Hitting the Road? Not Rhodes

I teach politics part-time and my students cannot pin down my personal beliefs because I really do argue as many sides of an issue as I can. When I eventually achieve F/T status at a community college, tenure will be vital to the way I do my job. In addition to having collective control regarding issues such as curriculum delivery methods, I all too often have to present ideas that are controversial to some or even a majority of people in order that I fairly represent the broad spectrum of opinions in the public arena. If that freedom is sacrificed because I feel the need to bow at the altar of playing it safe, then I have done a disservice to my students and my discipline.

I don’t see the fear point.   I see so much abuse of tenure at my school, that I have come (as a fully tenured faculty member) to disagree with it, or ask what modified approach can protect faculty from being let go for controversial ideas, such as conservative right-wing ones like mine, but allow them to be let go for being lazy.  I can’t tell you how lazy and good-for-nothing half of the tenured faculty in my department are.   Heck, I wish they had the gumption to express some controversial thought I disagreed with, it would show they had some life in them.  I would respect them more.  We have a bunch of highly paid tenured faculty working 10-15 hours a week, and not working at all over most of the Summer or over a one-month Christmas break.   The tenure thing is so abused.  And why protect faculty in a way that no other workers are protected?  I am just turned off by the whole thing and the ridiculous abuse I see.

Your dichotomy is false, neudy. Mostly, it’s politicians–state legislators–who are trying to take away tenure in some states. You might want to read the earlier column I alluded to above, “Tenure and the Two-Year College.”

Rob

If the candidate were applying for a job as a professor, her decision to rearrange the chairs would have been bold and probably appropriate. Personally, however, I want deans and chairs and provosts, etc., to take charge and give us direction. If your leaders are making up the rules as they go along, very bad things can happen. Candidate 3 would be good as a team-teacher or maybe to operate a tutoring program on campus, but not to make executive decisions.

Regarding gender, I must say I have 25 years in the working world, of which 13 years have been spent in higher education–and I can’t say women manage that much differently from men. I work with two female deans at my university: One works by consensus and always sees every issue as a case of compromise. The other is a “bulldog,” often criticized by people for being crude and insensitive. I love the bulldog lady.

I also work with the grants office a lot, which has mostly female grants officers. One is very sweet and gentle. Another one I nicknamed “Thunderbolt” because she has the thunderbolt stare that stops people dead in their tracks. I like working with Thunderbolt.

In my own department, I have found that female colleagues tend not to be very nurturing but they stand up for me when a clear ethical stake is on the table. I respect them immensely, to the last one. I haven’t had a single female colleague at this university who gossips or backstabs or does any of the stereotypical “girl” things.

My straight male colleagues present quite a different range, however. Four of them were very nurturing when I came back from active duty and struggled with post-deployment mental-health issues. They were kind and patient, willing to listen to me break down and even cry in front of them. Even though I am bisexual, I think they connected with me because I am married and a dad and served my country, so they could relate to the typical male stress of my experience.

Other straight men have been horrendous at places where I have worked, acting like little b*tches and going behind my back, forwarding emails and creating public pressure to force me out of this job or get me blocked on that grant. 

And then there are lesbians. I always, always, always get along with lesbians with one or two exceptions. They’re the most awesome people to have as colleagues or supervisors.

So I can’t really generalize about male/female leadership styles at all. Times have changed and I think those characterizations are passé. Candidate 3 in the scenario above is not indicative of the way “girls” or women lead things, from what I have seen. She is simply not the right person for an executive job. Maybe she could teach research classes at the library or do group therapy.

On the one hand:

1) people might have gotten bored sitting so a bit of movement might refresh
2) touchy feeling facilitators are among the most demanding dictators in life–throw her in the trash
3) asking 50 people to change ANYTHING is a good beginning—garlands around her neck
4) apparently brain contents were irrelevant—shoot all 50 faculty
5) why not chairs that roll?—-shoot the facilities people
6) hand out sheet with what leaders look like and give each candidate 5 minutes to strut and fret
7) March–real leaders take credit for luck and avoid credit for bad luck—check her ability to do that
8) Have a man and her run races, lift weights, spit, and make vulgar jokes—then choose the best
9) have her and a man fight using neutral tools—racoons, espressos, 
10) give em both a stack of abstracts in their field and challenge them to stay awake for 5+ minutes.

