Dan Drezner on Academic Tenure

Via Pharyngula: Dan Drezner, an acadmic who also has an A-list blog, is joining Tufts next year.

Well, what is so great about it? Earlier, he was at Chicago in a tenure track position, where he was denied tenure about a month ago. The 'denial-of-tenure' caused much heartburn among academics with blogs, and there was quite a bit of discussion. If you can read only one of them, I would suggest the last one, by Sean Carroll, a physicist who was denied tenure at (the same) Chicago several months ago; Sean is in Physics, and Dan Drezner is in Political Science.

In a recent post Drezner talks about his move to Tufts; more importantly, towards the end of his post, he also demolishes a few myths about the tenure system. After conceding the point that tenure equals lifetime employment, he goes on to provide some sobering facts of academic life in the US. He makes the following points:

1) Compared to other professions that require equivalent education, academics earn lower wages. This is clearly a choice for many of economic security and a more flexible work schedule over increased income. But it is a choice with real economic costs.

2) It's not like getting a tenured position at a top-drawer school is the easiest thing to do in the world. You have to get accepted into a good Ph.D. program, write an excellent dissertation, demonstrate an ability to generate research of high quality and quantity, and trust your luck that these skills will be recognized by your senior colleagues inside and outside your university.

3) I can't stress this enough -- a professor's wage is almost entirely determined by the market. Yearly raises in our profession range from infinitessimal to nonexistent. The only way to earn big raises is to demonstrate our value to the outside market by getting a competing job offer. That's about as real as you can get in terms of the wage structure.

Some links

Since we talked recently about university endowments, and gifts from alumni and philanthropists, let's start with the news that Tufts University received a 100 million dollar donation from Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. But the 'gift' comes with some interesting conditions. Microfinance, eBay and Tufts: it's a pretty heady combination!

Over at Pharyngula, there is a detailed post about vagina in mammals, and how the process of evolution led to it. Pretty interesting stuff.

Slashdot has a discussion on a German IT company (called Nutzwerk Ltd.) has made "cheerfulness a contractual obligation, advising those who don't measure up to the prescribed level of jollity in the morning to stay at home until they cheer up".

Women in Saptha Swarangal

With a four-year old at home, we have pretty much stopped watching TV ("Hey! You don't allow me to watch Power Rangers, and how come you are watching that movie?"). The one thing that I have managed to negotiate with the f.y.o. is the half-an-hour of Saptha Swarangal show on Sun TV every Sunday. It is a music competition, with its focus firmly on Tamil film songs, and it has been running non-stop for over six years now.

In the last year or so, Saptha Swarangal has reinvented itself into a truly wonderful program. Not that the earlier program was a pushover, but the new format is even better. There is none of that voice-oriented display of talent for individuals; now, it is for teams. In other words, the competition is between two different orchestra teams which, typically, are from colleges.

I like the new format for several reasons. First, when the teams perform a hit song, in spite of their best efforts to sound like the original, they end up sounding refreshingly different -- probably because they lack some of the instuments used in the original. Since some parts of the competition are forced on the teams (songs from MGR movies, for example), their choice of songs is also different from mine. This makes for an exquisite combination of songs.

Even in the regular song rounds, some excellent talent is on display on the instruments; in addition, there is also an instrumental round. When they perform as a team, their ability to work together is also nice to watch. Sometimes, whey they try to hide the inadequacies of a weak player, that is also cute!

Different teams come in with, naturally, different sets of instruments. I have seen a simple guitar-keyboard-drums combination; I have also seen teams with flutes, violins, two sets of keyboards, veena, mridangam, tabla, and so on.

In an earlier era: In the excellent Indian light music groups that we had in IT-BHU in the early eighties, the women rarely did things other than singing. Of course we had very few women in IT-BHU those days (I don't know if things are different now); but even in university-wide light music competitions, women just sang, with men doing pretty much everything else.

The best part is that I have seen women playing almost all the instruments; there have been several all-women teams, and there have also been other teams where women played the keyboard, the mridangam and even the drums! So, it is absolutely great to watch so many women doing pretty much everything there is in an orchestra. Some of the teams are also led by women -- a sight that is really, really rare in professional light music teams.

