text:
Why are seemingly important topics not covered in textbooks?
I've asked some professors this questions and none of them have seemed to been able to give an answer that didn't lead to both them and me having more questions.
To put into context:
I have my B.S in Marketing and have been working in the marketing industry for just under 4 years. Of all the jobs I have had and been interviewed for having a strong knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was required to even be considered. In order to market using anything digitally based you need to understand SEO and in some cases ASO.
Never in any of my textbooks was SEO talked about even though it's not a new topic and my textbooks were 2011-2013 publications. SEO was mentioned but never talked in a sense of someone would know what it is and how to use it.
For a concept so important in the marketing industry today why don't textbooks talk about it? I've looked through half a dozen of my marketing books and I've even asked to look through the new 2015 editions my professors were given.
Are their limitations to what goes into a textbook? This sounds silly even to me but anyone who works in marketing knows how important SEO is and when a textbook is written by people who have worked in the marketing field it only makes sense that they would want to include to most important industry topics to-date so that a new 2015 textbook doesn't seem outdated.

"Are their limitations to what goes into a textbook?": Yes, there are!

Because you haven't written a textbook yet.

Related: Approach the professors about making the course more “relevant”

I find a little naive the assumption that everything should be on plate in a textbook, especially such time sensitive topics like SEO. Do you trash Marketing 101 textbook after each Panda update? Frankly, if it were in the textbook, that would be much more disturbing.

I searched Amazon for "search engine optimization" and got a page of SEO books. I would rather buy a ten dollar paper back on such a rapidly changing subject than have it included in a hundred dollar marketing text.

An important distinction that needs to be considered, in the design of any course, is the timescale over which the knowledge is expected to be applied.

At one end of the spectrum are courses where the knowledge is expected to become obsolete only on a time scale of centuries, such as calculus or Newtonian physics (yes, they change: try reading a calculus text from 100 years ago and the notation is likely to be somewhat confusing), but are generally about fundamental knowledge and core principles and thus often rather removed from immediate applicability.
At the other end of the spectrum are courses where the knowledge is immediately applicable, but where it may become obsolete quite quickly, such as training in particular software systems or laboratory equipment.

Institutions then tend to organize themselves along this spectrum according to their goals:

Strong universities tend to focus much more on the long-term end of the spectrum, because they are trying to give their students skills to last a life-time, and indeed to help those students become the ones who create new systems and applications that render the shorter-term knowledge obsolete.
Vocational schools tend to have a mix that aims to give the students both immediately applicable skills but also enough foundations that they won't need major significant retraining for a number of years.
Professional development and other "on the job" training tends to be much shorter and focuses on the short-term skills that are needed now and where it's OK if you need to train again on the new system in six months.

Now, let's consider your example of search engine optimization: this is a rapidly moving target, since it's based on adapting to the current methods that the current search providers happen to be providing how the internet happens to be organized right now.  Cutting edge SEO techniques are being invented and destroyed constantly.  Pretty much any SEO technique from five years ago is totally useless today, and SEO didn't really even exist as a field ten years ago.
As such, you should expect a marketing textbook or course at a good university to pay little attention to SEO, but instead to focus on more foundational principles.  On the other hand, if you search for SEO textbooks and courses online, you'll find a lot of more vocational or corporate resources available.
In short: educational resources adapt to the timespan over which they are intended to apply.  The longer a timespan an education is intended to cover, the less it will focus on "hot topics," and a good undergraduate degree is intended to last your whole life.

Good answer. Though I do remember Search Engine Optimisation being a thing ("it's all about the meta tags, kids!") in the late 1990s, so nearly 20 years ago now.

This is a reasonable answer, but I am honestly not sure this is the reason why SEO isn't taught in a Marketing course.

@xLeitix, also EnergyNumbers: Maybe we should first establish what it means to "teach" SEO. Does it refer to hands-on knowledge how to concretely optimize a website for search engines? If so, this answer seems perfectly valid even for a marketing course, as such knowledge would, by its very nature, we somewhat technical and also become obsolete rather quickly. Or are we talking about just referring to doing SEO, without looking into how it works? If so, I'm not sure whether much more than "Use up-to-date SEO methods to stay on top of the search results." could possibly be said about the ...

... topic, i.e. a single mention of the word SEO. This, however, is already fulfilled by the textbooks; as the OP wrote, "SEO was mentioned".

Just a side remark: 101 classes (by force) are designed more around "fundamental ideas that will still be relevant in 5-15 years" (consider time until you graduate, and then to step into a position where you use that actively) than "this hot idea came up a couple of years ago, it might be gone/completely reworked before you graduate".

I am going to offer a bit of a diverging view here. In his answer, Jake offers the explanation that SEO is just too much of a "moving target" to be of value as a university course. I strongly disagree. Just because a topic isn't "static" does not mean that you can't have good, university-level courses on it. A prime example of this is security, specifically malware detection: the entire field is basically an ongoing race between people finding ways to detect malware, and others finding ways to prevent detection. The state-of-the-art tools change literally every month. By the time you even know about a given concrete threat, it's probably already not the most dangerous thing out there anymore. However, clearly there is method to the madness - there are principles and techniques that can be taught, which remain useful for a long time even if the concrete tools change. In the case of malware detection, this would be knowing about honey pots and sandboxing (to find and analyze real malware), malware signatures (both exact and fuzzy), heuristic methods, behavior-based methods, and so on.
For SEO, the same thing holds true. In a nutshell, SEO is a race between search engine makers wanting to show the best content to its users, and "optimizers" trying to figure out ways to trick the search engine into thinking that their mediocre stuff is the most relevant content to a given search query. How you do this concretely changes all the time, but the fundamentals have, to the best of my knowledge, remained relatively stable.
So, why is SEO then not routinely taught in marketing?
Likely, because for understanding how SEO actually works "under the hood" you should have:

Reasonably advanced knowledge about mathematical graphs and algorithms on graphs
Knowledge about the theory of recommender systems
At least basic knowledge about computational linguistics
And of course you should know how crawling and indexing actually works on Web-scale

All of these are not topics typically taught to marketing students. That is, in order to properly teach SEO (basically a computer science topic, after all) you would need to go onto a pretty significant tangent. If you don't, you will end up teaching a course that boils down to "you have to use these kinds of words using these frequency in these tags" without giving students a chance to understand why, and then you are back to Jake's answer.
(but yes, many computer science degrees, especially those with a  focus on information retrieval, actually do teach SEO or a variant of it)

I think you misunderstood the question. The OP is not missing a lecture about how search engines work or how to create one, the OP is looking to learn SEO itself, how to use it.

@Greg Yes, and if you want to understand SEO properly you'll have to know quite detailedly how a search engine works. Otherwise you'll be back to memorizing concrete techniques and parameters and learning tools, and that will indeed be invalid a year later.

xLetix, in my experience the recommendations you make sound nice but demonstrate you've probably never done SEO. The degree to which you need to learn "mathematical graphs and algorithms on graphs" takes about a day, because SEO is not about optimizing your site for mathematical graphing algorithms. Recommendor systems do play a role but it's not really all that useful for SEO to say "get your site recommended by thousands of trusted users".

The last two are more on point. Everyone wants to understand google's crawling algorithm, but google refuses to disclose it and massively punishes anyone who they think manipulates result based on the crawling algorithm... Computational linguistics knowledge would I am sure help in a certain way, but if you are modulating your copy against a computational linguistics function, then you probably are big enough (traffic and budget wise) that you don't need that to show up at the top for google.

@xLeitix You most probably never done SEO or ever even tried to learn it. It is a very naive, academic view on what you need to learn and what not. It is like telling Usain Bolt he needs to learn more differential equations, because running is mechanics, and the better he gets in solving complex mathematical problem the better runner he will be.

To put it simply, I think what you're facing is the difference between the purpose of courses that contribute to a university degree, the practical needs of companies that hire, and the desire of search engine companies to erect barriers to engineered SEO.
To restructure what you're asking, companies want SEO experts to help raise their online profiles (relative to the online profiles of similar competitors). Google, Bing, Baidu, etc. want to rank sites based on quality of content and ease of parsing pages rather than give into these SEO machinations.
It's hard to see how a university course could really help here. It could begin with a cursory and theoretical account of what SEO is and what it seeks to accomplish, but this would tell you little more than you can learn from a day of sleuthing about on the Internet.
After that, the problem is that Google, etc. won't tell you specifically what you need to do to accomplish SEO. Thus, there's a bit of a dark art of guessing and figuring out how to manipulate pages to raise the profile of a site. How does one construct a university course around industry secrets relative to companies that don't want people to know the exact means of optimizing?
It would seem you would need someone in the industry rather than a CS or marketing professor to teach it. But anyone who can do it well enough is gainfully employed and employed specifically to use that skill for their employer. The precise methods are changing so fast that the techniques I used in 2011 were outdated (meaning no longer provided an advantage) the last time I looked at in 2013.
To give an analogy, it's roughly like offering a course in contemporary street art where contemporary means -- drawn during the semester the course is taught. Sure, we can talk about in the classroom, but the experts are mostly criminals so how we do get access to fresh work and understand it?

