Collegiate Day of Prayer

This Thursday, February 23, is the National Collegiate Day of Prayer. It is a 100 year old tradition of praying for and over our colleges and universities. Many churches and student groups are participating. Many people will be fasting from sundown Wednesday to sundown Thursday.

With many economic prognosticators claiming higher ed and student loans are the next economic bubbles to burst, and the spiritual climate on so many of these campuses, it is well worth your time to go before the Lord at length on this day.

Our universities are the gathering places for world leaders, past, present, and particularly, future. How can we not go before the God of all Nations and intercede on behalf of the saints in classes with the pillars of this world’s system?

As a faculty member, I can say with grave certainty, we are in need of prayer. Pray for us.

On any given week, there are readers from at least 15 countries. All of these nations have some of their citizens at many of these campuses, who will one day return and impact their homeland. Pray, therefore, for your fellow countrymen, that they may find the fruit of the Gospel growing in their hearts because of their time here.

Pray.

SDG

Texas Governor Perry’s Encouragement for Faculty

Image source: Office of the Governor website

Today I had the privilege of being invited to, and participating in, a conference call for bloggers with Texas Governor Rick Perry. I have always promised to remain apartisan in this blog, so I will merely report on what he said without comment. One participant asked a question relevant to higher education and I report the question and the governor’s answer.

Questioner:  Do you have any words of advice or wisdom for faculty in higher ed and the university system in general as a lot of them are already feeling several years of budget crisis and with the stringent cuts that we are looking forward to over the next year? What would you say to faculty who are trying to make it happen for the students?”

Perry:  Yeah. Well, here I think we have some of the really fine institutions of higher learning in the country [here] in the state of Texas, and as we look at ways to make our institutions more affordable and accessible and really challenging the universities, and obviously their faculty as well, to come up with new and very expansive ways of creating more wealth. For instance, the commercialization of technology has not been as expansive at our institutions of higher learning as they should be. For instance, we had some statutes and historic ways of doing research where the professors and those researchers did not get to enjoy the wealth, if you will—they didn’t get to share in the proceeds that came from the commercialization of technologies, and I happen to think that the universities that really expand and make and allow, if you will, their faculty to be more engaged in keeping some of the wealth that they create with their research and what have you, that you’ll make Texas a more inviting place for professors to come and to continue to increase that ability to raise money. Obviously, our research capabilities are bringing federal dollars [from] the department of, for instance, the defense accelerated research projects—they use billions of dollars that are available there to create new and innovative… whether its treatments for disease or whether its protection of our troops, and all of those will, most likely, those innovations will come from our colleges and universities, so I full well expect our universities in the state of Texas will be stronger over the course of the years to come, and some of these universities in other states that continue to strangle, for lack of a better word, the innovation that their professors and instructors and researchers are allowed to be engaged in will fall behind and Texas will become a place where a researcher who truly wants to work, a professor who truly wants to work and be paid by virtue of the product they are putting out of the classroom, they’ll be rewarded with higher salaries and I feel very comfortable that we are going to continue to be a place that [faculty], whether it is professors or researchers, etc. want to come and live.

SDG

Carrying Culture Too Far

Today I met a lovely postdoc who is an international Fulbright scholar at a major university. She is working with a professor who happens to originally hail from her native country. There is a surprising bit of friction because the professor apparently perceives her as competition rather than a colleague. While this occurs sometimes in the US, it is fairly rare, but in this woman’s country it is fairly common. So there is no shortage in irony in this situation.

One of the things I love about universities is how cosmopolitan they truly are:  folks from the globe over coming together in scholarly pursuits, sharing and studying a world of knowledge and culture, ideally in harmony. All cultures have their weak spots as they are composed of fallen human beings, but it is still a shame when those weaknesses survive the transfer to a new environment, even though it should be expected.

When these rough spots arise, ideally the egalitarian environment of the university helps resolve them. This should be the hallmark of the Church, yet universities are more known for ‘inclusiveness’ and Christians known for ‘divisiveness.’ Both are stereotypes in every sense of the word. As Christian faculty, we have the opportunity to be peacemakers in both cultures, and from there affect many more.

