For the vast majority, there is no formal training process that professors go through before-hand to become chair or head of a department. That makes access to the experiences and knowledge of others an invaluable resource. In recent years, the APS has been sponsoring conferences of physics (or physics & astronomy) department chairs, and that's great, but pre-dating that have been electronic mailing lists for department chairs and heads*. There is a long-standing, somewhat appropriately named "Midwest Physics Department Chairs" email listserv, and similarly there is an analogous American Astronomical Society astronomy chairs listserv.
The chairs mailing list has been a great way to learn how processes work at other places, and to get advice or sanity checks. Sometimes it can be very helpful to be able to say to your administration, "here is how everyone else does this." Not everything translates, as large public universities have some real structural differences in operations compared to private universities, but it's still been informative. Examples of recent discussion topics in no particular order:
- Rough startup costs for hires in different subfields (and how those costs are borne between departments, deans, provosts, etc.)
- Qualifying/candidacy exams - what they cover (undergrad v grad), their value or lack thereof
- Promotion and tenure processes
- Diversity/equity/inclusion at all levels
- Graduate admissions in the post-standardized-test era
- International students in the era of covid + recent changes in student visa policies
- Various curricular issues (incorporating computation; lab staffing)
- Mental health at all levels (undergrads, grad students, faculty, staff)
The group also has an annual get-together. Last weekend I attended a meeting (face to face!) of about 30 physics department chairs at the exotic O'Hare Airport Hilton in Chicago. While not everyone was able to make it, it was helpful to talk and compare notes. People had a lot to say about teaching methods and what will stick around post-pandemic. It was also very informative to learn what it takes financially and in terms of personnel to support a successful bridge program.
Being chair or head can be isolating, and it's good having a community of people who understand the weird issues that can come up.
* The definitions are not rigid, but a chair is often elected and expected to make decisions through consensus and voting, while a head is appointed and typically has more autonomy and authority. As one former head at a big place once told me, though, you basically need consensus as a head, too, otherwise you can't get anything done.
11 comments:
You mentioned equity, diversity and inclusion as a common topic at these meetings. Was that also the case at this one? If so, I was hoping you could share a bit more about some things that were discussed. Did anyone have any interesting new ideas and/or initiatives for improving the state of affairs of EDI in physics, whether at their own institution or more generally?
Can you please elaborate on the idea of graduate admission "post standardized test"? What metrics will be used in the absence of GREs? Aren't recommendations and even grades highly subjective, and don't such subjective metrics conflate irrelevant information with physics acumen? And what about qualifying exams? I've heard the claims that performance on such exams doesn't correlate well with PhD "success", but these claims seem highly politicized. Where can one learn about these topics? Should we be worried that future generations of physicists will not be on par with their predecessors?
@Cortez: I guess my first question would be what you mean, exactly, by "not be on par with their predecessors?" My second, and related, question would be "what are the most important kinds of talents and skill sets should we be looking for in future physicists?"
There is no doubt that the current setup of physics grad schools and admissions selects for a very intelligent and talented set of students. However, in my opinion it also selects for a very specific kind of intelligence and talent while filtering out many other kinds. I believe that there are a lot of potentially wonderful students who can offer a lot to the field (whether through their creativity, fresh perspective, diverse experiences, or what have you) who are lost in the cracks.
Looked at from this vantage point, I argue that just as you could ask "Should we be worried that future generations of physicists will not be on par with their predecessors?", you could just as well ask "Should we be worried that our current generations of physicists are not on par with what they potentially could be?" It depends on what you prioritize.
This is a complex issue and I am not saying I have the answers to any of these challenges. I am just pointing out that there are many different types of "physics acumen", and our current training setup doesn't always appreciate that as much as it should, in my view.
@PPP, yes, DEI was a big topic of discussion - attracting and retaining folks in the field at the undergrad level, grad recruiting, postdocs, and faculty recruiting. Bridge programs and post-bac programs came up. Everyone acknowledges the chicken-or-egg challenge: attracting and retaining people at all levels is greatly helped by representation - having role models/representation already on the faculty and in the student population make a place a more attractive recruiting destination, but bootstrapping there is hard. Departments that are contracting because of finances and age demographics of the faculty (retirements more frequent than search authorizations) have even greater challenges. Named postdoctoral positions that have a chance of becoming tenure-track lines is an interesting idea being implemented in a couple of places, but it's complex and resource-intensive.
