Dialog consistent si extrem de interesant in Studioul BZI LIVE, alaturi de conf. univ. dr. Ilie - Gheorghe Farte de la Universitatea Cuza din Iasi

 Miercuri, 17 aprilie 2019, incepand cu ora 15.00 in lumina reflectoarelor Studioului BZI LIVE a fost programata o noua editie speciala, actuala si riguroasa • Astfel, intr-un dialog consistent si extrem de interesant alaturi de conf. univ. dr. Ilie - Gheorghe Farte din cadrul Departamentului de Stiinte ale Comunicarii si Relatii publice a Facultatii de Filosofie si Stiinte Social - Politice, Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza - UAIC din Iasi a avut loc o dezbatere axata pe Istoria presei in Romania de-a lungul a aproape doua secole alaturi de tematici ce tin de Stiinte ale comunicarii sau Relatii publice • De asemenea, universitarul a detaliat elemente ce tin de cel de-al XII-lea Congres international de istorie a presei cu tema "190 de ani de presa in spatiul de Limba romana 1829-2019" derulat saptamana trecuta la Cuza • In plus, specialist pe segmente precum: Comunicare politica, fundamente ale Relatiilor publice, Relatii publice la nivelul ONG-urilor, studii de caz in PR, universitarul Farte a fost interpelat si pe aceste planuri, aplicat la nivelul realitatilor din societatea romaneasca dar si pe plan international • Emisiunea completa cu acesta poate fi urmarita AICI

Miercuri, 17 aprilie 2019, incepand cu ora 15.00 in lumina reflectoarelor Studioului BZI LIVE a fost programata o noua editie speciala, actuala si riguroasa. Astfel, intr-un dialog consistent si extrem de interesant alaturi de conf. univ. dr. Ilie - Gheorghe Farte din cadrul Departamentului de Stiinte ale Comunicarii si Relatii publice a Facultatii de Filosofie si Stiinte Social - Politice, Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza (UAIC) din Iasi a avut loc o dezbatere axata pe Istoria presei in Romania de-a lungul a aproape doua secole alaturi de tematici ce tin de Stiinte ale comunicarii sau Relatii publice.

De asemenea, universitarul a detaliat elemente ce tin de cel de-al XII-lea Congres international de istorie a presei cu tema "190 de ani de presa in spatiul de Limba romana 1829-2019" derulat saptamana trecuta la Cuza. In plus, specialist pe segmente precum: Comunicare politica, fundamente ale Relatiilor publice, Relatii publice la nivelul ONG-urilor, studii de caz in PR, universitarul Farte a fost interpelat si pe aceste planuri, aplicat la nivelul realitatilor din societatea romaneasca dar si pe plan international. Despre rolul societatii civile, viata politica sau implicarea tinerilor in spatiul public au fost alte dintre punctele dialogului cu universitarul iesean. Emisiunea completa cu acesta poate fi urmarita AICI

Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași

"Dezvoltarea Economico-Sociala Durabila a Euroregiunilor si a Zonelor Transfrontaliere", prezentata la Iasi

Dezbaterea sub egida "Dezvoltarea Economico- Sociala Durabila a Euroregiunilor si a Zonelor Transfrontaliere" este programata anul acesta (luna octombrie - n.r.) în Aula Magna - filiala Iasi a Academiei Române.

Tematica propusa se axeaza pe urmatoarele domenii ale cunoasterii: economie, sociologie, juridic, agricultura, silvicultura, mediu, geodezie, sanatate, învatamânt, cultura, turism, arta, inginerie aplicata, respectiv structurarea, fundamentarea, testarea si aplicarea unor noi modele matematice si strategii de dezvoltare a Euroregiunii Siret- Prut- Nistru.

Conferinta este organizata de: Academia Romana, filiala Iasi - Institutul de Cercetari Economice si Sociale "Gheorghe Zane"- Colectivul de Cercetari Economice, Asociatia "Euroregiunea Siret- Prut- Nistru", AGER - filiala Iasi, Universitatea de Stat "Alecu Russo", Balti - Republica Moldova, Universitatea Cooperatist-Comerciala, Chisinau, Republica Moldova.

Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași

UK universities spent £87m on 'gagging orders' to keep bullying and sexual misconduct claims quiet

Sum paid for around 4,000 settlements during last two years, report says

UK universities have spent £87m on pay-offs with ”gagging orders” to keep allegations of bullying, harassment or sexual misconduct quiet, it has been reported.

The huge sum is said to have been spent on around 4,000 settlements over the last two years.

Universities UK (UUK), the sector’s representative organisation, said non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) were used for “many purposes”, including protecting valuable research.

owever, the body said the contracts should not be used to prevent victims from speaking out and such practices “will not be tolerated”.

Using Freedom of Information laws, nearly 140 universities were asked by the BBC to detail how much they had paid in settlements that included NDAs.

Figures from the 96 institutions that responded showed around £87m had been spent since 2017.

The BBC said it had heard from dozens of academics that NDAs were being used to silence allegations of bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct.

“Universities use non-disclosure agreements for many purposes, including the protection of commercially sensitive information related to university research,” UUK said.

“However, we also expect senior leaders to make it clear that the use of confidentiality clauses to prevent victims from speaking out will not be tolerated.

“All staff and students are entitled to a safe experience at university and all universities have a duty to ensure this outcome.”

The body said it is developing comprehensive new guidance on sexual misconduct that will be published in the autumn.

The guidelines will cover NDAs, while UUK is also working with a Government consultation on the issue.

The body added: “It’s important to note that a confidentiality clause will usually be one part of a wider settlement agreement that has been negotiated between two parties and, crucially, the signing of an agreement containing such a clause does not prevent staff or students from reporting criminal acts to the police or regulatory bodies, or from making a disclosure under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998.”

Publicație : The Independent

How to be a PhD supervisor

The relationship between PhD students and their supervisors is often said to be the most intense in the academy, with huge implications for student success. Yet most supervisors receive little if any training. Here, six academics give their take on how to approach it

The anomaly of academics receiving years of training in research but none in teaching is often remarked upon. But, equally notoriously, what that research training amounts to very much depends on the individual supervisor. After all, academics are not trained in research supervision either, and both supervisors and supervisees have their own set of expectations, needs and aptitudes.

How much and what variety of direction is appropriate? And to what end? Is the PhD still best conceived exclusively as an apprenticeship for would-be academics, even though many doctoral graduates end up – willingly or otherwise – in other walks of life? Indeed, is it realistic to expect all PhD students to be proficient in independent research at the end of the process? And what to do with those who are not? Is it the supervisor’s task to make sure they drop out early? Must supervisors always be optimistic and encouraging, offering whatever level of micromanagement is necessary to get the student through?

Here, six academics give their own takes on where the lines should be drawn in the doctoral quicksand.

‘A PhD is about becoming an independent researcher’

If a final-year PhD researcher isn’t regularly telling me that I’m wrong, I worry; something has gone badly awry. They should argue that there’s no way my latest hare-brained experimental design could ever work, that my interpretation of the data can’t possibly be correct because it doesn’t take very basic physics into account, and that the paper published months ago by Professor W. Leader’s group at Prestige University described exactly the type of measurement I suggested in our most recent meeting. Why the heck wasn’t I aware of this? Don’t I read the literature? (They get extra credit for peppering their arguments with suitably chosen expletives.)

Demonstrating that level of project “ownership” is essential because otherwise I feel that I’ve failed in my supervision, not least because my university’s criteria for awarding a PhD – in line with those of every other university out there – stipulate that the candidate must have developed “the general ability to conceptualise, design and implement a project for the generation of new knowledge, applications or understanding at the forefront of the discipline, and to adjust the project design in the light of unforeseen problems”.

They must also demonstrate “a systematic acquisition and understanding of a substantial body of knowledge which is at the forefront of an academic discipline or area of professional practice”. I’ve never been able to square the rather perverse circle of requiring a student to be at the forefront of an academic discipline; someone whose doctoral work is, by definition, at the forefront of a discipline is most definitely not a student; they’re an expert defining the direction of their particular sub-field (or, as is more usual, their sub-sub-sub-sub-field). Still, it is clear that they should at least be in a position to swear with conviction at someone who is at the forefront of the discipline.