Needless to say, the role-model effect of all this is obvious.

You don't need to think about such social consequences to enjoy the program. You can watch it just for its refreshing and wonderful music. And when the team is really good (like the one that played 'Minsaara Kannaa' when Nithyashree was the judge!), the music could be truly sublime.

Breaking News: The IIPM faculty pages have not been changed ...

In yet another surprising development -- NOT! -- the faculty pages of IIPM are yet to be changed from where they were when we took a look at them almost three weeks ago.

That's all.

PS: As the McD ad says, "I'm lovin' it!" Thank you, IIPM, for making my job easier.

One more professional mix-up

This is just a follow up on these two posts.

In the first, I wrote about how metallurgists have been confused with meteorologists ("So, ... what's the weather going to be like tomorrow?"). What you see below is far more lethal!

Caolionn O'Connell says:

... I always felt bad for cosmologists knowing how often they must explain at cocktail parties that no they do not study make-up.

World university rankings, again

Well, it's that time of the year, when the Times of London publishes its university rankings. This is the second year in a row. First go to this page, from which you can jump to the others: overall rankings, field-wise rankings (in science, technology, arts and humanities, social sciences and biomedicine), and regional rankings (US, Europe, and Everywhere Else); however, you need to register for at least a 14-day free trial, which is quite easy.

Here is a quick summary:

• The top 10 are: Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Yale, CalTech, Princeton and Ecole Polytechnique.
• Indian Institutes of Technology (50), Indian Institutes of Management (84) and JNU (192) are the only Indian universities in the top 200 globally.
• Beijing (15), Tokyo (16), Melbourne (19), NUS-Singapore (22) and Australian National (23) are the only non-US, non-Europe universities in the top 25. What was interesting, to me, is that Beijing is ahead of Tokyo, though it is only by one rank.

Let us turn now to where the Indian universities stand in the field-specific rankings -- all are Top-100 listings:

Science: IITs (36).

Technlogy: IITs (3), IIMs (69).

Arts and Humanities: Calcutta (37) and Delhi (89).

Social Sciences: IIMs (17), JNU (51), IITs (52), Mumbai (93).

Biomedicine (is there any other kind?): IITs (62).

Hmmm, I didn't know IIMs were well known for technology, and IITs, for biomedicine. TIFR may have suffered because of its small size. Somehow, the absence of AIIMS came as a big surprise to me. Finally, the fact that IISc doesn't figure here is going to cause some agitation among students and faculty in our Institute. One cannot attribute it to IISc being a post-graduate institution, since JNU and IIMs are listed.

[At some level, all the 'Universities' listed above -- Calcutta, JNU, Mumbai, Delhi -- are all postgraduate institutions, some of which also (!) conduct UG examinations, and print and issue UG degrees. But that's a rant for another day.]

CBSE, again!

Well, this seond move by CBSE is also interesting. It has instituted a scholarship scheme for its 1050 top students. There is quite a bit of fine print there, and therein lies the rub:

... the CBSE said a total of 500 scholarships of Rs. 1,000 each per month would be awarded for four years to candidates pursuing courses in medicine or engineering in the institutes participating in the CBSE conducted AIPMT/ AIEEE examinations. In addition, 550 scholarships of Rs. 500 per month will also be awarded for three years to candidates pursuing non-professional courses in Central or State government universities.

Also, some 50 of these scholarships are reserved for the single-girl-child students.

While I welcome the goals of this scheme (encouraging the brightest to study further by reducing some of the financial burden), I want to raise some questions:

• First, in what way are this scheme's goals different from the National Talent Search Exam, through which students get a bigger scholarship? If there is no difference, can't we simply expand the NTSE program?
• Why this bias towards engineering and medicine, and away from other endeavours including sciences - natural and social, and humanities? Should the government be playing favourites? When the society at large has screwed up notions about which courses are 'desirable' (Charu has a nice post on this), should the government be reinforcing those biases? To my knowledge, the NTSE scholarship does not differentiate among disciplines [correct me if I am wrong here].
• Why is the money so little? It won't even cover tuition in many colleges. If you want any award to be meaningful, make it truly meaningful, not just symbolic. From this point of view too, NTSE is better.
• Finally, why stop at bachelors' program? If these top students continue to perform at some pre-defined level (say, 90 percentile and above) in their college/university, shouldn't they be assured of an enhanced scholarship for higher studies?