I am not buying into most of your arguments, to be honest. That Google doesn't want students to know about SEO has likely very little to do with whether it's taught or not. That it's a moving field where the concrete tools and approaches change fast is also not very uncommon. Usually, there are still guiding principles and methods that you can teach students that endure even if the concrete tools change. Just think about security and malware detection, which is still often taught on university level.

This is exactly what adjunct positions are for: bringing people from industry into teaching. It may be not so easy to find one willing to take the pay cut, but some people do love teaching.

@xLeitix have you tried googling Google's advice about SEO ... they say "make a good site" which is fine and dandy but the entire point of SEO as an industry is to figure out what currently floats google's boat beyond that -- which they generally don't disclose. This is more akin to say having your random university offer a course in "trade secrets of Coca-cola" than a rapidly moving technology of the normal sort.

@Davidmh overall, I would agree. But it's not quite finding a synthetic chemist to teach advanced organic chemistry.

Here I've googled it for you: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/40349?hl=en  / http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf / If that's all you can do as an SEO strategist, you're not worth hiring.

I was teaching last year at a university and was really disappointed to see that the techniques they were teaching (in statistics) were very different from what I had been using in real-world problems. I have spent a lot of time pondering the reasons for this:

There seems to be a lot of inertia in academia, perhaps because once people have written the lecture notes for a class, they don't want to change it, even if they wrote the notes fifty years ago. My current boss, for example, told me the story of a professor who was still, at the turn of the century, inverting matrices by hand.
Academic classes have to prepare people for many different career paths at the same time. The things that need to be taught for people who are going to publish academic papers are going to be very different to the things that people need to know in the real world. In my case, there was a lot of teaching of t-tests, anova etc. but not much programming or messy data sets. In your case, people who are going to be marketing professors probably don't need to know about SEO, because it won't help them to get their papers published. And then of course they end up thinking it isn't important, and the problem percolates to the next generation of academia.
In some subjects (perhaps marketing is an example, I don't know) the people who know the most about it aren't working in academia. For example, the best footballers don't teach classes in sport science; they are too busy playing football.

OK, but the way to invert a matrix hasn't changed in the last century... yes, there are new tools, but using them sounds trivial, but isn't. Just get you class to use some computer algebra system consistently.


text:
Concerned about supervisor's poor level of knowledge on his students' research topics, and his reluctance to correct his knowledge - is this normal?
Hi I wish to ask for advice regarding the role of an academic supervisor nowadays. Current I am pursuing my Master in a physical science school in one of the university in the South East Asia.
While my academic supervisor is an energetic man and enthusiastic about his research, his research interest is very wide and that each of his students (including me) is working on a title that is only remotely connected to each other. Even he himself is working on a completely different topic than the rest of us. One would expect that we as students would at least get some useful advices from him, but it occurs to us that he is also not clear on background of the research he assigned to us in the first place. While we understand we, as the person who conduct the in depth research, will be more knowledgeable about the field in the end, we notice that he does not understand the basic terminology and theory of the particular field, which I feels is on the level of undergraduates. He would expect us to explain all the basic theory and terminology in our field to him, without bother to study for himself for a thing that is easily reachable even in Wikipedia.
Another thing I observe is his reluctance to search for verification of his current knowledge. He would like to speculate on a thing (which is an established and obvious stuff) based on his own limited knowledge on the said area, completing disregarding our counter arguments based on established facts. Only by exposing the current literature and references (which is simply a google search) did he reluctantly accept his flaws. As a result, this have made us to be skeptical every time he presents an argument.
I would expect my case is uncommon and standalone, until my friends said almost the same things happen to him. Apparently this situation is applicable for other academic supervisors as well. Practically we have to complete our research by ourselves, with the purpose of academic supervisors reduced to providing a working space (I do appreciate that) and stamping their approvals for our paperworks.
An even worse news to hear to that my friend told me that, after his discussion with some experienced international industrial personnels, this seems to be the current trend in area of research in physical science even in overseas, that we are supposed to carry out our research without expecting "useful" suggestions for our work.
Sorry for the long post, as I am confused about the state of the research community right now. Is this to be a norm to be accepted, and that I am expecting too much?

Do you have postdoctoral researchers that you work with? My adviser doesn't necessarily know everything about every topic we're working on, but he hires postdocs who have relevant experience in those areas that we (as students) work closer with. He handles the administrative details (and contributes research ideas).

No we do not have postdocs, and the Master and PhD in our school purely research based without any class or course to take. That means any verification on our works depends on our own resourcefulness.

Thanks for @ff524 for editing the title, but I think that the main question I wish to inquire the norm an advisor in advising a student, not the variation of topics and level of knowledges of my supervisor.

It's not clear what you mean by "the norm of a supervisor in advising". There are many different supervision "norms"; different styles work for different people. If you want to know if what your supervisor does is considered acceptable or within the range of normal supervisor behavior, you need to ask about the specific behavior of his that concerns you (whether it's his level of knowledge, or something else.)

I agree with you, in this case it is his level of knowledge and reluctance to correct his knowledge. Feel free to edit my title as you see fit.

It sounds like your problem is larger than just your advisor.  "Purely research based without any class or course to take" concerns me.  However, if you stay where you are, you will be an incredibly self-directed scholar by the time you are done.  Basically, I guess you are going to have to teach your special area to your advisor.  Try to find at least one study partner to work closely with.

Practically that is all we have done in the past. It is ok if things proceeded smoothly, but once problems arise, the whole research is basically stalled for extended amount of time until we somehow managed to find a solution by ourselves. And as it is commonly known, research is always riddled with problems.

First thing: you are not alone. This kind of behaviour is very commom within the academia.
In order to pursue a graduate degree you have to accept that your path will be both restless and lonely! Restless because you will discover a whole new word, full of opportunities and overshoots. On the other hand, you are going to have a master degree, so you have to do your dissertation alone. Yes, you SHOULD count on your advisor help, for sure, but you are supposed to do most of the work by yourself!
You can face your advisor lack of knowledge as another challenge to be overcome and start to either join a lab with people doing similar work or, in the worst case, you have an endless remote source of information out here.
My greatest advice is for you to look up conferences within your field and be in contact with people that are doing similar work. It could help you a lot.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
"I am looking for a job" on a student website, a good thing or a desperate sentence?
I saw that some students, even from top schools and who are giving faculty candidate talks are posting a sentence like, "I am actively looking for a job in ..". Is this a good thing or only shows a desperate job candidate?

Your professional website is a summary of who you are and how you are currently presenting yourself publicly.  If you are openly on the job market, then it is entirely appropriate to be frank about that fact on your website: just present it as a piece of neutral information, rather than making a big deal of it.

On a website, there's nothing wrong with such a statement. On the other hand, it's a much bigger problem to put "I'm actively looking" in a CV or resumé, where it could come off as seeming more desperate (or at the very least somewhat pushy, since a CV is sent for the purpose of looking for a job!).
But of course, context and phrasing are extremely important, and you'd have to look at the overall effect and impact of the sentence on the web page as a whole.

I think it's fine in a resume, where people are often advised to say "I am looking for a job of type X", but not a CV.

In common with many others in my industry (finance, and probably most other industries) I have two states of "looking for a job". Currently I am passively looking which means that my CV is out there and people can approach me if they wish and ask whether I would be interested in a particular job but I am not looking to change jobs unless something out of this world landed in my lap. Previously I was actively looking for a job; I was sending my CV to recruiters and trying to find a new position. This is because I was looking to change my position. Saying anywhere that you are actively looking for a job is at the very least a neutral statement but in many cases will lead to recruiters getting in touch with you because they know that they are likely to make money out of placing you in a job. This is particularly true if the statement is that you are looking for a job in a particular area or industry as it implies that you are focused on a goal and not desperate.
What would look desperate would be spamming recruiters and job boards with CVs aimed at no job in particular; this says to the recruiter that you are not interested in their particular job, have no direction in your job search, and are looking for any job that will take you.

If you want the recruiters to get in touch, I'd recommend adding a month and year, e.g. "March 2015 - actively looking for work", too, so they know it's not outdated. Mind you, a lot of recruiters will just contact everyone speculatively anyway...

by recruiters I didn't just mean recruitment consultants, I meant anyone recruiting. Keeping your CV up to date without putting a specific date as to when you started actively looking for work may actually be more helpful because if they think that you have been looking for a long time they will think that you're desperate too!

