An embarrassment of riches

Cross-posted at Context and Variation.

I have been quite the fancypants lately. In addition to the flood of new traffic from Science Online 2011, and in particular my post on the women scienceblogging panel, folks have been heading here to talk about broader issues of underrepresentation and racism, and, of course, iron-deficiency and the ladybusiness.

Then, because of a happy accident and the fact that Laura Weisskopf Bleill of Chambanamoms.com wanted to help me promote some focus groups I am running for a study on doctor-patient relationships around hormonal contraceptives,* I became a Chambana Mom to Know. At the same time I was recruited by the ever-clever John Hawks to do a bloggingheads.tv diavlog where we discuss women in science, blogging in academia, my fieldwork, the ladybusiness, #aaafail, and lots of other stuff.

I am feeling quite overwhelmed by the fact that I have a lot of new readers, and this is no longer the intimate space it once was (usually when I write, I imagine myself to be talking to a group of female friends while we sit on the couch and hang out - it now feels like giving a seminar to a medium-sized room full of people, where we are somehow still able to manage cool sidebar conversations). This is new and exciting, and while there is a part of me that will grieve for that little space where I knew most of the people who read me, I am delighted to bring anthropology to more people and keep pushing myself to write more accessibly for more people.

So, I am trying to think of next steps in terms of my writing. I still owe you all a summary of the survey I did on my readers a few weeks ago: given my day job commitments, that is the plan for what will probably be my single big post of the week.

However, I also want to continue to do two things: shorter researchblogging posts on articles I find interesting, and longer posts on specific issues around women's health, anthropology and medicine. So if there are particular papers you want me to read, particular topics you want me to cover... head over there to say so in the comments!


*I need to double-check with the IRB about whether I have approval to advertise this on the blog. If it turns out I do, expect a post on it this week!

LEE folks in the news

Dr. Clancy was mentioned by Robin Lloyd in Scientific American today regarding the panel she co-chaired with Anne Jefferson, Sheril Kirschenbaum and Joanne Manaster at Science Online 2011 this past weekend on the Perils of Blogging as a Woman under her Real Name.

A quick highlight:

The entire concept of a woman science blogger overturns various long-held assumptions about science and gender. Kirshenbaum urged the session audience to bring important science and health information to women readers even at old guard, mass-media "women's" magazines such as Redbook. "I am adamantly a believer that we have to reach beyond [conventional science news outlets]," she said. "Science is not addressed to women. It's written for men and marketed to men even if men at the magazines don't claim that it is."
A face-palm reaction rippled among the 20 or so mostly female attendees of the session when "Not exactly rocket science" blogger Ed Yong (@edyong209) said, "I suspect there is a bias in terms of what is pushed to me through Twitter." He explained that, although other male writers often ask him to retweet links to their latest blog posts, not a single such request has ever come from a woman writer. Women in the room immediately broke into laughter, and commented about the novelty and presumptuousness to them of such a practice. Said Yong, "The fact that people haven't done this speaks volumes."

Check it out!

Cross-posted at Context and Variation

Dr. Clancy's IVF story, now on CNN.com

I'm in a bragging mood, because it's not every day your face is on the front page of CNN.com. And the only reason why is because I jabbed some needles into my leg to help me have a baby!


Here's the permalink. And don't read the comments; they are mean.

I'm a bit bummed they didn't cover what, at least to navel-gazing me, is the cool part: the fact that I study women's reproductive biology and there are some interesting intersections between my experience and my research. The reporter Elizabeth Landau seemed quite interested in this and asked a lot of questions about it, so my guess is just that that part of the story ended up on the cutting room floor.

Anyway, I have been meaning to post this whole story to the blog, so consider this just a teaser for when I find more time later this week.

So, why did you become an anthropologist? (Part 3 of 3)

This is the third and final part of the series “So, why did you become an anthropologist?” based on the AAPA plenary talk I gave in 2010 alongside many other wonderful and interesting anthropologists (Parts 1 and 2). The question that frames this final part is, How did you get a freaking job?

How did you get a freaking job?

How I survived graduate school
For most of my time in graduate school, I was a union organizer for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale University. Most semesters the hours I put in were equivalent to a full-time job, sometimes more. My last semester of graduate school I worked full time as expository writing faculty at Harvard. Yet I finished in six years, which was shorter than average in my department. How did I do this?