Now, Prof. C.N.R. Rao is not just a top scientist, but he is also the Scientific Advisor to the Prime Minister. For quite a while, he has been bemoaning the fact that the top students choose to go to fields other than natural sciences. Well, I just find it interesting that one arm of the government (CBSE) has chosen to encourage the very trend that is opposed by the PM's Scientific Advisor.

CBSE supports families with a single girl child

Consider this pretty general question: Can the 'chooser' of a certain action be a different entity from the 'implementer' of that action, if all the risks of that action fall on the latter?

Let me give you an example: can your spouse promise a friend that you will drop her -- I mean, the friend -- at the airport/railway station/home at 1:30 a.m. on a weeknight? Without asking you ? You would be pissed, wouldn't you?

Well, our government has chosen to do something similar.

In an interesting experiment, the Central Board of Secondary Education, CBSE, has mandated that every single girl child (a girl with no siblings) in its affiliated schools must get free education.

It appears that private schools were not consulted before this order was issued. It also appears that the schools are not being compensated for the financial loss that arises due to this decision. Naturally, the private school administrators are worried, pissed and outraged.

While I welcome and support the goals of this move by CBSE, I am also worried about what the outcome might be. The reason is simple. If private schools are being asked to do something that results in a financial loss, it is easy to guess what they will do. They will skew their admission policies so that they can avoid taking the very students who will cause this loss! So, this move can actually be counterproductive.

A golden oldie

I was just clearing up some old stuff, and I discovered this crazy, amazing-but-true kind of news from three years ago. It is an old Reuters report from September 2002 about a plagiarism dispute 'over two pieces of silence' that was settled.

John Cage, an American composer, once did a 'ground-breaking silent composition' called 4' 33", which 'consists entirely of silent notes [!] and takes four minutes 33 seconds to perform". Reuters also helpfully informs us that it is a piano piece divided into three movements, performed for the first time over half a century ago.

Mike Batt, a composer 'best known for novelty tunes', was 'accused of plagiarism by Edition Peters, publishers of the late Cage's work, after he put a track called "A Minute's Silence" on his ... album "Classical Graffiti" ...'

Well, I am tired of quoting the Reuters report (which is available online on some mailing list). Here are some more bizarre parts:

"The struggle was one of the most amusing disputes I've ever, er, disputed," Batt said on his Web Site (http://www.mikebatt.com).

"I'm sure John Cage had a dry sense of humor, and would have loved the spectacle of The Planets being all over the press protesting that their (my) silence was original silence and not a quotation from his silence," he added. [emphasis added by me]

Earlier this year [2002], the parties attempted to prove their points by each staging a performance of their piece. The result was inconclusive.

Oh, by the way, this Cage character also seems to be interesting. Apparently, he once said "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it". Hmmm, that would make even Yogi Berra blink, wouldn't it?

[Update: changed the title from an earlier, clunky one]

SciAn Melt # 12 by Aswin

The 12th edition of SciAn Melt is up. Aswin does a great job of aggregating (and commenting on) science oriented blog posts by the desi blogosphere, as well as posts about science in India. Aswin also has a great name for his blog Neo-Sagredo!.

I really should have posted this message before, not least because Aswin's SciAn Melt features two of my posts!

Regulators with real powers

Siddharth Narrain's interview of Wajahat Habibullah, the chief of the Central Information Commission, appeared in the Hindu today. He says all the right things, and after reading the interview, I get the impression that he is calm and steady.

If he is indeed what he seems, it is good for all of us. I know a lot of people are not 100 % happy with the Right to Information Act. ToI gave it only a grudging approval in its editorial, and many people from the entire political spectrum are upset with something or the other in it. But, right now, it is the only thing we have got, and we have to make the best use of it.

As I said, my first impression about Habibullah after reading the interview is positive. More importantly, his measured response is something that I really like. He is likely to provide a stable leadership to the CIC, that will allow it to find its feet, and grow in stature and legitimacy.

