I’ve procrastinated in answering the question. I have to admit that I’m scared for our future, and that makes it hard to confront. While in general, when professors say “It seems that each year’s students are a little less prepared”, they are basically suffering from a specialized case of the “Back in my day” syndrome, this time that’s not entirely true. Under the “No Child Left Behind” act, test scores in the key fields of math and reading mattered so much that in some cases other subjects – including science – weren’t taught in all grades, but were rather focused on during the years they were tested. This means that where once kids got science every year of grades K-12 – at least in the form of getting to watch caterpillars become butterflies in kindergarten, and growing seedlings in 2nd grade – now kids may only get science every 3 years.(2) Every year since its passage during the Bush administration, a new batch of kids entered grade school and a new batch graduated. With every successive year, the kids graduating have spent more years under “No Child Left Behind”, and every successive year the kids have become less prepared for college in those areas that aren’t tested by the standardized tests.

It is my hope that whatever comes after “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) will be able to change our current slump into poor performance in the STE (and often M) parts of STEM.

To fix things,  a lot of repair work needs to be done. If you’ve ever built something, you know that it is sometimes just easier (and cheaper!) to tear something down and rebuild from scratch than it is to repair what you’ve got. With a kid’s education, however, we don’t have the option of using a sledge hammer to return everything to flat so that we can just start the building process over again. This means that in building a vision for STEM moving into the next decade, we need to include in our vision mechanisms to repair the harm NCLB has done. This means this vision needs to include ways to reignite that flame of science enthusiasm most children have when small – when they go through that dinosaurs and planets loving phase – and then feed that flame with as much inspirational content as possible. We have to both revive a starved curiosity and make up for material never learned in youth. This isn’t easy, but if we want to have a society that supports science it must be done. Put more positively, we have to inspire child-like curiosity while providing rigorous content.

Before I go any further, I have to acknowledge the added challenge of trying to teach science to a post-scientific society. Due to a lack of belief in vaccinations, the US society has lost its herd-immunity to deceases such as mumps, measles, and whopping cough. Recently, a Facebook group that facilitated parents purposely giving their kids chicken poxs instead of simply vaccinating them was in the news. The US hasn’t signed onto to the Kyoto climate protocols in part because the lobbying power of “climate skeptics;” people who turn a blind eye on scientific data showing conclusively that our planet is warming. Evolution is still not consistently taught due to the control of Christian conservatives over school systems (and in some cases just because teachers find it easier to not teach evolution than to deal with the wrath of parents), and Big Bang cosmology is missing from astronomy lessons designed to be as inoffensive as possible to those who may believe the universe is as young as a few thousand years old. I don’t know how our society achieved such an anti-scientific state. It shames me to see how we have culturally gone backwards as multiculturalism has been used as an excuse to label science as a culture and as something one isn’t required to believe in. If we are going to build a society rich in people who understand and support science, those of us who are scientifically literate need to find ways to respectfully say, “you are wrong” to people who choice to believe things not supported by the observational reality of our world and our universe. While one should be as respectful as possible of another’s religious beliefs, beliefs aren’t facts, and believing in something doesn’t make it true. Data, repeatably acquired and confirmed by more than one scientist: that is what makes something true. As a community, scientists need to consistently promote a data driven view of reality, and we need to work to get critical thinking, data analysis, and, well, reality into the classrooms.

This starts to define a picture of what STEM education must look like as we move forward. We have set of required outcomes: Must inspire child-like curiosity, must have a high efficacy in order to transfer a lot of content (and thus make up for lost time), must create people who want to see the data behind statements like “vaccines cause autism,” must demonstrate that we live in an evolving universe that is both physically and biologically changing over time due to a variety of driving forces. These basic science concepts need to be taught within the context of a world that relies on engineering solutions to problems, using technology to communicate, and that has statistics driving everything from medical research to economic models.

I don’t have the silver bullet of an idea that can address all these needs, but I do think the above problems suggest ways to concentrate our efforts and funding as we move forward. To inspire child-like curiosity, we need to expose kids (and adults!) to STEM content that is so amazing that they can’t help but forget their learned inhibitions and they revert to the “Why? How? What?” of a captivated child. This is something that can we done through effective communications of modern research and it may be most effectively done through kids magazines (remember the ones that came with the book order forms in elementary school on the ’80s? Anyone remember what they were called?), through after school and museum / science center focused programs, and through public outreach programs such as movies, TV shows, podcasts, and blogs that work to inspire through communications. To be effective, it is important that each of these mechanisms for inspiration be scaffolded with a system that facilitates questions and answers, and community building (e.g. with classroom discussions, online forums, and other discussion mechanisms).

With a healthy curiosity in place, it is also necessary to engage a healthy skepticism. This many require a fundamental change in how science is taught in some places . There is a temptation when teaching (and I know I’ve fallen prey to it at times) to teach science as a series of facts connected by equations and experiments. What is missing from this paradigm is the story of how we know what we know. When confronted with a new fact or theory, a skeptical thinker should ask, “But how do you know that?” If we expect our students to simply take what we say as gospel, then we are raising them up to see science as a faith-based system, and any “authority” figure can easily step in teach them any crazy idea is true. If we instead teach them science as a series of facts and theories that are derived from data and experiments, and if we can teach them there should be a line of evidence, mathematical proof, or other set of data demonstrating what we teach them, then we train them to expect evidence to back up what people tell them, and people without evidence will have a much harder time tricking them later.

