http://www.astrobetter.com/
I've got an opinion about it, like most other people who have read it. Let's be honest, I've got LOTS of opinions about it. And let's be honest, I'm not going to be the most eloquent, and for sure not the most diplomatic. This is a blog, that almost no one reads, so I'm going to write what I write.
1. "However, if you informally canvass the faculty (those people for whose jobs you came here to train), most will tell you that they worked 80-100 hours/week in graduate school. No one told us to work those hours, but we enjoyed what we were doing enough to want to do so. We were almost always at the office, including at night and on weekends. Nowadays, with the internet, it is fine to work from home sometimes, but you still miss out on learning from and forming collaborations with other graduate students when everyone does not work in the same place at the same time. We realize that students with families will not have 80-100 hours/week to spend at work. Again, what matters most is productivity. Any faculty member or mentoring/thesis committee will be more than happy to work with any student to develop strategies to maximize productivity, even in those cases where the student is unable to devote more than 60 hours to their work per week."
How about students with any other interests, too? Who want to have a pet, a hobby, a cause, a passion? A relationship? Let's not make this a women's issue, and let's not forget that there are many men with families who you are also losing (who would probably make much better mentors for having had time to engage with their kids and the complexity of family life instead of being absent) with this mindset.
And how about overachievers coming from dysfunctional families, from alcoholic or other abusive situations that result in their needing external validation like they need oxygen. I'd say you're underestimating the amount of overworking students (who become the lauded professors) who are doing what they are doing because their parents didn't do enough for them as kids.
2. Second, a related problem is that some students are not reading enough of the literature. All students should read at least several papers/week. You do not have to read the entire paper, as sometimes just the abstract, intro, figures, and conclusions will provide you with sufficient information. Nevertheless, please read. Knowing what is going on, right now, in your field and other fields is crucial to your development as a scientist. We would like to see more students engaged in defining their research projects and theses. We would like to receive more telescope proposals from students and post-docs that do not include faculty members. To do so, a detailed knowledge of the literature is a must.
Third, we are pleased with how Science Coffee and Journal Club are going and thank the many students who help make both of those opportunities available to everyone. We also recognize that we as a faculty need to do a better job at participating. Yet we have received some student comments about the way in which faculty do participate. Namely, that some faculty-student interactions have become too intense. In these cases, it is not the faculty member’s intention to make the student uncomfortable. The faculty member means to interact with the student as he or she would a peer. That should be flattering to the student! Faculty questions (at least in this department) do not arise from a desire to embarrass a student speaker, but from a real scientific interest in the answer. In such cases, the student should do his or her best to respond and, frankly, to consider the experience good (and relatively gentle) training for any discussion at Caltech or at Tuesday Lunch at the Princetitute.
Ahhh, my home base. Excuse me, I need to go put on my Lucha Libre mask....
First, if you think that reading the literature is crucial to doing well in this field, then you'd better act like it, and put it on the curriculum. Right there next to the other classes. If it is important to know how to read, you need to teach it. You need to give your own tricks and ways of reading. What questions do you approach a paper with, and don't leave out the sociological ones (Did someone I know write this to b(*&-slap someone else who left him/her off of a previous paper? What is the personal history behind this paper, that the reader knows, and how does that make him/her read it differently?). Don't pretend that a list of three bullets teaches someone how to read a text. Especially not one so culturally enmeshed. Same goes for answering a question, that may be asked because: someone understood the talk but wants to disagree but not in an overt manner, someone who is pissed off, someone who didn't understand the talk (ha, ha, like that is ever acceptable by the community!), someone who is trying to clarify something for the grad students in the audience, or someone who just doesn't want their department to be embarrassed by no one having asked a question after a talk.
Second, the framing of some faculty questions arise from individuals who do not know how or may not be capable of speaking with respect or have the awareness that they have power in that room and in that building. And when faculty spar with each other verbally, or with a postdoc, how often do they explain to students why this is acceptable but not for the student to do? What it takes to be given license to spar? If you, as a senior member of the community, have ever sat in a room where a faculty member was sarcastic, or inappropriately aggressive (read: any question that gets gossiped about after the event) towards a junior member, and not spoken up, not asked the faculty member to rephrase the question more neutrally, you're part of the problem. In this culture of advisor-as-scientific-parent and student-as-scientific-child, it is the equivalent of sitting around while a father or mother verbally oversteps their bounds with a child. Once you start excusing your colleagues (intended or innocent) jabs as "you just need to learn to toughen up", you're in abusive family territory. Abusive. Because kids don't have the power in the family. And you are protecting a colleague's feelings over that of a powerless individual's. You have a higher salary, a tenured job and the power to affect that student's career - it is not a room full of peers when there are faculty and students together, regardless of the ideal of intellectual academic discourse.
