I’m getting most of my information about California from a recent New Yorker article, A Letter From California, which tries to give an inside look at what has been going on there. I don’t like the article too much – it spends most of its time concentrating on one woman, only to suddenly decide at the end that perhaps she isn’t the real story. However, it does a good job at explaining many of the moving parts. Short conversations with some of my friends in California seem to back this version of events. I also was attending a workshop in UC Davis, arriving the day after students took over a building and the police brought in helicopters to flush them out.

The students have (as far as I can tell) two targets: high administration salaries and tuition hikes. The second one they should definitely be mad at. Ca is raising their cost of in-state tuition by 32% in one year! One year! UW is raising it 14% two years in a row – so 28% – almost the same as Ca, just spread over two years. Ouch! That said, both institutions are doing their best to put financial aid in place to help students who need it pay for the increases, and compared to private schools these two public, state, institutions are still an good bargain. It is important to keep in mind that in Ca the university system has direct control over the tuition and in Washington while the legislature has direct control, UW doesn’t have to raise the fees even if the legislature gives them permission – so it seems logical that university administrations be a target over the anger in tuition increases.

Second: the administration. I’ve seen the president of the Ca system, Yudof, and the president of the UW system, Emmert, have both been targets of their respective school student’s anger. And, it would seem, main targets in some cases.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I can see why they are easy targets. They make boat-loads of money. In some respects, they are a symbol of the general corporate drift of public universities – and get paid to match (i.e. they get paid a lot). And cutting their salaries and those of the top administrators down would certainly free up some cash.

But in the grand scale of things – it won’t free up that much cash. For example, the budget that was put together for UW last year by the state had our funding dropping by 26%. That is close to a 70 million cut in UW’s yearly budget. If you slashed all the administrators salaries to be mine, I suspect you’d save about 2 million per year. Those salaries aren’t the main problem!

The problem is the what the state! Higher education is not a priority. In California they spend more on prisons than they do on higher education! That doesn’t seem right – invest in the future, not the past! In Washington higher education is one of the few expenses that isn’t required by some law – so it is also something that gets cut often:

That red line on the right hand side is the funding per full time student (adjusted for 2009 dollars) from 1990 until the present. While this last drop was steep – this has been going on a long time. Public universities all over the USA have been seeing similar trends – this is not unique to California or Washington – it is just particularly bad here.

And, I think, that is where most of the anger of the students should be directed. The president of UW, Emmert, has decided that the state really doesn’t care any more – and that red curve will never return to its former level – so it is time to stop acting like it will and move on and negotiate a new relationship with the state. Still a public university, perhaps, but not in the same way. No matter what there will always be a better deal for in-state students – but that only works to the level that the state continues to kick in some cash. I suspect he is right – and it is too bad.

While the anger might sometimes be misdirected (and it sounds like the Ca administration made some pretty serious missteps), I do hope that in the future most students target legislators and other government officials. Who knows, perhaps a constitutional amendment is the answer?

The College Board announced today that college prices for the 2009-10 academic year continue to rise as state funding and endowment values decline. The financial difficulties facing households across the nation are putting increased pressure on financial aid budgets.

This was picked up by lots of news paper articles – for example this one from the AP:

With the economy struggling, parents and students dared to hope this year might offer a break from rising college costs. Instead, they got another sharp increase.

Average tuition at four-year public colleges in the U.S. climbed 6.5 percent, or $429, to $7,020 this fall as schools apologetically passed on much of their own financial problems, according to an annual report from the College Board, released Tuesday. At private colleges, tuition rose 4.4 percent, or $1,096, to $26,273.

From there it turned into articles talking about how universities were taking advantage of the students and families. At least the article that appeared in the New York Times got the real reason right – here is paragraph 2:

Hit hard by state budget cuts, four-year public colleges raised tuition and fees by an average of 6.5 percent last year. Prices at private colleges rose 4.4 percent, according to a report issued Tuesday by the College Board.

The next quote in that article takes a sharp left turn into.. well:

Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, called the increases “hugely disappointing.”

“Given the financial hardship of the country, it’s simply astonishing that colleges and universities would have this kind of increases,” Mr. Callan said. “It tells you that higher education is still a seller’s market. The level of debt we’re asking people to undertake is unsustainable.

I’m sorry, but give me a break. I totally understand the tuition problem. My university is going to raise tuition by 30% over the course of two years. Ouch. That will certainly strain students that don’t have financial aid. But what exactly were people expecting?

