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Is it acceptable to extend deadlines for coursework delayed due to student activism?
This article from the Brown University Daily Herald describes a number of student activists who claim to have suffered due to excess levels of student activism. Some excerpts from the article are included:

“There are people breaking down, dropping out of classes and failing classes because of the activism work they are taking on,” said David, an undergraduate whose name has been changed to preserve anonymity. Throughout the year, he has worked to confront issues of racism and diversity on campus.

[...]

Sampedro worked alongside the group that presented the demands for the diversity and inclusion action plan’s revision. It was a Thursday, she recalled, and she had a research presentation that needed to be completed that week. “I remember emailing the professor and begging her to put things off another week,” she said. The professor denied her request.
“I hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t slept. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally,” she said. After hours of work to compile and present the demands, she forced herself to stay up to complete the project anyway.

[...] (emphasis mine)

Deans’ notes helped Gaines to complete academic work while staying involved in student activism.
In writing such notes, deans acknowledge the difficulties faced by a student on campus and demonstrate their support for the student’s requests, said Ashley Ferranti, assistant dean of student support services.
Though it is ultimately up to a faculty member to accept a dean’s note, Ferranti estimated that notes are accepted over 90 percent of the time. Students who take issue with the rejection of a note can discuss the incident with a dean, Ferranti added.

I was under the impression from my personal experience that extension of deadlines are generally only awarded for reasons such as personal illness or family issues such as divorce, death, or serious illness.
As professors, is it generally considered acceptable to provide deadline extensions or other accommodations to students who have fallen behind on their coursework due to their involvement with activism?

I am surprised that majority of the answers do not mention the Dean's note. I more or less do what the Dean says.

@StrongBad where I come from, the Dean doesn't have anything to say on this matters. Of course, if your university is different, you should know it and act accordingly.

@JarrodRoberson I would say that these activities fall under the umbrella of "student activities" which in your analogy would be as if an employee has several projects and falls behind on one project because of another. I would not necessarily consider these as "personal time activities."

Sounds like the prime example of why I'm ashamed to even be on the cusp any where near being compared to millennials; that self-entitlement. Luckily I'm on the North end of the cusp and can cling to Gen X actually having matters to stand for and still having the ethics to get up and be responsible for our own actions. If you fall behind student activities because of personal, it's your own fault. As to @AustinHenley, sorry, but you're just plain wrong. This is comparable to a workers strike, which is never a "full win". These kids are being coddled and will hurt in the real world.

Only if you let them take their test in a safe space

@JarrodRoberson University is not a training ground for working for a company.

@jwg you're right, it's either an economic training ground or a debt factory -- major specific of course.

@Davidmh I would have said that too, but this is most likely in reference to Brown University, so I think it is possible at any US university.

Much would depend on the concrete situation. But, by default, I would think that activism is part of student's life that the student needs to learn to manage themselves; if they do not have the resources or ability to manage their  activism effectively so as not to have them interfere with their studies, then, largely, I would consider this to be their responsibility. One would probably not see any concessions given for extracurricular sports/music activity, and the question is why political activism should be exempt.
Some may argue that political activism is important as a part of society and therefore of a higher rank than, say, sports or music, but how this is evaluated would probably depend on whose side of the activism one sees oneself.
That being said, times which are more tolerant of studies as an opportunity for character development would probably give more leeway to activism, while times (such as ours) where studies would be considered more a means to an end (development of employment skills) would probably be less tolerant. I would see the former as an ideal of times past, but the latter as the reality today.

I will take issue with one thing in this answer: there most certainly are concessions given for other extracurricular activities like sports and music.  Think about major college football and basketball teams, for example.

@jakebeal, agreed. Sports should also not be a justified ground for any academic concession.

@jakebeal an important difference is that when players enrol in the football team do so under the promise of being given concessions. They also have to manage their time, they just have different allocations. (And this said, I don't think they should be given concessions for sports either, but that is a different discussion).

@Dilworth: it's lucky the Olympics take place during summer vacation :-)

I don't think exams should ever receive an extension for activism. If they're so busy they need to take the exam a different day, do you think they studied for it? Do you think they studied for your make-up in the short time of your extension (may be harder, much longer)? A presentation might be reasonable given a timely notice, because they're often scheduled so far out that the student will know it's due on a given day. If they choose to schedule something else despite knowing their obligation, I take issue with that.

@jakbeal Not that I disagree, but most collegiate athletes (at least in the US) are required to maintain a minimum level of academic performance or else they are benched until their performance improves.

Not acceptable. By taking part in a course, students effectively sign into a contract to work their butts off, attend lectures, take part in labs, open labs, exams, quizzes, homework exercises, etc, to earn marks. Only doctors notes and bereavement leave get any special consideration. The onus is on them to decide what's really important in their lives. Try swapping "activism" with something like "video game tournament", or "drinking" or "prank"; and "coursework" with "9-5 job" or "monthly contract that pays the bills".

@Dogbert The average 9-5 job gets you 16 days vacation in the US. So it's pretty easy to get time off for a video game tournament if you have a job, because they can't deny your vacation based on what you plan to do for it...

@corsiKa Yes, most day jobs offer vacation time. Schools do not. The point I was trying to convey was that as a student, OP has already taken on an obligation, and is trying to justify shirking that obligation. Let's say you've run out of vacation days. One day you decide you don't want to work, and would rather catch up for the annual SmashBros64 tourney. Is it reasonable for the employer to accommodate this and pay the employee during his/her absence? Also, I included "monthly contract" to address this possible counterpoint, since they don't offer vacation typically.

@jakebeal Whether concessions are offered depends on the country and is not generalisable (and note that I qualified my statement with "probably"). You are likely talking about the US model at some universities, but I am talking about the European model which, at university level, will likely only give concession to topic-oriented activity (say in music or sports studies). In fact, German universities, I believe, used to have concessions for political activism, but not music/sports.

@Captain Emacs Recent experience from a German university: Student parliament picked a date for protests. All other activities at the university were cancelled on that day. All lectures that should have happened were canceled effectively reducing the number of lecture weeks by one.

@AndrejaKo Good to see that in these turbulent times at least this has not changed ;-)

Lots of good and lengthy answers here: put concisely the answer is a resounding no.
A huge benefit of choosing to do something extracurricular in college is learning the consequences of failing to balance responsibilities.  By giving extensions to a student that chooses to spend  time doing something outside of coursework, you fail to help them find this balance.

I try to always spell things out like this in my syllabus, and I would hope others do, too. For me, I would excuse a small number of minor things, so long as warning is given in advance, but it wouldn't be a valid excuse on a test or especially major assignment.
I don't have a specific clause for activism, nor have I gotten excuses from that activity, but I've given leeway for other legitimate student activities (sports, coding camps, etc.) and this would be no different.
Other teachers in my department would feel differently, not giving excuses for anything but medical or religious leave, but the point is that this is spelled out in advance, which is the only way it ever should be. Students should understand the consequences of their choices and be bound by them.

Nice and concisely spelt out - Explaining your policy beforehand, especially on the first day of class and especially on a written syllabus handout, is a huge way of both being convenient to the student and protecting your own best interests.

Hello @RichardRast I am just curious about the "religious leave". In your experience, the restrictions that a student's religion impose in his or her life are accepted by professors as a sufficient reason to change, for instance, the date of a test or a presentation?

My university has a policy that no major assignments will be due and no tests will be conducted on religious holidays.  In practice this just means dodging the Jewish holidays.  I also have a policy where I (strongly) ask students to notify me well in advance of any religious holidays which will occur during the semester which will cause them to miss class (cont.)

In practice this means that it's not usually a problem, unless the University makes us do something on a weekend, which is always a problem (Saturday for the Jews, Sunday for the Christians; you will always get complaints and rightly so).  But in any case, if I mess up the scheduling somehow and put something on a religious holidays, it is an excused absence.

@Vitor if one is a public university, not allowing students their civil liberties when it comes to observing major religious holidays can certainly lead to legal issues and that's not even covering other tricky questions of religion and student bodies. Note you even have to watch what you says as Richard's statement this just means dodging the Jewish holidays could be seen as very offensive (I'm assuming he meant none).

What I meant is that if a holiday (a) has a significant number (at least one in my class) adherents who would miss class, and (b) occur on days when there is normally school, then that holiday is usually Jewish. I meant nothing more interesting than that.

"Warning: I don't give any extensions, never ever, just forget it. Yay, no more moral dilemma for me."

That's not really the point of the answer; I give excused absences/zeroes which are similar. The point is, have a clear policy in your syllabus, so you don't have to improvise later on and risk unfairness or favoritism.

