Mistress of the Animals

I wrote this nearly three years ago, when I was blogging with Mama Isis. This post was cathartic for me. But for people who think what happened in Berkeley is unique, I am here to say, it’s not (take a look at the comments from the original post). For people who think academic in particular lets people get away with this because of tenure, you are wrong. For people who think it’s just about women, that’s wrong too.

The world is not changing fast for many. And I hear lots of “the message of Berkeley is that it doesn’t matter and you can get away with it”. I see something else. If think that right now that whole department is filled with unhappy puppies. Things don’t ever change fast enough. But they are changing and that makes me happy.

Yes, a day for a calming manatee. It seems many of the tweeples have had bad grant news. Of course, just by stats its going to be 90+% of the folks. It’s hard. I can make the list of my too-full-plate-things, particularly the ones that seem insurmountable. But they’re mine, and perhaps to you they won’t seem so awful. I can make the list of things that are good in my life that bouy me up, but that might seem a bit arrogant. Some of them are a function of my age. The last thing I want to do is open yet another generational-war-thingie. or an entitlement-thingie. But lots of those good things are the people with whom I work. They’re like rings on a tree, around me, at various depths: the lab peeps, the summer med students who are thinking about md/phds, colleagues, friends, tweeps and blog-colleagues, especially the ones who argue with me (yes, becca@sciliz I’m looking at you), that and the sweetie who is not so new anymore, but like a rock in my life.

I am going to go do marvelous things today. I need to keep my eye on what’s important. Not the little things. Not the BSD’s and the wanna-be BSDs.  Not the males Who Just Don’t Get It. I don’t need to pull out my folder of marvelous things. In yesterday’s teaching lab, one of the students came up and said: thank you, your review made all the difference to me.  That’s why I’m here, still pushing rocks uphill. So, here’s another manatee to help you get through the day. This is for all of my friends, and colleagues and people who love me: thank you.

Anne-Marie Slaughter had an op-ed piece a few weeks ago in the NYTimes about Women’s work and how she stepped away from a fast-track job. She comes across as the anti-Sheryl-Lean-In-Sandberg [Note this is from a book of hers that just came out called “Unfinished Business”, NYT review here, excerpt here,  another review here].

One of the points she touches on, but doesn’t explore at length in the op-ed (but maybe in the book, I haven’t read it), are the issues of the kind of jobs most women have (which is not academia or Law School Dean or professional class) and what the wages of the jobs signify. One of the quotes I liked from the NYTimes piece:

The problem is even more acute for the 42 million women in America on the brink of poverty. Not showing up for work because a child has an ear infection, schools close for a snow day, or an elderly parent must go to the doctor puts their jobs at risk, and losing their jobs means that they can no longer care properly for their children — some 28 million — and other relatives who depend on them. They are often suffering not only from too little flexibility but also too much, as many low-wage service jobs no longer have a guaranteed number of hours a week.

One of the most common calls in this corner of the blogosphere is for “affordable day care”. Usually its younger people (of various genders) thinking about their kids. I’d point out that there is a lot of that going around in my generation (early-mid-boomers, 50-60ish) because our parents are still alive, and often in need of elder-care. My mom is in a wonderful facility, that is staffed by about 80-90% women. It is not cheap. It costs more than an expensive-in-America private school college education. This facility wouldn’t work if one had only social security. I have sibs with resources, and my parents lived a frugal life and saved for this eventuality. In fact, it only works because I am in the middle-of-America-rural. The same facility in the Big Cities where my brother and sister live is two to three times more. Why? salaries for workers, who are not minimum wage at a place like this, but still lower here than in coastal cities.

Which brings me to the salient point. When people ask for cheap, but good day care, what are they asking  for? Care-takers who will minimally treat their children (or parents) with respect, keep them from being hungry and tired, and make sure they are allowed to run and play and learn and be children (or whatever activities are possible for people with dementia).

To do this means you need people who are capable and committed to doing taking care of someone else’s children. Something that obviously the people asking are not doing for their own children (or parents) or for the caretakers children (or parents). It is a level of care that the caretaker’s children often don’t receive. The place where my Mom is pays better than minimum wage. There are many people who want  that job, and the place can chose good workers, caring people, and do background checks. That’s why it costs so much.

Daycare costs a lot. Good daycare costs even more. And so, we come to the crux of the issue. Who should pay? As Slaughter says in her article, affordable pushes the wages down, which are wages for the most part for women.  I have heard too many grad students/postdocs say “I can’t afford that”. Well, actually you can afford it, you just don’t want to put that much of your income into “that”, and have to give up things like vacations and organic food and whatever phone/internet/etc service you have.