So I’m firmly of the opinion that we should ditch the term “PhD student” and instead use the rather more accurate “PhD researcher”. I am not alone in this. Jeff Ollerton, professor of biodiversity at the University of Northampton, has been making compelling arguments against the use of the term “PhD student” for quite some time. Retiring the “student” label would help drive a culture change that not only better recognised the core contributions made by PhD candidates to the research “ecosystem” (including those many first-authored papers submitted to the research excellence framework) but could also help improve their status in the eyes of that – hopefully dying – breed of PI who see early career researchers as the hired help, rather than the peers they should be. I was very fortunate to have a PhD supervisor with whom I genuinely collaborated; ideas were debated, discussed and dissected and I was never made to feel that I should “know my place”. I’ve since learned that this is not always the norm.

Of course, not all PhD researchers are created equal; I am not so naive as to imagine that every doctoral candidate in every lab or library is capable of generating “a substantial body of knowledge at the forefront of an academic discipline”. But isn’t it then about time that we came clean about this? And wouldn’t phasing out the “PhD student” term help send a strong message to those who are considering taking on the formidable challenge of a doctoral programme?

A PhD is about becoming an independent researcher. The process is a universe away from the exam-and-coursework cycle that drives the vast majority of undergraduate degrees. There’s no curriculum and no textbook that map out a PhD from start to finish; no neatly annotated problems whose solutions are helpfully given in the back of the book. PhD researchers in effect write the textbook for the next generation of undergrads – what else do we mean when we say a doctoral thesis should be about expanding the body of knowledge in a particular field?

In physics, we’ve become rather more open with PhD applicants in recent years about their chances of ultimately securing an academic position, should that be their goal. Let’s go one step further and be entirely upfront about the level of independence and self-direction involved in a PhD.

I’ve already followed Ollerton’s example and stopped referring to doctoral candidates as students. Why not join us? I suspect that your PhD researchers will appreciate the change.

Philip Moriarty is professor of physics at the University of Nottingham.

Being a decent supervisor means being a decent human being’

My PhD supervisor taught me a valuable lesson about good supervision: it involves far more than teaching a doctoral student how to be a good writer and researcher. It is about believing in students’ academic potential, fostering their confidence and supporting them on whichever of life’s pathways they choose to take.

From the outset of my own PhD, I got a strong sense from my supervisor that he had faith in my abilities as an academic – he wanted me to succeed, and he never stopped telling me that he believed I could succeed. He was therefore committed to helping me develop the skills I would need when it came to navigating the postdoctoral job search. He advised me to do some tutoring early on, so that I could learn more about the art of teaching. He alerted me to job opportunities and gave some invaluable advice about performing well at interviews. He encouraged me to spend a semester at an overseas institution, which proved particularly fruitful, allowing me to develop my confidence on both personal and academic levels. Lastly, he instilled in me a passion for networking and collaboration, both of which have proved invaluable throughout my academic career.

Over the past few years, as I have taken up the mantle of PhD supervision, the lessons I learned from my supervisor have stayed with me. As well as guiding my students’ research and writing, I always take time to share some of the transferable skills that I acquired. I encourage them to participate in projects that will build their self-confidence as academics and in the wider world. I nudge them to present regularly at key conferences and have invited some to collaborate in writing projects with me. I seek opportunities for them to network with other academics in their field, or apply for a tutoring job, or gain experience and confidence in talking about their research. Following the example of my own supervisor, I want my students to know that I will do my best to nurture their abilities and support their endeavours as much as I can.

Nevertheless, good supervision is not solely focused on students’ future job prospects. Being a decent supervisor means being a decent human being, and showing students your respect and support. I always recall that, just before I began my PhD, my supervisor offered to assist me with my doctoral funding application; he knew I needed the funding and he wanted me to succeed. Despite being already overstretched with other academic commitments, he took time to look through my application with me, using his own rich experience to highlight its weaknesses and strengths. And throughout my studies, he supported me quietly as I went through the personal traumas of a family bereavement and a relationship break-up.

This basic sense of kindness is wrought from an acknowledgement that our PhD students are human beings, just like us. They look to us as role models – both academic and otherwise – and it is our responsibility to show them that we are good academics and good people. Hopefully, they will carry on this tradition if, in later years, they become supervisors themselves.

Kindness is something I place at the forefront of the relationships I share with all my students, and, honestly, it’s not that hard. Words of encouragement during moments of self-doubt, a listening ear when life’s stresses get in the way, a shared coffee or lunch when money is tight – small gestures that, as I recall myself, can go a long way in making the PhD journey that little bit easier.

Caroline Blyth is a senior lecturer in theological and religious studies at the University of Auckland.

‘Providing structure is hugely beneficial to both the student and the supervisor’

Some of life’s most important roles come with no training – you have to learn everything on the job. Being a parent is one of those, and being a PhD supervisor is another. The similarity between these undertakings probably extends even further – to me, being a PhD supervisor means having the opportunity to nurture a young researcher, and to provide them with a strong and secure foundation on which they can establish a career.

This involves figuring out how best to support and encourage them, while also establishing strong expectations and boundaries. It means being present and available to provide input and feedback, while at the same time fostering confidence, independence and a sense of responsibility for their own future. It means being a role model, and inculcating skills and values (such as academic integrity) that will serve them throughout their career, whether that is in academia or beyond. It also means supporting them through the inevitable hard times, and revelling in their successes. In other words – it’s a pretty hefty responsibility, and often a difficult and stressful one.

I have a rather unconventional supervision history – my first faculty position did not permit PhD student supervision – so the bulk of my experience comes from more informal supervisory relationships with people from a variety of backgrounds, from recent bachelor’s graduates, to postdoctoral fellows, to more senior researchers. But these experiences, together with my memories of my time as a student and my growing experience as an undergraduate, MSc and PhD supervisor, have taught me some important lessons.

Among the most significant is the importance of structure: setting clear and explicit expectations, including deadlines and milestones (such as submission of papers for peer review), backed up by regular meetings with a specific agenda, action items and student follow-up. Providing such structure can be a lot of work, but it is hugely beneficial to both the student and the supervisor.

For students who are making the transition from the undergraduate or taught MSc setting, one of the most challenging features of the research PhD is often the lack of deadlines and the feeling of achievement that comes with meeting them, as well as the benchmarking that feedback on assignments or exams provides. Easing that transition allows the student to gain a sense of achievement and awareness of areas of growth and weakness, but it also alerts the supervisor to any signs of difficulties that might stand in the way of completion, such as mental health difficulties that may need support and a potential revision of the PhD plan and timeline. It can also provide a clear basis for communicating with a student that things are not progressing as they should, and that completion may not be a realistic goal at all.

All that said, I have to acknowledge that I often find it difficult to follow my own advice. Academic time goes by at warp speed, and sometimes attempts at structure just fall by the wayside. I also think that the onus for managing the relationship should not fall on the supervisor alone: students must also take responsibility for their own progression.

Figuring out these roles and responsibilities can be one of the most challenging aspects of being a PhD supervisor, and seeking out formal training in good management skills (now offered by many universities) can be immensely beneficial. But, ultimately, the nature of the PhD structure is necessarily dictated on a case-by-case basis by both the supervisor’s and the student’s personalities and working styles. For some students, a “micromanagement” style may prove necessary, while for others, a lighter touch will be more effective. I naturally shy away from the former and find it difficult to implement.

No doubt many academics – who, by definition, were proficient at working semi-independently during their own doctorates – feel the same. But if we have admitted a student to a doctoral programme, we have to accept that it is incumbent on us to give them the help they need to succeed.

Sometimes, of course, a gap will remain between expectations and student progress. In such cases, structures for performance tracking and feedback can help supervisors to determine whether or not the completion of the PhD is within reach. Given the recessive job climate in academia, stepping off the PhD track can often be a sensible option, and should be thought of as goal adjustment, not defeat.

Clare Kelly is Ussher assistant professor of functional neuroimaging at Trinity College Dublin and adjunct assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University.

  ‘We can augment research skills with practical talents that build resilience and hone interpersonal intelligence’

PhD dropout numbers are approaching 50 per cent for many scientific disciplines in the US. That is because – speaking exclusively of scientific training – the truth is that not every doctoral student is cut out for independent research. In light of that, we should reconsider the true importance of possessing a doctorate.

After all, independent research is not the only walk of life in which the deep subject expertise and critical thinking skills acquired during doctoral study have enormous value. The years spent learning complex material, performing experiments and analysing data are immensely beneficial to anyone capable of doing these things. And sharing that information is necessary for the rest of society, too.

