The Pipeline Problem (III)

I'm writing about failure. You'd rather hear about success. We all would. Whether on the level of individuals or international policy and politics, failure is a drag. If I write about failure you might recognize yourself in the story.

It's our instinct to want to transcend. Turn the page, start a new chapter. Start a new conversation, all the while evading the more difficult, potentially confrontational one.

We transcend because time keeps going. We're propelled into the future before we understand the present whether we like it or not. And we keep going in the hope we'll have better 'luck' next time. But evading isn't transcending. And, in some cases, the conversation's been attempted too many times with an individual incapable of listening, unwilling to change, or in which bad communication habits have grown too deeply engrained.

To the people I care about, and that's all of you and any person reading this even if in real life it would be unlikely we'd get along (due to differences in politics, ethics, or whatever), please take the time to listen to Tim Wise's "White Like Me" about racism and sexism. About how even those intending no harm can cause harm.

In fact, it's so very ordinary and normal that if we comment on what's happening it's very easy to be "othered" and then the informational content of the message goes unheard.



In these days of the Internet if the conversation is public, as in the recent case of Tim Hunt, the key point gets lost due to mob reactivity. Women students in academia typically ARE more emotional in their expressions of sadness, hurt and disappointment. More senior women learn to suppress and internalize those emotions because emotional expression is badly received and, more importantly, they learn that the intellectual content of what they're saying gets lost. Tim Hunt's joke was not only in bad taste, it WAS sexist in the context of the meeting. Although it contained some truth, just like more rude comments about women's appearance, it distracted from women's overall intellectual contribution and added one more comment to the mountains of obstructions women have to overcome to be heard. It's more than sad that Hunt and St. Louis had to cope with mob reactivity. But also disappointing is that the point got lost -- even in Reason.com's article.

Each one of us, regardless of gender or race, has been guilty of othering, more often than we like to admit. Each one of us has been othered and not been heard.

Othering occurs, at least in part, because as a species we tend to operate on emotional autopilot. More visceral emotions and intuitions based on our inner beliefs play a larger role in affecting our decisions than our rational intentional mind wants to admit. I think men have learned to externalize their negative reactions (most typically anger), whereas women have learned to internalize their negative reactions (most typically hurt and disappointment) -- at least before feminist thinking grew to be more common.

Part of the pipeline problem, however, is that the frequency of being unheard occurs more often for women and minorities and the negative effects accumulate to have big effects on their lives and livelihoods over time.

In the case of gendered conversations, women's intellectual contributions are marginalized and women tend to be remembered for the wrong reasons by both men and women.

One point I missed in my last post is that when married tenured women DO exercise their assertiveness (by expression, tone, quantity or volume) or their feminine powers to be heard, it has less of a negative impact on how they're judged because our implicit mental weighting of their femininity and nurturing remain unchanged. Their marriage and children act as a counterbalance in observers' minds. But a price married women pay for this protection and success in the perceptions of others is that even the most productive married women's contributions usually end up being overshadowed by the contributions of their spouse in the public eye.

At the University of Michigan I can't tell you how many times my contributions at the seminars of invited guest speakers, faculty meetings, administrative functions and social events were overlooked. More numerous than I can count. I made an effort to contribute, an effort because of my own shyness, but rarely, if ever, was that contribution recognized. It grew even more frustrating when I realized that my ideas continued to flow through the discussion, but that others would receive the credit. When I mentioned this phenomenon at an assistant professor's meeting, I was told I was being oversensitive. When I mentioned it later at a tenure committee meeting, the official meeting minutes emphasized the patience of the all male committee and neglected to mention the point itself. Over time it grew more difficult to overcome my shyness to contribute at meetings.

All of this is even more ironic when you consider that NSF Advance was making an effort to correct sexist biases in hiring and the work environment at the University, but many of the senior faculty had failed to attend the seminars presenting the research indicative of the many ways sexist biases affect judgments and behavior.

About women's intellectual contributions being overlooked, Virginia Valian writes:

Those whose comments were ignored have suffered a small loss in prestige, and their contributions have been labeled, implicitly as low in value. Because they now have less prestige, they will be listened to less in the future; they will carry their previously earned labels into the next encounter... If everyone understood explicitly what some people understand implicitly―that success comes from creating and consolidating small gains―no one would counsel women to ignore being ignored...The well-meaning advice often given women―not to make a mountain out of a molehill―is mistaken.


While at the University of Michigan I, somewhat like Cheryl Gore-Felton at Stanford, tried to change the dynamics of the interactions. There was to my knowledge no poker night, but I joined a social hour once a month in which my colleagues and I, and sometimes students from our labs, would talk science over a beer at a local pub*. Unfortunately, I was the only woman, most of these colleagues were from outside my Department, assistant professors, and in the Medical School, though the conversations were some of most enjoyable during my time at the University -- part of my vision of what being a scientist was about. Without saying a word, I even forgave one of the tenured males from the Medical School for making googoo eyes at and flirting with the bartender considering we were in a pub. Without doubt, I would have preferred if we could have put our minds together and figured out a way to rescue my career after the hostile takeover.



