Couldn't you have just called your brother and asked what classes he was taking?
This is happening at a larger university, not mine. There's an adjunct who has been there forever. The university is abysmally run. No one ever gets employment contracts before school starts.
This adjunct decides she's been fired due to not receiving a renewal contract, so she hires a lawyer to sue the school. The department is emailing her saying things like, "Yes but have you picked textbooks for fall? Are you okay teaching in such and such a room?" She does not respond. Classes start and she doesn't show up for her classes, because she's suing for having been fired. They can't hire someone because they don't want to give her ammunition. So they're having other faculty members cover her class in a haphazard manner. Employment contracts show up in everyone's mailbox. They're trying to give her hers, but she won't take it, I guess?
It's still going on, and now they really do want to fire her, but I guess they're waiting for her lawsuit to play itself out?
I just really like the image of someone working really hard to avoid all evidence that they're still hired so that they can continue with their wrongful termination suit.
Part of the larger context, presumably, is that o-chem is designed to be a filter to reduce the number of pre-med students.
1: I guess, but do you have any idea where I wrote his number down?
Not that 3 means it has to be an unbearably difficult class (the student-informed article points out other teachers of the same class got much higher ratings), but difficulty for its own sake is baked into the expectations and may embolden an asshole professor.
I think the technical term for emboldened asshole is "hemorrhoids".
It's both true that this guy sounds like a bad teacher, and also that the intersection between intense pressure from deans to stop failing students with contract faculty is really bad.
If the administration doesn't want grades they should have the courage of their convictions and get rid of grades. If they decide we have to assign grades, then the teacher of record should be allowed to maintain standards without fear of getting fired. And right now all the lecturers and especially the temporary lecturers, especially at non-unionized schools, are just in an awful position.
The real story seems to be that the professor was losing it at age 84, perhaps exacerbated by inability to adapt to pandemic teaching conditions. Also he was an adjunct, didn't need the money, and was just getting to be more trouble than he was worth to the administration. The students didn't want him to be fired.
7.2: They probably have mixed feeling about meritocracy.
I love 2 and I kind of wish someone would do that here at my uni. I'm not up to date but lecturers never used to get contracts until a month into the semester. I'd especially approve if the plaintiff named a certain academic officer in the suit. Three strikes and you've got to be out, right?
I love 2 and I kind of wish someone would do that here at my uni. I'm not up to date but lecturers never used to get contracts until a month into the semester. I'd especially approve if the plaintiff named a certain academic officer in the suit. Three strikes and you've got to be out, right?
Two strikes and it's just a routine double post.
If she puts in the lawsuit she ever prayed on school grounds, the Supreme Court will agree she was fired and order reinstatement.
13 is what I was going to say. It sounds exactly like the football coach who they're trying to re-hire because SCOTUS said they had to and he's too busy on the wingnut lecture circuit to be bothered to take the thing he asked the Supreme Court for.
Anyway everyone acts like weed out courses are bad but similar to what's discussed in the other thread there's a case to be made that a course that teaches you pattern recognition instead of rote memorization is a useful filter for choosing who can be a doctor. I've literally seen students who memorize the exact reactants on a study sheet and if you add one irrelevant atom to a molecule they panic because now it's a different problem they've never studied.
14: I don't object to the path to being a doctor being difficult, but fwict there's zero correlation between the share of people weeded out (or who just can't get into medical school despite after passing all the hurdles) and the share of people unqualified, and zero attempt to figure out what the latter share would be. The supply of doctors is capped by and for doctors.
From a post on LGM: "...the real scandal here is that N.Y.U. is using super-cheap adjunct labor to teach a 350-person foundational course, so that it can buy up some more Manhattan real estate." Seriously. 350 students in the course and 60K tuition per student. Granted I have no realistic conception of what a living wage is in NYC, but an 84 year old retiree with an attitude is who you're going to hire to teach that course? Yes, I'm being ageist.
