Privacy is (not) for the birds!

In a world where Edward Snowden warns that children will never know privacy, I guess it makes sense to deny privacy to everything else, too. Get an early start on your future career with the NSA by purchasing the My Spy Birdhouse, which allows you to see into the homes of birds (including the ability to use a one-way mirror if you want to do so covertly!).

Next year, the makers of My Spy Birdhouse hope to allow us to monitor bird calls without a warrant.

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Republicans take their ball and go home

In case you hadn’t heard (in which case, you may be a student), the government shut down last night at midnight. Republican demands to delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) because they don’t like it, despite the fact that it was passed in the house and the senate, signed by the President, and withstood challenges in the Supreme Court, reminds me of when a kid who loses a game takes his ball and goes home because if he can’t win he would rather not play at all. After thinking of this earlier today and congratulating myself for being clever, I watched last night’s episode of The Daily Show and noticed that Jon Stewart said essentially the same thing.

Slate has a nice roundup of stories about the shutdown, including an article written in the style that we would likely use if it was occurring in another country. I also like this collection of wire photos used to depict the impending shutdown (Slate is not immune to these tactics – see the photo on the aforementioned article).

Over on the blogs, John Quiggin at Crooked Timber reposts an analysis from 2011 and Dan Hirschman talks about the plight of graduate students who need to use the National Archives (as does Tenured Radical).

Finally, Jimmy Kimmel demonstrates the importance of survey wording by asking people whether they prefer the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare without informing them that they are the same thing:

This is all so exciting that I can’t wait to do it again in a few weeks when the debt limit is reached! On another note, my “Government Inaction” category has never been so apt!

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More on Northwestern’s “adjuncts”

Thanks to Dan Hirschman, who provided me with a copy of the paper by Figlio, Schapiro, and Soter comparing tenure-track to non-tenure-track faculty at Northwestern, I was able to find an answer to my question from the other day about whether the non-tenure-track faculty included graduate students. The answer is no. As the authors note on page 7:

“We exclude graduate students and visiting professors who hold faculty appointments at other institutions from our analysis. Our results are fundamentally unchanged if we include these two groups, regardless of whether we assign them to the tenure track/tenured category or to the non-tenure line category of instructor.”

Not only are graduate students not included, then, but their inclusion does not affect the analysis in any meaningful way! I don’t know how the number of graduate student instructors at Northwestern compares to the number of other non-tenure-track faculty, but the fact that they can be placed in either category without changing the results seems to indicate that this number is either relatively small or that graduate students fall between the two categories that Figlio et al. focus on, which seems interesting in itself.

Also interesting, and incredibly important for the interpretation of their results, is the fact that most of the non-tenure-track faculty at Northwestern are not “adjuncts” in the typical sense. Rather, they are classified as Continued Lecturer Faculty, as Jeremy Freese describes in a comment at Orghtheory:

I haven’t read the study yet, but it’s worth noting that (to my understanding) most non-tenure track teaching at Northwestern is not done by “adjuncts” but by what we call Continuing Lecturer Faculty, who are on multi-year renewable contracts for which the pay is less than tenure-line but substantially more than what adjuncts get paid at Northwestern, which is in turn substantially more than what adjuncts get paid at other places in the area that have used our students as adjuncts. Also, at least in sociology and neighboring disciplines, CLF are expected to teach 6 courses a year, but we are on quarters, which means that the actual number of hours a CLF spends standing in front of a classroom is roughly the same the standard load for a tenure-line faculty member teaching 4 courses at, say, Wisconsin.

In short, if you are not at a similarly well-heeled place, there’s good reason to suppose our non-tenure track faculty are better teachers than your non-tenure track faculty, whereas I’m not sure the same is true for tenure-track and if it is I wouldn’t expect the difference to be as large.