We need credentialed experts in every field, spread broadly, to enrich the lives of others who may not be so fortunate to have such opportunities. This is especially essential today, when misinformation is more believable than fact, and people confuse opinion with scholarship. Ideally, experts of every discipline should be embedded at all levels of the community, from teachers to church leaders, from small business owners to corporate leaders, to connect people to wisdom.

Perhaps the first step towards achieving this goal would be to remove the term “non-traditional career” from the academic advising vocabulary – even while keeping it very much inclusive of the production of PIs. We are living in a time of immense innovation, so fresh thoughts about employment trajectories should be equally novel. A student who ends up working outside academia should not be regarded by their supervisor as a failed self-cloning experiment. A PhD teaches students how to think, but we can broaden the scope of our mentoring to augment research skills with practical talents that build resilience and hone the interpersonal intelligence that is valuable in a wide range of careers.

In many US universities, students intent on entering the research phase of their doctorates have first to pass a two-day written and a one-day oral candidacy exam, so we already have sufficient preliminary evidence of their subject content mastery. When their suitability to be an independent researcher is in doubt, I try to direct my own students into jobs that may better suit their skills within academia. One example is student instruction; I offer teaching opportunities in my undergraduate courses in the form of 1–2 credit hours of independent study. This allows the doctoral students to prepare a topic, present it and create test questions, as well as to host and moderate the associated discussions on the electronic learning platform. The postgraduates are often surprised at how difficult and time-consuming this is.

For instance, pharmacology or biochemistry students with talents that may be more suited to the biomedical industry could be partnered with industry experts in their field who offer internships beyond the bench, to see how they fit in a non-academic environment. Many academic scientists have their own ties to industry, so it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that this could be arranged for the few students a year – perhaps as early as the second year of graduate school, before the research phase begins.

Some will say that PIs are not in a good position to prepare people for careers with which they themselves have no personal familiarity. But we were trained to develop young scientists and to get them to their destination. Whether that destination mirrors our own should be irrelevant.

Jennifer Schnellmann is associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Arizona.

‘Students need to bring their interests into conversation with the discipline as a whole’

I’ve always conceived higher education to be a process of negotiation between the consumption and the production of knowledge. Students who are capable consumers of knowledge – usually those who do well in examinations – do not necessarily become equally capable producers of knowledge: that is, researchers. The reverse is also true.

Production of knowledge should start early, ideally in the form of undergraduate research papers. But, of course, it comes much more strongly into focus during the doctorate. There are debates about whether the dissertation is the last work of the research trainee or the first utterance of the professional. Perhaps it is a bit of both, but the proportions typically vary according to whether the student is working in the humanities or the natural sciences.

Research in the humanities is, for the most part, done by individuals, while scientific research is more of a group activity, led by a principal investigator. What this means is that anyone who has completed a doctorate in the humanities – my field – is, by definition, capable of independent research – unless the degree has been obtained by unfair means! Advisers share their expertise in the larger subfield, but the dissertation project itself is very much the student’s own.

I’ve known advisers who recommend that their students do not publish before completing their degree; and I’ve known advisers who encourage students to publish, present and network as much as possible even before the dissertation is completed. The conflict is between an approach that sees a doctorate as a complete, disinterested immersion in scholarship versus one that conceives it as professionalisation – which includes socialisation into the institutional lives of a given discipline, as well as more material functions such as seeking jobs, grants and fellowships. Scholarship and professionalisation are related and mutually reinforcing, of course, yet they are not the same and some people are better at one than the other.

My recommendation to my advisees is that they pursue a middle course. The origin of their scholarship, I tell them, should be something that sparks their passion, but once the fire is started, they need to bring their interests into conversation with the discipline as a whole. So, yes, they should use publication to enter into the conversation, but they should guard against letting professionalisation take over the independence and integrity of their intellectual lives. Dissertations should not be shaped in response to the jobs market. But once they have their scholarly trajectory in place, they should identify how it addresses needs and gaps in the discipline as practised today.

One of the big debates in my field, literary studies, is the book versus dissertation question. Should a doctoral student concentrate on fulfilling the traditional expectations of the very small group of people who will ever pay their dissertation any attention, adorning it with copious footnotes and a lengthy literature review that even the examiners won’t read? Or should they write with the wider book audience in mind right from the beginning?

My personal recommendation is to try to write the book. “Try” is the operative word: it is not easy to write something that coheres and reads like a book, especially for the first-time writer, yet aiming to do so will still lead to a radically more readable style. And this is important in the humanities, where the product and the process are not easily separable. It is probably OK for an article describing a new drug to be written in a dull or inaccessible style. But in literature, scholarship must also bring pleasure, even to academic readers.

In any case, students will be revising their dissertations for publication soon enough. Why waste huge chunks of time during their postdoctoral fellowship or first tenure-track job doing so? Much better to cut out the flab from the very outset.

Saikat Majumdar is professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University. He is the author, most recently, of College: Pathways of Possibility (Bloomsbury India, 2018).

  ‘The paltry credit offered in the US system disincentivises true mentorship’

Over the past half-decade I have directed well over a dozen graduate projects, and I believe more than ever that the effectiveness of the process should be replicated across the curriculum.

Working one-to-one with a senior scholar expert in the field is a unique boon for student persistence and engagement. To the extent that a thesis, dissertation or other extended research project effectively reduces the corporate scale and increasingly impersonal feel of higher education, it is a process worth celebrating. Because it is also labour-intensive, time-inefficient and messy, it offers an antidote to the brand of assembly-line education preferred by degree mills.

The thesis and dissertation serve as invaluable reminders that student engagement in the 21st century, regardless of level, has everything to do with helping scholars find authorship and agency. When students propose their topic, research it and ultimately defend it, they are more likely to experience the kind of ownership that produces the best, most accountable scholarship. Even removed from faculty guidance, extended independent research projects are valuable for the self-directed, iterative learning processes they cultivate.

However, the idea that a doctoral or master’s candidate could derive significant value from the dissertation or thesis even without faculty supervision raises the question of how meaningful, in practice, the role of director is. For example, graduate students often enrol in thesis or dissertation hours equivalent to a full-credit course, then re-enrol in those hours to work on their credit-bearing project for a second semester. However, if contact hours with supervising faculty members are minimal, as they often are, can we consider those credit hours well earned? The integrity of the thesis and dissertation process depends in large part on the activeness and availability of the director; if that director only meets in-person with their advisee once or twice a semester and again at the defence, have they not become mostly ceremonial figures, there to cement the illusion of academic legitimacy?

It isn’t that thesis advisers and dissertation directors are lazy, but that the paltry credit offered for their labours in the US system disincentivises true mentorship. While a graduate student may earn the equivalent of two full classes’ worth of credit for two semesters of thesis or dissertation work, the faculty member who signs on as director does well to earn a quarter of the credits they would otherwise earn teaching in the classroom.

Provosts may argue that because the thesis and the dissertation qualify as independent research, any credits awarded supervising faculty should reflect that supporting (read: secondary) role. Such logic works in cases where the graduate student is self-motivated and intellectually prepared, but it fails spectacularly in instances where the degree candidate needs significant retraining or academic acculturation.

The thesis or dissertation process works best with fully engaged supervisory faculty properly credited for their work. It is vital that director and degree candidate be realistic about what may be achieved in a given period of time. In my view, both grad students and their supervising faculty members are better served by shorter theses and dissertations, where greater focus and depth make for a truer simulacrum of life. PhD candidates will need to add chapters at a later date to merit publication by a scholarly or university press in any event, and the intervening years between the completion of the thesis or dissertation and its ultimate book publication serve to age the scholar and their scholarship. With candidates for advanced degrees getting younger, the postdoctoral years become more conducive to the maturative process that ripens the writer and refines the research.

For my money, the thesis or dissertation is best regarded not merely as pre-professorial training but as the beginning of collaborative intellectual enquiry designed to last a lifetime.

Publicație : The Times

Academic publishing must do better on gender

Current remedies are not enough. Publishers, editors and referees must do more to eliminate lurking biases, say Melinda Duer and Athene Donald

It was no surprise to see from UK universities’ latest annual statistics that the gender pay gap remains stubbornly high. There simply are not as many women as men at the top of the pay scales – and there are many more in the bottom grades.

If, as we would all like to believe, promotion is determined purely on merit, why should this be so? This problem is about so much more than women’s choices about families. The system needs fixing, not the women. But which bits, and how?