I don't understand 15. I'm interested but can't follow that first sentence. I will say that at my college, there are a LOT of would-be medical school applicants who I would in no way ever want to see in charge of my health care. Leave aside those cheating to get As in freshman biology. The sheer number that think they're going to be doctors but can't learn simple concepts (I'm sounding just like that NYU professor now, aren't I?!)...I want them weeded out, please. And they are weeded out, and it happens by their failing courses, not by people advising them that med school isn't going to happen and they should reconsider.
In addition to weird power differentials that make adjuncts dependent on student evaluations, the fact is being a more rigorous grader is simply harder and takes more mental and emotional energy that adjuncts aren't being paid for, outside of the occasional sadist who gets intrinsic pleasure from making people unhappy. If you want to blow off grading, it's way easier just to give most students an A- than something lower since 99% of students will judge it an acceptable grade. Adjuncts don't get paid enough to deal with neurotic students nitpicking a bad grade in their office hours or to deal with the low morale low grades on assignments can create in the classroom. If universities want adjuncts to take evaluation seriously, they have to pay more than minimum wage. Same with things like plagiarism. If you want adjuncts to go through the official channels for plagiarism, they need to be paid way more than they are.
I just went to a doctor who gave me factually wrong basic medical advice. I googled her later and she went to Myanmar Medical College. Maybe they need some more weeding out courses.
A doctor once told me aunt to smoke during pregnancy because the baby will be smaller and easier to deliver. Which is, in every sense that doesn't matter, factually correct.
At first glance, this 1930's ad seems perfectly reasonable.
"People are always telling me that smoking causes low birth weight." (TRUE)
The double take is when it goes on to say,
" Talk about a win-win-win! An easy labor. A slim baby. and the Full Flavor of Winstons"
Yes, there was a time when pregnant women were encouraged to smoke- not only to help their disposition (and the babies disposition!) but also to ensure a low birth weight and an easy delivery!
https://www.drstreicher.com/dr-streicher-blog/2020/1/when-pregnant-women-were-encouraged-to-smoke
This would have been in the middle 60s.
21: Oh, no! This is a fake old ad!
https://www.designcrowd.com/community/contest.aspx?id=1671803
I read something on Twitter from someone who is now a faculty member in some other field that he would routinely highlight the lowest grade on the exam and make snide comments about the person. In 2009 that person was her, and her entire teaching philosophy has been "not what he did." Frankly, it sounds like he was unprofessional.
16: I think he retired from Princeton, so this is like his spending money.
It's healthier for the mother if the baby vapes.
In her second trimester, Mom had gone for her usual monthly set of maternal x-rays at the obstetrician office. Before she even had a chance to share her anxieties with the doctor, he noticed she had a mild cough.
Padding over to his tall steel medical cabinet Dr Orenstein pulled out a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes. Along with tinctures, ointments, and penicillin, the painted cabinet was well stocked with dozens of cigarette cartons, tokens of appreciation received at medical conventions over the years courtesy of Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds.
Handing her the familiar gold pack, he assured her, "You can kiss your cough goodbye Betty. You'll soon feel better because you'll be smoking the cigarette recommended by eminent nose and throat specialists to patients who smoke."
"You'll feel better," continued the doctor, pausing to light up a Camel for himself, "because in case after case coughs due to smoking disappear, parched throats clear up...that stale smoked out feeling vanishes. Tests showed 3 out of every case of smokers cough cleared on changing to Phillip Morris."
"And," he added smiling broadly, "it was the same brand comedienne Lucille Ball smoked...and a pregnant Lucy at that!"
Mom loved Lucy.
https://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2014/01/27/smoking-just-what-the-doctor-ordered/
Who knows? Maybe this one is true.