Dan Hirschman discusses the implications of this for the generalizability of the study (which it seems that outlets like Inside Higher Ed would consider important):

Rather than asking (just) about comparability of students, or even the capacity to attract elite non-tenure track faculty, we have to ask, where do non-tenure track positions look like the ones at Northwestern? For example, here at Michigan, the Lecturers’ Employee Organization (LEO) has successfully fought to unionize non-tenure track faculty, securing multi-year contracts for more senior instructors, along with benefits, and etc. So we can imagine these findings mapping reasonably well onto Michigan.* But could we say the same for Eastern Michigan? For Washtenaw Community College? For the (seemingly) typical adjunct making less than $3,000 per course with no benefits?

He concludes:

Figlio et al.’s study looks to my not especially expert eyes like an excellent evaluation of the efficacy of NU’s non-tenure track lecturers, with obvious relevance to the potential for such full-time faculty at other reasonably selective universities. But it’s just not a study about part-time adjuncts and says nothing about such instructors. So, let’s stop framing it that way.

While the “Adjuncts are better!” framing certainly helped the study gain attention among academics, it is not in line with the authors’ own claims. Nevertheless, I fear that this framing will stick as those in positions of power use these reports to justify the increasing adjunctification of higher education.

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South Park on standing your ground

In 2005, Florida passed the “Stand Your Ground” law that George Zimmerman and his defense team used to justify the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, which ended yesterday with an acquittal. The available evidence suggests that these laws may lead to more deaths and that the results are racially biased, since white-on-black homicides are considered to be “justified” over 350% more often than white-on-white homicides in states with Stand Your Ground laws, as seen in this table from PBS:

In 1997, the third episode of South Park was unfortunately prescient  in how the Zimmerman trial ended up. A clip of the relevant portion of the episode can be seen here. In the clip, Stan Marsh’s uncle Jimbo takes the boys hunting, explaining the technicality that allows him to shoot anything he wants:

“You see, boys, the Democrats have passed a lot of laws trying to stop us from hunting… they say we can’t shoot certain animals anymore, unless they’re posing an immediate threat. Therefore, before we shoot something, we have to say, ‘It’s coming right for us!'”

This is, essentially, George Zimmerman’s entire defense. Despite the fact that he was told not to pursue Martin and despite the fact that he did so and then shot and killed the unarmed teenager, because there were no witnesses who could contradict Zimmerman’s argument that he felt that his life was in danger it was impossible for the jury to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman’s version of events did not occur. It appears that the evidence in this case was applied in compliance with the law, but the graph above (and the case of Marissa Alexander, who was not allowed to claim that she was “standing her ground” because she went back into a house where her attacker was in order to get her car keys and ended up being sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing warning shots that did no harm to anybody) shows that these laws are not applied equally across racial lines and need to be changed.

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If the American revolution happened today

The image above was posted on Facebook by somebody that I went to high school with. It is ironic that the man who gained national attention for a speech that highlighted similarities in people of different backgrounds is seen as such a divisive president. Since I am both of those things and do both of those things, this image, and my perceived lack of status as a “real American” in the eyes of my former classmate, got me thinking about the American revolution.

Can you imagine the American revolution occurring today? Can you imagine a group of revolutionaries whose every statement is critiqued on Twitter and cable news? Can you imagine a relatively small group of radicals leading a revolution and then watching in horror as their conservative neighbors elect a president who is not aligned with the ideals of increased freedom and equality that the revolution stood for? Can you imagine the efforts of CEOs and politicians to maintain their power under a new regime? Can you imagine the futility of trying to create a constitution that unites a bitterly partisan country? Can you imagine the economic devastation that endless arguments would bring as regular people try to go about their daily lives in the face of grave uncertainty?

To me, these thoughts reinforce the idea that we need to work to improve our country from the inside out. Despite the large (and seemingly growing) differences in our country between liberals and conservatives, rich and poor, corporations and employees, we are lucky to have a guiding document that was crafted over 200 years ago, because I don’t think we would get very far if we had to start all over again.

