The sheep look up

I teach. I’ve been at this university for 23 years, and I try to avoid the management side of things — I stay away from the administration building, I don’t even care who is the university president as long as they leave me alone. This may have been a very bad idea.

I got a notice from the administration that they are accepting applications for interim president of the university, because the last one is abandoning us after a short 5 years of employment (that’s not surprising, U presidents seem to flit hither and yon, another reason to ignore them.) But it meant I had to take a minute to figure out what’s going on.

Our outgoing president, Joan Gabel, is paid over $700,000/year. I don’t know that she is worth that much. Now I learn that she’s being offered an additional $260,000 if she stays through June. All right, that’s a pretty sweet deal she’s had. What is she being offered by the University of Pittsburgh?

She’s had a few scandals — the biggest being that she took a position on the board of Securian, a financial company that does a lot of money management for the university. This was a serious conflict of interest, not to mention that she’s getting paid a buttload of money to be the U president, and should be devoting full time to her job. The Board of Regents said it was OK, though, although our governor said it was not. She resigned eventually. Maybe she’s mad at us because we wouldn’t let her rake in more money with a side gig?

And then, the Board of Regents…every time I hear about them, the less impressed I am. These are a bunch of politicians and business people who don’t understand the purpose of an educational system. I’ve mentioned Sviggum before — the bozo who thought UMM was “too diverse”. Now I learn that the chair of the board, Ken Powell, was the disgustingly rich CEO of General Mills who made $24 million in the year before he retired. He is, supposedly, retired, but is now appointed to the chair of the Board of Regents — he’s the guy who thought is was no problem for her to work with Securian, who approved her exorbitant salary. The Regents main purpose seems to be to dip into the university till and give money to each other.

All I can say is that if I got paid tens of millions in my last year here, I would definitely definitively absolutely retire. I’d be done. I’d go relax with my grandchildren, and wouldn’t come back to plague my university for years to come, and I certainly wouldn’t be working hard to transfer money from hardworking faculty and staff salaries to serve the leeches appointed to administrative positions.

There’s no hope that I’ll get paid that much — that’s like more than my lifetime income — but here’s the deal. Appoint me to the interim presidency, pay me like a half million for my services, and I’ll try to keep the money going to the people who really deserve it, and then quietly disappear when my term is done. You can trust me on that. I was such a good boy when the regents visited my university in March, not confronting them at all and turning around and walking away when I saw them coming. I promise to ignore all of their blandishments in the future, as well.

Tough times for education

The universities in Minnesota are divided into multiple teams. My university is part of the University of Minnesota system, which has 5 campuses — it’s the smaller subsystem, but it’s also older and wealthier, founded before Minnesota had statehood, and it’s a little bit more independent for that reason. The real giant in this state is MnSCU, the Minnesota State College and University system, which is made up of 30 colleges and 7 universities. These campuses were explicitly set up by the state to provide educational opportunities to all of its citizens. Then there are all the private colleges, about which I’ll say no more.

They’re all good institutions, operating in parallel. My oldest son attended a MnSCU college, St Cloud State University (SCSU), the middle child went to school in Wisconsin, and my youngest went to a UM school right here at UMM, so we aren’t snobs about which system is better. Unfortunately, they’re all suffering right now, with painful declines in enrollment. SCSU has been hit hard.

The student headcount at St. Cloud State has dropped from more than 18,000 in 2010 to about 10,000 last fall. But not only are the numbers dropping, the students are changing: Nearly 50% of students are part-time, about 25% are under 18 and enrolled in postsecondary classes, and about 10% are 35 and older.

There are also fewer traditional students — recent high school graduates looking for a four-year degree — than in previous decades because of declining birthrates beginning in the 1990s, changes in perception around the importance of undergraduate degrees, and more education options such as for-profit and online colleges.

Yikes. SCSU is about 10 times the size of UMM, and while we’ve suffered substantial enrollment declines, I think that SCSU has been proportionally hit even harder. Their solution: put major programs on the chopping block.

St. Cloud State University will phase out six majors and cut three dozen jobs in the wake of a looming $18.3 million deficit projected for the upcoming school year, according to leaders at the central Minnesota school.

The majors to be phased out are philosophy, theater, nuclear medicine technology, real estate and insurance at the undergraduate level, as well as marriage and family therapy at the graduate level.

