Academics
pharyngula | August 4, 2008It actually feels kind of good, considering that my job is secure, and that these critics are looking increasingly rabidly insane. I just sit back and watch their hysteria grow. Case in point: Rod Dreher, who seems to be crawling the walls and screaming right now. In his 'review' of the desecration issue, nowhere does he mention the cause: the violent over-reaction of Catholics to a student in Florida walking away from Mass with a communion wafer, and the subsequent uproar calling for expulsion and punishment from Bill Donohue.
His parting shot to believers: "Nothing must be held sacred."
He…
pharyngula | August 2, 2008The Center for Inquiry has put together two letters on the Webster Cook affair, one to be sent to UCF president John Hitt, and the other to the Catholic League. I've put both below the fold.
Dear John C. Hitt:
We are writing in response to the recent controversy surrounding University of Central Florida student Webster Cook. Countless people have publicly proclaimed that they are sending letters to your University demanding the expulsion of Webster Cook.
Let us quickly recap the events in question. Webster Cook went to a communion ceremony on campus, not at a Catholic Church, and was given a…
sciencetolife | July 28, 2008I recently read an interesting article about why doing scientific research makes a person feel stupid and why this may actually be a good thing.
The article is written by Martin A. Schwartz, a professor at the University of Virginia and is published in the April 2008 edition of Journal of Cell Science.
Schwartz writes: I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major…
pharyngula | July 26, 2008I guess that since the Catholic League was unable to fire up a stake in Minnesota, they're going to push for some success in Florida. Webster Cook has been impeached, and now look at this: his friend Benjamin Collard who was there but not involved in the heinous crime of not eating a cracker is being harassed by UCF.
"I tried to look at my class schedule," Collard said. "There was a hold placed on my account that I couldn't sign up for classes. I went to the office of Student conduct to see what was going on and they told me Catholic Campus Ministries filed charges against me."
Collard…
pharyngula | July 25, 2008The president of Baylor, John M. Lilley, was fired abruptly yesterday. He demonstrated insufficient dedication to their "faith mission", so of course he had to go. I'm sure the ID crowd will be pleased — by encouraging a stronger "Christian vision", the next president of the university will probably encourage more Intelligent Design nonsense…which, of course, is an entirely secular concept that is not reliant on faith or Christian visions. Right.
I also have to say that this diagram accompanying the commentary is spot on.
sciencetolife | July 21, 2008After 6 years in graduate school, I finally defended my dissertation and earned those 3 letters I've wanted for so long: P.h. & D.
I look forward to putting the emotional and psychological roller coaster called "grad school" behind me and moving on into the professional world, which I hope will be more routinely stable.
Anyone looking to hire a medical writer? Email me.
pharyngula | July 19, 2008June Sheldon was an adjunct professor of biology at San Jose/Evergreen Community College, teaching genetics. Here's one account of a lecture she gave.
On June 21, 2007, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course, answered a question about how heredity affects homosexual behavior by citing the class textbook and a well-known German scientist. She noted that the scientist found a correlation between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males but that the scientist's views are only one set of theories in the nature-versus-nurture debate mentioned by the textbook…
pharyngula | July 8, 2008Social networking sites are getting to be a dime-a-dozen — I'm getting invitations to join new ones all the time. Here's one that gets at least one thing right: Graduate Junction. They are specifically aimed at a narrow clientele, which at least adds a little focus to their group. In this case, it's a network for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers — at least they've all got shared goals and shared miseries they can talk about.
pharyngula | June 24, 2008I guess most of us missed a bizarre poster at the Evolution 2008 meetings tonight. It was basically a paper titled The Evidently Imminent Phyletic Transition of Homo sapiens into Homo militarensis (the military hominid), by Richard H. Lambertsen. It's garbage from the first page, I'm afraid, in which the author tries to demonstrate that there must be direction and intent in the evolution of life, and that "Earth's largest blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
swimming at peak velocity most precisely represents the
central tendency of evolution." This is followed by many pages of oddball math in…
pharyngula | June 11, 2008I'm going to give you a choice today.