I would like to offer an alternative, possibly unpopular answer: professors should try to err on the side of making accommodations for extracurricular activities. This includes allowing extensions for student activists when the requests are reasonable.
Of course academic work should always be students' first priority. However, for better or worse, colleges and universities in the United States are not exclusively academic institutions. Universities frequently promote themselves as offering students the opportunity to learn and develop in and out of the classroom, and many students feel that success in college depends extracurricular activities in addition to academic performance. This may frustrate professors, but it isn't entirely baseless; post-graduate success may result from extracurricular involvement such as internships, volunteer experience and yes, activism.
None of this is to say that students should focus exclusively on extracurriculars. If a student is consistently incapable of completing coursework due to nonacademic obligations, they should either scale back their competing interests or suffer the academic consequences. However, in the event that a student requests a short extension because they are organizing a protest, playing a concert, training for a big game, or completing a task for their job or internship, I believe the request should be granted (provided it does not seriously inconvenience the instructor or disadvantage other students). After all, even a student who seriously prioritizes academics and manages their time excellently will experience an occasional deadline conflict and time crunch.

I agree.  But one thing consider is timing.  The student in the OP's example didn't contact the professor until the day before the project was due.  A better approach would have been to e-mail the professor when the protests started and say "Though I can get the project done on time if you absolutely require, but I'd really like to be involved in the protests and so, if you could allow it, would appreciate being able to turn it in by Monday instead."  I always refuse non-emergency last hour requests, but given enough notice, I'm far more accommodating.

Student activism would not be something that I would normally grant an extension for. If however, my Dean asked me to grant an extension (either for an individual student or the entire class), I think I would side with my Dean well over 90% of the time. If the Dean made a habit of "interfering" I would likely talk to my Department Chair and complain. I would also consider making a "letter from the Dean" an official avenue of getting an extension similar to a "letter from the doctor".

While this is an answer from the perspective of a professor, it kind of passes the buck. It doesn't answer the question for the dean, who is now the one who decides policy on the matter for every student in every class on every assignment.

@ParthianShot it is the Dean's own fault and he/she should stay out of the business of granting extensions.

Another issue is that it is difficult for the professor to evaluate the level of engagement of the student. Some activists are working long and hard on noble causes; it would be easy for a lazy student to show up for the parties to get an extension.
The personal opinion of the professor in the matter may also influence the results. So, someone may decide that racism is a worthy cause of a week of extension, but the same effort for gender equality (or the welfare of the campus' trees) is not.
As Captain Emacs says, time management is one of the things you should learn at University, and if delaying the deadline a week would have made it possible, they could also have postponed their activities for one week, after doing the assignment.
So, all in all, I believe most cases don't merit special dispensations, and if a student believes something does (for example, participation on an event with fixed date), it should be requested in advance, so that the student can act on a rejection, show they aren't just running out of time, and arrange what would be s suitable proof if the professor requires it. This also gives time for the professor to rearrange the schedule, as they may have been planning to, for example, go through the solutions of the problems once they were handed in.
Finally: some of my friends were very active in different activist movements (and me too, to a lesser degree), at times, to great personal sacrifice; and yet no one of us ever thought to be entitled to any special treatment for this.

"someone may decide that racism is a worthy cause" -- the ugliest consequence of this is reprisals against those whose activism is directed against the school itself. "Yeah, sure, you're opposing racism, have an extension. Oh wait, you think my friend in the History department did something racist? No extension for you". Of course it's the academic's responsibility how far they can go down the road of personally assessing the student's cause without risking this, and "not at all" has the virtue of simplicity.

It is up to the professor's discretion whether or not this is a reasonable justification for an extension.
Ideally, said professor has already outlined the criteria they will accept for academic extensions - usually as you said, serious family issues and illness/death - but individual cases should come down to the professor's own discretion.
This may seem a petty way of handling a situation, but a professor cannot be expected to anticipate all possible reasons for a student to request an extension, and when a student comes to them asking for one, it is up to that professor's judgment whether one is justified or not.
Some professors are more lenient and will allow for occasional (or frequent!) extensions on personal matters, others are strict and will not allow any extensions past due dates (professors typically lay out the exact time each assignment and exam is due on the first day of class, so that there is no question whether or not the student should have been prepared for the exam/due date).
For this particular case, professors may handle it differently - some more lenient than others - and that's perfectly acceptable.  It is a personal matter, and unless the academic body itself has a policy on such events (which the professor should definitely adhere to if one exists) then it falls upon them to decide, based on the circumstances of an individual event.
That being said, a dean's letter would certainly override a professor's decision.  But this does not invalidate the professor, nor does it mean they should necessarily excuse students in the future for similar reasons (unless said letter has explicit instructions to do so). This just means the individual student has sought a specific exception to this rule, and got one.
Important Exception
That being said, if many students request such an extension, it may be in the best interest of the professor to offer one - the nature of today's socio-political society makes it very dangerous to take on students, especially a large body of students, on moral grounds.  And for the sake of the professor's academic career, they should consider picking their battles carefully.
This is not to say that students are justified in choosing to fight a professor on their deadlines (in fact they are probably not if all the above laid out facts are true) but that the professor, unfortunately, will probably not be able to force these students to accept their deadline, and should not sacrifice their position for it.

Having attended Brown (long ago, but still...) I am not the least bit surprised.  That school has a long history of considering diversity and activism (both) as more important than scholarship.  Though, as I recall, in the late 80's Amy Carter was expelled from there "for academic reasons," specifically because she had spent too much time in jail and not enough in class, as a result of her activism.  Today, she would be more likely to receive a special President's award.
So, it certainly depends on the School.  I doubt the same consideration would apply to a student at RPI, for example.
I added this "answer" because I believe it is an important bit of context that was missing from the discussion.

Why are you singling out RPI? I don't see what it adds to the answer.

Just an example of a school where academics is taken seriously.

Specifically, where academics is taken more seriously than "diversity" (such an example is getting harder to think of every year).


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Where can I learn more about the differences between areas of chemistry at graduate level?
I'm a 3rd year undergraduate student studying chemistry, and I'm starting to think about grad school. I've enjoyed the different chem courses I've taken, so it's hard for me to pick a subcategory of chemistry to study.
Are there books or other resources available which describe in depth how the rubber meets the road for the different fields of chemistry? I've spoken with my professors somewhat and I plan to continue doing so, but I would like a text-based resource which I could refer to and look up or research the words and concepts contained in it.
A related, but different question is this: What are the most important factors when considering graduate school in chemistry?

If you are in the EU, most graduate schools typically prefer you to have a Masters degree before applying for a PhD, it is apparently not so necessary in the US. The Masters is however, important for several reasons:

You can see if chemical research is what you really want to do, as most undergraduate programmes have no or very limited opportunity for original research, largely being focussed on equipping you with a set of techniques and skills to enable you to carry out chemical research. I have many friends who were 'all chemistry'd out' after their Masters, and left the field completely (Of my cohort over half are no longer in a chemical field).
You can try out a field of chemistry in a research environment, either one you have come across during your undergraduate e.g. spectroscopy of small molecules, and enjoyed, or one that only really gets introduced at undergraduate level, if at all e.g. supramolecular chemistry.
You can try out a supervisor you are considering working under for a PhD, without the commitment of 3+ years on the line.
It demonstrates to a potential supervisor that you are capable of conducting original research to a good standard. Agreeing to take someone on with no prior demonstration of research aptitude is not something many supervisors would do!

PhD programmes can also vary a lot: Some are longer and have a first 'introduction' year, where they train you in the specific skills you need to complete the programme. This first, often taught year is very similar to the 4th year of an integrated Bachelor + Masters course. Some are just straight research from the start, with an evaluation at the end of the first year, the failure of which prevents you from continuing, and you leave with an M.res or similar. I could go on...
To more directly answer your question, the best way to find out about the differences in day-to-day activity between the different areas of chemistry at PhD level is to try and talk to some current PhD students.
If you have completely free reign and no particular interest, I would suggest you aim to talk to students in most of these categories:

Physical lots of maths, often boils down to applied physics, in my opinion the least 'chemical' of these options. Can also overlap with analytical in areas like atmospheric chemistry or kinetics.
Analytical (physical chemistry typically focussing on spectroscopic exploration)
often overlaps with computational (modelling the behaviour of chemicals on surfaces e.g. catalysts, or the behaviour of proteins and their binding sites, or small molecules as entirely simulated objects, to name a few)
Chemical informatics e.g. developing tools to help statistically analyse chemical behaviours for drug discovery, or to communicate chemical information electronically. Can be a good way into programming with a chemical slant.
Synthetic chemistry this comes in many flavours, organic and inorganic, but most are similar on a day to day basis (see below for exceptions)
Medicinal/natural product synthesis synthetic chemistry but typically much longer hours, often the most internally competitive/'macho' culture in the department
Materials chemistry this can cover a very wide range of specialisations and include engineering and physics too; very dependent on the particular programme. Nanoscience is sometimes lumped in here, sometimes in organic and sometimes in inorganic!