No, it's not meant to be a start date. If in April 2015 you're still actively looking for work, you update it to "April 2015 - actively looking for work". The point is that if all it says is "actively looking for work", they don't know whether you put that there today or several months ago. You may have stopped looking, or found a new job, and not updated your LinkedIn (or wherever) profile yet.

What about making the employer aware of the level of loyality to the current job - is this relevant?

@starsplusplus: if it looks like a starting date to me (albeit unintentionally) it will to others.
VolkerSiegel: I've found that most companies want to make you happy so that you won't leave rather than punishing you for wanting to be happier. Your question is irrelevant to this question (as its a first job question) and would be best asked on the workplace stack as the answer is long and complicated.

I think such a line on a website straddles the line between

I am interested in talking to anyone who might have an interesting job.
I'd like it if a job looked for me, instead of the other way around.

The former attitude is very reasonable.  I don't think I'd want to see just "I'm looking for a job" on a website of a potential employee.  However, "I'm looking for a job.  Contact me if you are looking for someone who wants to do cool stuff in Material Sciences (or just contact me if you are interested in talking about it!)" shows a slightly different type of personality.

Hmm... I'm not sure, it may be obvious or implied somehow, but what is that difference in personality type?

One is just lazy and not bothering to search for a job properly.  The other is an active engaged individual who is interested in talking to you about interesting things, and might even work for you if it's interesting enough.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
What is the etiquette for thesis acknowledgements that thank God?
I saw that some theses acknowledgements thanks God, so are there any rules or suggestions about that? Is it ok to do it for believers or just don't mention your religious affiliation in a scientific work?

If it's OK to thank dog I see no reason why it wouldn't be OK to thank God.

Don't misspell her name.

There are no specific rules for who or what can be acknowledged. Academic writing is not, in general, governed by rules.

For a thesis, what is allowed depends on the rules of your institution. I think most institutions won't care one way or the other, but some do object to certain acknowledgments. The University of Leiden has forced people to rewrite, or leave out, their acknowledgements because they had thanked various deities, their pet, or their running mates. As for etiquette, there is none that I heard of.

What you put in your thesis acknowledgement is up to you, but I feel it is inappropriate to thank God.  What if someone refutes your thesis? Your thesis is the work of man and like all other man made products is fallible.

@emory Perhaps, but thanking another person in the acknowledgements section is not usually meant (or seen) as an attempt to transfer responsibility for mistakes in the paper onto that person and I don't see why thanking God would be different in this respect.

I do not understand why one would need to thank God by writing it in the paper. I am an atheist, but I assume that any religious person has their own rituals for thanking God (could be a prayer, or the simple thought of acknowledgement, like thanking God for the meal before eating). If I were a religious man, I would for sure not mention that in the paper, as my connection with God would be private and certainly of no interest to the reader. Adding such words to the paper is not a message to God, but rather a message to the reader about your own religion.

There's nothing wrong with thanking God or other religious figures, and it's not particularly unusual.  It could upset people if you use the acknowledgments as a place to expound religious doctrine, but no reasonable person would take offense at simply thanking God and I've never seen it cause any controversy.

Nonbelievers might be annoyed to see god thanked prior to, or instead of, someone they think deserves it. I haven't seen it in an academic setting, but I have seen grumbling from athletes about a successful teammate who thanks god but not their teammates.

@Kryan that is an issue of not thanking someone who should be thanked, and is really unrelated to thanking god per se. For example if you only thanked your parents, I'd assume you'd get the same possible reaction.

@WetLabStudent It arguably weakens the value of all acknowledgements to include bogus acknowledgements (my sister once did quite intentionally to make a point, by thanking Black Sabbath). Consider thanking a deity for your (or your relatives’) recovery from a disease: many people (me included) consider that this cheapens the actual work of the medical personnel who cured the person, and consequently ungrateful and rude (even when the medical personnel is acknowledged besides a deity).

@KonradRudolph I think the people who aided in the actual work should try their best to maintain some cultural sensitivity and not take such statements personally. To many people a deity is actually involved in looking after the "actual work" and whether such beliefs are bogus or not, it seems a bit of an over-reaction to view such statements as ungrateful or rude just because they conflict with your own world views. I say this as someone who doesn't believe in a deity.

@KRyan then they do not know who really deserves the thanks!

Your acknowledgements are yours to do with as you see fit. Some might look at you a bit askance, particularly if your professed beliefs conflict with your research (e.g., a Jehovah's witness working on blood transfusions), but ultimately you can thank whoever or whatever you found helpful, whatever it might be.

A thesis about blood transfusions written by a Jehovah's witness seems a rather far-fetched and extreme example.

I see no problem with this. A rabid atheist or differently-religious advisor or reviewer may be unhappy, but so may be a reviewer who is just going through a bitter divorce upon seeing an acknowledgement of a beloved spouse. No matter what you do, you can always inadvertently hit the wrong note.
As to suggestions, I'd say a discreet

A.M.D.G.

(centered on its own page) can never be wrong.

OT, but I have to remark that I think the phrase "rabid atheist" is an unfortunate choice. It both denigrates a subset of people for their strong beliefs and trivializes a medical condition.

Jesuit schooling, @StephanKolassa?

@Matt: no. If I had been SJ schooled, I might have avoided the poor choice of words Tim very rightly criticizes.

Putting A.M.D.G or its equivalent in thesis acknowledgements is one thing; putting it in a standard paper (as I have occasionally seen) is another, and less appropriate.

I tend to regard "A.M.D.G." on academic work as a bit presumptuous about the quality of the work.

Perhaps this is a cultural thing but I would consider use of AMDG in any scientific work to be wildly inappropriate. Simply thanking your deity of choice in the acknowledgements would be perfectly fine, even if I'd personally consider it quaint.

Spot on, this answer. +1

"Rabid atheist" might be the wrong term, but there are certainly those that would discount your work simply because of this acknowledgment: http://www.thethinkingatheist.com/forum/Thread-Amusing-acknowledgement-to-God-in-a-student-thesis-I-was-reading

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


text:
Invited to give a talk but could not attend, can it be on CV?
If I was invited to give a talk but was not able to attend, could it be listed under invited talks in a CV? My point is that there was an invitation and it worth to show it. Similarly, a paper can be accepted for a conference and no one of the authors presented it but it was published in the proceedings. Or a someone receive an award as a sign of recognition.

You can mention it, orally, during your interview. Don't put it on your CV though.

“I almost gave a talk.“

If you decide to put it anyway, I would put a damn good reason along with why you couldn't attend, e.g. "...but couldn't attend due to Trump's visa policy changes" or something. (Health issues won't cut it, sorry. I don't know why, but I feel like if you put it, you have to show you were both willing and capable to deliver, and something else stood in your way.)

If your CV is in such a bad shape that you need to list talks you didn't actually give, you have other problems than what to put on your CV.

An invited talk is not about being invited but more about giving a talk.
Strictly speaking, there is nothing that you did: You have not given the talk, thus, I would not include it into the CV.
Regarding your comparison with papers that were not presented: The main contribution of a paper is the result which is included in the proceedings. Presenting a paper is just an extension and explanation of your results. So the majority of the novelty and effort went into the paper itself. Please note that there are also journal papers which are (mostly) not presented at all. The same is true for conference papers which I include in my CV despite I have not presented them myself, because on of the co-authors did it.

No: Don't list anything that you didn't do.

From a comment on my answer:

He's not saying he'll pretend he gave the talk. The invitation itself is a good indicator of his status as an expert in the relevant field, at least in the eyes of the people running the conference. If this is relevant to the job, I don't see a reason not to include it, as long as he makes it clear he didn't give the talk.

which was extended to add:

If Google or Apple offered me a job, but I couldn't relocate or whatever, I'd absolutely put it on my CV.

A comment on another answer provides an excellent response:

if I saw such a claim on your CV I wouldn't even invite you to an interview. If you didn't take the job, if you didn't go to the presentation, if you didn't do the thing, it doesn't count. It never happened; it doesn't count.

Another commenter writes:

It may be a accomplishment, but it is also a opportunity wasted. You do not really want to underline your failures to execute. Its a bit like saying businessman saying they got a big contract but never fulfilled it. People are looking for people who can get things done.

He's not saying he'll pretend he gave the talk. The invitation itself is a good indicator of his status as an expert in the relevant field, at least in the eyes of the people running the conference. If this is relevant to the job, I don't see a reason not to include it, as long as he makes it clear he didn't give the talk.

Why are you quoting a whole bunch of comments inside your answer? You are offering ideas which conflict with your original answer, without explaining your motivation behind doing so, which seems fairly pointless...

@PeterAbolins I don't understand your reasoning. I have presented a comment by MGOwen that casts doubt over my answer, and provided a responses to that doubt by Roddy and joojaa. There's little point in me responding to MGOwen directly, when Roddy and joojaa have already provided excellent responses.