The state of Washington cut almost 30% of the UW budget. The voters in Washington made it clear that there were other priorities. So, UW has two choices: shrink by 30% in 6 months (about the length of time we knew what was going to happen). Shrinking by 30% is certainly possible – but it would be huge. We’d have to take about 30% less students than we do now – that probably would mean no incoming students this year at all (or we would have to kick out students that were already here), fire 30% of the faculty, close lots of departments. Probably have to completely kill off research. Actually, that would help with firing 30% of the faculty – most of us would just leave as fast as we could. Students who came to a major research university for learning would now be at what was basically a teaching college full of very pissed off professors – not what they signed up for. So Seattle raised tuition by 30% and took a 6% over all cut to the operating budget. All signs point to the same thing happening in the next two year budget as stimulus money disappears.

So look – we like to call these things public universities – but that implies public support. Frankly, the more the state backs out of its implied contract with the university, the more like a private university these institutions will look. At some point the state support will be small enough that the universities will want to change their relationship with the state. Heck, why deal with the oversight if they aren’t getting anything in return for it!?

Somewhere out there there is a year-by-year trend plot of state support of universities. It has been steadily falling for over 20 years. This last year was particularly bad, but not really that different from the trend overall. California is at risk of destroying one of the best university systems in the country over this very same issue.

Want to keep tuition down? Keep public universities accessible? Don’t just yell “cut costs, get rid of waste” at the universities. Make sure your state legislature continues to support the university as well. The budget has to balance. If the state gives less, then that extra money has to come from somewhere!

Ah, the soap box. How I have missed thee.

The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections.

Ouch.

So starts a mostly accurate article in the New York Times about the current state of the LHC. There is good news and bad news in this sentence. To paraphrase a famous politician currently sight-seeing north of South Korea, it really depends on your definition of the word bad. To most people, if someone says that the electrical connection between your light and the wall socket is bad, then that means your light won’t work. That is the normal definition of bad. We High Energy Physicists have a different definition of bad.

For us, bad means that the connection isn’t going to conduct as much current as it could (I had a blog post about this a while back – but this article contains an excellent explanation – well worth registering if you have to to read it). And this is the reason behind the timing of this article. As I mentioned in that article it would not be until the beginning of August that the LHC group of scientists would have finished measuring all those connections – all those splices – and know exactly how bad they were. Tomorrow the LHC and CERN will announce exactly what energy they will run the LHC at initially.

But scientists say it could be years, if ever, before the collider runs at full strength, stretching out the time it should take to achieve the collider’s main goals…

And that is the bad part of the news. The bad connections mean that we can’t run at the full 14 TeV energy – we will run something short of that (I’m betting it will be 7.5 TeV – if I get it right it isn’t because I have inside information from the accelerator group!). The article is correct that running at this reduced energy won’t give us the access to the science we’d all expected and hoped for if we were running at 14 TeV.

But another thing to keep in mind is: we need data. Any data. And not to discover something new – because we need to tune up and commission our detectors! We’ve never run these things in anything but a simulated collider environment or looking for cosmic rays. We would probably be able to keep ourselves busy for almost a year with two months of data.

Peter Limon, a physicist from Fermilab got it right:

“These are baby problems,” said Peter Limon, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., who helped build the collider.

Indeed, these are birthing problems – no one has ever run a machine like this before. Which brings me to the one spot in the article that got my hackles up:

“I’ve waited 15 years,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a leading particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “I want it to get up running. We can’t tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now.”

Nima, whom I also know (and like), is a theorist. If an experimentalist said this we would all make them run outside turn around three times, and spit to the north to cancel the jinx they would have just placed on the machine. I think we can all guarantee that there are going to be other failures and problems that occur. We hope none of them are as bad as this last one. But if they are, we will do exactly what we’ve done up to now: pick up the bits, study them, figure out exactly what we did wrong, and then fix it better than it was originally made, and try again.

There was one last quote in that article I would have liked to have seen more of a back story to:

Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean.

The story behind this is fascinating because it is where science meets humanity. The machine across the ocean is the Tevatron at Fermilab (I’m on one of the experiments there, DZERO). There is plenty of science still there, and the race for the Higgs is very much alive – more so with each delay in the LHC. So scientifically it is attractive. But, there is also the fact that a graduate student in the USA must use real data in their thesis. Thus the delays in the LHC mean that it will take longer and longer for the graduate students to graduate. In the ATLAS LHC experiment the canonical number of graduate students quoted I hear is about 800. Think of that – 800 Ph.D.’s all getting ready to graduate – about 1/3rd or more of them waiting for the first data (talk about a “big bang”). Unfortunately, you can’t be a graduate student forever – so at some point the LHC is taking long enough and you have to move back to the USA in order to get a timely thesis. Similar pressures exist for post-docs and professors trying to get tenure.

UPDATE: Just announced earlier today: they will start with 3.5×3.5 – that is, 7 TeV center of mass. This is exactly half the design energy of the LHC. The hope is that if all runs well at that energy they can slowly ramp up to 4×5 or 8 TeV. At 8 things start to get interesting as a decent amount of data at 8 will provide access to things that the Fermilab Tevatron can’t. Fingers crossed all goes well!

