A wake for scholarship

An emeritus professor has a small office across the hall, but declining health has kept him from using it very often these past couple of years, so he was asked to pack it in so that a new faculty member could have a more convenient office location for their teaching and research.  My colleague was never a favorite of mine, but he was a true scholar who read, read, and read.  Like all scholarly people he accumulated a quite a library of books and journals, and now no one wants them especially the journals (which in case you don't know weigh a ton).  If you can't find a repository for your library and you have no room for it at home, your only choice is to simply discard/recycle a career's worth of scholarly materials.  This is actually extremely sad to watch.  In our bygone era, the mark of a scholar, the evidence that you were a serious intellectual was the size of your personal library.  As my colleague put it, "I feel like I'm conducting a wake for scholarship."  You see these days journals are published electronically and your credentials are pdfs and ebooks, so your "library" is probably measured in kilobytes or gigabytes.  In the old days you would tell your department how many linear feet of book shelves you needed in your office.  Yes, it was meant to impress, but it was so you could unpack your boxes and have access to reference materials and all you need to teach and write.  One of the reasons for my sadness is that my time for such a down-sizing is not so far off.  TPP's library occupies more than 150 linear feet of shelf space and several large filing cabinets of scientific papers.  OK, half of this could be discarded without feeling much loss, but things then get tough.  Many useful books could be moved to the herbarium where a small reference collection is kept.  Some colleagues and students would like some of my books especially the classics like the 8 books by Darwin that are over 100 years old, no rare editions, but something about their age and look feels so Victorian it puts you in the right frame of mind.  The journals are really sad in come cases a over 50 volumes.  My younger colleagues think it quite quaint that someone still has journals, but what will go missing from their scholarly lives?  Curiosity always drove TPP to thumb through every one page by page reading the titles, abstracts and results, and you never knew what you would find interesting among the diverse research papers, and especially looking at the figures where you learn so much so quickly.  This is how you got new ideas.  My younger colleagues are more specialized with a narrower research focus, although we had narrow people too, but you never see all the other papers because you never see the whole issue.  You put a series of keywords into a search engine that then delivers just those items that fit.  The long term effect of narrower scholarship is hard to predict, and at times it is hard to express or document the value of knowing a little about a lot other than when an off-the-wall-crazy question or query about plants comes to our department, you know who gets the call.  Time now to get another dumpster for my colleague as they are too heavy for him to move.  Appropriately enough, the dumpsters are black. 

Citations - Scholarly Beans

When you publish in science, you must place your research into context, that is, you must show how your work relates to all other work relevant to your study and findings.  This is no small task and the list of citations in some of TPPs publications runs well upwards of 100.  This is somewhat easier to keep track of now, heck, it's a whole lot easier to keep track of now than at any time in the past.  In the early days of my career we'd spend at least one day a month shifting through a major research library looking for publications of interest, and maybe 2 or 3 days a year looking yourself up in the Science Citation Index.  Now good old Google Scholar not only tells you how many other authors have cited your publications, but how many citations each of your publications has had.  TPP is by no means a major publisher, but as Captain Jack Sparrow pointed out when called the worst pirate I've ever heard of,  "But you have heard of me."  So indeed my modest enough record of scholarship generates something on the average of 50 citations a year, and GS alerts the author to these citations because any publication that cites your work is likely to be a study you yourself are interested in.  When the titles of these publications pop up in the email, it's usually not too hard to guess which of my publications were cited.  Then TPP gets this: Capillary wave propagation during the delamination of graphene by the precursor films in electro-elasto-capillarity.  TPP has no idea what this means at all; the publication is totally opaque to this botanist.  Remember the particular area of expertise we be talking about here is floral biology, pollination, ecology, floral form and function.  Now perhaps someone has TPP confused with someone else.  After all Phactor is a fairly common name.  Actually not, and while still in the dark about its significance to this study, how biological organisms interact with certain physical parameters of the environment, particularly surface tension, was in these authors' opinions important.  TPP must admit a certain grudging respect for anyone who is so thorough in their literature search as to find that connection.  Score one small bean for the counters.

Dun, da, dun, done!