Ok.. you provided an answer where you affirmed your point of view. Then you saw some other responses and started doubting whether you still believed in your original answer. So, instead of updating your answer with your new ideas, you simply copied other people's comments into your answer. That is what I was trying to highlight. A better approach would be to support the answers you now agree with (using votes or comments).

@PeterAbolins I was never in doubt (and I don't have any new ideas), but I do feel that responses to comments should be given. I didn't "simply [copy] other people's comments into [my] answer," I quoted other people's comments (giving them due credit) and included them in my answer; surely that's how we operate in academia? Although there is no reason to copy answers verbatim, there is reason to copy comments verbatim: It gives them more visibility and longevity (comments get deleted).

"if I saw such a claim on your CV I wouldn't even invite you to an interview. If you didn't take the job, if you didn't go to the presentation, if you didn't do the thing, it doesn't count. It never happened; it doesn't count." The invitation did happen though? They were invited to do a talk so that's what they should write.

Why are you posting comments as an answer?

@user2768, Are you plagiarizing yourself? Are you lerenau? Posting under two different usernames is not allowed. Furthermore, you  say you're doing this because the comments might get deleted, but by removing the usernames and only linking to the original comments, those links will stop working once those comments get removed. Also, Stackexchange isn't about archiving discussions verbatim, otherwise it would be using an online forum or a twitter feed as its main display interface. Stackexchange is about synthesizing single coherent answers (that possibly came from multiple sources).

Yes, Stephen, I plagiarize myself, on an internet forum, I have nothing better to do.... I'm being sarcastic. Actually, Stackexchange is all about archiving useful content. That's a major use case. I haven't been "removing usernames," albeit, you're right that it would be nice to include them, but they can change, and it is a lot of effort -- by all means edit my answer to include.

This is the greatest answer of all times. If you don't get this, read the first line of the answer again.

No.
For the same reason that you do not list the jobs that you declined on your CV.

If Google or Apple offered me a job, but I couldn't relocate or whatever, I'd absolutely put it on my CV.

@MGOwen ...and conversely, if I saw such a claim on your CV I wouldn't even invite you to an interview. If you didn't take the job, if you didn't go to the presentation, if you didn't do the thing, it doesn't count. It never happened; it doesn't count.

People frequently put declined jobs, scholarships & grants on CVs in academia.

@innisfree really? I haven't encountered it. Do you have a few examples?

Yes really http://www.google.com/search?q=high+energy+physics+cv+declined

Honestly the answers and comments here are just wrong

Including a declined job offer on your CV is literally telling the hiring manager "I don't think you have great judgement, you should outsource it to these guys - they thought I was great!". If the hiring manager cared for Google's opinion on you working for a company that isn't Google - they would ask them. Including a declined offer provides absolutely no useful information to a hiring manager. I don't have a clue where this idea came from.

I regularly see professor CVs with information like "I was ranked 1 for position X at university Y", sometimes even for rank 2.

@Roddy: I assume you wouldn't list a prize in your CV because you didn't "do it".

@innisfree Without evidence to the contrary, surely that's just your opinion?

@trunklop When they took the position or declined it?

@user2768 Declined. Just try the Google search suggested by innisfree. It's funny that all the answers here are in contradiction to what is common practice. Maybe it's an European thing. Of course, you don't want to give the impression that you are unreliable or not serious. But an entry in your CV like "Nov 2016: Position at university X accepted. Oct 2016: Offer from university Y declined" is very common.

As @trunklop already said: At least in the German academic system it is very common to also put declined offers of professorship on your academic CV: They are considered as a high-level achievement  (unless you have declined too many times). If you are not yet a full professor, you even put the second or third list rank on your CV. This is also considered an achievement: To have been placed on a list is an external assessment of your "Berufbarkeit" (habilitation equivalence).

@trunklop Just because some CVs contain "declined," doesn't mean it is a good idea. As Roddy notes: "if I saw such a claim on your CV I wouldn't even invite you to an interview." An interesting question at this point is: does included declined opportunities give you an advantage?

@user2768 I have the impression that you don't want to read what others have written. You asked innisfree for evidence although he provided it (Google search), and you are asking now whether it is a good idea despite Daniel's explanation for Germany (and I know that other countries in Europe do the same).

@trunklop Information is scattered throughout this page. I typically read sequentially, I do not necessarily follow parallel threads of communication. Thus, I miss things. That said, regarding innisfree, a blanket statement is offered, without any precision nor clarification. We don't even know what innisfee objects too (as stated, innisfee's answer and all innisfee's comments "are just wrong"), hence, the evidence you elude to may or may not be relevant. Regarding Daniel, it is only claimed that people do it, not that it is a good idea.

@trunklop Sounds like a disagreement over something that is different in the US/EU.

"If I saw such a claim on your CV I wouldn't even invite you to an interview" << Evil person speaking right there

I don't understand the other answers. Being invited to give a talk at a conference is an indicator of esteem, regardless of whether you could make it. I see no harm in writing Great Conference (2017), invited to give plenary talk on topic X, but could not attend.
Mentioning in CVs declined jobs, grants  and scholarship and funding is common in some fields, see e.g. the results of this search, http://www.google.com/search?q=high+energy+physics+cv+declined
In fact, one of the first hits mentions at least half a dozen declined declined talks
http://cosmo.nyu.edu/aim/macfadyen_cv.pdf

It's honest, I suppose, but I've simply never seen it done.  I think it would look very peculiar and distract from other accomplishments.

being invited to give a talk at a big conference is a big accomplishment

It may be a accomplishment, but it is also a opportunity wasted. You do not really want to underline your failures to execute. Its a bit like saying businessman saying they got a big contract but never fullfilled it. People are looking for peole who can get things done.

Rubbish. Could not attend indicates you couldn't attend. No reason to assume that's an inability to deliver rather than a result of family,  health, financial, visa etc circumstances

@innisfree Why does the reason your couldn't attend matter? If this invitation is a testament to being well esteemed, shouldn't there be other, more tangible achievements to show this?

The links provided settle this matter

In an ideal world, perhaps it belongs on a CV. In the real world the risk of putting it in probably outweighs the benefit. If there is a good chance that the readers of the CV won't see its inclusion in a positive light, why do it? As the other answers and comments illustrate, the chance of it being so misconstrued is  non-negligible. Having said that, your answer does add something of value to the discussion, so +1.

A common thing in German academic CV is to list the tenure position calls, including those you declined.

Being invited does certainly count for something. However, if you were unable to attend, for whatever reasons, then you shouldn't put it on your CV.
It wasn't important enough to me at the time, but I am adding it to my CV because I think it could impress someone...
Having said that... if you actually wrote the paper (or, co-wrote) that prompted the invitation, then you should definitely add that to your CV, because the writing is an achievement.

What would you write on your CV with regards to a co-author giving an invited talk?

@user2768 I am not sure I understand the question. If I wasn't invited, then there would be nothing to put in my CV. The publication would still be listed in my CV, but the invitation (by proxy) wouldn't.

You wrote "if you actually wrote the paper (or, co-wrote) that prompted the invitation, then you should definitely add that to your CV, because the writing is an achievement." Suppose you were the person that co-wrote the paper that prompted your co-writer's invitation, what would you add to your CV? Also, how would you ever know that your paper prompted the invitation?

@user2768 Ok, it looks like there has been a slight misinterpretation of what I wrote. I would add to my CV that I wrote (or co-wrote) a paper / publication. End of story. If that paper then prompted an invitation, which I declined, or which my co-writer accepted in my stead, I would add nothing further to my CV.

Understood, and I completely agree that you should list all your publications on your CV.

Just look how many answers and comments around here think it's a negative thing.
Sure, with the recruiters that don't it might be a positive point. But you'll lose many others that will think it's pitiful.
Compare the possible gain (little) against the possible non-invitations.

Despite everyone saying 'no', I'm pretty sure yes, you can. Is that a good idea? Most likely not.
Unless that talk is really prestigious and invitation to it underlines an important accomplishment and you had a good reason not to attend, like sickness or no means to make a trip AND you have nothing better to put on your CV AND you can specify that you were invited, did not attend, because of (a good reason) without writing an essay on your CV, AND you make it valuable to your potential employer and not look like an exercise in vanity, AND... well, you get the point

Well, obviously, you can but it's clear that the question shouldn't be interpreted so literally.

@NajibIdrissi It's nice that it brought up so many memories of teachers making fun of students in the need to go. No, it's not what I mean. He can put it on his cv, he may put it, and there is a possibility that he should put it there, but there are many conditions for it to look like something positive there.


text:
How to select dates and times of office hours for the benefit of students and instructors?
Office hours can be selected at any time, but how they can be selected to benefit all? The students to ask the instructors and the instructors to have some time to conduct research? Before a class or after a class? In the same days as the class, days with no classes, or all days?