Good luck, Egypt.

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Adjuncts, you’re doing it wrong

When most people think of working as an adjunct instructor, they probably picture teaching a semester-long course for a few thousand dollars with none of the benefits enjoyed by tenure-track professors (you know, things like health insurance, job security, and office space). It turns out, though, that there is a better way. It involves rising through the ranks of the military (the business world would probably work, too), losing your job, and being hired to teach a course for $150,000 per year. You might think that this sounds impossible, but it isn’t. General David Patraeus has done it, so it must be an option that the rest of us have been overlooking. As reported by J.K. Trotter at Gawker:

In April, CUNY announced that Petraeus would do a stint as a visiting professor of public policy at the school’s Macaulay Honors College, leading a seminar on “developments that could position the United States…to lead the world out of the current global economic slowdown.” According to documents Gawker obtained from CUNY via a Freedom of Information Law request, the fallen war architect will net a whopping $200,000 a year for the course, which will total about three hours of work, aided by a group of graduate students to take care of “course research, administration, and grading.” (He will also throw in two lectures.)

This is a lot of money to spend on one person (CUNY could have hired a number of assistant professors or an army of adjuncts with that much money). Corey Robin discusses this, and the fact that the reported salary was downgraded (now it is only $150,000 – good thing he also has a job at USC!) after Gawker posted the story, at Crooked Timber:

I have no idea if Lalor is right about whether tax-payers are footing the bill for this celebrity hire or not. But let’s assume CUNY is securing private funds for it. Isn’t that in itself a terrible waste of resources? Private donations don’t just roll in; university fundraisers work and cultivate donors to make specific donations for earmarked funds. The notion that even one paid member of the university staff is working right now to secure private money to pay for this hire is itself a scandal.

It’s also indicative of a larger problem: CUNY is being run (into the ground) by a group of men and women with no sense of how to educate students, how to build (and pay) a first-class teaching staff, and how to manage a great public institution.

It is unfortunate that this story perpetuates that myth that teaching a three-credit-hour course only amounts to three hours per week of work, but it is hard to know how much work Patraeus will actually have to do given his graduate assistants. The fact that Patraeus was hired by CUNY at all also perpetuates the myth that anybody can teach regardless of training. On the other hand, it would be interesting to observe whether Patraeus’s students are better-behaved than typical college students and, if not, how he responds to them arriving late, falling asleep, and texting. Are push ups part of the CUNY curriculum?

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TV news is dead

Tuesday night, the most exciting thing to watch was not available on TV, it was only available as a web stream. Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’s attempted filibuster of Senate Bill 5, which would have make abortions in Texas very difficult to obtain, and its aftermath, were far more interesting than anything on cable news late at night. As this post at Buzzfeed highlights, however, the cable news channels were focused on things like reruns and the number of calories in blueberry muffins. This post at Medium.com gives a good rundown of the experience of watching the stream of the proceedings online with others on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

Davis’s filibuster, and the public filibuster that followed and prevented the Texas State Senate from voting before the midnight deadline was ultimately successful (although it took until after 3 am for them to admit it), though this success is likely short-lived, as Governor Rick Perry has scheduled another special session starting July 1 that will likely end in the passage of the bill. Nevertheless, as this Slate article suggests, Davis’s filibuster raised the profile of a bill that Texas hoped to pass quietly and may have revitalized the Democratic party in Texas.

Beyond the fate of Senate Bill 5, Davis’s filibuster was one part of an online explosion this week signaling the death of TV news. In addition to the fact that coverage of the filibuster was not available on TV, news of the Supreme Court’s rulings on important cases such as the Voting Rights Act and DOMA marked the first time that I turned to Facebook for news, first repeating the basic rulings and then linking to the best sources for insight and analysis – the sort of role that TV news would usually play. Even the ESPN analysts on tonight’s NBA draft program are referring to information about trades that they have received via Twitter.

