It has been two months since my last post. Sorry for the extended silence, but I do have a real job. It is not coincidental that my last post precedes the start of the semester. It has been the best of semesters, but mostly the worst of semesters.

On the positive side, I’m teaching our upper level cosmology course. The students are great, really interested and interactive. Interest has always run high, going back to the first time I taught it (in 1999) as a graduate course at the University of Maryland. Aficionados of web history may marvel at the old course website, which was one of the first of its kind, as was the class – prior to that, graduate level cosmology was often taught as part of extragalactic astronomy. Being a new member of the faculty, it was an obvious gap to fill. I also remember with bemusement receiving Mike A’Hearn (comet expert and PI of Deep Impact) as an envoy from the serious-minded planetary scientists, who wondered if there was enough legitimate substance to the historically flaky subject of cosmology to teach a full three credit graduate course on the subject. Being both an expert and a skeptic, it was easy to reassure him: yes.

That class was large for a graduate level course, being taken in equal numbers by both astronomy and physics students. The astronomers were shocked and horrified that I went so deeply into the background theory to frame the course from the outset, and frequently asked “what’s a metric?” while the physicists loved that part. When we got to observational constraints, you could see the astronomers’ eyes glaze – not the distance scale again – while the physicists desperately asked “what’s a distance modulus?” This dichotomy persists.

This semester’s course is the largest it has ever been, up 70% from previous already-large enrollments. This is consistent with the explosive growth of the field. Interest in the field has never been higher. The number of astronomy majors has doubled over the past decade, having doubled already in the preceding decade.

Astronomy bachelor’s degrees as reported by the American Institute of Physics.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that over the past four years, our department has been allowed to whither. In 2018, we were the smallest astronomy department in the country, with five tenured professors and an observatory manager who functioned as research faculty. The inevitable retirements that we had warned our administration were coming arrived, and we were allowed to fall off the demographic cliff (a common problem here and at many institutions). Despite the clear demand and the depth, breadth, and diversity of the available talent pool, the only faculty hire we have made in the past decade was an instructor (a rank that differs from a professor in having no research obligations), so now we are a department of two tenured professors and one instructor. I thought we were already small! It boggles the mind when you realize that the three of us are obliged to cover literally the entire universe in our curriculum.

Though always a small department, we managed. Now we don’t manage so much as cling to the edge of the cliff by our fingernails. We can barely cover the required courses for our majors. During the peak of concern about the Covid pandemic, we Chairs were asked to provide a plan for covering courses should one or some of our faculty become ill for an extended period. What a joke. The only “plan” I could offer was “don’t get sick.”

We did at least get along, which is not the case with faculty in all departments. The only minor tension we sometimes encountered was the distribution of research students. A Capstone (basically a senior thesis) is required here, and some faculty wound up with a higher supervisory load than others. That is baked-in now, as we have fewer faculty but more students to supervise.

We have reached a breaking point. The only way to address the problems we face is to hire new faculty. So the solution proffered by the dean is to merge our department into Physics.

Regardless of any other pros and cons, a merger does nothing to address the fundamental problem: we need astronomers to teach the astronomy curriculum. We need astronomers to conduct astronomy research, and to have a critical mass for a viable research community. In short, we need astronomers to do astronomy.

I have been Chair of the CWRU Department of Astronomy for over seven years now. Prof. Mihos served in this capacity for six years before that. No sane faculty member wants to be Chair; it is a service obligation we take on because there are tasks that need doing to serve our students and enable our research. Though necessary, these tasks are a drain on the person doing them, and detract from our ability to help our students and conduct research. Having sustained the department for this long to be told we needn’t have bothered is a deep and profound betrayal. I did not come here to turn out the lights.

Stacy McGaugh is an astrophysicist and cosmologist who studies galaxies, dark matter, and theories of modified gravity. He is an expert on low surface brightness galaxies, a class of objects in which the stars are spread thin compared to bright galaxies like our own Milky Way. He demonstrated that these dim galaxies appear to be dark matter dominated, providing unique tests of theories of galaxy formation and modified gravity. Professor McGaugh is currently the chair of the Department of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and director of the Warner and Swasey Observatory. Previously he was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, having also held research fellowships at Rutgers, the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

33 thoughts on “Not quiet on the northern front”

  1. It sounds like there needs to be some sort of financial grant to enable your university to hire the astronomer faculty it needs. I would contribute something on the order of $50,000 to such a grant, for my part.

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    1. Thanks! That’s very generous. But I’m assured the issue isn’t financial, and it certainly shouldn’t be since our department’s budget is down half a million dollars a year from the retirements. The overall budget certainly hasn’t suffered a proportional reduction; these resources simply have not been reinvested in astronomy. That’s a choice by the administration.

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  2. Perhaps what is needed to rejuvenate your program are some fresh ideas to help further the discussion. I trust you have time to read the first page of the second piece captioned as the Addendum re: the Muon and Tau Families in the link below. If it is of interest and further pursuit, given time it can help generate that discussion and rejuvenation.
    I have enjoyed your comments over the past year.
    https://uniservent.org/pp01-condensed-matter-model-of-fundamental-particles/

    Sent from my iPhone

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    1. That implies a level of thought deeper than I have seen on display, though it does seem to be an issue that the fields are perceived to be the same, even if really the physicists have co-opted some of the words to mean different things.

