a simple prop

Saturday was the last full day of the OSLEP course and we had the students thinking about religious and other reactions to Darwin’s ideas; three hours on St George Jackson Mivart, Alfred Russel Wallace, Ernst Haeckel, and Charles Kingsley, followed by another three hours on American anti-evolutionism. The students really seemed to get into the material and I’ve been very impressed with what they’ve been able to accomplish since Wednesday. For those that may be interested, on Wednesday we discussed natural theology (Paley & Hume) and Darwin’s life. Thursday was devoted to discussions of Origin and Descent, while Friday was spent at a symposium examining Darwin’s influence across the disciplines. I’m fairly confident that the students can now distinguish what Darwin really said from the assertions made by many anti-evolutionists – it’s amazing what a reading of the original texts can accomplish!

After the day’s work, we went for a beer and a bite with the wonderful Abbie who in meat-space is charming, funny and oh-so passionate about science (not that she is not that online!). It was a pleasure to finally get to sit down and chat with her about creationism, HIV research, our sciblings (yup, that’s why your ears were burning!), grad school, lab safety, life, the universe, and everything.

Tomorrow there’s a short wrap-up session to take care of the students research papers and, beyond that, I intend to relax until I return home on Monday when my mind will have to turn to other talks and my regular classes.

Thinking about it, this past week has been filled with Darwin, good friends, new friends, great students, tornadoes, crazies on campus, creationist shenanigans, really old books, discussion, and collaboration. In short, it was great. 

Abbie (of ERV fame) and I after my talk at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Natural History Museum. It went well, I think. About 350 folks in the audience and the local NPR and PBS stations will apparently be offering audio and video at some stage. No questions from creationists (surprisingly) and, while the theme was the Darwinian Revolution, I got to get in a few comments regarding SB 320 and science education, and managed to plug Oklahomans for Excellence for Science Education.

Abbie tells me that she’ll blog something about the talk at some stage. We didn’t get to chat much, but will be getting together before the end of the week.

(Thanks to Ray for the photo!)

I’m in Oklahoma at the moment (more anon perhaps) but was dismayed, to put it mildly, to see the following announcement come from ASU’s Provost:

The funding lost in the recently revised FY09 state budget has forced Arizona State University to cap enrollment and to close applications to next year’s freshman class on March 1, five months earlier than usual. …

ASU is also closing about four dozen academic programs, many on the Tempe campus, and scaling down administrative operations at its Polytechnic and West campuses, in response to state budget reductions, which have totaled $88 million or 18% of the university’s base state budget since June 2008. …

Additional cuts in state funding in FY 10 would force ASU to consider additional staff layoffs, a substantial increase in tuition and fees, further limitations on student enrollment, and closing the Polytechnic and West campuses entirely…

The new FY09 budget, after a reduction of $88 million in state funding, reduces ASU’s per-student funding from the state general fund to what it was 10 years ago. ASU received $7,976 per student in 2008. The $6,500 per student the university receives for 2009 is only $4 more per student than it received in 1998…

In addition to these changes, another three dozen academic programs have stopped taking student applications and the process of disestablishing them has begun

There are going to be staff and contract faculty layoffs in many programs. Thankfully, my own unit – the Honors College – seems to have survived this round, though scrolling down the list of programs facing the axe was not a pleasant experience. I hope the Republicans in the State Senate are happy.

More info here.

Apparently I have to take 12 9 days of unpaid furlough before May 15th. And it can’t be days I teach on, i.e. it has to be Monday or Friday. All because the Republicans in the state senate want to gut K-16 education in Arizona. Seriously, in a state that hasn’t raised state taxes in 20 years, we’re having to do this to keep education afloat. A read somewhere that a 1c sales tax on alcohol would keep the K-16 system afloat, but no … that would be raising taxes.

What galls is simply this. Staff on furlough will go home and rest. Sure, they’re not being paid, but they will at least rest. Faculty will do what faculty do – prepare classes, read, grade, maintain labs; all the usual stuff we do, except for twelve days we’ll be working for free. We’d love to have the balls to take those days off but it’s not like we can say to our students, “Sorry, yesterday I was on furlough so I didn’t prepare the class … so talk among yourselves.” We have a commitment to the students that we made when they signed up for our classes … so we don’t get to take days off.

