"I want our postdocs to know that we as a nation appreciate what they do," says Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), speaking by telephone from her office in Arlington, Virginia. To show that appreciation and to insure that the U.S. science establishment continues to attract outstanding talent, Colwell says, "we need to reward those who are in the training phase," whom...
Master of the whale-roads,let the white wings of the gullsspread out their cover.You have become like us,disgraced and mortal. Thus wrote Stanley Kunitz, the current and tenth Poet Laureate of the United States, about coming eye-to-eye with a beached finback whale just before it died on Cape Cod in 1966. The lines are the last in the five-part "The Wellfleet Whale," one of Kunitz's better known w...
It's the first day of February, the month that in the north temperate zone is usually devoted to teeth-gritting and finding a way to hang on until March and signs of spring. So you can imagine my thrill when, in the early gray of this morning's commute through central Maryland, I heard what sounded like the honking of Canada geese. Certain it had to be something else, such as a truck in trouble, ...
Who are the people riding the next wave into the future of science and research? We at Next Wave are eager to find the answers to that question and we thought you might be, too. So, I made a trip to the beach, so to speak, and there I found a surfer taking a break and reading Italo Calvino's Difficult Loves ... glick160.jpg That isn't really where I found Ben Glick, assistant professor of molecul...
When an institution like the University of Michigan, which prides itself on academic freedom and excellence, warns against "systematic substitution of non-tenure-track instructional faculty for tenured and tenure-track faculty," it's time to sit up and take notice. And that's exactly what the May 1999 report prepared by a university-wide committee and sponsored by the University of Michigan Offic...
"The story of the meadow is a litany of loosely patterned weather, a chronicle of circular succession. Indians hunted here in summer, but they never wintered here, as far as we can tell, not on purpose. It's the highest cultivated ground in this spur of the Medicine Bow, no other level terrain in sight. There have been four names on the deed to it, starting just a hundred years back." So wrote Ja...
The New Year in the Chinese Lunar Calendar, which has a cycle of 12 years--each named for an animal--and undergoes a complete cycle every 60 years, began on 24 January and is The Year of the Snake. Individuals born this year, 2001, and those born in earlier 12-year increments--1989, 1977, 1965, 1953, 1941, 1929--come under the serpent's sign and are said to have similar personality traits, such a...
Job opportunities for faculty are "better now than they have been for many years," says Tina Shelley, supervisory economist at the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Shelley and colleagues helped produce the BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook 2000-01 , which--among other things--projects that employment of college and university faculty will increase faster than average...
A few weeks ago, in writing a story about the Preparing Future Faculty program, I heard about changes in graduate student training and how those changes are affecting today's postdocs and new faculty. The message from people at all levels in the academic hierarchy was clear: Leaving graduate students--and hence postdocs and new faculty--unprepared to teach is like leaving them stranded in the des...
That's the title of the Harvard Law School Negotiation Project's statement of principle, which is subtitled Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. And what it's about, in the words of a sage Rolling Stone, is how "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need." In the 1991 second edition of Getting to Yes (Penguin paperback, $14), Roger F...
Science is international. And so it follows that one perq of an academic job in the United States is attending conferences in intriguing places like Japan, where, as a graduate student, I discovered that I could fall in love with a foreign place and its people. It was on a post-conference field trip, a tour of the lakes near Mt. Fuji, where something happened that led eventually to the long perio...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX When Marlene Noble left her particle physics graduate program at Princeton with a master's degree instead of the Ph.D. she had originally planned to stick around for, it was because she wanted to "work in an emerging field," as she puts it. That field, the study of how sediments move along ocean shelves, is now burgeoning but was at best embryonic in the early 1970s when...
It's your first year in a tenure-track faculty position, and the first course the department head has asked you to teach is the same one you taught--in a special mentored program--as a graduate student. So you just happen to have a syllabus in your back pocket, and you are already well schooled in framing the necessary exam questions. Not having to spend as much time preparing your course, you ar...