We suggest that publishers and journal editors have a key role to play that is often ignored or overlooked. Over hundreds of years, the publication of papers has been the main route for communicating science between researchers. But more recently, the number of papers published and the impact factor of the journal in which they appear have become accepted, if crude, proxies for assessing a researcher’s worth – for promotion, job applications and funding new research projects. The result is that universities are, in effect, outsourcing decisions about hiring and promotions to external organisations whose chief motivation is not to get this morally “right” but – in the case of commercial publishers, at least – to make money.

The evidence suggests that the current publishing model, set up by men for men, is beset with unconscious bias. The knock-on effect is not simply that much fantastic research never sees the light of day. It is also that many talented people from minority backgrounds do not see their careers progress in the way their excellence would warrant. This is not good for science, let alone the individuals. Science has always advanced by building on others’ achievements: under-representation of any part of the community impacts all of us by limiting progress and constraining research directions for no good scientific reasons.

Publishers and editors need to take more responsibility. This is not simply about inviting more women to write review articles, monitoring the percentage of women in the reviewer pool or collecting statistics on how many papers with female last or first authors are published – important though these measures are. If the best researchers’ work is to see the light of the day, and if, as a consequence, the best researchers are to be properly rewarded, we need to do far more as a community.

To take one telling statistic, Nicole Neuman, editor of Trends in Biochemical Sciences, reports that just 13 per cent of pre-submission enquiries to her journal come from women. Why? Is it because women are fragile snowflakes who cannot face rejection? Or is it that their experience tells them that they will waste a lot of time trying to publish in journals with high impact factors? Who is checking what happens when a paper with a female senior author hits the editor’s desk?

Bias is well known to be subtle. It is not just men who are biased against women; so too are women, as a 2012 study of job applications published in PNAS showed. So increasing the number of women in the reviewer pool, while giving more women useful experience, is unlikely to affect the number of female-authored papers accepted. Nor, correspondingly, is having more women on the editorial team of the journals.

Who is reviewing the reviewers and checking that they are not biased, consciously or unconsciously? After all, it was the authors who brought to public attention the case, in 2015, of the referee who told a pair of female scientists to get a male co-author. The editor had not seen fit to tear up the referee’s totally unacceptable report.

We have been able to find little evidence in the literature about how long papers with female authors take to be published in comparison with those with male authors, or on whether they are likely to have to go through more resubmissions before final acceptance, let alone on whether implicit or explicit sexism is to be found in the actual referees’ reports. But an analysis of papers in economics published last October concludes that “referees of both genders appear to set a higher bar for female-authored papers”; it would be interesting for comparable analyses to be done in different disciplines.

Our challenge to publishers, editors and referees alike is to do more to check at every stage that there is no lurking bias, implicit or explicit – and to think about the knock-on effects for gender equality of everything they do.

And universities should think about the unreflective ways that data around publishing may be used in their promotions and appointments processes. If, as anecdote would suggest, women get harsher referees’ comments, more revisions demanded and more outright rejections from editors even before review, then the consequences are that a significant sector in higher education is expending time and energy for no useful outcome.

We need much more sophisticated and wide-ranging consideration of the whole publication system. Otherwise, endemic bias will continue to skew the academic population.

Publicație : The Times

Big tech funding AI ethics research to ‘delay and avoid’ regulation

Philosopher calls on universities to take AI debate ‘out of the hands of the industry’ and end ‘ethics washing’

One of Europe’s leading philosophers has called on universities to take the debate about the ethical use of artificial intelligence “out of the hands of the industry” and warned that big technology firms are funding academic research in the area to create the illusion of action and so stall real regulation.

Thomas Metzinger, a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, said that corporations hoping to profit from AI had created an “industry” of “ethics washing”.

This is an attempt to “organise and cultivate ethical debates in order to delay, postpone, avoid…policymaking and regulation. And that is something you find everywhere right now,” he told university leaders at the European University Association annual conference in Paris.

“There is a high responsibility for European universities to take the ethics debates on artificial intelligence out of the hands of the industry now, and put them on a more neutral and serious academic platform,” he added.

The debate over “ethics washing” has flared up in Germany after the Technical University of Munich (TUM) earlier this year accepted a $7.5 million (£5.7 million) donation from Facebook to found a new AI ethics research centre.

“TUM has done great damage to its reputation in my view, by accepting money from Facebook,” Professor Metzinger said.

“Nobody believes that this is a sincere initiative by Facebook,” he said, adding that there were “all kinds of these strange relationships” between academia and technology companies that compromised research independence.

Christoph Lütge, head of the new centre, said that it had “no obligation” towards Facebook as a result of the gift. “Facebook has really understood that they need to change their approach,” he said.

“Even if we question the motivations of a company, what counts for ethics is the outcome” and the impact on policy and wider society, he argued.

A spokesman for Facebook said the firm did not wish to comment.

Professor Metzinger is part of an EU panel of 52 experts that has drawn up ethical guidelines for the use of AI, now being piloted in companies and research institutes.

These guidelines were “strongly industry-dominated” and had “no real normative substance” on “concrete recommendations,” he said. Nonetheless, they were the “best thing we have on the planet right now”, he said, and meant that Europe has taken a global lead on ethical AI.

The EU should spend an eighth of its AI research budget on initiatives exploring the ethical implications of the technology, Professor Metzinger argued.

The conference also heard from Magnus Rattray, director of the University of Manchester’s Data Science Institute, who agreed with Professor Metzinger’s ethics washing concerns. “I think it’s much better if big tech pays tax and then governments fund these kind of centres,” he said.

But he also also faced questions over corporate funding of research at the UK’s new Alan Turing Institute, an AI and data science-focused centre with which Professor Rattray is involved.

Industry money was “ringfenced for their particular projects and does not leak into other funded aspects of the programmes,” he said.

Companies possess “a huge amount of data”, making it “quite difficult to envisage an AI and data science national institute that doesn’t work with business,” he added.

Publicație : The Times

US ‘free college’ clashes key to Democratic presidential race

Fractures emerge between Democratic candidates – but they, and even Republicans, actually share broad concerns on affordability

The rejection of “free college” by a prominent contender for the Democratic US presidential nomination spotlights clashes between the candidates over the idea, but also the need for a political debate on higher education that “reflects what college students actually look like”, according to experts.

As the race for the Democratic nomination hots up, differing – and overlapping – policies on higher education funding are proving to be key. Pete Buttigieg, the middle-America college-town mayor now rising up in presidential polls, has turned some heads in recent days by warning that cost-free college offers the greatest benefit for those who least need it.

“As a progressive,” he told students at Northeastern University in Boston, “I have a hard time getting my head around the idea of a majority who earn less, because they didn’t go to college, subsidising a minority who earn more because they did.”

In the minds of some commentators, that declaration set the telegenic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, apart from other leading Democratic contenders. Bernie Sanders and Julián Castro back versions of tuition-free college, while Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand advocate for debt-free college.

Mr Buttigieg overtly embraces neither, instead emphasising a goal of making college far more affordable by expanding the Pell Grant programme for low-income students and encouraging states to spend more on college.

The actual policy differences, however, are far smaller than the energetic headlines about Mr Buttigieg's position suggest. Other than perhaps Mr Sanders, none of the leading presidential candidates is clearly calling for the elimination of all tuition fees at public institutions.

According to Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, said Mr Buttigieg appears pretty centred among his Democratic rivals in seeking some way of making college – especially the first two years – truly possible for all students regardless of wealth.

“The sweet spot is where Buttigieg and all these other people are landing,” Dr Carnevale said. And by continuing to push for truly tuition-free college “Bernie is left holding the bag”, he added.

While it may win Mr Sanders enthusiastic crowds and primary votes, the possibility of the US government’s providing truly free college is zero, according to one leading US political analyst. Larry J. Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, said that the idea was as “dead as the proverbial doornail”.

The confusion that nevertheless cast Mr Buttigieg, rather than Mr Sanders, as the greater outlier was an example of how resolving the complicated details of improving college affordability was unlikely to occur during a political campaign, Dr Carnevale and other experts said.

Ben Miller, vice-president for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress thinktank, said that “raising concerns about free college”, as Mr Buttigieg was doing, was “not the same thing as saying we don’t need to make progress on college affordability. Often I see the two get intertwined.”

In fact, the focus in US political coverage on perceived differences between Democratic candidates over “free college” could be obscuring a more important area in which Democrats and Republicans may find room for progress: vocational training – also described as skills-based training or competency training.

Republicans have led calls for slimmer versions of the Pell Grant that can be used for shorter-duration skills-oriented training, as part of their long-standing push for colleges to be more tightly focused on meeting immediate employer needs.