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  4. Sorry to hear the state of things at Case. I’ve been reading some bad things about the recent history of education in the U.S. “Blight” does not seem too strong a word. I’m very glad you are tenured.

    I’ve been following this blog for a few years now, having followed a link from Sabine’s Backreaction sometime around Higgs Hysteria. It’s led to untold hours with textbooks and open access publications, the arxiv, etc. Some was re-learning, much has new to me, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. It was also a useful means of mostly not being much bothered by pandemic lockdowns.

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      1. Boon doessn’t even begin to cover it. Yes, I too followed Sabine’s link some years back. Yes, I have bought books and googled until my eyes bleed to get up to speed. I have linked some ex-students to your blog to give them an alternative education on interpreting anomalous rotation, and they too find your explanations most illuminating.

        Over the pond here academia is under pressure from economic reality once again (or more correctly, is under even greater pressure) and intellectual literacy will be the victim. I feel for you in your horrible situation.

        Thanks for all you do and especially the blog.

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  5. Maybe a merger with the physics department won’t be such a bad thing. I believe students education should not be too narrow and it will allow them to work on astronomical instruments and new telescopes if they want to. Much of your existing departments teaching could be move to undergraduate option courses and the masters level, and perhaps you can run Astronomy dedicated summers schools for students not interested in the maths.

    I don’t think you sell your course on Dark Matter well. It should be named “Dark Matter vs Modified Gravity” or something exciting scientific debate.

    The question what does your department get in return for compromise:
    a) Name change: Institute of Physics and Astronomy and better joint promotion
    b) Astronomy staff numbers increased in the process
    etc etc

    I think you are being too negative.

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    1. Actually, I’m being far too positive – I just haven’t shared that many details.

      Our students are already required to take a lot of physics courses; you can’t do astrophysics without knowing a lot of physics. That doesn’t make them the same field – a good physics background is a good starting point, but there is an awful lot to learn beyond that. Still, my complaints are less about field boundaries and more about administrative process. University administrations should enable the work of their faculty; instead, they often impede us. This is such a case.

      I’m not sure what you mean about “students not interested in the maths.” We already run summer introductory courses. Everything above that requires plenty of both math and physics.

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      1. Oh, and one of the process issues – we get nothing. There has been no commitment to hiring new staff or any other positive to make this an attractive proposition, just a vague intimation that this is the way forward.

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  6. As was the case in my department in a Medical School, I assume all administrative decisions are based on the availability of grant money. I don’t know the details of astronomy versus physics funding. Is there more money available in physics, per capita?

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    1. Physics grants tend to be larger. There is plenty of investment in Astronomy per capita, but it mostly goes into major facilities like JWST. Relatively little trickles down to individual investigator grants.

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  7. Dr McGaugh, what is the employment situation for new astronomy graduates? Is there sufficient demand for the current number of graduates?

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  8. You have played a very important role in questioning the LCDM paradigm. MOND is no longer so easily dismissed. Also, your field is promising to move very fast when results from the JWST are properly assimilated.
    Even without the JWST, intriguing results are constantly emerging. The latest example is the analysis of some open star clusters, where significantly more “lost” stars are found in the front “tail”, compared to the rear “tail”, in defiance of Newton’s laws but in accordance with MOND.
    So this is just a roundabout of saying that, should the scientific community come to recognise the need to revise LCDM, and your role in this process duly recognised, your university may suddenly find the missing funds.

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    2. Dear T. Redding,
      I would be very grateful to you for a reference about this analysis of open cluster.
      And for the the owner of this blog, all I can do is to repeat Dan Varnam’s words
      “Thanks for all you do and especially the blog.”

      Maurice

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      1. Hi Maurice,
        Go into the science reporting web site phys.org, and look up under the sub section “Astronomy & Space”. Or, for the original paper, see Michael Musson, below.

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  9. And yet, the tide (tidal?) seems to be turning lately with new results like:

    Pavel Kroupa et al, Asymmetrical tidal tails of open star clusters: stars crossing their cluster’s práh challenge Newtonian gravitation, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2022). doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac2563

    I would think your institution would be eager to support you.

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    1. The institutional support is the issue. I don’t need much support; but Chris and I have been trying to hold up the department as it crumbles. It is bad enough to have this argument with a community that, for the most part, has chosen not to listen, but until recently I at least felt that my institution had my back. Not so much, apparently.

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  10. When the administrators don’t respond to rising course enrollments with more teaching bodies—even untenured ones—then something odd is going on. Especially if you’re attracting more undergrad majors.

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  11. I know this is probably not practical, but, if there is some grunt work I could help with on line as a volunteer, and reduce the load on yourself or Dr. Mihos, I would be quite honored to do so, gratis. I am retired now, so I could devote 20 or so hours a week to such work. As I said, I know this is probably not practical, but I felt compelled to offer.

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      1. I was thinking of things like proof reading, searching for on line documents, things like that maybe. The way I see it, anything I can do, no matter how trivial, to save you guys some time is time that you can use for your own research, and therefore bring the end of this DM nonsense a little bit closer.
        Anyway, the offer is always open if ever a way for me to help turns up.

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  12. I am a regular reader of your blog and a fellow professor. I am saddened to hear that your dean wants to merge your astronomy department with the physics department. I too was in a similar situation back in 2013. Your employer, Case Western University, is where the Michelson-Morley experiment took place. Therefore, erasing its astronomy department is an affront to history. Would you like your readers to write to your dean asking him to reconsider?

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