Don’t get me wrong … I’d rather have this than lose my job, but I cant help but feel that the administration realizes that the faculty will keep on trucking because, hey, that’s what we do. Do they save money? Yes. Do we work any less? No.

Update: Looks like it is only nine days altough I’ve had no official confirmation. What makes everything better. Yeah, right!

Arizona Republicans have proposed that education – from kindergarten through university – should be the first thing to get the chop in a proposed budget. They are looking to cut $1.5 billion from education over the next 18 months with the K-12 system being hit for nearly $1 billion of that. I agree with our Board of Regents that the proposed $500,000 cut to the universities would be “cataclysmic in the depth and breadth of devastation they will cause to our higher-education system in Arizona.” Even a short-term cut in funding will have serious implications for the competitiveness of Arizona. ASU alone pumps approximately $3.2 billion dollars each year into the state’s economy and creates tens of thousands of jobs. We have taken more than $37 million in state funding cuts in the last 18 months, leading to the loss of 500 staff positions and over 200 faculty associates, the disestablishment of two schools and a reduction in the number of nursing students. And that is just ASU.

(As an aside, one of the two proposers of the cuts – Russell Pearce – has featured here before. He had no problem making universities pay for flags in every classroom.)

As I’ve mentioned before, I spent a good part of my graduate years working on specimens in the collections of the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Some readers may have read of the museum through the essay “Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive O!” in Stephen Jay Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack. Gould was a fan of the museum and he felt it represented the majesty of the old-style Victorian museum. This story would therefore have brought Gould much sadness. Following closure in 2007 due to the collapse of a staircase, plans to renovate the museum are now on hold and it appears the future of the museum at its current site is a little murkier than is desirable. 

As a young boy, I remember spending hours in the Museum with my father. It was dark and mysterious. You entered to encounter the skeleton of a Giant Irish Deer surrounded by those of Ireland’s extant cervids. Megaloceros was awe-inspiring to me as a kid (it still is, just in different ways!). As you moved down the entrance hall, case after case of vertebrates yielded to cases of insects. These were shielded from the light with covers that had to be removed almost ceremoniously to reveal the jewels within. Staircases lead to a second floor (see below, much brighter than it was was when I was a kid) where specimen after specimen were packed on top of each other in glass cabinets. The floorboards creaked. Higher galleries revealed birds and, on the top-most gallery, hand-blown glass models of medusae and other marine organisms created by the famed Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. It was a magical place for an aspiring naturalist.

The museum got even more magical when I got access to the study collections beyond the big doors at the back of the museum. As the natural history museum of the second city of the British Empire, many unique specimens ended up in the collections, and the strong Irish tradition of natural history kept them growing (to an eventual two-million specimens). Visiting academics from Europe and America would come to study Ireland’s unique fauna. While measuring skulls in my office, I could hear schoolchildren in the galleries. I couldn’t believe my luck in being part of such a cabinet of curiosities.

The staircase that collapsed is actually behind the scenes (near where the skulls of mustelid carnivores were stored, if I remember correctly). The real problem is that the upper floors of the  museum were not wheelchair-accessible. Renovations planned included a new extension, elevators, a shop & cafe. Total cost was €15 million and work was to take from 2007 until 2010/11. That work is now on hold with little hope of completion given the current economic climate. Whether the essential repair work is on-hold is unknown.

It would be a shame if the museum were not to re-open in its current location. It would be even more of a shame if a re-opened museum turned its back on the past and became yet another Disneyified amusement park masquerading as a museum.

There’s a Facebook group for those who care. 

It’s the week before teaching starts again and I’m staring at a “to do” list that somehow managed to increase in size over the winter break. That’s never good, especially when that list includes a few book reviews and a short article. I had hoped that the coming semester would be a relatively quiet one, but that looks unlikely. Teaching-wise, I have my usual seminar course and my lecture course on Origins, Evolution & Creation, so there shouldn’t be a huge amount of preparation involved there. It’s the other stuff – particularly talks and conferences – that are going to be time-consuming. Onward!