Processes always have quite a number of more or less continuous steps leading from here to there, from a start to a finish, but for purposes of our mental health certain stages of processes are celebrated to mark our progress along the path.  Yesterday was one such day.  After having had this manuscript nagging at me for the past couple of  years, the Phactor declared his book manuscript done knowing full well that it is not done done, but it was at a stage where little else was being accomplished so with a semester looming, and knowing that progress on big projects does not happen during semesters, a big pile of paper (That's a 4.5" tall coffee cup for comparison.) was shipped off to the publisher.  Also a certain very patient editor had been promised that the book would be done this summer, and as mentioned above, with a semester's arrival ready to destroy August, if a book was to be done this summer, this was the week.  But more than a feeling of accomplishment, it was a wave of relief that passed over me.  It will be a couple of weeks at least before an editor kindly explains that this or that should have been done that way or this way.  This is to be expected, but these are only details.  It was the ideas that counted anyways.  It is way premature to be flogging my book to readers; that will come later, when it actually has a cover and a title (it remains tentative).  Suffice it to say that the Phactor's academic alter ego has attempted to explain a great deal about what we know about plant diversity in a manner accessible to the interested amateur, which is very different from most botany books.  So botany textbook it is not.  Now to go and update my CV and indicate the status as "In press", which is sort of more impressive than "manuscript in limbo" or "manuscript progress incredibly slow" or one of the many other euphemisms for "not published".  Actually it has been accepted for publication.  The next task is to clear enough of the book debris out of the office that there's room for a new semester.  Who knows what will be discovered in the lower strata?

How a university works - administrative leave

Let's save money by shutting down the university between Christmas and New Year's Day. Hard to argue with the basic concept, but then comes the practical side of things. None of our organisms got the memo! That's right, all of our culture chambers, incubators, animal rooms, and greenhouses must continue to function, daily; organisms can't just take the "time off". Of course, it's different for faculty. A security guard just popped into my office to ask who I was and what I was doing here (clearly the university is recycling big box store greeters to improve campus security).
This is the Phytophactor's office and the person you are interrupting at work is the Phytophactor.
There aren't any classes to teach and the university is shut down.
Ah, you are operating under the inaccurate presumption that we are just teachers, but we do so much more. These are manuscripts being written; science being communicated. Do you wish to assist me in moving this library, a 40 year accumulation, or the specimens to which reference is being made, to my home? No, of course not, so this is where my work gets done. Did I in fact notify anyone that I would be working over the shut down?
No. You must be new here. You see faculty do not need any one's permission to be in their office or laboratory. Did you notice that the university entrusts us with keys.
I'll just make note of your name and continue on my rounds.
Please do, and notify my department chair and dean. They're both new and need to know who's dedicated among their faculty.
The basic problem here is that by common standards no one in their right mind goes to work when they don't have to, and technically, the Phactor could be at home letting day-time TV dissolve his brain. Now if it were gardening season, well, then there might be some temptation to stay home and putter about the estate. But here's the thing, and this goes to the oft asked question "when are you going to retire?" as well, the Phactor really likes what he does. It's quite gratifying to see your name in print, to get scholarly recognition, and to have figured something out, something new, something unique, on your own. This is quite hard for other people to understand. It's easier to assume that we're up to no good scuttling around a nearly, eerily empty campus. And do understand that even blogging is but a brief respite from the tedium of working on a book's appendix, a vestigial organ, that should be able to be excised without any harm to the main body of work.

Deans, provosts, and presidents, oh my!