Well, first, I was lucky enough that my family was able to supply extra funding (like a car and car insurance) that my small stipend couldn’t cover, so I didn’t need to work. I didn’t have any dependents like I do now, unless you count my needy cat. I was and am able-bodied, so the university and surrounding area was set up well for me. And because I didn’t mind the occasional cockroach (well, I minded, but I was willing to tolerate them and several health and safety violations because my apartment was so airy and pretty), I was able to afford living less than a mile from campus.

Then, two things helped me be successful: I worked my ass off, and I had a community of people who were able to contradict the oppression and isolation of graduate school.

I’ll explain the easy part first. There has to be some tiny part of you that is crazily passionate about the work you do in order to be successful in graduate school. If not, you will not put in the necessary hours, you will not feel compelled to go to the library on a Saturday morning, you will not go back into lab in the evening after three hours of house visits and an intense two-hour staff meeting.
But really, that’s the easy part. Because if you’re considering graduate school, you are or shortly will become intensely interested in your discipline, you will think about it all the time, you will read about it just to learn more. Being an academic doesn’t require that this be constant; if anything, I think the more sane and more successful academics I know get periodically exhausted by their jobs and know when to put a project or manuscript down for a while. But you probably do need that occasionally manic buzzing in your ear that makes you spend three extra hours reading up and teaching yourself about inflammosomes when you could be watching an NCIS marathon.

The harder part is finding a way to contradict isolation and oppression. I think we need to be honest with ourselves that graduate school is incredibly oppressive, not necessarily by individuals, but certainly as a system. I don’t think I need to explain myself here, but if you are not in academia, as one example, find a graduate student and talk to her before and after her qualifying exams. Her feelings of isolation, stupidity, confusion, anger, self-blame will be incredibly high in your first interview compared to your second! And this is independent of the bread-and-butter issues that also promote stress during graduate school, like pay and benefits.

Being in GESO made me part of a collective of women and men that were able to identify the source of their oppression as external – the system of higher education – rather than internal. Not blaming yourself for feeling crazy all the time goes a long way towards feeling better during graduate school. Being a union organizer also meant I was creating social change on a daily basis. I got people to join the union, sometimes after months of conversations, and many of these people became lifelong friends. I helped write reports that showed the university’s true commitments to gender equality and other issues. I was arrested in civil disobedience and I went on strike, two times each. These were personally meaningful moments just as much as they contributed positively to the climate at Yale.

To me, being part of a movement to change the system of higher education is a necessary component of graduate school. This isn’t just selfishly to find friends to help you through graduate school and it’s not playing at union organizing. It is serious, it is real, and it is how we start our stewardship of higher education. If you are going to be an academic, you need to understand the workings and failings of academia, and you need to have experience working to improve it. Otherwise, the feelings of powerlessness that one can feel over qualifying exams, grantwriting, dissertation research, mentor relationships and the job market can overwhelm.

Myths and meritocracies
Academia is not a meritocracy. There, I said it! Many of the best scholars and intellectuals I have known quit graduate school, or left academia after getting a PhD. Many other excellent academics took years to find the magical tenure-track job. Still others are still looking. I think that many excellent scholars do tend to eventually find a home in academia, but I am also saying that while sitting comfortably in a tenure-track position at an R1 institution.

Academia is not a meritocracy. Racism, sexism and classism, to name just a few, still run rampant. A lot of this is built into the institution: for instance, many places are improving their recruitment of people of color, but are still poor at retention. On-site childcare that is nonexistent or has too few slots is a disincentive for people with dependents or those who shoulder a greater proportion of childcare; these tend to be women. Departmental culture can discourage people from varying backgrounds to express themselves, or even survive in that world: I know male faculty who feel they can’t express themselves as parents in their departments because the other fathers work all the time and never see their children. I know a woman who quit graduate school in the physical sciences because of objectionable images of women plastered in the halls to advertise social events in her department; her work to have the images taken down ended in a meeting with a Dean who told her she was ruining her career by speaking up.

