Old White Men vs. Young Ambitious Women

Some months ago, I had a strange conversation with a woman a bit younger than me. While we talked about a workshop, she told me she had disliked it as she wasn’t willing to have an “old white man” explain *anything* to her. She used this phrase several times referring to the instructor, addressing herself as “a young, ambitious, but underestimated woman.”

Apparently, as soon as she saw the person giving the workshop she had grown an instant refusal against anything that person would say, as this would in any case be patronizing. Just because that person was a man and visibly older than she. The "white" aspect didn't make any sense here as they both have the same skin color.

But obviously she used the phrase "old white man" as a general fixed expression referring to "the other." And most probably she assumed that I would agree as we have the same age and gender (and skin color). But I'm sorry, my automatic solidarity is very limited and doesn't go along those lines.

I was really upset then and I’m still very annoyed, for two reasons:

First, I had never before heard someone with an academic background (!) explicitly referring to somebody else (not a group, a single person!) by assigning them a label used in a discriminating fashion.

Second, I was too surprised to react properly. I didn’t manage to tell her that what she just did was clearly discriminating -- and she could be sued for doing so.


She didn't discriminate against me but against another person; she hadn't said anything directly to this person. I had walked away and hoped that she would probably react that way directly to someone else one day and then *that person* would speak up. But that’s not the way one stops discrimination, right?

In retrospect, what had happened was abusing feminism, a single person got a label and had been filed under "enemy" on the spot. Any serious discussion of specific issues had been blocked. You don't talk to the enemy and you don't trust what they tell you, no matter what.

Another annoying thought, playing “the feminist card” assumes instant solidarity from other women, maybe even regardless of age. If you don't agree, you are at least suspicious. However, such an atmosphere does not foster any form of discourse, no serious discussion is possible. The only thing left is throwing labels and generic accusations at each other. That's not very grown-up. And it also doesn't help to address and overcome questionable power structures and attitudes.

German universities: #uberized or #unbezahlt? Or both?

On Twitter (mostly in German, though), there are some great discussions these days triggered by sometimes very personal, sometimes very pointed tweets tagged with #unbezahlt ("unpaid") and #unbefristet ("non-permanent") or more recently #FristIstFrust (roughly: "fixed-term is frustration"). Some years ago, the GEW ("Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft," the educators' union) encouraged members and non-members alike to share what they like and don't like in academia using the hashtag #TraumJobWiss (short for "dream job academia"). Most of the tweets are in German and most of them are rather critical if not downright sarcastic. Apparently, the non-professorial teaching and research staff (in German: "Mittelbau") is sick of being offered mostly fixed-term part-time jobs at universities. And "fixed-term" more often than not means contracts for less than two years, or even less than one year!

The hashtag #unbezahlt refers to jobs or tasks that academics do without being properly paid for them, e.g., reviewing, grant proposal writing, talk preparation, student supervision, workshop organization, edition of volumes of scholarly papers, thesis writing, teaching. Wait, but aren't these genuine academic tasks? Why would people not get paid for doing them in the first place, and secondly, why would they do them if they don't get paid (or not get paid properly, as is the case for adjunct lecturers at German universities; have you ever heard of "Titellehre", when you have to teach for not losing your status as "Privatdozent", and as you have to, universities can offer to pay, hm, nothing at all)? The main factor is probably the vague hope to be able to list all these tasks on your CV to be eligible for a professorship one day. Of course, one hast to be qualified, too, but this "only" means writing the so-called "second book" -- all the other things: being an active member of the scientific community, building a network, etc. are no hard conditions, but a widely agreed upon view is that without those you won't have a chance to get a professorship one day. However, due to the very limited number of professorships at German universities, having all this on your CV doesn't mean that you will get one sooner or later. And apparently, people in academia realize this more and more and they get upset more and more. I predict a rather hot academic summer! At least I hope so.

The German academic system (or the German university) is often seen as being rather feudalistic, old-fashioned, and out-dated. Which is also supported by the fact that there has been almost no investment in infrastructure of any kind in the last decades. Which is partly due to the German system of federal vs. state tasks; only recently the ban of cooperation with respect to education has been lifted. So German universities, German acadmia has to move and has to keep up with current developments, with the digital transformation -- people start to leave either the system as such (they rather aim for a job in industry) or they move into other academic systems (Switzerland, Scandinavia, USA, etc.) where they feel more welcome.

The other week I read "Digitale Gefolgschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine Stammesgesellschaft" by the philosopher Christoph Türcke, C.H.Beck Verlag, München 2019 (there is also an interview at Deutschlandfunk Kultur (also in German)). Türcke makes some interesting points and bold claims, but one thing struck me: He writes about how the digital transformation changes the working processes. People working with digitized data on mobile devices are able to work from anywhere at anytime they want. It even changes other fields like taxi driving (Uber) or hotel business (AirBnB). As customer, you just call for a service or a product and it will be delivered. Türcke doesn't mention the term, but "uberization" of whatever industrial field is everywhere. And this is the future, it has started already and it will increase.