Yet, even as adults pursuing mid-career retraining claim a bigger and bigger share of postsecondary education, the needs of such adults command a relatively small share of higher education-related attention on the presidential campaign trail.

“It’s a remarkable absence,” Dr Carnevale said. Instead of voters routinely demanding that politicians help low-skilled workers afford job training, he noted, “they want [candidates] to say what Trump says to them: I’m going to bring your job back.”

As such, said Beth Popp Berman of the State University of New York Albany, the emphasis on terms such as “free college” was yet another way in which political debates fail to capture reality.

“It’s just very hard,” said Dr Berman, an associate professor of sociology who specialises in education, “to get people to talk about college students in a way that reflects what college students actually look like.”

The fog often seems deliberate, said Wesley Whistle, an education policy adviser with the Third Way thinktank. “These candidates have to distinguish themselves in such a crowded field,” he said. At least in their messaging to voters, Mr Whistle said, “they can’t all support the same policies”.

Publicație : The Times

The four-day week: will it catch on in academia?

Some institutions now follow the model, but experts question whether it will benefit a sector where 24/7 culture is ingrained

Many academics have come out as strong advocates for the four-day working week, with studies highlighting benefits from increased productivity to improved mental health and work-life balance. But could universities benefit by following the model?

The University of Mobile, a private, Baptist-affiliated institution in Alabama, introduced the arrangement two years ago as part of an initiative dubbed “Focus Fridays”. Academics and staff work a 35-hour week, with classes timetabled from Mondays to Thursdays and professional staff rotating days off.

Students are encouraged to spend Fridays volunteering in the community, socialising with classmates, doing internships or working to pay for their education.

Meanwhile, for employees “the four-day academic week represents an opportunity for balance”, said Chris McCaghren, the university’s provost.

“I had one of our English professors tell me she was reading for fun for the first time in years. The irony, and the applicability, of that statement has stayed with me,” Dr McCaghren added.

Fred Wilson, the university’s president, added that the institution has “seen productivity increase, even though people are working less hours in total” and the model is “an attractive benefit for recruiting students and retaining employees”.

Across the pond, the UK’s Wellcome Trust had been considering moving all of its 800 head office staff to a four-day week in a bid to improve “welfare and productivity”. However, the biomedical research charity said this week that following “internal consultation” it would not be pursuing the idea, as it would be “too operationally complex”.

But Gregor Gall, affiliate research associate at the University of Glasgow and an expert in industrial relations, cautioned that “for academic staff, most would find it impossible to do all their work within four days given that they cannot manage it in five eight-hour days and so work their evenings and weekends, and don’t take all their holidays.

“For academic staff seeking to make their mark on their subject and get promoted for doing so, individually they would only pay lip service to it.”

Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington-Bothell, has studied the impact of a four-day week on rural primary and secondary schools in the US.

“Its appeal in rural areas is that it gives teachers and students’ families a weekday to travel to cities to see doctors, do necessary shopping etc,” he said.

However, students and academics in higher education have “looser schedules” and “enough flexibility to attend to their own needs and those of their children”, he claimed.

In fact, “some universities are concerned that their immense physical plants are underused, and are wondering whether to expand their faculties and student bodies by operating seven days each week”, he said.

Publicație : The Times

A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile, by Judith Friedlander

Book of the week: Samantha Hill considers the first century of a pioneering institution whose history can still inspire us today

The New School for Social Research in New York continues to be a focus for debate and free speech, and is here the site of a protest on divestment from fossil fuels

Judith Friedlander’s engaging intellectual history of The New School for Social Research in New York appears at a timely moment – against a backdrop of renewed debates about free speech and academic freedom on college campuses, and the rise of illiberalism worldwide. As the school celebrates its centennial, she lifts the curtain on academic administration, inviting us to the front lines of these battles. While looking at the past, she draws attention to contemporary crises in higher education, offering an insider’s view of academia in the US. She herself was dean of the graduate faculty at the New School from 1993 to 2000.

One hundred years ago, James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard left Columbia University in an act of political protest and founded what would become the New School. Columbia was firing faculty who spoke out against US involvement in the First World War for “sedition”. Robinson and Beard quit not because they were against the war, but because they refused to support an institution that was not committed to academic freedom. They were quickly joined by other frustrated intellectuals such as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen. Ever since, the New School has been home to some of the world’s leading minds: John Maynard Keynes, Harold Laski, Margaret Mead, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Frank Lloyd Wright, W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin and Hannah Arendt, to name but a few.

In the beginning, the aim of the New School was clear: “to make social research of immediate assistance to a bewildered and groping American democracy”. Like the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in Paris, which was founded in 1872, the year after France surrendered to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, and the Institut für Sozialforschung (institutional home of the Frankfurt School), set up in 1923 as a response to the fallout from the First World War, the New School appeared as a bastion of academic freedom during a moment of political crisis. Friedlander emphasises that Robinson and Beard also left Columbia amid a “power struggle” that had been going on for years, there and at other universities, as boards of trustees were “refashioning the governance structure of academic institutions to resemble business corporations”, minimising faculty autonomy.

If Columbia University and boards of trustees appear as villains in Friedlander’s history, then Alvin Johnson emerges as superhero. As a co-founder and president from 1922 to 1946, he not only stewarded the New School through a tumultuous era, but saved innumerable scholars who were forced to flee the horrors of fascism, bringing more than 200 people to the New School alone. In 1933, when the Nazi Party took power, Johnson raised money to found the University in Exile there as a home for thinkers escaping persecution and, when France fell to the Nazi invasion, he worked to establish the École libre des hautes études as a graduate division of the University in Exile, receiving a charter from de Gaulle’s Free French government. In 1934, the University in Exile was renamed the Graduate Faculty, and in 2005 the name was restored to The New School for Social Research. Today, the school continues to change, recently launching its New University in Exile Consortium, partly in response to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s attack on Budapest’s Central European University.

The story of the New School is full of squabbles – some significant, some petty. In 1938, Hans Staudinger, together with a few New School colleagues, began working on a translation of the first unabridged edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf for Houghton Mifflin, which would ensnare the school in legal battles that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. What was at stake? The publishing house Stackpole and Sons announced that it was also publishing a translation of Mein Kampf, and challenged Houghton Mifflin’s claim that it alone had the rights to publication. This was complicated by the fact that, when Hitler’s publisher got word of the translation, it “requested copyright protection on behalf of their author”. In the end, Hitler never received royalties.

Friedlander’s book focuses on the transitional moments that have shaped the New School. In this way, its history is also a history of the 20th century: the First World War, the Great Depression, the Red Scare, the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in Europe, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, the fall of communism in eastern Europe. Under the direction of John (Jack) Everett from 1964 to 1982, the school weathered and grew from the student protest movement that swept Europe and the US in the late 1960s. In the 1990s, we read, then president Jonathan Fanton “used the school as a platform for taking stands in national debates about freedom of expression”, turning protests into teaching opportunities.

The voices of Hannah Arendt and Ira Katznelson echo throughout as guiding interlocutors, reflecting on the intimate relationship between our political moment and the moral responsibility of academic institutions. Katznelson left the University of Chicago in 1983 for the New School. Together with Fanton, he stepped forward to defend the rights of persecuted intellectuals in east and central Europe. When he left in 1994, accepting a position at Columbia University, Fanton asked him to deliver the commencement address. Friedlander ends her history by summarising Katznelson’s prescient words: “The New School’s European colleagues, he said – both those of the generation of 1933 and those of 1989 – saw the weakness in liberal democracies more clearly than their American counterparts. Given their experiences with totalitarian regimes, the Europeans understood ‘that all liberal regimes are built on foundations of state violence and coercion, and that these instruments in the basements of the state can be used to topple the upper floors of open societies. At best, they remain in place as hidden instruments of rule’.”

Friedlander is close to the topic that she is writing about; there is a kind of pride and cheekiness in her telling that marvels at the remarkable history of the New School. Each section could easily have made a volume in its own right, with the wealth of archival material and letters filling the pages. These are essential and gripping stories, and to appreciate the full significance of the role that The New School has played one wants to linger a bit longer on the particular lives that have sustained its existence. A couple of paragraphs about Johnson’s back-story seem hardly adequate for a man who comes off as nothing less than a great American hero.

The title of the book comes from Arendt’s Men in Dark Times (1974), itself referring to a famous poem by Bertolt Brecht. Even in the darkest time, she writes, “we have the right to expect some illumination, and that illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them.”