Also, on the subject of seeder classes. Tim' studied something called bio pharmaceutical sciences. He liked biology in highschool better than chemistry, but he realized that was just because of the teaching style once he got to university. Biology seemed to be more about memorizing. I didn't think his grades, unlike his brother's, were high enough for him to get into medical school in Canada. He did get a professor to admit him for graduate school in organic chemistry. I think they have one standard for grades if the department admits you and another if you identify a supervisor in advance, and his advisor (who was pretty well known - on the short list for the Nobel etc.) was willing to take a chance on him. He only did a Masters, but the Canadian system is different. That's a funded, research degree. PhD students do a Masters thesis first and then choose to go on. He didn't, because he wanted to go into industry.
I think he'd be a pretty good doctor, and there are a lot of people who work at prestigious hospitals who are worse/less thoughtful. Being able to do organic chemistry isn't what weeded him out. I don't think he'd like it because of the productivity demands of the modern medical industrial complex and the volume of stuff you have to memorize. He was never on track to be a high-powered academic, but he's pretty decent organic scale-up chemist.
He also hated teaching the pre-meds, because, as SP said, they wanted to memorize a rule, and he wanted to teach them how to think through problems. To this day, he's afraid of a lot of doctors, because he doesn't believe that they can think.
I think 18 overstates the role of analyzing students answers as a component of grading, relative to setting a generous curve. The question is whether you pass someone who shows up to assessments and who understands half the material poorly and the other half not at all, or whether that should be a failing grade. You don't really have to read their answers carefully to tell when someone has no idea what's going on.
For example, in Calculus we're talking about someone who can't consistently add fractions correctly, is pretty good at taking derivatives of formulas (certainly better than they are at adding fractions), and has no idea what the meaning of a limit or a derivative is and will miss any question that combines two concepts. Should that get you a B or a D? Such a student will certainly fail any course that uses this course as a prereq.
(What I want is a concept of a terminal C. If you show consistently and make a minimal effort then you can't get below a C, but then you can't take any course that has that course as a prereq without retaking.)
That's already the standard in many schools, isn't it?
Yes, it is standard that there are far too many calculus students who can't add fractions, in many schools.
We're under intense pressure to pass more people, and the D/C cutoff is typically somewhere around 35%-40% raw score on the final. (Personally I think our exams are typically a bit too hard, but still, we're not talking about people who understand the material at all.)
I just went to a doctor who gave me factually wrong basic medical advice. I googled her later and she went to Myanmar Medical College. Maybe they need some more weeding out courses.
Right now we make it hard to become a doctor, but once you're in, you're in: continuing education requirements are far from ensuring they keep up with emerging science.
I think some doctor has gotten CEs from listening to someone read slides I wrote.
This is really an academia-wide push at the moment. For example, at Van/der/bilt they recently put the math department under receivership (chair from outside the department, huge cuts (like I think they weren't allowed to accept new grad students for at least a year), etc.) solely because their grades were too low.
Of course if you suggest that maybe students aren't succeeding because there's too much material in each course and maybe they need three semesters of single-variable calculus, or more credit hours in a class for practice, that's a complete non-starter because you can't increase the number of required classes.
31: Back in my day, you needed a B or higher in Calculus to go on in many major. You needed a C average to stay in the school.
AIHMHB at some schools in Boston it took a lot of paperwork to fail a student in organic chemistry, and that was 20 years ago. Easier to go with the C- and recommendation they don't take the next course.
Speaking of faculty firings, anyone have any hot goss about that Center for the American West situation? It seems really weird. (I had a professor whose classes were really key for me who was an Americanist/Westernist/etc so I have a little interest in this.)
38: I had to google this to find out what you were referring to. For other ignoramuses like myself, this article seems informative - https://coloradosun.com/2022/09/30/patty-limerick-fired-cu-center-of-american-west/
Personal highlight
In 1988, at her own request, she was named CU's "University Fool." She held similar gigs at Harvard and Yale. She spent 40 years serving as the school's credentialed, festooned fool, galavanting around campus spreading silliness and folly. Humor, she said, is a valuable tool in easing social anxiety and maybe releasing some of the pressures of higher education.