However, on page 45 he writes:

"Universitäten sind längst dazu übergegangen, einen großen Teil von Forschung und Lehre auf Lieferbasis erledigen zu lassen. Die Mehrzahl hochqualifizierter Nachwuchswissenschaftler bewegt sich von Forschungsprojekt zu Forschungsprojekt, von Lehrauftrag zu Lehrauftrag, mit geringer Aussicht, daß ihr Engagement irgendwann einmal mit einer der wenigen festen Stellen belohnt wird."

(Translation by deepl.com: "Universities have long since started to have a large part of their research and teaching done on a delivery basis. The majority of highly qualified young scientists move from research project to research project, from teaching position to teaching position, with little prospect that their commitment will be rewarded some day with one of the few permanent positions.")

On the one hand, Türcke states what I just wrote in the beginning: the situation in academia is rather bad, people don't have a realistic long-term perspective. On the other hand, some sentences earlier he characterized the uberized society as the future; so the first sentence I cited could be turned into a rather optimistic picture: German universities are not left behind, they are far ahead! The already started uberizing research as well as teaching! Isn't that wonderful?

If only we could convince the academic staff to let go hoping for a professorship but doing scientific research and teaching in a similar fashion they drive their taxis -- and wasn't that always the fallback plan at least for students in the humanities and arts: to be a taxi driver with a doctorate?!

Back where I started

So, we have 2018 and I'm an e-learning specialist at a university of applied sciences in Switzerland.

Last week I found my old business cards when I was looking for something else in my desk drawers. And I realized that exactly 10 years ago, I also had business cards as e-learning consultant of a university of applied sciences in Switzerland — in 2008, I was at the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (HSA FHNW), today I'm with the Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), at the Competence Center for Higher Ed Didactics and E-Learning. And the fun thing is: exactly 10 years after, I now have a 50% permanent position as I had then, I do similar things — although I'm not on my own as I was 10 years ago but a member of a wonderful team — , and even my salary is the same (yes, I also found old pay slips when looking for documents needed for the 2017 tax declarations).

So, what did I do in between — and was it worth it when I end up almost where I started? Let's look at the business card circle (the current card is at the top, the starting card is the one right to it and the circle goes clockwise).

The e-learning job at HSA FHNW wasn't my first one, but the first outside the University of Zurich (and I even had an e-learning job there from 2004 to 2008). After that I held various positions and did various things as senior researcher at the University of Basel, as acting professor at the University of Konstanz (I blogged about that experience and most of the posts are still quite relevant, I guess), as postdoc and scientific coordinator at the University of Stuttgart, as scientific coordinator and later as senior researcher at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, as guest professor again at the University of Stuttgart, and as researcher at the University of Bern. All of those activities where related to my other live as computational linguist and writing researcher — I used e-learning activities and tools for my teaching, but I wasn't active in that area during that time.

I had left the e-learning business in 2010 for a chance to pursue my scientific career and to become a professor one day. Turns out, I didn't succeed.

Yes, I published a lot, yes I finished and defended my thesis (so at least I have a different academic title on my current business card), yes I grew an international network, yes I founded two workshop series (both of them have fallen asleep because of decreasing interest), yes I edited various proceedings (oh, and yes I know a lot about publishing and “added values” by publishers now and I do have an expletive explicit opinion about those and their work flows), yes I was what's called “an active member of the scientific community” (I founded and still run a doctoral consortium, I'm co-leader of a SIG, I was a newsletter editor), yes I was active in various scientific areas (computational morphology, writing research, document engineering, corpus linguistics), yes I taught a lot (as acting and as guest professor I did the usual German 9 hours per week (so 3 to 4 courses per term) teaching load and I taught one course per term at the other places), yes I have been acting professor, yes I reviewed for various prestigious conferences and journals — all those activities you find listed as recommended or even necessary on your way towards professorship. But I'm still not a professor.

However, I grew older.

And last year when I got the chance to “go back to e-learning” I decided to no longer actively pursue the scientific career road — my chances will not increase. I will not apply for grants any longer, I will reduce reviewing activities, I might continue publishing but will carefully chose where and how (considering issues of access and submission formats). I hopefully will continue teaching and I hopefully will get chances to do small scale research at the intersection of document engineering, linguistics, and writing research. I will not apply to scientific jobs — my list of rejected or even unanswered applications is long enough now. I'm not sure whether all of this equals “I'm leaving academia”, but time will tell.

So the question remains: was it worth it? I guess so. I got chances to do research, I taught a lot (and I didn't know that I actually enjoy teaching before!), I could present my research at various places I wouldn't have visited otherwise, and last but not least I got to know a lot of people with similar interests, some of whom I call friends today.

