Academic freedom for all

The cover story in the latest issue of C&EN is about threats to academic tenure. As someone who spent six years on the tenure track and saw the possibility of tenure snatched away from my colleagues, I have thoughts.

When discussing tenure, non-academics tend to think that tenure means you've got a job forever. Critics of tenure often point to a hypothetical "lazy" tenured professor taking up university resources without putting in "enough" effort, or (all too real) examples of universities finding it difficult to fire abusive tenured professors. These arguments against tenure are specious, though. Tenure does not prevent a university from firing someone for cause – so when they retain an abuser or let them quietly find another place seek prey, know that they are being cowardly, not fulfilling some legal obligation. Besides that, I have a spouse working in the corporate world, and trust me that he has encountered incompetent and abusive people who have kept their jobs for years despite a lack of tenure. Offering tenure does not mean keeping incompetence, and getting rid of tenure does not mean only competent people will persist.

Proponents of tenure point to the importance of academic freedom: the freedom to pursue lines of study (in research and also in teaching) that may be controversial without threat of losing your job. Those areas of study could be anything. As Andrew Dressler says in the C&EN piece, “You don’t know what’s going to be politicized until it does get politicized."

What boards and administrators want (but may not admit to) is the ability to fire people when they feel like it. Worried about decreasing enrollment? Fire faculty from your least favorite programs and tell them it's for the good of the institution. Feel threatened by the existence of transgender people? Fire anyone who puts pronouns in their email signature. Think a Black professor is "difficult" and just doesn't "fit"? Get rid of that professor. These things already happen, but they're easier to do to the untenured.

I am glad tenure exists, but I don't think it is a very good tool for the problems it tries to solve. I agree with tenure supporters that academic freedom is important. I think it's so important, that its protection shouldn't be reserved for those who make it through a six-year obstacle course. A first-year, part-time instructor should be just as protected when teaching controversial topics as a distinguished professor with decades of full-time experience. But right now, they're not.

Tenure is an individual solution to collective problems. I suppose it's very American in that way. The individual professor jumps through hoops attempting to please all and sundry, incentivized to overextend themselves, compete with colleagues, and exploit their trainees. If you think I exaggerate, know that I was advised by my very first dean not to meet expectations for tenure but exceed them, meaning of course that the implicit expectations were somewhere higher than the explicit ones, and how much higher was impossible to know. A couple years later a faculty member on the committee that made tenure recommendations warned junior faculty that since we were part of a hiring boom, the board may not want to grant tenure to everyone. The implied advice was to be even more excellent than the other tenure candidates to have a shot at one of a limited number of seats. (Seats that, when the time came, the board yanked anyway.) And after years of doing more more more, isn't it understandable that some people would want to slow down or stop? How dare they be "lazy."

Once a professor achieves tenure they have its protection, but on the track to tenure they will have been advised not to ruffle too many feathers among the established lest they lose out on necessary recommendations. For those who spend years playing it safe, how many suddenly feel empowered to take the risks academic freedom protects?

If I dream of an alternative, it looks like this: faculty supporting each other instead of competing for scarce seats in the tenure club; faculty of all levels of experience equally empowered to take risks and protected from termination or political interference when they pursue controversial areas of study; and equitable expectations for faculty labor.

A model for this alternative exists, and it's called a union.

Unions aren't perfect. They're still made of people, and people are complicated. Unions are difficult to form at private universities thanks to case law like the Yeshiva decision. Membership among faculty groups (part-time, full-time non-tenure track, tenure-track, tenured, librarians, and other folks with teaching duties and other titles and/or responsibilities) varies widely. But when a union works well it comes with solidarity, job protections backed by federal law, and contracts that set firm boundaries so the work cannot just grow grow grow.

When I came to Utica I took a non-tenure track position. Giving up pursuit of tenure took some getting used to, but as I said that summer and have said many times since: I'd rather have a union than tenure. I'd rather have solidarity, job protections, and a clear contract from day one than spend more years exhausting myself chasing the possibility of security.

If that sounds good to you, maybe you can have that too.

Happy Labor Day

On Inheritance

My grandmother passed away this spring, aged 93. Yesterday my father brought the last of the furniture I have inherited from her and my grandfather. She was a cheerful, outgoing woman who had a habit of treating friends like family, and distant relatives like immediate relations. She was a keeper of family history. Even in the last days of her life, she could tell you which items in her home came from which family member and how they were related, or how else the object came to be in the family.

