University of Toronto President explains why the Occupy for Palestine demands are unreasonable and unacceptable

The Occupy for Palestine protestors have occupied part of the campus of the University of Toronto. The protestors are making two demands on the university.

• “terminate all partnerships with Israeli academic institutions that operate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or sustain the apartheid policies, occupation and illegal settlement of these territories.”
• “divest its endowment, pension fund, and other financial holdings from all companies that provide Israel with military goods or services which sustain the Israeli apartheid, occupation and illegal settlement of the Palestinian Territories, as well as the ongoing attacks on Gaza.”

The President of the University of Toronto, Meric Gertler, has responded to these demands with a letter sent to the members of Occupy for Palestine [President Meric Gertler’s response to members of Occupy for Palestine].

With respect to the first demand, President Gertler points out that the university has a history of opposition to academic boycotts.

Such demands are antithetical to the University’s firm conviction that the best way to protect human rights is by staunchly defending and promoting academic freedom, freedom of expression, and the unfettered circulation of ideas within the global scholarly community. We have consistently emphasized that it is both inappropriate and, ultimately, counterproductive to single out academics working or studying in a particular country, and to hold them accountable for the actions or policies of their country’s government. Faculty and students are often among the most trenchant critics of their own government’s policies or actions. Events over the past year confirm that Israeli academics – as well as university leaders – have been amongst the most vociferous critics of the current government and its policies.

For this reason, the university rejects the Occupy for Palestine's first demand.

The second demand is unreasonable because the University does not directly control the pension fund; those investments are controlled by a Board of Trustees, some of whom are appointed by staff and faculty because a large percentage of the pension fund is their money. Also, the pension fund is a joint fund with the University of Guelph and Queen's University. Similarly, with respect to the endowment fund, the University does not directly control direct investments in companies so it cannot comply with the demand even if it wished to.

However, notwithstanding those practicalities, there are fundamental principles at stake that need to be addressed.

... the University’s Policy on Social and Political Issues with Respect to University Divestment notes in its opening Preamble that “As a general matter, the University does not take positions on social or political issues apart from those directly pertinent to higher education and academic research.” Accordingly, “the University will not consider proposals for restrictions on its investments that require the institution to take sides in matters that are properly the subject of ongoing academic inquiry and debate.” It further notes, as a corollary, that the University’s response to any requests for divestment “must be governed by the fundamental place of diversity of opinion within its community. Except in those situations in which the University must settle on an answer to controversial questions about how best to achieve its academic mission, the University risks abandoning its core values if it takes sides in ongoing debates and is perceived to be advancing a specific political or social position.”

This is consistent with the Chicago Principles on free expression and the Kalven Report on the University's role in political and social action. Meric Gertler does not specifically mention the Kalven Report from the University of Chicago but it's clear that it forms the basis of the University of Toronto's position. For that reason, and because that position is not widely understood, I quote from the report.

A university has a great and unique role to play in fostering the development of social and political values in a society. The role is defined by the distinctive mission of the university and defined too by the distinctive characteristics of the university as a community. It is a role for the long term.

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.

I am a University of Toronto retired professor and I fully support the position of the University President. The university cannot and should not take a position on social issues. I fully support the rights of students and faculty to express their personal views on such issues. For example, we may protest the behavior of the Israel government, of Hamas, the governments of Russia or Ukraine, and even, especially, our own government. Those are all legitimate targets of protest. The university is not a legitimate target. The university is not our enemy.

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Toronto is number 3 in health sciences!

I'm a retired member of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. For many decades researchers here have been complaining that they don't get the recognition they deserve. They were convinced that the University of Toronto and its associated hospital research insitutes were among the top health science research centers in the world.

That seems to be changing. In the March 14, 2024 issue of Nature we rank #3 in the world, ahead of many American health science centers that you might think are better [Leading 200 institutions in health sciences]. The University of Toronto is the only non-American institution in the top ten and one of only four in the top 20.

I expect to see the Chinese institutions move up in the next few years.

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Junior scientist snowflakes

A recent letter in Nature draws attention to a serious (?) problem in modern society; namely, the persecution of junior scientists by older scientists who ask them tough questions. Anand Kumar Sharma warns us: "Don’t belittle junior researchers in meetings". Here's what he says, ...

The most interesting part of a scientific seminar, colloquium or conference for me is the question and answer session. However, I find it upsetting to witness the unnecessarily hard time that is increasingly given to junior presenters at such meetings. As inquisitive scientists, we do not have the right to undermine or denigrate the efforts of fellow researchers — even when their reply is unconvincing.

