Academic Mixtape 21

can now legally drink

The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgments

“The unappreciated downsides of pausing the tenure clock”

“Not Enough: Efforts to Diversify Biogeosciences Benefit Limited Segment of Society.” AGU is well known for its progress relative to some other societies, but this invited piece in one of their journals points out there is still a lot of work to do.

This is pretty wild. Because academic librarians don’t necessarily crank out the pubs and train doctoral students like other academics, counting them as tenure-track faculty apparently screws up with the bean-counters tracking the ratings of research productivity. How to fix the problem? Well, just push librarians off the tenure track, is what LSU just decided.

Our job is to protect student curiosity.

Here’s a nice short explainer for why many cutesy wildlife photos with animals hanging out together are not only staged but often involve torture of the subjects. So now when you need to explain this to someone, here’s your link for that.

I think it’s worth observing and condemning the destruction of the library of New College’s Gender and Diversity Center. It goes without saying that this is horrific, as this PEN press release explains, it’s “more than alarming; it is frightening.” Here is the story covered by the Herald Tribune.

This essay in the LA Review of Books was really enlightening, about a fallout between Audre Lorde and June Jordan, captured by in their own correspondence, precipitated by differences about Zionism.

“Because the scientific community is approximately self-governing and constructs its own reward schedule, the incentives that researchers are willing to impose on themselves are inadequate to motivate the scientific risks that would best expedite scientific progress” Can I say Hell To The Yes with this?! I think it’s exceptionally well argued. (As resonates as I’ve said before that one of the reasons I chose teaching-focused institutions was that I had the latitude to do whatever I wanted with my research without the concern that taking changes and failing would put me out on the street.)

Teen Vogue gave Anthony Jack the space to introduce his new book about the challenges experienced by low-income students.

Know someone who got an Honorable Mention on their GRFP application in the past few years? There is a new program at NSF to support these students if they’re doing grad school in an EPSCoR jurisdiction. (If you’re not familiar with EPSCoR, this is a program that targets funding to states that receive proportionally smaller shares of federal research funds, which are often more rural states.)