Academia is not a meritocracy. I am a spousal hire. I know that some people view spousal hires as second class citizens (I also know that those people don’t happen to reside in my department). I think this view originates in the fact that we want to believe academia is a meritocracy and that only the best get in, and that somehow dual hires get around that. There are two problems with this: first, spousal hires do not get around meritocracy, because they are as rigorously evaluated as other hires and are rejected as often as accepted (at least at R1s; I do know occasionally this happens differently at other types of institutions). The other dual hires I know on this campus are inspiring, intelligent, and major players in their departments. Second, since the idea of a meritocracy is a myth anyway, it is silly to pick on one group of people when we are all struggling to find work in the discipline we love.

The idea that academia is a meritocracy is a myth that keeps people who have not been successful in finishing their degrees/finding jobs/getting tenure/etc from speaking up about larger inequalities and issues in higher education. It’s time we discarded this in favor of an honest appraisal of what is wonderful and problematic about academia.

What now?
I finished my degree, then spent a year as a faculty preceptor at Harvard University teaching expository writing (that is a grueling job to cut your teaching chops, but has good pay, benefits and job security). Then I had a baby and a semester of maternity leave (sort of, but we’ll leave FMLA gripes for another day), then in the fall of 2008 moved to Illinois to begin my position here with a five month old in tow and only twenty hours a week of childcare because it was so hard to come by. We wouldn’t get to full time childcare until the beginning of my second year. This meant even less sleep than usual for young parents, as my husband and I had to work nights and weekends to make up for the childcare deficit.

In my work, I take a holistic approach to ecology and women’s reproductive functioning. While my dissertation was on the endometrium and that is still a major interest, some of the mechanisms for variation in endometrial functioning, and a little navel gazing from my experience of pregnancy and a recent diagnosis of gluten intolerance, led me towards immune health and inflammation. I have a few projects nearing completion (if you were at the AAPAs/HBAs and saw my talks you heard about one of them on ovarian follicular waves) and a few others in the mix (a departure from my human snobbery to work with mice?!).

All criticism of the system of higher education aside, and all paperwork and bureaucracy and grading and meetings aside, this is the most stimulating, interesting and fun job I could have ever hoped to have. I get to spend my day using my mind, interrogating ideas, and learning new things. If I have an idea for a project, it’s on me to do the legwork and on me if it fails… but how cool is it that I get to go after the idea in the first place? I love that if I get excited about something, I can explore it further. I can do a literature review, or write a grant, or find a collaborator in another discipline. One of my most interesting collaborations so far came from emailing the authors of an article I found interesting out of the blue.

I can teach women that what they learned about their bodies was reductive, that they aren’t diseased simply by being female. I can mentor undergraduates and graduates, make them critical thinkers, and help them get grants and get jobs and get into graduate school. I can work with non-science majors and make them less afraid of science. I can promote different kinds of pedagogy and increase access to education using online learning technologies.

Folks, I have drunk the kool-aid. This is a great job. But I don’t want to keep it to myself; I want more people to have access to academia and secure jobs and to just having a more intellectual life. That is why the institution and culture of higher education needs to change, and why I become an academic anthropologist. I like to think about women, I like to think about biology and medicine, but I also like to share my excitement. I hope you’ll join me in working towards positive change so that anthropology can continue to grow and have a positive influence on society.

If you don't want to meet brilliant young biological anthropologists, you can ignore this post

Which is exactly why you are reading. Who wouldn't want to meet the coolest cohort in the AAPAs?

Plenty of us young biological anthropology folk are struggling in isolation at an important point in our careers: we may be writing up our dissertations, defending, starting our first postdoc, contingent faculty or tenure-line faculty gig, or we may be otherwise looking at the established folk and thinking, "How in heck did they get there, and will I ever get there too?"

Enter BANDIT, the brainchild of brilliant and eminently likable Assistant Professor Julienne Rutherford of the University of Illinois, Chicago (full disclosure: I am completely biased because we are collaborators and friends). BANDIT, or Biological ANthropology Developing Investigators Troop, is a loose collective of young anthropologists sharing information, insight, and support. Check it out, contribute, and appreciate the early career anthropologist in your life by supporting this site. Go to http://aapabandit.blogspot.com for more information, and check back in as it grows.

We interrupt this series to talk about furlough

I was planning on writing the last contraception series post today. Instead I need to talk about furlough days. What I write below is my opinion (KBHC) and my opinion only, and is not necessarily shared by members of my laboratory, department or university.