This is important, because we have had a whole bunch of people who took their regulatory powers so seriously that they stepped on the toes of some powerful people. Seshan, the first Chief of our Election Commission with real powers, scared our politicians so much that they went right back to the Parliament to dilute our election laws, and changed EC to a body with three commissioners. Vittal, the first Chief of the Vigilance Commission, also did some irresponsible things, such as posting pictures and other details of those under investigation on the CVC website; I am sure many bureaucrats would like a toothless CVC, but our politicians, thankfully, haven't changed the law -- yet. Another person, for whom I have very high regard, is Justice Sodhi, the first Chairman of our telecom regulator, TRAI. He didn't do anything wrong; he just took his powers a little too seriously (and he was entirely right to do it), and introduced some big bang reforms in telecom. The entrenched interests in our Department of Telecommunications ensured that the TRAI legislation was amended to dilute its powers. This also had a cascading effect on later legislation to set up regulators for other fields. The most notable is the regulatory body of power, which is so powerless that it is laughable.

Back to Habibullah. He says there is enough flexibility in the Act, and let us hope he will use it -- slowly, without appearing to rock the boat -- for the people's benefit. His prior background in the Panchayati Raj ministry too should help. Please do read his interview to know what he thinks about the RTI act. Let me highlight here something else that I found interesting.

[Question] Do you feel that appointing persons who have already been in the government as Information Commissioners, despite the RTI Act providing for others to be appointed, is inappropriate? Won't the appointment of ex-bureaucrats lead to a conflict of interest?

[Habibullah's answer] I know there has been criticism from certain sections with regard to the composition of the both the Central Information Commission and the State Information Commissions. Within the bureaucracy or those having served in government, it is made up of individuals. To preclude a certain branch from exercising a responsibility under this law is a trifle unfair. A blanket criticism of this nature is not justified in my view.

Of course I have done the highlighting. Just compare this sentence with what Sri Sri Ravishankar once said about celebrities -- like Vijay Mallya -- hanging around him: "We don’t excommunicate somebody just because they are rich and famous."

Indeed.

A 21st century Feynman?

Can you believe a Nobel winner is teaching an undergraduate physics course for nonscientists? Further, he uses some really cool physics simulations, and -- this is the biggest of all -- they are so cool that even non-physics majors can also appreciate it! The simulations are really, really classy.

We are talking about the 2001 Nobel winner Carl E. Wieman, and the simulations were developed through a project called PhET (Physics Education Technology). All the simulations are hosted by Wieman's home, the Department of Physics in the University of Colorado - Boulder, and you can download them for free!

Wieman's interview (by Claudia Dreifus) appeared in today's New York Times. In it, he elaborates on what physics education should really be like. Instead of stopping at elaborating a vision, he has actually been living it! Consider two facts. First, as already mentioned, he has been teaching a physics course for nonscientists. And, second, the money for developing the course, the class-room technology and the simulations has come mostly from a part of his Nobel Prize money. Talk about putting money where your mouth is!

Here is what he says about how physics is being taught today:

I've long thought that undergraduate science is poorly taught. Undergraduates think of science usually as something they have to "go through," a class where they memorize a bunch of disconnected facts and formulas. It has no connection to anything around them. They learn it in the same way they might learn Latin - by rote.

Moreover, the subject matter is taught quickly, overwhelmingly, without any concern for what young people can take in cognitively. After a while you have them thinking, This is what science is! And then you get them graduating and sometimes becoming K-12 teachers themselves. They then repeat this, believing, This is how science should be taught, because this is how I was taught.

Do read the rest of the interview, particularly for how he actually teaches the course. It's absolutely fascinating.

Endowments :-) and corpus funds :-(

From Inside HigherEd:

Yale University's School of Music has received an anonymous $100 million gift that will, among other things, result in free tuition for students, starting next year.

You can read a longer report at Yale Daily News.

Everytime I see such news stories, I certainly feel happy for the recepient universities. At the same time I feel so sad for Indian universities and other institutions of higher education.

