Posts

Showing posts with the label academia

Work in Progress: Changing Academic Culture

Image
I find myself often thinking of the Make Love, Not Warcraft episode of South Park. Every time Stan, Cartman, Kyle and Kenny load into Azeroth to go questing, a way-higher-level dude shows up and kills them , even though they don’t agree to duel. They concoct an elaborate long-term strategy to avoid the guy by hiding in the forest, slaying boars, to gain levels in order to eventually be strong enough to defeat him. The exchange at the end is the most poignant to me.   Stan: I can't believe it's all over. What do we do now? Cartman: What do you mean? Now we can finally play the game. Unlike a cartoon about a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game , however, there isn’t just one person ruining the game. There is an entire academic culture organized around professional privilege and imbalances of power. And multiple harassers and assaulters are navigating these landscapes targeting vulnerable trainees . In the midst of whispers, outright disclosures, and even confirmatory

Got Bias? Adventures in Academic Publishing

Image
“ … find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors), in order to serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically based assumptions .”                                                      -Reviewer to @FionaIngleby Yep. The recipe for a manuscript to some “colleagues” apparently requires a pinch or two of male. Luckily the internet is a thing, providing the venue to expose this heaping pile of horseshit...  very quickly even more awesomeness emerged on the twitter #AddMaleAuthorGate THANK YOU Leon Eyrich Jessen ‏@jessenleon & Mick Watson ‏@BioMickWatson   Importantly, journalists and academics have already delivered great coverage and exquisite essays on event #721 of recent descriptions of gendered experiences in academia. In recent years, studies have reported real world disparity of invitations to talk