It is our responsibility to nurture upcoming researchers. Firing at a speaker from the front row is unlikely to enhance discussions. In my experience, it is more productive to offer positive queries and suggestions, and save negative feedback for more-private settings.

On the (false) significance of a liberal arts education

Joshua Kim posted an article on Inside Higher Education last month (Dec. 8, 2015). The article described his answers to some questions he was being asked in a interview [How Would You Answer These 9 Reimagine Education Questions?].

Here's one of the questions and his answer ...

Question 4: Is there an innovation/idea/movement/methodology that excites you in terms of the future of education?

Yes. A liberal arts education.

In defense of curiosity-motivated research

I was prompted to write this post by three recent events. First, I read an article by Angelika Amon who made A case for more curiosity-driven basic research. She is the recipient of the 2015 ASCB [American Society for Cell Biology] Women in Cell Biology Sandra K. Masur Senior Leadership Award.

She says,

While conducting research to improve the lives of others is certainly a worthy motivation, it is not the main reason why I get up very early in the morning to go to the lab. To me, gaining an understanding of a basic principle in the purest Faustian terms is what I find most rewarding and exciting.

... For me, having a career in curiosity-driven basic research has been immensely rewarding. It is my hope that basic research remains one of the pillars of the American scientific enterprise, attracting the brightest young minds for generations to come. We as a community can help to make this a reality by telling people what we do and highlighting the importance of our work to their lives.

I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment although I would emphasize that the general public needs to understand that the important result of basic research is knowledge, and knowledge for its own sake is important. It's certainly far better than ignorance.

This kind of scholarly activity—curiosity motivated research—is the backbone of activity in the universities. At least it used to be. I still think that universities should stand up and defend the search for knowledge.

The second stimulus was an acknowledgement I recently stumbled across at the end of a paper by Ford Doolittle from 1982 (Doolittle, 1982).

And I' m most grateful to the Medical Research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for providing us with the funds to pursue our sometimes arcane interests without hindrance.

The old MRC has become CIHR. It's hard to imagine any scientist writing such an acknowledgement today since CIHR is notorious for hindering basic curiosity-motivated research [see Support basic research with new leaders at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)].

Not only have the funding agencies abandoned curiosity-motivated research, so have the universities and that brings me to the third event. My university, the University of Toronto, has been trying to direct health research for several decades. It does this by preferentially funding and supporting research in designated areas that are likely to become the beneficiaries of substantial donations and/or support from the private sector. This emphasis often goes hand-in-hand with government wishes and the subverted goals of the funding agencies they control.

The latest example is a new research facility across the street from the main campus in a brand-new, expensive, building that's part of MaRS [U of T expands research facilities in new partnership with MaRS].

The first U of T groups to move over to the new MaRS tower are the Medicine by Design initiative, the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research, the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine, and the ARCNet advanced research computing and data analytics centre. Other research groups from the Faculty of Medicine will move to MaRS to enhance existing networks in regenerative medicine, drug discovery and infectious disease.

The idea here is to take successful, well-funded, research groups from different campus-based basic science departments and group them together in units that focus on, for example, drug discovery and infectious diseases. They will get all the perks of a new building and new research facilities and enhanced prestige and recognition.

Meanwhile, those researchers working on basic curiosity-motivated projects like Drosophila development, the targeting of cellular RNAs, the survival of mitochondria, theoretical investigations of protein folding, the structure of glycoproteins, and protein turnover in yeast and bacteria—to name just a few—will remain in a 50 year old building that looks more like a prison than a modern research facility. The message is loud and clear. Curiosity-motivated basic researchers are second class scientists unless they just happen to be working on projects that Faculty administrators think are important

That's not how universities should behave. I expect university leaders and administrators to stand up for the search for knowledge and promote the rights of researchers to go where curiosity takes them. That's what academic freedom is all about.

I think you can make a case that grouping like-minded researchers together in specific goal-oriented research groups may not be the most successful strategy in a university environment even if you concede that it's up to universities to pick and choose research priorities. It reminds me of a discussion I had with Janet Stemwedel a few years ago. The discussion started off on the topic of ethics then changed to the difference between "science" and "technology." It applies also to the difference between curiosity-motivated research and goal-oriented research.