On the other hand:

Whomever you hire will have zero money the next 20 years—so it hardly matters, hire anyone. 
if you are in great warm city with great coffees and conversations and lots of high tech firms near the ocean and are paying 300K or more a year—hire me. 

GREAT LEADERS, truth be told, do not LOOK like ANYTHING—
they can be very very unimpressive people–their RESULTS look impressive, not them—
research shows interviews are the LEAST RELIABLE hiring criterion—people who are fascinated with winning interviews are stupid (candidates and deciders both).

More seriously–since LOTS of research finds executives have NO MEASURABLE EFFECTS except in crisis situations where confounding factors abound, hire someone it is entertaining to watch the ups and downs of—someone who enjoys the flows of life instead of taking it out on the poor staff, organization, students, faculty, or other stakeholders. People who treat the interview as a joke can turn out to be pretty accurate and good readers of faculty. ooooo that was subtle…..

“I believe that pointing out inadequacies can lead to changes for the better…Speak out constructively.”

Here, here! 

“Speaking out constructively” will allow you to test your freedoms. Make it relevant. That is, take instances when there’s “skin in the game”–yours, your colleagues, and administrators. Don’t start with a difficult issue, like sports corruption. Instead, assume you identify reliable, preferably documented, evidence that, say, your school made several material misrepresentations in its accreditation reports. Honesty is important to you. Now, “constructively speak out” to your colleagues and administrators.

Pick any instance of misconduct or corruption where you and your school has “skin in the game.” You shouldn’t have long to wait. For details, see “University and AACSB Diversity” and “A General Theory To Test Social Reality.” (http://ssrn.com/author=397169)

Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA
Professor
School of Accountancy
College of Business
University of Southern Mississippi
http://www.usmnews.net

True leadership is not about the position we hold, but the influence we wield.  When selecting for leadership position, we must consistently look at the influence the candidate imparts to us in the short time that they are with us. The method that a candidate uses to present is far less important than the leadership influence they exude.   We must always ask ourselves, is this a person that I want to follow?  If not, move on to the next candidate. 

Congratulations! I think your article speaks to a larger issue that I encountered when I was on the job market: while many schools do seem to follow a standardized set of behaviors while conducting their job searches, a good number also do their own thing and are looking for their own thing, so standard job advice doesn’t always fit. It can be helpful to understand that not all schools play by the standard rules, and sometimes it also helps for you to break from the standard routine as well.

For instance, I was told not to discuss money until I had an offer on the table, and two schools broached the topic very early. One, a fancy junior college in the northeast, had an HR person call, and before she would tell me why she was calling (to set up a phone interview) she asked me first if I was really willing to move to New Jersey (yes, or I wouldn’t have applied) and what my salary requirements were (I mumbled something about the national average for starting tenure-track profs). At the other, the chair of the department asked me about money during my campus interview in a break between my various meetings. He also pretty much offered me the job at the end of the day.

At first I was flummoxed when schools asked me questions I had been told they wouldn’t ask, but I quickly tried to adjust and roll with it.

More relevant to your particular situation, some of the advice that I did receive in a grad school job market workshop was the equivalent of “to thine own self be true.” While we were mostly encouraged to stay on our best behavior during the interview, and to project that sort of bland, non-offensive effaced mask of a personality that doesn’t reveal too much, we were also told that interviews are all about finding a good fit. Thus, a little judicious revelation of personality and personal opinion might help schools who are a good fit see us as such. Toward the end of the day at the campus interview where the chair brought up money early in the interview, I had recognized that the chair has the same kind of goofy, teasing sense of humor that I have, and I made a small joke with him that I wouldn’t have otherwise made. His response: a long hard laugh and “Ah, I like you, I really like you.” I think we’ve gotten along well ever since.

While I agree with your comment that pointing out inadequacies can lead to changes for the better, it’s been my experience that doing so leads to reprisal, retaliation, and revenge, especially from insecure managers. After the beatings I’ve suffered — many of them probably in violation of FLSA and NLRA but difficult to prove — I’ve concluded it isn’t worth my matter, energy, time, and space. 