Professor for one year (week 29): Devices galore -- am I a geek?

How many electronic devices do you use regularly?  When you go to a conference or attend a meeting, the first thing participants ask for is Internet access -- and then coffee.  So organizers estimate the number of participants, add some tolerance and then order a certain number of WiFi accounts.  When you look around, almost everybody uses a laptop.  But people have a laptop and a tablet.  So you should double the number of accounts.  And then almost everybody uses their smart phone, too.  Which triples the original estimate.  I don't have a smart phone, but I too travel with laptop and tablet (mostly because I always have to prepare some longer texts for which I prefer a real keyboard and Emacs -- while you can use an external keyboard with an iPad, Emacs is not available for iPad).

When I survey my home office, I discover a high number of computers per square meter:  A black MacBook from 2004 named Heinz, a MacBook Air from 2008 (the rounded-edge model) named Marlene, a MacBook Air from 2013 (the sharp-edge model) named Fred.  Then there is my partner's late-2008 model MacBook (named Themis) and a Celeron PC running NetBSD (named Eurus) we use for scanning -- so we do have a scanner, too (no name for this one!).  All in 10 square meters.  We have a cable modem, which is connected to an AirPort Express wireless router named Horst and a printer named Gaia also connected to the wireless network via a second AirPort Express named Gunther.  And then there are Fräulein Meier, the iPad, Laurin, the iPad Mini, Tippse, my Apple Wireless Keyboard, and Berta, my Nokia phone, floating about the entire apartment.  That's a lot and everybody is talking to everybody via WiFi or Bluetooth!  And in a corner, there is still Herbert, my old Toshiba Satellite notebook from 2001.

I use Heinz for iTunes mainly, I haven't quite finished the migration from Marlene to Fred yet -- Marlene was kind of a lemon, she got a new SSD, but this didn't fix the unexpected crashes and her refusal to install updates.  At my previous jobs, I always had a computer, too.  As I sometimes had several employments at the same times, this almost doubled the number of computers I used regularly: A Sun and later an iMac (with alternating names because of network changes) at the University of Zurich, a Dell laptop at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland named Waltraud, and after that an iMac at the University of Basel also named Waltraud.

Switching computers requires data management, like deciding where and how to access e-mail messages, and where to store documents -- I used the versioning system CVS with the repository stored on the network at UZH, so I could check out and commit drafts from anywhere.  In Konstanz, I decided to use only Fred and not another computer -- I'm also running out of names, but more on this next week -- and asked for a big screen only.

Professor for one year (week 28): Another German compound process: Reisekostenrückerstattung (travel reimbursement)

Last week, I wrote about my conference tour this fall.  As this tour had no private aspects, it was a "Dienstreise" (business trip) and in that case, you can get a reimbursement for your traveling costs -- train or plane, hotel, conference fees, etc.  In German, that's "Reisekostenrückerstattung" and it's not only a compound, it's also complex.

In Konstanz, you have to fill this two-page form: 

It first asks for your address and some personal data and your bank account in the left part of the first page -- this part is easy.  Then you find seven points of instruction how to fill out the reverse side.  Generally, if you need complex instructions for a form, it's a badly designed form.  So this is a first hint that the whole process might not be an easy one.

You have to state when and where you started your travel, when and where it ended and when the "Dienstgeschäft" -- the reason for your travel -- started and ended.  If you remember last week's post, I started my tour in Paris (not my usual "Dienststelle" (place of employment) nor my "Wohnort" (residence) and neither in one of the corresponding countries) and it ended in Zurich (my residence, but a different country than my "Dienstort").  I went from Paris to Berlin to Zurich (for a short stop-over and exchange of cloths) to Florence -- so from France to Germany to Switzerland to Italy.  I crossed three borders and I would have to state the exact time when I crossed which border -- I never heard the captain of a plane announcing that just now we would be crossing a border, so I invented a time.  For the hotel where you stayed you have to justify why you stayed in exactly this hotel.  Of course for Florence and Berlin it's "Nähe zum Dienstgeschäft, Einsparung von Fahrtkosten" -- it wouldn't have been possible to commute.  But these boxes look like check boxes, not radio buttons, so should I also tick other possibilities?  But it was different for Berlin and for Florence.  But then, these boxes are identical to the ones you have to choose for the end point and starting point of your travels and here it's impossible to start from two or more places at the same time, so maybe they are both radio buttons.  I treat them this way.

Interestingly, if you don't travel by train, bus, or plane but by "Kfz" (motor vehicle), you have to state the "Hubraum" (engine displacement) -- up to 600ccm or more.  There are probably different reimbursement rules depending on whether you go by Harley or by VW van.