The next level of response is “it should be subsidized”. Subsidized by whom? The universities, who claim they don’t have money to cover what they do right now? Ha, I say. There is so much uni’s could cut. A whole layer of middle management administrators. Professor salaries. Climbing walls for rich undergraduates. Athletics programs. But realistically, right now, this is not going to happen. Better day care will require higher fringe rates (which are now between 30-40% at most places) to cover the benefits. Where will the money come from for such postdoc/grad student benefits? NIH grants, mostly, and we are back to the arguments about what the cost of a postdoc or student is. And we’ve been down that path before.

The  next usual suspect for covering benefits/daycare etc  is the “government”. Where does the government get its money? Right now, in our country, we are engaged in a struggle, a political struggle about what should the government do and where should the money come from. This is not likely to be settled before the need for daycare for most current students and postdocs has long expired. The question is what are you going to do about changing this now?

Every generation, not just the boomers, tends to forget what their issues were at a different life-stage. The most marvelous wonderful committed millenials I know, many working for Bernie Sanders are not much different from those of who worked for George  McGovern (go look it up, I’ll wait for you). And now those McGovern workers of days gone by are the despised boomers who are stealing your NIH funding. I’ll be long gone before I can say “told you so” to aging Millenials who will in turn be despised by what comes after Gen Z. I double dare you to take on an issue that is not your immediate bread-and-butter. I can’t think of a single millennial or GenXer in academics, right now, who thinks elder care is a burning issue that needs to be solved. Or who thinks we should be investing more money in dementia research. Hell, I don’t care if you do or don’t. Personally, I think there are more pressing social issues, and (hell, its my bread-and-butter, even if not solved in my lifetime) especially what the heck is happening with NIH funding.

But back to daycare. Without government or university/employer subsidies, what does pressure for “low cost daycare” produce? More minimum wage jobs for women. Particularly women. Women who likely have children or parents or both of their own in need of care. Women who after a long day of caring for your children or parents, go home to try and love and care for their families. Women who aren’t in higher education, and who are glad for a regular job with a regular paycheck, and even some small amount of healthcare benefits.

I’m all of out of solutions and suggestions here. I work to change the world, in my own little way. I try and pay people, where I have the ability, what they are worth. I don’t cheat on my taxes, despite the fact I think the government wastes huge amounts of money on not doing things, and then puts more into doing things I think are Wrong. All I ask is that when you ask for “affordable day care” you think through the implications. Someone is providing that daycare, at a wage you wouldn’t work for.

I have always since the last five years, subscribed to the view that you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket, and if funding is <10% then you gotta put in ~10 grants to get funded (more or less).

So, I’ve been hitting at least one R01, and often an additional lesser  proposal (r21/non-NIH) per cycle for the last 4 cycles. A year and a third. It takes a toll. I’ve been good (hahaha) about not getting funded. Mostly.

Today, I got a score back for an  r21. Scored, but not fundable. For a first submission, I’m happy. So is the young scientist who  wants this project. It was in danger of “who the fuck cares” since it is a very women’s health/science issue. Scoring means there were problems but someone thought it worthwhile at some level. We’ll see when get the reviews.

But thats not the doing it right part. The doing it right part is my chair at almost-MRU.

I found a potential (non-NIH) source for some funds. Enough to get a new project going, get some prelim data. This is  important because I am on a no-cost-extension of my current grant (ie I didnt spend all the money, I asked for another year from NIH to spend it. They said yes, mostly because I moved from MRU to almost-MRU in the middle of hte project and lost a year without a lab). My dept chair saw this as a VeryGoodThing for me to be doing. Commitment. Initiative. He said so.

But this still isn’t what I’m thinking is doing it right. The next part of the conversation was show me your budget. Do the math. How much are you going to need to keep your lab going? At this point I re-iterated that I was trying to make every NIH deadline, and in get 1-2 proposals in for each cycle. He didn’t ask how I felt about it (which is fucking tired), he just said: thats too much. You will kill yourself. He said that he appreciated I was working hard, but that that pace would kill him, and he knows, because he’s done it. He would rather get me some bridge funding.

Everybody (that would DrugMonkey and Comradde Physioproffe, here, but others, too IRL)  always says that the caveat on making every deadline is that what goes in has to be great. The best you can do. That making every deadline with half-assed attempts isn’t worth it. I think, for me, in my head, that I am reaching the point where I need to stop writing proposals and go back and do science.

I am not going to stop writing proposals, but perhaps not so many. I do remember when I *loved* writing them. I loved taking a new idea and what happened to that idea as the design solidified to become a submittable proposal. When PCs (ah yes… I did grants before word processing) took away the mechanical/logistic angst of producing something neat looking, I was ecstatic. But I have to say, while it still seems not a huge burden to write a grant, I don’t love the process as much as I used to.

I am going to go back and do some research. If I get a bit of seed money to do the new project, and if I can get some loose ends tied up with old projects, these will be deeply satisfying. Then there is this other possible thing that can be done, and a med student thinking about doing a PhD with me which is a whole nuther thing. I think I will be happier.