Speaking for myself, the most significant case in my career of my contribution receiving less recognition than it deserved occurred prior to my time at the University of Michigan when my postdoctoral advisor chose to present my research at a prestigious Gordon conference himself. I was neither informed of the meeting nor invited to attend and missed out on an early opportunity to network and gain recognition. Maybe he considered it more important to promote his lab or someone else. At least my paper pulled his lab out of a bit of a slump. And I did get invited to a conference in Armenia many years later, even though I had to pay the airfare myself and I already had failed to get tenure.

In terms of the pipeline problem, the accumulation of negative effects in my case translates to the scientific community studying ion channels and synaptic plasticity having lost an enthusiastic contributor, colleague and friend.



*Conversations like this, in the absence of alcohol in this case, were also one reason I enjoyed Green Gulch as much as I did. Though we didn't talk about ion channels or synaptic plasticity. We talked about our individual experiences, the environment, and other problems of our world. (I never quite made it to The Pelican Inn outside Green Gulch borders, but possibly that will change sometime in the future.)

The Pipeline Problem (II): Let's NOT make this about luck.

Luck. I doubt anyone would argue with the observation that luck isn't good business. And whether the currency is scientific knowledge or money, universities are business.

In her book Why So Slow? Virginia Valian presents evidence that women have a tendency to attribute success or failure to luck. She suggests that the tendency is due to the perceptual distortion women experience as they navigate the triple standard of productivity, femininity and nurturing mentioned in my last post.



About luck Virginia Valian writes:

"success demands competence, strategic analysis, and effort...Luck, in the guise of an uncontrollable set of external circumstances, plays an unwarranted role in women's professional lives. Women do not reliably profit from their competence, strategic analysis, and effort to the same extent men do...because women's objective circumstances are more difficult than men's."

So let's NOT make this about luck!


Productivity, Not Luck

I know I deserve to have been tenured. When I left my postdoctoral fellowship at Yale I had already reached critical escape velocity and would have been easily tenured. In that sense I know the University of Michigan failed to provide the support I needed to demonstrate the productivity we all would have preferred. I assume that wasn't their initial intention even though that was the effect.

There's an old adage "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," not to mention a lot of wasted dollars, time, and effort. The adage is true whether talking about war, natural disasters, the financial excesses of Wall Street, the increasing capitalistic structuring of health care, pharmaceutical industries, or education from charter schools to universities.

If the University of Michigan really wanted the success they were after when I was hired -- and as a University trying to be competitive with Ivy Leagues that seems like logical reasoning -- then I should never have found myself in a situation so sensitive to the effects of the hostile takeover of Research Genetics.

When the Department failed to consider it essential to recruit one or more graduate students with a sincere desire to learn electrophysiology, I was placed under a tremendous handicap in terms of productivity. In fact, the first graduate student that got sent my way (without information concerning their condition) was an extremely intelligent and kind manic-depressive interested in biochemistry.

Electrophysiology is my primary area of expertise. With an initial set of electrophysiological publications I would have been able to recreate the rich context of the project on ion channel regulation and plasticity I had worked on at Yale, this time in a biological system that was more genetically and behaviorally tractable with strong correlation to the processes of synaptic plasticity that underlie learning and memory. In contrast to that ideal, as it was, I performed the electrophysiological experiments to supplement the work of my students. As it was, my research program was outside my primary area of expertise. Most scientists only risk that after promotion.

I did eventually manage to recruit a postdoctoral fellow with electrophysiological training. Because I couldn't afford to gamble after the hostile takeover, I tasked him with a project that other investigators' work suggested would have a high likelihood of publishable data regardless of what the results were. Namely, modulation of the channel by calmodulin. Although his work was delayed by writing up his thesis results and then an NIH fellowship (to gain familiarity with the project regardless of the chance of funding), in the second year he presented his findings at the Annual Biophysics meeting and his project attracted the interest of David Yue whose work on calcium-calmodulin signaling mechanisms I had long admired. I envisioned a collaboration in which we could explore the physical interaction between the channel and calmodulin using FRET. I was thrilled because I hadn't had the opportunity to pursue the more structural and biophysical approaches to channel modulation in the earlier years of my own training.

Most likely due to gossip and politics in the Department, as well as the discouragement of not getting his fellowship award, my postdoc decided to begin applying and interviewing for a second appointment in a larger lab instead of focusing on the project. I understood. Once he found another position, we agreed on an exit date that would allow him to bring the project to a close and write the paper. On the day he entered my office to mention that he was taking an extra month to vacation with his wife before leaving, I resorted to tonglen and then tried, unsuccessfully, to convey that his choice was likely to negatively affect both of us since my lab would shut down if I didn't get tenure.

That gossip and politics were in the air was clear in variety of ways. For example, after the hostile takeover there was an obvious change in the tone of my annual meetings with the promotions committee. In another example, my faculty advisor caused one of my students to fail his preliminary exams by using an overly confrontational tone of voice when asking a basic question. My student went blank and gave the wrong answer even though I knew he knew the right one. It was a silly waste of our time and energy to make my student prepare and retake the exams at a later date, especially since my students were already having to work as teaching assistants to support themselves.

Recommendations

The University of Michigan's failure to recruit a graduate student wanting to learn electrophysiology in the initial years of my appointment provided them with sufficient evidence to validate a negative judgement concerning my abilities, not to mention the judgements of any outside evaluators they selected to write letters for my case.