The University of Illinois has just announced an Interim Furlough Policy. An email from President White states:

Reflecting the interim policy, the Notifications of Appointment (NOAs)
that will be issued effective August 16, 2009 (new and renewal), and all
NOAs issued after that date, will include a provision allowing for unpaid
furlough days for faculty and academic professionals. The revised NOA form
will also include language shortening the appointment period for grants
and contracts-funded positions in the event of a loss of such funds.

In line with our commitment to shared governance, we will consult with
representatives of faculty and academic professionals should the need to
declare furlough days arise. We will also confer with them as we consider
making permanent the interim policy.

We reiterate that we are not, at this time, declaring furlough days for
fiscal 2010. We hope that they, and other actions to reduce personnel
costs, will not be needed. But we must be prepared.

I will make a hasty attempt at a reasoned response: many other academics have already made this point well, but it bears repeating: furlough days will not, in the end, save money, and they will only harm the educational goals of the university.** The amount of planning, infrastructure, and coordination to implement furlough days will cost money, as will working against those of us who disagree with their implementation. Further, furlough days for academic professionals manipulates a workforce that tends not to have a defined set of hours, and wears many hats over the course of a day. For instance, I have heard of furloughs at other universities where academic professionals are asked to take their furloughs on non-teaching days. However, during the semester there is no such thing -- there are emails, office hours, and course prep to account for even on days when one is not directly teaching a course. Administrators are counting on us to do the work anyway on those days to prep for class; they are counting on us to work for free.

What is most disturbing about the email we received and this interim policy, is that we have been told that the new governor "likes" us and that the recisions we had been facing were not to be. The Illinois administration is using this time of recession as a chance to jam some questionable policies through, because they think we are more likely to lay down for it. I find it interesting that Illinois would make this announcement right after the UC system, one of the most impressive public university systems in the country, got bled dry by the state of California. An interim furlough policy sounds so tame next to what happened to them, yes? I think the students, faculty and staff at Illinois are too smart for that game. I do not think, given the Clout List and online ed scandals that are already on White's plate, that this is the time to try to sneak in a policy that could become permanent.

However, I foresee several wonderful things coming out of this: an increased campus presence and membership in the local AAUP chapter and Campus Faculty Association*, budding relationships between existing campus unions and the CFA and AAUP, and students, faculty and staff on this campus building a stronger sense of self. This is an excellent campus with truly innovative, creative, caring and brilliant workers and students. Coming together to stop furlough days could be the beginning of a more aware campus body that values itself highly like it deserves. I'm tired of hearing the "but we live in a corn field" trope. This is the best campus I've ever worked at, with the best colleagues. It's time for us to realize our value, amplify our voices by organizing together, and stand against injustice, starting with furlough.

*Here is how to join these two organizations. For the AAUP, call the IL Chapter at (618) 235-2700 x4199 or just go here. To join the Campus Faculty Association, you can contact me and I'll get you a card, or download the pdf card by clicking on "join now" on the front page of their website. If you get the card from me I can just send it for you, or send it by campus mail to this address:
Campus Faculty Association
1001 S. Wright Street
Suite 14, MC-390
Champaign, IL 61820

**According to this story on WICD each furlough day would only save $3 million. We would need 100 furlough days to account for the mess that was Global Campus!

What does a professor's life look like?

Because some students, particularly Illinois students, may end up reading this blog, I think it is important to share what it's like to be a faculty member at a large research university. I have had a number of experiences in my first year here, as well as plenty of memories as a college student, that suggest that most undergrads have no idea what we do on a daily basis. Current experiences include:

• Requests for extra credit work after the semester is over
  
• Requests for meetings on evenings or weekends
  
• Surprise that I am in my office even when it's not officially office hours
  
• Jealousy that I am "only" teaching two classes
  
• Surprise that I do not know the entire course catalog and cannot provide advice on courses to take

I make these points without irony or anger -- given media and fictional portrayals of academic life, as well as students' high school experiences, it makes sense for students to misunderstand our role and job description. In a field like anthropology, we do a ton of service teaching, meaning we teach large courses with a high proportion of non-majors, and yet in particular in biological anthropology there is pressure to publish, obtain grant money, and do research. Unlike in high school and college, a lot of our work has to be intrinsically motivated (or one could say motivated by the quest for tenure), and our colleagues expect much higher quality writing out of us than is expected in college, so we cannot pull an all-nighter to write a grant or paper. On top of all of this are the service obligations, in our departments and across the university, that make this place run and make important policy decisions.