You have to input the amount of money you spent, but no currency is given.  So do I have to convert expense in CHF and US$ to € or just state them?  I chose the latter and wait what will happen.

For comparison, this is the form the Institute of Informatics at the University of Zurich uses:

Yes, apart from stating address and bank account, it's a simple table where you insert the kind of expense you asking reimbursement for.  And it's even assumed that you might have had expenses in different currencies.  It's a simple single-page form.  You might invent other layouts for this form, but the important part is that you don't spend hours with filling the form.  The German Department at the University of Basel had a similar simple document.  For reimbursements by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences there isn't even a form, you submit receipts for all your expenses, state your bank account and address and that's it.

And don't forget to add your "Dienstreisegenehmigung" (business trip approval).  For this I had to fill an even worse designed two-page document beforehand asking all kind of things -- but not about estimated costs.  It has even more explanations and the parts to be filled out by you are scattered to the two pages.

You even have to fill this document for trips you won't ask for reimbursement.  I guess the main reason for those approvals are insurance issues: You have insurance at your place of employment, but for all other places you need a private insurance.  So if something happens outside your office, the employers insurance is responsible only if he approved that it was necessary that you had to be outside your office.  It's different in Switzerland: As soon as you work more than 8 hours a week, you're insured via the employer for accidents inside and outside your office ("Berufsunfall- und Nichtberufsunfallversicherung").  So there is no need to get official approval to meet with colleagues or clients for a meeting outside your office -- you only need to get approval in case you ask for reimbursement of travel costs as different grants or accounts might be used to cover your expenses.

I guess the more badly-designed documents you have to fill, the more you get accustomed to fill them without thinking.  But this is no good excuse to design poor documents!  And I even haven't mentioned the language used in those forms -- it is far from plain language.  There is much room for improvement from a document design point of view.

Professor for one year (week 25): Dress properly

When you look for advice on how to dress professionally, you always hear: "Dress appropriately," and "You should feel comfortable with what you wear."  OK, the second part is easy: It depends on the season how many pieces you wear, and maybe after Christmas-New-Year-holidays you'll have to adjust your clothes a bit.  But "appropriately"?

When you have a job interview, this is a critical question.  For people in medicine or law it's easy, you wear a suit as a man and a pantsuit or deux-pièces (skirt suit) as a woman.  You want to look like "one of them," you want to look like the other professors.  So what do professors in Computational Linguistics look like?

The old men wearing three-piece suits are retiring these days.

When do you see professors wearing formal clothes?  Maybe on conferences.  Only a few men wear suits regularly, most wear pants and coats, some even wear jeans and pullovers or fleece jackets.  Women wear pants and coats, some even wear jeans and fleece jackets (oh, no gender difference?  OK, some women also wear skirts or dresses, but I'm not into skirts.)  So maybe for very official occasions, I get a bit more formal with pants and a blazer.

But what do you wear on a day-to-day basis?  You won't look overdressed and feel comfortable at the same time, so jeans and fleece jacket would be OK?  But then you make experiences like I did on my first days in Konstanz, people treat you like another student.

How could I show that I'm a bit more mature than my students?  Maybe getting grey hair would help.  But that's not the best option, you simply feel old -- not mature or professional -- discovering the first grey hair in the mirror.  As a man, I could grow a full beard.  But wait, I already had bachelor students with full beard -- so no significant difference again.

I guess I'll have to live with being mistaken for a student from time to time, a deux-pièces simply doesn't go with my EDC -- Kitchensink and Motörizers.

Professor for one year (week 23): Repositories

In today's scientific community, it's all about publications, journals, and impact factors.  So you not only publish your research in a high-ranked journal or via a high-ranked conference, but you keep track of your publications, make lists, allow others to access your publications, and hope to get cited.

For me, the best place to store and maintain publications is CiteULike:

I have full control of what is listed here, I can store full papers, and I can extract the publication meta data as BibTeX data.  This also means that available categories are consistent with usual BibTeX categories, i.e., article in proceedings, book, edited book, book chapter, thesis, technical report, etc.

CiteULike is also the place I store all bibliographic information of papers and books I read (or I want to read) and the papers itself.  I put quite some effort in this: if the paper is available online, I upload it and add the link, if it's from a paper-only publication, I scan it and then store it there.  So for almost all of the seven hundred and something papers in my library, I can access the paper itself.  I add abstracts and keywords.  I can export the meta data as BibTeX and thus use it for referencing stuff when writing an article myself.  It's consistent and up-to-date.  There is very convenient feature: the Post-to-CiteULike button you can add to your browser.  In most of the cases, I can add a reference by using this button and then maybe correcting some information.

The only drawback with CiteULike I encountered over the years:  I cannot download all the stored papers at once.  It would be very convenient to have off-line access to all data when writing an article -- however, abstract and keywords are included in the BibTeX export, this already is quite nice.