Anyone who kept his/her eyes open during the during the last 10 years knows that quite a few industry bigwigs and entrepreneurs who made it big (and there were many during the dot-com boom) donateed big money to the IITs (and probably to other colleges as well, but the news about IITs was really prominent). For example, IIT-B benefited from gifts from its alumni such as Kanwal Rekhi and Nandan Nilekani.

The IITs that received these donations used them to start new programs, notably in management, and for other purposes such as sprucing up their facilities, including their hostels. Everything was going great, until the then Minister of Human Resources Development, Murli Manohar Joshi, intervened, and the rest, as they say is history.

In this case, it was a truly sad history. One particularly dark episode is recounted by Urmi Goswami:

In the summer of 2003, Gururaj Desh Deshpande, co-founder of high-end optical technology company Sycamore Networks, tried in vain to donate $10 million to his alma mater IIT Madars. The purpose of this grant was for his alma mater to undertake an optical research project. His grant was rejected by the ministry of human resources development. Deshpande finally took his money where it was wanted — to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The MIT received a grant of $20 million to set up the ‘Deshpande Centre of Technological Innovation’.

Why? Because, gifts to individual institutions became impossible in the new, warped regime imposed by M.M. Joshi. From the same report by Goswami:

In January 2003, a fund -- Bharat Shiksha Kosh -- was set up. All donations made to educational institutions or for educational purposes were to be routed through the BSK. Set up as the brainchild of Murli Manohar Joshi, the Bharat Shiksha Kosh was meant to help channel funds — especially from smaller contributors — to the education sector, particularly the institutes of higher education.

All right. That was then, and this is now. How have things changed? When the regime change took place in May 2004, Arjun Singh, the new minister at the helm at MHRD, immediately changed the rules back to those that existed earlier. Now, people can make donations directly to the institutions of their choice.

However, this year, in an announcement about the new scheme (called 'block-grant' schme' -- I don't even know what it means!) for funding IISc, IITs and IIMs, I found this interesting passage:

...The modified scheme will provide a matching contribution to the corpus equalling the net income of the institute, that is income after all expenditure has been met. The scheme would be implemented in all these institutions with the stipulation that the level of corpus may be allowed up to Rs 100 crore in the case of IITs and IISc and Rs 50 crore in respect of other institutions [IIMs].

Please correct me if I am wrong, here. Isn't this passage saying that the corpus (which is the term equilvalent to 'endowment' used in the US) cannot grow to more than 100 crores? Why should there be a cap at all -- except perhaps a cap on the government's contribution?

The US universities get big gifts all the time, and universities build fairly huge endowments with them. Harvard is truly well endowed with some $25 billion in its kitty! Other universities such as Michigan, Cornell and UCLA have endowments of about $3 billion each (info from Satya). Remember, Michigan and UCLA are state universities! They have been using it for all kinds of purposes, such as a new building, new academic programs, establishing a scholarship program, etc. The gift to Yale's School of Music seems to break new ground in that it will go towards waiving the tuition fees for all the students in that school! In times of distress, an endowment is a great stabilizer. One can go on and on, but I am sure you get the point.

I am sure there are still many people who would be willing to donate big money to the corpus funds of higher ed institutions -- IIMs and IITs in particular. A corpus of some 1000 crore (10 billion) rupees should be quite easy to build in a short time for an IIT if it makes a concerted effort; such a corpus would help it become financially independent. In principle, the government can either reduce or even stop its funding of those institutions with big corpus funds, and use the money thus saved to create new IITs, IIMs and so on.

Sure, the corpus funds may not be large now. However, by removing the cap on them, and by encouraging institutions to tap their alumni and other philanthropists, our universities too can benefit from all the good things made possible with a big corpus.

Aren't we missing out on all of this good stuff?

Ban those debates on TV!

Sometime ago, there was a blog post (or, was it a news item?) that argued that all the bad teleserials from the production house of Ekta Kapoor (who once famously said that she produces more soaps than Hindustan Lever!) may actually have some social value. The argument is that these hit serials among the women can be -- and are -- effective in disseminating information regarding a whole bunch of things, including reproductive health, contraception, and other such topics which, if dealt with separately, would be news and hence, just plain boring.