My daughter goes to a college where calculus is very hard. I think they just assume everyone took the class in high school and make the questions difficult. Most intro calculus has easy-ish questions that if you are doing them right neatly tie themselves up. Her calculus questions require you to push through hairy algebra complications and often rely on subtle tricks. I think it is some sort of weed out since the school doesn't have enough slots in CS classes and the like.
Ars Technica's story on the NYU o-chem firing has some interesting background.
Partly that the prof and his textbook were heretofore thought of as a _kinder_ way to teach ochem, and mostly pointing out that courses that have always been awful for sophomores are going to be worst for sophomores whose freshman year was during the Zoom-heavy pandemic.
mostly pointing out that courses that have always been awful for sophomores are going to be worst for sophomores whose freshman year was during the Zoom-heavy pandemic.
In addition to the year of zoom-instruction, it's just been a tough year for a lot of people. I was having a recent conversation in which I mentioned that I look around the office and am struck by how many people have been struggling for one reason or another this year and just seem burned-out (and I include myself). The person mentioned that they had read an article about Burning Man which seemed to come to the conclusion, "many people had a rough time with the weather at Burning Man this year; the weather was not outside of the range of what might be expected; one contributing factor was people just having less capacity to work through challenges."
I maintain that I'm excellent at working through challenges, same as before. I've just realized more challenges are not worth it.
It seems possible that this was a case where NYU was reasonably responsive to reasonable complaints. The story notes that the complaining students were surprised he was fired -- it sort of looks as thought the department brought about it, and decided they had a point.
I think the story seemed weird enough to get published because it's not usual for a professor with personally high status like this guy to be a fireable adjunct. So a prestigious old man gets fired, and it feels like it must be some kind of tenure/academic freedom issue, but it just isn't.
Pro-tip: If you buy a "These colors don't run" shirt, you need to throw it away once the colors fade. People will extend the metaphor.
So the things that rang for me in the NYT article: the focus on non-passing rates as a way of evaluating faculty. It's the latest consulting craze: if more than X% are not earning a C, that's bad and ought to be remedied. The remedy is unspecified but the NYU case is making it clear that the answer is going to be blame the faculty.
I'm all for meeting students where they are but the lack of direction is going to create some perverse incentives. As in, if I manually kick out people from my class who aren't showing up, they will lose their financial aid and this is worse for them in every way, but they won't count against my numbers But if I'm kind and let them continue, and they fail because they're not showing up, it's my fault. A directive to reduce the % of non passing students is 100% going to result in people dropping out because their professor kicked them out of the class.
Here it's DFW, withdrawal is just as bad as F. The weird one is why they care about D's, which pass them out of their requirement here in most subdivisions. The annoying thing is that our business school requires a B or higher in all classes to transfer in, so people withdraw with a B- and that makes us look bad.
In other academic news, the University of Florida is getting a shiny new president. Can't be letting Georgia have all the fun.
49: dfwi here - so an Incomplete is just as bad as Failing, but far more work for the professor.
So how does kicking them out not count against your numbers? What grade is that?
I'm rather surprised by the tenor of many of the comments. Prior posts have discussed the difficulties of remote teaching. And how adjuncts are exploited. And the unreliability of teacher evaluations. And the way that higher education is becoming more of a business to the detriment of learning. And the badness of rote memorization as compared to developing problem-solving skills. And yet the general impulse appears to be looking for a way to blame this dude for his termination?
You got juicy quotes like this:
The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department's chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a "one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college."
Marc A. Walters, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, summed up the situation in an email to Dr. Jones, before his firing.
He said the plan would "extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills," an apparent reference to parents.
The university's handling of the petition provoked equal and opposite reactions from both the chemistry faculty, who protested the decisions, and pro-Jones students, who sent glowing letters of endorsement.
"The deans are obviously going for some bottom line, and they want happy students who are saying great things about the university so more people apply and the U.S. News rankings keep going higher," said Paramjit Arora, a chemistry professor who has worked closely with Dr. Jones.
What gives?