The promotions committee can bias their selection of letter writers in any way they like, although at least some of the writers are derived from a list provided by the candidate. The writers had considerably less information concerning my case than the promotions committee. Without sounding whiny or overly defensive, there was no way to include details concerning graduate student recruitment, the combined effect of the hostile takeover and funding, and the overload of teaching that resulted for myself and my students as a result of the lack of funding in later years. That was also the case for numerous grant proposals I submitted to NIH, NSF and the American Cancer Society.

Teaching

Teaching requirements for faculty in Letters and Sciences are much more extensive than for Medical School faculty. Although it varies for different universities and departments, some Medical School research faculty are required to teach only 3-5 lectures in a major Medical School class per year. Or, alternatively, share responsibility for a graduate level class or journal club with ~ 20 students one semester every one or two years. In contrast, in the Letters and Sciences, faculty in my field are required to co-teach an undergraduate and a graduate level class every year. I was assigned to teach Animal Physiology for undergraduates and Neuroscience for new graduate students.

For a starting Assistant Professor, Animal Physiology, with greater than 300 students each semester was a big ask. It's not that some of the other large lecture courses weren't also taught by research faculty. However, the other large lecture courses were taken by freshman and sophomores and were supported by study sections. In contrast, Animal Physiology was typically taken by competitive juniors and seniors needing to ace the class for a good chance at medical school. And for some strange reason Animal Physiology lacked study sections and teaching assistants.

My first two years teaching the class were hell. Not only was I inexperienced instructing classes of that size, the students also seemed to respect teachers less and to feel overly entitled compared to when I was a student. In addition, my authority was overshadowed and undermined by the other more experienced lecturers. I was in a unfair situation in that I was judged relative to (a) tenured male research professors with considerable teaching experience or (b) women lecturers with considerable experience and teaching as their only responsibility. Those of you in academia know that student evaluation comments can be as virulent as sometimes observed in the online environment. (Perhaps I've gained some immunity from those days.) I witnessed one of my male teaching colleagues slam his office door in a student's face in response to being interrupted outside of office hours. I received the same negative evaluation simply as a result of politely asking students to return at another time if they visited while I was in the middle of an electrophysiological recording experiment.

I learned to change my projection to be more authoritative while still being encouraging. I learned to present lecture material as a story with a narrative. Pausing to take and ask questions to allow students to process the material. I prepared extensive online lecture notes, including practice problems and past exams, in addition to providing online access to my PowerPoints for the lectures. I doubled office hours. I moved my electrophysiology rig to the other corner of the building so that I wouldn't be interrupted. Exams were half multiple choice and half short answer. I took a class to learn how to design less ambiguous multiple choice questions. During the last two years I finally had Animal Physiology down to a point that I was enjoying teaching.

Other teaching included weekly lab meetings, weekly meetings with each student in my lab to review their data and plan subsequent experiments (I devised a form for this purpose and wrote down the major points of each meeting), and I ran a journal club with other scientists in my area of research, the majority of them from the Medical School.

While I did learn to appreciate the Animal Physiology class, there were other courses I could have taught that would have been more appropriate: the Department's upper level class in neuroscience with 40-50 students or the Department's upper level electrophysiology lab for undergraduates and new neuroscience graduate students, or the interdisciplinary Learning and Memory laboratory course. The laboratory courses would not have been much more time consuming than Animal Physiology in the end and I might have been able to recruit an electrophysiology student to my lab from that student pool.

Spousal Hiring

Judging by the numbers of women who have reached the higher ranks of academia whose spouses are also in academia, the benefits of spousal hiring are clear. First, married women have support at the personal level that can provide an independent source of self-esteem and comradery to counteract some of the implicit biases of sexism Virginia Valian has researched and described. Second, when women scientists are part of an academic couple they typically don't have to be as assertive as single women to be heard at faculty and adminstrative meetings and even at social events. In this way the magnitude, as well as impact, of sexist biases are reduced. Married women scientists are protected by the fact that loss of one would mean loss of the couple. Not only do married women have to be less assertive, by virtue of being married they have an easier time at being judged as competent while still preserving the characteristics of femininity and nurturing. Virginia Valian presents considerable evidence for the inverse interactions of these variables in how women are judged.

Because my husband was employed by a university already (essentially in his dream job) it would have been extremely helpful to bring him in under the umbrella of a spousal hire. This possibility wasn't considered because my husband was a graphic artist and not a professor. (Similarly, the difference in standing also resulted in my being ineligible for spousal hiring at his university.)

The lack of flexibility on the part of either university left me without personal support during difficult times, stressed the relationship, and spelled doom for my chances of having children. In addition, my husband's absence likely created additional bias due to lingering questions in people minds concerning why he wasn't there.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, having to put effort into maintaining a long distance relationship, especially when combined with my teaching and service load, obstructed my opportunities to network with the international scientific community to gain stature and recognition, as well as establish productive collaborations. Both would have provided a better chance at grant funding. Less than 10 percent of submitted grant proposals are funded in my area of research. Proposals compete with those submitted by huge well-established labs in medical schools whose principal investigators have considerable reputation and numerous collaborations.