Faculty and staff members at the University of California will be placed on furlough starting in September for seven to 26 days per year, according to a plan released today by the system’s president, Mark G. Yudof. The plan, which is expected to be approved by the university’s Board of Regents next week, will amount to a salary cut of 4 to 10 percent, with the highest-earning employees facing the largest cuts.

The temporary furlough will push the university’s faculty compensation to about 20 percent behind comparative institutions, university officials said at a news conference. “We’re going to really have to work hard to come up with creative means to retain the excellent faculty that we have now and to further recruit people,” said Mary Croughan, chair of the university’s Academic Senate.

I feel for California. The state of Washington was in the same place. They are cutting salaries, reducing classes offered, and increasing tuition to try to close the budget gap. We did almost the same thing except for the salary cuts (and we raised tuition considerably more than they did). The trade off is interesting. That second paragraph points out the danger to this approach – others will poach the faculty. Hopefully California can fix the problems they have (economy comes back enough, change proposition 13, etc.) – they have some time as very few people have money to be poaching other universities.

Things are bad here in Washington, but at least I know the future and can plan on the cuts. The California budget crisis is still ongoing – and perhaps the legislature will pull back at the last minute. But given the constraints I don’t see how that will happen. The University of California system is one of the gems in the nation – it is too bad seeing something like this happen.

This cartoon made me a bit sensitive. Here I am in the South of France. I’m in an apartment with a great view of the sea… It sure feels like I’m kicking back. Of course, I’m still working like crazy (especially since my family hasn’t joined me yet). What was the first thing I spent money on here in Marseille? It wasn’t cheese. It wasn’t even Pastis. It was a bit 1080p monitor for my computer so I could work efficiently from the apartment I’m renting. I spent 150 euros for my three months here.

But 2 days a week? What university is that guy planning on working in!? And do they pay decent money? Sign me up!

Washington state legislature cut support for University of Washington 26%. That would have been the end of UW as I know it – and I guess the state legislature knew it too. To prevent that they allowed us to raise tuition on undergraduates by 30% over the course of two years (30%!!!). Which we will do. This is old news now – the reality came down at the end of April. Final budgets are being drawn up and they are every bit as bad as we were worried at the time. But the institution will survive.

Most states escaped such dramatic changes. I think only Nevada was going to be hurt as badly as we were. California was bad when I wrote that post – about 10%. What I didn’t realize was the 10% depended on a bunch of initiatives being passed that would raise various taxes. Apparently the complete political establishment (and a lot of people I know, including me) fooled themselves into thinking this was going to pass. Ops! I think the only budget related initiative that passed was one making sure the legislature didn’t give themselves a raise!

The upshot is going to be nasty. Berkeley’s chancellor just laid it on the line:

…the campus now facing a budget shortfall of around $145 million — "a shocking number," he said, more than twice the size of the deficit expected just six weeks ago…

…Birgeneau said all campus units will be asked to cut their budgets by an average of 20 percent over two years, instead of the 8 percent cuts expected as recently as mid-May. Staff who survive these contractions — and, the chancellor emphasized, "there will be eliminations of staff positions" — will see their paychecks shrink.

"We can all collectively expect wage reductions in the neighborhood of 8 percent," reported Birgeneau, adding that the formula could include some combination of furloughs and actual pay cuts.

Wow – 8% pay cut? That sucks. I’ve got a lot of friends in the Ca system. If only UW had some extra cash I’d say we should be off hunting there!! Too bad we will also have a multi-year hiring freeze.

To be fair, the Ca budget isn’t final yet. And it could be some of this is a warning shot at the legislature. But if it is anything like the Washington legislature, all the Ca university system will get back is a big ***ger.

When San Jose State University student Kyle Brady published the source code of his completed homework assignments after finishing a computer science class, his professor vigorously objected. The professor insisted that publication of the source code constituted a violation of the school’s academic integrity policy because it would enable future students to cheat. Brady stood his ground as the confrontation escalated to the school’s judicial affairs office, which sided with the student and affirmed that professors at the university cannot prohibit students from posting source code.

And second, the thing that made me decide to write this post:

Cory Doctorow shared his thoughts about the issue on Thursday in a blog post on BoingBoing. Doctorow suggests that assignments are ultimately more valuable to the students when the work that they produce can have broader purpose than merely fulfilling academic requirements. He also rightly points out that peer review of source code and studying existing implementations are both common practices in the real world of professional software development.

These are both compelling points and they illustrate how traditional academic sensibilities can be detrimental to the intellectual development of students.