One content area that can be used to convey the “How we know” part of science is the story of the universe itself. From Big Bang cosmology, to the evolution of the earth through plate tectonics and geology, to evolutionary biology itself, we live a universe that is ever changing and that conveniently leave evidence of how it is changing in both this cosmic and terrestrial fossil record. Each of these scientific areas has multiple lines of evidence, and an interesting human story behind the discoveries. They also lead naturally into a discussion of the planet and universe’s future. Part of teaching students not only what we know, but how we know it includes engaging them directly in data, and in these areas, there is often data that students can find intellectually accessible. In fact, many different scientific lines of study have data sets that can be meaningfully analyzed by students.

In the current digital era, many of the sciences possess more data than can be readily analyzed by the professional scientific community. From protein folding simulations to animal behavior videos to astronomical images, data exists in abundance that needs a pair of human eyes to analyze it in a way that computers at this time can’t be programed to do. Many different citizen science projects exist to facilitate everyday people – including students – participating in data analysis, and in many cases curricula exist to help students solve basic problems using the data they look at. This type of an exercise can serve two different purposes: It gets students’ hands dirty doing actual science and it provides a context for learning statistics. Recent motivational work done to try and understand why adults participate in citizen science found that many of them said they always wanted to be a scientist, but then didn’t become one because they didn’t feel they were capable. By providing students an experience being part of the scientific process, confidence in their own competency as a scientist can be instilled at an early age. At the same time, the importance of teaching statistics within a meaningful context can’t be stressed enough.

It is amazingly easy to twist statistics in ways that obscurate reality. From polling results that say “Candidate X has pulled into the lead” when in reality Candidate X is statistically tied with two others, to medical studies that stress how on new medicine A 55 people out of 70 had their symptoms improve after just 3 days without stressing that the same thing happened in 53 out of 70 people not on medicine A, and across so many other examples people get mislead by misused numbers. By teaching statistics in a meaningful context that allows students to understand both a data-driven research study and the statistics used to describe it, statistics can be made more tangible. With a solid understanding of statistics, students will not only ask “How do you know that?” but they will also ask “How many standard deviations above background is that result?” and “What was the margin of error in that result?”(3)

With a strong grounding in science as a process and statistics as a way of understanding significance, it become possible to apply the problem solving methods of science to engineering new solutions to new problems. From devising the experiments (how do you determine how different genes in guppies are linked, and which are dominant?) to devising solutions to problems (how do you use a Lego robot and camera to build a log cabin with 4 different colored walls?) science teaches the problem solving skills needed in engineering and utilizes technology in all of its myriad forms.

Unfortunately, putting these ideas into practice through a complete reworking of the educational system isn’t practical. There may be a backdoor though. Through different science funding strands it is possible to get money for education that is related directly to a research projects. The NASA ROSES programs, HST observing programs, and many NSF grants all offer these educational supplants. This funding can be used to create teacher professional development programs, classroom curricula, and after school programs that work to create the needed materials, and change education one classroom at a time.

The exact amount of money available for education fluctuates over time. With NASA ROSES grants, you can request $10k per year per grant. Many NASA missions spend a couple percent of the mission budget on education and public outreach. NSF is more varied, where money can come in the form of a student intern (an REU student) or an educational supplement) and amounts can vary greatly.

What worries me is the future of this funding. As budgets get tighter, something has to give. In the past, NASA has reduced the budget spent on EPO more than once. I don’t know if NSF has done the same, but in the funding-restricted future, the temptation has got to be there. Both these agencies are STEM funding agencies, not STEM education funding agencies. But in a way, by funding STEM education we are funding future science by creating the people who are prepared to do science in the future. The Department of Education has its hands full with all the other parts of education, and current developments under NCLB make it clear science is not their priority. If we want to protect STEM, it is the people in the STEM fields who need to do that protecting.

I’m listening to my iPod while typing and the song I’m listening to just had the lyric “I wish it were simple but we give up easily, you’re close enough to see that.”(4)  I think everyone reading this is close enough to know that we all wish fixing education was easy, but we do give up easily. We gave up under NCLB, and rather than fighting a harmful piece of educational legislation, we have lived with it and simply complained while trying to help out in small corners, in random classrooms where we could. In this moment, as congress works to define what comes after NCLB, we need to fight for something better. Today, as NSF and other agencies work to fit their programs into narrowing budgets, we need to fight convince them that the money they spend on education is money they should continue to spend on education. We need to find a way to reform education so that graduates in the future are STEM curious problem solvers who are also statistically literate and driven to always ask, “How do you know that?”

Can we work to fund and build that future?

(1) STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

(2) This is because under NCLB schools only require “science assessments to be administered at least once during grades 3-5; grades 6-9; and grades 10-12.” (http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/ayp/testing-faq.html)

(3) I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t make since to reduce the amount of geometry and trigonometry taught in school and introduce statistics. While students going into STEM careers need as much calculus as they can get, I’m really not sure who, other than math majors, needs to know how to do a geometric or trigonometric proof, and to perhaps say something scandalous, I’d nix most of the prof writing from both those classes and combine them into one year to make space for a course on statistics.

