Academia roundup #5
Protests, projects, and new PIs
Campus protests have dominated news within the higher education community and the general public. For the past month or so, the number of protests over the war in Gaza has grown both in the USA and abroad. Over 2,000 protesters in the USA have been arrested on college campuses.
Most of the protests have been peaceful. There have been an increasing number of incidents between opposing protest groups and between protestors and the police. US campuses have responded in a myriad of ways. There is a lot of noise regarding the protests. It is difficult to separate fact from fiction. There is a lot of pain in our community. I hope we can support one another within the academy and beyond. Here are a few good writeups of recent events for anyone needing to catch up.
I also think that protests and responses to protests reveal long-standing issues in academia that have only been inflamed by recent events. I believe we have a real crisis of leadership at most universities. There is confusion over free speech policies. Lastly, most people, even those in universities, don’t understand how universities operate.
Beyond the protests, I’ve enjoyed reading articles on several topics.
The importance of thinking about generosity in authorship. Does your lab have an authorship policy? In my lab, we use the definition from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:
Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
Final approval of the version to be published; AND
Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. In addition, “the corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process”.
We have also been exploring using the CRediT author contribution criteria to formalize the above process.
I think one of the most important skills is being able to prioritize. I appreciate this set of criteria to assess potential projects. I was able to use similar criteria to say no to projects that didn’t truly align with my values and long-term goals.
I cannot recommend enough that new PIs (pre-tenure folks) join the newPI Slack community. Being a newPI in some departments can feel like a lonely experience. You should know that others have been through the same struggles.
There is a new tool from NSF to visualize the funding your institution receives.