Is ‘what is this good for?’ a question to be discouraged?
Teaching Ethics in Science: Science v Technology

A worker in basic scientific research is motivated by a driving curiosity about the unknown. When his explorations yield new knowledge, he experiences the satisfaction of those who first attain the summit of a mountain or the upper reaches of a river flowing through unmapped territory. Discovery of truth and understanding of nature are his objectives. His professional standing among his fellows depends upon the originality and soundness of his work. Creativeness in science is of a cloth with that of the poet or painter.
National Science Foundation (USA) Annual Report 1953

I'm not arguing that scientists who are interested in drug discovery or infectious diseases aren't motivated by curiosity just like the rest of us. What I'm arguing is that it should not be the university's business to reward those whose curiosity leads them in one direction and penalize those who are curious about something else. That's sending a strong message and the message is "go in this direction" if you want the perks. That's not compatible with supporting curiosity-motivated research and the quest for knowledge in its purest form.

Maybe the university needs to stop supporting curiosity-motivated research? That's worth debating but in my experience debate is not what university administrators want to hear. It's rare that professors and researchers are invited to discuss the decisions made in the President's Office or the Dean's Office even though those decisions will seriously affect their lives and their careers.

Why can't we at least discuss these issues rather than read about them in the newspaper?

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Doolittle, W.F. (1982) Evolutionary molecular biology: where is it going? Canadian Journal of Biochemistry, 60:83-90.

Get a Job! - Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto

This is my department [Department of Biochemistry]. Apply now!

Don't be fooled by the ad. Cutting edge biochemists can also apply.

Applications are invited for two Tenure-Stream Positions

The Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto invites applications for two tenure-stream appointments, at the rank of Assistant Professor. The appointments will commence on 1 July, 2016.

We seek candidates undertaking cutting edge research in cell, systems, molecular, or chemical biology. Technical knowledge including but not limited to metabolomics, synthetic biology, and structural biology (particularly, cryo-electron microscopy) that will complement our existing strengths would also be an asset.

Candidates must have a Ph.D. or equivalent in Biochemistry, Biophysics, Molecular Biology, Genetics, or a related discipline and have postdoctoral experience with an established record of excellence in research as demonstrated through a strong track record in publication. The successful candidates will be expected to mount an original and independently-funded research program at the highest international level and to publish articles in internationally recognized journals. The successful candidates must also demonstrate teaching excellence at the undergraduate and graduate levels through letters of reference. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

The Department is one of the premier academic life sciences departments in North America, with 67 full-time faculty members and more than 200 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

All qualified candidates are invited to apply online by clicking on the link below. All application materials should be submitted online and include: 1) a detailed curriculum vitae; 2) a 3-5 page statement detailing research interests and objectives as well as potential teaching interests. We recommend combining documents into one or two files in PDF/MS Word format. Applicants should also arrange for three letters of reference commenting specifically on the applicant’s experience in teaching and research, to be sent directly to the department at chair.biochemistry@utoronto.ca by November 16, 2015.

Review of applications will begin on November 16, 2015, and applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Submission guidelines can be found at: http://uoft.me/how-to-apply. If you have questions about this position, please contact us at chair.biochemistry@utoronto.ca. For more information about the Department of Biochemistry, please visit http://biochemistry.utoronto.ca/.

The University of Toronto offers the opportunity to teach, conduct research and live in one of the most diverse cities in the world. The University is strongly committed to diversity within its community and especially welcomes applications from visible minority group members, women, Aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, members of sexual minority groups, and others who may contribute to further diversification of ideas.

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents of Canada will be given priority.

For further details and to apply online please visit https://utoronto.taleo.net/careersection/10050/jobdetail.ftl?job=1501211

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What is "PeerWise"?

I came across an interesting article about "PeerWise."

Hardy, J., Bates, S.P., Casey, M.M., Galloway, K.D., Galloway, R.K., Kay, A.E., Kirsop, P., and McQueen, H.A. (2015) Student-Generated Content: Enhancing learning through sharing multiple-choice questions. International Journal of Science Education 36: 2180-2194. [doi: 10.1080/09500693.2014.916831]

Abstract

The relationship between students' use of PeerWise, an online tool that facilitates peer learning through student-generated content in the form of multiple-choice questions (MCQs), and achievement, as measured by their performance in the end-of-module examinations, was investigated in 5 large early-years science modules (in physics, chemistry and biology) across 3 research-intensive UK universities. A complex pattern was observed in terms of which type of activity (writing, answering or commenting on questions) was most beneficial for students; however, there was some evidence that students of lower intermediate ability may have gained particular benefit. In all modules, a modest but statistically significant positive correlation was found between students' PeerWise activity and their examination performance, after taking prior ability into account. This suggests that engaging with the production and discussion of student-generated content in the form of MCQs can support student learning in a way that is not critically dependent on course, institution, instructor or student.

This sounds like a good way to encourage some student-centered learning in large classes. We have several biochemistry classes in our department that could benefit.

Does anyone have any experience with PeerWise?

