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Two Assistant/Associate Faculty Positions in Science and Technology Policy Research, CIRES, University of Colorado at Boulder

The Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder announces that it is recruiting for two faculty positions at the assistant/associate (with tenure) level in science and technology policy research with a focus on decision making under uncertainty. One position would be rostered in the Graduate School and within the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), the parent Institute of the Policy Center. Departmental affiliation for this position is open. The second position will be rostered in the College of Arts & Sciences in its Environmental Studies Program with a formal affiliation with CIRES and the Policy Center. We are particularly interested in candidates with strong interdisciplinary interests and the ability to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in science and technology policy and/or science and technology studies. Area of research specialization and disciplinary background are open. Required qualifications are a PhD in a cognate field. A major commitment to and demonstrated excellence in research and the ability to secure external research funding are expected, as well as commitment to excellence in teaching at both graduate and undergraduate levels.

Applicants should send letter of interest, curriculum vitae, evidence of teaching effectiveness, and three names for letters of reference to Karen Dempsey, CIRES Human Resources via email: jobs@cires.colorado.edu. Questions can be sent to Prof. Roger Pielke Jr., Chair, Search Committee for Science and Technology Policy Research: pielke@cires.colorado.edu.
Review of completed applications will begin December 1, 2006 and continue until the position is filled. For more information about CIRES, see http://cires.colorado.edu, and the Science and Technology Policy Center /cires.colorado.edu/science/centers/policy/

The University of Colorado at Boulder is committed to diversity and equality in education and employment.

A university class with about 90 students has been assigned Prometheus, and several other weblogs, as part of its reading assignments this semester. Welcome! The course instructor has emailed me to ask if I would write up a short note about what purpose our weblog serves and to offer some pointers to a few key posts on various topics. This seems like a worthwhile exercise, so here goes.

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Many of my colleagues at the University of Colorado are convinced that our local Boulder newspaper, The Daily Camera, carries some grudge against the university. Today’s front page headline in the Camera on the release yesterday of a report on tenure here does not hurt their case:

CU tenure flawed: Independent study says it is too hard to fire tenured professors

Here is how the Chronicle of Higher Education headlined their coverage of the same report:

Outside Report Applauds Tenure System at U. of Colorado

Interesting difference in perspective. For those interested in the tenure report itself, you can find it here.

In yesterday’s Daily Camera (our local newspaper here in Boulder) Todd Neff had a good article on a complicated subject – academic earmarks. Earmarks are directed spending by members of Congress to their district. Earmarks are typically not a large amount when compared to the discretionary budget, but they have been growing in recent years and have caught the attention of a number of members of Congress. Historically, earmarks have been an acceptable and important mechanism for members of Congress to “bring home the bacon” to their districts. Earmarks have to be taken out of existing programs, and thus represent a reshuffling of spending priorities from that originally authorized by Congress. For some programs, like those related to transportation, earmarking is expected and fairly typical (although there are exceptions).

“Academic” earmarks refer to directed spending on research and development programs. Many researchers oppose such earmarks because they circumvent most institutional mechanisms of peer review and thus place politics above merit. In addition, academic earmarks can materially affect the performance of government research programs if the money for the earmark comes from an existing research program. From the perspective of a government program manager, an academic earmark looks very much like an unexpected budget cut. None of this is to say that good work can’t be done under an earmark, only that it introduces a very different mechanism for resource allocation than a merit-based, strategic-focused approach that is difficult enough under ordinary circumstances.

Back to Boulder. It turns out that some of the budgets of NOAA labs here in Boulder are being earmarked, effectively resulting in cuts to programs core to the NOAA mission. In the Daily Camera article I am quoted suggesting that universities need to take a greater role in policing academic earmarks, or else they should not be surprised when in some situation scientific excellence is subsumed to jobs and money. Here is an excerpt:

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John V. Lombardi, chancellor and a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has a great essay on making sense of the seeming nonsense of the bureaucratic structure of universities. He writes,

“How universities are organized can confuse not only the sympathetic, casual observer of higher education but students and staff members as well… Insiders know, however, that all of these organizational permutations reflect not only significant changes in the universe of knowledge but also internal structures of personality, politics, money and power as well as the external pressures of fad, fashion or funding. Academic reorganization is a frequent exercise on university campuses, and often generates tremendous controversy because each effort signifies a potential for gain or loss in academic positioning for money, power and prestige. Although, to outsiders, the warfare that these reorganizations frequently provoke can often appear out of proportion to the stakes involved, insiders know that organizational structure can influence internal distributions of resources. Even more importantly for many faculty and students, the organizational structure serves as a prestige map.”

