New academic year's resolutions

So much has changed over the past academic year. Mostly for the worse. Wherever you are in your professional journey, some new orienteering plans are in order. Since the paths that were laid out ahead for us are either eroded or in flames, it's time to take out a map, compass, and go off trail to get to the destination. Wherever that may be.

Before I tell you about my academic new years resolutions, I'd like to share one change with you. Which you might have just noticed? Whether you're reading on the web or by email, it's still ScienceForEveryone.science, but I'm now running the site on a different platform^[1]. This change should be seamless on your end. If you're paying for a subscription – thank you! – that also has transferred over without a hitch and nothing to change on your end. I realize that substack was intrusive with emails and chats and stuff, and I believe those days are over. Heck, now you can be a subscriber and turn the emailed posts! If you have any questions about the switch, please leave a comment on here and I'll field any questions.

With that item of business aside, what are the changes prompting my new years resolutions?

GenAI in teaching and beyond: I'm coming off a year of sabbatical. (Which has been great. More on that some other day.) Before that, I was on administrative reassignment to run a remote field station and a university consortium that took me away from my teaching duties. I'll be back in the thick of regular university life, and this generative AI stuff is going to hit me like a pile of bricks. What am I going to do about it? This year, I resolve to begin with kindness, and to remind every single one of the students I'm working with that they are more creative, more interesting, and downright smarter than any large language model they might choose to consult. Sure, the folks who treat school as a transactional competition with their professors will use GenAI as a shortcut just like old school plagiarists have always done, and this is an evolutionary arms race that is exhausting to participate in. I'm more concerned about the people who fear that they aren't capable of crafting original, creative, and well-informed pieces of writing. That's the educational challenge we face. (More on that some other day, too.)

Staying healthy and positive while living in an authoritarian state: Yes, it's bad. It's really bad. We all somehow need to find a way to recognize and live with that reality while also taking enough care of ourselves to care for others, and to find personal joy in the midst of all of this intentional cruelty and suffering. To stay informed but not overwhelmed. To take positive action and be a functional part of the resistance, to heed the lessons of the scholars who are teaching us how authoritarian governments are toppled. With this in mind, I resolve to stay informed about the big picture and take appropriate action but not fester in every horrible thing beyond my control. And I resolve to physically move every day because this is the prerequisite for a healthy mind. I resolve to take the advice of the scholars who study authoritarian movements to learn how to do it right.

The assaults on science, equity, immigrant justice, and higher education: They are coming for us at all angles. Many of our institutions have not been up to these challenges, as trustees and presidents are all to easily rolling over. There still is a lot we can do, to protect the people who work with us, to protect scientific knowledge and inquiry, and to protect our institutions. In the face of all this, I resolve to lean into research and teaching science as an act of resistance. I resolve to engage in mutual aid and support the more vulnerable members of my community. I resolve to leverage the authority that I have in my university to protect our people and the institution itself. I resolve to maintain and build my public voice to support DEI, promote racial diversity, celebrate immigrants, uplift science communicators and their work, and engage with policymakers. For decades I have wondered what I would do if I was in a situation like this one and how I could live with myself and the horrors perpetrated by my government. And now I'm in it, and I'm discovering what that answer is. Part of that answer is continuing to live life as well as one can, which is an aspect of this situation that never occurred to me when I was taking a class on Nazi Germany in college.

The big stack of board games that are calling out to me. I love me a good board game. Especially those intricate ones that can go on for hour after hour, with good company and also those wavy those potato chips and the creamy onion dip? That sounds like a perfect day. I resolve to do that more. You up for Iron Dragon or Goldbrau, Agricola, or Wingspan?

The absurd number of typos and errors in my posts. You are generous for seeing them, knowing what I meant to write, and then gently moving on. I resolve to proofread each post at least once. You're worth it!

That's a lot. But also, little of this is additional effort or work, it's just trying doing things a certain way.

What kinds of Academic New Years resolutions do you have? I realize answering this question means owning up to the reality that we're one week into August. Sorry about that. I'm brand new to this platform and I'd like to see how the commenting works, so please give it a go and share.

¹ I won't bore you with all the reasons for moving from substack to ghost, unless you're reading the footnotes. And look, you are. First, on my end writing is easier and the platform is just smoother. Second, the way that ghost works they aren't going to be deluging with promotional emails, trying to do fancy chats, nudging you to do other stuff in the network. Third, it will allow readers to subscribe to the site without getting emails by very easily turning off emails in their account. That might not matter much to you but in this blogging/newsletter game, more subscribers means more opportunity to reach more people. One is that on my end, writing is easier. Fourth, the financial model of ghost is better than substack, in that they don't take a cut of subscriptions, and instead, they just charge me based on the number of subscribers. This does cost more out of my pocket, but it also means that my subscribers aren't compelled to fund the people who run substack, who are actual genuine Nazis. The platform is actively promoting newsletters from anti-science clowns, including scientific racists, transphobic grifters, antivaxxers, climate deniers, and even more bad stuff. This new platform is far less annoying for subscribers, they won't send you annoying emails and commenting/logins are more straightforward, and I'm hoping this will induce more of y'all to pitch in a little bit. So, fifth and last, on this site it's far more workable for me to offer a super-low cost subscription tier for students who want to tangibly chip in to let me know they appreciate what happens here. I'm not looking to make (much) money here, but I have to admit that that knowing people are paying for what I do here is a form of accountability and keeps me going.