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University of Toronto Professor, teaching stream

After years of negotiation between the administration and the Faculty Association, the university has finally allowed full time lecturers to calls themselves "professors" [U of T introduces new teaching stream professorial ranks]. This brings my university into line with some other progressive universities that recognize the value of teaching.

Unfortunately, the news isn't all good. These new professors will have a qualifier attached to their titles. The new positions are: assistant professor (conditional), teaching stream; assistant professor, teaching stream; associate professor, teaching stream; and professor, teaching stream. Research and scholarly activity is an important component of these positions. The fact that the activity is in the field of pedagogy or the discipline in which they teach should not make a difference.

Meanwhile, current professors will not have qualifiers such as "professor: research," or "professor: administration," or "professor: physician," or "professor: mostly teaching."

The next step is to increase the status of these new professors by making searches more rigorous and more competitive, by keeping the salaries competitive with other professors in the university, and by insisting on high quality research and scholarly activity in the field of pedagogy. The new professors will have to establish an national and international reputation in their field just like other professors. They will have to publish in the pedagogical literature. They are not just lecturers. Almost all of them can do this if they are given the chance.

Some departments have to change the way they treat the new professors. The University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA) has published a guideline: Teaching Stream Workload. Here's the part on research and scholarly activity ....

• In section 7.2, the WLPP offers the following definition of scholarship: “Scholarship refers to any combination of discipline-based scholarship in relation to or relevant to the field in which the faculty member teaches, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and creative/professional activities. Teaching stream faculty are entitled to reasonable time for pedagogical/professional development in determining workload.”
• It is imperative that teaching stream faculty have enough time in their schedules, that is, enough “space” in their appointments, to allow for the “continued pedagogical/professional development” that the appointments policy (PPAA) calls for. Faculty teaching excessive numbers of courses or with excessive administrative loads will not have the time to engage in scholarly activity. Remember that UTFA fought an Association grievance to win the right for teaching stream faculty to “count” their discipline-based scholarship. That scholarship “counts” in both PTR review and review for promotion to senior lecturer.

And here's a rule that many departments disobey ...

Under 4.1, the WLPP reminds us of a Memorandum of Agreement workload protection: “faculty will not be required to teach in all three terms, nor shall they be pressured to volunteer to do so.” Any faculty member who must teach in all three terms should come to see UTFA.

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Molecular Evolution Exam - April 2015

Here's the final exam in my course. Students have to answer the first two questions and three of the next five questions. How would you do?

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1. Choose a subtopic from your essay and explain it better than you did in your essay and/or rebut the comments and criticisms made by the marker/grader.


2. Michael Lynch says in The Origins of Genome Architecture ....
   

   Nothing in Evolution Makes Sense Except in the Light of Population Genetics
   Evolution is a population genetic process governed by four fundamental forces, which jointly dictate the relative abilities of genotype variants to expand through a species. Darwin articulated a clear but informal description of one of those forces, selection (including natural and sexual selection), whose central role in the evolution of complex phenotypic traits is universally accepted, and for which an elaborate formal theory in terms of changing genotype frequencies now exists. The remaining three evolutionary forces, however, are non-adaptive in the sense that they are not the function of the fitness properties of individuals: mutation (broadly including insertions, deletions, and duplications) is the fundamental source of variation on which natural selection acts; recombination (including crossing-over and gene conversion) assorts variation within and among chromosomes; and random genetic drift insures that gene frequencies deviate a bit from generation to generation independently of other forces. Given the century of theoretical and empirical work devoted to the study of evolution, the only logical conclusion is that these four broad classes of mechanisms are, in fact, the only fundamental forces of evolution. Their relative intensity, directionality, and variation over time define the way in which evolution proceeds in a particular context.

   Do you agree with Lynch that “Nothing in Evolution Makes Sense Except in the Light of Population Genetics”? If so, why isn’t population genetics taught in introductory biology courses? If not, why not?


3. Imagine that identical female twins were born to a woman in 1000 AD. Imagine that you could find a direct descendant of each twin in 2015. If you sequence the complete genomes of the descendants, approximately how many differences would you expect to find? How do these compare to the differences between any two randomly selected individuals from the same part of the world? Explain your reasoning and describe any assumptions you make. Think carefully before you answer. The second question is the most important one. (Human mutation rate = 130 mutations per generation. Haploid genome size = 3.2 × 10⁹ bp.)


4. Why do some scientists think that there is no unique tree of life?


5. Many people believe that recombination evolved because it increases genetic variation in a population and this provided a selective advantage over species that didn’t have recombination. Do you agree with this explanation for the evolution of recombination? Why, or why not? What are the other possibilities?