Read the whole essay.

In an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post, James E. McWilliams, an assistant professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos, lays into the academic enterprise. He writes,

“The few history PhDs who manage to land full-time academic jobs quickly learn that the easiest way to become distinguished in the profession is through a lifetime of scholarly dedication to a single, defining and often very small idea — one that usually has no bearing on contemporary events. That’s precisely how to “make a contribution” — the be-all and end-all for a serious academic. More often than not, though, that contribution is to our own job security and status within a small club rather than to a public debate badly in need of a broader historical perspective.”

Although I empathize with his frustrations, I don’t think that all of academia is as bleak an enterprise as McWilliams suggests. In particular, academia diverges from McWilliams’ characterization with the growth of interdisciplinary, policy-focused graduate programs that are educating a new cadre of graduate students on how to be a specialist in the integration of knowledge as a contribution to real-world concerns. One such program is the University of Colorado’s now-3-year-old experiemnt in its interdisciplinary graduate Environmental Studies Program. But there many others as well.

We often hear calls for society to become more informed about science. A letter in Nature this week turns this around and calls for scientists to become more informed about society. An excerpt:

“Recent calls by the United Nations (Nature 430, 5; 2004) for stronger science input to support aid policy, in particular for feeding the hungry, are welcome. In the United Kingdom, organizations such as the Department for International Development (DFID) need to improve their use of the science base. But there is also scope for the scientific community to improve its understanding of development issues surrounding agricultural policy, if scientists are to be productively engaged in fighting world hunger and poverty.”

Thanks to SciDev.net for the link.

In today’s New York Times, Nicolas Kristof has a column on gene therapies and its effects on people and humankind.

He closes his essay with this comment:

“Perhaps the most important and complex decision in the history of our species is approaching: in what ways should we improve our genetic endowment? Yet we are neither focused on this question nor adequately schooled to resolve it.

So we desperately need greater scientific literacy, and it’s past time for a post-Sputnik style revitalization of science education, especially genetics, to help us figure out if we want our descendants to belong to the same species as we do.”

If we have $1.00 to spend on “the most important and complex decision in the history of our species” I wonder what fraction it would make sense to devote to spend on a massive campaign of public education, versus other possible investments.

Kristof provides no data, but I’d guess his call for public education is grounded in his underlying assumptions of democracy (see my post earlier today) rather than any empirical evidence that such campaigns actually led to better societal outcomes. But I’d welcome any evidence to the contrary.

The New Yorker online has an excellent article by Louis Menand on voting and democracy, or at least how these issues look through the lens of political scientists.

Menand writes:

“Skepticism about the competence of the masses to govern themselves is as old as mass self-government…”

Political scientists, at least, have given up on the notion that the public can come to well-informed judgments about political candidates, much less complicated issues of policy. The perspective of political scientists raises difficult questions about the viability of “public education” as a strategy for coming to grips with complicated issues like global climate change, genetic technologies, and international terrorism.

But if people aren’t the source of wisdom in a democracy, then where does it come from? Menad offers two alternatives in the form of three theories:

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Science magazine reports today:

“Graduate student enrollment in science and engineering (S&E) programs across the United States reached a record high in the fall of 2002, according to a new report from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The 6.1% increase, to 455,000, is driven by rising numbers of U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and foreign students already in the country and comes despite a 6% drop in the number of first-time foreign students.”

Surely this recond number of graduate students is related to record high funding for science and technology, and the corresponding availability of funded graduate student positions. Could it be that oft-expressed concern about a shortage of graduate students in science and engineering is just a euphemism for calling for larger S&T budgets?