I also have a ResearchGate account I try to maintain:

There are some odd things with ResearchGate: Look at the very first entry, it refers to the proceedings of SFCM 2013.  I'm one of the editors of this book.  Yes, it's an edited book and/or "conference proceedings (whole)."  However, ResearchGate lacks both of these categories: if you choose "book", you have to input "authors."  After exchanging quite some e-mails with them, they were finally able to list the publication at all.  But it now has authors and editors and those are identical.  Very annoying.

Next, ResearchGate tries to find your publications in the Web.  When creating an account, this is somewhat convenient, you don't have to input all your publications by hand -- uploading a valid BibTeX file as exported from CiteULike doesn't work properly.  However, as publications are listed at various places, sometimes with different (wrong) meta data, it also finds incorrect data.  And it comes up again and again and again proposing to add this data -- it's impossible to stop this.  Oh, and the number of citations is wrong.

However, it's a nice place to be informed about recent publications of colleagues.  I also had an eye-opener some time ago: When you list the people you follow, their names, ResearchGate score, and impact factor is listed.  I follow some linguists, some computer scientists, some psychologists, and some computational linguists.  And it's very easy to recognize the computational linguists -- they have very low impact factors or none at all.  A very nice empirical confirmation that journals (and moreover: indexed journals) don't play a big role in computational linguistics.

I also have a Google Scholar account I try to maintain:

Google Scholar doesn't come up with suggestions to include incorrect data and I can add information myself.  The citation number seems to be somewhat realistic, although you never know about the missing citations (except your self-citations).

I also have an account with Microsoft Academic Search I try to maintain:

Here, incorrect information is included -- I'm not into Chemistry, although I did my secondary school written exam in Chemistry, but how should Microsoft know about this?  You can try to edit and add data, but it takes a long time until it finally appears.  The number of citations is incorrect, the list of conferences, too.

I put most of my publications in ZORA, the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, hosted by the University of Zurich:

I don't maintain this list anymore, so publications there stop in 2011.

I list my publications on my website:

Here the order is by type of publication (journal articles, edited books, book chapters, conference/workshop papers, other) as usually done in the humanities.  If possible, I give the link to the full paper, i.e., to a repository (most of the time it's ZORA) or to the original article if published as open access.




And of course I need a list of publications for job and grant applications.  Here I order them by year and mark the topic (linguistics, NLP, e-learning, writing research).  Additionally, I list the publications "in press" with the date of submission of the final version.

And yes, publication number 32, final version submitted in October 2011, still is "in press".

Oh, and some of my publications are listed in the catalogue of the German National Library and in the ACM Digital Library.

I seem to have an account with Academia, which I don't maintain:

The only reason for this profile: I wanted to download a paper from there following a provided link.  But I had to click through a dozen of pop-ups creating my own account before being able to do so.  I never access this site and so it includes invalid information, most importantly: No information on co-authors is given.  Actually, it seems to be impossible to list co-authors at all.

I still have an account at ResearcherID:

I don't maintain this account.  The interface is ugly and maintaining the list is annoying -- you have to use an online version of EndNote, which is slow and not very user friendly at the same time.  I think I also lost the password, so I cannot delete this account.

I also had an account with Mendeley, but I managed to delete this one some months ago.  It was as user friendly as ResearcherID, I never used it.


That's a lot of places.  But wait, I also added some publications to the Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System(KOPS) and some to the Uni Basel Research Database (those publications that had been published when I was employed at these places -- and yes, some publications appear at both places, some because I had been employed at both places at the same time, some because the co-authors belong to different institutions): 

 
I used to list my publications also on the website I had at the University of Zurich and at the University of Basel -- I don't maintain a website at the University of Konstanz, there is only a link to my private-professional website. And when I start a new job at another institution, I will probably link to my CiteULike list of publications only.

But maybe the perfect repository is still to come?

Professor for one year (week 21): The WWW

The University of Konstanz uses ILIAS for E-Learning.  So far, I also worked with OLAT/OpenOLAT and Moodle, I will compare all three in a later post.  Today, I will only comment on the WWW I found in ILIAS.  No, not the World Wide Web, but the World's Worst Wiki.


That's how the editor looks like, you can modify text and make it bold, italic, etc. And you can itemize and enumerate things or have three levels of headings.  That's what I did in this short text: three headings (level 2) followed by a bit of text each.

Then you hit "Save" and face this:

The text is broken into small pieces and you are no longer able to edit the text as a whole!  You could edit or delete one of the headings or one of the paragraphs independently.  Awkward!

Sure, for the visitor of the page, it looks like it was intended:

With an interface like this, it's no fun to edit wiki pages.  Therefore I can forget about this activity in my courses -- I always have students organize group work, discuss ideas to present, collect material, and decide who is responsible for which part.  All of this involves structuring text, moving parts of written text around, editing and restructuring.  Which is impossible with this GUI.

