Small Pond Science

I’m making a big change. I just moved over to substack. Henceforth, you can find me at Science for Everyone. The tagline is “Science needs everyone, and everyone needs science.” I believe that’s an accurate distillation of what my work here on Small Pond Science has always been about, and I’m taking that ethos with me to my new site. Please come over and join me! Subscribe for free using the…

There are a bunch of federally-funded programs that are designed to support students and faculty who are at teaching-focused institutions. Let’s talk about it by busting out a new taxonomic term that we’ll probably be seeing more of in the future. Basically any university that doesn’t have R1-ish level of annual research spending is called an “Emerging Research Institution (ERI)” according to the…

Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty: “We show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years.” The most striking thing about the data in this paper is that this phenomenon hasn’t improved in recent years, it’s actually gotten worse. Women in leadership face ageism…

We’ve got an acronym problem when it comes to classifying colleges and universities. No, it’s not that we have too many acronyms. Our problem is that the commonly used acronyms rarely capture the distinctions that we’re trying to specify. While I’ve already taken a stab at describing institutions with a typology that I think holds up really well, I think it would be really useful to provide…

Some academic societies do this thing where they offer free conference registration to a limited number of students, and in turn, those students earn their keep by donating their labor for to help run the conference (at registration tables, projection tech support, etc). I think this is problematic. You might think that this increases accessibility and allows students who otherwise couldn’t…

The ongoing conversation about inequitable outcomes in the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) is scaffolded on a steady trickle of inappropriate remarks from reviewers that applicants share on social media. Take, for example, the howler from this weekend, which said, “His Hispanic pride prevented him from seeking mentorship and advise [sic] from other…

Higher education’s other diversity crisis (the article is about Oxford, but really, it’s about everywhere) Insect decline gets the Elizabeth Kolbert treatment in the New Yorker. American teens are unwell because society is unwell. Confidence. highlighted read Women have been misled about menopause The intersections of identity and persistence for retention in ecology and environmental…

Undergraduate labor powers many university laboratories. Many of us faculty in primarily undergraduate institutions simply would not be shipping much product without this source of labor. And even in PhD-granting institutions, undergrads are often the labor that makes dissertations possible. Oftentimes, this is unpaid labor. But in the eyes of many, this form of unpaid labor is not…

The loss of bodily autonomy is making prospective college students rethink where they’ll go off to college. The great forgetting. On the Teaching Tenure Track (about positions in some university systems that have full-time positions with security of employment that are focused on teaching) Exxon knew. (And in general, I’d just like to draw attention to the fact that the EIC of Science, Holden…

Good, bad, and worst dates for academic conferences

Looking at social media today, I have developed an unambiguous case of FOMO because I’m not at the SICB conference in Austin. But did I even give any thought to attending this meeting? Heck no. A meeting during the January break? Count me out. Have I ever been to one of these meetings? Nope. This time is just too valuable for personal time and/or research for me*. Granted, there is never a good…

The SLAC job market and disappearing jobs

Just in case you thought blogging was dead: I read an interesting blog post that I want to share with you, and comment on it in my blog. This post was about disappearing faculty positions at Small Liberal Arts Colleges (SLACs), on a blog for early career philosophers. It points out enrollment declines in SLACs, and a notably substantial drop in the number of new tenure-track positions being…

Isn't it funny how there REUs are subject to applications, search committees, letters of rec, etc. But when we hire NTT faculty, there is basically no process at all?

Once in a while, I get an email that sounds like this: Hi everybody I know who is driving distance from campus, We’re looking to hire an adjunct to teach [something] for us before the semester starts in a few weeks. Ideally this person has a PhD related to this topic and some teaching experience, but if you know of a grad student who is looking to gain experience teaching a course of record and…

A couple more research articles showing how teaching valuations are sexist. And the interaction effect with age is quite something. If you’re involved in teaching evaluations in any way, this is important to know about. book: The Guidebook for the Engaged University “Do I really want to be a professor?” What a frog pandemic tells us about humans It’s not too late to bid on items from Joan…

On bureaucratic obstacles to field experiences for students

If your university is like mine, then you hear a lot about everybody is working hard to make sure that students have exposure to high impact educational practices. We all want to make sure that while students are in college, that they have the chance to have meaningful experiences. For students in a bunch of science fields, it’s pretty clear that one of the most transformative and impactful…

NSF’s accountability for the Waterman award

Usually we talk about accountability when people are getting it wrong, and perhaps on the occasional moment when someone or some organization experiences appropriate negative consequences for their own actions. That’s only the first step. Accountability includes taking the steps to right the wrong, to move forward doing the right things. So: I’d just like to take a brief moment to say thank you…

“I know you’re busy, so I’ll make this quick”

This is a sign that I’ve been getting it wrong. When people start talking to me by saying, “I know you’re busy, but…” then I feel like I have already failed a little bit. (more…)

Black@PWI: navigating an anti-Black campus climate Meet the professor who hiked 500 miles across the Mojave Desert Why I shrank my lab in half. (more…)