How does that song go? If you want to be happy for you academic life, never make a pretty woman your wife; no, that’s not right! For a happy academic life, never make a non-scholar your dean, provost, or president. It’s very simple, if not a scholar, they just don’t seem to get it, and in this case, the “it” they don’t get is that scholarship is both necessary and important to quality university teaching. Provost Plodder is an “educator” and seems to subscribe to the old, often criticized, characterization of universities as places where faculty research comes at the expense of teaching. This of course is often the case at big research universities, but at such institutions, no one is confused about the role of teaching and research, and prospective students would be well advised to figure out what faculty at such institutions do. However those of us who embrace the concept of an undergraduate research university would beg to differ with that characterization of research and teaching, and whenever we uppity faculty beg to differ with the provost, well, life can be difficult. At this stage of his career the Phactor has seen them come and seen them go; some just don’t go soon enough. Quality does not count with our provost, just those enrollment beans. Programs that have grabbed every warm body they can find are being rewarded with resources, and programs that have been selective and offered those students quality educational opportunities are being dunned. The cheap drives out the dear. No matter that the highest form of teaching is original investigation, and those who do not investigate themselves are in no position to teach students this skill. Do you disagree? Well, substitute “swimming” for investigate in the previous sentence to see how ridiculous your position is. It’s hard to maintain a research endeavor, it takes time and resources; it’s even harder to keep it funded, especially at smaller universities, but time spent on research just doesn’t count with our provost, although they always accept the indirect costs from research grants. The fact that our students are regularly exposed to and engage in not just little tiddles or keep-em busy projects, but participate in scientific scholarship of the highest caliber, makes little impression upon our provost. This doesn’t mean the provost is an evil person, but somewhere along the line they just lost sight, assuming they ever had it, of the fact that the highest calling of university faculty is to investigate so that they can teach not just what we know, but how we know it. So by all means, do find out what those job candidates think about the role of research in science teaching. Years ago, one dean hopeful said, “Research is encouraged, but not completely necessary at this type of university.” We all got up and headed for the door. The candidate asked, “Don’t you have any more question?” “No,” was the answer, “you got the first one wrong, so the rest don’t matter.”

Finish book, check. Well, almost.

The Phactor's real-life alter ego has been a busy scholar of botany. During May, two manuscripts were completed, one start to finish, one finishing up a 3-yr-old project, submitted and accepted for publication at a major journal within 3 weeks and put to bed. Electronic communications make such head-spining speed possible, and if you do not appreciate this then you've never dealt with typed manuscripts, hard-copy photographic plates, and the mail. A third manuscript submitted earlier this year was accepted with revision and those are nearly done. But the big, it's-been-going-on-forever, gorilla-on-my-back project is a book on plant diversity for a more general readership, and it's done, today, well, almost. A nagging little chore remains, and that involves getting copyright permissions and correct attributions for all the figures that do not belong to the Phactor or that are not in the common domain. Hardly had the process begun, and already an undeliverable email has bounced back at me. Doesn't that mean they waive their rights to exercise copyright? And then you find the perfect image, a truly excellent photo, and not unreasonably, the photographer would like compensation, but even modest compensation is out of the question when you have no picture purchasing budget. This means you end up relying on fellow academics to do you a favor. So will the end of June arbitrary deadline set for submission be met or not? Hard to say. But as Douglas Adams used to say, "I love deadlines; I like the whooshing sound they make as they rush by." Of course, publishing a book here in the twilight of books may be a foolish endeavor anyways, but it will still feel like something big was accomplished. Ah, but the Phactor has posted 342 (!) blogs already this year, and everyone knows that's where the action is! Please tell my chair.

Reviewing your own literature

While writing a review paper, it was necessary to read several of my own research papers of circa 20 years ago to refresh the old memory. This is an interesting exercise. In doing so you might cringe at your own naivite and premature conclusions. You might find that subsequent studies in the field have trashed your best ideas. Or you might find that your studies have stood the test of time fairly well, that they still are sound biology and a good reflection on your work. In this respect the Phactor is feeling OK; these were good field work on a little studied group. What is more interesting is to see how your papers are getting cited by other authors. Chased down three publications cited as more or less supporting some of the conclusions reached in my own papers. All three were actually citing my papers, so these were sort of secondary citations, by a third author. Then there's always the "say what?" citation, where you wonder what they were reading. Can't find anything in those papers that might have been so misconstrured either. So that's on them and their scholarship, not on me. And yes, it does help to refresh the memory. Two publications had become confused in my memory, and it helped sort them out before making a mistake. But now the eyes are a bit glazed and focus wanders. Need another dose of caffeine perhaps, or at least a walk around to get out of this mid afternoon daze.