Academic Mixtape 29

everything is one fire or in debris flow from the post-fire torrent, but read on we must

I don’t have as many recommended reads accumulated over the past month because I’ve been avoiding doomscrolling, which also inadvertently puts a cap on the joyscrolling and curiosityscrolling.

The ‘hidden figure’ of entomology fought for civil rights.

From McSweeney’s: The status of the shits women have left to give and This is how you normalize performing a fascist gesture

In his blog The EEB & Flow, Marc Cadotte counts up the hours he spends doing administrivia instead of the stuff that matters. He comes to the conclusion that so many of us have - that this job has changed and that it’s evolved to the point of unsustainability. You want us to keep teaching well and getting lots of cool research done? Then we actually need enough staff to support the educational and research work, who are adequately compensated and don’t leave as soon as they get trained. The more and more I talk to fellow scientists, having one grant at a time is a headache and more than one can be unmanageable. It really should not be like this, and it doesn’t have to be like this.

Tressie McMillan Cottom on the Musk situation. (This was in her NYT column).

The wonder of the regional art museum. (I generally agree with this piece but I felt the overall tone and approach was condescending. I mean, who should be surprised that museums outside of LA, Chicago, and New York are actually good? In a coincidence, this piece about the exceptional Cleveland Museum of Art came out a couple weeks after I did a two-hour road trip from Columbus particularly to visit this one museum, knowing it would be worth my time. There was so much cool stuff there.

A letter from a postdoc who survived the Bolsonaro years: “The best “fuck you” to fascists? Thriving. Publish that paper. Build that collaboration. Laugh with labmates.”

“If you want to know why RFK Jr. believes so many weird things, just read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci. Four pages explain everything.”

The new crop of R1s has been announced by the Carnegie Classification folks, as I just picked up from the socials. Exciting to see that Howard University is now an R1, the first Historically Black institution to have the designation. Drugmonkey has lot of thoughts on this. Also on this list is UC Merced, which has invested heavily in ramping up to this, as the campus continues to principally serve students with marginalized identities like no other UC. And also San Diego State, which is in the same university system as me, even though oddly enough the CSUs are (generally) disallowed from operating PhD programs. Wonder how that computes? I’d explain it, but, I’m committed to keeping this site from being that boring. Meanwhile, I have no idea which institutions got demoted down to R2? Nobody’s sending out those press releases, after all. In general, my colleagues who I am most concerned about are those who are working at R2 that aspire to R1 status but aren’t investing the resources into the effort, but instead, try to reach that height by flaying their faculty. I don’t think that’s the case at SDSU or Merced, and I don’t know enough about the situation at Howard to hazard an opinion on the matter, though when I learned their teaching loads I was a bit surprised.

In the wake of revelations about Neil Gaiman’s history of sexual assault, one fan reflects on where we go from here. And here’s an interview with the person who wrote the story breaking the horrific details of his sexual assaults. “To what extent can and should we separate the art from the artist?” I think is a good question to continue to struggle with, and that includes scientists and their science as well.

And we can’t go a whole month without at least one new piece of research explaining how progress in gender equity is still far from where we need it to be: “Even in scientific areas in which women are well represented, they are up to 40% more likely than men to leave research within 20 years.” [“leave research” in this case means “cease to publish in academic journals” which is methodologically questionable but it is what it is].