The stories my grandparents handed down were heroic. But I am no longer a child, and I am old enough now to know that no family is made entirely of heroes. I am descended from a colonial governor, whose grandson was an early president of Harvard College, and whose name was handed down for a dozen generations to my grandfather, father, and brother. I learned his title, his status, and his heraldry. We didn't talk about his role in genocide.

A few years ago I read Stamped from the Beginning, and there, in between the lines of Chapters 4-6, were whispers of my ancestors. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, knowing they were well-to-do Boston contemporaries of Increase and Cotton Mather, but it still startled me to notice threads of my own family's myths in the pages of a best seller on the history of racism.

The family story I grew up with was one of former greatness. A coat of arms and service to the King. Towns named for a forefather. A silver cup engraved with generations of names. A massive oil portrait in a gilded frame of a several-greats aunt in a black dress and a white lace cap, whose stern eyes followed me through my grandparents' modest home. I was the eldest child of the eldest child of the eldest child going back two hundred years, but my father was a dairy farmer, my mother a schoolteacher. We had rats in the basement (and under the sink once), and countless mice in the kitchen. We hung curls of flypaper in the summer, and the sticky yellow paper would soon be black with wings and bodies. I fed calves, stacked hay bales, milked cows, and, on more than one slushy gray March night, I leant my weight to pull a newborn calf free from its mother's womb. I know the pickled smell of silage and the taste of cow shit. It didn't feel like wealth.

Someone clever on Twitter (perhaps it was Jorts) observed that monarchs inheriting titles from their ancestors also inherit the sins of the ancestors wielding those titles. The new King of England has chosen to use his birth name for his regnal name, and is now Charles III. My many-greats grandfather, the colonial governor, served at the pleasure of the previous Charles. I inherited no title, but I did receive his family name, the myth of his greatness, and later the uncomfortable knowledge that he, personally, stole land and life from Indigenous Peoples.

I am here because my ancestors had the fortune to survive and prosper. Their possessions and privileges became my wealth. My great grandmother's cabinet has a crack running through the glass door. Grandpa's dresser has a nick in one drawer. The silver spoons have tarnished. They are witnesses to wealth and hard times and making do. They have seen family heroes and their flaws. I have inherited it all: the glory and the sins, the hero myths and the oppressive history, the riches my ancestors accumulated and the inequality they perpetuated. My grandmother's home was filled with such things: treasures, keepsakes, burdens, and obligations. And now they are mine.

What am I even doing

This weekend I'm in the in-between space of classes ending and finals week beginning. My classes will meet one more time to finish existing work and share projects, but there's no new stuff to do. No more slides to prepare, copies to make, or work to assign. Just feedback to give and conversations to have. For the first time in a while, I have the time and energy to think about stuff other than what's beyond the next week or so. I'm looking ahead to the summer and fall, and I'm looking back too.

It's the end of April. The 30th, which happens to be my defensiversary. Eight years ago today I defended my PhD. I still have feelings about that day. I was so anxious that when I finished my presentation I sobbed before taking questions. I felt such relief at being done. It wasn't perfect. Not by a long shot. But it was done. I'm feeling a similar kind of relief about the past year. It was hard and imperfect, but it's done.

This time last year I had been fired from my tenure-track job. No tenure decision, just budget excuses and a "courtesy" 1-year appointment. Eleven professors were fired in November 2020, following numerous staff layoffs. Faculty and students held an event mourning the loss of colleagues shortly before Thanksgiving. We laid flowers at the feet of a statue of Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy, the order who had founded our university. At that event I spoke to a local reporter about our grief and the injustice of the terminations. I was the only professor fired in Spring 2021. Make of that what you will.

This time last year I had agreed to the 1-year contract, but the thought of coming back to a place that had mistreated my colleagues and me didn't sit well. A couple weeks later I would see the posting for the job I have now. I applied, interviewied, got hired, had an offer accepted on a house, and moved my family 120 miles by the end of the summer. The fall was busy and complicated. We moved multiple times, going from one temporary home to another until the closing on our new house, and even moving our belongings in several trips spread out over months. We sold our old house over the winter.

A few years ago I made an account on Mastodon, but since few people in my existing network were on the fediverse, I checked it only very occasionally. Now that Musk may be buying Twitter, lots of people I know are moving to Mastodon (or at least trying it out), and I've returned with a new account in a different instance. (Find me @belehaa@scholar.social if you'd like.) Seeing everyone's introduction posts has nudged me to think about how I might introduce myself, and I don't know what to say that fits in a toot.