If I had a two day a week class, I would have it before class on Tuesday, and after class on Thursday.  And also by arrangement, if someone couldn't come because of their class or work schedule.
At my school, the rule was two hours for each class.  There's no recommended amount of time where you are?

I think it is same

I like that schedule for a Tuesday - Thursday class.  More generally, you want to vary your times.  Don't do, for example, Monday and Wednesday at the same time of day.

I try to set "official office hours" on some schedule that shouldn't clash with classes, but encourage students to ask directly after class if warranted. I tell them that otherwise they can get an appointment, or just drop by. I'll tell them (or leave a note on my door) when I'm unable to spare a few minutes for a quick question.

I think it is important to cover as much time slots as possible. So if classes start for example every two hours, let's say 8-10, 10-12 etc. try to make your office hours for example from 9.30 to 10.30. This way students with a class in one of these slots can still visit you.
edit: Also, if your office hours are directly before or after your class, your students won't have time to prepare for the class after your talk, or think about questions after your class.


text:
Can a syllabus be adopted and modified?
I have seen some few syllabuses online that look very similar. Is it fine to adopt any syllabus or instructors need to have their own syllabus? And do instructors need to get permission from the original syllabus writer or just link and acknowledgement?

Are you referring to the content of the courses described in the syllabi, or do you simply mean the style and format of the syllabus document itself?

@aeismail the description, text books used, grading policy etc.

In some cases, it could be that the instructors had a template provided by the school.  When I was an instructor at a college, I was required to update a few things on the syllabus, like my name, but I was required to NOT change ANYTHING else.  I had no flexibility (in that one specific way...  I did have a whole lot of flexibility with just about every other way that I ran my particular class, which I know is quite different than what some other instructors experience).  One thing I did have the flexibility to do was to create my own addition to the syllabus, but the college bureaucracy, which determined the official course objectives, also mandated a certain amount of information get presented unaltered.
In that case, I, as the instructor, never bothered to check the copyright of each and every syllabus, because obviously I had the organization's permission to do what the organization absolutely required of me.
This is just one example: The main point being, in some cases, instructors might not be creating their syllabus entirely from scratch.  Surely, the specific details vary from school to school.

It's probably a (morally) minor copyright violation in the US to just copy the material and use it. At the very least, you'd want to borrow that material with written (email is fine) permission from the original writer. You can't simply acknowledge your way out of copyright infringement. IANAL, but there are those who might argue in the US that the collection of what you will teach in what order when is not sufficiently creative enough to warrant copyright protection (it's already that way for recipes), but that's an argument for a court to hear not a way to rationalize your own behavior.
On top of this, there's probably local things required by your university or government that will be specific to you that will need changing anyway, so unless you are borrowing last year's instructor's syllabus from your own university, you're presumably going to want to do more than just copy someone else's.

Then why research papers can copy a text or quote from another paper with just a citation and without a written permission?

Quoting is an accepted practice. In the US, it clearly falls under the Fair Use parts of our copyright laws. It's typically such a small amount of the original, that there's no issue and no one sues anyone.

What about using some text and images from a book to prepare class slides? Does that require a written permission also?

Probably not in the long run, but by my lay reading of the law, yes, absolutely. You'd probably win if you got sued for doing it using a Fair Use argument in the US, but permission is generally required. And it would probably cost you 6 figures to defend yourself in court.

During writing courses and according to my own readings, all what I read and heard is just cite the work. I never came across get written permission. If a book is used in thousands of universities, do the authors have time to reply and give permission to all instructors using it? And do the authors write a book to be used or to sue others? Are there any cases that authors sued others?

In many cases nowadays, if you adopt a textbook for your class, the publisher will provide you with slides to use in class.

@GEdgar Yes, but if you added text from multiple books do you need to get "written permission" from all authors or just cite the work?

Other questions, not related to syllabus adoption, should be elsewhere.

@ThomasLee, if you want good legal advice, I'd suggest addressing your question to your university's in-house counsel.


text:
Disclaimer in syllabus, a good or bad idea for instructor and students?
I have seen couple of syllabi that used a disclaimer similar to "Instructor reserves the right to change the syllabus at any time". For the instructor side, it could be good, but from students side it could be good or bad, depending on the change. Any other thoughts?

I thought you meant disclaimer as in 'trigger warning', or such nonsense...

Unless there is an unusually rigid set of controls and policies in the instructor's department, it is generally always the case that the instructor can change the syllabus on the fly.  With any decent instructor, there is usually a good reason for doing so, such as incorporating an improvement the instructor has figured out partway through or adding extra emphasis on a section that people seem to be having trouble with.  With a poor instructor, on the other hand, I don't think that the situation can be rescued by making the syllabus more rigid.
As such, my interpretation of the disclaimer is that it's simply a way to insulate the professor from complaints of students who take a rigid interpretation.  From the students' side, I think it means little, only acknowledging a reality of instruction.

I treat some parts of the syllabus—like the grade calculation—as a contract with the students and always put proposed changes in those sections to the class before implementing them. Calling an audible on the schedule, however, is to be expected.

@dmckee Even grade calculation might sometimes be appropriately adjusted: for example, let's say that a class collectively bombs its second quiz, and the instructor realizes that it's because they taught something poorly.  Then they might adjust grading to consider two weightings---the original and one where that quiz is considered more lightly---and give students the better of the two.

Sure, and the class will accept that proposed change by universal acclimation with many a puppy-eyed look of grateful relief. Then I have to figure out what good stuff I'm going to lose and the end of the term so we can re-do the just-tested material better. Which gives you both parts of my approach.

Do you think that is should be part of syllabus just to protect the instructor? From the students side, it also doesn't look as a good contract.

@ThomasLee I don't think a syllabus is a contract in any legalistic sense.  I think the "contract" is that the instructor should provide the students the best education in the subject and the fairest evaluation possible.  The syllabus is just one tool to help with doing so, by providing information about what students should expect.

Is the wording just a reaction to an increasingly litigious society? You don't want little Johnny's parents suing the university for a refund of tuition fees etc if he failed his degree "because the lecturer didn't cover page 593 in the textbook but there was a question on it in the final exam".

Where I teach it is a sad reality that lectures do get cancelled in the winter tem due to situations beyond human control (i.e., snowstorms/blizzards). For that reason the schedule must be adjustable, and with it the timing, weighting and content of deliverables such as assignments, and sometimes greater course components.

(Somewhat in reference to the other answer and pursuant comments...) Even though I do privately think that my job is to give the students the best education I can, it seems both "fair" and "anxiety-reducing" to make quasi-contractual promises in advance... all the while realizing that the students make no such promises to me, etc. But it's a very asymmetrical situation.
So basically what I try to promise is to assure the anxious, primarily about the grading system, gradelines, and how much material will be "assessed-upon". In effect, such an approach does give openings to those seeking to "game" the system, but I reject a role of "policeman" for one thing, and, for another, see it as undesirable that the earnest (often anxious) students get put-upon for the sake of trying (which is often unsuccessful anyway) to keep at bay the game-the-system people.
The aspect of the syllabus that specifies the extent of the content of the course can be made fairly independent of the grading scheme specification, I think, even if this amounts to declaring some "extra topics" outside the bounds of "what will be tested-on". (In upper-division undergrad courses I'd regularly include will-not-be-on-the-test information, with a few catty remarks about people who only care "what's on the final"... and certainly in graduate courses only talking about what's reasonably testable does a great dis-service to the students, since they'll have a "textbook" picture of something (with the pursuant testability constraints, non-interaction with other topics/ideas, and so on), rather than the "live" version.)
I really do think the "promises about grading system" and "outline of what will be covered (and tested upon?)" are two very distinct things. The grading system should be a bit contractual, I think, given the power discrepancy, and potential for harm/anxiety. The content promises are rather different, since there's not necessarily any adversarial relationship.

The students do make promises to you. By continuing in your class past the add/drop deadline they are agreeing to accept the grade they get on your class as part of their academic record. Their commitment will be enforced by the school. That is a big risk for them to take unless they can count on your promises, mainly the syllabus. If the content changes mid-course to something they would not have signed up for, they are still stuck with either completing the course or having a black mark on their record.

@PatriciaShanahan, yes, indeed, they have a commitment, but not an obligation, in the picky sense that if they screw up, it has little detrimental effect on me. But, yes, you are right, I strongly believe, that they risk something, and would hope to be able to count on my promises. (Just a quibble about words, though maybe that is a part of the issue...)