The many founders of the New School were true public intellectuals, journalists, academics and philanthropists. Friedlander’s record of their lives and work emerges as a light in these dark times, offering us a portrait of how an institution takes shape, a vision for thinking about how universities can fail and some ideas about how they might be renewed amid the chaos of our current moment. This work will surely be of interest to anyone who is committed to academic freedom and democratic education.

Samantha Hill is visiting assistant professor of politics – and assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities – at Bard College. She is working on a translation of Hannah Arendt’s poems and has just finished a memoir about sexual violence in academia.

A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile
By Judith Friedlander
Columbia University Press, 484pp, £30.00
ISBN 9780231180184
Published 5 February 2019

The author

Judith Friedlander, who retired from the State University of New York and City University of New York in 2017, was born in New York City but moved to Long Island as an infant. Her
parents, she says, thereby “left the crowded city together with thousands of other upwardly mobile Jews, children, for the most part, of east European immigrants” and entered
“a community of wealthy White Anglo-Saxon Protestants [which soon] became known pejoratively as the ‘golden ghetto’ ”.

Apart from a year of graduate school at Harvard University, Friedlander studied entirely at the University of Chicago. Politically active herself, she became fascinated by “the rise of separatist political movements – based on ethnic, racial and gender identity”. Her doctoral research “looked at the ways a colonised people – indigenous Mexicans – interpreted their ethnic identity” from the time of the Spanish conquest, although it was only later that she realised that her analysis was “deeply influenced by debates in the literature on antisemitism and the Jewish question”. She then turned directly to studying “French Jewish intellectuals of the generation of 1968”. A Light in Dark Times allowed her to develop her interest in antisemitism and Jews, while “expanding the subject to look more broadly at the role intellectuals and their academic institutions have played in framing debates about academic freedom, difference and human rights”.

Today, in the light of “a refugee crisis the likes of which we have not seen since 1945”, Friedlander would like “our universities to follow the model of The New School by providing safe havens for the intellectuals among them. Furthermore, given the debates raging on university campuses about academic freedom, this is also the time to remember how the founders of The New School campaigned for freedom of expression by standing up for the rights of people with whom they disagreed…”

Publicație : The Times

Patently Mathematical: Picking Partners, Passwords and Careers by the Numbers, by Jeff Suzuki

Tony Mann learns that ‘applied mathematics’ isn’t what it used to be

Although mathematical discoveries cannot be patented – they are regarded as ideas rather than inventions – it is possible to take out a patent on a mathematical procedure that is part of some sort of device. Many methods have now been patented in this way. Patently Mathematical tells us about some such mathematics, raising significant issues about how the law deals with the field.

There is no traditional applied mathematics here. It is all linear algebra, network analysis and number theory: formerly abstract areas of pure mathematics that have proved to be of practical significance in the digital age. The mathematics of many of the most important applications in today’s world is not the mathematics that was regarded as applied or applicable when I was a student!

Suzuki begins by discussing how software can analyse text, explaining the difficulties faced in compiling an index, whether the indexer is human or computer. Curiously, despite this extensive analysis, the term “index” does not appear in the index to this book! We learn how mathematics can help determine when two documents relate to the same subject. There are clear explanations of the challenges – for example, words with two different meanings that could lead to documents on different subjects being incorrectly matched; and the difficulty of matching two documents on the same topic which refer to it by different words. Mathematical algorithms (and a great deal of computing power) can address these problems: search engines are remarkably good at finding relevant documents for us!

There are lucid and useful chapters on the mathematics on which internet security relies: public-key encryption, such as the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange algorithm and the RSA cryptographic system. Both were initially patented by their inventors, and hence come within Suzuki’s remit, but his informative discussion of possible attacks on these systems suggests that his enthusiasm for the mathematics involved goes beyond mere consideration of its patentability.

How can mobile phone companies cope with the fact that many of their most profitable customers move to another supplier every year? Offering better deals to all would damage profits, but network analysis allows those customers who are most likely to influence others to be identified so that they can be specifically targeted. Not surprisingly, given the commercial stakes involved, there are some interesting patents in this field. Here Suzuki identifies a problem: one of the patents discussed is so vague as to potentially cover any use of network theory, without any evidence that the patent holder has an effective formula. Such loose patents offer a great opportunity for “patent trolls” who exploit patents by litigation.

The book contains scattered references to issues around the patenting of mathematics, and concludes with a very brief epilogue making proposals as to how these might be addressed. Suzuki suggests that patent applications should provide evidence of the effectiveness of their mathematical procedures, and that mathematical expertise be required of patent officers making decisions on such patents. These suggestions are eminently sensible. Indeed, given concerns about the activities of patent trolls, more extensive discussion of some of these issues might have strengthened the argument. Overall, however, the book presents many new applications of mathematics, clearly described, and makes fascinating reading

Publicație : The Times

Einstein’s Wife: The Real Story of Mileva Einstein-Marić, by Allen Esterson, David C. Cassidy and Ruth Lewin Sime

Jennifer Rohn enjoys an account that shatters some of the myths about Einstein’s marriage

Throughout history, women have been involved in scientific discovery, but in the past their roles have been peripheral, underplayed or overlooked, and their names forgotten. Even the few success stories – women such as Marie Curie and Lise Meitner – depict a struggle for acceptance in a man’s world. In our somewhat more enlightened times, the desire to restore these shadowy women of science to their rightful place in history is strong. Unfortunately, the severe injustice of their plights can sometimes lead to well-meaning but ultimately flawed overcompensation.

Such seems to be the case for Mileva Marić. Born in 1875 in what is now Serbia, she showed early promise at school and was encouraged by her family to carry on with what limited studies were available to young women of that era. Embarking on a long journey of intense endurance and tenacity, she was allowed to attend an all-male gymnasium, where she held her own, although she had to receive special permission to enrol in physics. A move to Switzerland was required to enter higher education. Ultimately, Marić met her date with destiny at the Zurich Polytechnic: she was the only woman in her cohort, and the only other first-year physics student was Albert Einstein.

The pair struck up a deepening friendship and study partnership. Neither Marić nor Einstein was a top student, but only he passed his diploma. By then betrothed to Einstein, whose own career was taking off, Marić was also pregnant and flunked her degree exams for the second time; the two were probably not unrelated. Her child was born out of wedlock without Einstein’s attendance back at her parents’ home, and ultimately vanished from history, either to illness or adoption. The pair eventually married and had two more children, but their previous connection soon eroded; Marić was increasingly excluded from Einstein’s inner scientific circle during the height of the activity culminating in his 1905 paper on special relativity, and became ever more bitter. After his affair with a cousin, divorce followed, and Marić was never able to resume her interest in science.

Thus might her story have been forgotten, were it not for a series of biographers planting the seed that Marić contributed more to Einstein’s work than had been previously appreciated. These biographers apparently relied heavily on hearsay, and sometimes stated speculation as fact. In a process like Chinese whispers, further distorted by translations into various languages, as Einstein’s Wife makes clear, subsequent chroniclers repeated the stories uncritically and even embellished them. The publication of the couple’s correspondence fuelled the fire, as occasionally Einstein in more affectionate moments would refer to “our” work.

By the 1990s, the idea that Marić was the unsung co-author of Einstein’s brilliance was firmly rooted in the public domain, spawning books and articles and even television dramas. But this account, despite being an uneasy hybrid of two overlapping and lengthy essays, glued together by a brief treatise on the plight of women in science, does a convincing job of debunking the myth. At the same time, the authors note that the myth has marred the real human-interest story here: the remarkable struggle of a tragic woman who almost succeeded despite terrible odds.

Publicație : The Times

The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, by Leo Damrosch

Jeffrey Meyers considers a new account of one of the most talented generations in English literature

The Club – whose members included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick and Adam Smith (Boswell’s professor in Glasgow) – was the greatest constellation of talent since the English Renaissance. It surpassed the Scriblerus Club of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay, and has not been equalled in modern times by the Bloomsburys or other literary sodalities.

Leo Damrosch’s familiar but lively and perceptive The Club (with 124 helpful illustrations accompanied by his incisive comments) is a group biography that traces “the intersecting lives, interests, friendships, rivalries, and careers” of these eminences up to and beyond the formation in 1764 of the original nine-member Club. This assembly of learned and ingenious good fellows dined out on pigeon, wigeon, gudgeon and sturgeon. The Club was designed to inspire warm comradeship, high-powered conversation and intellectual stimulation. David Hume wrote that through enlightened talk “the whole man acquires a vigour which he cannot command in solitary moments”.