For six years I was on the tenure-track, teaching classes, serving on committees, helping my department recruit and retain students, and doing little bits of research on this and that. I was assured I had done enough to clear the bar for tenure at my teaching-focused institution. But I never got a decision. The spring I was fired, none of the faculty who should have had a tenure decision were granted tenure. The Board decided to "study" tenure instead.

Lesson learned: The job won't love you back.

My new job doesn't come with a tenure decision, but it does come with a union, and that is immensely valuable to me. I'm not under the illusion that my new university is morally superior to the old one. They can burn me just as well as the last place, but at least I stand some chance of recourse. I have some hope that if they tried to fire me I'd get more solidarity than "Gosh, that's too bad."

The switch to a non-tenured position came with its own identity crisis. I'm hardly original in this way. Like so many others, I left grad school hoping for an academic position with tenure. It's strange not to want that any more. (Don't get me wrong, if they offered me tenure, I'd take it, but I just don't want to jump through any more tenure-track hoops.) If I had been on the tenure-track this year, there is no way I could have made adequate research progress toward tenure. The projects I'd had in the works last year were not readily portable, and even thinking about them hurts, like bumping a bruised place. I'd have needed to start over, and that is its own kind of demoralizing. The part of my career that I have enjoyed the most is the teaching. This job is all about teaching, and it's been great to focus on that part. Restorative, even.

So who am I now and what am I doing?

I am a mom of two, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, an aunt, and a granddaughter mourning the recent loss of her last grandparent. I am a chemist, an educator, and an enthusiastic nerd. I am trying to make the world a kinder place. I am making chemistry as welcome a space as I can manage for the fledgling scientists in my care. I am convincing non-scientists to give chemistry a chance. I am learning, growing, and persevering.

To Do

I cannot brain right now. There’s a buzz in my head like a fluorescent bulb in an empty office. A quiet, persistent humming that at first I didn’t notice, but once noticed I cannot stop noticing, as if its sound is magnified by my attention.

I have things to do, decisions to make, and the buzzing confounds me. It interrupts my thoughts and scatters them, like scraps of paper I have started to sort and organize, tossed by zephyrs.

I want to go out into the snow, fresh and bright and heaping. I want to make angels with my kids and teach them the joys of snowballs and the squeaks and crunches they make as we pack them together with mittened hands.

I am afraid of the nagging and finger wagging I will receive from myself, hands on hips, knocking knuckles on the doorframe to remind me of the undone things and promises unkept.

Maybe my focus is buried in the snow, and my children will find it for me, cocooned in scarves and savoring the warmth of the sun amid the chill of icy flakes. I’ve promised them, too, while they slept curled against me, tiny hands seeking my warmth, while they tugged at my sleeve or my side, clambering into my lap to take my whole attention by right and force, while they waited for me to do ‘one more thing.’ I never seem to put ‘have fun’ on my agenda.

Out in the brilliant snow there is no need for lights or lists. There is quiet, just the sounds of breaths freezing in the air, little tongues catching flakes, boots shuffling, sleds sliding. There is calm, each tiny crystal a miniature wonder, blown into drifts, predictable order born of chance and chaos.

If the room won’t stop buzzing, then I will just leave the room. If the work won’t happen, I will just not work. If the snow is beautiful, I will just enjoy it. I’ll bundle up and brave the cold, and like the flurries dance and drift, I’ll let my worries go. We’ll track a trail around the yard, and all they have to do is smile for everything to be fine.

Cutting off other futures

I'm having trouble not caring.

I was fired¹ in March. I've witnessed a series of poor decisions that have crushed staff and faculty morale and negatively impacted students. I've seen in-fighting over the scraps the administration/Board dangles over our heads. And every time a new bad thing comes, I say, "This is it. I'm done."

But I'm not done. I keep fighting it. I keep resisting these changes. Sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, but always pushing back.

I am appealing the decision to fire me. It is a tedious process. It was not made for my benefit. It feels specifically designed to discourage its own use. Somehow the hostility makes me want to keep pressing forward. Like I need to know what's on the other side of a fence marked "Keep out."

There are so many things wrong in the world right now that my complaints feel insignificant. People are dying in Gaza. The US Senate Republicans are pretending the Jan 6 insurrection was no big deal. Black people keep getting killed by police. Nikole Hannah-Jones was just denied tenure by the trustees of UNC-Chapel Hill despite being phenomenally qualified. The pandemic isn't over.

But my problems are still problems, and their size in the scheme of the world does not render them insignificant to my life. The injustices here² are not absolved by their mundanity.