This doesn’t mean I’ve become willfully oblivious rather I’ve just given up. Don’t let my experience dissuade anyone else. Go right ahead and continue to point out institutional inadequacies. Perhaps they, or some at least, will indeed lead to changes for the better.

Hi Issaac,
I am honestly happy that you now have a full time job and that you spoke so openly about the adjunct life.
 
Unfortunately I disagree with the title of the last blog though.  
 ”Don’t keep quiet” would have been adequate.
or  
 ”Want TT track or to be disheartened?  Speaking up”   
 ”Tenure track or quit: speak out.” 
 ”Become TT, be labeled a discontent, and thank god that adjunct have no union protection cause we’re getting rid of them:  3 ways colleges could act in reaction to those who speak up”
 
 I spoke up and speak up politely. This will apply to 95% (guestamit) of adjunct with integrity. Luckily I have a strong union in my state.  The nearest other college is 30 miles away,  The next 60.   My department head seems to think I can teach adjunct for the next 20 years as I am so good.

Sincerely with best wishes,
Carol

It seems to me that international student mobility isn’t nessesarily slowing but that the patterns of where they go may be shifting.  While the UK, for example, may see a slowing of international students due to visa restrictions, they may also see a slowing due to increased tuition, and I’d be interested to learn if there are any implications for UK nationals who may be less likely to now attend post-secondary institutions due to the rising costs as well.

As a staff member in the international student recruitment unit of my university in Canada, we definitely hear the argument that international students are taking up spaces in classes that would otherwise be reserved for Canadian students.  The only support for this argument is a statistical one, in that our entrance averages are based on a combination of the number of spaces available, the average scores achieved by all applicants to a program in the previous year, and the normal uptake of admissions offers.  The distribution of GPAs, not surprisingly, waivers very little from year to year, perhaps a percentage point or two one way or the other at most.  International student applications have the ability, certainly, to skew the averages higher if one can assume that the majority of such applicants are high achievers, but the more likely case, statistically speaking, is that the higher the volume of applications, the more normalised a distribution becomes, not necessarily skewed.  As a result, any student who meets our minimum average is guaranteed to get in, regardless of that student being Canadian or international, and as 22280998 states, international students are often more likely to study in programs that local students tend not to.  I’ve never heard of a case at our university, which has no international or domestic student quotas, where a Canadian student lost a spot because an international student got it.  The only reason any student loses a spot is that they don’t meet the minimum requirement.

In addition, our labour market will continue to require us to attract international students because as a nation with stagnant birth rates and increasing ages of others, we continue to experience labour shortages in all types of fields, from professional to labour positions, and as long as there are people who continue to want to immigrate here, I can’t forsee any change in Canada receiving international students, regardless of any protests Canadians may have.

You are flat out wrong, and your argument smells of liberal propaganda.  

International students don’t flood areas that would otherwise not have been filled.  The problem is that most qualifications for international students are far lower than that of American students.  It is far more difficult for an American to get into an MIT engineering program than a Chinese student.  Examples: the American needs high scores, high test scores, work experience, volunteer experience, sports, art, etc, etc.  The Chinese student needs a test score.  Not an English test score, but a math test score.  If that was all that was required of American student, Americans could compete more.  All they would have to do is copy Chinese students and sit in their rooms studying maths for a decade or more.  

On top of this, because international students flood these programs, the result is that Americans don’t want to do them.  It is a stereotype that Indians and Chinese will outperform Americans when that is simply not true and there are no real measurements to prove it.  So, Americans, with these biased perceptions, decide on other fields.  Lets not forget that some other fields like finance, life sciences, social sciences, and economics also use a lot of maths.  American students can easily outperform in these areas.  Assuming they don’t perform well in engineering or hard sciences is just naive and ignorant.  

As well, international students flooding these programs actually downgrade the jobs that result from studying in these programs.  When US companies are more interested in hiring an Indian or Chinese because of the perception that they are “better”, why would a white American go into a career where their skin color would go against them.  

Lets not forget that most international students are accepted simply because they have money and they bring “diversity” to US universities.  