Give me a break. This has nothing to do with any high end ideals. It has to do with work. In lower division courses there are only so many types of homework problems you can write without making something really complex, and in upper division courses creating a good problem that is hard, solvable, and interesting takes an immense amount of time. The professor of the course just wants to be able to re-use the homework problems – and cut/pasting the answer from the web is something he/she wants to make as hard as possible.

I wrote a bunch of problems for my graduate course this last year – they took a lot of work – I spent hours on them. I’d very much like to be able to reuse them – or reuse the core of the problem. If the solutions were widely available then that means I have that much more work I need to do next year.

I think, on its own, the answer to the question about a student posting their source code is clear: they should be allowed to do it. But the issue isn’t black and white when you get right down to it – that solution is a product of both the students and the professor’s sweat. Finally, actually saying that you can’t post code is totally unenforceable in this day and age (e.g. RIAA). There is also the basic fact that a student that decides to cheat is only cheating themselves… boy, that sounds kind-a lame, doesn’t it?

I don’t have an opinion in this particular instance. But I think the overly simplistic view that is taken is a bit sensationalist. Cory Doctorow wrote a much more nuanced bit:

But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience — especially now, with universities ratcheting up their tuition fees and trying to justify an education that can put students into debt for the majority of their working lives. Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension.

I disagree. It isn’t just about convenience of the profs – it is about having a good course for the next student. It is about the professor learning what worked to teach the students this time and refining it next time – these things have to be factored in. Both the students and the professors, it seems to me, have a shared responsibility here.

Though a bit later on he seems to go off the rails (no pun intended):

I’ve always thought it was miserable that we take the supposed best and brightest in society, charge them up to $60,000 a year in fees, then put them to work for four years on producing busywork that no one — not them, not their profs, not other scholars — actually wants to read.

Well, gee. When you start learning something you have to start with the basics. You can’t start with Quantum physics – you need to understand a bit about mechanics, E&M, and other things – after all, quantum had better devolve to those in the macroscopic world! You can start out students on cutting edge research – we all do it when we take on undergraduate researchers – but they have to learn the basics too. It is, sadly, a fact of life. If you don’t know how to start a program, how can you learn how to write cool code!?!?

BTW, if you read down, you can find a response from the student involved in this case.

For the University of Washington, the resulting budget decisions are dramatic. The bad news is that the Legislature decided to reduce state funding to the six public four-year college and universities more than any other sector in state government. The University of Washington received the highest percentage cut in all of higher education-26 percent. This is a stark and sobering number. Beginning July 1, one quarter of our funding from the state will no longer exist. It is unprecedented in state history, and as far as we know, it is by far the largest reduction in state support to a flagship university by any state in the nation. It takes our state funding level back to where it was more than a decade ago and drops the portion of the state budget dedicated to four-year higher education to an all-time low.

That is impressive, isn’t it? 26%. States worse off than us have cut their big universities by far less. I don’t know what folks were thinking.

They threw us a pill to try to mitigate the pain. But the pill is rather bitter. Essentially the state transferred a large part of the funding they used to take care of onto the backs of our students. If you are going to cut by 26% then something has to be done in order to mitigate the cuts. The university does not survive as one of the premiere ones in the USA if you don’t. In the end the cuts end up being 12%.

I’m curious to see what happens to individual departments. I also hope the university tracks (and makes public) how many people they loose because of this. I suspect a lot of people are looking for jobs elsewhere now.

Apparently he would fill the lecture board with these amazing figures and very neat writing before lecture, and then work his way through the the board, moving from one end of the room to the next. Wow, eh? Think of that – every seminar he would give he would have to write it from scratch. No reusing power point slides!!

When the age of transparencies hit I remember seeing several people who would give talks that were art and science combined – just as above. Half the joy of watching the talk was their slides and how they told a story with their amazing pictures. The other half was the science, of course.

Then there is me. For lectures I use something called OneNote. I basically use it like a very long transparency roll, only it is better since it is on a very large projected computer screen (hey – no more transparency pen rubbing off on my left hand!). I like it because it has axes pre-drawn – and straight lines! But that doesn’t change a basic fact: my lectures are a jumble of bad writing, bad pictures, and squiggly lines.

I wonder how much time and effort I’ve have to put into things to make them look like above!? Perhaps there is some program that will automatically draw what I mean and not the tortured path my pen actually draws out?

Emmert said he was "offended" by the funding proposals coming out of Olympia. Across the nation — including hard-off states such as California and Michigan — no states are proposing such drastic cuts to higher education funding, he said.

Nationwide, Washington is ranked 30th in state funding for four-year institutions, Arkans said. After the proposed budget cuts — using either the House’s or Senate’s budget proposals — Washington would drop to a rank of 42nd.