Professor for one year (week 16): What is excellence?

After one semester of teaching at the University of Konstanz, it's time for some retrospection.  Konstanz is one of those "excellent" German universities -- which also means they have a bit more money than non-excellent universities.  (By the way, how are these universities labeled: "ordinary", "miserable", "amateurish"?)

So far, I spent several years at the University of Zurich (UZH), at the University of Basel (I taught at both), and at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (although I didn't teach there).  As researcher and lecturer, I had contact to departments concerned with study affairs and teaching in the broadest sense (e.g., teaching evaluation, examination authorities, e-learning consultants), to people concerned with facilitating research activities (e.g., publication database managers, third-party funding offices), and to the general administration (e.g., human resources, secretaries, and the "Abwart" or "Hausmeister" [caretaker] -- nowadays called "facility manager" in German).

For general issues like getting keys and a badge, German bureaucracy meets all the known prejudices perfectly.  You have to go from pillar to post just to realize that today nothing will happen, you will not even get the form you have to fill before being eligible to get a key.  The scene where Asterix and Obelix have to get permit A38 is a perfect match.  You have to find out by yourself about all the things you might need.  I was told, I even had to fill a form and get the signature of the department confirming that they would pay the costs for a -- trash bin!  I didn't even try to get a pencil, yet -- I rather bought one myself.  Whereas at Swiss institutions (not only in higher education) everything is prepared beforehand and you will get an invitation when to come where and collect your keys and your badge.  You are taken care of.  You just go and grab a new pencil.

At all Swiss institutions I worked at, offices were cleaned twice a week, restrooms were cleaned twice a day (around noon and in the evening, so when you come the next day, everything is clean).  In Konstanz, offices are cleaned twice a month, restrooms once a day (around 16:00; of course, people use them after this, so when you come the next day, everything looks messy again).

Swiss offices and lecture halls are equipped with high-value furniture from USM or Vitra, and desks and chairs are renewed regularly.  There is a design concept defining which furniture goes in which kind of working space (there are different chairs for offices, lecture halls, cafeterias, and waiting areas).  It gives a good atmosphere, you feel valued.  Someone invested in getting you a great office to create a positive and creative working ambiance.  Chairs meet ergonomic standards.  Oh, and you just order a new shelf, another chair for visitors, or a desk lamp by e-mail or online -- some days later you find it in your office.  In Konstanz, desks and chairs look very used and accidentally assembled.

I was lucky that someone wanted to get rid of an old orange desk lamp with a proper light bulb and I could use it; I don't like neon light coming from the ceiling.  And yes, this red chair is a victim of the ravages of time.

The only design furniture I am aware of are original Eames Side Chairs on stretchers in front of some professors' offices (a kind of waiting area for consulting hours). 

But this is probably due to the time the university was build: In the 1960s, the Eames furniture served -- as intended -- as mass produced chairs; you can still find the fiber chairs in older stadiums, concert halls, or universities.  Today's Eames chairs are rather expensive (at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, several dozens of original Eames DSS had been stolen this Spring) -- but still very nice for large seating in cafeterias or concert halls.

What I do like in Konstanz are some rather "facilitating" aspects:  As lecturer you get a link to configure evaluation questionnaires for your lectures, then you receive the printed copies to use them in your class.  Only two hours after submitting the filled-in questionnaires, I got an elaborate analysis via e-mail.  That's great!  At the UZH I had to evaluate the questionnaires myself manually.  Part of getting the excellence label for Konstanz meant  investing in support for students -- for example, they have a very active writing center -- and for researchers.  They provide a regular newsletter pointing to open calls for grants and awards sorted by topics -- i.e., calls for linguists, for chemists, etc. -- and by career level.  That's very convenient!

And then there are some simple things when you realize that this excellence label means something else than the word "excellence" -- Swiss universities don't label themselves as "excellent", but they offer more convenience for scientists.  For example, let's consider getting reimbursed for expenses related with attending conferences.  As researcher you go to conferences and workshops to present and discuss recent findings and to do networking.  In some areas like computer science or computational linguistics, where publications are mainly conference proceedings, authors have to attend the conference and give a talk to get their articles published.  Depending on the location and the duration of a conference, this can get rather expensive.  Since the university has an interest in publications, they should pay for it.  At UZH and in Basel, researchers could get reimbursement up to CHF 1000 per year.  Swiss researchers can also get funding from academies.  So maybe going to two European conferences per year is possible.  If there is additional money at the general budget of the institute or as part of third-party funded projects, you can even publish more.  In Konstanz, the amount of money available is very limited -- less than 2000 € per year to be split between all junior researchers (i.e., non-professors) of one rather large department.  Oh, and don't forget the messy forms you have to fill in before and after the conference!  And of course you have to submit two copies of the form, both signed and filled manually (as always, the forms cannot be filled properly by using a PDF viewer).  If you don't have third-party money, you will have to pay everything yourself -- which is feasible with a professor's salary, but not with the usual 50% or less assistant salary.  In the end, this contributes to statements like "in engineering, regular money is less than 20% of the general budget" (see here) -- everything else researchers acquire themselves.  The time you spend writing grant proposals is time you cannot spend to do research, to publish, or to teach. 