23 faculty and 14 staff are being laid off! I’m feeling the pain from here, a hundred miles away. My U hasn’t done anything quite that drastic, at least not yet, but we have been letting natural attrition of faculty take its course and avoiding some important replacement hires, but that has still caused serious difficulties. We haven’t been firing people or killing majors programs, but when staffing withers away and your department has one professor left, you’ve de facto closed off a major. You’re also going to exhaust that one overworked professor, who is going to be looking for jobs elsewhere.

These are terrifying times in academia. Enrollment dropping, the pandemic was a major strike, and then, of course, Republicans whining about ‘woke’ colleges. One of the things that has made Minnesota a great place to live is an outstanding educational system — let’s not throw that away.

Florida, again

Now they’re planning to destroy higher ed in the state by putting everything in the hands of the governor and his appointed cronies.

A bill filed this week in the Florida House would turn many of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law by limiting diversity efforts, vastly expanding the powers of university boards and altering course offerings.

House Bill 999, filed by Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, proposes leaving all faculty hiring to boards of trustees, allowing a faculty member’s tenure to be reviewed “at any time,” and removing majors or minors in subjects like critical race theory and gender studies. It would also prohibit spending on activities that promote diversity, equity and inclusion and create new general education requirements.

You want to read the whole bill? Here it is.

My sympathies to my colleagues in Florida. This is a terrible time to be looking for a new job — colleges everywhere are struggling — but do you really want Chris Rufo deciding whether to fire you or not?

The university administration is spooked

The Michigan State University shooting has our university officials concerned. I’ve been getting multiple emails from them telling us what to do if it happens here, which could very well occur, and that’s the first time that’s happened. This country has shootings every day, and finally, someone in the administration calls attention to our situation. We’re an openly liberal institution promoting liberal values — we’ve faced protests from outside because we support gay and trans students, for instance — and we’re imbedded deep in red state/Trump country. All it takes is one maladjusted hater to grab his gun and decide hunting season has opened on campus.

Unfortunately, the only advice I’ve seen is a link to this university page, with the advice to RUN-HIDE-FIGHT. Oh, yeah? Like I never would have thought of that. It is basically telling us the obvious, that we’re on our own and are desperately helpless.

I take that back. There are bits I wouldn’t have considered, like, when running, “Keep your hands visible.” Why? Oh, right, the other thing they tell us is that the campus police are around. We wouldn’t want to be shot by a cop while running away! Also:

How to React When Law Enforcement Arrives
Remain calm; follow officers’ instructions

Keep your hands up and out in front of you, assuring your hand are empty

Keep hands visible at all times

Avoid making quick movements towards officers such as attempting to hold on to them for safety

Avoid pointing, screaming and/or yelling

Move quickly towards the nearest exit or where directed to by police

Do not stop to ask officers for help or directions when evacuating

OBEY. DO NOT STARTLE THE POLICE. I guess that’s important advice. It’s the lengthiest section of the page.

Really, this advice is nothing but “try not to get shot by the shooter or police,” and none of it is particularly useful. When dealing with an active shooter, we should be thinking about active prevention, like with tighter gun laws. Instead of endangering the innocent, maybe the police ought to be confiscating guns from dangerous people, before the shooting starts. The Michigan State murderer had been found to have mental health issues, and had been arrested on a felony weapons charge…and the justice system had done nothing, letting him walk away armed. It’s time to end that.

I’m tired of seeing scenes like this.

At least one Michigan state representative has the right idea.

Some people finally noticed Bryan Pesta

Bryan Pesta no longer has a job. This is good news; Pesta was a professor at Cleveland State who was notorious for publishing racist ideas and promoting the work of his fellow racists. I wish that were enough to have gotten him fired, but it wasn’t — it took a lot of effort to expose him and discredit his work.

Publications like Pesta’s may fly under the academic radar, but can seep into popular misperceptions of race and lend them a scholarly veneer. Pesta was heavily involved, for example, in editing a 2010 version of Wikipedia’s article on race and intelligence, according to the site’s discussion-forum archives. At the time, the article cited both Pesta’s work and that of other “racial hereditarians.” The racist manifesto of Peyton Gendron, the man accused of murdering 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store this year, cited some of Pesta’s racial-hereditarian colleagues and predecessors.

Despite nearly a dozen publications over more than a decade arguing for the intellectual inferiority of Black people, Pesta earned merit pay for research and eventually promotion and tenure at Cleveland State. Finally, this year, after researchers at other institutions filed complaints, the university fired him.

But those complaints weren’t about the legitimacy of his research.