In broad strokes, more physical PhDs can require greater discipline, because you don't have the obvious 'put this reaction on/analyse this intermediate' type workflow and can spend weeks waiting for computations to run/repairs to a piece of analytical equipment etc. It is easier to remain emotionally uninvested in the outcome of an experiment, because you are typically trying to find an answer to a question, rather than produce a specific result. By contrast, synthetic PhDs can have moments of soul-crushing defeat when reactions repeatedly fail, frequently requiring a lot of mental fortitude to keep trying things to get a reaction to work/work out a way round it.
To summarise, doing a Masters first is a good idea, to ensure you want to go the PhD route and improve the strength of a PhD application. For picking a PhD (and to a lesser extent, a Masters) you really need to be able to narrow down your options by some/all of topic, supervisor, location and type of programme.
addition from comments: Here is a link to information provided by ACS for students looking to find out about graduate courses, should be a good starting point.

Most graduate schools typically prefer you to have a Masters degree before applying for a PhD - I don't think this is necessarily true.

I didn't actually specify which degree I was thinking about. That aside, I appreciate the list with brief descriptions you made as well as all the advice you gave me, but that doesn't really answer my question about written materials. I am taking every opportunity to talk with grad students, but I'm at a small undergrad school, so those opportunities are fewer. However, I did have a few opportunities recently at an ACS student symposium. Nevertheless, I'm still looking for books, articles, etc. that I can read this summer which will help me understand the different fields of chemistry better.

@Cohen_the_Librarian https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/students/graduate/gradschool.html Give this a look, I think it will give you a good starting point.

Great! Could you edit that into your answer, then I will upvote and accept? (Comments can easily be deleted and they are not always read)

@Cohen_the_Librarian done. Hope you find it useful!

Ok, I'll edit the answer to reflect the necessity of the Masters, In the EU it is definitely preferred in my experience.

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Does grading based on a curve make cheating unfair?
I went through this and still can't fathom why cheating isn't black-and-white.  Nevertheless, https://www.csusm.edu/dos/studres/wwwc.html says,

"A cheater receives through deception what honest students work hard for; and in classes graded on a curve, he lowers their grades to boot."

Ok, I get why people don't cheat(moral fortitude) and why people don't rat(social fortitude); and that's just me saying I'm on the "I'll force all you cheaters to pay for your injustices" side; but is it the grading system that makes it bad for honest students?  If honest students honestly receive high marks, but are "curved down" in rank because cheaters get near perfect marks, then grading based on a curve must be one of the only things that makes it unfair.
--- clarification:
Grading on a Curve: means to statistically conform grades of all those measured to a curve that measures performance based on a norm-referenced assessment.
Would cheating still be considered unfair if we drop the concept of grading according to a curve?  (which we should)

Would cheating still be considered unfair if we drop the concept of grading according to a curve? (which we should)

Of course!
Let's assume that without cheating 10% of students get As. Therefore, students who earned As are a small group. Having an A might help getting funding, or finding an internship or a job. Now let's say that with cheating, 50% (no normalizing) of students get As, now an A is no longer that valuable because a lot of people have them. Therefore, the value of As that honest students earned has diminished.

In other words, grading is on a curve in reality regardless of the actual marking scheme. With or without the presence of a formal curve, people will invent their own for particular purposes. Ultimately the consideration is "this person has a degree: what does that mean to me?". The presence or absence of large numbers of cheats among those with degrees affects the answer to that question.

Chose it because the question was answered; sorry.

Cheating is unfair regardless of how you handle grading, but how unfair it is depends on the grading scheme.  Let's assume that the cheater's efforts earn him among the highest raw scores in the class.
No matter how you adjust the grades (unless you flip high and low grades!) the cheater will have a higher grade that they deserve, and anything which is grade dependent and competitive (e.g. getting a job, getting into grad school, etc.) will be unfairly easier for the cheater and unfairly harder for everyone else.  So there's a baseline unfairness to cheating.
If, additionally, you keep the percentage of A's fixed (grading on a curve), the cheater will bump someone out of an A, which will likely impact them negatively (career, grad school, etc.).  Someone else may be bumped out of a B, etc, down to where the cheater would have been if they hadn't cheated.  So there is direct and noticeable harm to the cheater's fellow classmates.  It's a pretty rotten thing to do.  (This is also related to why students fight so ardently for every grade or grade step.)
If you keep the requirements fixed, then everyone will get the same grades they would have, save the cheater, but the average fraction of A's will go up.  The net impact is the same--a 3.2 average now looks worse than it did before because the averages have gone up--but the negative effects are not felt by individual classmates but rather averaged over everyone from the university with cheaters.  By spreading the harm among more people, in some ways the effects are less acute; aside from the cheater, everyone else is still going to have the same relative standing.
So, especially if cheating is rare, it's even more unfair if you're grading on a curve* since those people who have the bad luck to be stuck with a cheater will be unfairly punished in addition to the cheater being unfairly rewarded.
* There is an argument for grading on a curve, however: there is also unfairness due to differences in grading schemes between universities.  Grading on a curve helps to combat this, as instead of measuring various different expectations of mastery (e.g. if Harvard expects you to do more to get an A than does Yale, then your GPA will be lower if you go to Harvard than Yale), it just measures students against each other, and there are enough of those for statistical sampling help even out the other differences (e.g. if the incoming classes to Harvard and Yale are of similar quality, and both grade on similar curves, regardless of which one you'll know who was in the top 10%, and those top 10% will be similar regardless of where they went).

If Harvard expects you to do more to get an A than Yale, it would seem unreasonable to suppose that Harvard expects the same of you to get in as Yale does. So why would the incoming classes be of similar quality? Fundamentally if you want your grade to mean something to somebody, then that somebody needs to have some notion (probably not a very accurate one) of how demanding the course was. Whether it was demanding according to a fixed schedule or demanding because of the calibre of students you competed with, employers will still be pretty close to clueless about the details ;-)

@SteveJessop - There is not necessarily any connection between a grading scheme and difficulty of admission; our hypothetical Yale might try to compete with Harvard for the better (but not absolutely best) students by having a reputation for being less stingy with A's.  It is true that most employers will be clueless about the details, and even graduate admissions committees will only have a vague idea of a few of the biggest names.  (A school that gives everyone A's for everything will quickly get a bad reputation, though.)

Agreed, there isn't necessarily any connection. But it's not reasonable to assume there isn't and hence to compare positions within the class between the two. At least, it's no more reasonable than to compare GPAs between the two.

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In how many conferences should I serve as PC member?
Three months ago, I served as a PC (=Program Committee) member in a top conference in my field (CS). Now, I was offered to serve as a PC member in another top conference.
Although I found this job quite fun, I still wonder, in how many conferences "should" I be a PC each year? ("should" in quotes, since there is no formal obligation).

"Should" depends on your goals: is this for etiquette? getting tenure? enhancing your reputation? staying on top of advances in the field?

@DSVA PC = Program Committee.

There is no right answer here. It’s a function of the time you have available to do service duties, as well as the benefits to you of helping out. However, it is a significant time commitment, so it’s probably not necessary to do it more than a few times a year. But whether the right answer is one, two, three, or more is a question only you can answer.

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How to arrange a multi-topic academic homepage
I would like to build my academic homepage and I am not sure how to organize it. I did research in several very different and unrelated topics, and in every topic I have different types of materials (e.g. introductory texts for students, published papers, presentations, working papers and open questions).
One option is to arrange the website by topic. This will help students and fellow researchers quickly find the material that they interests them and maybe lead to useful collaborations.
On the other hand, potential employers (academic personnel) looking at my website may wish to see the material arranged by type, e.g. see all the publications by years, all the teaching materials, etc, regardless of topic.
What is a good way to arrange such a website? Examples of good multi-topic academic homepages are welcome.

CONCLUSION: Thanks to all the repliers. I learned from all the answers and examples, and finally created my academic homepage here: http://erelsgl.github.io . The main technical decision I took was to use Jekyll - a tool for automatically building a static website from templates. It allows me to put all publications in a single data-file, and then automatically creates pages for each topic and a general "publications" page. It is very flexible and lets me easily manage a bi-lingual website.
EDIT: one thing I am very happy to have put in my website is the wishlist page. In it, I put some open problems and research projects I am interested in. So far, 4 different researchers have contacted me regarding these questions. In two cases, this have already lead to a joint paper. I warmly recommend this idea.