As a teaching assistant in grad school, I once strayed from a professor's syllabus and was reprimanded by said professor, who said that the syllabus has contractual weight and serious problems can result from sudden deviations from it.
I never investigated the true legal weight that was claimed by that professor, but even if its legal weight is very small, it remains a fact that American culture has grown increasingly litigious. It is common practice to put in disclaimers to this effect "just in case".
In law there are clear violations, clear non-violations, and a frequently vast grey area in between them.  Most universities, corporations, etc. make it a point to avoid the grey area completely.  You just don't want to risk someone taking you to court over a possible violation.
Similarly, as an instructor it's a major pain if one or more of your students decide to go to your chair or dean to complain about violations of your syllabus.  Being able to point at the syllabus and say "nope, it specifically says this could/would happen" will fend off the more spurious claims.
When changes are made they are almost always minor, and are announced in advance or plainly necessary.  Usually it's a matter of changing the planned lectures due to falling behind (or even getting ahead); adjusting to the strengths and weaknesses of the particular class; removing optional topics in favor of something else; or giving a class-wide re-examination when the class as a whole performs unacceptably poorly.  You still have to stay within the broad scope of the course description: a calculus course has to stay about calculus, a course about 18th century China can't turn into a course on modern Japan, etc.

At my school faculty could make any changes to the syllabus that they wanted to make, but a copy had to be given to the students in writing (email was okay).
As far as the contract is concerned, it protects the instructor to think of it in that way.  If it comes to a grade grievance, the only thing in question is whether the instructor graded the student according to the terms of the syllabus; everything else is extraneous.  It seldom happens that a grade grievance makes it all the way to a committee, but if it does, this protects the faculty member.

The syllabus is not just a contract with the students, but more so a contract with whoever will have to teach the classes after yours. If you just leave something out, or cover it lightly to make space for "more interesting" subjects, you are doing your students (and those who will have to clean up afterwards) a disservice.
Here you can request the syllabi for the classes you have taken, in case you want to e.g. apply for continuing study elsewhere (and also for exchange students visiting from abroad). So it is important to have them quite clear in what subjects are covered, and adhere to that. Grading is more a local matter, but shouldn't be changed without the explicit consent of the affected students.


text:
What to do about a proposed research idea during the waiting period after submitting a grant proposal?
Grant proposals can take months until you hear back. What should researchers do during that period?

Start working on the research since the idea could be implemented by others and publish without acknowledging the funder.
Similar to point 1 but in publishing wait to hear about the results and acknowledge the funder if you were funded.
Wait since you don't know if the idea will be funded and there are no funds to support students but the idea could become obsolete after 6 months.
Something else

Catch up with the work you are paid for (previous grants) after spending weeks on writing grants to support you during future grant writing?

@NajibIdrissi true for people with awarded grants

@Roland ok, but the idea could be gone

Start the work if you can.  Acknowledge the grant if you get it.
If you don't have the necessary resources to start the proposed research without the new grant, the only thing you can do is wait for the new grant.  Yes, your idea could become obsolete after six months; in fact, your might already be obsolete.  Nothing you can do about that.  Let it go.
If you do have the necessary resources to start the proposed research without the new grant, go right ahead.  (Those necessary resources definitely include your time and expertise; they might also include specialized equipment, money for research assistants, money for publication costs, money for travel, ethics board approval, and/or other things I didn't think of.)
But while you're waiting for the grant decision, remember that developing a research idea into a publication also takes several months.  You have to do the actual research; you have to write the paper; the paper has to be reviewed and edited.  All of these steps take significant time.
If you can get a paper all the way to print before the proposal decision, you don't need to acknowledge the new grant, because it doesn't exist yet.  But this seems rather unlikely; any idea that you can get to publication in only a few months is a weak basis for a grant proposal.
On the other hand, if the grant comes in before your paper is actually published, pat yourself on the back and then acknowledge the grant.  Even if you are already revising the galley proofs.  ("Research by this author is partially supported by XXX under grant ZZZ.")  You have nothing to lose by being generous to the funding agency.

Can you please check this question https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/140559/acknowledging-a-funder-for-related-contribution-and-using-fund-to-travel-to-a-co? Thanks!

Do you have access to any other funding? In the meantime, typically we would apply for ethics for the proposed project and seek out other funding. If its a topic you could write a short commentary on or get it out there under your name, you can do that.
If you can start the work after obtaining ethics, and money isn't holding the work back, you should put wheels in motion.

What do you mean by "apply for ethics"?

And what do you mean by "obtaining ethics"?

Apologies - applying for ethics at the review ethics board of the institution you are at for the study you wish to conduct.


text:
Can the review of a tenure track application start before the reference letters arrive?
I was chatting with some friends and some claimed that a tenure track applicant can be reviewed and invited to campus before letters arrive. However, others claim that without the arrival of all 3-5 reference letters nothing will move forward. Can the application review start before the arrival of reference letters or is it similar to graduate students' applications, where the graduate school will not forward the application documents to the department before they are complete?

I'm not sure there is any general rule for universities...

If they did not request letters, then yes, otherwise maybe.

Is this question about a particular country?

At least in my department, yes, faculty candidates can be interviewed before their reference letters arrive, although an actual job offer requires all letters.  (In fact, this is relatively common for more senior applicants, who often want to keep their application confidential as long as possible.)  But that was a policy decision by the department, made with the explicit approval of higher administration.  Other departments and other universities can set their own hiring policies/procedures/requirements.
The overarching rule (according to my understanding of US equal-opportunity labor laws) is that the hiring process must be consistent; the same process must be followed for all applicants.  If you interview one applicant before all their letters arrive, you cannot then claim that you didn't interview a second applicant because you didn't have all their letters.
(I ran my department's faculty hiring committee for three years.)

I don't think US law typically requires you to be consistent, but nonetheless that's pretty universally the policy for large employers.  Being inconsistent can get you in trouble with the law if you're inconsistent in specific ways that may suggest that you're illegally discriminating or may cause problems with requirements to preferentially hire US residents.  But if you decided that you wanted to require letters for people born in odd years but not for people born in even years, that wouldn't be illegal (because parity of birthyear is not a protected class).

I would think this is pretty generally the case if not universal. Waiting until "all" materials are received before reviewing anything would be impossible, since some things will never arrive. And it is a poor use of faculty/staff time to force a wait until the deadline before starting. Initial weeding out of the obviously not qualified can happen early and probably does.

@Noah Snyder: require letters for people born in odd years but not for people born in even years I like your example! And not just because I was born in an even year . . .

It's an interesting weird example because you might think that the protection against age discrimination would apply, but actually you're allowed to discriminate based on age, you're just not to discriminate against people over 40.

I'm aware of someone who was hired with a missing letter. Presumably the committee called the letter writer to ask what the deal was, and the answer was positive.

At least a third of the promised letters in the last search I was on never arrived.

@AlexanderWoo and what happened next? Did you remove the applicants or make offers without the letters?

@ZachH - at the company I work at, letters are not needed. Instead the hiring manager calls the references directly and runs through a standard set of questions. One less thing to keep track of.

@NoahSnyder But if you decided that you wanted to require letters for people born in odd years but not for people born in even years, that wouldn't be illegal — It might not be illegal, but I'm quite sure my university's lawyers wouldn't allow it.  By the same logic, I could regally require letters only from people whose name rhymes with Boa Rider.

@JeffE "regally"? :)

@paulgarrett We are only human.

@JeffE ... I see what you did there. :)

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


text:
Tenure and tenure denial rates by universities
Is there a way or website to find the tenure and tenure denial rates by universities and departments? I heard from some faculty that the tenure rate at X university is Y%, so I wonder if there is a way to find the statistics for all universities.

I would be surprised if this exists. Tenure decisions are normally a personnel matter that is considered private, not public. In general, I doubt that many universities would announce in any way that a candidate was denied tenure. And given small numbers in a given year and a given university, aggregate numbers would be pretty easy to disambiguate. At best, any results would be spotty.

The faculty at university X probably have a fairly good idea for their own university.  But maybe just for their own discipline. There is a way to estimate overall tenure success, but it is harder on a per university basis.

It is my understanding that people are often not officially denied tenure - they are informed some time in advance that "their tenure case isn't looking good" and they consequently quit and look for a different job.

Even if you have numbers, there is often a story behind them. In my undergraduate department, many moons ago, there was a long standing political stink between two factions. The upshot was that no professor was granted tenure for quite some time, since one faction or the other would veto it. Eventually, the main actors either (a) died/retired, or (b) realized that not having new tenured professors was a real problem for the health of the department. Tenure rates abruptly rose in the next few years.

@Buffy: In practice, the result of a tenure decision is easily seen by the public: you look at the department webpage the next year and see if the candidate has the title "Associate Professor", or you look one year after that and see if they are listed at all.