Johnson, the natural leader who feared solitude and craved company, combined impressive brain power with warm-hearted humanity. As Plato said of Socrates, “Of all those whom we knew in our time, he was the bravest and also the wisest and most upright.” Boswell, a drunkard and whoremonger (for as little as sixpence), played Falstaff to Johnson’s Prince Hal: “Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety.” Damrosch does not note that Johnson’s remarks on Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2 suggest that he took vicarious pleasure in Boswell’s behaviour. Conversely, Damrosch writes, “in Johnson Boswell had the father figure he really needed: highly moral and capable of criticism, but nonjudgmental and loving”.

Johnson admired Reynolds for his artistic ability and sweet temper, Burke for his range of knowledge and mental prowess, Goldsmith for his prodigal generosity and literary talent. Damrosch is more interesting on the less familiar figures and could have devoted a useful chapter to Goldsmith. The character of this imaginative idiot and court jester strangely combined absurdity and malice with kindness and benevolence. Other Club members were just as strange. The pudgy face of the grotesquely obese Gibbon “resembled the rear end of a baby”. Johnson called the reticent Adam Smith “as dull a dog as he had ever met with”. Although he seemed “unclubbable”, Smith was elected for his work.

Johnson’s later life was transformed by three fortunate events: the annual royal pension of £300, the formation of the Club and then his bountiful and emotional friendship with Henry and Hester Thrale, who supplied congenial company and replaced his need for the Club. Both Boswell and Thrale had many liaisons, but were decent enough to avoid conjugal relations when they had the clap.

Johnson felt guilty – a dominant characteristic – about his failure to visit his domineering, aged mother in Lichfield and the failure of his marriage to his older wife Tetty, who desperately tried to look young. She boasted, Garrick said, “a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks of a florid red, increased by the liberal use of cordials”. Despite his profound piety, Johnson never found religious consolation, suffered spiritual torment, and always feared death, damnation and hellfire.

Publicație : The Times

David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity, by Leslie Ritchie

Marketing concepts shed new light on ‘the first modern celebrity’ even if some threads are missed, says Liz Schafer

David Garrick, depicted here by Joshua Reynolds, was an arch-showman, on stage and through the media

David Garrick (1717-79) was a star actor, a theatre manager, a writer and, Leslie Ritchie argues, a media mogul. During the period 1747-76, when Garrick ran the Drury Lane Theatre, he was also performing and adapting Shakespeare as well as writing puffs, advertisements, poetry, prologues, epilogues and plays. Understanding that there is no such thing as bad publicity, he also stirred up discussion in the coffee houses of Georgian London by publishing anonymous attacks on his own work. He achieved astonishing market penetration and was almost always, in today’s terms, trending.

Ritchie claims that Garrick was possibly the first “modern” celebrity and, anachronistically but memorably, uses marketing concepts to explore Garrick’s media-savvy strategies, such as his skill in building and managing his “brand”. This “brand” sold him as a “natural” performer who could play wildly divergent roles, sometimes comedy and tragedy on the same night; a performer who, at a time when heroic leads were expected to be six-feet tall, played heroes despite his relatively short (but allegedly perfectly proportioned) stature; and who marketed the Drury Lane Theatre as the home of another successful brand, “Shakespeare”.

The book assumes knowledge of Garrick’s biography as Ritchie homes in on the details of his media strategies, documenting his shareholdings and proprietorial interests in a range of newspapers, and indicating how he could promote some news while suppressing publicity that could potentially favour rivals. He had long-standing connection with the Public Advertiser – Ritchie finds Garrick’s name in this newspaper more than 300 times in 1756 – but his writing appeared in a host of journals, newspapers and periodicals, with content sometimes reused, reworked and recycled many times.

While making a convincing case for Garrick’s attention to marketing, merchandising, liaising with booksellers and distributing portraits, Ritchie is overzealous in relentlessly signposting the direction of her argument and hammering some of her points home. And while its scrutiny of Garrick’s media influence and the “cobweb politics” involved makes the book an important resource, there could have been more on how Garrick’s mediation employed and influenced women, who are largely left on the margins of the “cobweb”.

Another neglected aspect is the degree to which some of Garrick’s “mediation” strategies were actually an extension of play-acting. The anonymous newspaper columns, poems and letters surely show him performing in print, playing a part offstage as well as on. Even in his final illness he was still working with an anonymous publishing persona, “Matthew Mum”, authoring “The Whisperer” column in the Public Advertiser – that is, he was assuming a voice, performing a role through writing. Yes, Garrick mediated celebrity skilfully, but he was also a showman, whether performing as Richard III, “The Whisperer” or friend to the Countess Spencer. And those performances were foundational in the mediation of his celebrity.

Publicație : The Times

«On va intégrer une école qui n’existera plus?» Le désarroi des étudiants qui préparent l’ENA

TÉMOIGNAGES - À la suite de l’annonce par Emmanuel Macron de la suppression de l’Ecole nationale de l’administration, les jeunes qui se destinaient à préparer le concours d’entrée se disent pris au dépourvu.

«À quelle sauce va-t-on être mangés?» L’interrogation est dans toutes les bouches des étudiants qui préparent le concours externe de l’ENA en vue d’y rentrer l’année prochaine, voire celles d’après. Dans son allocution prévue lundi dernier et finalement annulée à la suite de l’incendie de Notre-Dame de Paris, Emmanuel Macron s’était en effet déclaré «favorable» à la suppression de l’Ecole nationale de l’Administration.

» LIRE AUSSI - Sciences Po a reçu plus de 20 000 candidatures en 2018, un nouveau record

Cette annonce a donc provoqué une onde de choc. «J’étais en cours lorsque j’ai vu un article qui annonçait la nouvelle. J’ai fait les gros yeux. À la pause, j’en ai discuté avec mes camarades. On a d’abord cru à une fake news, avant que l’information ne soit confirmée par Le Figaro puis par l’Agence France Presse» raconte Pierre-Louis Hue, en deuxième année de master Carrière administrative à Sciences Po Grenoble, qui a prévu de passer le concours le 26 août prochain. «Le décret d’application pour le concours 2019 a déjà été publié, il y a donc peu de chances que le concours soit annulé dès cette année» se réjouit-il néanmoins.

«Certains sont révoltés»

Pour Pierre, en classe préparatoire ENA à Dauphine et également candidat au concours 2019, le désarroi est plus grand encore. «Même si le concours est maintenu, il y a beaucoup d’incertitudes. Je me demande ce que va devenir le diplôme de l’ENA. Ça fait bizarre de se dire qu’on va peut-être faire partie d’une école qui n’existera plus. Si j’y entre, ce sera la dernière promotion. Est-ce qu’on passera pour les derniers à avoir profité d’un système très critiqué?», s’interroge-t-il.

» LIRE AUSSI - L’ENA supprimée serait remplacée par une nouvelle structure

Ce sentiment d’incertitude est partagé par Gabrielle Radet, en première année de double master entre Sciences Po et HEC. La jeune femme explique: «Faire Sciences Po et HEC pour préparer l’ENA, c’est un duo souvent encensé et considéré comme idéal. Finalement, si l’ENA est supprimée, on sera la première génération d’étudiants qui ne pourra pas tenter sa chance. Parmi nous, certains sont révoltés. De mon côté, j’attends de voir par quel système l’ENA va-t-elle être remplacée», raconte-t-elle.

«On sait ce que l’on perd, mais on ne sait pas ce que l’on gagne»

Quel que soit le mode de recrutement des hauts fonctionnaires qui succède à l’ENA, il pourrait bien être similaire au système actuel. Pour Pierre-Louis Hue, cela ne fait aucun doute: «Je nous vois mal revenir au système de nominations qui prévalait avant la création de l’ENA. L’accès à ces postes se fera toujours par le biais de concours», affirme-t-il. Selon lui, un recrutement plus spécifique mis en place par chaque ministère permettrait de couper court aux critiques selon lesquelles l’école serait trop élitiste. Gabrielle Radier le rejoint sur ce point «Les énarques ont des profils très généralistes, mais les ministères pourraient rechercher à recrutement des personnes plus spécialisée dans un domaine d’expertise en particulier», affirme-t-elle.