"We’re running out of adjectives and adverbs," Emmert said. "It’s unprecedented in the state’s history. What’s happening in the Senate and the House may be unprecedented in the States — the United States — in the post-war era."

This was in the middle of a discussion he was having on layoffs that will hit the U by the end of this April.

BTW, I mentioned several times that we were #1 public university when it came to federal funding. I don’t think that is true any longer. New statistics I just say indicate that NIH funding levels dropped us to #5 overall, and #3 for public institutions. NIH funding is the largest part of our funding, so that means our total funding rank has probably also dropped.

So, lets consider a 20%-30% budget cut. First of all, you can’t absorb that in straight staff cuts. As much as some professors would like to believe, the staff at the UW makes it run. Without them we’d never get to teach or do research or anything else.

What if you could slim things down a bit? Say you want to keep class sizes similar to what they are now (something that many legislators draw a red line in the sand over). How about doubling the teaching load for each professor? We professors are currently assigned a single course a quarter. This generally means between 3 and 4 hours of face time with the students (in the classrooms), some class preparation time, and some office hours, and some grading time. Class prep time varies depending on the course. An easy course might require only a single hour of prep time to teach one hour. The graduate level class I was teaching the last two quarters required about 5-8 hours of prep time for every hour of teaching. In the case of a heavy load you couldn’t double it – obviously – there aren’t enough hours in the week. But why not the light classes? I don’t know the legal basis of our agreement with the University, but most of us joined the University because we wanted to do both teaching and research. If a change like this happens it will change the balance of our research and teaching time. That will certainly drive a lot of the people currently at UW away – UW will no longer be one of the top ranked research universities in the USA, and will no longer get the largest amount of public funding for a public institution in the USA. All of this will mean the students that are attracted won’t be as good, we will have less students (less grant money to fund students), etc. UW will not be what it is today – it will become more like a teaching institution rather than a teaching and research institution. A game changer, as I said earlier.

What else could you do? How about attrition? Initially we were considering a 13% budget cut. My impression is that it would take 2-3 years for attrition to shrink the faculty to the correct size. That is 2-3 years of no hiring. I’m sure departments could survive, though they would be gritting their teeth at being unable to compete for some of the best people on the market (which many department at UW normally do). And that 2-3 years is well matched to the budget cycle in the state of Washington – we do it in 2 year cycles. But when you are talking 20-30% budget cuts now you are talking 4-6 years of attrition. Massive forward loans would have to be arranged. Perhaps you could use some of the federal stimulus money to help – but that is only around for two years. Attrition would have another side-effect: increased class sizes and longer times to graduate or fewer students to be admitted. UW is a state institution – one of the main charges is to educate the population of the state – so none of these options are very palatable to either the faculty, the university administration, or the legislature.

Ok. What’s next on the list? The tenure issue (at UW) can be gotten around by closing a full department. For example, decide you don’t need physics any longer – at that point my tenure no longer means anything. The university has committed to doing its best to find me a job, but, lets be serious – in these times? This is a pretty crude tool. I’m sure you could come up with some small departments on campus that aren’t nationally ranked and have very small numbers of students and aren’t considered vital to a liberal arts education – but I wonder if you could come up with enough of them to absorb a 20 or 30% cut. Any organization our size is bound to have some fat – but 25% fat? I doubt it.

Finally, another option is to raise tuition. Currently we are allowed to raise it 7% per year. If that was doubled to 14% per year, and done for two years in a row, the end result would be mitigating these 20-30% cuts to something more like 10%. A 10% cut the university can deal with without a fundamental change in its mission. This option is generating the most political heat right now. On the face of it, it looks pretty bad – raising tuition during hard economic times isn’t exactly smart. However, it turns out part of the federal budget increases and stimulus bill were a bunch of new money for financial aids for undergraduates. Some projections I’ve seen from the university say that if you are family making less than 160K you won’t notice the increase at all. So raising the tuition seems like a good way to transfer more federal money into the university’s accounts. There is one hiccup here, unfortunately: graduate students. Cuts in the budget that would happen due to 10% cuts would reduce the number of TA’s we could hire, which means graduate students would suddenly find themselves unemployed. Graduate students make almost nothing anyway – and now we have significantly upped how much they have to pay. Fortunately, relatively speaking, graduate students are a small fraction of the university student population – so solving that problem is much easier than solving the same problem for the undergraduate population.

In the end I’m sure it will be a combination of some the above. Whatever, I hope that the rhetoric calms down enough so people make a rational decision based on the minimal impact to students, research, the university mission, and still make sure that the state budget gets balanced. There is no way to escape cuts at this point, but lets not throw the baby out with the bath water.

There are probably other options that are out there that I’ve not thought of. Feel free to leave a comment!