6. What is “evolvability ”and why could it be important in evolution? Why are some scientists skeptical of this claim?


7. Richard Dawkins once wrote,
   

   Even the most ardent neutralist is quite happy to agree that natural selection is responsible for all adaptation. All he is saying is that most evolutionary change is not adaptation. He may well be right, although one school of geneticists would not agree. From the sidelines, my own hope is that the neutralists will win, because this will make it so much easier to work out evolutionary relationships and rates of evolution. Everybody on both sides agrees that neutral evolution cannot lead to adaptive improvement, for the simple reason that neutral evolution is, by definition, random, and adaptive improvement is, by definition, non-random. Once again, we have failed to find any alternative to Darwinian selection, as an explanation for the feature of life that distinguishes it from non-life, namely adaptive complexity.
   
   Richard Dawkins (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. p. 304

   Can you describe situations in Richard Lenski’s ongoing evolution experiment where neutral or deleterious alleles were essential for adaptive change?

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Do offensive pictures justify violence?

This video raises many complicated issues. It's a confrontation between students and anti-abortion protestors on the University of Oregon campus on March 10, 2015.

Most of the buzz on the internet is about the first policeman who tried to defuse a potentially violent confrontation by telling the main protestor that he did not have the right to free speech on a private university campus. He almost succeeded in getting the protestor to hide his offensive signs.

When the sargeant showed up, he overruled his officer and told the protestor he could display his signs and stay on the campus. I agree with the sergeant but I have a great deal of sympathy with what the first policeman was trying to do.

The University of Toronto ranks 16th in the world!

The latest Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings for 2015 are out [The World Reputation Rankings]. This ranking list universities by their academic reputation. It has little to do with undergraduate education, which in most cases, is just an important sideline for these universities.

The University of Toronto ranks #16 on this list. I mention this because many people in the USA are unaware of the quality of universities in other countries. They will not be surprised to learn that Harvard is #1 but do they know that Cambridge is #2 and Oxford is #3?

Canada has three universities in the top 40 (McGill #35 and the University of British Columbia #37 are the other two). Our population is 35 million.

The USA has twenty-one universities in the top 40. It's population is 320 million.

The United Kingdom has seven in the top 40 with a population of 65 million.

It won't be long before China takes over.

It seems pretty obvious that the number and quality of universities is proportional to the wealth and the population of countries in the "Western" English-speaking world. It is not obvious that any one country can claim to be better than the others at fostering good universities. If you had to pick a country, it looks like the United Kingdom would be the clear winner.

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Here's a good example of a tenured professor who should be fired

I am a staunch defendant of academic freedom but tenure doesn't protect you from gross misconduct. Here's an example where a Professor of Philosophy at UNC faced dismissal hearings and, wisely, decided to resign. I'm betting that ethics wasn't her specialty.

Why did she resign? Read about it at: Jan Boxill, implicated in UNC scandal, resigns.

Apparently Boxill was counselor to the women’s basketball team and she participated in a scheme to give athletes decent grades in "courses" that didn't exist or required minimal work. Some of the courses were in African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) and some were philosophy courses.

[The Provost's] letter to Boxill said there was "compelling evidence that over a period of several years you knowingly participated in grossly improper practices in your roles as a member of the faculty and an academic advisor to student athletes."

The letter, released Thursday, accused Boxill of several acts of misconduct:

▪ Requesting that AFAM employees provide specific grades to students.

▪ Steering athletes to AFAM courses that she knew were not overseen or taught by faculty, required only a paper and were graded by former office manager Deborah Crowder.

▪ Editing and writing portions of text inserted into the papers of the students she tutored.

▪ Allowing students to enroll in independent study classes in philosophy that required little academic work.

Bye-bye Boxhill.

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Is the University of Toronto promoting quackery and pseudoscience?

There's a conference this Saturday at the University of Toronto on the Scarborough campus. It features presentations by a number of leading homeopaths and naturopaths. You may not be familiar with them so if you want a brief summary of their quackery check out Scott Gavura's post at Science-Based Medicine: Pseudoscience North: What’s happening to the University of Toronto?.

That post documents a number of very troubling things going on at my university.

The conference is organized by an outside a student group who pays to hold the event on the university campus. This is very common and it does not mean the the university endorses the conference. I believe the contract specifies that such an endorsement must not be implied or stated.

The poster contains a prominent sign using the University of Toronto logo and crest. That certainly looks to me like the university is sponsoring and endorsing the event. I am trying to contact Bruce Kidd, Principal of the University of Toronto, Scarborough to clarify the situation.

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Should universities defend free speech and academic freedom?