It's an Unofficial Withdrawal, which doesn't hit the DFWI metric. That One Weird Trick etc
I don't think professors can kick anyone out of classes where I teach. If they can, I've never heard of it happening.
57ish: * This class was not remote. It sounds like it was way too big, and the discussion sections were also way too big. Institutional failure NYU (at least if we are assuming that institutional goal was to teach young people organich chemistry). It also sounds like the professor did not try to adapt to the admittedly sub-optimal conditions set by NYU.
* This guy is retired from a long, tenured, well-remunerated career at Princeton and was a main (or perhaps the sole) author of a widely used textbook. That maps very poorly to the category of exploited adjunct.
* Student evaluations can be unreliable, but evaluations that are "by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university's undergraduate science courses" are not a signal of some sort? Maybe even a warning sign?
* When nobody in the class is getting the subject matter, then either NYU made a major mistake in enrolling them, or the teaching methods are unsound.
+++
As for the Center for the American West, I'm of at least two minds. First is that 40+ years is a very long time for any one person to be in charge of any one thing, and that institutions need renewal before they turn into cults. Second is that she had been explicitly prohibited from supervising graduate students, and that sounds like a great clanging warning bell of an abusive person. Third is that bits of historian twitter were all, "I have heard so many stories that I'm not at liberty to tell..."
So yeah, having a new director sounds like something that should have been done about 25 years ago, maybe she'd be back for a second term by now if she really is so great.
First is that 40+ years is a very long time for any one person to be in charge of any one thing, and that institutions need renewal before they turn into cults.
HEY NOW.
60 https://www.denverpost.com/2022/10/05/patty-limerick-fired-cu-boulder-center-american-west/
'And you had a famous ancestor, I believe, who was a regicide?'
Here it comes, thought Vimes. 'Yes, Stoneface Vimes,' he said, as levelly as possible. 'I've always thought that was a bit unfair, though. It was only one king. It wasn't as if it was a hobby.'
'But you don't like kings,' said the dwarf [king].
'I don't meet many, sir,' said Vimes, hoping that this would pass for a diplomatic answer.
I am grading right now, and some of my students have a terrible understanding of the material, and I exhort them to come see me to get individual help. However, if they all actually took me up on my offer, I'd quickly run out of time. I'm like an airline overselling every flight. What a great model of education.
Charge them $50 if they bring a backpack into your office.
I really find it fascinating/depressing that airlines created this perverse incentive forcing everyone not to use aircraft storage as designed, due to algorithms on search engines driving affecting their pricing schemes.
"For no good reason, we're going to tax your refrigerator space, but no worries, you can retro-hack your freezer into a refrigerator and just be sure to only store smaller food. What's the problem?"
I only fly Southwest. It's slightly less dystopian.
Yeah, nothing says "not dystopian" like faux-folksy PA announcements on a plane full of occasional flyers. Southwest is setting large piles of money on fire flying interisland here but I'm sticking with the local carrier. It has its annoying bits, but I know where I'm sitting and I mostly know that they're going to fly when they say they're going to.
I can't (can) believe that two Russian draft refugees put in on St. Lawrence Island and the Alaskan congressional delegation is freaking out that the Bering Strait turns out not to be brimming with Border Patrol interceptor boats.
We don't even have a local carrier.
I can't (can) believe that two Russian draft refugees put in on St. Lawrence Island and the Alaskan congressional delegation is freaking out that the Bering Strait turns out not to be brimming with Border Patrol interceptor boats.
What they really want is a Coast Guard presence in Nome, which is a good idea for a lot of reasons including the increase in area sea traffic due to the warmer oceans. That'll require substantial upgrades to the port infrastructure, which the Corps has been dragging its feet on for years. It's a whole longstanding thing, which they're using this latest incident to draw attention to.
Also, and you didn't make this mistake but I've seen it elsewhere, those Russians didn't flee across the Bering Strait! St. Lawrence Island is significantly to the southwest of the Strait proper. I presume there's some name for the different strait that separates it from the Siberian mainland but I don't know it.