Last post I mentioned that Washington higher education state funding was facing something between a 20% and 30% cut. It is important to know what is actually being cut. It turns out the university gets its funding from three sources, roughly equal: state funds, grants, and endowment. The endowment money is colored: when it was gifted to the university it was gifted for a particular purpose – and often that can’t be used to hire people. I believe UW’s endowment is down about 25% or so right now. Grants are the research grants that people at the university get – for example, my NSF grant. The university skims off 20%-30% of the money from each grant and puts it towards operating expenses. Stimulus funding and increased budgets at the federal level mean that the grant income is about the same or even a bit better – as long as we don’t loose the people applying for those grants.

The final bit, the state funds, are what pays for most of the people here at UW – graduate student’s TA’s, staff, and, of course, the professors. When we talk about cutting 20% or 30% here, we are talking about cutting only the state portion of the budget. If we were to do this across the board this would mean a 20%-30% cut in the number of people (professors, TA’s, administrators, etc.). This is complicated by the concept of tenure. You can’t fire a tenured professor as long as they are doing their basic job (teaching, participating in the department administration at an acceptable level, etc.). You can layoff a tenured faculty if you close down their whole department, however.

The final bit of information is about the UW itself. We are a major research university. This means our mission is not just teaching, but also research. Students (undergraduate and, obviously, graduate) are fully expected to participate in this research. We are one of the largest public universities in the USA. We are the largest research university – that is, we receive more money in grants than any other public university. I think we are second only to Johns Hopkins (which is not a public university). Of course, our ability to get those grants has a lot to do with the people applying for them and the fantastic facilities here which means the federal research dollars are well spent.

Next I’ll talk about some of the cut scenarios.

Sorry if it gets cut off – click on it and look at the 2nd page of the PDF that comes up. Those numbers are the size of proposed cuts to higher education state-by-state – smaller is better!! Washington is highlighted. You’ll note Washington has the largest number. I’ve heard that Nevada is the one state that is worse. If you look at other state universities that are similar in size and stature to UW you’ll find they are getting 6%-8% cuts.

Our state is particularly bad off – but not the worst in the nation. I believe, for example, Florida is worse – they are planning on cutting their higher education program by 1% or 2%. Arizona – the only other university of similar size (though I think we are better ranked then they are) is planning on a 30% tuition increase to counter their cuts. A friend of mine, who is a professor there, commented “I wonder if there will be a physics department when I get back?”

So, what is going on in Washington?

Frankly, I don’t really understand what is going on. Higher education here is getting cut harder than other programs in the state. The talk that is coming from some of our state politicians is so factually incorrect that it makes one wonder if facts are being stretched to make a point motivated by other forces (that I’m not aware of). I should also state that I see cuts to our budget as inevitable. There is just no way to avoid them – the whole state is going to suffer and everyone is going to have to bear some of the pain.

But these cuts will be painful!

Wu-Ki is famous for his work on parton distribution functions (PDFs). I’ve known of him for years – but after retiring from MSU he moved to Seattle to be near his kids. Once here he joined the department of physics as an affiliate. That was when I got to know him personally. He attended many of our joint theory-experiment meetings. He helped me out a bit when I was teaching my graduate particle physics course (he wrote a book related to the topic). He smart and knowledgeable and always helpful. He will be missed.

I stole the picture from his retirement symposium page.

The last two quarters I taught graduate level particle physics. Not well, mind you. But I did teach it. It was a lot of fun – I’d not looked carefully at a lot of that material since I was a graduate student. And when I was a graduate student I never did symmetry breaking in my courses – or motivated anything using group theory. The flip side was the price I paid over the last two quarters. I think on average for each hour I was standing in front of students I was probably preparing for about 5 or 6 hours. I teach the course again next year, too. But it will be much better (I hope); I now know my way all the way to the end. Right now I want to redo everything – especially the first quarter which I really don’t like now. And I think it will take me a lot less time to prepare too [one of those lies we tell ourselves].

And now spring break starts. One advantage of teaching a graduate course is I don’t give a final exam. My grades are already done! Woo hoo! I’m off to Prague for a small conference. It would be a lot of fun if I didn’t actually have to have my posters and talks ready!

Next quarter – which starts in a little more than 2 weeks – I’ll be teaching again. But the class will be a very different animal. This quarter I had 3 students in my class and 1-2 others that would drop by to listen. Taught in a small room, all of us sitting around a table with my projecting my Tablet PC’s output onto a projector. Next quarter I will have about 500 students! Talk about shifting gears! But it is an introductory lab course, so it will take less intellectual effort and, thank goodness, I’ll have a small army of TA’s. And that will give me some time to get back to my research – something I’ve been ignoring way to much for the last six months.