This post was prompted by a discussion I'm having with Jerry Coyne on whether he should be trying to censor university professors who teach various forms of creationism.

I very much enjoyed Jerry Coyne's stance on free speech in his latest blog website post: The anti-free speech police ride again. Here's what he said,

How do we teach our students that basic research is important?

There's a fabulous editorial in the Toronto Star today. It's critical of the Prime Minister and the Conservative Party of Canada for the damage they are doing to science in Canada [Canada needs a brighter federal science policy: Editorial].

Here's some excerpts ...

Finding a fan of Canada’s current science policy among those who care about such things would be a discovery worthy of Banting and Best. Few if any would contend that Ottawa’s approach is sound; rather, the debate in 2014 has been over what in the world would possess a government to pursue such a catastrophic course.

According to one school of thought, the answer is simple: the Conservatives are cavemen set on dragging Canada into a dark age in which ideology reigns unencumbered by evidence. Let’s call this the Caveman Theory.

The other, more moderate view holds that Prime Minister Stephen Harper et al are not anti-science – that they at least understand the importance of research and development to their "jobs and growth" agenda – but are instead merely confused about how the enterprise works and about the role government must play to help it flourish. Let’s call this the Incompetence Theory.

The rest of the editorial describes how Stephen Harper and his Conservative buddies have directed funding agencies to concentrate on research that will be of direct benefit to Canadian for-profit companies.

It concludes with ...

Whatever the government’s motives, whatever it understands or does not about how science works, it has over the last eight years devastated Canadian research in a way that will be hard to reverse. Private sector R&D continues to lag, but in our efforts to solve that problem we have seriously reduced our capacity for primary research, squandering a long-held Canadian advantage. Meanwhile, we have earned an international reputation for muzzling scientists, for defunding research that is politically inconvenient and for perversely conflating scientific goals with business ones, thus dooming both. Our current funding system is less well placed than it was in 2006 to promote innovation and our science culture has been so eroded that we are unlikely to attract the top talent we need to compete in the knowledge economy.

Whether it was anti-intellectualism, incompetence or both that led us to this dark place, let this coming election year bring the beginning of a climb back into the light.

How can the government of Canada be so ignorant? It's because they have a huge amount of support from the general public who see all research as technology. They are only willing to support research that helps the economy.

Most people are not interested in research that simply advances our knowledge of the natural world.

What are we doing as educators to reverse this trend? Not very much, as it turns out. Many of our courses in biochemistry focus on how biochemistry can benefit medicine as though this was the only reason for learning about biochemistry.¹ Our department is discussing whether we should have undergraduate courses on drug discovery and how drugs are brought to market. We are considering a co-op program where students will spend some time working in the private sector. We are toying with the idea of creating an entirely new program that will train students to work in the pharmaceutical industry.

It's no wonder that the general public thinks of science as the servant of industry. We are not doing a very good job of teaching undergraduates about the importance of knowledge and the value of scientific thinking. In fact, we are doing the opposite. We are supporting the Stephen Harper agenda.

Don't be surprised if it comes back to bite you in the future.

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1. We teach medical case studies in our introductory biochemistry course for science undergraduates!

Professors and stress

Last January I posted a note about how stressful the job of university professor can be [University Professor is one of the least stressful jobs in America?]. That was a followup to a previous post that I wrote in response to Forbes magazine claiming that university professor have an easy job [I Have the Least Stressful Job!!!]. (That's me on the right in the picture. If you don't think this is stressful then you ought to try dressing up like that!)

A writer for the Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada) contacted me about an article she was writing on stress in academia. The article has been published and she got it right! [Increased pressures, class sizes taking their toll on faculties in academia. I even got quoted.

Research funds are also difficult to access. New funding rules that emphasize commercial potential, particularly in the sciences, mean that professors have to deal with the prospect of their careers being cut short if they don’t win grants to run a lab.

“My younger colleagues are having to survive in stressful situations that I never had to survive,” said Larry Moran, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto. “Government policies have redirected research funds so that it’s hit and miss if you get grants. ... When you fail at this job, there aren’t a lot of other places to go,” he said.

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On the importance of course evaluations at the University of Toronto

My university (the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada) recently developed a new policy and new procedures on undergraduate student evaluations [Policy on the Student Evaluation of Teaching in Courses]. The policy was the work of a committee that began with the assumption that student evaluations were a good thing. As far as I can tell, the committee did not spend any time examining the pedagogical literature to see if the evidence supported their assumptions. As you can see from the title of the policy, the assumed purpose of student evaluations is to judge the quality of teaching.

The university has a website: Course Evaluations. Here's what the administrators say ...