It would have been helpful if the university and department had been more welcoming and made a stronger effort to find my husband a position similar to the one he would have had to leave. I had already done what I could to select a location with family and friends in the area.

...As deftly as a camel handler in Egypt, society had sold me on the idea that having both a career and marriage was within reach. And academia had led me into the desert demanding ever-increasing payments until, finally, I was left stranded with neither.



My experience at the University of Michigan was only the tip of the iceberg (buried in the desert no less) in terms of the implicit biases and systemic inefficiencies I've encountered in life. Please continue to follow along during the next few posts while I draw on my own experience to contribute to the cause of equality for women and minorities.



*Typical requirements for tenure at a major university in the United States are:

1. (60-75%) A strong record of productivity which is judged on the basis of:
a. Number of research publications
b. Ranking of the journals in which those publications occur
c. Funding record
d. International reputation and scientific impact of the research findings.
e. Letters of recommendation judging the entire tenure package, i.e., research, teaching and service

2. (25-40%) Teaching and Service Record
a. Undergraduate and Graduate Level Courses taught
b. Student End-of-Semester Evaluation Scores
c. Innovation in Teaching
d. Undergraduate and Graduate Student Recommendation Letters

It is important to observe that there is a significant amount of subjectivity incorporated into each of the variables and that many of the productivity variables covary. There is also substantial opportunity for members of the promotions committee to influence the outcome of the tenure decision based on their own views and biases.

The Pipeline Problem (I): Patriarchy doesn't have the balls; women have the heart; and the 1% keeps rolling in the cash.

Please regard the next few posts as an open letter to the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Advance Program and a personal case study from a panoramic view that distance and time allow.

I'll be addressing the Pipeline Problem: Academia's difficulties in recruiting and retaining women, particularly in the STEM fields.

The Pipeline Problem is a question of considerable shared interest: For myself, from an historical perspective; for NSF and universities, as evidenced by the grant dollars awarded to study the problem and the continued commitment to diversity; and also for industry, technology and politics because the obstacles in those environments are very similar in terms of biases, harassment, pay gaps, promotions and retention.

I'll have some actionable recommendations before I'm done. I'll also point to some issues that I doubt universities can resolve without more concerted changes across our society.

Moreover, until the problems of sexist biases, sexual harrassment, pay gaps and promotions are resolved, the stratification of effects in terms of the socio-economic class hierarchy are little more than window dressing and lip service to gender and racial equality. It represents an enormous waste of resources and effort on the part of people, families, communities, and education systems. It's a shame that academia and its supporters haven't done a better job investigating and resolving the problem given science's commitment to ethics.

I'm writing, in part, in response to the recently published study by Williams and Ceci (2015) and related commentary (e.g., Lehmann, 2015). The conclusion reached by Williams and Ceci (2014), namely that sexism is not present in academia, is flat out wrong precisely because the variables they use to control their data sets are the variables in which gender and racial bias are most operational. Gender and racial biases held by all genders collude with other causes and thus typically escape detection.*

The good news is that having served on hiring committees, as well as having been offered a tenure-track appointment at each university I interviewed, university departments are making efforts to bring women and minorities into the ranks. Those efforts shouldn't curtailed, at least not until the numbers are substantially more representative of the diversity in awarded degrees.

The efforts made in hiring, however, are where the good news ends. Women are still navigating the razor's edge of a double or, more truthfully, triple standard that men rarely, if ever, have to face. (That men have little experience facing a similar triple standard is perhaps to the detriment of all). The razor's edge of the triple standard by which women are explicitly and implicitly judged by students, as well as male and female faculty and colleagues include: productivity, femininity and nuturing. I would further argue that conflation of the latter two variables has been at least one source of confusion in addressing the Pipeline Problem.

The conclusion of Williams and Ceci that women are choosing family over career is an ad hominem and/or ad feminam argument since (a) most men in academics have families, in other words the issue of marriage and family is never used to evaluate the careers and characters of men; (b) women entering graduate school have decided in favor of careers; and (c) in today's economic environment most women are employed and the statistics in business and technology aren't much, if at all, better as the recent statistics gathered by the PEW Research Center suggest.


From Wikipedia: an Ironic illustration showing Sutherland Highlander wearing exaggerated Feather bonnet observing "By Jove, what extraordinary headgear you women do wear!"

In future posts I'll address the various ways academia fails to adequately provide women with the resources they need to survive the obstacles they encounter on the tenure track. The raw data are much more discouraging than the doctored numbers of Williams and Ceci would lead us to believe. For example, a recent study by Jane Junn at the University of Southern California found that only 55% of women and minorities were promoted, in constrast to 92% of white males. (Scroll to the top of the link to see data from other countries.) Dismal results of this nature also point to the method by which the illusion of equality on campuses is maintained as discussed in: Ivy League Stiffs its Female Profs. If you look at any given STEM department's webpage, the majority of the women's faces you'll see are staff, lecturers, adjuncts, researchers and assistant professors. Finally, I feel obliged to mention one more point, a statistic I haven't seen discussed, and that is the proportion of those fully tenured women that have reached their position without either (a) a spouse appointed at the same university or (b) former mentors appointed at the same university. Both of these categories of women are swimming with the current by virtue of support other women don't have. (I am not at all against spousal hiring programs, I highly recommend them, but the fact that other women don't have access to the various types of support spousal hiring provides needs to be recognized.) In short:

NOW I KNOW HOW ACADEMIA IS FOOLING US!

