Visiting Faculty Position at Union College

My trip into the office today was for the express purpose of posting this job ad: We invite applications for Visiting Assistant Professor starting in September 2014. This position is available for up to three years, contingent on satisfactory performance. Applicants should have some teaching experience and a strong commitment to undergraduate education. Union is… Continue reading Visiting Faculty Position at Union College

Admissions and Hiring: Faculty Are Students in a Funhouse Mirror

In one of those Information Supercollider moments, two very different articles crossed in my social media feeds, and suddenly seemed to be related. The first was this New York Post piece by a college essay consultant: Finally, after 15 or so years of parents managing every variable, there comes the time when a student is… Continue reading Admissions and Hiring: Faculty Are Students in a Funhouse Mirror

Baseball and Gender Bias: “Number of Women in Physics Departments: A Simulation Analysis “

Figure 3 from the AIP report discussed in the post.

I’ve spent a bunch of time recently blogging about baseball statistics, which you might be inclined to write off as some quirk of a sports-obsessed scientist. I was very amused, therefore, to see Inside Higher Ed and ZapperZ writing about a new AIP report on women in physics (PDF) that uses essentially the same sort… Continue reading Baseball and Gender Bias: “Number of Women in Physics Departments: A Simulation Analysis “

Deficit Models, Bureaucratic Empathy, and Work-Life Juggling

Every now and then, I run across a couple of items that tie together a whole bunch of different issues that weigh heavily on my mind. That happened yesterday courtesy of Timothy Burke, whose blog post about an NPR story is so good that there aren’t enough +1 buttons on the entire Internet for it.… Continue reading Deficit Models, Bureaucratic Empathy, and Work-Life Juggling

How Would You Do a Gender-Blind Faculty Search?

There’s been a lot of bloggage recently about a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicating bias toward male students on the part of faculty who thought they were evaluating an application for a laboratory manager. Half of the faculty in the study were given an application with “Jennifer” at… Continue reading How Would You Do a Gender-Blind Faculty Search?

Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing

Somebody on Twitter linked this article about “brogrammers”, which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that’s where it gets weird: As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According… Continue reading Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing

Wanted: Non-Academic Astronomer in Texas

Someone from the American Astronomical Society ran across the Project for Non-Academic Science posts here, and is looking for someone to participate in a career panel at their upcoming meeting in Austin, TX: The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Employment Committee is hosting a panel discussion at our annual AAS winter meeting in Austin on current… Continue reading Wanted: Non-Academic Astronomer in Texas

Administrative Bloat? Numbers Need Context

A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy– that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the “tenured faculty are greedy and lazy” explanation you… Continue reading Administrative Bloat? Numbers Need Context