I knew about Pesta. RationalWiki had a short article on him (which needs to be updated, it still reports he is a professor). Is there just a tiny and frequently ignored minority of people who are aware of the hereditarian infection in popular science? It’s not as if he was subtle and hiding in the shadows.

Many of his papers about race ran in Intelligence, a peer-reviewed journal that has drawn fire for publishing other racial-hereditarian arguments. Three of his articles appeared in Mankind Quarterly, which a writer in The New York Review of Books once called “a notorious journal of ‘racial history’ founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.” Two were published in the Journal of Intelligence, an international, open-access periodical that advertises its quick review and publication process.

Many racial hereditarians present their claims as widely accepted but deliberately suppressed facts in the scientific community. They blame the political correctness of academe for their difficulty publishing in well-respected journals.

Publishing in Mankind Quarterly ought to be regarded as a great blaring klaxon alerting you that there is a huge fucking problem here.

Also concerning: Pesta has legitimate academic qualifications, “with bachelor’s, an M.A., and a master’s in labor relations and human services,” and also has a doctorate in psychology. Do you notice what’s missing? He has no background in biology or genetics, but he’s pushing radical distortions of genetics and using poor genetics methodology. From the description of his research, I’m unimpressed.

Pesta’s papers also consistently maintain that racial gaps in test scores can’t be explained by factors like discrimination or economic status. In 2008, for example, he published an article in Intelligence arguing that the gap between Black and white students’ IQ scores could be explained entirely by Black students’ lower intelligence rather than any bias in intelligence measures.

The article relied on a study of 179 students in Cleveland State’s introductory accounting courses categorized as either Black or white. Pesta’s co-author was a CSU accounting professor, Peter J. Poznanski, who has since retired. The university did not appear to be bothered by the article, even linking to it on its “EngagedScholarship@CSU” page. (After The Chronicle inquired about the paper, the university left up the abstract but removed the link.)

Wait, what? He makes sweeping conclusions that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than white people on the basis of a tiny study of his own students, categorizing them as black and white, and then…what? Assessing their intelligence on the basis of their performance in an introductory accounting course? That’s nuts. I wonder if the students knew they were being measured up as exemplars of particular races. Cleveland State seems to have had no problem with this kind of biased and inappropriate analysis.

Even if his methodology wasn’t weak and flawed, his ability to interpret the data ought to be called into question.

A 2014 paper Pesta published in Intelligence, “Only in America: Cold Winters Theory, Race, IQ, and Well-Being,” takes up the historically baseless theory that people who evolved in cold climates — Europeans and Asians — became smarter because cold winters made survival more difficult. Pesta’s paper finds that IQ and average temperature are correlated in U.S. states even though nearly all their residents are descended from people who came to America within the last 400 years, meaning the supposed difference couldn’t have been caused by evolution in place.

Instead, he proposes another hypothesis, the “founder effect,” arguing that certain types of people, genetically and culturally, were drawn to certain communities and areas — ignoring America’s long history of forced migration for people of color. He does add, though, that it’s “possible that significant historical events” — he mentions the Civil War but not slavery or segregation — could have also created regional differences in well-being and education. He also writes that his study doesn’t disprove the Cold Winters Theory, but shows only that phenomena other than evolution can drive geographic differences in IQ scores.

Wow. The reviewers were lying down on the job with that one — it should have been instantly rejected, unless the journal Intelligence just has appallingly low standards.

That didn’t get Pesta fired, though. What did get him axed was the discovery that he’d violated the terms of service in using (well, misusing and abusing) a confidential NIH database. Crossing NIH, from whom all blessings and large grants flow, is a really bad idea, not just for the individual researcher but for his institution.

Independently, Kent Taylor had a similar reaction to Pesta’s new work. Taylor, a molecular biologist and genomics researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, wasn’t familiar with Pesta but found the article methodologically shoddy.

More important, he couldn’t see how such a paper could have passed ethical muster with the NIH.

Taylor fired off emails to the NIH, Cleveland State, and the University of Minnesota* alerting them to the article.

Taylor’s letter to Harlan M. Sands, who until this past April was CSU’s president, was short and to the point. It called Pesta’s article “both a violation of the data-use agreement and unethical.”

That was the last straw. He’s outta there.

Cleveland State declared that Pesta had been incompetent or dishonest in teaching or scholarship; neglected his duty, and engaged in personal conduct that substantially impaired the fulfillment of his institutional responsibilities; and interfered with the normal operations of the university. The letter declared Bloomberg’s decision to fire Pesta.