*Update 1.06.16: See Zuleyka Zevallos's critique of Williams and Ceci in The Myth About Women in Science? Bias in the Study of Gender Inequality in STEM.

For the Rights of Women

One group of people that's been taken advantage of for longer than African-Americans and Indians in our country and the world is Women. Regardless of race, women have been enslaved and exploited since our species began. 

Even today, whatever rights women have gained since they wised-up while championing the rights of African-Americans, a woman's worth is still often judged by whether or not she's physically worthy of man's attention. Patience, ingenuity, intelligence, wit, creativity and the ability to challenge and debate alternate views are characteristics that can be as much of a liability as a strength. 

After living four years in an isolated monastic-like setting, it might be understandable that I am disturbed by the high degree of sexism in marketing, which undoubtedly has been normalized in the perceptions and cognition of many. Its nearly impossible to escape the sexism present in news and the entertainment industry whether the propaganda being fed to society relates to romantic love or the exaggerated sexist image of what an ideal woman should look and act like. 

With the above in mind it should not be surprising that I find yesterday's decision by Amnesty International to decriminalize sex work disturbing. Amnesty, care and compassion for victims, yes; decriminalization, no. Let me ask Amnesty International this: How do we now as a society define “pimping”? Can not our entire capitalisitic society, not to mention the GOP, or prostitutes themselves be declared guilty?

In my view, decriminalization is an endorsement of slavery. Decriminalization will likely lead to an increase in sexist biases, dismissiveness of the concerns and views of women, and disrespect for women's true potential. Speaking for myself that seems to be the antithesis of compassion and is in contradiction to the values I've lived my life by and the sacrifices I've made believing in and fighting for the equality for women.  

I am aware that other women may disagree with my views as result of conditioning or normalization to a different set of cultural standards and values. To them let me say that its not that I wish harsher conditions on anyone, what I wish for all is a recognition of and respect for their full potential and worth. What I support is a society that is more respectful of relationship at the level of community, friendship and family regardless of race or gender. 

There is not a single human being that has not been harmed by the disregard and disrespect of relationship due to the stresses inherent in our capitalistic society. 

Black Lives Matter: Death is not an Opinion

I'm not talking about the Great Death, Great Doubt of Zen koans, though I've commented on death in reference to koan introspection in the past.

I'm talking biological death -- the measurable fact of when the opportunity for conversation ceases. Death is irrevocable. Death is not an opinion or a feeling except for those that are still alive.  All the speculations about what happens after death can not change the fact of death. And all the Social Security and Medicare our country has to offer can't reach the person that died, can't replace the promise or potential of the life that was lost.

African-Americans of our country have been waiting for longer than a generation for Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of equality. The gradual gains made via education and equal opportunity laws rapidly pale when all that effort can be wiped out, undone in an instant, by the overly indignant attitude of a police officer. 

Listen, remembering all the times in your life you wished you would have been heard.

Listen and work to demilitarize the police. Abolish the prison industrial complex. Improve and correct for racial bias in our judicial system and sentencing laws.

You can't talk to a dead person.

At the Intersection of Mindfulness and Compassion in a Complex World (I)

Though my view is as spacious as the sky,

My actions and respect for cause and effect 

are as fine as grains of flour. 

- Padmasambhava

I have a tremendous appreciation and respect for the Buddha-dharma and its teachers. The Buddha-dharma is part of me anywhere and everywhere I go. But if I have a criticism of meditation and mindfulness as they are taught today, it concerns a disrespect of the effects of karma for students. Many of the people arriving at the gates of practice are facing multiple difficulties in their lives. Meditation and mindfulness are a balm, but encourage passivity in the face of those difficulties and, initially, teach only the simplest interpretation of karma by focusing on personal responsibility and self-improvement when the systems of our society, even if not all the people in those systems, are corrupt. 

Has Tibet won autonomy from China? How much harm have its people suffered in the interim? 

Are the only options in the face of extraordinary levels of suffering in the US and across the globe, meditation, malnourishment, deprivation and self-immolation? 

If that's the case then none of us, not even the Dalai Lama, can say we've avoided doing harm by sitting.  

Moreover, the wave of meditation and mindfulness that's sweeping across the US as a counter-current to unregulated capitalism is at risk of de-powering, if not outright harming, some of the individuals most aware of the need for a more altruistic approach. If a major demographic is the white middle class woman looking either for self-improvement, a strengthening of some sense of spirituality, or recovery from depression or depressing circumstances, what are the long term effects on equality for all women going to be if the primary recommended response is passive acceptance? Moreover, in contrast to a view voiced at a Mindfulness and Compassion Conference I attended recently, the Sanghas I've been a member of have been racially diverse and included traumatized, low income and unemployed.

There aren't enough monasteries in the world, let alone the US, to accommodate all the individuals arriving at the gates of practice. A traditional role of monasteries has been to provide protection as practitioners move through the ranks of perceptual shifts meditation gives rise to. 