I've struggled with this myself, all the more so because "topic" is an amorphous notion with poorly defined boundaries.  I've considered trying to do something with a tag cloud, but that doesn't seem quite right either.

Why not both? Many publication list web solutions such as bibbase or bibtexbrowser allow displaying your publications sorted by both type and keywords.

I never thought about having my own page/blog. After reading the edit of your question, I think I am going to have one. Thanks for adding the info.

Firstly, this question is not really academia-specific, since it is applicable to any relatively complex multi-topic multi-user-type website (or any other information resource, for that matter) - however, I will answer it, since some time ago I was facing the same problem, so I understand your situation.
Secondly, this problem lies within the scope of the very large interdisciplinary field of information architecture (IA) (for some introduction, beyond the corresponding Wikipedia article, see, for example, this page and this page.
Thirdly, there is a multitude of approaches to solving this problem and finding the one ("good way", as you put it), which is close to the optimal approach, requires consideration and prioritization of multiple factors, including perspectives for different types of potential users of the site.
Since different types of users have different priorities and preferences, your analysis will most likely generate several (relatively) optimal designs. As some have already mentioned in other answers, those user-type-based optimal designs might be combined on a single site via tabbed interface, with each tab, focused on a particular type of user. Then, within each tab area, relevant topics can be arranged, based on topics hierarchy, using various methods (smaller tabs, navigational side tree or menu, etc.), plus, the hierarchy's content might be adjusted, based on the relevant type of users and their interests. This just one of the most straightforward and simple ideas. While the sky is the limit in generating site designs, I suggest applying KISS principle to the site's IA for the optimal UX.
There are many nice academic websites out there, but I can't really recommend much due to their diversity and lack of time (I'd have to dig through my vast number of bookmarks). If you care, feel free to visit my own personal professional website, which targets both academia and industry, but academic content is quite limited so far. Please keep in mind that I haven't had a chance to fully update the site in terms of both design and, especially, content, which I hope to get my hands on eventually. Nevertheless, overall IA of the site might give you some useful ideas for implementing on your site (i.e., main menu structure, project types dynamic filtering in the Portfolio section, etc.).
P.S. Despite warning, I have decided to made a quick review of my bookmarks in regard to the topic and here is a tiny subset of academic websites that I find useful, interesting and attractive:

Website of Prof. Donald Knuth
Website of Prof. David Ketcheson (this site uses dynamic filtering approach, similarly to my site's Portfolio section, but it is implemented more comprehensively and in several sections)
Website of Prof. Lorrie Cranor
Website of postdoctoral researcher Davide Chicco
Website of Prof. Aaron Clauset
Website of Prof. Kieran Healy
Website of Prof. Ariel Procaccia
Website of Prof. Theodore Pavlic

@ErelSegal-Halevi: You're very welcome. I appreciate the bounty award. Good luck with building your academic website! After you're done, feel free to post a link to it here as a comment - I curious to see the result :-).

I suggest by-type-then-date organization, with a "Research Interests" menu which, when an item is clicked, leads to another page which is also organized by-type-then-date, but contains only materials relevant to that particular area.
By doing so you can keep the format consistent across multiple views, which provides a friendlier navigation interface to visitors than if they were faced with multiple disparate organizational schemes.
Of course it is possible to provide more than one level of "zoom" into a topic.  Also, your topic-specific pages may want to include materials which you are not author of.  In this last case you may also find that some of the topics are well-covered by group pages and you can link to them instead of maintaining your own.

What is your principal audience? Presumably you'd contact prospective employers directly, with a polished CV. Many publications you'll have to publish as preprints (if at all), so perhaps a page listing publications (with links where available) ordered chronologically (including papers, class notes, whatever) might be enough. Or perhaps segregate into "formal" (papers, conferences) and "informal" (class notes, miscelanea). Leaves students or random drivers-by. Organize by topic for them.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
What to do if most of my students have switched to a better lecturer's class?
I teach a certain course which is part of the obligatory undergraduate curriculum. I teach two groups out of four; the other two groups are taught by two other lecturers. In one group I have about 20-30 students. The other group also started with the same number, but students left the group gradually, and now there remain only 5 or even less; the others go to the other lecturer who gives the same lesson in parallel. One reason is probably that I am a new teacher and still not very good at teaching. Another reason is that the other lecturer is very good.
I feel that some of the 5 students remaining in my class do so only because they are being polite. I appreciate it very much since I put a lot of effort in preparing the lessons, but it is not very efficient for me or for them. So, I thought of suggesting to the remaining students that they move to the other lecturer's group. This way, they will have a better lecturer and I will have more time for research  (the other lecturer said it's OK with him). What might be the implications of such a step?
UPDATE: Thanks a lot for all the feedback. While there are many great answers, the one thing that convinced me to keep going was the fact that this is the only way I can become a better teacher. So today I came to class as usual. For some reason, the number of students rised to 10.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

The question in the title and the actual question are two very different things.

One thing that I missed on the original reading -- you teach two sections, one of which has a full complement and the other has students fleeing.  What is the difference between the two?  Is one at an undesirable time of day?  Are you a terrible teacher just after lunch?  Is there a significant difference between the students enrolled in the two sections for some reason (one possibility is that a section added late is likely to contain more junior or less committed students.)  Can you talk about the differences a bit?

@arp both are at 9:00 at the same location. I think the difference is that in the time I give the lesson to the smaller group, there is another lecturer that gives the same lesson.

I'm confused. So they remain enrolled in your class, but they attend the class lectures of another instructor (in other words, unofficially switching classes). Assuming this is the case, eventually, there will be homework, quizzes, tests, and grades. Who will manage all that for those students, you, or the other lecturer? Or, are those students actually dropping your class and taking the other class.

@KevinFegan yes, they switch unofficially. The homework etc. are given to all students via the course website, and they are graded by teaching assistants (which are the same to both groups).

By letting your students move to the other lecturer there are several losers here. You and yes even the students. A new teacher is learning. How do you learn to teach with out students to teach? How do you make sure students are involved, listening or even on the same page, how do inspire them to ask questions that will cause you to "Research" . too bad the work, and tests is by "website"; not really provoking reasoning skills and or additional thought. Think on that one student that asks relevant outside the box questions (where you say I never thought of it that way) - adding value to all.

I had a finance class and we were talking about a specific function - the professor had taught for years and in one of his classes an engineering student said why are you doing all of that math to get to the answer; all you need to do is x and then you will have your answer. All the texts and the guidelines taught that function long hand - he as well in his books) . He never thought to do it the engineers way before,  I can tell you the engineers method was easy as can be in comparison..

I’ll speak from the perspective of a student since it’s all I’ve got.

What to do if most of my students leave? I teach a certain course which is part of the obligatory undergraduate curriculum. I teach two groups out of four; the other two groups are taught by two other lecturers. In one group I have about 20-30 students. The other group also started with the same number, but students left the group gradually, and now there remain only 5 or even less; the others go to the other lecturer who gives the same lesson in parallel.

At the end of the day, you can’t literally control where and what your students decide to do. But nevertheless the key points here are the following.

One reason is probably that I am a new teacher and still not very good at teaching. Another reason is that the other lecturer is very good.

You acknowledge your shortcomings and identify strengths in others. This is important, keep reading as to why.

I feel that some of the 5 students remaining in my class do so only because they are being polite. I appreciate it very much since I put a lot of effort in preparing the lessons, but, it is not very efficient for me nor for them. So, I thought of suggesting to the remaining students that they move to the other lecturer's group. This way, they will have a better lecturer and I will have more time for research (the other lecturer said it's OK with him). What might be the implications of such step?

Regardless of your skill at teaching, I ask you: how would you get better if you have no one left to teach and in turn, learn from?
Teaching is reciprocative, students learn from the teacher and the teacher from the students. In large classes, the time and opportunity for qualitative exchange is limited. Think lecture hall size, the professor and students would rarely have 1:1 time with each other.
Since you can’t literally control where students decide to go, you need to have a honest conversation with your current students as to where they want to be, acknowledge your shortcomings, and propose a solution where you will adapt to the situation as best you can.
Whether it is investing more time preparing, asking the more experienced teacher for help, or offering 1:1 time. In absence of a plan, the students don’t know what you are planning and would be fearful of their ability to perform well; communication is key here to ensure that they stay.
Nevertheless, know that moving forward you will most likely have future teaching requirements, if you don’t change and address your shortcomings now, how would ensure your success in the future, as a PhD student, as a professor, as a team lead in industry?

"Teaching is reciprocative, students learn from the teacher and the teacher from the students" - you are very much correct. I do learn a lot from teaching the small group, and this benefits the other group (which I teach several days later). This feels somewhat unfair towards the smaller group, though.