I somehow totally didn't know St. Lawrence Island existed, which is rather embarrassing since I feel like I'm generally pretty good at islands. Thought all the major islands in that area were Aleutian! But it's closer to the Bering Strait than it is to the Aleutians!
Not all straights look alike. We just all dress the same.
How do I not know the 6th largest island in the United States?!
71: But you also don't have big chunks of ocean between towns, so you've got that going for you.
I knew about the Diomede islands because of birbs, but I didn't actually know where they were...
I had RUSSIANS knocking on the DOOR to my HOUSE!!
The number of Alaskan islands that are larger than Maui is blowing my mind.
St. Lawrence Island is an interesting anomaly; it's much closer to Siberia than to mainland Alaska and has a lot of historical and cultural ties in that direction. But the way the colonial history went it ended up on the US side of the line.
Also, and you didn't make this mistake but I've seen it elsewhere, those Russians didn't flee across the Bering Strait! St. Lawrence Island is significantly to the southwest of the Strait proper.
I may not have written this mistake but I was thinking of it. The second map image on the Wikipedia page for the Bering Strait shows an line going right past St. Lawrence Island and further south. I feel like most people using the term to refer to the waters between Alaska and Russia generally, not between Seward and Chukchi alone - possibly enough for usage to overcome local and/or nautical conventions.
I feel like most people using the term to refer to the waters between Alaska and Russia generally, not between Seward and Chukchi alone - possibly enough for usage to overcome local and/or nautical conventions.
There's definitely ambiguity about defining the strait, and in fact the regional Native corporation is called Bering Straits to account for that. I think that's mostly because the presence of the Diomedes means there's technically three straits between Cape Dezhnev and Cape Prince of Wales, but it could also be construed to include St. Lawrence Island (which is culturally distinct from the rest of the region and an awkward fit in the regional corporation).
It sounds Canadian. Is that the problem?
Hm, and this navigational chart linked by Wikipedia does identify the strait off of SLI as "Bering Strait"! So maybe it is technically all considered part of the same strait after all.
Talk about awkward: multiple maps on their "History and Region" page omit the island entirely - in particular the larger one showing the whole outline of Alaska doesn't even color the island green like it does the mainland. Yet it does seem to include St. Lawrence per other official maps.
That is, the BNSC does seem to include SLI officially.
86 , 87: Yes, it's awkward. St. Lawrence Island is physically included within the boundaries of the region, but its villages opted out of some portions of ANCSA (at least the land settlement part, and I think they're not shareholders of the corporation either). They're not the only villages in the region to do that, either. It's a complicated, culturally heterogeneous region that's long had trouble with coordinating activity on anything. There's no borough government, for example, just individual cities and tribes.
Kawerak, the region non-profit, does include the SLI villages and has a good explanation on its website of the various regional and local entities and how they interact. It's complicated!
79: Glaciers turn out to be more efficient island-creators than volcanoes, apparently.
79: Glaciers turn out to be more efficient island-creators than volcanoes, apparently.
Especially when they melt.
91: Step 1 is carving out deep valleys. Step 2 is melting away, leaving the valleys to fill with water. Unless I misunderstand how a bunch of those islands along the Alaska coast were formed (entirely possible!).
Has there ever been a work of genre fiction with the setting a great lost kingdom in Beringia before the waters rose? As opposed to just extrapolated hunter-gatherers.
93: There's also the process where they send a huge volume of meltwater out the terminal end and cut valleys like the one I grew up in, but that's still a valley (with a river that's undersized for the valley it runs through).
94: not to my knowledge, but you might try Stephen Baxter's Etxelur trilogy which is similar but for the Dogger Bank.
Someone drove an over-height crane under a bridge here. Damaged beyond repair. Bad week for bridges.
Tangential to the OP, reading this gave me hives: https://wapo.st/3fPHURV
Is it possible to describe to someone who hasn't taken chemistry since 11th grade why Organic Chemistry is so famously hard?
101: I haven't taken chemistry since 11th grade either, but I could ask my sister.