“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” Proverbs 27:17

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Matthew 5:9

SDG

Discussions of Tenure

Wednesday I had a very pleasant hour–long conversation with a student and we talked about an amazing range of topics. One of them was tenure. I don’t remember how it came up and she expressed her opinion that the elimination of the tenure system would be a good thing because, in her mind, it let bad professors stay in their job and nothing could happen to them. I agreed there are cases of deadwood, but explained that the purpose of tenure was to protect the academic freedom of good faculty to explore controversial things.

She said that if they were good faculty they shouldn’t have to worry about being reviewed. I explained how what are considered unpopular research topics or public stances changes over time, and so tenure is designed to protect that freedom regardless of the political climate. I told her that even though I’m not even on tenure track, I would rather have a system that allowed for a few ‘bad apples’ in order to protect the majority that are doing good work. She saw the logic of this and we continued to other topics.

A case in point was revealed today. A fellow colleague, Dr. Bob Woodberry, went up for tenure this semester in Sociology. His research is extremely controversial, as this excerpt from his university profile webpage shows:  “Bob Woodberry's research looks at the long-term impact of missionaries and different colonial governments on education, economic development and democracy in post-colonial societies. Other research interests include the spread of religious liberty, the international diffusion of social movements, religious influences on political institutions and the economy, religious attitudes of elites, religious tolerance, conservative Protestants, and measuring religious groups on surveys.”

Bob has had good grant coverage, won teaching awards, and “’The Measure of American Religion’ won the Outstanding Published Article Award from the Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association (2001).” He is popular with students, and his passion for doing thorough complex statistical work to both verify and falsify his work is unimpeachable.

There is one problem. His research results clearly reveal exceedingly politically incorrect results. In every culture, by every measure, when Protestant missionaries move into a native culture, every indicator of standard of living starts improving dramatically, even when all other known factors are taken into account.

This inconvenient truth has meant that he has had to take longer to publish in order to make the case as airtight as possible, countering every objection before it is raised, so he has fewer papers than normal. Also, the best journals have rejected his papers for trivial reasons, forcing him to publish in journals outside his field, which count less towards tenure. And so on.

This morning, Bob’s chair notified him that he was denied tenure.

Bob now must start looking for another job. Academic freedom is an illusion unless you agree with certain tenets of academic culture, or unless you have tenure. Even then, life can be rough if you are too outspoken about the wrong things.

The tenure system protected people with these politically correct views before they were politically correct, and now what was once politically correct is intolerable, and it is by accident (i.e. the hand of God) when someone like Bob gets tenure at a major university these days.

We are grateful for the time we’ve had with Bob and are thankful to have him for a while yet. The Lord is sovereign and will bring good of this. But I am saddened that the university did not deign this scholar worthy of its protection. It is a loss for the university, and I will miss him.

SDG

Things That Go Bump at the End of the Semester

In an earlier post, I think I mentioned how as a student I hated the end of the semester because it meant I was out of time for ‘catching up,’ and that now end-of-term-dread is lessened, but not removed, because I get to see human beings change into cornered/panicked animals. It’s not a pretty sight.

Today, I did a preliminary posting of the grades on one of the university’s online gradebooks, and announced as much. About 45 minutes ago, I got a panicked email (from a non-native English speaking student):

“Dear Dr Robb J Wilson

                   I just go to eGradebook to check my grade and I didn't see my letter grade yet. Oh no, am I fail your class?”

Emotion trumps logic—“No letter grade = fail” instead of “No Letter Grade = @$%@#$$ technology” Keep in mind also, that the numerical grade IS posted, and the grade breaks are in the syllabus. That’s too much work. It’s much easier to panic and email the instructor. And these are upperclassmen.

In all honesty, I do get frustrated and tired by the stream of panic, attempted manipulation, anger, indignation, immaturity, and so on. I forget that this is actually a small percentage of the total class (something about a squeaking wheel comes to mind). My defenses are raised up and I have to force myself sometimes to stop and listen to them to see if, actually, they have a valid complaint. I should be more patient. I just want to wrap up the semester and move on.