@Cortez, there are various approaches that fall under the label "holistic admissions"; grades, letters, looking for examples of student leadership and initiative, screening interviews with some applicants, etc. The Fisk-Vanderbilt bridge program was an early adopter: https://aas.org/sites/default/files/2019-10/Stassun_AJP_2011_combined.pdf .
Speaking only for myself, one thing I've learned while assoc chair for the grad program and department chair is, the main reasons that people drop out of doctoral programs in physics (and I suspect other STEM disciplines) are not associated with proficiency in rapidly answering multiple-choice standardized test questions, or even long-form questions in a closed-book timed setting. There is almost always some other issue (realizing grad research isn't what they really want to do; mental health challenges; physical health challenges; family or financial constraints). I don't have tightly controlled studies as references for you. Prelim/qualifying/candidacy exams are a complex topic. You have to think carefully about the pedagogical value of these things, and if the only point is to try to get people to leave, imo your program has problems.
@PPP, I guess what I mean by "not on par" is that by forgoing more quantitative metrics in favor of holistic admissions, the selection will no longer really optimize for those that can best advance physics research. Of course, current selection is very far from ideal in this regard, but I worry that taking steps that deemphasize physics problem solving from graduate admissions selection is a step in the wrong direction. I think there are extremely serious problems in the world (e.g. climate change) to which physicists can positively contribute, and so my wish is that we somehow attract the best minds to get the biggest societal returns. Your second question about what we should really be selecting for is definitely a tricky one. I'm a condensed matter experimentalist (hence why I'm reading this blog in the first place), and so my perspectives are heavily skewed in favor of what I feel is best for my particular niche. From my own experiences (anecdata, not super persuasive), the best experimentalists I have worked with were ones that could also have been theorists if they desired, really enjoy "hacking" on things in their free time, are very good with their hands, are open to both criticism as well as giving feedback, work well in a team, not afraid to break things, and, crucially, are very creative problem solvers. Regarding this last point, I've observed a strong correlation between creative problem solving in experimental work and also brain teasers/puzzles, and so I can imagine an interview component to admissions where prospective students are given a sort of oral examination.
Can you please give me some examples of 'fresh perspective' and 'diverse experiences' that would contribute meaningfully to advancing physics? They don't need to be actual examples, I'm curious about hypothetical examples as well. I'm genuinely curious to learn more about these perspectives, and I'm having trouble conjuring such examples myself.
@Doug, Thanks for linking that paper, I will definitely read it. I'm embarrassingly really unfamiliar with the literature around these topics, and so I want to become much better informed. So any other relevant papers anybody can suggest are very welcome. I suspect there are plenty of other physicists who are also curious about these topics but also don't have an informed viewpoint (in all directions). These issues are increasingly politicized, but maybe with easy access to quality studies on these topics, we can somehow rise above the fray and come to some consensus.
Regarding prelim/qualifying/candidacy exams, I'll admit to having a strong bias in favor of these exams. During my PhD, I found the qualifying exams to be a really positive process overall. Although it was a bit stressful, I found that I had a much stronger command of the basic material at the end of the process, and this was a good foundation for beginning a PhD. I think there really should be some minimum standard that you should know to call yourself a physicist. This might vary from institution to institution based on prestige, but should at least guarantee to some extent a minimum of what a PhD holder in physics should understand or be capable of. The school where I got my PhD no longer has a qualifying exam, and I'm not sure on what basis this decision was made. Do you have any insights why schools are now getting rid of these exams?
@Doug: Thanks for the response. The named postdoc position seems like an interesting idea, I hope it works out.