(4) KT Tunstall “Otherside of the World” from Eye to the Telescope

Help me? (© Veronika Vasilyuk | Dreamstime.com)

I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately. I generally just make the excuses, “I’ve been busy” or say “I don’t make money on my blog and need to focus on paid jobs.” These are just excuses though. I can always find time to write. The truth is, I just can’t find it in me to write positively about science and academia when I look around and see so many things that hurt. This has been a rough year for our community. Colleges in California and Arizona have been shutting down a few days a month here and there (euphemistically referred to as furloughing staff). In the UK, 25% of the fellowships and student grants for PhD students and PostDocs are being removed. Everywhere, universities have cut journal subscriptions, travel and seminar budgets have been zeroed, and even chalk is being cut back on. The situation in academia has gotten demoralizing to the point where somedays the only proper response seems to be crying at my keyboard. Astronomy is a field that should be inspiring to the public, but our economically downtrodden public just don’t have the money needed to live, yet alone the money needed to fund astronomy through taxes. I get it. There are too many people too close to me without jobs to not understand the problem.

Today I saw something that made me decide I needed to talk about what has been bothering me all these months. A local high school teacher came into campus to return some equipment she’d borrowed from the center I work in. As she talked to one of the other women, she blinked back tears as she said (as best as I can remember) “They cut everything. They cut all my programs. It’s all gone.” She went on to detail some of the amazing things she’d been doing. If I mention them, she’ll be identifiable, so let me just say this woman was what everyone who loves science wishes for in a science teacher. She was. And she still could be. But science is getting removed from schools.

To graduate from high school in Illinois, you are required two years of science. That’s it: two years. Some students take earth science and bio, and move on with life, never looking back. Sometimes they want to take physics, chemistry, astronomy, and so much more, and their school says “Take earth science and bio and move on with life – that’s all we’ll teach.” It costs money to teach science, and it is devalued in our national standard. While the “No Child Left Behind” program tests math and reading skills on a yearly basis through grade 8 (and at least once between grades 10-12), science is only examined three times in all 12 years of a student’s education. Since the entire nation is tested the same years, and students in bins of grades all get the same test, what reason do schools even have to teach science in years when exams aren’t being given? At all levels cuts are being made. Math too suffers. Here in Illinois, only two years of math are required to graduate. And foreign languages aren’t even required.

This is a devastating problem. Last semester I taught Physics Concepts, a class for non-science majors. Many had never had math above basic geometry. Chemistry and Physics weren’t even offered in many of their schools. These are students from small towns with high schools of under 100 students per class. With no budget due to the problem of no tax dollars (because unemployment is high and people just can’t pay taxes), these schools just can’t afford to teach math and science. But college entrance requirements don’t match what the high schools teach. Here at SIUE, I regularly have students in my classes who are as smart as the students I’ve worked with at MIT and Harvard, but in many cases their high schools simply didn’t offer the classes needed for them to get into an outstanding university.

MIT, a school whose undergrads I hold in the highest regard, suggests 1 year each of physics, chemistry and biology, math through (and including) calculus, and 2 years of a foreign language. My Alma Mater, MSU, as a public school is less demanding, but it still expects 3 years of math and prefers 4, looks for 2 years of foreign language, and 2 of science. And University of Illinois recommends 4 years of math, science and foreign language. This is what floors me, in some cases high schools in Illinois aren’t even making it possible for their students to attend the flagship state university.

Part of the reason I want to stay at SIUE is I know I can offer our students chances they wouldn’t otherwise have. I have outstanding colleagues in other departments who feel the same. We are here to be the difference we want to see in the world. I have NASA-funded programs that allow students to be part of research programs rather then still working at Starbucks, Home Depot, or Radio Shack. These students are in many cases the hardest working I’ve ever dealt with, and not once has someone complained to me that they deserved a better test grade because of how much tuition they paid or who their daddy is (Things I’ve heard at more than 1 other university). I love my students (even in the moments I want to kill them). But every day things are making it harder to function. First it was the journals. We don’t have 1 astronomy journal at SIUE, so I personally subscribe where I can, and where I can’t I beg PDFs from colleagues at what my students call “Real Universities” (do you know how much that hurts to hear from a student?) Then it was the discount chalk – dusty c*** that breaks easily and covers everything in white while not adhering to the board. Then it was zeroing of all travel budgets – even for student travel. Now it is the Illinois legislated hiring freezes. Our university has departments with no secretary, and now department chairs – PhD academics – are struggling to process payroll sheets, inventory orders, and even class evaluation forms all on top of their teaching, and research, and committee assignments and the too many other duties that are the normal, overly busy life of a chair. Departments aren’t thriving, and depression rules.

And it’s only going to get worse. The state of Illinois is $130 MILLION behind in paying their bills. This is $25,000 in debt per household in a state where the average annual household income is only $56,000 (and if you remove Chicago and its surroundings, this number drops significantly). Here is the southern half of the state, this debt is well over half the typical household’s yearly income.

There simply is no money.

For the past several months, about every 6 weeks we have gotten notice from our university president that says (total total paraphrase) “We now know we can pay salary this month, but we don’t know about next month, but if everyone tightens their belt we hope to make it.” In February, after all the students had paid their tuition, we still didn’t know if the university would be able to stay open all semester. Do you know how hard it is to have a student ask, “But what happens if SIUE shuts down? Will we have to give back our student loans? I already paid my tuition on my loan. What can I do?” I didn’t have answers, and all I could say was, “I’m sorry. Let’s hope Illinois comes through.”

And it’s simply going to get worse.