Comparing just single elements (reimbursement of conference travels, furniture) at Swiss and German universities shows that indeed Swiss universities are much more attractive without labeling themselves as "excellent" -- of course not to do so is part of the Swiss culture, but then: what does this say about German culture and the German self-perception? But of course these conclusions are based on a very small sample.  

Professor for one year (week 14): Consultation-hours

When you teach and supervise student projects, students sometimes want to discuss something.  They come to your consultation-hours.

If you don't have a walk-in policy, because you don't want to be interrupted constantly, you have a dedicated time when students can come to your office.  I offer consultation two hours a week on Tuesdays.  However, sometimes nobody will show up, sometimes five students are waiting in line.  So some consultation management is needed.

The traditional way is to use a sheet of paper.  You print a list (or draw one by hand) with consultation slots and pin it to your door.  Students have to sign up for a slot beforehand and then they can come for consultation.  However, this means you have to remember to pin a new sheet of paper each week (or you need a secretary for this task), and students have to come by twice.  Sometimes they even have to stop by your office more often in case all slots for this week have been filled already.  This is very inconvenient, especially when your office is on a floor no student comes by regularly.  I also don't think it is a good idea that everybody can see who is coming when for consultation -- sometimes students even have to write the topic they want discuss.  And I don't want to pin paper to my door -- it's ugly and there are fire authority regulations.

For some time now, I have been looking for an electronic solution.  I have only a few requirements:

1. I want to set up all the slots at once with as least effort as possible.
2. Students should sign up some days in advance -- I prefer to plan my days and maybe skip the consultation-hours completely if nobody will come.  So no surprises an hour before, please.
3. I want to be notified who is coming when.
4. No costs.
5. Oh, and I just want to have this tool only, no fancy add-ons.  No need to create a bigger structure.

I thought about using Doodle, but this would not meet the requirement #1, and also for requirement #2 it would not work.  Of course your LMS (learning management system) or your university's CMS (content management system) would be the perfect plase for a tool like this.  However, they usually don't offer this kind of functionality. 

The University of Konstanz uses ILIAS, and you can have a personal calender -- as for most LMS.  This calender also has a "Consultation hours" functionality.  Perfect!  And you can integrate this calendar into all your courses.  Even better!

But then it doesn't meet requirement #5.  Of course, it is nice to have this calender in all the courses I use for lectures.  But some students I supervise do not attend any of my courses.  So they cannot access this calendar.  Unless I create another course with this calendar only -- no, wait, I have to ask someone to create such a course, I cannot do this myself because of the right managament.  There is no structure element in ILIAS where students could access calendars for consultation-hours of lecturers.  They have to sign up for a specific course first and then they can access this calendar and book a consultation appointment.

So in the end, I do have a sheet of paper pinned to my office door -- a description on how to sign up for consultation.  At least I don't have to remember to print a new one each week.

Professor for one year (week 12): Lessons learned

You learn from errors.  It would be great if you could just learn from errors made by someone else.  But sometimes I even make the same error again and again -- at the first sight it looks like a different situation, but in the end it's not.  However, here is a short list of lessons I hope I finally got:

Don't trust the nice guys

This is the academic equivalent of "Give him an inch and he will take a mile."  There are deadlines and guidelines.  Both are there for a purpose.  Sometimes, people ask you for an extension of a deadline.  And if you think the person will be able to meet the new deadline and deliver something of high quality, you agree -- even more, if you think it's a nice person and everything will go smoothly.  But then people start negotiating this and that and you spend a lot of time discussing and explaining that of course you expect guidelines to be carefully attended.

Don't make verbal contracts

Although in Switzerland (and maybe in Germany, too?) contracts don't necessarily have to be signed by the involved parties, it's not a good idea to only have verbal contracts.  I made this error twice.  The last time, I accepted a job without even asking about the payment.  I was lucky enough that the payment is OK.  Before this, I got an offer including a statement about payment.  I agreed, resigned my former job and started the new one.  I hadn't signed a contract for the new job.  Two weeks after my first day I got the contract -- with a much lower payment.  It turned out that even the salary stated in this contract wasn't correct.  I could negotiate a bit, but I regretted having resigned my old job.

