End of semester

This week is one of my favourites in the college timetable. The teaching semester finished last Friday and the hapless students are now starting their Christmas exams. It’s time to empty out the teaching briefcase and catch up on research…

Examtime in college

I recently compiled a list of this semseter’s research and outreach and was pleasantly surprised – three conference presentations, two academic papers and eight public lectures , not to mention a couple of science articles and book reviews in The Irish Times (see here for presentations and here for articles).

All of this is on top of an 18-hour teaching week, which adds up to a lot of late nights. I’ve been arguing for years that the workload in the Institutes of Technology should be more flexible; it’s very difficult to do any meaningful research if you’re teaching 18 hours a week. Another challenge is that most lecturers in the IoT sector are 3-4 to an office, with consequent staff interactions, phone calls and students coming to the door. As a result, a great many lecturers simply stop doing research, which is a terrible waste and hardly ideal for a college that teaches to degree level and beyond. I often think that, far from enhancing ‘productivity’, work practices in the IoT sector mitigate strongly against good teaching and research at third level.

In my case, I stay in college most evenings until 9 pm. That said, I enjoy the research – as I say to my students, if you find a job you truly like, you’ll never work a day in your life!

I’m particularly pleased with my recent paper on the discovery of the expanding universe. It’s my first foray into the history of cosmology, and it has already got quite a bit of attention,  thanks to a very nice conference in Arizona. I very nearly didn’t go to this conference because of teaching commitments; now I’m glad I did as it was a lot of fun and the paper has opened quite a few doors. These days, I turn down far more opportunities than I accept, it may finally be time to consider an academic move.

Slipher’s telescope at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona

Update

Meanwhile, rumours continue to circulate in the media concerning the prospect of our college being turned into a technological university. This would certainly be a welcome development, especially if it meant reduced teaching for those engaged in research, but I’d be quite surprised. WIT has been very successful at attracting research funding in certain areas, but research activity per academic is quite low in our college in comparison with the university sector. I don’t see how we could qualify as a university without bringing in quite a lot of new research-active staff , a buy-in for which there is no money whatsoever; hopefully I’m wrong on this.