Illinois still hasn’t passed a budget for 2010-2011. A state bill was passed allowing the university to borrow money. We don’t know if the hiring freeze will end. But we know we can’t make life harder on our students: SIUE has frozen tuition and fees at their 2009-2010 level. Our students will not suffer financially for the failures of Illinois. But I worry about academics. The only way SIUE and our sister school SIUC will be able to survive is by increasing enrollment. We are also cutting faculty lines, reducing the number of non-tenure/tenure track professors (I’m not scheduled to teach in the fall, but hope something may still change), and cutting support staff. This means more students with fewer people contributing to their education. We’ll have larger classes, more multiple choice tests, and more digital homework sets. Students will still get a good education, but the one-on-one moments that matter, all those times when a prof and a student just talk in an office, all the times a real learning problem is identified by a prof going over a hand-written homework assignment, all the things that make good profs great professors are going to go away in the face of too much work and no free time.

Providing a great education is difficult with limited resources and too high a teaching load. It is only possible when faculty make personal sacrifices for the good of their students. Most of us will do that, but we are at our breaking point. We love our students. We will fight to give them a solid education. But somedays I don’t know how much longer we can go on fighting.

Today, a high school teacher fought back tears in the hallway. Her programs are gone.

Without education, there is no future. I understand her tears, and for her and all the students who are having doors closed to their future, I too simply want to cry.

An economic earthquake has shaken our state and our nation. There are some buildings still standing, but I’m afraid everyone has been hurt.

Earlier this evening I got an IM from a friend alerting me that this afternoon there had been a shooting at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Details are sketchy, but it looks like a faculty member who was recently denied tenure went into the biology faculty meeting and shot 6 people, killing 3 of the 6.

On twitter I’ve seen people express mystification at how this could happen.

Like I said a few years ago, about another school shooting, what really surprises me is how rarely it happens.

Academia as a system is deeply flawed in a lot of ways. One of the ways it is flawed is how the tenure system gets employed. For those of you who don’t know what it means to have tenure, it means you are a God. You can never again be fired without really significant cause (felony criminal charges, embezzling from a grant, cheating on your wife with an undergrad who gets pregnant, etc). Faculty with tenure often abuse their power, assigning junior faculty the largest classes, the worst committee tasks, and the hardest/most time consuming service assignments (like running outreach events). These young faculty, under the weight of these assignments, are required to spend 3 to 6 years demonstrating they are excellent researchers, excellent teachers, and solid community members. People do crack. But rather than take the time off to take care of themselves, they push on, because if only they can get tenure, they will never have to worry about finding a job ever again.

And we are all taught early on that we are failures if we don’t get tenure.

I don’t have tenure. (But then, I haven’t really looked for it)

A few years ago I was attending a meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. I was giving workshops on doing real science in the classroom, and giving talks on other research I’d done. I was trying to liveblog what I could in the midst of all this. All the presentations went well, the blogging went well, but I spent each night of the conference in my room in tears. Over and over the same thing happened – I’d give a great talk/workshop/etc and then some gray haired males (and it was always gray haired males) would come up to me to talk about my work, and then ask “So, when did you get tenure?” I’d explain I’m just an assistant prof. They’d say, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll do fine when you go up for tenure!” But I’m not tenure track. And when they heard this, they always asked – what did you do wrong? who did you piss off? – or some version of that same question.

It was always assumed that there is something wrong with me that I didn’t have tenure. I’d only had my PhD 5 years at that point. I’d only applied once for a tenure-track position and I didn’t get that one position. But because I wasn’t inline to join them as Gods in the top of the Ivory Tower, I was (and I guess I still am) a failure. It is this type of “What is wrong with you?” attitude, that breaks people. I simply went back to my room and cried myself out at the end of every day. I can see where someone less emotionally stable would on day 2 or 3 of the meeting start punching people or worse.

I wish this was a one off attitude problem, but as someone without tenure I know it’s not.

The people I know who’ve been denied tenure have generally had to completely start over or mostly start over at a new university. This means facing a second 3 to 6 years of being hazed, of working too hard and never sleeping. It means facing a second 3 to 6 years of postponing children and telling your spouse, “I’m sorry,” over and over and over again as you crawl into bed too late because of the grant deadlines, and then again as you accidently wake them as you get out of bed at 5am to grade, because 5am is the only hour left empty in the day. It means another 3-6 years of knowing you can have everything taken away at any moment yet again.

I’m not sure this means anything to someone outside of academia. People loose jobs all the time and it is no big deal. But academics are essentially self-employed. We design our own research. We raise our own money through grants and donations to do that research. But all that money goes through the university. We are like small business owners who can get kicked out of our own business at any moment. If someone is denied tenure they loose all their equipment they raised money to purchase. They loose all their computers, software, money for staff, and everything else. They may not even get to keep the grants they’ve been awarded that still extend years into the future. It’s terrifying.

Academia is a field that eats its young. It is too often the regurgitated, half digested mass of a human that is left when it is over that gets tenure.

We need to revise the system. “Well, I survived” can no longer be the phrase of the day. There are too many brilliant people crying when they should be working to make our world better.

It shouldn’t take a broken woman shooting people to recognize the problems.

sorrow

Jose Antonio Sânchez Reyes | Dreamstime.com

This is a piece on gender inequity and sexual discrimination (not sexual harassment, which is a different and emotionally more devastating thing). I´m writing this at this time not because of any one thing that´s happened, but because of a culmination of things. Sometimes it just seems like a topic is in the air, building momentum, and this topic has finally found a voice in me.

