Decoding Academia: Power, Hierarchies, and Transforming Institutions.
Intro
Decoding Academia: Power, Hierarchies, and Transforming Institutions is a Spring course at Stanford (HRP 255) focused on helping students understand the “hidden curriculum” (i.e., unwritten rules that influence success) in academia as well as pathways toward change. Topics include faculty governance, funding models, publishing, incentive structures, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Content centers largely on the social, health, and computational sciences but enrollment is not restricted. Format features lectures, discussions, practical assignments, and student presentations.
Instructor
Prof. Sherri Rose comes from a low-income background and experienced first-hand some of the challenges of navigating academic environments without understanding the “hidden curriculum.” She is faculty at Stanford University.
Week 01
Colleges and Universities
Topics Covered: Institution types, faculty and student demographics, hierarchies that exist in academia, incentives created by ranking and classification systems, and defining peer institutions.
Required Reading for Next Class: Bas Hofstra, Daniel McFarland, Sanne Smith, David Jurgens. (2022). Diversifying the professoriate, Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. [Link]
Time Traveling CV Assignment: Choose a faculty member from your field who is Associate Professor or Professor and has a recent (i.e., 2020 or later) publicly available CV at that rank. You’ll remove everything from the CV that occurred after graduate school. (This can be approximate.) Include a short reflection (~200 words) on what you learned from this exercise.
Week 02
Graduate Student Essentials
Topics Covered: Being a trainee, transitioning to research, developing a research vision, and support & mentoring networks.
Required Reading for Next Class: Chandani Patel (2016). Why I said no, Inside Higher Ed. [Link]; Sahalie Donaldson, Abbi Ross, Oyin Adedoyin, Chelsea Long (2022). Rejected. These five scholars were denied tenure. Could they move on? The Chronicle of Higher Education. [Link]
Funding Assignment: Identify a grant or fellowship you are currently eligible for or will be in the future:
• Who is the funding organization (e.g., Stanford, professional society, federal government institution)?
• What are the required components (e.g., essay, paper, letters of recommendation, transcripts)?
• What do you see as the barriers to application? Why might some people apply and others not? What could be done to ameliorate these barriers?
Write a half page summary with this information.
Week 03
Faculty Roles & Governance
Week 04
Budgets & Funding Models
Week 05
Publishing & Academic Writing
Week 06
Academic Incentive Structures
Week 07
Conferences, Networking, and Science Communication
Week 08
The Future
Week 09
Final Project Presentations
Careers and End of Class Reflections
Week 10