Pesta was officially fired on March 4, 2022, two and a half years after his article was published.

Unfortunately, the lingering stench of his published papers remains, still being cited, still being trotted out in every pseudoscientific argument by a Nazi on Twitter.

* Unfortunately, one of Pesta’s co-authors, Jordan Lasker claims to be affiliated with UM’s school of economics. He is not listed anywhere in my university’s directories, and seems instead to be at Texas Tech University? All these guys seem dodgy to me.

Can you teach organic chemistry?

We’re hiring for a tenure-track position!

The University of Minnesota Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in undergraduate education, to fill a tenure-track position in chemistry beginning August 14, 2023. Responsibilities include: Teaching a wide range of undergraduate chemistry courses including organic chemistry lectures and labs and an advanced elective; advising undergraduates; conducting research that could involve undergraduates; and sharing in the governance and advancement of the Chemistry program, the division, interdisciplinary programs, and the campus.

Applicants must hold or expect to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry or a related field by August 14, 2023. Evidence of excellence in teaching and mentoring undergraduate chemistry students is required. A minimum of one year experience teaching undergraduate organic chemistry is required; graduate TA experience is acceptable. Preference will be given to applicants with more than one year experience teaching undergraduate chemistry and with demonstrated research and/or teaching experience in sustainable/green or environmental chemistry.

(If you’re wondering why I, a mere biologist, am promoting a chemistry job search, it’s because a) we biologists depend on a strong chemistry program, and b) I’ve been roped into serving on the search committee.)

A flimsy excuse to do nothing

When science is being faked in the published literature, that is a big problem. You’d think the gatekeepers would want to do something about it.

In a new report now being made public by Retraction Watch, Artemisia draws attention to four main groups centered on Ali Nazari, Mostafa Jalal, a postdoc at Texas A&M University, Ehsan Mohseni of the University of Newcastle in Australia, and Alireza Najigivi of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. The whistleblower lists a total of 287 potentially compromised papers in the 42-page report.

Two hundred eighty seven papers with dodgy data, all churned out by these interlinked lab groups! That’s nuts. It’s practically a criminal enterprise. Part of the problem is at the university level, where the number of papers, without concern for their content, is the metric for promotion. But it’s also a problem with the proliferation of poorly managed journals, where the sole concern is volume and collecting those publication fees.

The guilty person at the journal level here is Guido Schmitz, at the University of Stuttgart, who is the editor of the International Journal of Materials Research, where this crap is published. He had an astonishing response when the bad papers in his journal were reported to him.

I can assure that I do not like fraud in scientific results and I will do my best to prevent them. But on the other hand, I hate anonymous accusations. So it would be my pleasure to follow up this matter after you have discovered your personality to me and send contact data under which I can reach you.

Wait wait wait. Because the person reporting the problem to him, “Artemisia”, is an anonymous whistleblower, he refuses to do anything? That makes no sense. If they had a Nobel prize attached to their name, would he jump up and take care of the problem immediately? Not knowing who they are is reason enough to ignore a credible complaint? This is not how it’s supposed to work. Any action taken would not be on the basis of the say-so of the person reporting it — his fucking job is to evaluate the evidence given and act appropriately.

He has been handed documentation that shows these papers contain falsified images, and he chooses to sit on his hands and not do anything because he doesn’t see a named authority behind the complaint. It’s rank credentialism. He’s also snooty and dismissive.

I will not take any action based on an anonymous accusation. As soon as you discover your clear name, contact address and your personal motivation in this issue, I will consider the appropriate and required means.

That doesn’t matter. If Bozo the Clown hands you evidence that figures were faked and data manipulated, you do due diligence and look at the work and verify the concerns, and then you take action, based on the evidence, not your perception of the authority of the complainant. If you don’t, why were you appointed to be editor of this journal?

Jonathan Pruitt hasn’t gone away yet?

Please, can we think of the spiders?

I think there are a heck of a lot of good scientists who deserve to be displayed in a big photo in the pages of Nature. Can he please be retired to a well-deserved obscurity now?

At least this article seems rather more focused on the foot-dragging by university administrators and the deep harm he has done to collaborators.

After more than two years of allegations over data irregularities in his publications, Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioural ecologist and rising star in the field of spider behaviour, resigned from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, in July. The resignation marks a turning point in a painful saga — but Pruitt’s former lab members and collaborators told Nature that they want more closure, as they continue to deal with the fallout. Aside from the time wasted on studies that are now retracted, they have struggled with the stigma of being associated with alleged misconduct and have found it difficult to once again trust co-workers and collaborators.