“how would you get better if you have no one left to teach”. But they have someone left to teach: the other group that still has 20–30 students.

"At the end of the day, you can’t literally control where and what your students decide to do. Hence the definition of free will." .. what are you saying here? "You cannot control other people, therefore we have defined free will"? The reference to free will seems pointless here, and is a potential distraction.

@ErelSegal-Halevi But remember that in a small group, you spend more time and attention with each of the students, which kind of balance the fact that the group is first and you may be less prepared. I always preferred to have the first group in the week smaller or more active, it makes things easier and better in the end.

@ErelSegal-Halevi and FrankFYC: I Support most of this answer, but I object to the part about the "honest conversation with the remaining students". The students are not teaching coaches, and should not be expected to now have the meta-duty of taking their teacher's "issues" into account. What I would do is ask another faculty member - or perhaps more than one, both a lecturer and a younger TA - to sit in on one of your classes, then give you feedback. Also, since you only have a few students, you can be rather attentive to how they react and cope, and reflect on that some after class.

@FooBar feel free to edit.

You should discuss this with your department chair.  This is who you need to keep happy and their opinion matters more than ours.
Describe the dwindling number of students as a concern, then see where the conversation goes.  Instead of offering your suggestion, invite your chair to offer their thoughts and suggestions first, before you launch into yours.  Who knows?  Perhaps they will suggest closing down your section on their own and you get what you want.  Their response probably also depends on the attractiveness of your research alternative versus their need to find instructors to cover sections they've already committed to offering.
Your chair may also be glad you invited the conversation, because they may have some feedback based on their own observations and conversations with your colleagues and students they would like to share with you.  They may be able to tell you how you could get better so you could one day be the instructor who draws away everyone else's students.
But I agree with and upvoted DBB's answer, that trying to dump the class could make you look bad and that if you care about getting good at teaching, you should simply "push through" and deliver the lectures.

OP should also check faculty handbook, if any. E.g., the one at my institution explicitly says, "only department chairpersons have
the authority to cancel classes".

Discussing the matter with the chair (or equivalent person) is certainly the right thing to do.  But I don't like that the highest voted answer takes so seriously the idea that stopping the lecturing altogether might be in the OP's best interests.  In my opinion, this will certainly make the OP look bad -- the only question is how bad.  And since he has an academic job with a teaching component, I think we should safely presume that he "cares about getting good at teaching" -- i.e., that he cares about keeping his job and continuing his academic career....

[cont'd] The idea that one can have a good academic career by focusing on research success to the detriment of teaching success is so N years ago, where N is at least 20.  My understanding is that the OP's position is the Israeli equivalent of a tenure track assistant professor in the US.  He thus needs to show good teaching in order to keep his job.  If he applies for another academic job he will need a teaching letter, and I struggle to imagine how to put a positive spin on "stopped teaching a class because the students figured out another lecturer was better."

@PeteL.Clark I upvoted DBB's answer for the same reason.  But the OP does seem to want out if possible. In suggesting he discuss the dwindling number as a concern with their chair and then invite thoughts, I think it's possible he gets what he wants or that the chair will want to suggest ways to improve, not the possibility of being released from the teaching assignment, and he gets better.  Also, I don't think you can assume that faculty with both research and teaching responsibilities all care about becoming good teachers.

"Also, I don't think you can assume that faculty with both research and teaching responsibilities all care about becoming good teachers." I think that they all should care about being not-too-bad teachers.  I don't think the OP is thinking this through enough -- that unpopular teachers get rewarded by having more time for their research is just not the way academia works.  Academia is hard to figure out; lots of times questioners on this site "want" something that is not actually in their long-term best interest.  If so, we do well to point it out to them (IMO, of course).

I'm scared that doing this will result in the institution enforcing students to attend their assigned classes. That would be a loss for everyone. OP's attendance will still be low (students will just skip lecture, without attending another 'better' one)

I am sympathetic as to why you feel this way based on the loss of students. But I want to answer your question briefly and honestly. The worst possible implications of taking this step is you could look to your department chair like a (a) quitter (b) person who is not interested in teaching (c) bad teacher (d) bad colleague (e) all of the above... Seems like you also were not put in a position to succeed, matched up against a beloved senior instructor.
In my experience as a student, I left classes when I felt the material was over my head and the teacher did not care about it. The smaller class sizes seem like a good opportunity for you to improve as a teacher which will be invaluable in an academic job search or tenure push. If you want to stay in academia I advise you to push through this type of adversity and improve.

I also sometimes (as a student) left classes because I felt I could learn it faster by myself or that a different instructor explains it way better. Just to point out that the reason you mentioned is not the only reason possible

The answer to what you should do is "Keeping plugging away with the students you have."  There are some side issues here, and I think they are important.  First, your colleague is misbehaving.  On the surface, it seems noble for him to double his class size for no compensation, and perhaps no immediate damage is done.  But what happens when the dean notices that the class size can be doubled at no cost?  1. Probably half the lecturers will no longer be needed. Bye-bye. 2.  The remaining lecturers have their class size doubled just because ONE lecturer was OK with it.  If I were the chairman, I would have a clear policy against "course hopping" and encourage the faculty to take steps to reduce it.  Assuming your chairman is sensible, I would think that the most likely implication from your meeting with him is that your colleague gets his leash yanked.  Most chairmen know that it's vital to keep sections even.
Sometimes I teach two sections of the same course which has a TA-led discussion section attached.  Sometimes one TA will be experienced and personable while the other is a first-year grad student who barely squeaked by the TOEFL.  I absolutely forbid the students from one section attending the other.  It's not fair to the popular TA, as his reward for being good, to have more students and have his office hours overrun by extra students.  I help enforce this by requiring one quiz per week in discussion, so that the students attend the correct section at least once a week.  (And this is a bit of free-but-worth-every-penny advice:  Make attending your class worth some small amount of points.  It will bring some students back.  And it will help you measure how big the gap is between you and your colleague.  If a 1% attendance grade brings back most students, then the gap is not that great.)
Second:  A lecturer just has to be Dory (the fish in Finding Nemo.)  No matter what happens (you fart real loud in class, you give the whole lecture with your pants unzipped, you accidentally offend all the women in class and don't know why, you give a test and the average is 12%, a student with emotional problems has a major meltdown in class, etc.)  you "just keep teaching...just keep teaching...just keep teaching...

@Roland Yes, I do care more about fairness to the TA's.  Not every teacher can be World's Greatest(TM) and some students are going to have to take their turn with less than perfect professors and TA's.  It's good for them, because they get to learn how to learn in less than ideal circumstances; like the "real world."  Your proposal to alternate won't work, because the students will still follow the TA of choice.

@Roland If a student always has the very best teachers, then he'll never learn how to learn in adverse situations.  If the white sheet isn't written with spot-on prose, he won't be able to struggle through it.  It's certainly not our job to add extra adversity, but we also do no favors when we try to strew all paths with rose petals (in the name of "fairness.")

If the class size can truly be doubled with no downside (probably not), then it would be a bit of a waste to pay twice as many people as necessary.

@Obie2.0  There is a constant war going on between faculty and administration.  Admins see no problem with having one lecturer teaching a class in the football stadium.  They think that all we do is stand there and talk.  (Hence these MOOG courses.)  The faculty are always fighting against this tendency to destroy education.  So my point is that the dean would think he could double class size with no downside.

Hmm seems like if you accidentally offend half your class or the average on your test is 12% you would do well to consider why and not just "just keep teaching"...

@Azor-Ahai I agree introspection is important. I had a professor whose average class grade was failing (owing largely to his zero defects grading policy) and his suggestion to all of us was to "study harder." He wasn't able to get enough people to sign up for his classes the next quarter to run a course.

@Azor-Ahai  I never said not to consider why.  I said to persevere.  The OP was proposing to give up.

Another side effect:  if I sign up for a class expecting a discussion section of 25 students, (and especially if I use my academic priority to get a discussion leader with a good reputation), I will feel rather disappointed if the TA ends up taking in another 20 students just because they don’t like the section they were assigned to.

The idea that we need to teach students to 'learn in adverse situations' overlooks the inherently competitive nature of university. It's nice to think that undergraduate education's only purpose is to teach students to learn. If that's true, suffering lower grades due to a bad instructor is part of the process. But a student's grades will also be used to rank them for scholarships, graduate programs, employment etc. So i think fairness to students is more important than fairness to instructors.

Also, I think part of learning how to learn in adverse situations might reasonably involve finding ways to overcome the adversity. And if that means finding a better instructor, good for the student. In my undergrad, we had terrible physics tutorials. That was an adverse situation, and I dealt with it by not attending the tutorials, and instead teaching myself using other materials. That may not have been fair to the instructors, but it was a better use of my time, given I got A grades without wasting time attending bad classes.