As I’ve mentioned before, the budget crisis is hitting the university – and I’m on the faculty senate. There were several big issues on the floor today having to do with things like us not getting raises, the interaction between the faculty and the administration, etc. I waded in on the questions I had gotten from fellow members of the physics department. But I swear what I wrote down that I was going to ask seemed much more sensible and important than when I actually asked them – they seemed pretty unimportant – and, more to the point, the answers really weren’t going to either change anything the university did or any position of the faculty. Another bit was how the administration and the faculty are interacting over these budget cuts. There is a special committee, lots more expert than I, whose responsibility is to give advice to the university about how to proceed cutting (i.e. no one has any idea how to cut 20% from the universities’ budget). I felt like it could operate and interact with the University a bit better – so I pressed the chair. Actually, “pressed” is too gentle a word – more like attacked, or acted like an a**.

Yuck. I think I’ll curl up with a bad TV show and start over again tomorrow. Sorry about those 150 emails I’ve ignored today…

UPDATE: This meeting made the news, though not for the reasons I think it should have. If you look at the picture of Mark Emmert (prez of UW) and Phyllis Wise (Provost) you can see me in the background, in soft-focus glory!

The American Physical Society produces a small rag which has a neat article by the father, Soren Sorensen of one of my former graduate students. He is chair of the physics department at Tennessee. They have a great deal of research funding there, similar to what we have here at UW, and also teach large introductory courses. The article is long – but if you are interested in this sort of thing he has a catalog of things they have tried to do to help their department.

So how do these budget cuts influence our physics department here at University of Tennessee? Profoundly! We now have 25.5 Full Time Equivalent faculty members in our department. This is two less than just a year ago, since we lost two positions as a result of the budget cuts in June. We have to go all the way back to around 1960 to find fewer faculty members in our department.

He goes on to list a few other things that have changed at their department and then notes:

This high efficiency, however, is coming at a cost. There is no more “slack” in the system in the form of professors who can teach more courses. If we have to implement additional budget cuts, we will have to cancel classes. This will result in much higher student dissatisfaction and, more importantly, longer graduation times for our majors, since many students will not be able to schedule the needed 15 credit hours each semester.

This is between a rock and a very hard place. This is because state legislatures get extremely angry when this sort of thing happens (reducing # of students admitted, etc.). Something is going to have to give. In a nice touch, Soren finishes up that bit of the article noting that is where they are now – the recent falls in the economy mean that things are actually going to get a fair amount worse. And, as he correctly points out, there are no contingency plans in place for these sorts of cuts. No one at a major university has ever faced something like this before. We can’t look to another university and see how they dealt with it, there aren’t books titled “how to cut a university by 20%”. This is complicated by the fact that the state isn’t the only source of funding – donations and endowments make up something like 60% of UW’s budget, the state is less than 40%. Those two revenue streams work in concert to make the university run, and they are being cut at different rates (sadly, the money from those two revenue streams has different colors – you can’t use one to make up for the other).

One option that has been floated in our state is to cut the amount of research we do and replace it with teaching. Apparently, Tennessee has (or is) being faced with similar suggestions:

… and 2/3 of our total budget consists of external research grants and contracts. So for a physics department it is vital also to maintain the emphasis on excellence in research and graduate education, and that is not an easy task in the current climate. Letters to the editor of our local newspapers or online comments to articles about our university give the impression that a large segment of the public (and therefore maybe also the politicians) considers research a nice hobby for the faculty, but nothing that should have any priority during a financial crisis.

Let me put it this way. Lets say my group get 1 million a year from the NSF to do research here at UW on particle physics. The university skims more than 400,000 off the top of that. So that 1 million is worth only 600,000 to me. This is called overhead (I’m making up the exact numbers, I have no idea what the average overhead is at large universities). So, if we are busy doing teaching and less research, we will get less money, which means the university has less of that 400,000 to play with – which is another budget cut. So increasing teaching isn’t a win-win game. Not to mention the fact this will drive many of the best people away.

There is no easy way out. Whatever happens it is going to hurt. Everyone is going to see it – students, graduate students, post-docs, lecturers, professors, staff. And, of course, the rate of science output. Good thing the country is already leading in innovation – we can coast for a few years. Oh, wait… Right. Back to work.

Out jobs are pretty secure. Both my wife and I are are quite productive – both in teaching and research. We bring in some decent sized grants to the university in connection with our research. Students don’t complain about our teaching very much. Further we have tenure, which makes it that much more difficult to lay us off.

But budget cuts are coming to the university, no two ways about it.

This last week we found out about the first direct impact – no raises this year. This is no surprise – we were all expecting this, we just didn’t know when it was going to become official. Indeed, it would have been quite hard (embarrassing) to take raises when staff around us is getting laid off! The staff hasn’t been laid off yet – in fact, Washington (and thus the university) won’t know its budget until the end of this month. But I don’t see how staff won’t loose their jobs here at the University.

