Academic Mixtape 14

good stuff to read

Rigorous science demands support of transgender scientists: this is a very useful commentary in the pages of Cell. There is a glossary that you can cite when someone is trying to understand you, contextualization with history, and calls to action that can provide support for actions that you want to take in your department, university, and academic society.

Is there an enrollment cliff? Or just a demographic shift? Yes college enrollment is on the decline, but this isn’t caused by the number of high school graduates, but rather, the identities of these people and whether or not they’re expected to go to college.

“Is grad school for me?” This book drops next month about “demystifying the application process for first-gen BIPOC scholars” and I’ve yet to see it, but it looks promising. Yeah, the UC Press is apparently selling the hardback for $510.00, but it’s 20 bucks for the paperback, it seems.

Collections are truly priceless. In this era of rapid change across the planet, building, maintaining, and using biological collections are one way that universities are so important for our society. And yet Duke and other places are dropping this as a priority?! Sigh.

Let them eat pedagogy. A book review with lots of chew on. I think in a lot of ways that this is the same review that could have been written about the book I wrote to address the same issues in science classrooms. (You know about my book, by the way? I wrote it for grad programs to buy in stacks to hand out to new grad students who are being thrown into teaching without any prior support.)

Just another day at SpaceX: “…her married supervisor pressured her into having a sexual relationship that resulted in a pregnancy. He offered her $100,000 to have an abortion, which she declined, and then SpaceX allowed him to transfer $3.7 million in stock options out of his name to avoid paying child support to the plaintiff…”

On being good enough. From Paul Cairn’s newsletter, UnCultured.

This paper came out in 2011, but somehow never caught my attention to now. It’s written by some folks working in an Amazonian field station discovered that they had sloths to hang out inside their latrines. And eating heartily. And regularly. What?!

Another thing that I missed from a while ago: in 2015, Inside Higher Ed sold a majority stake to Quad Partners, which also is invested heavily into for-profit higher ed organizations. And they recently became part of Times Higher Ed, which also is not a good thing. I think it might have been around that period of time that I think I slowed down on linking to stories from IHE, which wasn’t by design, but maybe because it just stopped being useful? I dunno.

It is therefore time to connect the dots among efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities, overturn race-conscious admissions, and bring back standardized tests. These trends are connected in their overtly political origins and in the chilling effect they may create. Universities risk undermining diversity by signaling unwelcoming conditions for the same populations who, for centuries, were formally excluded. By being proactive with admissions, recruitment, and advising, however, we can reduce this risk.