This post had three different triggers. The first was a bad moment I had last semester, when I found out a student in my Physics for Engineers class was making sexually harassing comments on a regular basis. The second trigger came from confronting numbers and statistics on women in physics and astronomy for a pair of talks at Dragon*Con. And the third trigger was this little gem posted by Rebecca Watson on Twitter under the heading “Sexual Assault Prevention Tips (A must-read! Pls RT and save someone from being raped)”

Sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and rape all share one rather awful thing in common: They occur when one person or group is able to act in a hurtful way to another person or group without anyone stopping what´s going on. This does not have to be men against women: I´ve seen barns filled with middle-aged women swarm on the lone equestrian male, doing everything from landing the friendly slap on the ass, to cat calling him in his riding attire. It also doesn’t have to be purposely hurtful: I´ve watched as male grad students, at the beginning of the semester and before social groups have formed, thoughtlessly walk around asking all the other men if they want to head out [for lunch / to go to the gym /to get a drink] while they left the women behind. Sometimes people in power don´t even realize what´s going on as they do it, the sexual discrimination that happened to women at MIT is an example of this. Over years women weren’t given the same job advantages as men, and it was entirely without thought. When the problem was pointed out, measures were taken to fix the problem. (This study is mentioned in the forthcoming National Academies report, “Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty.” )

And here is where I´m going to ask all of you to listen to me really closely: Anytime anyone with the power to help is aware of any form of discrimination and they do nothing to fix it, they are just as much to blame as the perpetrators.

Throughout my adult life I have over and over had some well-meaning man watch me get frustrated in some work situation or academic situation, and they´ve said with the intention of comforting me: “It’s not you, he´s an [expletive] to all women.” Okay, nice try. I appreciate the attempt, but – Could you maybe offer a girl a little help?

I want to be clear: If you are in a position of power, and you see a problem, telling the victim they are being victimized is not a solution. Finding a way to stop the perpetrator is the only a solution.

This is not a matter of men against women. This can be in either direction with gender. It can be racial. It can be religious in nature. And in academia it can even take the form of Large Prestigious University Researchers discriminating against small college researchers.

Let me return to those 3 triggers above as talking points.

Trigger 1: Male student making sexually harassing comments I have never been so angry in my life, and as the professor of the class I grabbed my syllabus, found the line that says, “Loud and disruptive students are not welcome. If you disturb your classmates, you will be kicked out!” and made it clear that I would wield that line of my syllabus if even one word of sexually loaded speech was uttered, and that the student – any student with harassing language – would not only be kicked out of my class for the rest of the semester and fail, but I´d report them to the dean of students.  Then I moved back onto discussing physics. The students behaved (all the way through the end of the semester in fact!), but at the end of class a tough as nails, takes no shit from anyone, women came up and commended me for what I had done, but then she said it´s all kind of useless as long as there are professors making sexually explicit jokes in single gender dominated classes. All I could do was say, I´m sorry, I can´t help you, that prof has tenure and I´m just someone living grant to grant. All I can say is you need to report it on your evaluations or go to a chair or dean. Every university has its 1 or more faculty member who say the wrong things, crossing the wrong lines, sometimes just to get a laugh. But as long as that 1 (or more) person exists, the problem exists.

And here, I have to be very careful what I say because I know this is a dangerous post to write. The people I work with now I may have to work with for the rest of my life – academia is a very small culture, and with our very limited resources, emotions run high and grudges are held for decades. But I want to say this nonetheless: We as a field need a better way for addressing these problems so junior faculty like me don’t have to tell students – “I’m sorry, I can’t help you” because I’m too afraid for my own job. I have known about problems at every institution I´ve been at and I haven´t felt comfortable reporting them because I know that if I reported every problem a student reports to me it would put my situation in jeopardy. We need a better way to report problems.

Right now, a student must report the problem to a person in power (all men in my areas of expertise – I don’t count as someone with power. If they report it to me, I can report it to the chair or dean, but then have to produce the student), and if it is another student victimizing them, they may have to confront that student face-to-face in the university judicial system. If it is a faculty member, it is likely half the university will know who reported what very rapidly (never trust an academic with a secret). We’re all told everything is in confidence, but we’ve also all had that one gossipy tenured senior person (often from another department) let us in on the past 10 years of sexual misdeeds. This means the accuser – the victim – will face extensive scrutiny and the potential of becoming the bunt of lunch time laughter (a form of additional harassment) while they wait and hope for the academic judicial system to help them out.

We need a better way to handle problems and keep people safe. I don’t know what the solution is. I wish I did. I just know we need something better.

Trigger 2: The depressing numbers Let´s face it, the situation is bleak. Go read the two reports I summarize here. These numbers tell me one simple thing: A lot of women are leaving science for a lot of undocumented reasons. People only go into things like physics and astronomy for 1 reason: Love. They love the field or they love the challenge. They weren´t seeking fame or fortune. Like the impoverished poet, they self-selected to bleed themselves into their work. Both men and women with into physics/astronomy out of love, but women have preferentially left behind the field or challenge for undocumented reasons. I know I personally left the field once out of frustration, and one element of that frustration was knowing I’d never be part of the old boys club (which I then learned also existed in other fields).

Trigger 3: The one certain way to prevent rape is to get rid of the rapers – The topic of this post isn´t rape, but the idea still applies. In the case of gender discrimination by men on women, I as a woman can do all I want to try and avoid harassment, but at the end of the day, I can be as cautious and uncontroversial as I want (or don’t want), but the choice to be discriminated against based on my gender isn´t a choice I get to make – it is a decision made by others. The only thing that can stop men from harassing women is for men to step forward and say enough is enough. (The same is true if you reverse the genders, or change this to a case of religious, race, or other discrimination.) Always, it must be other members of the group in power who step forward and stand up for the people being victimized. This was true during the civil rights movement, for instance.

