't like is that people who do choose to leave are seen as turning their backs on their home. When I decided to go to college in a different state, more than one person said to me, more as a statement than a question "So we aren't good enough for you?".

I left home long ago (by choice) and have not returned to live there (by the vagaries of the academic job market), and this fact has repercussions to this day. For example, a few years ago I tried to talk to my mother's doctor about my concerns about her deteriorating memory and cognitive abilities, and instead got a lecture about how, because I have chosen to live elsewhere, I can't possibly really care about my mother and so it was a waste of his time for this doctor to talk to me because I was probably just trying to ease my conscience about living so far away. [note: 'far away' in this context means anything more than a 45 minute drive]

There are a lot of great things about growing up in a fairly small place, but people there can be a bit unforgiving if you leave.

I am doing pretty well at being a professor and a mom, but perhaps not so well at being a daughter and a sister. I don't think I am a terrible daughter/sister, though, despite some drops in my approval rating in recent family opinion polls. I visit my relatives*, keep in touch by phone/email, enjoy sending gifts and cards for various occasions and non-occasions, and feel reasonably well connected to the rest of the family**. Right now, my approval rating is probably as low as it has ever been, but I am going to hang in there until not even one relative is willing to vote for me. I seem to be channeling Hillary Clinton and that is not good. It must be the stress of having 82% of my family annoyed with me right now.

* Way more often than my brother does, though I realize it is neither constructive nor mature to point this out.

** With the exception of a cousin who carries a concealed weapon and has read nothing but golfing magazines for the past 15 years, and another cousin who was living in a shed and found God ("In the shed?" I asked, causing a further drop in my family approval rating) and who now wants to travel the world distributing Bibles to desperately poor people in violence-torn countries.

After the Fall

A recent article in The Chronicle Review, “The Sweet Lure of Your Graduate-School Town” (2/22/08 issue), has been a topic of discussion in the part of the academe-o-sphere in which I orbit. In the essay, the author, Murray Sperber, proposes that many academics view the site of their graduate school days as Eden, and therefore choose to return to live in the vicinity of their old grad school when they retire.

The author of the essay spent most of his academic career in Indiana, but is retiring to Berkeley, where he went to grad school. It might be difficult to convince some people that this particular trajectory is evidence for a trend in academic society. To do so, it would be necessary to show that the opposite trajectory is likely as well – i.e. that Berkeley faculty who went to grad school in Indiana are longing to return there. Indeed, to support his hypothesis, the author mentions some academics he knows who plan to return to Indiana (site of their grad school days) after living many years in France.

If this grad-school-as-Eden-retirement-magnet idea is true, this is interesting. I can see why the place you end up as a professor might not be your ideal place to live – we tend to go where the jobs are, and most of us don’t end up living in our geographic location of choice. But why would GradSchoolVille be more Edenic than, say, the place where you went to college or did a postdoc or the place where you grew up or even some other random place you’ve never lived before but have always wanted to?

Sperber proposes that we long for GradSchoolVille (GSV) because when we were in grad school we were young, energetic, independent (perhaps for the first time), optimistic, and intellectually stimulated. After grad school, “.. we had to work at a demanding, often frustrating full-time job, usually devoid of the stimulation of graduate study.” In fact, I think that is a very sad statement considering the unequal distribution of time (for most people) between duration of grad study vs. academic career. Furthermore, I have found that being a professor is much more intellectually stimulating and rewarding than being a graduate student or postdoc.

According to the Sperber hypothesis, your postdoc year(s) could also be Edenic. You are still young(ish), intellectually stimulated, further on your career path, past the stressful exams and will-I-get-my-PhD stage, but not yet burdened with (too many) administrative tasks and other frustrations and stresses that come with a faculty position. Or perhaps the stresses of being a postdoc (and being in the will-I-get-a-job stage) negate any Edenic potential. I would not move to my postdoc town because I have unpleasant memories of being harassed there, an Eden-wrecking experience if there ever was one.

Nor is Eden a word I would associate with my grad school experience. However, it so happens that I went to grad school in a geographically excellent place, and I would love to live there again.

Despite my willingness to move back to my old GSV, I guess I’m not convinced that there are flocks of professors longing to return to their GSV. I have met very few who have made such a move, and am not aware that my grad school contemporaries long to return to our GradSchoolVille. It might be fun if we all did, though. We could move to a retirement villa in GSV and recreate our grad school days. To make the experience authentic, our rooms must be very small and lit by flickering fluorescent lights, squirrels and/or other rodents must die and rot in inaccessible sites between the walls, and we must occasionally be told that we are inadequate. It will be just like old times, but at least we will be living in a beautiful place.

Fame, the Sequel

In January, I wrote about how even 'famous' professors aren't famous in a side-of-the-bus kind of way. In that particular anecdote, a childhood friend of my husband's had become name-on-the-side-of-the-bus famous owing to his success as a contemporary artist.

In a strange twist of fate, although my husband and I have not achieved side-of-the-bus fame in the past month, we have nevertheless both recently had unusual experiences involving the intersection of our lives with Art.

In my case, part of my research has been incorporated into a visual artwork. I am pleased by this because something that I find intellectually beautiful is now part of something that is beautiful in a different way.

In the case of my husband, the situation is more complicated: we recently learned that he is a character in book written about another childhood friend. In the book, which is semi-biographical, the author changed the spelling of my husband's name slightly, but phonetically it is the same.

I immediately acquired the book and scanned it for the juicy parts -- i.e., the parts that mention my spouse. Although I did not know him in his youth, various aspects of his personality are quite recognizable, even though he is a 5th grader when he first appears in the book.

My husband refuses to read this book. He doesn't mind if I tell him about an incident or person in the book, but he doesn't want to discuss it or give his point of view on any incident or person. He says he doesn't want to read what someone else's imagination decided he was like as a kid. I can understand that. I would be unnerved if I showed up in someone else's book, especially if, like this one, the book is a roman à clef. And who would want their tween to teenage years enshrined in Literature?

Neither of us actually had a choice about having our life/work incorporated into the Art of others, but overall, I think I got the better deal of the two of us.