If you've only got a moment and want to click a button and be done with something fairly trivial, vote on whether to impeach Bush.
For a change, if you've got a half hour or so and would like to contribute data to serious research, take Elisabeth Cornwell's research survey. I think we could add a large dollop of godless attitudes to her work.
(Hmmm…I should do a poll on who would rather crash a poll vs. take a serious survey!)
pharyngula | May 23, 2008One more has joined the official academic mafia. We'll never be able to trust her again.
pharyngula | May 16, 2008It's the end of our semester, and there's another transition here: one of our colleagues, Dave Hoppe, is retiring, to our regret but to his happy progress. We all got together for a retirement dinner yesterday, so here's the happy crew, the entire UMM biology discipline.
From left to right: Chris Cole, Tracey Anderson, Margaret Kuchenreuther, Dave Hoppe, PZ Myers, Timna Wyckoff, Pete Wyckoff, Van Gooch
We hope Dave can still drag himself away from his lakefront home to say hello to us all now and then!
pharyngula | May 13, 2008I'm getting there — I just gave my second final exam for this semester, will get them all graded up tomorrow, and then have one last exam to give on Thursday…then I'm free! Free!
pharyngula | May 7, 2008And it's actually enforced? Two teachers have been fired for refusing to take an oath…an oath that was put in place during the McCarthy witch hunts. Apparently they just left it on the books, but now it's a hook that can be used to eject troublemakers.
You know, like those rabble-rousing, dangerous Quakers.
The most incredibly ironic thing about this whole controversy is that non-citizens are not required to sign it. Says Marianne Kearney-Brown, one of the fired teachers, "The way it's laid out, a noncitizen member of Al Qaeda could work for the university, but not a citizen Quaker."
That's…
pharyngula | May 5, 2008We are entering into the final week of classes here at UMM, when all of the administrative work for me reaches a horrible, cataclysmic crescendo with piles of exams and papers pouring in starting today. This would be a very poor time for a creationist spammer to try to cause trouble, because I'm going to be very pissy for a while, and blood might be spilled.
One cheery bit of news that means I might not be quite as vicious as I would otherwise: I've been invited to take a cruise to the Galapagos! Of course I'm going. It will be a fine tonic before I start next year's classes. And there are…
pharyngula | April 30, 2008Wheaton has a good academic reputation, but man, it's the little things that make it frightening. I would not want to live in the theocratic world it represents. Hank Fox has a couple of stories about Wheaton.
The first is the blog of a recent graduate of Wheaton who determined halfway through his undergraduate education that he was an atheist. It sounds like it was rough. He's ended the blog, though, with a statement that "…now that I'm slightly closer to the real world, I just don't think it's that important whether you're an atheist or a Christian" — which is true. The differences are…
pharyngula | April 19, 2008Another minor blog skirmish has erupted over a perennial issue in the blogosphere: the wickedness of anonymous commenters/bloggers/whatever. I'm going to sort of take the side of Greg Laden.
I despise anonymous commenters. It's pretty much a sure sign that anything the person is going to say is worthless noise if they aren't willing to sign a name to it.
That said, though, I consider a consistent pseudonym to be a name. I've gotten to know lots of people on the web via their chosen pseudonym, and that pseudonym acquires its own authority on the merits of the writing behind it. You don't need…
pharyngula | April 15, 2008I like Greg Laden's taxonomy of Horwitzian Academic "Freedom" bills:
"Academic Freedom" bills seem to come in two flavors: Those that protect students from the possibility of learning certain things, and those that protect subversive teachers from getting in trouble for being bad teachers.
pharyngula | April 2, 2008To my students and advisees: I've emailed a few of you, but just in case, I'm also putting this here. You've been trying to get in touch with me, especially this week when registration is pending, but when I'm not in class I'm flitting off to somewhere else. I was away in Washington DC last Thursday afternoon through Sunday, and I'm about to do it again with trips to Mankato tomorrow, a long weekend at a conference in Oregon, and then zooming away again right after class on Monday to Fergus Falls. Trust me, though, you're not the only one feeling a bit tired of it all.
Here's the deal, though…