And here is the challenge I want to put out there: If you are a man and ever feel the need to pull a woman aside and say “It´s not you, it´s because you´re a woman,” I want you to act on that need, and then I want you to report to the proper authorities what is going on. Be an advocate. Stand up for someone who may not be able to stand up for themselves. You have the power to change things.

And if anyone ever tells you, “It’s not you, they are like that to all [women / minorities / Christians / Jews / gays / etc],” look at that person and tell them, “If I fight this, I could lose my job and be labeled a trouble maker. If you report this, they’ll listen. Will you help? Will you report what you’ve witnessed to the appropriate authorities and prevent this from happening again? Will you help me?”

Be safe. Be good. And if you have power, help someone without it.

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The telescope was parked in its dome with great care,
In hopes of spying a star on which it could stare;

My students were nested all snug in their beds
While visions of data danced in their heads

And I in my office, my Mac at my side,
Was Googling for gifts – no bargain could hide.

When on the network, there arose a great clatter,
I popped up an xterm to ping what’s the matter

Ping 74.208.25.93
“CONNECTION FAILED” was all it said back to me.

The lamp on the screen of the Mac Book Pro
Illuminated too many processes refusing to go.

When, on what should my wandering eyes obsess,
But a remote client, and eight shared processes!

With a little old driver, and each program taking its time,
I knew in a moment it again must be Dr. Belstein.

More rapid than Windows, his executions they came,
As he typed, and compiled, and called languages by name;

“Now, Java! Now, Python! Now, GNU C++!
On, Cobalt! On Pascal! On, Visual C++!”

Make software to formulate where Santa shall go!
Now make away! make away! make away -o!”

As old ‘puters not updated cease to fly,
My processor whirred and proceeded to die,

Up to the network panel, my fingers they flew,
As I typed IPCONFIG /Release and /Renew

And then, in a second, I heard from the hall
Some cursing and a keyboard tossed like a ball.

As I leaned my head out, and looked all around,
I heard from his office the most amazing of sounds.

He was dressed all in tweed, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were chalky and somehow dusted in soot!

A bundle of disks he had clutched in his teeth,
And he was a bit manic, as the sys admin he beseeched.

His eyes — how they twinkled! The promises he made!
For Beowulf access, bonuses would be paid!

His droll little mouth was drawn down like a bow,
And his chin quivered as if he stood in the snow;

The loop of a flash drive he held tight in his hand,
While his desktop sent death encircling the LAN;

He had a broad face and a little pot belly,
That shook, as he begged (like a bowlful of jelly).

He was tenured and sage, a right powerful prof,
No non-tenured faculty dared tick him off;

In the sys-admin, however, there was no dread,
The passwords were contained just one place: His Head!;

He spoke not a word, ignoring the old bloak,
To the Beowulf he gave not even a poke

He just proceeded to open the main system node,
And with a click, updates he began to upload

Belstein stomped to his desk, letting out a great sigh,
Another year lost, (I thought he might cry).

But I heard him state, as if he couldn’t care less,
“Next Christmas I’ll find Santa using GPS.”

Merry Christmas!

I have to admit, my own journal article (which I’ll post links to once it is online), would put me to sleep – it is a dry recitation of facts, figures, numbers and a couple charts. Everything is quantified and potential errors are noted. If you want to replicate my analysis, almost everything you need is there, and the only stuff missing is the exact words folks wrote in the fill in the blank boxes (and federal research guidelines on privacy require I keep that private). My reasons for writing in this dry and over numerical way comes from my research history of mining other people’s work for additional analysis that can come from pooling multiple people’s measurements. When a paper doesn’t state all its numbers in tables, but only gives a summary graph or a verbal description of a graph, it is very very hard to repeat the analysis or re-purpose the data for further science. I recognize that I am overly sensitive this, and acknowledge my papers probably contain an excessive number of tables, but still…

As my student worked hard to find information on the fraction of blue spiral galaxies in galaxy clusters, he was alternating between finding papers that were very friendly and carefully tabulated cluster distance (redshift), magnitude, size (N_30 and R_30), and blue fraction. (Whoot for good result reporting to several teams). Many others, and I’m going to be nice and not name names, discussed in words how they had seen the blue fraction change across multiple clusters across multiple redshifts… But no numbers were stated. GRRRR It is all very nice for me to say that I see a trend in the growth of my lawn as a function of time, and to state the growth seems to be enhanced by rain, but unless I document the change in height with time, and the enhancement in the change with time and rain fall, using at least a plot, well, I’m, for lack of a cleaner way to state it, I’m talking fluff. Numbers and mathematics are the language of science, and they are the only way we have to compare concrete factors.

So, my student, gets the wonderful task of writing emails to journal article authors and requesting raw numbers.  Fun Fun Fun.

Now, I have to admit I understand how this happens. A lot of scientists start from the premise that the most important part of their paper is the discussion of the results from the data analysis (I agree), and they recognize that people will start by reading their abstract, the intro, and the discussion (and that people *might* read how the data was acquired.)  So… Since tables are a bear to create, stuff that can be described in words sometimes gets described in words alone because no one is going to read the table anyway.  And generally, they are right. And all these papers get passed through peer review, so… It must be alright. Right?