In addition, the meditation and mindfulness movements, as well as funding for neuroscience research fueling those approaches, are at risk of burning themselves out if they don't recognize a need beyond introspection, one that recognizes the reality of phenomena and circumstances. Precisely because karma is not only the result of our own actions.

From the kamikazi pilot to the middle class white woman to the peace activist, the majority of karma lies in the roles other people project onto us -- good and bad --whether we've recognized and agreed to those roles or not. The lethargy of our social and political systems demonstrate in bringing about positive change is, in part, caused by the inertia of thousands and millions of people accepting things as they are, in addition to different strategies for how problems should be resolved.

I'm convinced that to address the wrongs within corrupt systems we all need to learn to communicate more effectively with ourselves as well as others. 

In that regard, one of the best books I've read in recent years is Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication. If you haven't already read it, read it now! The forward by Arun Gandhi, alone, is worth the price -- or the trip to a library.

For one thing, in my case, Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication put me in touch with the types of questions I should be and should have been asking of my feelings. Feelings are highly sensitive indicators of distress. But if we only sit with them allowing them to dissolve into forgiveness, equanimity and kindness, none of us will ever develop the ability to think outside the box or do more than accept the status quo.

Considering our society's continued inability to identify and negotiate needs-based solutions across political boundaries such as race and/or religion, socio-economic status and gender, and considering the increasingly rapid depletion of our planet's natural and economic resources, accepting the status quo is simply not good enough.

The disconnect we experience in communication about serious problems ranges from individuals to political parties and countries. 

Using some of Rosenberg's suggestions and using my past feelings as a guide, I'm going to unpack some of my experiences as a woman in academia because it's the situation I'm most familiar with. One issue I'll be addressing is the continued low number of women in faculty ranks in spite of being recipients of approximately fifty percent of doctorate degrees. 

My sense, however, is that some of the problems, as well as strategies for resolution, are generalizable. 

My Head-On Collision with the Traffic of Capitalism's 'Golden Gate Bridge' (III)

Back to the hostile take-over. When the biotechnology company failed to respond to my emails over the next few months, it became obvious that the same day responsiveness and collaborative interactions I'd experienced with Research Genetics were a thing of the past. 

It felt like I'd suddenly been materialized on a tightrope. Though I didn't have problems focusing on work, once home, my mind would spiral out of control replaying conversations with colleagues, as well as trouble-shooting experiments in my lab. Thankfully, encountering Eckhart Tolle's description of his own mind in a similar state in The Power of Now let me know I wasn't alone in my experience.

I knew that being on hyper-alert, over-sensitive to the slightest rebuff from colleagues and failures in experiments wasn't going to help me traverse the tightrope I found myself on instead of the well-delineated tenure track I'd expected. I started meditating more intensively. I also read ~10 pages of dharma a day and found my first Sangha -- not only as a support for sitting, also as a social support separate from academia.

It didn't take long for me to learn to shut-down mental spirals at the outset. I also grew more attuned to the beauty in my environment and drew on it as source of strength and patience. I rediscovered my amazement and appreciation for simple things. I began to see the many ways the quality of my life had suffered due to gradually increasing stresses of work over the years.

A practice that began, at least in part, as stress reduction, affirmations, and positive psychology, grew to include the four immeasurables, the four foundations of mindfulness, the eight-fold path, and tonglen in its foundation.

When the time came to go up for tenure, I can't say I thought I had a strong case in spite of my lab's extraordinary findings in the interim. So I was surprised that my faculty advisor insisted. (Every assistant professor is assigned a senior faculty member as an advisor and meetings are scheduled a minimum of once a year.) It seemed as though he knew something I didn't.

My tenure seminar was stellar. It would have been impossible for it to be otherwise. I viewed the seminar as the summary argument of a defense lawyer in front of judge and jury. Or perhaps, even more accurately, my last chance to present all we'd accomplished -- in front of a firing squad.

A few days later, my faculty advisor pulled me into his office. I was expecting some words of consolation or an apology for the difficulty of, but necessity for, their decision. 

His opening words: "NOW WE KNOW HOW YOU FOOLED US!"

My response while he continued in a similar vein was to tap into my breath and send him kindness and understanding. Somewhat like the social worker in That Bird Has my Wings that, in complacency, believed Jarvis' second foster parents more than Jarvis, my advisor had failed to listen and do his job. Whether unintentionally or purposefully, I'll never know.

For any Zen practitioners, being denied tenure and being stripped of one's ordination are not that different. Here's the mirror. And the shadow.


A Means-Whereby

As a measure of the seriousness of the circumstances, a few months after the hostile take-over I explicitly told my husband to stay where he was even though, after getting the NIH grant, I'd bought a house in the hopes of encouraging him to join me.

Although I was still working toward tenure, my primary goal became to plant as much of a seed as possible for the hypothesis that the type of protein we were studying, an ion channel, could play a direct role in the intracellular signaling pathways responsible for neuronal plasticity.

The traditional accepted role of  ion channels is the generation of an electric current that is the language used to communicate within and between neurons, as well as muscle fibers. Without the current generated by the flow of ions through the pores of ion channels, information exchange in the brain and body would be forced to depend on the much slower process of diffusion.