Still, I wish I could stop caring, and let go. When layoffs were imminent last fall, I started looking for jobs. Now I have actually started applying, and the difference feels immense. When browsing job postings, everything is possible, but submitting an application is making a decision. I recall something I read in a middle school English textbook: decision and scissors are cognates. The meaning of that shared cis root is "to cut off." When you make a decision, you cut off other futures and possibilities.

When I decide to apply to jobs elsewhere, I am cutting off possible futures here. And that process is hard and painful and scary.

I know that staying is an unlikely option. I know that things are Not Good at this university, and even if I could stay, it is probably not wise to stay. But it's still hard to go.

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1: I was informed that my contract would not be renewed and that I've been moved from a tenure-track position to a term position

2: The injustices are not only to me, but also to my colleagues: 11 others fired, 6 denied tenure decisions (not denied tenure, denied even a decision about tenure), 19 more without hope of tenure for years, all justified with specious claims about the "needs of the University both now and into the future"

Professor Damocles

My university administration is planning to cut faculty next year. We don't know who or even how many, but I know my name is on that list somewhere. I'm probably not at the top, but I'm also not at the bottom. I've been here 5 years and (because of maternity leave) I'm coming up for tenure the year after next. I teach in a department of five with some service courses and never enough majors. The courses I teach are all for majors, though one doubles as a service course for a handful of other, larger majors. If the administration chose to cut our program, three of us would become somewhat redundant and might be cut down to two. The main thing going for me in that scenario is that I'm likely the cheapest of the three to keep.

My university is, for the moment at least, in decent financial shape. We just don't expect to have enough enrollment this fall to support the size of our faculty and staff. Staff have already been furloughed and let go. Our outgoing president wants to abide by the existing faculty contracts signed just before the pandemic storm hit us, so no faculty cuts this year. But this knowledge looms over all of our discussions now: faculty cuts are coming.

These cuts are impersonal, and because they will be done to save the university money, we will probably not get an additional year to stay on. We could be cut in March, right before contracts are sent out. Academic hiring is seasonal: ads are posted in the fall and winter, interviews happen through winter and spring, decisions are made before spring semester ends. To find yourself in March expecting to be jobless in May is to anticipate an entire year out of academic work.

But it's worse than that right now because we are not the only university going through this anxious process. Anyone cut from the faculty will find themselves with plenty of company; plenty of competition. For many faculty, with myself very possibly included, these cuts will be the end of their academic careers.

I could be sad about this prospect, but instead I feel free. I am anxious now, and if I am cut from the faculty, I will grieve, to be sure. But if I will be fired in March and dropped into a dismal job market, what other professional harm can anyone do me?

I am resolved to enjoy what may be my last year of teaching. I am planning to pull out whatever stops are left and just have fun. The awesomest seven-year postdoc comes to mind now. Even one year of job security is more than most people get these days, and I will have had six. I am grateful for it, and I won't let it go to waste.

Communicating Data with Periodic Tables

I think periodic tables might just be the most ubiquitous infographic. I have zero data to back up this assertion. It’s just something that chemists use all the time, and most chemists I know tend to have one handy at a moment’s notice, or decorate their offices with them. They never seem to have just one. Even chemistry classrooms tend to have more than one, so I think it’s worth considering the periodic table’s ability to communicate information. Some periodic tables are pretty sparse. Some are hugely information dense (here’s a favorite of mine). And, as a recent article in C&EN points out, although there’s a common shape, there isn’t even a consensus on the “one true way” to arrange a periodic table.

Last May I found this periodic table while browsing through old books in my university’s library.

Periodic Chart of the Elements from inside cover of Gaines, Binder & Woodriff, 1951.

It’s from a 1951 textbook (Gaines, Binder & Woodriff), so it’s not terribly surprising that there are fewer elements (96 instead of 118) and some of the symbols have changed (e.g. A for argon, Fa for francium, Cb for columbium, which was later renamed niobium). What made it jump out to me at the time is the arrangement of the table itself: what I’m used to seeing in the middle of the table as the d-block is wrapped around in doubled rows. Copper, silver, and gold are in the same column as lithium, sodium, and potassium! 15 rare earths (La-Lu) are noted in a single cell, but not identified individually, and elements 89-96 are incorporated into the table, rather than segregated on an island of misfit actinides.

I’m told this arrangement was common in the Soviet Union. That it appears in an English-language textbook in 1951 seems interesting, and I wonder if it became less common in the US as the Cold War carried on.