As @buffy says, statistics of that kind are hard to come by, but there are several stories (usual caveats apply) by very well-known researchers who have shared their stories of tenure denial.

Actually, @NateEldredge, it isn't nearly so easy. People leave for a variety of reasons. Some leave having been granted tenure. Some people change their names. And, to get numbers you have to track it over time, which means maintaining lists of provisional and tenured faculty, by university, by department, over a range of time. And, you need to depend the websites being updated in a timely manner.

@Buffy: Yes, I realize that isn't a great way for an outsider to collect statistics.  I'm just saying that "privacy" is sort of a silly reason for the university not to release them.

@NateEldredge Privacy is the best possible reason for a university not to release them!  As Buffy says, not every departure by an assistant professor is the result of a tenure denial, and it is none of your business which ones are.

@ssquidd Anonymous accounts are scattered about the web, some in academic forums. Two fairly well-known ones just because the people involved shared their stories publicly: Dan Drezner (U. Chicago, Political Science) and Sean Carroll (U. Chicago, Physics)

No.  Most institutions would consider tenure denial to be a confidential personnel matter.  This information probably cannot even be obtained using freedom of information laws.
A small portion of institutions have their newly tenured faculty announced in Inside Higher Ed.
You can estimate faculty retention rates by viewing archive.org's records of the list of faculty on the university website.  In practice, tenure rates are not as important as retention rates.  There's no point in getting tenure at an institution you don't want to work at.

_ In practice, tenure rates are not as important as retention rates._ - For an pre-tenure or prospective faculty, I'm not sure.  There's are lots of reasons people leave, and there's a big difference between being forced out and choosing to leave.


text:
Buy a server or cloud computing for a new lab?
We are starting a new computer lab and expect to have data that is 50-100 TB of text, images, and maybe videos to process. We will need to run tasks occasionally (10-30% utilization per month), so mostly it will be used for storage. Should we go for a server or cloud computing? Some points to consider (I am not expert in hardware):
Server pros:

Last for years
Cheaper

Server cons:

Maintenance, upgrade problems, and other issues are common given that our expert is always busy

Cloud pros:

Easier to use (no hassle)

Cloud cons:

Might be expensive to host large data
Need to pay for it after 1-2 years (some funds needs to be spent within 1-2 years).

Surely this depends primarily on the host institution's rules and resources.

@Thomas ok, but do researchers generally prefer to use of the options these days?

Clouds don't evaporate after 5-6 years. Why do you say they'll go away? Also I'm not sure I agree with your assertion clouds are point-blank easier to use. Why do you think it will be easier for your group to use a cloud than a local server?

I suspect people will have an instinct to close this as a boat-computing question, but I urge them to think first; this is a question that many in academia are having to answer at the moment, and IMHO there are some aspects that are not in common with the same question elsewhere - plus, the people making the choices in academia don't tend to have the same expertise as IT infrastructure people elsewhere.

@Flyto This is a question specific to a research field. It's like me asking here if I should buy an atomic clock for my next experiment or if I better lease it or ask to the lab next to mine to provide the signal.

@MassimoOrtolano is it, though? Many people across many fields face this question.

@Flyto Also many people across other fields face the example question I gave above, or similar ones. Even though this site is clearly skewed toward CS and maths, this is still a question about a choice which depends on the content of the research and on the regulations of the OP's institution.

@Flyto But the answer is going to be very different based on things like if 100 TB is a lot for you or not that much; or the technical ability of your staff. A group in the CS department might have a very different time getting a cloud going than e.g. a linguistics department branching out into some more technical forms of analysis for the first time.

@AzorAhai I mean that we will need to pay for it. I update it.

@ThomasLee Don't you have to pay for it for the first 5-6 years too?

@AzorAhai I added more details, is that clear?

@ThomasLee Yes, thank you

Perhaps consider Amazon, I think -- but can't confirm -- storage is incredibly cheap.

This isn't an answer - because the correct answer, if there is one, will depend on your circumstances and what exactly you need to do with all that data - but here are some things to consider:

If you have your own server, then in addition to the CapEx to buy the system you must budget for somebody's time to maintain it (maybe a group member, if somebody has the requisite knowledge, or maybe somebody from your institution's IT department), electricity (if you pay for that), backups, and so forth. (do not neglect backups - if your main need is storage, this may nearly double the cost)
If you use a cloud facility then you have all OpEx and no CapEx - but the operational costs will be substantially more.
In my experience looking into this for compute-based HPC tasks, if you can't keep your own system busy then it's often better value to use cloud offerings, during the life of the project. If your main need is storage, this may well not apply.
Once the project has finished, if you have bought a server then you have an outdated server that you may, or may not, be able to usefully repurpose. If you have used a cloud system then you have nothing.
Consider transfer speeds to/from the storage. If your data and your processing are both in the cloud that's fine, but don't plan on copying tens of terabytes between local and cloud systems on a regular basis.

So far, those are considerations that apply everywhere - not just to academic projects. But here are some additional considerations for research:

If the need is mostly for storage and not serious computation (not clear from the question) then up to 100Tb isn't that much storage by today's standards. It's more than a university IT department is going to offer for free, but you might be able to pay them out of project funds and not have to worry further about it. That way you get a resilient system that's looked after by professionals within your institution. They'll probably be buying the same hardware that you'd be buying yourself, so this isn't a cheap option - but it may be a good one.
Consider whether, at the end of the project, you will still need to store that 100Tb - or whether the archival need is less. Consider whether, and how, this relates to any funder data archiving policy, and/or any instutional archive facilities.
Some funders like to be able to take pictures with a thing that they bought (though you're probably talking about bigger computers than this before that kicks in). Similarly, some funding streams will only cover CapEx and some will only cover OpEx, so this may be the deciding factor.

There are probably some other factors that I haven't thought of - if you've thought of one - especially for the second section - that you don't think is worthy of its own answer, leave a comment and I'll edit it in.

Local servers are likely to be substantially cheaper and also faster to access the data over LAN rather than the internet for data on that scale (just for a quick count from AWS you're looking at $2400 per month if you ignore the deep-storage options that are not appropriate for data in-use; for the same price you could pay for local servers in a couple months with the same capacity).
Given similar choices, the labs I've worked in have always opted for local storage, but we also utilize cloud options for sharing data both for personal use (i.e., having access at work and home) and between other labs. However, this is only a subset of the data, for example data extracted or summarized from raw data.

I would first look to see if there are HPC (high-performance computing) resources associated with your university (or funding agency, or wherever you're eligible to apply for an allocation). Not all of them are for pure number crunching - some are very suited (even designed) for data intensive tasks. Usually that doesn't give you long term storage, but getting an allocation with temporary scratch storage on the order of 1-10 terabytes is quite feasible. And you could probably pay a bit to extend the storage, if needed. Should still be cheaper than setting up your own cloud solution, and less work than a custom server.


text:
New overlapping courses
As departments grow, they tend to hire people in the same area of research. And different people from different communities call things differently. For example, people in Statistics may call it "Statistical learning", while others "Pattern recognition". If several departments or people within the same department propose courses with similar content but different names and no one wants to change, what can be done at this point? Offer 2 courses but allow students to take only 1? Offer 2 courses and try to minimize the overlap? A senior faculty, chair, or dean should decide on 1 course only? Other ideas?

Why take any action? The purpose of a course is to teach students something, not to make life hard for them. Lots of courses overlap in lots of ways. It is unavoidable in some fields. Some places teach essentially the same course in different departments. It is up to advisors to advise and work with individuals on what meets their goals. I see no real problem here. An education doesn't consist of a bunch of discrete topics.

@Buffy it is fine if it is different departments, but within the same department there is no point of taking 2 similar courses

You've already given three options for how to proceed, all of which are used. How many more do you hope to find?

In all universities I know of, new courses and course changes have to be approved by some curriculum committee (or the faculty senate) that ensures that there is not too much overlap. So two almost identical, proposed courses will run into this exact problem, and likely neither of the two will get approved.

@JessicaB these might not be the best options

If it is between 2 possible courses, its better to check what is different and what is the same, then join what it is the same and if there are not that many differences then add them all in the same course, if there are many, then you can either give one course with extra set of classes for each course (which is a bit of an administrative nightmare), or you can give 2 courses with shared classes of those that are the same.
As an example, in my university there are 2 extremely similar careers. 1 in the Licencee in Informatic sciences, and the other is the Licencee in Enginery of Informatic sciences. They are basically the same in most courses with same professors teaching in both, however, the first one has administration courses and the second has instead physics and chemistry. The other difference is that one has 1 semester of probability and another of statistics, and the other has both probability and statistics on the same semester. Who decides this? the direction of the school and the heads of careers/departments. they revise and update curriculum plans and then send them for approval/registration to the national education department, which might not be needed in your case.
My suggestion regarding the courses is in sum to check what is different between the proposed courses and see if it's worth A)to make them separate, B)Mash them together into 1 course, or C) Make 1 course with 'optional' extra classes needed for the student to Attain the credits to the different subjects.
Who needs to be consulted? All your stake-holders, meaning all the professors, chairs and  such that would participate in the definition of the curricula.

