The classic three pillars of an academic position are teaching, research, and service. While the University Administration sometimes seems to think of “service” as being synonymous with “sitting on committees”, many of us enjoy taking the broader view.
As part of my service activities, this weekend I had the pleasure to talk with a roomful of fantastic young scholars from the McNair program (officially known as the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program). The program was named after one of the astronauts who was killed in the Challenger disaster). He was also a physicist with a Ph.D. from MIT.
The McNair program identifies promising undergraduates who either are low-income, are first-generation college students, or are from an underrepresented minority group. It then provides extensive mentoring to encourage the students to continue on to graduate school. The mentoring takes the form of supporting the students in research projects in their own departments, guiding them through the steps involved in preparing a strong graduate application, providing an additional resource for academic and personal advising, and waiving application fees.
If you haven’t run across this program, keep an eye out for it. If you know a student who might be a candidate, encourage them to apply. Even more importantly, if you have a chance to work with a McNair scholar, jump at the chance. These kids are phenomenal. They’re interesting and driven, and a pleasure to know.
May 5th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Time to add a new pillar to your classics – exchanging scientific integrity for political conformity in order to gain tenured positions in a corporate-controlled academic system. It’s all the rage in academia these days, and is probably the single most common feature among all professors in those areas of science that generate potentially lucrative intellectual property rights.
Yes, the system is broken, and American academics is in a huge but mostly silent crisis as a result. After all, who is running your school? Chances are, it is an ex-pharmaceutical company CEO or someone similar. That is certainly the case at many of the leading U.S. universities these days – all the Ivy League schools, as well as at the University of California system and all the large Midwestern schools.
When a fish rots, it rots from the head down. Do your students a favor and tell them the truth about the current situation in academics.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:11 am
President of Brown University:
Not seeing a lot of the pharmaceutical company CEO experience there.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I’d be interested in knowing what schools are headed by ex-pharmaceutical company CEOs or other similar people. The president of Harvard seems to be a professor of history without any of this CEO experience. Princeton’s president is a molecular biologist who seems to have worked in many places but I don’t see any pharmaceutical companies. After looking at Cornell, Yale and Columbia and also don’t see this link.
Can you give some concrete examples of what Ivy League schools you are talking about? It certainly doesn’t seem to be all of them.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Ronald McNair lived a pretty interesting life, and seemed like both a stand-up guy and someone with a fascinating career. I’m glad to see there’s a legacy like this for him.
You can read his NASA bio here, and a more detailed bio of him here. I particularly like this quote from him:
There’s a neat book about him, too.
May 5th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
The McNair program sounds wonderful in principle, but I have to say that a student I had who was in the program found it annoying (he said there was a lot of “touchy-feely” mentoring) and dropped out. He did fine on his own.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Levin (Yale) is a former economics professor, and Columbia president is a lawyer first amendment scholar. So far Ike’s batting average looks remarkably weak.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Hit submit too early, but hopefully my meaning can be disentangled from the typos above…
May 5th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
The McNair program is probably run slightly differently at different institutions, so touchy-feeliness can probably vary. I have an extremely low tolerance for that stuff myself, so I’m sympathetic. It’s certainly true that some fraction of McNair scholars are going to be fine no matter what, particularly given that it’s a competive program, so the students are already selected to be somewhat on the ball. But, I think that, at least in the incarnation run here at UW, the practical information is of great value, particularly for first-generation students who’ve never seen the path modeled by anyone in their family.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:01 am
Just come across this after blogging about the UK’s problem with the representation of UK African/Caribbean people in science. Yet again, the US blazes a trail. When I make trips to US science depts (which I do as part of my job), I am always amazed how many African Americans work in science. A few years ago I was part of a flurry of arms waving around about the UK’s problem, now, revisiting the subject, I find that no one is doing anything about it here any more – at least as far as I can tell. If anyone in the UK knows any different, I’d be glad to hear about it via michaelbrooks.org