The university concluded an investigation into the matter in late 2021 but has not released its outcome, and revealed last month that it had reached a confidential settlement with Pruitt.

For those who have spent years combing through data to comply with university investigators and talking with journal editors about retractions, this resolution is particularly unsatisfying, says Kate Laskowski, a behavioural ecologist at the University of California, Davis, who collaborated with Pruitt on several projects. Since allegations of data fabrication emerged in early 2020, at least 13 of Pruitt’s papers have been retracted, and 6 others have been labelled with expressions of concern.

Note the “confidential settlement” and the “more than two years of allegations” — this has been agonizingly drawn out over years without a clear resolution. McMaster University lawyers and administrators were clearly more interested in concealing malfeasance than in little things like “research integrity”. And then there are all these people like Laskowski left twisting in the wind…I would say that this is no blot on her career at all, but rather a huge red flag about McMaster’s management.

Unfortunately, Pruitt has landed on his feet and is now teaching at Tampa Catholic High School in Florida. I know, it’s Florida, so standards are pretty low there already, but I wouldn’t want a fraud teaching my kids. The way things are going, he’s more likely to be punished for being gay than for faking data.

Oh, and this is timely: you’ve heard of RateMyProfessor? Now there’s a version to RateYourCampusAdmin.

Are you tired of having little voice over the decisions on your campus?

Are you concerned about the spiraling costs of senior administration?

Do you think accountability is a two-way street?

We believe in the power of symmetry and transparency, of open evaluation, for and by faculty. At RateYourCampusAdmin.com, you will have the power to evaluate the performance of the senior administrators on your campus, through a thoroughly researched, robust means for aggregating expert opinions about the quality of the service they deliver to your community.

Turnabout is fair play. It’s little more than the promise of delivering a little accountability at this point, with only a few names in the database, but give them time, it could grow.

Goon University shot their wad

Would you believe that a two week course in a rented building led by a team of conservative wankers was the majestic peak of intellectual achievement this summer? Bari Weiss thinks so.

They’ve reached their peak so soon. It’s all downhill from here.

One way the right wing is winning

This one is going to have immense long term effects. The United States is experiencing a teacher shortage.

The teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels — and school officials everywhere are scrambling to ensure that, as students return to classrooms, someone will be there to educate them.

“I have never seen it this bad,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, said of the teacher shortage. “Right now it’s number one on the list of issues that are concerning school districts … necessity is the mother of invention, and hard-pressed districts are going to have to come up with some solutions.”

You might be wondering why. As a teacher myself (albeit one insulated from the worst by a position in higher ed), I looked at the Washington Post’s explanation to see if it aligned with my own experience.

Why are America’s schools so short-staffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators’ sense that politicians and parents — and sometimes their own school board members — have little respect for their profession amid an escalating educational culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues.

✔ “pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion”: Yes, definitely. We’ve been overworked for the past few years, trying to adjust to radical changes in instruction. It’s been ugly. The administration hasn’t been particularly helpful, either, happily passing down dictates and expecting us to implement them.

✔ “low pay”: My institution is one of the lowest paying in the University of Minnesota system, and it still rankles that shortly after the pandemic started, they convened a meeting to discuss how best and most equitably to reduce our pay further. Hey, everyone, you need to work harder, and by the way, we want to cut your salary, and have brought in a couple of economists to discuss it. Not the most sensitive move to make.

✔ “politicians and parents … have little respect for their profession”: You bet. That’s not just pandemic-induced, either — we’ve been watching Republicans whittle away at our budget for decades, and the latest accusations that we’re all post-modern neo-Marxists or trying to smuggle in CRT or encouraging sexual fluidity don’t help. That’s all true, of course, but what’s wrong with that?

✔ “laws restricting what teachers can say”: Not much of a problem for me (higher ed, again), and Minnesota has generally been good about that, but I can see it all coming down the road right now. Elect Ron DeSantis to the presidency, and I’m either going to be fired or lined up with my peers before a firing squad.

I have to add another, though: the cavalier attitude of our administrators to the pandemic. They don’t care. They don’t have to go into classrooms, they sit in their marble-lined offices and pretend the pandemic is over. Nothing has convinced me more that I’m regarded as nothing but a cog in the machine, expendable and easily replaced. Except that maybe I’m not going to be so easily replaced.

Since I am in higher ed, we’ll probably get 50-100 applications for my position the instant I retire.