As for the article’s assumption that there is “hostility” towards international students in the US, that is just ridiculous.  The hostility comes from Americans Universities and so-called scholars who continuously attack Americans in education.  Americans are far more qualified than most people in any other country in the world.  The attacks on us are causing a backlash.  But the hostilities didn’t start with us.  It started with the discriminatory US higher education system that hates Americans.  

International students parents did not pay any taxes that support publically funded institutions so therefore they should pay the full cost of their tuition.
As for those complain that they are taking up spaces from more qualified domestic candidates, which I really wasn’t commenting on at all, why don’t those same institutions apply the same standards to foreign sudents and charge them the full cost of tuition.  Sounds like the solution to the unqualified student problem.  But remember, money talks.

Despite the tone of the article, this is an excellent area for study, and not only for psychology.  There are many areas of engineering and even physics where papers are being published based on the “predictions” of essentially unverified, and highly tunable, computer models that could do with a look-see.  

The argument about psychology possibly being harmed as a reason to desist is pretty humorous.  Oh wait, they *really* feel that way in Psychology departments?

One final piece of snark, which I don’t really mean as snark.  Psychology may indeed be a valid field of study.  But I would stop short of calling it “science”.  I would also go as far as to say that maybe part of the problem is that in their zeal to be labeled as a science, psychologists may be using techniques that are valid for investigating the physical world but that are inappropriate for assessing the state of something as variable as people’s feelings or reactions to stimuli. 

In the physical world, the implicit assumption is that if you do the same thing, the same result should occur.  And this should be true whether you do it, or anybody else does it, 1 time, or 1000000 times. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can react differently to the same stimulus between morning and afternoon.

How is a field that uses the scientific method not science?

Many years ago, when Boyd McCandless was appointed editor of the then new APA journal, Developmental Psychology, and invited me to join its editorial board, I suggested that one of the criteria for accepting a research article should be whether or not the author(s) had replicated the results in a second study.  It was deemed impractical. Nevertheless,I have always thought that some evidence of the replication of results prior to publication would have advanced our science considerably.  Frances Degen Horowitz

This song will now be stuck in my mind all day! ;-0)

@willismg: Even in the “hard” sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) there is no expectation that the results will be the same each time. That’s why those fields use models that *estimate* the true value and that also provide various indices of error in the estimate (standard errors). Granted, their estimates are more precise and farther along as a science than in psychology, but that doesn’t make the use of the scientific method by psychologists any less scientific. Science is a process not an outcome.

 For Mr. Doesit,  Yes there is scatter around some expected value in physical experiments, but if one is sufficiently careful, one can minimize this and see clear answers.  In psychology, one is in fact measuring reactions of a conscious entity which alters itself with each application of the experiment.  Indeed, depending on how perverse or puckish one is feeling on any given day, or depending on whether or not it’s raining outside, the same person can be in a different mood and react differently.  The billiard ball has no such ability to change the outcome of any experiment performed upon it.  Science is indeed about the process but if one wants to apply a process, one should ensure that the process, with all its built-in limitations, is able to achieve what is desired.

In my view, the scientific process has no hope of teasing out whatever it is that makes us do the things we do when somebody prods us.  The fact that I can exercise control over my own conscious entity (my brain) means that the underlying assumptions of the scientific method have been violated.

Again, I’m not saying that psychology isn’t worthy of study.  I’m merely saying that the application of an inappropriate process in that study might be part of the problem with any lack of reproducibility in the field.  If only they weren’t so damned insecure about the nature of their field, maybe somebody could figure out a more appropriate process for psychology than the scientific method.

Tom: Would you please elaborate on the basis for your assertion: “If it turns out that a sizable percentage (a quarter? half?) of the results published in these three top psychology journals can’t be replicated, it’s not going to reflect well on the field or on the researchers whose papers didn’t pass the test. 

Your prediction about the *perception* of nonreplicated studies may be true, but do you think that perception would be well founded when there are a variety of valid reasons for nonreplication to occur?

I agree. Medicine is not a science. Nor is so-called “neuroscience”, nor is quantum mechanics. 