As a freshman in college, my 20th Century History professor told the class that if there was ever a war or terrorist attack (this was after Oklahoma City but before 9/11) he would not be in class because he would be sitting on his couch watching CNN. This week, I imagine that he spent his time online, glued to Twitter.

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The thoughts of a sociologist in a meeting of organization members

Back in January I expressed some frustration that my involvement with local government was largely useless. I am not on a slightly different subcommittee that has the purpose of looking at data to see how research has explored various approaches to the problem. This is the part I thought I could be useful for! So how did the first meeting go? Like this:

1. Somebody tells a story about how their organization handles the problem.
2. This approach is termed a “suggestion.”
3. People share personal opinions about this suggestion.
4. Others tell stories about how their organizations could use this suggestion.
5. I think about how much I hate these meetings.
6. Somebody tells a story about how their organization handles the problem.
7. This approach is termed a “suggestion.”
8. People share personal opinions about this suggestion.
9. Others tell stories about how their organizations could use this suggestion.
10. People remark how much they are learning from this exchange of information that is based purely on anecdotal evidence.
11. These anecdotes are labeled “best practices.”
12. I think about how much I hate these meetings.

I’m sure that to those involved in these organizations, sharing stories like this is fun and interesting. What these stories are not, however, is based on anything other than anecdotal evidence with no real information about whether an approach has worked for an organization or not. Some know that their organization does a thing and others contemplate how their organization could do that thing.

If only there were a large body of research about the problem that we could somehow tap into…

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Doonesbury on abortion

In the local paper today I saw an editorial explaining the decision not to run last week’s Doonesbury series about the Texas abortion law by Garry Trudeau. Since I’ve been living under a rock (it is spring break, after all), this was the first I’d heard of the controversy surrounding the comic. The editor’s main justification was that the comics were “offensive,” though Trudeau’s treatment of the situation seems much less offensive than the situation itself. As a writer for the Texas Observer describes (via Historiann):

“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice.

“Here I see a well-developed diaphragm and here I see four healthy chambers of the heart…”

I closed my eyes and waited for it to end, as one waits for the car to stop rolling at the end of a terrible accident.

You can decide for yourself by viewing the comics below (via Gawker):

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Follow-up on community involvement

I’ve mentioned before that I was able to become involved in local government last summer. After being part of a local government subcommittee for the past six months, including biweekly meetings, I have a number of thoughts on the experience so far. In addition to my initial surprise at how quickly local government can move (especially compared to the glacial pace I am used to for on-campus projects), I’ve also been surprised by how useless I am during meetings. Most of the other subcommittee members are stakeholders in various organizations that are working together on the project, making the suggestions I might have based on research less useful than those of people who have been dealing with these issues in the community for years.

Ironically, my uselessness is at its worst when the committee tries to involve me in the conversation. Because I represent a local college and my college has expressed interest in helping with the task in some form, members of my committee rightfully see me as a representative who should know what sorts of involvement the college has been discussing. Unfortunately, I don’t. The discussions about my college’s involvement have taken place between administrators and the person who sent the initial invitation to work on the committee. This person is not on my subcommittee and rarely communicates with me about the campus-level discussion, which causes me (and likely the other committee members) some frustration. The duplication of discussions from one meeting to the next is also a source of frustration, since our meetings have the potential to be half as long but equally productive.

Having persevered through six months of frustration, I have hopes that these patterns will change now that we are moving from the “planning” and phase of our project to the “starting work” phase. As a part of this transition there may be more room for academic research to support the experiences of the other committee members. I should also note that a colleague who has worked on a number of local government projects reports that my experiences on this committee have been abnormal. She reported that her previous experiences typically consisted of three or four people working on a much smaller project, compared to the fifteen people on my particular subcommittee. She’s also done some consulting for which she actually got paid, so I imagine that her opinions were valued a bit more highly in those circumstances. I wouldn’t turn down payment, but I would settle for feeling a bit more valuable.

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