En effet, depuis plusieurs décennies, l’ENA est la source de beaucoup de crispations et de reproches. On l’accuse, entre autres, de ne pas être parvenue à démocratiser l’accès à la haute fonction publique. Les étudiants qui aspirent à y entrer sont conscients de ces remarques. «L’ENA cristallise tous les problèmes de la société, notamment en ce qui concerne l’accès à des postes haut placés, mais on constate aussi la même chose à Polytechnique, à l’ENS ou encore à HEC», fait remarquer Pierre, qui espère que le renouvellement de la méthode de recrutement des hauts fonctionnaires sera «quelque chose de profond, et pas seulement superficiel».

Si tous sont dans l’attente de ce qui va remplacer l’ENA, ils semblent avoir encore des doutes sur le bien-fondé de cette mesure. «Si le nouveau cadre de recrutement tarde à être clarifié ou ne convainc pas, on risque de voir des profils très intéressants se tourner plus facilement vers le secteur privé plutôt que vers l’administration», avertit tout de même Gabrielle Radier. «Pour l’instant, on sait ce que l’on perd, mais on ne sait pas encore ce que l’on gagne», conclut l’étudiante.

Publicație : Le Figaro

Emploi: les étudiants de plus en plus nombreux à consulter les avis sur les entreprises avant de postuler

Quelles sont les attentes des milleniums? le Figaro Etudiant avec l’IFOP les a interrogés afin d’en savoir plus sur leur état d’esprit, leurs craintes et leurs attentes.

À l’heure où 68% des étudiants sont en recherche de stage, d’alternance ou d’un premier emploi, le Figaro Etudiant avec l’IFOP les a interrogés afin d’en savoir plus sur leur état d’esprit, leurs craintes et leurs attentes. Comment mènent-ils leurs recherches? Quelles sont leurs craintes? Qu’attendent-ils de leur futur emploi? Quels sont leurs critères de motivation? Si les résultats font le portrait d’étudiants plutôt optimistes, ils n’en demeurent pas moins stressés. C’est pourquoi ils sont une large majorité à consulter les avis sur les entreprises avant de postuler, comme par exemple sur le site Viadeo.

Des étudiants confiants et conscients de leurs qualités

Les étudiants déclarent être confiants pour leur futur car 79% d’entre eux se disent optimistes pour leur avenir. En plus d’être confiants, les étudiants sont 56% à appréhender de façon positive leur recherche de stage ou d’emploi.

Cet optimisme est principalement porté par les nombreuses qualités dont les étudiants pensent disposer dans leurs recherches. Biens conscients de la montée en puissance des soft skills, les étudiants n’hésitent pas à mettre en avant auprès des recruteurs leur motivation (63%), ainsi que leurs qualités personnelles (52%). Au-delà de leur personnalité, ils misent également sur leurs précédentes expériences professionnelles (50%) pouvant constituer un réel atout pour séduire les entreprises.

Le premier pas dans la vie professionnelle demeure une source de stress

Malgré un degré d’optimisme très élevé, la recherche de stage et du 1er premier emploi demeure stressante pour 40% des étudiants. Pour pallier à ces inquiétudes, les étudiants sont une majorité à postuler en masse (54%) afin de maximiser leurs chances de trouver une opportunité.

Le fait de ne pas trouver rapidement ou à temps (53%), de devoir accepter un poste qui ne correspondrait pas à leurs attentes (50%) ou à leur formation (37%) constituent les principales craintes des étudiants.

Les inquiétudes des étudiants divergent néanmoins en fonction du type de recherche effectuée. Si 31% des étudiants craignent de devoir accepter une rémunération insatisfaisante, ce chiffre monte à 40% pour les étudiants en recherche de leur premier emploi, tandis qu’il n’atteint que 22% pour ceux en recherche de stage.

Lors de leurs recherches les étudiants font également face à certaines difficultés, notamment liées à un volume d’offre trop faible et à leur niveau d’expérience parfois insuffisant pour postuler aux offres (34%), ce chiffre est d’autant plus fort lorsqu’il s’agit de la recherche du premier emploi (44%).

De fortes attentes liées au bien-être

Face à ces difficultés, les étudiants ont plus que jamais besoin d’être rassurés. C’est pourquoi ils sont une large majorité à consulter les avis sur les entreprises avant de postuler (67%).

Bien qu’encore jeunes sur le marché de l’emploi, les étudiants n’en sont pas moins exigeants dans leurs recherches. Tout comme leurs aînés, ils sont nombreux à privilégier de plus en plus des éléments liés au bien être, 46% des étudiants déclarent vouloir travailler dans un environnement sympathique et convivial et 34% souhaitent bénéficier d’un bon équilibre vie personnelle/ vie professionnelle.

Les étudiants d’université sont beaucoup moins confiants dans leur capacité à trouver un travail

Les missions sont également un facteur de choix primordial pour 45% des étudiants, cet élément se place par ailleurs comme première attente des étudiants lorsqu’il s’agit d’une recherche d’alternance (58%). Quant aux étudiants en recherche de leur premier emploi, ils prêtent une attention particulière au critère rémunération (48%). C’est donc sans surprise que les taches et mission (74%), la rémunération (65%) et la localisation (54%) apparaissent comme les trois premiers facteurs ayant un impact sur le choix de l’entreprise.

Enfin, l’employabilité est perçue comme inégale selon le cursus. Quand on leur demande s’il est facile de trouver un stage, un contrat en alternance ou un premier emploi, ils sont 66% à trouver ça «facile» lorsqu’ils sont étudiants en école de commerce, 60 % en école de d’ingénieurs, mais seulement 28 % s’ils sont à l’université.

Publicație : Le Figaro

Università, truccarono concorso a Ragusa: per i tre commissari arriva la condanna penale

Dopo quella amministrativa. Alla selezione in Storia contemporanea lo storico Scirè era stato bocciato a favore di un architetto, arrivato primo pur senza titoli. Per i docenti un anno di reclusione (pena sospesa) e l'interdizione dai pubblici uffici. Il ricercatore: "Sentenza esemplare"

CATANIA - Il tribunale di Catania ha condannato i tre docenti universitari - Simone Neri Serneri, Luigi Masella e Alessandra Staderini - che componevano la commissione d'esame per il concorso di ricercatore di Storia contemporanea nella struttura didattica di Lingue, a Ragusa. Comminate le condanne a un anno di reclusione ciascuno, pena sospesa, per abuso d'ufficio e interdizione dai pubblici uffici, dagli uffici direttivi delle persone giuridiche e delle imprese.

Il tribunale ha riconosciuto una provvisionale di 10 mila euro a  Giambattista Scirè: in quel concorso, lo storico di Vittoria era stato bocciato a vantaggio di un'architetta che, pur non avendo i titoli, era arrivata prima. Scirè aveva poi denunciato i fatti alla procura dopo aver vinto sul piano amministrativo. E nel marzo 2018 l'Università di Catania, prendendo le distanze dai suoi stessi selezionatori, si era rivolta alla Corte dei conti per chiedere i danni alla commissione infedele.

Il caso di Scirè ha fatto scuola, aprendo la strada alle iniziative nazionali che si impegnano a combattere i casi di malauniversità, dall'Osservatorio indipendente sui concorsi universitari all'associazione "Trasparenza e merito", fondata proprio da Scirè da Giuliano Gruner e Pierpaolo Sileri (oggi senatore M5S). Esperienze di rete che in pochi mesi hanno raccolto decine di segnalazioni di bandi su misura e valutazioni abnormi.

Lo storico, difeso in sede penale dall'avvocato Enrico Di Martino del foro di Ragusa, parla di "condanna simbolicamente esemplare che deve fungere da monito per il futuro del reclutamento universitario italiano. La macroscopica condotta irregolare, già sanzionata a livello amministrativo, è stata confermata in sede penale, accertando l'intenzionalità e il dolo nella violazione del bando e del decreto ministeriale".

Publicație : La Repubblica

Important:

• Revista presei conţine fragmente preluate, fără nici o modificare, din articolele despre învăţământul superior ce apar în presa locală, regională şi naţională.
• Revista presei este o reflectare imparţială a presei educaţionale, cu misiunea clară de a prezenta noutăţile şi ştirile cu adevarat importante pentru mediul academic.
• Universitatea "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" atrage atenţia că nu îşi asumă responsabilitatea pentru corectitudinea informaţiilor apărute în presă, redate pe această pagina exact în forma în care au aparut în publicaţiile respective.
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Realizator: Dr. Bogdan Baghiu
Contact: promovare@uaic.ro