Well, no. Peer review is a good system, but it isn’t perfect. We are all supposed to read the papers of our peers and give them constructive comments to help make sure that what is allowed to be published in our professional journals is valid science, presented clearly, with all the needed information – all the required citations, all the required equations, and all the required tables.

But, sometimes referees are just being human and miss things. Professionally, we’re always too busy and too tired. We make mistakes as we fight through 80+ hour work weeks. I personally decided (not on purpose) to mis-grade a question regarding pullies on all of my exams. (I asked how many pulleys they needed and then expected them to write the number of ropes that were needed.) I’d like to think that when I am asked to referee things, that I do it well, but I can see how easy it would be for me or anyone else to read a paper and not notice the one or two paragraphs (out of several pages), or even the one sub-section (of the dozen or so) that describes very well some secondary effect in words but fails to document the effect in numbers.

We are all over worked and we are all tired. We love what we do, so we push ourselves to do everything so that we can to keep doing it. And we are tired, so sometimes we are lazy, and sometimes we write papers that, well, cause my undergrad to send begging emails.

But those are excuses. Somehow, as a community, we need to figure out how to better balance research, writing grant proposals, teaching classes, serving on committees and all the other things we do through better task distribution and time allocation (e.g. work us less and don’t cause us to have 30 twenty-minute breaks a week between classes, meetings, and everything else during which we’re expected to accomplish research). This will really make all of us better professors and scientists. It will improve our teaching – we could be better prepared and less rushed in our creation of notes, tests, and HW. It would improve our research – we’d see things quicker, and maybe even be less lazy in our writing – and it would make starting on grant proposals earlier easier. And, it might mean less sleeping in committee meetings too

I am grateful for the journal articles written by the people with the time, the energy, and the foresight to include way too many data tables. I wish happy coffee and table typing experiences on everyone else as they work to write their next paper.

Include you data or my undergrad just might email you…

Some of us do look for the data in the papers.

This image doesn’t have much room for young woman – heck it doesn’t really have room for the young at all. But it’s just a metaphor, right?

The problem with stereotypes and metaphors is they are often rooted in a certain amount of truth.

One of my favorite blogs is FemaleScienceProfessor. I don’t know who the writer is, accept that she is a “full professor at a large research university, and [does] research in the physical sciences.” From her posts, I feel safe guessing she’s not an astronomer, but even though her experiences aren’t identical to mine, she does articulate a lot of the universal experiences of women in academe. Because she writes anonymously, and because she has tenure, she has the freedom to talk in ways that someone like me should never dare.

(Note to everyone: People lose their jobs and are punished in their jobs for what they write in personal blogs. I’ve now heard two stories of different people losing their jobs after being outed as bloggers – both had blogged anonymously about non-proprietary stuff that lived in their heads.)

In a recent post, the FemaleScienceProfessor noted that in meetings she has repeatedly seen female faculty get ignored until a senior male faculty member has spoken up on their behalf. After the senior male supported their effort, the rest of the men suddenly listened to the female. She referred to the person who spoke up for the woman as a social training wheel and asked the interesting question, “if a female professor has an advocate who supports her ideas again and again during committee meetings, will that committee eventually be able to listen, even when the training wheel is removed and the ideas are expressed by a higher pitched voice?”

It is a fascinating question.  What is required to enact a shift in what I think/hope are largely subconscious behaviors?

Gender discrimination crops up in a lot of different and annoying ways. Some of them aren’t even malicious – they are just subtly annoying. For instance, I’ve noticed that students assume men are Dr. SoAndSo, and they assume I’m Ms. Gay (to which I respond “You can call me Dr Gay, Pamela, or some combination of those three words, but Ms/Mrs/Miss are off limits”). The other day I had some really sweet students ask if I had my PhD yet, and I’m afraid I responded “Yes, since 2002″ a bit more arrogantly than I should have – I’m just tired of people who don’t know me assuming I couldn’t possibly have a PhD, and these kids got a bit of pent of frustration.

This is the mostly harmless kind of the c*** that periodically (but regularly) smacks women in academia. Some places are better, some are worse, but discrimination widely exists and is recognized as a problem but also as the norm.

I’m not sure how to enact systemic change. I just know the same biases exist in my students as exist in the senior faculty. This makes me worry that change won’t come with a changing of the old guard for younger faces. There are women coming up through the ranks, but they are still rare.

I hate seeing problems that have no solution – not even difficult to implement solutions. My greatest personal frustration comes from seeing problems that aren’t rooted in logic. I see a problem with subconscious gender discrimination. I live with the problem of subconscious gender discrimination. And when I read TheFemaleScienceProfessor I know I’m not alone.

Maybe, every woman just needs a gray-haired wizard to serve as her training wheel.

Perhaps I need to sit at the foot of the tower and see who comes out ready to offer keys to the carefully chained off stairs.

In truth, universities are just places that strive to be more, but often struggle to make their dreams reality. As places run by humans and often open to the public, they aren’t as secure as we may desire. While the majority of crimes are related to random strangers entering campus to thieve, and peep, and sometime grope and rape, the most tragic crimes we see are the ones perpetrated by the students and staff who become broken as they try to run the academic gauntlet.

At the University of Texas as a graduate student, I learned in the shadow of the UT tower. In August of 1966, Charles Whitman (a former UT student) went on a shooting spree from the top of that 307-foot tower and over the course of 96 minutes shot and killed 14 people while injuring dozens more. Earlier in the day, he had killed both his mother and his estranged wife. The day ended with a a police officer killing Whitman. By all accounts, he snapped after experiencing one too many personal failures, including academic failures.