I think those who want to dismiss the social sciences including psychology as outside of  science are invoking an incredibly scientistic approach to the scientific method. In the hard sciences the objects of our inquiry are PERCEIVED as acting as if they themselves are not engaged in sense making but that is not always (ever?) the case in the social sciences. Not only are we sometimes engaged in ignoring and controlling the sense making activities of others, sometimes we actively dismiss the sense making activities of those we study and at other times in other fields and disciplines we work to try to understand the sense made by others. In my own field (sociology) some of us are even engaged in understanding our own sense making. In any event when we work with sense making subjects and when we treat ourselves as constructors of meaning and not simply as reporters and readers of texts written by nature we can still do science but our subjects are rich, intricate, and very complex.
And those in the social sciences would seem to adopt incredibly scientistic approaches when they invoke the same kind of accounts (of literal causality and the like) as those in the hard sciences. It is the coroner who “causes” the suicide, the hospital committee that “creates” the medical error, the CDC that makes us “obese” – a very different way of thinking about “causality” than the ways that physicists and biologists think about causality.
 

pffft. This will just confirm that most psych studies are underpowered. Average beta of psychology studies is about 0.52. Thus, I expect they will replicate something less than 50% of the published works. No big deal if you understand stats. Nothing to see here that a careful meta-analysis of power in the same journals wouldn’t demonstrate (at most, the replication project will provide more reason to report effect sizes in studies, rather than only p-values).

see this youtube for why replicability is not related to p, but beta! http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to-come-undone/29045

What’s to say he won’t just fake his results just so he doesn’t make psychologists look bad. That’s probably his whole reason for doing this project. He’s just gonna make all the research he checks seem real on purpose.

As a psychology researcher, I cannot express how excited I am about this. We absolutely need this to be going on. 

Hopefully, similar undertakings will occur for biomedical research, and folks will turn their eyes on the natural sciences as well – I know from experience that they share this problem with us, though fortunately it seems it is not to the same degree. 

We have a responsibility as scientists to hold ourselves and our colleagues to a far higher standard than we have.

 My experience has been that almost any field that uses the word “science” in its title doesn’t really have much to do with science…  Political Science, Computer Science, Social Science, etc….

Extending the definition of “science” so that the original intent is derided as being too scientistic (is that a word?) is tantamount to claiming that “when I use a word it means exactly what I say it does.”  (Apologies to Lewis Carroll).

In a lot of fields, 95% of what is published is not worth reading.  Face it, if it wasn’t worth attempting to replicate by a separate team, it wasn’t worth doing in the first place, let alone publishing it.

This is a facet of the way “publish or perish” has worked out.  It was already seen as a serious problem way back in 1964 in a popular science book published by Life Magazine. 

“The Scientist,” by Henry Margenau and David Bergamini:

“Antidotes for a flood 

While some scientists see automation as their last-ditch hope for coping with the mounting flood of words, others argue that the best way to control the output is to cut it down. In many universities and industries, promotions hinge, in part, on the sheer bulk of a scholar’s published papers. The pressure to ‘publish or perish’ clutters scientific literature with items of small consequence masquerading under pretentious titles. Authors of scientific papers, say the reformers, must learn to police their own productivity, and scholarly reviewers — who traditionally do not attack another man’s work unless it contains actual errors— should go further, praising genuine contributions and puncturing empty ones.”

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

- Alphonse Karr, in 1849

And why have things not improved in the years since 1964 and instead worsened? 

We might look to: 

“Cui bono?”
“To whose profit?”

- Cicero

What’s the condition of a group of individuals every one of whom has come to expect others, outsiders, to pony up for re-examinations of conclusions…because those conclusions have no use, serve no purpose, and will otherwise never be tested or even known to exist?

The pursuit (psychology) *might* have something going for it if the experiments were assigned, similarly to the way experiments are assigned to those who engage in real science (or an art that results in either life or death): medicine.  

What if everybody’s funding depended upon someone’s discovering a link between 9/11 and Iraq, so that there’d exist evidence in favor of the war (if not in favor of a brain in every body that’s held down a chair in Congress since 9/11), which war has taken the lives of thousands of individuals…a couple of whom, if they weren’t exactly pulling for psychology, may’ve been willing to feed a few psychologists.