I haven't called my sister yet because the last two times I called her, so she needs to call me.
11: It's taught like content to memorize, but then the problems are little logic puzzles.
The article in 100 sounds very much like Jamaal's experience. In several of his classes, he has fewer than 10% passing right now.
There are also honors classes and stuff where the students are presumably a little more willing to play along, but Jammies doesn't teach those.
I'm helping my kid with AP Chem now which is an entirely different beast from organic chemistry. High school Chem you're learning fundamental rules that apply to all of chemistry- protons, electrons, charges, molecular weight, moles. Organic chemistry has some parts in common but otherwise is an entirely new set of concepts. Part of it is just understanding what you're trying to do- turn molecules A and B into C- which involves a combination of memorization (how do we add a carbon to a ketone? For that matter what is a ketone?) and pattern recognition (I've seen two things react like this before so I can see what the key pieces are to make the reaction happen.) Then there's understanding the mechanism for why those things react- this has a partial negative charge and that has a positive charge so they'll form a bond as the electrons go from here to there. I had a legendary professor for first semester and found it completely intuitive, but it's a type of material I don't think is ever covered is any previous course. Maybe the closest is molecular biology with enzymes and macromolecules but usually that comes after orgo even if you're not writing out the chemical structure of proteins or DNA. I found inorganic and physical chemistry to be much more difficult.
102: I truly can't imagine hating anything as much as Schultz hates unions. Dude's retired and has 3.5B dollars, and he *came out of retirement* solely for the purpose of union-busting? It makes no damn sense. And it's bizarre how long that article is and how little insight it gives into what his deal is.
The other interesting thing to me about that article is just how often he keeps being surprised by what's going on with his employees, and can't put together that if they had a union then all this wouldn't be such a surprise to him because the union would advocate for the workers! I know this is badly violating the analogy ban, but the whole thing has the vibes of a marriage where communication has broken down but one party won't go to counseling because counseling is only for bad relationships and he thinks it's a good relationship.
I took the message as "either defeat billionaires politically or be prepared to suffer. "
109: My son is taking regular high school chemistry. I'm no help because all I remember is moles.
I convinced some Harvard undergrads that the alkanes were methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, sexane, septane, octane.
Why would the Osmonds care what the alkanes are?
I guess I shouldn't judge. They may have been brilliant scientists, but just shoved into pop music because in the 70s frequent hints of incest were frowned upon in other fields.
This follow-up on the Limerick story makes it sound like they went looking for reasons to fire her, which is not the same as saying they found none.
I'm also surprised she wasn't already retired. There was a wave of foundings of centers for the study of what many North Americans call the west around the turn of the 21st century, but I think most of the original founders of most of them, having successfully achieved the highest purpose of the university, the creation of an entity upon which family names and money could be bestowed, went back to the creation of new knowledge and the education of future generations, or at the very least, occupied their ordinary faculty positions again.
I see that's basically the same story as in 62, as it was pretty much the basis for the story in 62. A case of rival newspapers writing basically the same thing after one got there first.
RWM worked for a while in a small subunit of a university where the director had poor personal/professional boundaries and was abusive to his immediate staff (not so much her directly, she was far enough away in the building to avoid most of the abuse, though not the incompetence and general rot). They did some morale survey of staff and discovered that unit was a wild outlier for unhappiness, and then the university didn't do anything about it. (Or rather made all of them have awkward individual meetings with the director, which was worse than nothing.) Unless there's some obvious reason that this is being pushed by actual politicians (legislators, trustees), my inclination is to think she must have been so much worse than you see in the article for them to have actually fired her.
101: I describe it like geometry. Folks go along in math doing basic calculations, then algebra, then the shift to geometry with shapes and proofs means a big adjustment in how students approach the subject.
In organic chemistry, there's the same type of shift from computation to logic type problems, but in conjunction with fairly demanding memorization of vocabulary and how to draw structures. It's also stressful for students because they're all panicking about med school admissions.
