Double Whammy for Wheaton Professor, and Other Reading

Kent Gramm, a popular and longtime English professor at Wheaton College, is out of a job because he won’t explain the reasons for divorcing his wife to college officials — as required by institutional policy, The Chicago Tribune reports.
Dean Dad explains why good administrators sometimes make bad decisions.
A study of postdoctoral researchers at Fermi National Laboratory found evidence of institutional gender bias there, Richard Monastersky reports on The Chronicle’s News Blog. The author, Sherry Towers, a physicist, examined the research productivity and career trajectories of 57 postdoctoral physicists working on Fermilab’s DZero collaboration, an experiment involving some 700 physicists around the world, from 1998-2006 and found that while female postdocs outproduced many of their male counterparts, they were much less likely to be permitted to present their papers at conferences, a fact that ultimately hurt their careers, Monastersky writes. See an article at Nature, and related posts at Historiann, Keeping It Simple, and Young Female Scientist.
The National Academy of Sciences has elected 72 new scientists to its ranks, 16 of them women, Jeffrey Brainard writes on the News Blog. That’s an improvement over last year, when only nine out of 90 were women, he notes.
Don’t miss an interesting discussion on The Chronicle’s Forums about how working professors cope with chronic illness, which was inspired by a recent post at Shifting Careers.