Our findings suggested that ion channels are not limited to that role: Channels containing mutations that prevented ions from flowing through their pores were still able to affect intracellular signaling pathways.

[In fact, my lab was not the first to show the potential multiplicity of roles for an ion channel. The first, most well-described example was for the interaction between L-type calcium channels and channels in the sarcoplasmic reticulum. That example was in muscle and seemed to be viewed as a special case, as opposed to an indicator of the flexibility of roles that might be applicable to all ion channels. In addition, the link was direct: conformational changes in the L-type calcium channel directly triggered changes in the sarcoplasmic reticulum channels, as opposed to interacting with intracellular signaling proteins. There are other examples that appeared simultaneously or since. It would be interesting to write a review -- now, ten years after.]

By the time I was informed of the tenure decision my focus was primarily on getting the last two research papers published and my graduate students their Ph.D. degrees. When I rejoined my husband, I pushed my disappointment aside and focused on the papers.*  I also searched for employment in the area and any free-time I had I spent knitting: A sweater for my husband. Ten or more pair of socks.

What happened next is going to break your heart. Well, at the very least, it broke mine.

Both manuscripts went through a couple of rounds of review. We had tested the model using transgenic fly lines containing specific mutations in the channel gene to confirm an in vivo role. I had hoped that the fact that four distinct transgenic fly lines confirmed the overall model as well as specific hypotheses would  permit reviewer's comments to be dealt with through revision of the text. That was not the case.

Though 'threatening' might not have been the best word choice in my previous post, any finding that challenges the predominant paradigm or way of thinking is subject to more stringent criteria for publication. And that's how it should be. I remembered the difficulties researchers had encountered decades before when trying to convince the larger neuroscience community that ion channels could be modified by phosphorylation. Unfortunately, I no longer had a lab.

I recruited the help of a longtime collaborator. Her lab's initial findings, a first step before attempting to address the reviewer's comment, failed to replicate ours. There could have been several reasons for the failure, including but not limited to modification, masking, or deletion of the transgenic constructs due to stresses during shipping or deleterious effects of the inserts given that the channel we were studying has been implicated in several forms of cancer.

It gets worse. When I went back to check the files corresponding to the data in question, the relevant files were missing. After trying and failing to contact the graduate student that performed the experiments, I let go of the thought of publishing the papers. It was the only responsible thing to do. And I was days away from starting a new job.

What did it feel like? If you love the Buddha-dharma the way I do, you might understand this comparison: It felt like being Dogen and being forced to destroy half the Shobogenzo, with no possibility of recreating it. It felt like being a witness to the destruction of the final chapters of Buddhacarita.


*Unpublished Manuscripts:

Hegle, AP, Marble, DD & Wilson, GF. Conductance-independent gating of CaMKII associated with Ether a-go-go K⁺ channels.

Marble, DD, Clyne, JD, Sun, X-X, Ganetzky, B, Griffith, LC, & Wilson, GF. Bi-directional regulation of Drosophila EAG potassium channels by calcium-dependent mechanisms.

My Head-On Collision with the Traffic of Capitalism's 'Golden Gate Bridge' (II)

The effects of the hostile takeover of Research Genetics on my research and career weren't immediately apparent. No crowd gathered. No ambulance drove me and my passengers, the other members of my lab, to an emergency room for X-rays. No circle of frowning physicians conferenced around my bed while I lay in a coma. It wasn't a car accident. What it was was a tipping point.

A tipping point is usually identified in retrospect as the critical moment of change in a progression of events. A tipping point affects perception to cause reinterpretation of preceding events. A tipping point is the proverbial straw that breaks a camel's back, but it's only one straw in the bundle.

Good Luck, Bad Luck 

There's an old Zen story called Good Luck, Bad Luck about a farmer who inherits a horse to help him with his field work. This version is as told by Anthony De Mello in The Song of the Bird:

There once was a simple farmer who lived and struggled alongside his neighbours and friends, trying to exist and fulfil a peaceful life. One day news arrived from far away, that his old loving father had died. His neighbours gathered to grieve, but the farmer simply said, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?" 

In time relatives brought a very fine horse of great cost and fine breeding, left to the farmer by his father. All the villagers and neighbours gathered in delight with him to celebrate his good fortune, but he just said, "Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?” 

One day the horse escaped into the hills and when all the farmer’s neighbours sympathized with the old man over his bad luck, the farmer replied, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?” 

A week later the horse returned with a herd of wild horses from the hills and this time the neighbours congratulated the farmer on his good luck. His reply was, “Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?” 

Then, when the farmer’s son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off its back and broke his leg. Everyone thought this very bad luck. Not the farmer, whose only reaction was, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?” 

Some weeks later the army marched into the village and conscripted every able-bodied youth they found there. When they saw the farmer’s son with his broken leg they let him off. Now was that good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?

It would be a mistake to say I didn't know how difficult even a partial recovery from the impact of the hostile takeover would be. What made it particularly difficult is that I was only months away from having to renew my lab funding. Good luck, namely receiving an R01 award from the National Institutes of Health on my first try, even if  only an award for three years, now had turned decidedly bad.

Without the antibodies that were on that truck to California, convincing grant reviewers was going to be nearly impossible. What I didn't suspect were the cumulative effects of lingering sexism and increased competitiveness as capitalistic concerns invaded academia.