@Cortez: Well, the most direct example that comes to my mind when thinking about fresh perspectives and diverse experiences that could be valuable to physics is the situation of people with undergrad training in non-physics fields, who switched into physics for graduate school (or afterwards). Doug himself is an example of that, and I strongly suspect that his engineering background has given him unique perspectives that most of his colleagues don’t have (Doug, correct me if I’m wrong). Another person is Craig Fennie at Cornell, who was an engineer by training and then went to Rutgers to do a PhD in condensed matter theory. Nowadays, it is not that unusual in physics departments to have people working on things like computational materials design, particularly for exotic things like topological and/or strongly-correlated materials. But I don’t think such a mindset was so commonly found in physics departments in the past. I suspect that people like Craig, with an engineering approach to theory grounded in frequently tying abstract models to concrete real-world systems, are a major reason why such novel approaches have become more mainstream. A third example is Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist by training (BS and PhD) who has made invaluable contributions to quantum information science.
The point is that, while quantitative thinking and problem solving are no doubt essential elements of being a professional physicist, there are many ways of having such acumen. I worry that when we select students, through the Physics GRE and qualifying exams, we are losing a lot of people who might not be particularly strong or well-trained in ‘traditional’ classroom physics, but who could nevertheless ask unexpected questions and have fresh ideas.
A different (but, I suspect, related) type of fresh perspective and experience has to do with that of students from underrepresented groups. Whatever the underlying reason, there is no question that the current `weed-out’ culture in physics disproportionately affects women, people of color and students from lower socioeconomic statuses. As Doug said in his post, representation at all levels matters for DEI, and we are losing out on a large pool of very talented people when we stick to a system that has these biases. And that’s just bad for the overall health of the field, period.
@Cortez,
There have been a few studies in recent years which attempt to quantify the relationship between things like GRE scores and "PhD success" so it's not just PC talking-points, there's actual data and analysis on the topic.
See for example:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.04329
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14027
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.11618
https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03709
As for qualifying exams, something to consider is that in other parts of the world, such as in Europe, these type of exams largely don't exist, but I seldom hear arguments about European physicists having a systematically inferior education.
@Cortez, on quals, I think Suomynona's point is well taken. At Rice, for many years (since I got here, anyway) there has been an oral candidacy exam, and our grad handbook spells out expected areas of knowledge for given subfields. The rationale there is that having to explain yourself up at a board is at least something that takes place professionally, as opposed to the artificial timed-closed-book written qual experience. I agree, preparing for the candidacy exam *should* be pedagogically valuable - it's really a chance to synthesize a lot of what you've learned and get a broader perspective on analyzing and thinking like a professional scientist.
Talking with chairs at other places, my impression (anecdotal) is that some departments have found that (a) annually preparing a high quality written qualifier multiple times per year is a lot of work for something that can have marginal utility, because (b) grades in graduate coursework are often just as indicative of gaps in knowledge or proficiency.
I do think that an exam that covers undergrad-level material upon arrival (Stanford's qual was like this when I was a student there) can have the valuable feature of helping to inform course selection (e.g. perhaps a student who really struggled on the quantum questions should take the undergrad quantum course first before the grad level one). It's not without challenges, though, esp for international students who may have just arrived and are dealing with a ton of real-life challenges.
There is a sort of elephant in the room regarding attracting minorities to physics programs (and eventually faculty) that I feel is ignored. The simple fact is that grad school and postdocs are financially disastrous decisions. People of color are generally not nearly as financially well off as other groups (whites, international students, etc.), so it makes very little sense to choose an academic career in physics vs. something an industry career in computer science or engineering. Doing more outreach is the "easy" way out, but it cannot address this root cause.
I find this purposeful blindness to the reality of the financial situation of many people of color to be quite frustrating. Simply doing more outreach feels like the white-man savior complex at work- "minorities just need the right exposure to science to make them choose this amazing field of science". Reality is more complicated
I agree, more outreach alone is not nearly enough. As you said, it’s critical to be cognizant of the challenges that minorities face, be they economic, social (tacit and explicit biases), or anything else.
@Anon, indeed. The ability to go to grad school at all is predicated on being able to get by on the typical stipend, and if there are pressing financial needs, that can be an untenable decision. This is not a race issue per se, but it certainly is relevant to people from modest economic means (a set which has considerable overlap with first-generation college students, for example). Outreach and teaching and being welcoming are things where academics hope to have some control, and that's why academics concentrate on them. Massive economic reforms for whole sectors of society are much harder.
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