@Tyler Note that I never said that we "need to teach students to learn in adverse situations."  I said, actually, the exact opposite.  I also said the reverse is true:  Gilding a student's path does them no favors.  It will also eventually destroy the educational system because there is no room for novice instructors.  There's a reason we hate millenials:  They were brought up in your system and now they think that all they have to do is point to some inconvenience and the rest of us our supposed to swoop in and remove the inconvenience.  No one seems to care that I, too, am inconvenienced.

+1 I think this is a great answer, and the kind of clear truth that for some reason makes non-academic workers froth at the mouth. One thing they could reflect on is that meta-studies show that the difference any given teacher makes is actually very small, around 10% of the overall variation in test scores (Haertel, 2013; http://www.madmath.com/2015/07/the-difference-teacher-makes.html)...

A second thing is that it's becoming more well-known that acting like "the customer is always right", to the detriment of one's full-time staff, is long-term corrosive to an institution (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-kjerulf/top-5-reasons-customer-service_b_5145636.html).

You have a great opportunity here if you can grab it. You have a very small class, just 5 students, and, if you are willing, you can offer them much more individualised attention than a regular class. Are you sure the students who are left are not enjoying this?
Given the small class you should try to engage them, and help them learn the material better.
However, I am under the impression you really want to have more time to do research (I may be wrong, sorry if I am suggesting something that is incorrect) in which case you may not be putting the needed time in this class, but if you are really interested in improving as a teacher, I can't see a better opportunity.
To add further, you have two opportunities here:

Use this small class to refine your teaching potential and get good feedback from your students
Use this opportunity to talk to the other teacher and chair and, if they agree, have more time to do your research

In other words, do not stop this class just because you think the other lecturer is better and the students will do better with him, on the contrary, you (and them) can learn a lot. On the other hand I can understand your pressure to do research, especially if you are on a tenure track or similar path, and any extra time is valuable.
What is more important to you? Do you think you have the potential to end up in an institution where your research will be valued? Or do you think, like most people, that you will end up in an institution where teaching is very valuable? (many institutions will hire you -or not- depending on your teaching abilities)
You need to consider many factors before making a decision (most of which I do not know).

+1 for the first paragraph.  A small section of non-discouraged students can be a great opportunity to hone one's craft.

I get from the question and your comments that the Sturdy Five are the people who suffer the first time you ever teach these classes. The other group is then fine as you have already trained and prepared for the material.
What not to do?
Do not drop the Sturdy Five. Some group will have to be first to endure your lectures. If the other group will become first, they might start to leave as well.
What to do?
Try to reward the first group: give more 1-on-1 time, try to be engaging and help with their particular problems. Use their size to their advantage to outweigh the flaws of first-timer.
Secondly, try to understand what exactly is that what you learn during the lecture with the first group. Maybe you can incorporate some of that in the preparations before the lectures.

You say the other teacher is “very good.”  How do you know this?  If you are correct, that implies you are able to recognize good teaching.  That in turn implies that you should be able to identify what makes it good and develop your own version of those characteristics.
This is a long-term solution; other answers have already addressed your more immediate issue.

I was more or less assuming "very good" meant "easier to get a good grade from" when I read the question. I'm wondering if that's something that the OP has thought about as it seems likely to be part of the problem here.

@enderland I would assume that while students can go to a lecture they're not enrolled in without anyone challenging them, turning in a test to someone who's not your instructor would be something quite different.

If you quit from teaching, you won't learn to teach at all. The other lecturers had to learn it as well.
Is it possible for you to join the other lecture and alternate with your colleague? One lecture held by them - you can watch them how they teach and learn it - and the other lecture held by you - your colleague can watch you and give you some feedback.
When I was in high school students from faculties of education were coming to our school for practice. They were watching our actual teacher for couple of days and then they were teaching us under our actual teacher supervision. You can try to mimic this, with your department head approval of course.

This is an excellent answer anyone could apply to any discipline, learning from the most experienced one’s while helping/assisting and collaborating.

Are you sure you've considered all explanations other than "I'm a bad lecturer and the other one is much better, hence the students go there"? You say they cover the same content in parallel, but does this mean at the exact same lecture time? I know in my first year chem course, there were 3 lecture streams in the same lecture theatre. The first was at 9:30, the second was something like 2:30, and I think the last started at 5:30. I was assigned to the 2:30 one, and thought it must have been an utterly enormous class to fill a 1500 seat lecture theatre 3 times a day, until I realised that everyone just skipped the more unpleasant times to go to the mid-afternoon lectures. Even if they're at the same time, it could be that the other lecturer's location is simply easier for the students to get to. Maybe you have an accent that's more difficult to understand for them, I know that I had several lecturers in undergrad that took me weeks to figure out (hearing "callum wector" repeatedly in a programming class before I'd taken linear algebra... eventually I clicked that he'd been talking about column vectors).
A possible course of action here is to ask the students that remained in your section why other people go to the other sections, but this has to be done carefully if you want a useful answer - I also remember taking lectures from a new lecturer who constantly asked how things were going but also seemed like he might burst into tears if we gave a negative response. They're probably not going to say "you're a bad lecturer and the other ones are better", but you might get a hint of some of the real reasons (which are likely to be numerous). Try not to suggest reasons to them unless they don't give you any response, and try to do it casually at the start of end of the class. Giving them reasons will skew the responses, but will also let them agree with you instead of bringing up something they might consider a bit rude or insulting if they were the first to say it.

I appreciate your candor and self assessment.
You haven't stated your own background or aspirations but I feel the issue your bumping into is a manifestation of a failure in our academic system.
I have experienced this from the perspective of a student attending an entry level required physics class taught by a professor who was a research scientist.
I didn't transfer classes and attended his class for the tests but attended a much better lecturers class for the normal lessons.
My first professor had research to do, grants to fullfill, TAs to manage, PhD candidates to coach, but due to some policy in our academic institutions a man who might be a brilliant research sceintest is being forced to teach entry level physics when he has no skill as a teacher, which is an entirely different and often non-overlapping skillset from researching, manager, etc.
The idea that we scale teachers based on physical buildings, or the difficulty in grading assignments, or in providing one on one assistance is incongruent with our modern digital communication methods.
In the extreme case a great lecturer can scale to hundreds of millions of people as evidenced by things like MIT Open Course Ware.
In a microcosim this is already happening, teachers assistants are already relied on to do most of the grading, they staff labs where students can receive one on one assistance, and many of the other duties that don't scale and also do not require the skill of a great lecturer.
The thing that bothers me the most is the disservice the process does to students.
Instead of them getting the best quality lecture that allows them to understand and aquire new information with the least friction, they are made struggle with learning from someone who is not adept at teaching, whose aspirations are not to teach, who wouldn't even be teaching the class if they weren't required to, all so that a department can justify the headcount of staff based on the ratio of teachers to students.
Ultimately it comes down to money and how academic institutions are funded. When lecturing is commoditized as a product and then mass produced cheaply (replaying a great lecturer via youtube recording) that completely erodes their business model. They are not acting in the students best interests but in what they think is their own.
To keep your job, not make waves, etc. the other answers are probably better advice.
If you genuinely want to become a good teacher then there is no better way to do it then actually teaching but if that is not your aspiration, only a part of what is required of you so that you you can do what your real aim is, then any way you can lessen them until our academic systems eliminate them for good anyway (great lecturers lecture, great researchers research, etc.) seems like a good idea.
I could be wrong about all of this but it is an area I feel passionate about, criticism welcomed if you disagree.

Good teaching style does require practice, but such practice doesn't guarantee it.  I have no doubt some of the professors I tolerated projecting textbook pages on a screen and reading them out loud will continue to do so until fired or retired or someone enlightens them on why this is wrong.

-1 Disagree that online learning is a panacea. Lecturing is fundamentally about questions-and-answers interactions, and this cannot be scaled. There have been many, many cycles of technologies promised to take humans out of lecturing (starting with books...) and none have succeeded. We're already at least a few years past when the craziest hopes for MOOCs have ebbed. http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/14046/mooc-revolution-uber-for-education/

This question has excellent extensive answers, but I want to add something that I think might help you and maybe somebody else who might ask this quite common question.
You must make a much more important decision asap: whether you want to teach in your future career or make money solely doing research. Don't make the decision lightly. Think about salaries, job opportunities, your interests, ambitions, etc.
If your career plans include teaching, do not drop the class. Push it through and learn as much as you can from it. View 5 students as an excellent opportunity to improve your teaching. You be their student, it will pay off 10-fold in the future. Also pivot the class towards what you are interested in, introduce something related to your research projects. Students will love it.
If you don't want to make money teaching in the future, drop it like a rock. Focus on research and don't waste time.
In my opinion, if you make this decision solely basing on your self-interest, everyone will benefit. Do not worry about others in this matter, they'll do well if you do well.