I also didn't anticipate that the very thing that was a major source of my enthusiasm and perseverance would contribute to my downfall. My research was threatening to be the start of a paradigm shift. That was why it was worth the work and the other sacrifices in my life, at least to me.

The paradigm the scientific community and pharmaceutical corporations were invested in was that neuronal plasticity, learning and memory, and the resulting changes in behavior were a consequence of activity dependent changes in the concentration of calcium inside cells. To be clear, my research,  if it had been allowed to proceed unhindered, would not have negated previous results but called them into question.

 ...to be continued…

My Head-On Collision with the Traffic of Capitalism's 'Golden Gate Bridge' (I)

The last few years my mother was alive a frequent refrain I heard was that she wasn't going to mind when death arrived. She said, now that she was in her eighties, when she looked back she could see the many ways she'd had a good life. Since I retired, and especially during the Practice Period at Green Gulch, I've had the chance to reflect back and inquire about the many ways my mother's statement can be applied to my own life. 

One of the main things that stands out is my contribution as a scientist — not only my research, also my contribution in terms of energy and enthusiasm to the larger community. (Check out my Curriculum Vitae on the Pages of this website! View All.) As a scientist I was very much at the cutting edge of the research on neuronal plasticity that serves as a foundation for the Dalai Lama's efforts to bring meditation, mindfulness and compassion to society. 

image from TIME's Beautiful, White, Blonde 'Mindfulness Revolution 
by Joanna Piacenza in The Huffington Post

Most scientists and business savvy geeks will admit that simply showing that different areas of the human brain light up during meditation is not much more advanced than the archaic practice of phrenology though it might qualify as "sexy" marketing. An irony that may escape any mindful vegetarians reading this blog is that, however regrettable, much of the scientific data that is being used to market meditation and mindfulness relies on decades of animal research for it's interpretation — not just young sexy blondes as some advertisers might lead you to believe. (I'm in my late 50's and post-menopausal, thank you very much!) More seriously, as I said to a handful of people during my visits to Sanshin-ji and Green Gulch this last year, I meditated and 'mindfulnessed' myself out of what some would call a near perfect life, near perfect because all careers, marriages and especially 1920s bungalows need work and cooperation to maintain. It is this observation, as much as my credentials and thirty or more years of meditation and mindfulness experience, that qualifies me to comment on, even critique, the Mindfulness Revolution and the gimmicks used to market it whether in real life or online.


My Head-On Collision with the Traffic of Capitalism's 'Golden Gate Bridge'

So what happened? What was the event that caused me to dare compare my life to Grace's? My head-on collision wasn't with a car, but rather with a major biotechnology company that bought out a much smaller company, Research Genetics, I had hired and was collaborating with to make antibodies to the protein that was the focus of my research. One morning the employees arrived at work to face security guards who escorted them to their offices to remove personal belongings and escorted them back out. A couple of weeks later I received email notification of the buyout and was informed that the animals being immunized, the protein fragments that my lab had worked to purify that were being used to generate the immune response, and the various anti-sera were on a truck transporting them from the east coast to the San Fransisco Bay Area where the biotechnology company was located. It was months before I heard from the biotech company again. Obviously, the immunization protocol was not being maintained during that time…

...to be continued, possibly with the occasional commercial break like my last post. Links and credits for this post will be added tomorrow when I have access to my laptop and wireless... It's not easy being homeless!

An Open Letter to the NFL and FIFA

Many people around the globe rely on football to provide them with an entertaining distraction from otherwise mundane and less than satisfactory lives. Yet in recent years both the NFL and FIFA have been another disappointment for citizens worldwide with the many controversies surrounding players, hosting cities, and organizations. The scandal surrounding FIFA officials and Sepp Blatter is another example in which the morals and ethics implied by the phrase "sportsman-like conduct" appear to have been forgotten.

The NFL and FIFA could use some positive PR, so here is an idea given to you free of charge. It involves each team taking a year off and instead of televising games, televise your teams and players planning and building housing and businesses for the homeless, recently unemployed, and recently released to give them a good chance at life and a real chance at regaining dignity and integrity. 

A very good "how to" example that offers guidance and advice is The Greystone Institute in New York, the building of which is described in the book Instructions to the Cook by Bernard Glassman and Rick Fields. Ideally when finished, the environment should provide: 1) Housing; 2) Employment with on-site training; 3) Health care and day care; 4) Opportunity for study; 5) Some form of spirituality or non-denominational interfaith sharing; 6) Opportunities for social action and community building.

Your organizations and teams have the necessary connections and resources. The necessary steps in the process and any difficulties encountered would give your players the business expertise they'll benefit from when they retire and give them the chance to give back to the neighborhoods and communities they grew up in by setting a good example. Not only your players, all those watching worldwide, would benefit. Televise the efforts of your players and the businesses involved in the planning and construction. (Please don't prey on those who have fallen on difficult times at least not until they've become success stories.) Let the Super Bowl and World Cup wins next season go to the teams with the best design, business concept and finished building in real life.

In these troubled economic times, when our countries and governments are offering more spectacle than solution, dare to set an example of good that will stay on the record books of your organizations and our shared history for all time.