I'm not really sure what the issue is. Similar courses are offered all the time. Some examples from my own life would be:

A physiology department offering courses for majors, pre-med students, and nursing majors.
A linguistics department offering syntax courses for theoreticians and computational linguists. My department had Intro to Linguistics for non-majors (a number of foreign language departments required it and I believe it was also an elective for English), and prospective majors.

It's common for undergraduates to not be allowed to take both for credit, or can only use one to fulfill a requirement and the other only for elective credit. It's nice to take a class that's geared toward your subfield.
I'm not sure what your role in the department is, but if the chair doesn't have an issue, then there's no reason to change.

Similar courses in same department for same students

@ThomasLee Not sure what that's supposed to mean

@AzorAhai The issue is if a single student can gain 2 courses worth of credit while only learning 1.2 courses worth of material. Some overlap is fine, but it shouldn't be too substantial.

@JessicaB That's only an issue if it's happening. The post only says two similar classes exist, not that all of the students are taking both ... it's not clear what role the OP has. In any case, I address that situation in my third paragraph


text:
Who might lose a job in academia due to covid19?
With covid19 continues to spread, this might affect the universities in the next semesters as the number of students might drop and many universities are offering cheap online degrees compared with the expensive traditional degrees. Who can lose a job due to covid19 in academia? Instructors with annual contracts, postdocs, adjunct-faculty, pre-tenure faculty, tenure faculty, or even all and many could universities shut down.

Universities Issue Hiring Freezes in Response to COVID-19
Some offers were withdrawn and one case of layoffs- see comments

Are you just curious or do you have a specific worry?

I have no idea which one, but I think probabilistically there is a fairly high chance at least one state will appropriate 0 dollars in government funding to its 4-year public universities in 2023.  Those universities might be able to survive, or not.

@Buffy curious and planning for the worst-case scenario

@AlexanderWoo why 2023 and not 2021?

@ThomasLee - because some effects on state budgets take longer to happen.  Also gives me a couple more years to be right, b/c once a state cuts universities to 0, it's probably not undoing that.

@AlexanderWoo, it would be a death sentence (actually suicide) for the state's economy.

In my home country we are bracing for an increase of students. Traditionally many students study abroad but now everyone is applying to local universities. We are under pressure to increase the number of students. So, I guess, local universities might be benefited.

Of all the examples you name, I think only those on annual contracts have much of any risk and I think that is small. The world isn't actually ending. Universities still have their mission(s): Teaching, Research, Service. That won't change unless the disruptions are much worse than are now foreseen or even likely.
Course delivery is being affected, but hasn't ended. Research goes on, though interrupted/slowed in some fields for safety. Funding for research is still in place and will probably continue. It will be a boon for some (biomedical) research.
Some marginal colleges will be in trouble. Think Walden University from the Doonesbury comic, but they were in trouble before this began. Tenure Track professors are unlikely to be affected because they represent the future of the university, not some disposable resource. Postdocs have contracts and funding in place for the most part, often by grants.
There is even a chance that the current disruption will increase the need for faculty in the short term.
But for long term effects we need to see how the hundreds to thousands of variables now in play work out over time. And it will take time since universities have quite a bit of built-in inertia. Whether "cheap online degrees" have any actual value is something yet to be determined. And they may not be as cheap as you think. Some online programs are extremely expensive to create. And the issue of the actual qualifications of those who take them is important and, perhaps, doubtful.
But even if a university were to try to deliver such a "cheap" degree there is the question of still needing to do research and that requires highly qualified personnel. There isn't a "cheap online research path" that has and likelihood of success.
Diploma mills have a poor history, being more associated with exploitation than with excellence.
Relax. Stay healthy. Do a good job. Climate change is a bigger risk than what we are going through in the current months.

Some people normally employed by colleges are at risk, of course. The people who clean the dormitories and prepare meals for resident students, for example. Lots of service jobs are at risk. Likewise, there are lots of small businesses in college towns that are at risk of failure, leaving their employees (including students) without resources.

"Research goes on": Well, the university which I'm currently visiting has asked all faculty to shut down their labs and suspend all research that can't be done remotely.  Which, in many fields, is most of it.

@NateEldredge -- but it you and the research will return :-)

My guess would be that more biomedical research gets funded, but this money gets taken away from funding in other fields.

Tenure Track professors are unlikely to be affected because they represent the future of the university, not some disposable resource. — I think this is unduly optimistic.  Some tenure-track faculty lost their jobs in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis.  It's hard to imagine that the economic impact of the current pandemic will be less severe.

@JeffE, possibly, but I think that people will want to hang on to the resource unless it is impossible. If we can solve the medical issues the economy is likely to rebound. But we have idiots in too many government positions.

Anybody might, anybody might not.  Job contract duration and institutional/regional/disciplinary factors are more important than job title.
There are some institutions which are doomed over the long term to close, merge, or transform themselves because of demographic changes.   Some of those institutions will be closing much sooner than was previously expected.
People with short-term and at-will contracts will loose their jobs first, just like every other industry.


text:
How to have a high productivity in research in schools without a PhD program?
I was talking with a faculty member from Electrical Engineering department in a school that doesn't have a PhD program and she had some difficulties in finding students to work on research. How faculty in such schools can work on research if in general, undergraduates and Master students are not interested in doing research?

The field matters greatly... can you clarify? In mathematics, for example, faculty do not really-truly need undergrads or grad students to do research, although the interactions can be stimulating...

@paulgarrett in STEM fields

Ok, STEM, but still more detail is needed.

Can you clarify if the schools in question have a relatively high teaching load for faculty in your target area? My initial reaction to your colleague's observation is that she would like to involve students with research because she is teaching all the time and is not always able to keep her research program going because of that (and students who want to do research with her would ideally be able to devote more time, assuming they weren't also always busy with classes). Is that the case? If not, what is it? Is it related to a field-dependent issue? Something else?

@MadJack teaching load is 2-3 and can be 2-2 after getting a grant

“STEM” is far too broad, Research in high-energy physics is very different from research in fracture mechanics, which is very different from research in theoretical computer science, which is very different from research in genetics.

I agree with @JeffE that STEM is too broad, I also dont like that term anymore, bcs ppl are associating it with high employability rate. I think Thomas Lee need to advise her to change school, or to get affiliated with pther institutions

Electrical engineering


text:
What are good reasons for a budget extension?
What are some reasons that could justify a no-cost budget extension for grant received from a funding agency and possibly reasons that don't?

Is this the same as a cost-neutral project extension? If so, it would mainly depend on what kind of budget you have left. (Staff, investments, machines/equipment...)

@JayFromA "no cost" = no additional funding.

Answer probably depends on the funder.

@StrongBad I don't see a how funding agencies will differ

Can you provide context?

@ThomasLeeth because the NIH basically does not require any reasons, but industry or charity funders are going to want to know why.

@user2768 a grant received from a funding agency to support academic research

@ThomasLee, I don't understand why a funding agency would want a "no-cost budget extension." There's no cost, so continue the research without further funding.

The "no cost" in no cost extension really means "no additional cost."  You're asking for permission to keep spending from the budget after the originally scheduled end of the project.

@BrianBorchers yes, no additional cost https://osp.mit.edu/grant-and-contract-administration/managing-projects/no-cost-extensions


text:
How to approach research on an unproven theory for academic submission?
I'd like to look more into the Fermi Paradox for research purposes and possibly submit it as an academic paper.
The Fermi Paradox is a theory proposed by a scientist that has some very interesting and factual points based on our current knowledge of space and technology advancements.
My only concerns are the entire theory is based on speculation while it's not possible to disprove it's also not possible to prove.
Is it acceptable to research from one stand point either against or for the theory. Or is it better to approach it from a non bias stand point and show the evidence and the possible counter evidence?

Notions that are both highly accessible and consequential enough to be interesting to a significant fraction of the population (like the Fermi "Paradox") generally have a lot of history. Many, many people have weighed in on the subject over the decades, so you have a lot of research to do before you are in a position to say that your thoughts are new (or even a new approach to an old answer).

Lots of interesting things in science are not proven, so I don't think there's any special privilege for unproven theories vs. other types of subject.  The real question is this: what do you have to contribute to the intellectual discussion? It doesn't really matter whether you start from a perspective of aiming to prove, aiming to disprove, or just aiming to clarify (in fact, you might well change your perspective multiple times during your investigations). What really matters is that you will need to gather novel evidence that advances the state of knowledge with regards to the subject.