Agree with most everything here except the promise that "Students will love it.".

Current college student here. This won’t help your current situation, since I’m not sure you could make such a change to your course’s grading mid-semester, but pop quizzes that comprise 10% of the students grade are an excellent way to ensure students show up.
Make them at the end of class or near the end of class so students have to stay the whole time to take it. They don’t have to take much time, and you can even give something like 50% credit just for taking it. In addition to boosting attendance, this will give you the added benefit of checking your student’s knowledge on the subject and knowing where you can spend more time teaching.
One final thought—if your students aren’t showing up to class then how do you hope to get feedback to help you improve? Keep your chin up and realize the other lecturer has likely been in your position before as well.

In many places, this is not feasible, as all students have received a syllabus stating the grading policy.

Yeah... like I said. So implement it the next semester.

I'm not sure this even answers the question. The way I understand it the issue isn't a matter of attendance since the students are leaving the OP's course for a different one all together

@WGroleau: The syllabus is not a contract and can be considered tentative and changed for compelling reasons.

That’s likely true in most places, but in many, this suggestion would not be a “compelling reason.”

Student perspective here: In addition to improving your oration, make sure your lesson materials are good.
For me, that's been the single highest most important thing for a good class: quality visual aids, whether it be live math on a white/chalk board, or a slideshow). It's really important that they don't have too much text (that's what the textbook/google is for!). It's astounding how many people get this wrong, both in professional and academic settings. Slideshows are meant to illustrate your point, and add to your speech, and not just be a transcript of everything you said.
There are lots of public resources for improving general presentation skills, which would carry over quite naturally to lecturing. Perhaps those are worth checking out

I am posting my comments as an answer - others have very valid points as well.
By letting your students move to the other lecturer there are several losers here. You and yes even the students. A new teacher is learning. How do you learn to teach with out students to teach? How do you make sure students are involved, listening or even on the same page, how do inspire them to ask questions that will cause you to "Research" . too bad the work, and tests is by "website"; not really provoking reasoning skills and or additional thought. Think on that one student that asks relevant outside the box questions (where you say I never thought of it that way) - adding value to all.
I had a finance class and we were talking about a specific function - the professor had taught for years and in one of his classes an engineering student said why are you doing all of that math to get to the answer; all you need to do is x and then you will have your answer. All the texts and the guidelines taught that function long hand - he as well in his books) . He never thought to do it the engineers way before, I can tell you the engineers method was easy as can be in comparison.
Now think if that engineering student was not in his class or the professor let another professor take over - no matter how good they are;  what says you can not become as good or better and the only way to do that is get your students involved in your lectures and provoke them to challenge you .. kind of like stirring you up to research / study.


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Should I send unsolicited applications for postdoc positions?
I am currently concluding my PhD in England and I’d like to do a postdoc preferably in the US or Canada. I’d like to know:
Does it make sense to contact the supervisors when I find an interesting project or should I only act upon explicit job advertisements?

Computational biology/ Genetics!

What does your supervisor say?

As this site follows a strict question-and-answer format, there should be only one distinct question per question. I therefore took the liberty to remove all but your first question. You can ask them separately, but before you do, please check that they haven’t been asked already.

They were all related to one single question!

Usually you could go to a conference in US, present your ideas, and see if any professors are interested. If one of them do, you could ask for a short term visiting position, funded by either your side or his side, doing research with him. Then, if he likes you, you could become a postdoc of him. In other cases, if you have a strong track record of publications, for example, you could directly ask for a paid postdoc fellow position without previous networking efforts. But that is kind of rare. Most postdocs are somehow socially connected with their supervisors before they come.

Another very common way is depended on your current adviser. If he has some strong connections and he is willing to help you, you will most likely get a relevant position.

Absolutely you should, many positions aren't advertised and it could be your skills are just what the other group needed. Make sure you go for a quality over quantity approach, and really tailor each application to the group you are applying to. A well thought out cover letter (checked for spelling and grammar) and a well formatted and targeted CV puts you in a favourable position. A good approach is to send an application by post as well as by email; you will really stand out doing this. Talk about what you what you like in the group, your current situation, and how you think you would contribute to the group's research. In terms of funding, if you have some already great, if not, research what you would be eligible for and open the possibility of the pair of you developing an application together.

I advise against it.  In my research group (social sciences), we have post-doc opportunities, but we have very targeted searches and only consider candidates when positions are open.  I receive lots of unsolicited applications throughout the year.  Many are not remotely close to our area of research, so it seems to be a SPAM-based approach.  The only time I think it might make sense is if you brought funding with you, and the post-doc was relevant to the broader work being done within that research group.  That might be attractive to a research group when a funding source is not immediately available to hire a post-doc.
If you are interested in a given University / research group, you may consider reaching out to see whether post doc opportunities are on the horizon.  That will likely be a better use of your time.

Hi Brian, thanks for your comment? What do you mean by "reaching out"? Does this mean face to face encounter or a one liner enquiry through email?

This may be field specific, as in my field it is quite normal to reach out with non-spam, personalized emails to academics about having positions open. Most people react positively, even if they do not have money for hiring. Perhaps the fact that in Social Sciences funding is likely to be less common than in  e.g. engineering leads to spammy behavior


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What can a PhD student do when a professor is no longer interested in advising them?
I am a first-year PhD student. After about  months into my program, my adviser has asked me to look for another lab. I have had no luck so far with other labs in my department. He told me as my background is not similar to his research work, I cannot succeed in this area. He told me to look for a lab which matches with my background and interest. I have funding for this semester but so far have no guarantees for the future.
I have talked to the graduate adviser, and they said there are no options for departmental funding.
Given this situation, what could be my best option? I can’t even earn a master’s degree without funding, and from what I’ve heard, transferring to another university would be tough since they may not view my case favorably.

First thing you should do is to find out what the problem is that makes your professor tell you to leave the lab.

He told me as my background is not similar to his research work, I cannot succeed in this area. He told me to look for a lab which matches with my background and interest.

Talk to the Dean.

You really only have two choices. Either you convince your advisor to advise you and finish up or you need to find a new advisor.


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How reliable is GoogleScholar for judging the status of a researcher?
Since GoogleScholar is based on a search engine, it is useful to find the ranks of researchers (of course just by the h-index measure) in a topic or institution. I am conducting a scientometric research, and found three key problems.

Not all researchers (even top ones) are on GoogleScholar (as it needs email verification before building a profile).
The search engine adds works of similar authors to the same profile.
Some researchers deliberately add work of others to improve the overall look of their profile (I came across some cases, which would be impossible for a machine error).

My questions are:

Is there any estimate about the participation of academics (at least
in research universities) in GoogleScholar? Is it 10% or 90%? Just an estimate.
The problems 2 and 3 quoted above overestimate the status of some researchers, and this undermines others. Is there any trick to have a
more accurate data?

Since your assessment is based on the h-index, I would add a fourth key problem: what constitutes a good h-index differs quite substantially between fields.

@glauc Said differently: Google Scholar is much better than other services in curating citations/work, because it does not distinguish peer reviewed journal papers from other types of publications, such as peer-reviewed conference papers, arXiv preprints, workshop abstracts, presentations, and lecture notes, all of which can be and are cited, and therefore have impact.  More carefully curated databases in CS are significantly less complete: for example, DBLP doesn't track citations, and ACM DL only tracks a subset of publishers (notably excluding both LIPIcs and arXiv).

There is a prior question: how useful are bibliometrics in judging a researcher?  There is substantial evidence that the answer is "not very".

You should probably consider Scopus. It has author profiles for most published academics. Many universities subscribe to the database (so check your university library). It also provides greater curation both of publications (i.e., what gets listed on an author's profile) and of publications that can give rise to citations. With a single click you will get various publication and citation estimates (e.g., total publications, total citations, h-index, citation indices excluding self-citations, etc.).
You occasionally have to be careful with academics who have variations in names (e.g., married names; with and without middle initials combined with changes in institution). If they have not merged their records, then sometimes an academic can be split over two or more author profiles.
So, if you want to for example rank all the academics in a given department, then Scopus is going to be easier to use.
If you do want to use Google Scholar, you could use PublishOrPerish. It is free software that interfaces with Google Scholar. This can be used with authors who do not have a profile. That said, if their name is common, then it can be fiddly.


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Is it important to include my supervisor name in research paper
I have done a research paper with someone in industry, while doing a Phd. Is it important to include my supervisor name also in research paper. Will three names be a good thing or should i go with 2 names.