Then I remember our Father. I have to laugh at what HIS perspective must be when He sees/hears us panic at what to Him is not even an anthill. I suddenly get real thankful that He shows me far more patience than I sometimes show my students. Is my frustration reflecting Christ? Uhh, let me get back to you.

SDG

Ahh, Those Freshmen

Satire is a dying art form. Not because there are few who can do it, but because there are fewer and fewer who can recognize and appreciate it. I feel it is part of my responsibility to challenge my students to think critically, and not just in my field (chemistry), but to apply those skills also to other areas. Therefore, with this in mind, I try to bring current events and outside things into class, usually at the beginning, and apply it in some way to chemistry, or vice versa. Thus, the day after Saddam was convicted, I brought it up at the beginning of class, saying I was glad he’d been convicted, and explained that I had been a civilian technical contractor in Baghdad when he’d been caught. I opened the floor of the class for a few minutes to any questions about the situation and about my personal experience over there, and I felt it was reasonably productive and informative for them.

So, the day after the 2006 Congressional Elections and the turn over of the House and Senate to the Democrats, I had an inspiration. I announced the following to my 275 freshmen in General Chemistry:

“In honor of the election results yesterday, I am considering a major policy shift in this class. I am considering proposing grade reform, in the form of GPA welfare. If, at the end of the semester, you are making an ‘A’ in this course, you will ‘donate’ 7 points to the class. If you have a ‘B’, it will be 5 points, a ‘C+’, 3 points. Then, everyone making ‘D’s’ or ‘F’s’ will automatically receive a ‘C.’ If there are surplus points, I will retain them as administrative overhead, but if there are too few points, we will engage in deficit point spending. Of course, if I really wanted to be fair, I would eliminate all tests and homeworks, and just give everyone a ‘C.’ Chemistry learning would decrease, but everyone would feel better about it. How does that sound?”

During my spiel, the class as a whole were laughing and cheering, so I thought they were with me, and upon my final question, they erupted in support. Beginning to be concerned, I then asked, “Ok, those of you currently making ‘As’ and ‘Bs’, how does this sound?” Of course, they, a smaller fraction of the class, were strongly against the proposition. I then made a couple of comments that I thought strengthened the idea that I was not being serious.

After class, as normal, a group of students clustered around to ask some questions. One asked about a grading issue regarding the final, a normal reasonable question (although a month early). The guy behind him chimed in with, “So we are still guaranteed a ‘C’ even if we are failing?” I laughed and said, “Of course not.” The disappointment on his face was real, and at least one other person behind him sighed/groaned with disappointment.

SO, on the next class day, I made a statement of clarification. I introduced it with a definition of satire. I then explained that this is how welfare and other entitlement programs actually work, and this is how the income tax system is based. It may not be general chemistry, but some things are more important than molecules. And the sooner they understand how the real world works, the better for them. Then I moved on to the different kinds of solids that exist and why they have the structures they do as a result of their chemical and physical properties.

SDG

The Least of These, Our Brethren

The current economy is causing considerable stress to many of our institutions, and hard decisions are needed. Last year, our university president sent out a notice that in order to maintain resources to attract top faculty hires, salaries for all support staff were to be frozen. A colleague in our fellowship sent a letter to the editor of a local paper that shared my concerns. As a rule, the support staff already make much less than the faculty, yet they do critical work that few faculty would even consider doing--how many Nobel laureates do you know who are willing to clean a dorm bathroom at the end of a rowdy weekend? They are called support staff for a reason-they support our work so that we can focus on what we've trained for and love doing. Making life harder for them risks cutting us off at the knees.

Jesus said, "whatsoever you've done for the least of these my brethren, you have done it also to me." (Matthew 25:40) We ignore our support staff at our peril, on many fronts. Get to know the staff who clean your offices/labs. When you see the bathrooms being cleaned, thank them. Take your admin assistant out to lunch or otherwise let them know you appreciate them. This, too, is ministry.

Coda: this year, the president announced a one time merit bonus that nearly all staff are eligible for. This is a move in the right direction. Good job.

SDG