Not a fan of the direction the comments took. I think double checking work is always important and if someone has the time to do that then more power to them. With anything there are going to be different outcomes whether it be a cancer research study or psychology but it’s important to get the information right. So I say bring it on mass peer review!

Measurements can be accurate and not precise, precise and not accurate, both accurate and precise, or neither accurate nor precise.

How can anyone discover “true stuff” in the event trials are merely reproducible?

Most of us in the physical sciences know that science itself runs amuk when it claims to establish “absolute” truth no matter how reproducible our trials.

Determining outright fraud is one thing, but I sense aspirations to (physical) scientism by this Reproducibility Project which itself appears to labor under false premises.

“Not the least of which is the possibility that something important to the outcome was unrecognized and unmeasured in the original study — and that unmeasured factor was not common in the population of the replication study.”

Isn’t this just a longer way of saying that the original study, if it asserted there was a connection between some cause and some effect, was wrong?

I’m a sociologist, not a psychologist, but don’t psychology papers usually have the form “We did X, we observed Y, and we conclude Z”.  If somebody else does X and doesn’t not observe Y, then Z has been _disproved_ if the second study was done properly.

Yes, there might be a confounding effect.  Yes, much can be learned this way.  But the conclusion of the original study is now known to be wrong.

For evidence that in 1976 Berkeley statistics students were intellectually superior to most of the statistics TAs that were inflicted upon them:

http://chronicle.com/article/Negotiators-Reach-an-Impasse/131534/#comment-496668008

For the parallels between SAT/ACT based admissions and Tryon’s “maze-bright” rats:
http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-by-Lottery/131322/#comment-484775851

For an illustration of how poor a predictor of college GPA that SAT can be, even with a SAT Math range of 300 to 800, for a single year, at a single 4 year university, for all Computer Science majors for 3 semesters, see the subthread starting here:
http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-by-Lottery/131322/#comment-483721868 

SAT Verbal was worthless. SAT Math predicted 6%, while High School Math marks predicted 19% of the cumulative GPA.

For an illustration of the parallels between NCLB and the Revised Code of 1862:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/5th-avenue-percussions/30953#comment-372249648

For an example of how college seems to cause loss of civic knowledge, at least according to the ISI’s tests, please see this subthread:
http://chronicle.com/article/College-at-Risk/130893/#comment-450329553

For reasons why ed schools should not be trusted, see various comments starting here:
http://chronicle.com/article/Negotiators-Reach-an-Impasse/131534/#comment-496611616

For my critique of the misuse of medical admissions statistics to promote the Humanities:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Liberal-Arts-as-Guideposts/130475/#comment-430281277 
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Liberal-Arts-as-Guideposts/130475/#comment-430829706

These might all be examples of why some results are not tested or replicated. People aren’t interested in the answer or don’t want the answer. It gives the impression that if something provides an undesirable answer it best that no one know about it or that it be vigorously spun to support a particular agenda.

More inconvenient info:

Trying to dispell STEM myths:

http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/12/07/what-makes-kids-want-to-become-engineers/#comment-383088567

As a social psychology grad student, I see nothing wrong with this. If someone is willing to replicate a study, I say kudos to them. As long as they replicate it exactly the way the original author intended the experiment to be run. The “sad” part that Dr. George Curious mentioned might be that they are targeting social psychology. Sure, that makes me a bit sad too. All research disciplines should be targeted. But alas, as tdr75 mentions, if your research is ethical and sound, why worry? 

i hope they go after the pharma journals next!

Most psychology is a load…we all know that; and most psychologists only support “new” ideas in the subject that are politically correct, because, hey, many of them are affiliated with the local college or university, and they aren’t about to bite the hand the feeds them (you know…grant money and all that).  It’s all garbage.

The nature of Psychology make “exact” replication impossible. Psychology is not an exact science.

Tell that to the many people, including many psychologists, who think or act like it is a science.

Psychology, Ed. Psychology, Social Psychology, the entire profession and its contents are utter fictional nonsense. It’s a literature course and has had horrible impacts on all spheres of American life based on air. Get rid of the Psychologists and the the Political Scientists for the same reason.
suibne

Gee.  Next, they’ll be suggesting “reproducibility studies” in climate science…  Where will it end?

Interesting and great thing for the scientific method