Course evaluations are read by many people at UofT, including instructors, chairs, deans, the provost and the president. They are used for a variety of purposes, including:

• To help instructors design and deliver their courses in ways that impact their students’ learning
• To make changes and improvements to individual courses and programs
• To assess instructors for annual reviews
• To assess instructors for tenure and promotion review
• To provide students with summary information about other students’ learning experiences in UofT courses

It is essential that students have a voice in these key decision-making processes and that’s why your course evaluation is so important at the University of Toronto.

Your feedback is used to improve your courses, to better your learning experience and to recognize great teaching.

Evaluating students' evaluations

Student evaluations are an important part of the undergraduate experience at most universities. But how effective are they?

You would think that universities might have studied this question and applied critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning to the question. You might think that the popularity of student evaluations at universities is largely because they have proven to be reliable indicators of teaching effectiveness.

Think again. The pedagogical literature contains dozens of studies indicating that student evaluations are not reliable indicators of teaching effectiveness. Here are some recent papers that show you what the experts are thinking and what kind of evidence is being published.

Gormally, C., Evans, M. and Brickman, P. (2014) Feedback about Teaching in Higher Ed: Neglected Opportunities to Promote Change. CBE-Life Sciences Education 13, 187-199. [doi: 10.1187/cbe.13-12-023]

Despite ongoing dissemination of evidence-based teaching strategies, science teaching at the university level is less than reformed. Most college biology instructors could benefit from more sustained support in implementing these strategies. One-time workshops raise awareness of evidence-based practices, but faculty members are more likely to make significant changes in their teaching practices when supported by coaching and feedback. Currently, most instructional feedback occurs via student evaluations, which typically lack specific feedback for improvement and focus on teacher-centered practices, or via drop-in classroom observations and peer evaluation by other instructors, which raise issues for promotion, tenure, and evaluation. The goals of this essay are to summarize the best practices for providing instructional feedback, recommend specific strategies for providing feedback, and suggest areas for further research. Missed opportunities for feedback in teaching are highlighted, and the sharing of instructional expertise is encouraged.

Osborne, D. and Janssen, H. (2014) Flipping the medical school classroom: student acceptance and student evaluation issues (719.4). The FASEB Journal 28, 719.4.

Flipping the classroom has generated improvement on summative exam scores in our first-year medical students; however, faculty members adopting this teaching methodology often receive lower satisfaction rating on student evaluations. In previous years, these same professors received outstanding evaluation ratings when the same topics were presented using standard didactic lectures. We feel that this decreased student satisfaction may be result of two distinct causes. First, students who have been accustomed to didactic lectures often come to class unprepared and therefore are incapable of the critical thinking and problem solving skills need in the flipped classroom. Second, the evaluation tool which was appropriate for didactic lectures is inappropriate for the analyzing the flipped classroom methodology. The student evaluations have improved in that last several years; however, the transition was not accomplished without difficulty. Anyone planning to pursue this teaching approach should be prepared to weather the storm of sub-standard student evaluations and, if possible, prepare their administrators for this potential outcome. Our experience suggests that faculty persistence targeted at changing student culture and expectations can help in this process. Accurately determining student’s acceptance of this relative new teaching methodology is important. Improvements in the teaching methodology can be made only when the evaluation tool is valid. It is felt a new evaluation tool can be developed based on results obtained in student focus-groups coupled with cognitive assessment outcomes.

Wilson, J.H., Beyer, D. and Monteiro, H. (2014) Professor age affects student ratings: halo effect for younger teachers. College Teaching 62, 20-24. [doi: 10.1080/87567555.2013.825574]

Student evaluations of teaching provide valued information about teaching effectiveness, and studies support the reliability and validity of such measures. However, research also illustrates potential moderation of student perceptions based on teacher gender, attractiveness, and even age, although the latter receives little research attention. In the present study, we examined the potential effects of professor age and gender on student perceptions of the teacher as well as their anticipated rapport in the classroom. We also asked students to rate each instructor's attractiveness based on societal beliefs about age and beauty. We expected students to rate a picture of a middle-aged female professor more negatively (and less attractive) than the younger version of the same woman. For the young versus old man offered in a photograph, we expected no age effects. Although age served as a detriment for both genders, evaluations suffered more based on aging for female than male professors.

