The first review of my first column: a grad student passing in the hallway asks, "What have you got against adjuncts?" Sigh. I had called my colleagues dorks and committed some other minor transgressions, but I knew what would stick was my questioning whether universities were obliged to help limited-term hires become permanent.

Conferences are a routine experience for academics, who regularly pursue up-to-date research in their highly specialized fields by attending national and international gatherings. The confines of specialization are burst open, however, when retired scholars assemble, as they did at the University of Toronto on April 11, to hold a "Senior Scholars Symposium.

It was a bit of a nightmare when Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, biology professor at Laurentian University, found himself blindsided by a powerful Ontario politician's attack. Conservative leader John Tory said in a March press release that the biologist was wasting $150,000 of public money "studying flying squirrel sex.

The University Affairs style manual (ok, it's not a manual, it's more like a Post-it, mostly advising contributors not to use words like "aspect", "scenario", or "ivory tower grunt monkeys") recommends that if you don't know whether a professor has a doctorate or not, call her "Professor"; if you learn she does, call her "Dr. " I find this odd, because "Professor" strikes me as more of an honorific than "Dr.

Teaching science offers significant challenges, including low student interest, varying levels of students' math literacy and a need to deal with abstract concepts. Many students see science as a foreign culture with little relevance to their daily lives.

Every year, come September, come January, faculty meet in hallways, asking, "How's it going, what's new - how many you got?" We think about students as people first, really we do, but at that one time in the term, they are also numbers.

I once knew a professor who liked books. He read one a day, it was said, every day of his adult life.