I’m hopeful that our family will suffer no more than the loss of our raises. But it is hard to believe that will be it. Looking around – car sales fall about 50%. The 8.1% unemployment number… Breath taking.

I’m very curious to see how the budget for Washington state and higher education here works out. The noises coming out of the legislature are all over the place – doubling the class load, turning off research (which makes no sense considering how much cash it brings into the state), no reduction in numbers of students in the entering class, no tuition increases… Many of these things don’t sum to one (i.e. in geek physics speak: violate unitarity). So far the University doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job explaining how it works to the state legislature. I hope it will improve – if it does perhaps we will only get a 13% cut of our budget…

UPDATE: Ron pointed out in the comments that my statement above “The U doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job explaining…” might be more harsh than I intended. The climate down there is almost impossible – and very complex. After all, it is a lot of people interacting and it is very easy for messages to get crossed. For the most part the university is doing quite well. There is a small army of people – a number of whom donate their time because the believe in the mission of the university – who spend a lot of time down in Olympia trying to make sure that legislators are making decisions based on facts and not rumors. Perhaps I was overly depressed hearing a few people who I know where directly talked to still seemed to entertain incorrect notions of how a university like UW operates and how its finances work (deciding to cut is one thing, but deciding to cut and citing incorrect facts to justify it is another). Apologies if I angered anyone who is spending time down there. I’ve lobbied congress and spent considerable effort convincing one or two aides that a particle accelerator is not a source of energy – I know how hard it can be sometimes.

As I’ve gotten older my eyes have followed my father’s: fantastic until 40, and then fall off a cliff. It won’t be long till I’m wearing trifocals. But the more rest I give my eyes – or, the more exercise I give them by looking around at objects at different distances – the better they feel. I stare at computers and books all day long. And so I don’t read much in the way of books at night. A few magazines perhaps, but not often enough to warrant the $360 dollar price of the Kindle.

But what I really want are my text books in electronic form. There is nothing like a well written text book to learn from. The web just doesn’t hack it (yet?) in this department. I can find little nuggets of information but there is almost never any context. But if I want to be taken from basic lagrangians, through group theory, to the Higgs mechanism in some detail… well, I a text book is my best source for that.

I’ve got some 80 of them, taking up a significant bit of my shelf space. They almost never leave my office here at work. The furthest they sometimes make it is home and back. And they are much less useful because of that. There is only one reason for this: they are heavy!

Wouldn’t it be great if they were electronic? I’d be happy to pay the same price for them, so long as I could put them on my various computers. I could display them on my big computer screen, and use my Tablet to take notes or create a lecture. Or even better, if they were in some sort of PDF format (or similar) I could write on them on my tablet and leave myself little margin notes! I’d be quite willing to put up with some DRM as long as it didn’t prevent me from reading it on my various computers.

Scanning through Amazon’s library of text books (as you might expect, I can find almost all the textbooks I need there) I’ve yet to see even one that I could get in electronic form – in any electronic form. What a pity!

Eventually this will happen – I just wish it was faster. And when it does I suspect it will be something like the folks older enough to own vinyl or VHS. Everyone will be forced to re-purchase the books in electronic form. Good thing these text books can be put down as tax write-offs!

Compostable has a very specific definition. 60 days in a heap and it has to have broken down. One of the out growths of this is “silverware” made out of corn starch. It works great – until you put it in hot soup. The spoons have this very odd behavior of curling up, which makes it difficult to fit in your mouth (or hold soup).

Apparently cups that hold cold liquids are the hardest to make compostable. Hot liquids are easy – you coat the inside of the cup with something, and the cup is good to go. Cold cups, however, have to be coated both inside and outside. The reason is condensation! If the outside isn’t coated, and the cold liquid causes condensation, then the water droplets that form on the outside of the cup will cause the paper part of the cup to disintegrate. Not so good! The fellow at the party told me he had found cups that would be compostable under a 90 day definition, but the UW composting contractor didn’t do 90 days.

Apparently they have solve the problem. Above is the cup. There is a twist, however. I tend to bring these cups back from lunch with some rootbeer in them. After that is gone I fill them with water and use them until the next day. If I eat lunch in my office the next day, the cup will remain in active duty. Sometimes for several days.

No more. These new cups make it almost 48 hours. At that point I noticed a ring of water forming around the cup. Still, it is very cool to see UW have such a high rate of compostable material coming from its cafeterias. The fellow I was talking to said that the next step was to tackle the office work areas. He said this was going to be much more difficult because he had much less control over them. I would imagine so, just looking at all the stuff we throw out! I’m waiting to see!