Blair, E. and Valdez Noel, K. (2014) Improving higher education practice through student evaluation systems: is the student voice being heard? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1-16. [doi: 10.1080/02602938.2013.875984]

Many higher education institutions use student evaluation systems as a way of highlighting course and lecturer strengths and areas for improvement. Globally, the student voice has been increasing in volume, and capitalising on student feedback has been proposed as a means to benefit teacher professional development. This paper examines the student evaluations at a university in Trinidad and Tobago in an effort to determine whether the student voice is being heard. The research focused on students’ responses to the question, ‘How do you think this course could be improved?’ Student evaluations were gathered from five purposefully selected courses taught at the university during 2011–2012 and then again one year later, in 2012–2013. This allowed for an analysis of the selected courses. Whilst the literature suggested that student evaluation systems are a valuable aid to lecturer improvement, this research found little evidence that these evaluations actually led to any real significant changes in lecturers’ practice.

Braga, M., Paccagnella, M., and Pellizzari, M. (2014) Evaluating students’ evaluations of professors. Economics of Education 41:71–88. [doi: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2014.04.002]

This paper contrasts measures of teacher effectiveness with the students’ evaluations for the same teachers using administrative data from Bocconi University. The effectiveness measures are estimated by comparing the performance in follow-on coursework of students who are randomly assigned to teachers. We find that teacher quality matters substantially and that our measure of effectiveness is negatively correlated with the students’ evaluations of professors. A simple theory rationalizes this result under the assumption that students evaluate professors based on their realized utility, an assumption that is supported by additional evidence that the evaluations respond to meteorological conditions.

Stark, P.B. and Freishtat, R. (2014) An Evaluation of Course Evaluations. [PDF]

Student ratings of teaching have been used, studied, and debated for almost a century. This article examines student ratings of teaching from a statistical perspective. The common practice of relying on averages of student teaching evaluation scores as the primary measure of teaching effectiveness for promotion and tenure decisions should be abandoned for substantive and statistical reasons: There is strong evidence that student responses to questions of “effectiveness” do not measure teaching effectiveness. Response rates and response variability matter. And comparing averages of categorical responses, even if the categories are represented by numbers, makes little sense. Student ratings of teaching are valuable when they ask the right questions, report response rates and score distributions, and are balanced by a variety of other sources and methods to evaluate teaching....

Recommendations

1. Drop omnibus items about “overall teaching effectiveness” and “value of the course” from teaching evaluations (SET): They are misleading.
2. Do not average or compare averages of SET scores: Such averages do not make sense statistically. Instead, report the distribution of scores, the number of responders, and the response rate.
3. When response rates are low, extrapolating from responders to the whole class is unreliable.
4. Pay attention to student comments—but understand their limitations. Students typically are not well situated to evaluate pedagogy.
5. Avoid comparing teaching in courses of different types, levels, sizes, functions, or disciplines.
6. Use teaching portfolios as part of the review process.
7. Use classroom observation as part of milestone reviews.
8. To improve teaching and evaluate teaching fairly and honestly, spend more time observing the teaching and looking at teaching materials.

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How to become a better teacher (not)

Here's a video by Dr. Lodge McCammon. He has a website: lodgemccammon.com. Here are his credentials.

Dr. Lodge McCammon is an educational innovator. His career began in 2003 at Wakefield High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he taught Civics and AP Economics. McCammon received a Ph.D. from NC State University in 2008 and continued his work by developing innovative practices and sharing them with students, teachers and schools across the world. McCammon is a musician who spends much of his time in the recording studio composing curriculum-based music. His songs and related materials can be found in Discovery Education Streaming. He is also an education consultant who provides professional services, including keynote speeches, presentations, curriculum development, and a variety of training programs.

Watch the video and discuss. I think you can guess what I think. I reject one of the basic premise; namely that online courses are taught by the very best teachers. How do we know who is the best teacher just by watching videos?

Here's a question for your consideration. It concerns "reflective teaching." Imagine that you record yourself teaching an incorrect version of the citric acid cycle or a flawed version of the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. How many times do you have to watch that video to recognize that what you are teaching is wrong? Is it more than three? Less than ten?

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On the meaning of pH optima for enzyme activity

The students in my lab course measured the activity of trypsin at different pH's. They discovered that the enzyme was most active at a pH of about 8.0-8.5 and that activity fell off rapidly at pH values above and below this optimum. This is consistent with results in the published literature (see figure from Sipsos and Merkel, 1970). Here's the exam question ...

What was the pH optimum of trypsin activity? Can you explain this in terms of the normal biological function of the enzyme and the physiological conditions under which it is active? Do you expect there to be a strong correlation between the optimal pH of an enzyme’s activity and the pH of the cell/environment where it is active?

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Sipos, T., and Merkel, J. R. (1970) An effect of calcium ions on the activity, heat stability, and structure of trypsin. Biochemistry, 9:2766-2775 [doi: 10.1021/bi00816a003]