What has struck me since that first look are the choices the creator of this table made about which information to include about each element, and how it’s presented.[1] We have atomic numbers, symbols, atomic weights, and the number of electrons in each shell. But, wait, there’s more: small text at the top of the table explains the horizontal lines running through the table cells:

• “% area below dotted lines indicates relative ability to lose electrons”
• “% area above broken lines indicates relative ability to gain electrons”

First, I’m curious now what method or measurement they used to rate ability to gain/lose electrons. Since they are relative quantities, I wonder what they are relative to? (I suppose it’s time to go back to the library and take another look at that old textbook.)

Second, I think the use of the different line styles to convey relative values is a neat trick. They are subtle, yet distinct, and they’re even read from opposite ends of the table cell (area above vs area below). Look along the fourth row (K→Ni) and watch the dotted line drop. You can see the periodic trend in ability to lose electrons! And using the same table you can see the trend in ability to gain electrons!

Several textbooks I’ve used have included figures with the periodic trends as 3D column charts. I don’t love them. 3D charts are really difficult to read because the depth or apparent volume tends to distort the actual differences in size. As a physical object I’d bet they’re useful (like these 3D-printable models), but as an image on a page or screen, I’m not enthused. The periodic table shown above, though, shows two of those trends clearly in a single figure. (Even those 3D printed models show only one trend at a time.) That’s pretty cool.

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[1]: As you might guess, I’m a fan of Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

The Bus

"The last student who went to graduate school after working with me was hit by a bus," my research advisor said to me as I began to figure out what I'd do after graduation with a Bachelor's degree and a desire to work in industry. He has an odd sense of humor, and I took the comment as a reminder to keep my eyes open and not get wrapped up in my head. This same advisor had encouraged me to apply to graduate programs, warning me that it would be hard later to "take the vow of poverty" after an industrial-sized paycheck if I decided to pursue a PhD after a few years on the job.

I didn't know the first thing about the graduate school application process and wasn't even sure where to apply. He encouraged me to set my sights high, nudged me toward higher profile programs and, in retrospect, he also guided me away from programs that I later learned had reputations for treating their students poorly. I was accepted at multiple schools thanks to his efforts, my letter writers, and the good advice I got about writing personal statements.

Skip ahead three years and his voice is in my ear, though it's only a memory speaking: "the last student … was hit by a bus." I cross the street like I'm five. Look left-look right-look left. All clear. I'm going to finish this thing and I will not become a pancake.

It's not until another year later, maybe two, that I hear something different as the memory speaks: "the last student stepped in front of a bus."

Oh.

Oh.

Oh no.

I don't know the story. I never knew the other student, but I can't unhear this version of the story now. And I understand it in a different way: Be careful, and Come back safe, okay?

During graduate school I learned about my anxiety, and I experienced the emotional quicksand that is depression. I felt sad for no apparent reason. Blue. Down. There were days I was unmotivated to leave home. Days when the failures of my research felt like failures of my self. And I realized one day that my predecessor had probably felt the same way.

I wish I could reach back through time and tell him that depression lies. But I can't. It doesn't work that way.

So I'll tell you: Depression lies. Don't carry that burden around alone. You are worthy of love and worthy of help.

And please, for the love of whatever you hold dear, be careful crossing the street. Come back safe, okay?

Professoring by the Golden Rule

My internal clock is perpetually off. I am very, very good at arriving 5 minutes late. Reminders and alarms help, but they aren't a cure.

I am also an Olympic-level procrastinator. Something due at noon? I may finish at 11:57 that morning. (If it didn't rank high enough on my to-do list, I may have started at 11.) More than once I have stayed up late (or, in some cases, gotten up early) to finish something I ought to have done weeks before.

So when a student arrives to class late, or scribbles down the last of their homework just before handing it in, I don't get mad. It doesn't seem fair to judge them for behavior I also exhibit. (Pot, meet Kettle.) I try to set reasonable expectations for workload and due dates. I try to be forgiving when they miss class, or forget to come to a meeting. Because I have also had to miss class, and I have also forgotten meetings, and I have also had to respond to unexpected events in my life that were out of my control. Sometimes I am the person asking for their understanding.

I try to teach by following a form of the Golden Rule:

Expect of others what you would have them expect of you.

I see it as an act of mercy. Some of my colleagues call it coddling. "They need to be prepared for The Real World! In the Real World you'd be fired. In the Real World blah blah blah!"

They're already in the real world. They're holding down jobs, and some have kids of their own. They're participating in service, and active in athletics. They're people with responsibilities, hobbies, and demands on their time and attention. I am not the only influence in their lives. My class is not the most important thing in their lives.

And I can live with that.