At the University of Texas as a observational astronomer, I took data through the McDonald Observatory 107-inch telescope. In February 1970, a night assistant had a mental breakdown, fired a shot at his supervisor and then shot up the mirror of the telescope. The day ended with a local law enforcement officer talking him down and taking him away in hand cuffs. The stories I’ve heard from people who were there attribute his breakdown to frustrations in part or in whole related to research problems.

These events aren’t unique. In grad school, we all hear the stories of abused graduate students breaking and killing themselves or their advisors. I suspect we all hope never to experience this happening at our home institutions, but at the same time we all have or know someone who has thought “what if I…”

In 1998, the year I defended my master’s thesis, Harvard graduate student Jason D. Altom, one of the best of his field, killed himself. In a note published in the Harvard Crimson after release by Altom’s parents, Altom wrote, “This event could have been avoided. Professors here have too much power over the lives of their grad students,” the letter continued. Having a committee of professors involved earlier in the evaluation of a student’s work would “provide protection for graduate students from abusive research advisers,” Mr. Altom wrote. “If I had such a committee now I know things would be different.” (Taken from linked Chronicle article.)

If our best can’t thrive in our Darwinian “survival of the fittest” academic community, … .

Yesterday, a new and tragic crime joined the list of events we can not afford to forget.

In April of 2007, the spring of my first year possessing a title containing the coveted word “professor”, Virginia Tech senior Cho Sheung-Hui killed 7 faculty and 23 students before turning a gun on himself. In a note, he railed against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus. (Taken from linked News Day article.)

I’m not a psychologist, a sociologist, or someone who can pretend the slightest training in the mental workings of the human mind. But, I am a human who has survived the US educational system. When I hear of these shootings, I don’t ask why, I thank God it doesn’t happen more often. The upper tiers of academia, to which Harvard and Texas and Virginia Tech all belong, appeal to a certain type of person. They welcome the student who chooses to study astrophysics because they are told it’s the hardest major. They nurture the student who believes anything less then perfection is failure. They push and push and push, trying to get each student to jump over a bar so high most of us can never reach it. They push, because occasionally someone can jump over the bar, and that person, when pushed to become the best they can be, just might save the world. And hey, there is a curve (often unspoken) to make sure everyone else still gets a mostly passing grade.

But just passing can be an emotional failure. The pressures put on students pulverize self-worth and crush the understanding that mistakes are okay.

I was one of those freaked out students who feared every B would keep me from college. I was so freaked that I vapor locked on exams. The only semester I actually got straight As was my last semester of my senior year (when it really no longer mattered). As early as 8th grade, I was being pressured that my occasional Bs would keep me out of the MIT I dreamed of attending (in reality, I suspect the D I got in German and my less then perfect math SATs had more to do with it). Today, I hear parents freaking out that if their child doesn’t attend the correct private pre-school, they won’t get into the elementary school that will get them into the right high school that will get them into the right college.

Parents are hiring college admissions advisors to shape their children into what colleges want. In one of the sadder examples, would-be Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan was assisted by her admissions councilor in getting a book deal that would have her writing her first novel while she tried to finish high school and complete her first year of college. She was accepted at Harvard, but her first book was retracted after it was discovered that she had somehow plagiarized large amounts of text from her favorite authors. I don’t know how anyone thought this brilliant young woman could balance so many things. Phil Plait, a brilliant astronomer needed to quit his job to write his second book, and he is an experienced writer. Viswanathan was an 18 year old who should have been busy having fun learning to be an independent co-ed.

We are all guilty of occasionally perpetuating higher than necessary standards. In mentoring students, I hear myself advising them to seek research opportunities as high school students and to try and publish research as undergrads. That is what I did, and it worked for me. But… aren’t normal high school students supposed to be flipping burgers and don’t normal undergrads just focus on finding a good summer co-op, but otherwise worry more about what they are doing Friday night?

Oh yeah – being normal is the same as failing. At least that is the impression any student trying to replicate my career path might be tempted to believe. It is even what I believed. At Harvard, I decided I must be too dumb to be a professor. After all, many of the profs I dealt with got their PhD in their early 20s and had tenure by 30. Here I am at 33 and still not on the tenure-track. To some, that is failure. In truth, we all chase our dreams at our own rates and if I think about it, I haven’t failed.

And I need to remember, as I place myself in the awful position of potentially getting mistaken as a role model, that I shouldn’t put pressure on the same students who are already putting pressure on themselves. We in academe need to tell our students stories of the successful people in our lives who never saw college as a need. We can’t forget to praise our students for trying. We need to tell them to enjoy life. We can’t simply push them as we were pushed. Academe can be a cycle not too different from any other cycle of abuse – but each of us has the ability to break the cycle. We’ll make mistakes – on our thoughtless days, we’ll write “See me” on failed exams without writing praise on perfect papers (isn’t perfection simply meeting expectations? No – it’s not.) We’ll forget to say, hey, you may not make it the first try, and that’s okay – it was hard for us too, and we struggled too. But hopefully we’ll learn to nurture as we teach.

And we’ll remember our youth and what it was like to have a dream and fear every day that one bad homework, one mistake on an exam, could crush that dream forever. Dreams should be treaded on lightly, and we need to care for those who are hurting as they struggle toward a dream.

I will never forget the stories of the students academe has broken and the world has lost. I will always be here for the student in need. To you, my door is always open.