What this means is that the number of hours students see us is a tiny portion of the total work we do. Course preparation takes hours, as does lab work and writing for grants and publications. Mentoring and meeting with students, and service meetings also comprise a significant portion of our day (not to mention prepping for said meetings).

The other issue that undergraduates tend not to know is that that small amount of face time we have with them is one of the smaller components of our tenure package. Most of the time they do not see us, when we are locked in our offices or labs or homes, writing or pipetting or analyzing data, is what will make or break our tenure package. Teaching, mentoring and service are less valued, perhaps undervalued, particularly in a research university.

So I will offer two days in my life, a teaching day and a non-teaching day, in order to make faculty life a bit more transparent. Should other members of the lab want to share their lives too, this will become an ongoing series to share all elements of academic life.

Teaching day
6am My daughter Joan wakes me by poking me in the eye. We practice learning where eyes, ears, mouth and nose are, until my husband is awake enough for us to get up for the morning.
6:15am We start our morning ritual: showers, diaper and outfit change for Joanie, the making of coffee, lunch, food and bottles for Joan, breakfast, and then one of us (let's say my husband today) walks Joan to daycare while the other (me) bikes to work.
8:15am Drink coffee while reading and answering email
9am Open my powerpoint made the night before to tinker.
10am Meet with TA to discuss plans for the week and to put together a lab section.
10:30am Finish revising powerpoint, run through it once or twice, save it and try to ignore it to get other work done.
11am Pump breastmilk.
11:15am Read over comments from previous grant, put together an action plan to revise and resubmit. Eat lunch cold while working.
1pm Lecture.
2pm Office hours.
3pm Pump breastmilk.
3:15pm Answer emails, talk to colleagues. Work on grant.
4:45pm Bike home, then walk to daycare to pick up my daughter.
5:15pm Family run.
6pm Make dinner.
6:45pm Eat dinner.
7:15 Change Joan for bed.
8pm Nurse Joan and hold her until she falls asleep.
8:30pm Try to put her in crib to work; she wakes. End up positioning her on chest, laptop on lap. Work on grant for evening.
10:30pm Go to bed.
Total number of hours of possible face time with students: 2.5
Hours spent on teaching (includes time with students): 4
Hours spent on research: 5.25
Hours spent on service: 0
Hours spent on email: Too many

Non-teaching day
6am My daughter Joan wakes me by head-butting my chest. We play with my watch and some tissues from the bedside table, until Joan is too antsy to stay in bed.
6:15am We start our morning ritual: showers, diaper and outfit change for Joanie, the making of coffee, lunch, food and bottles for Joan, breakfast, and then one of us (let's say me today) walks Joan to daycare while the other (my husband) bikes to work.
9:30am Drink coffee while reading and answering email.
10:15am Read student posts on course blog; comment where warranted.
11am Pump breastmilk.
11:15am Fill out paperwork for laboratory: safety committee, human subjects committee, ordering of supplies depending on the day.
12pm Dare to use microwave to heat up lunch; get to enjoy slightly warm lunch today.
12:10pm Sort and arrange data from a colleague. Don't even have time to analyze it because it takes so long to organize it.
2:45pm Pump breastmilk.
3pm Committee meeting.
4:30 Answer some emails, save all my work from organizing data.
5pm Go home.
5:15pm Play with Joan and next door neighbor.
6pm Make dinner.
6:45pm Eat dinner.
7:15 Change Joan for bed.
8pm Nurse Joan and hold her until she falls asleep.
8:30pm Try to put her in crib to work; she wakes. End up positioning her on chest, laptop on lap. Work on powerpoint for class for the next day.
11pm Go to bed.
Total number of hours of possible face time with students: .75 online, 2 minutes in lounge to microwave lunch
Hours spent on teaching (includes time with students): 3.25
Hours spent on research: 3.5
Hours spent on service: 1.5
Hours spent on email: Too many