What is doing it right? My chair has an idea about what life is like for me, doesn’t think its good, and took some concrete steps to give me the tools & resources to make it better. I’m going to pass this on to the folks in my lab.  Here’s to getting funded, but more, here’s to doing what we love that brought us here in the first place.

A few caveats on this post: American education still has a class system. This exacerbates a number of the racial issues, as the racial groups in America are not evenly distributed across socioeconomic classes. I do not ignore race, and I do not think any right thinking person can. But, I want to focus on class issues, so this post is not about the racial aspects of these issues. They are there, and there is a class-race interaction, in the statistical sense of interaction. Also, I have spent enough time working abroad, in Europe, in Southeast Asia and Australia, to realize that America’s class issues are not as bad as some other places, where class is determined at birth, and there is bloody all one can do about it. But my objective here is not to address those societies and systems, which often revolve around racial groups that many Americans wouldn’t even recognize.

Incident of last week. I have, working in my lab, for money, a young (~19) college student, Cordelia, who wants to be a clinician (a therapist, but not of the mind, of the body). I know her Mom, from where I work and hang out. Her Mom is in her mid-late 30s (yes do the math, no Mom did not go to college). They live in a multi-generational household, and there are financial struggles. They are not the desperate struggles of the inner city, no one is going hungry. But these are working class people who put in long, often hard, days to make sure their children have a better life than they had.

Because this is not the city, one cannot get to almost-MRU on public transportation. Or rather it is possible, but the buses run every 90-120 minutes, and timing is everything. (yes, that’s a whole additional issue, but not for this post). Cordelia’s Mom’s car broke down. There isn’t money for a new car. Cordelia’s Mom took Cordelia’s car, but Mom said she’d take Cordelia to work (with me).  Last week, Mom overslept, and forgot to pick up Cordelia.

The best-tech-in-the-universe, and I, actually mostly the Btintu, who watches out for Cordelia, noticed she didn’t show up. Cordelia also hadn’t answered a bunch of emails from HR (the most evil part of almost-MRU) to get her on the payroll. We were irritated, as one is when one is counting on someone who doesn’t show. . But Btintu, is someone who will give anyone who works hard a 2nd or 3rd chance, but kick the slackers out the door in a heartbeat. Cordelia was in danger of having moved from category one to category two in Btintu eye’s.

However, Cordelia called in, explained that there had been “miscommunications about rides, and that she didn’t have a car right now,” and also said that she didn’t realize she had an almost-MRU email account (she goes to a different college), and would take care of everything. Mom found me later in the week and explained (almost with tears) that it was HER fault, and that Cordelia had been furious with her. Which, btw, Cordelia had not mentioned. She blamed no one. So Cordelia is back in good graces at work, and I am doing what I can to help promote her career. She is bright and hard working.

In the end, this is not about one hardworking undergrad (although of course it is). This is about the working-class penalty in life. If Cordelia came from a wealthy or professional (depending on how you want to count wealthy) family, this issue would never have come up. Not only would Mom have a car that worked, but Cordelia would have her own car, and plenty of gas money (and rent and ability to live near excellent public transportation).

But when you’re rubbing pennies together (as my Mom used to say, so hard that Lincoln is back sitting in his memorial), little things like transportation, reliable transportation, can be the difference between keeping a job and being on the street.

As is true of everything, personal experience makes a difference in perceptions. Senator Rob Portman, a relatively conservative Ohio senator, was stridently homophobic and anti-same-sex-marriage… until his son came out. Although he’s not marching in the parades with a rainbow flag, he does, perhaps too quietly for some, support LBGT issues. Abstraction versus reality. Or rather, your own child versus someone else’s

It’s easy to think that one doesn’t interact much with members of the working class. Except for the grocery store or my Mom’s AD facility. The folks that clean at almost-MRU, or serve food in the cafeteria line. It’s easy to assume everyone is “just like me”. It is so easy to forget what it’s like to struggle to make it to work because you can’t afford another car. I am grateful to Cordelia for showing me.

From Lemony Snicket (I found this first one, but there were so very many good ones, it was hard to chose)

As I am sure you know, when people say ‘It’s my pleasure,’ they usually mean something along the lines of, ‘There’s nothing on Earth I would rather do less…

and

Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record.

and

No matter how many slow and complicated mysteries I encounters in my life, I still hope that one day a slow and complicated mystery will be solved quickly and simply. An associate of mine calls this feeling “the triumph of hope over experience”, which simply means that it’s never going to happen …

and

There are those who say life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which to spend your time. But I prefer to think that is a book is like life, particularly a good one, which is worth staying up all night to finish.

I’ve spent way too many nights up late, finishing a bit of life or a good book.