Don't procrastinate

This is easy, you should start a task as early as possible and necessary.  Most of the time I estimate the time a job will take.  And I start just the estimated amount of time before the deadline.  Sometimes it is easy and my estimation is correct.  But most of the time it is not.  Some jobs or projects take longer and then I have to work until very late, I get tired, and I'm angry about myself.  Sometimes I get a job done a lot faster than estimated -- but then I'm angry about myself too, because I spend more time planning and thinking about the task and defining the best point to start than for the task itself.  If I would have started immediately, I could have had more time for something else.

You always underestimate the time needed for a software project

"Software project" refers to every kind of programming task, may it be small or large.  Even with a lot of experience, every project is something new and every project comes with surprises.  Clients change specifications on the fly, you start without any specification at all, nobody is available for beta-testing -- it just has to work now! --, you don't have a backup structure or even a backup strategy.  You spend hours with debugging, because you have been interrupted in the middle of programming a structure.  You work with a not-so-mature framework.  Documentation is only available for a different version of the framework than you are using.  The data you work with is bigger than expected and interactive processes have to be transferred to batch processes.

But what to learn from all this -- don't program at all?  The better lesson is probably to learn to estimate better.  Somewhere I read that for programming you estimate the time needed, then double the amount, and then take the next larger time unit -- for a task estimated to be done in one hour, this will result in two days you should allow for.

End then you have to take into account the user of the code you produce.  If it is only you, you can skip comments and keep it simple (like using default variables, anonymous datastructures, short versions of control structures, etc).  For other programmers being the users, you need to add more information and you should do error handling.  The next step would be a program someone will call from the command line.  Even more effort is needed for a web application.  And even more time you need for adding a nice GUI and converting it into an actuall application.  I think there was an article in the Communications of the ACM some months ago basically saying that each step increases the time needed by factor ten.  And of course being a computational linguist, most of the time your "clients" will be linguists or other non-technical users -- so whatever you program it has to have some kind of interface and user guidance.  Meaning that you are creating actual applications, not scripts that just output a number or a string.

Don't reschedule your plans and don't discuss programming with non-technical people

Having said that programming will allways need more time than you had estimated -- the Hofstadter's law -- you should never agree to reschedule your plans because your users think they need the things to be done just now.  The only effect this will have is more stress on you and constant arguing with your users.  People without any experience in programming usually cannot assess the complexity of a task --  How costly is sorting large data?   How long does it take to create a frequency list?  What does it need to allow users to make searchable comments during annotating corpora?  What does it mean to "have everything in a database?" -- You are the expert, you estimate the time needed and you decide if a feature should be implemented at all.  There is no sense in spending a lot of time in implementing a "probably-nice-to-have feature" just to find out that no-one will use it.  If users don't provide a specification and are not willing to create a specification together with the programmer, it's up to the programmer to create something.  With usually tight schedules in projects, there is no time for specifying something on the fly or to make substantial changes after a first version has been tested.

Professor for one year (week 9): Lots of trouble

Last week was a busy week.  I spent two days with the GPP13 participants in Riva San Vitale (TI) with lots of discussions and interaction.  Students at the University of Konstanz had to solve assignments on their own in the computer lab.

Before I started the trip to Riva, I got a message that over the weekend somebody committed burglary at the university.  They stole some items from the athletics office.  This office has a connecting door to our computer lab.  And there we had a dozen iMacs and a dozen MacMinis.  All of the Minis have been stolen!

Now this has various impacts:  Most obviously, my colleagues have to deal with the police and probably with the insurance company.  Then we have to by new computers and set them up.  For the moment, the technician is busy with configuring old iMacs to make sure teaching can go on.  I don't know yet how I will conduct the computer-based exam at the end of July.

Not so obvious are some other effects:  The lab is a bunch of stand-alone computers, you start the computer and then log in using a local account.  There is no connection to any net-based disk space.  Everything is stored locally.  That means that everything students had stored on the MacMinis (e.g., programs and notes) is lost.  Some students already had started to work on projects; unless they had stored these data on a private device, this work is lost, too.

So it is always a good idea to have backups on a local device or to send everything to yourself via e-mail.  But of course it would be even better to offer access to net-based disk space.  When you log in, you connect to your university account and you can store everything there.  This also means that you always use your personal account, not a local one.  That's the way computer labs at the University of Zurich work.  So students don't have to remember which computer they worked with during the last lecture and they can access their data from everywhere.  Also OLAT, the LMS used in Zurich provides some personal storing space; students can use this to store data they want to access from different locations or they want to share with student fellows for project work or the like.  Unfortunately, ILIAS (the LMS used in Konstanz) does not offer this.

When I was just recovering from the burglary message, I got another message basically asking, if I was aware that next semester I would not teach the courses I offered to teach some days before -- instead of a research colloquium, I'm supposed to offer a seminar for students enrolled in teacher training for German.  Aha!

This week is a "normal week", I hope.  Next week I will be in the US, again with GPP13.  I hope surprises will be kept to a minimum.