You need to provide more information. Did your supervisor contribute any data or intellectual input into the paper? I'm flagging this because it's currently too broad and needs work.

If (@Eppicurt's comment suggests) the supervisor didn't contribute enough to merit authorship, well that's what acknowledgements are for.  But talk to them

Authorship should be decided by who made intellectual contributions to the work, not by feelings that three is or is not a better number than two.

The Vancouver Protocol is generally considered as the authoritative guideline for ethics in science publishing. Here it is stated:
"Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the concept, design, execution or interpretation of the research study. All those who have made significant contributions should be offered the opportunity to be listed as authors. Other individuals who have contributed to the study should be acknowledged, but not identified as authors. The sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed."
So:
If your supervisor did not make any contribution, she should not be included on the author list.
If your supervisor made a significant contribution, she should be offered authorship.
There is clearly a middle category here. In my field it is usually considered "nice" to offer a contributor who have made a contribution bordering significant, a chance to contribute enough to warrant authorship before the project is finished.
In any case, you should discuss the matter with your supervisor before publishing. You also ought to investigate whether your university has a course on publishing ethics, and consider taking it.

@Abra strictly speaking it's mainly medical journals.  A few other jopurnals have adopted it, but many institutions and publishers use it as a guideline, or derive guidelines from it.


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Should I submit a paper to a journal whose staff I am challenging?
I would like to submit a paper to a particular journal. The problem is that I am critiquing the analysis of several individuals who work for the journal or are on their editorial board...and I'm providing evidence that proves their theories were incorrect. I'd like to know how to handle this, as my paper challenges their theories (and the motives behind their theories). Would this create a conflict of interest for the journal? And would my critique harm my chances of having my paper accepted for publication?

my paper challenges […] the motives behind their theories – What do you mean by this. At first glance, this sounds like “Doe et al. just proposed this theory to get better grants”, which wouldn’t be very scientific.

I doubt their theories are wrong, they might have some flaws. Also, a theory is a well established concept, so are you referring to a theory or an hypothesis? Theories are extremely hard to challenge and are usually well accepted in a field.

First, I do not think the term "conflict of interest" applies here, so I do not expect the editors will reject you paper just because their work is somehow related with your paper. Nevertheless, it can get quite tricky to get your paper accepted by this journal and it highly depends on the editor's ability to receive criticism, but even more on the quality of your publication! So to increase your chances, you should consider the following.

Never get personal: A paper is not a place for ranting about other people. Make sure that it is very clear from the paper that it is not the people you are challenging (as expressed in your question), but only their theories. Otherwise, this will surely result in a rejection, even if your work is otherwise groundbreaking.
State the positive aspects of the editor's work, too: This highly depends on the topic. For example, if the theory still applies to some areas, state this clearly. Even if you are not sure about this aspect, you can write something like "Our analysis has given a counterexample that shows that the statement by xy et al. is not as universal as assumed, but future work is required to find the conditions under which it is valid." And even if their theory is completely bogus in you opinion, take the editors point of view, for example with statements such as "The experiments conducted by xy et al. could lead to the conclusion that ..., but future experiments presented in this paper show that the results should interpreted differently.".
Stay calm in your wording: Keep your emotions low. Do not attack or challenge their theory. Even prove the theory wrong might be too strong. See the previous paragraph for better examples which are of course highly dependent on the topic.
Do not provide attack vectors: Every weak part or minor mistake gives a good opportunity to reject your paper, before even thinking about the validity of your arguments. Too many typos -> reject, weak related work section -> reject, unreadable fonts in the figures -> reject.
Explain your arguments very good: Do not expect the editors even understand what is wrong with their theory if you explain it to them. Unfortunately, it is a human tendency is to stay at the own belief, even if the arguments are strong enough to convince a neutral person (think about all the conspiracy theories).
Expect competition: Even if the editors are very open to publish a publication that contradicts their work and your paper is generally good enough to be published, you still compete against other good papers. If the journal usually publishes x papers per year and the editors think there are x submissions that advance science more than your publication does, they will take these x submissions. Do not expect a bonus here and keep in mind that even papers that do not challenge the editors usually have a hard time of getting accepted!

All in all, it is important to submit an excellent publication!


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How to access microfilm data at a university library in another country?
I am writing a research paper and need to access some data that was collected by someone long deceased. The university library that has this data is in another country, and has the data on microfilm. The data contained in the microfilm is a manuscript (not sure if that’s helpful).

How would something like this normally be handled for researchers who cannot visit the country in which the microfilm is held?
Is this a common issue for researchers?
Can microfilm be duplicated and sent over somehow, perhaps to another library?

Have you tried contacting the library that has the microfilm to see if there are any options?

Go into your library and ask the librarian

You should file an interlibrary loan at your home library. The ILL librarian will contact the lending library and come up with a solution.
A common scenario is that the lending library will scan in the applicable section and send you a PDF, or they may just mail your library the film on loan. (In times past, they would print out the section and mail you the pages.) If the film is valuable, they may restrict it to library use only. It is possible to copy a microfilm though I suspect that people these days will digitize it instead.
It would be helpful to talk to the ILL librarian after you file a request to they know exactly what sections/pages to get you or whether you want the whole film.


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What should I do if the admission committee has missed something in my application and rejected me?
I applied for a graduate program and I was rejected, but there is evidence suggesting that there was a mistake in reviewing my application. Now the school seems reluctant to reconsider the application. What should I do? Is there any real chance of being reconsidered?
Here are some details about the story:
The reason for rejection was mentioned in my rejection letter, and apparently, it was a very objective and quantifiable admission requirement that they thought I don't meet. But that was simply wrong, and they seem to have misunderstood (or even completely missed) one of my documents. It is a university in a different country, and apparently, they misinterpreted the document, which was issued by my undergrad school, and missed important information. I explained the document to them and they responded with a change in the reason, but the new reason in a way contradicts the previous one and it again seems to be about missing the exact same information related to that document. The new reason is also even more objective and almost purely bureaucratic, so I explained the policy of my undergrad university to them and what the information in the document means, but then I did not hear back from them anymore.
What should I do in this situation? So far I've just been explaining to them how there might have been some confusions, but with their most recent response, it seems to me that most probably, they misunderstood my documents, and might have even completely missed one of them! I'm afraid of pursuing this more seriously and directly because the department is one of my favorite departments and I like to keep the option of going there later in my academic career open.

Evaluating an applicant through the application is not a simple logical exercise. Formulating a rejection reason is somewhat easier. Because you can refute the stated rejection reason in no way implies that you would  become accepted.

@JonCuster
Of course. If I thought I'd be accepted, I wouldn't want to ask for reconsideration, but rather an offer. But if they actually noticed the document, they wouldn't formulate a reason that is simply wrong, right? It's a very simple thing, it's about the number of my major credits, that they added it up wrong and I fall below the required number, but I'm in fact far above the required number

But more applicants could be accepted than are accepted. Even with the ‘correct’ number of whatever, that still does not imply that you then automatically get accepted.

@JonCuster I'd suggest that you pay closer attention to my use of words. My intention is to ask for "reconsideration" with considering all documents, not for admission! I think I already said that more than once

And this is why we don't tell applicants why we reject them.

I am assuming you don't have a prospective advisor at this institution working with you on your admission. If you do, they will be in a much better position than us to tell you how to navigate this situation!
The concrete policy would depend on the country or individual institution, but to me it seems unlikely that they would reverse such a decision after the fact. In all probability they have limited places that they have filled already. They might also have rejected you for reasons they don't like to say openly, such as because the other candidates were equally good and didn't require double-checking the paperwork.
To know more about your chances of appeal, you would have to look into how similar cases have been handled by this department in the past, but that might be quite difficult without a connection to someone with historical insider info. While you are contesting the decision, the administration will naturally try to say as little as possible to avoid giving you ammunition.
If re-applying next year is an option for you, I would try to strike a more collaborative tone and ask how you should present your documents so as to avoid confusion in the future. And also try to strike up some contact with a faculty member who might help you. They don't necessarily need to actually do much, but an internal interest will give the administration some incentive to spend time answering your questions.

It's a German university and it's written on my rejection letter that I could appeal the decision at the court.
Given that they've given me two contradictory explanation about the same issue and I have that in email, I could possibly make the case for a complaint.
Would I have any chance for winning the case at the court?

In my totally unqualified opinion, the contradictory statements themselves are a very weak case. But depending on your situation you might have some right to be accepted if you fulfil all the criteria and score higher than others on some objective scala - it really depends on the institution's processes.

Comments are not for extended discussion; the conversation about supervisors at the admission stage has been moved to chat.