Third, in the "department as academic family" scenario, that last statement is like saying "you should be happy that we only make fun of you meanly in this family, in the other ones they use a belt and a broken bottle."
3. Fourth, in their evaluations for the APC, some students alluded to research or advisor problems that other students were having and that “no one else knew about.” If you have a problem of any kind, or know someone who does, please come and talk with me or another faculty member. Encourage the other student to do so. Use your mentoring/thesis committees with or without your advisor present. It makes no sense for someone to be struggling and not seek help. These problems can be solved, but only after they are uncovered.
If there was a departmental map available of all the actual relationships (marriage, friendship, affairs, secret supporters) among the faculty, a student might feel more comfortable complaining about a problematic "faculty-parent" instead of fearing that any complaint will be subverted in favor of the inttra-faculty relationships. And to go complain to an obudsman in hopes of impartiality? Like that's not going to get you kicked out of the "family." Or heaven forbid you are thinking of leaving academic but not sure - stating such might get you already listed as someone not worthy enough to have known from an early age that this was a calling. Or hell forbid you are depressed. If I don't know I'm going to talk with a person who has dealt with depression themselves or from a close friend/family member, and understands its power, no way I'm going to speak up when I'm not in a position of power. Thank goodness for some brave faculty who will use their power to speak up.
4. Fifth, while we welcome the thoughtful, honest, and insightful comments that we generally receive from students in their department evaluations, a few students are somewhat rude. In those cases, it is hard to draw sympathy for your problem. In your career, providing constructive criticism to your department and colleagues is important and should be valued. Being negative and disrespectful will generally not fix the problems and will make colleagues less likely to work with you.
Again, parent .vs. child - it is the parent's job to model behavior desired. The parent has the power. As does the faculty advisor. Just because some forums like a journal club are supposed to be about peers and equals, there is almost no variable in which graduate students have equal power or say - job stability, salary, expectations. And there are many instances of faculty who do not want either constructive or other kinds of criticism. If your faculty are not modelling it, don't expect the grad students to step up.
5. Tenth, your evaluations of our program identified some concerns, including a lack of computer support, inadequate representation of women and minorities among the faculty and colloquium speakers, and poor attendance by faculty at various department talks and functions. We are working on all three. Professor E has developed a plan for better student support of student computing. The faculty hiring committee is developing a detailed plan to make sure that the best women and minority candidates are encouraged to apply and carefully considered for the job. The colloquium organizers have been made aware of your concerns. All faculty are being strongly encouraged to participate more in the intellectual atmosphere of the department. Do not ease up on reminding us of these points.
Unfortunately, in this department, the last 9-10 hires were male. Over the period of many years. So really, how much more time did they need to find someone female or minority to hire? And did they really hire the "best" men in these 9-10 positions? And were all the current faculty carefully considered for their "bestness" and only that? Or did some of them get on the faculty for a range of reasons? Gender equity comes when you have as many "less-than-best" females as "less-than-best" males on your faculty. However you want to define "less-than-best" - be it legally, in terms of mentoring, in terms of teaching, in terms of research, in terms of anything...
6. And finally, mostly what I hope is that the writer of the letter doesn't get thrown under the bus for articulating the many arcane, and misguided ideas that I think many science faculty members have about education, management and mentoring. Science faculty are mostly only trained in research - not in anything else that is important to the job, at least not in a methodical way. There is no reason we should think they will be good at mentoring, gender and minority issues, teaching, managing a group, at any level better than beginner.
Your professorship is no more noble than any other job, so don't keep giving up parts of your life, your family life, your marriage, your health as if it were. If you were to die, or quit, the academic machine that keeps asking for pounds of flesh would pretty cold-heartedly replace you, quickly. They'd hold a memorial, or a moment of silence and then get busy forgetting any legacy or heart or time you put into this. Fidelity to the institution is some sort of noble idea, and yet the institution is rarely faithful to its faculty.
Your family and friends, however, would be devastated and feel the loss. Even if you stopped having time to tend to those relationships because you were in an office 80 hours a week.
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