I am in such an enraged state that I haven't bothered to post appropriate links to other sites which offer more authoritative info. I hope to get to it later.

I don't think the serials in Tamil, which tend to be one long sob story after another, can ever be held to even that (admittedly modest) ideal. However, the debates ('patti mandram's) that are extremely popular during the festival days are really ideal for mass education on tricky topics. Having seen today's debate, I would rather prefer that they ban such debates altogether.

With the first Deepavali -- the 'thalai deepavali' -- of a couple being given a very special place in the Tamil psyche, the topic of today's debate on Sun TV was not at all surprising. It was on "which is better: marriages among non-relatives or among close relatives". [the latter category is one in which the spouse is from the family of one's maternal uncle or paternal aunt. In an egregious version, the groom is the bride's maternal uncle himself! Ugh!]

Sure, the debaters are professionals -- I would even say 'mercenaries', after seeing the debaters for 'close relatives' in action. Sure, they are expected to defend any position given to them and to trash their opponents. Sure, the debates are about entertainment, and not education. But, this one was entertaining in a bizarre way, and an opportunity to educate the public about the bad implications of marriage among the close relatives (MCR) was, alas, completely missed.

First of all, it was a pretty serious topic of great relevance to large sections of population, and the debaters could have alerted the people about the alarming consequences of MCR, mixed with some entertainment. What we got instead was just too much bad entertainment, and too little of education. For one thing, the side arguing for 'close relatives' could at least have been advised to go it easy. On the contrary, they carried out their job with a missionary zeal and mercenary professionalism! They came out with all their guns blazing. If I were a dumb judge who didn't know the facts, I would certainly say they won!

To be fair, the other team did point out some of the medical problems that MCR might expose the couple's children to. But, where they should really have pressed hard, they offered weak arguments. As examples of medical problems, they cited some strange diseases of historical figures in other countries (Queen Victoria!), as if it is not a contemporary problem. Couldn't they cite examples from their personal lives? From their circle of relatives and friends? From their neighbourhood? Couldn't they have made up some everyday examples that everyone is aware of? Couldn't they cite what the doctors say, even if the language is a little technical?

I missed the judge's verdict (because of a phone call), but the way things were going, I wouldn't be surprised if he said MCR is actually better!

Utterly terrible fellows, these TV debaters. We should ban these useless debates on festival days!

Oh, that reminds me: we have a festival on. Happy Deepavali, folks.

News about IISc

Let me just point you -- without further comment -- to this link (to a story in the Hindu in its Bangalore edition):

IISc. seeks Rs. 700 crores from Centre for modernisation

In an earlier news story (for which I have so far failed to find a link) in the Bangalore edition of the Hindu dated October 29, it was also reported that IISc is planning another campus and may also introduce undergraduate programme. The report says:

[...]

For this, the IISc plans to approach the State Government and request it to grant the institute around 200 acres of land in Bangalore. However, as the idea is still in the planning stages, the IISc is yet to submit an official proposal to the Government although informal discussions are going on, says a senior faculty member.

The proposed undergraduate programme is contingent upon acquiring the land as the present campus does not have the infrastructure to meed the demands of an additional undergraduate programme.

[...]

A group of scientists recently recommended to the science advisory committee to the Union Cabinet that the IISc set up an undergraduate programme. These scientists believe that the introduction of such a programme by a premier institution will lead to a revival of interest in science among high school students and will help improve the quality of science graduates.

However, the idea has evoked a mixed response among the IISc faculty. Several of them feel the establishment of an undergraduate programme will take away from the institute's avowed focus on research. "The workload of teaching undergraduates is far too much. Many of them have to be spoon-fed," says a senior faculty member.

Acknowledging the ambivalent response, the senior faculty member involved with the initiative says that even if an undergraduate programme is established, there would be no need for current faculty members to be concerned because new faculty members will be hired for hte undergraduate programme. "We will probably go on a faculty recruitment drive by which a whole new group will be added."

[...]

When contacted about the undergraduate initiative, he [IISc Director P. Balaram] said, "IISc is thinking of such an experiment, but it is still in the very early stages. It is an idea that we need to discuss among our faculty members", he stressed. [sic]