Help, I'm trapped in an ivory tower! Or "what the fuck am i getting myself into with this academia stuff"

Dunno if this will go anywhere, but there seem to be a few of us and it's nice to have a home thread...

Some happy thoughts to kick off:

I know of people that have given a purportedly crippled software to a collegue to sabotage his project. I’ve been violently attacked verbally for having dared talking with my supervisor of a project I was collaborating with, because she feared that I wanted to “steal” her credit. And I can’t blame her: she was “helped” by another postdoc when she first came in Cambridge, only to find all credit for her work taken by the nice and smiling guy who scammed her by “helping” her. There are endless horror stories like that. Everywhere. Now, do you want to work in a place full of insanely clever people who are also insanely cynical and determined to do everything to get on top of you? If so, you can do top level science.

http://blog.devicerandom.org/2011/02/18/getting-a-life/

i gave up graduate school, where my degree would have only set me up for PHd work, to go to law school.

tbh, i should have become a circus clown instead. or a paid assassin.

Or both. Imagine the possibilities.

yeah, except few of the high-value assassin targets go to rodeo shows.

hard to cross-pollinate good careers.

ameritocracy!

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/the-strangest-conference-i-ever-attended/32805

2 stories:

1) friend goes to top 10 history dept, makes straight a's, gets into masters program at top 3 history grad department. makes a 3.7, runs the international blah blah film festival and in general excels in his studies. at the end of the 2 years, his advisor is like, "well, look, a 3.7 isn't bad and youre a smart guy, but i'm not going to write you a letter of recommendation. period. cause 2 other folx got 3.8's and frankly a phd for you will just be a $150,000 hole fr you to dig your way out of in bitterness and starbucks jobs. you should save yourself the misery, and to help you along i'm fucking your chances at getting into a phd program, on purpose. your welcome." dude went on to make crazy 6 figure salaries selling hospital equipmement in south america and land in seasia, and the advisdor was probably right. but that had to sting just a bit.

2) my dad's a professor. pay scale was quite comfortable, office politics were a bit sucky but when you have tenure who gives a fuck really. i could tell he loved his job, was bit jealous i didn't have the talent in acedemia to follow in his footsteps, honestly being a prof looked like an awesome job from close up.

BUT: even if you get that phd you're still about 1 in 50 from getting an opening position at a university, and what, 1 in 200 from getting tenured? competition is ridiculous, and yeah i've heard my share of backstabbing horror stories in the academic publishing communities. apply at your own risk!

still, nice work if you can get it.

'use other words, please':

'rich', re conference presentations, journal articles

Ruth Richards drove me to the station. As we sat in her car waiting for my train to come in she leaned back in her seat, lit a cigarette, then turned to me and said: “You know what keeps this whole thing going? What allows them to take themselves so seriously, and still go on behaving like this? It’s guys like my husband. My husband is a good man, a kind and gentle man, comes from a poor home, fought his way to the top. And he’s smart. Very, very smart. But you know? In spite of all that, and in spite of everything he knows, every morning of his life he wakes up, goes to the bathroom, starts to shave, and as he’s looking at himself in the mirror, somewhere inside of him a voice is saying: ‘Jesus Christ. I’m at Yale.’”

via

this is a booming post (and a great blog)

http://secondlanguage.blogspot.de/2013/05/science-as-hustle-and-bustle-2.html

also this

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/rowanpelling/8604337/Save-us-from-the-BBCs-New-Generation-Thinkers.html

and these

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109
http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/

sorry for link dump

As I enter my seventh year of teaching, I am now twelve days away from the big day: on the 18th of September there will be a private senior faculty meeting at which my colleagues will decide whether or not I get tenure. If they reject me, then I get a terminal year of employment in which to seek positions elsewhere (or else just leave the field) and then I lose my job. If they approve of me, I get the satisfaction of my colleague's esteem and temporary relief from the anxious feelings, and then my candidacy is kicked up the chain to another ad hoc committee (whose members are a secret) who then will take another 7-8 months to solicit further external letters, look over the report of my colleagues, and then decide if, for real, I actually get tenure or not. (The higher-up vote is not a rubber stamp at my school; at some institutions if the department supports you then it's a lock but that's not the case where I teach) The pressure is starting to get to me, in little ways and in big ways. Anyone on here who has made it to the farther shore? Any advice about how to manage the fear? I do realize, fully, how lucky I am to even be in this highly privileged position; when so many people are adjuncts, I got the brass ring, but now it's starting to burn my hands.

I made it through, twice even because the year after the big T I got another, better job, but to hire me with T they had to put me through the process again. How to manage the fear: I didn't? The first time I traveled a lot that term and made sure to avoid my colleagues after the vote until I heard the result. The second time I got weird twitches. It takes a permanent toll.

*Raises hand*: are there schools at which the odds are 50/50 or worse?

Yes. Harvard and Yale are pretty notorious for the very low rate at which junior faculty get tenure. My department hasn't had anyone come up for tenure in ten years and the last person who came up for it was denied tenure, so at my institution there isn't a great track record either. Trying to Keep It Positive, my book came out this spring, I've already published another article since then, and I have six book chapters or articles which have been accepted for publication and are forthcoming, so there's really no way they can make a productivity argument against my tenure. But they can always just decide that they don't like me or my work and then it's curtains.

well if they "just don't like you" then they'll have justify that, and you can appeal that etc. what's crucial there are the outside letters. how many do you need? my institutions have gotten about half a dozen, which I understand is fairly normal for R1s, but I've interviewed at a UC school that said they needed about 10 outside letters.

the outside letter part is weird, since you're not allowed to know even who wrote them. but they hold big time sway, especially with committees above your departmental one.

yeah, my chair can't tell me anything about the outside letters, I get the impression that the department solicits 5-7 and the outside ad hoc committee solicits another 5-7, so they're at 10-14 by the end of the process. I was allowed to submit some names that I *did not* want asked (i.e. people whose work I critique in my book), but I couldn't have any knowledge of who they were going to ask, for obvious reasons. If I'm honest with myself, I'm probably in pretty good shape with my colleagues (at our faculty meetings and cocktail parties and receptions everyone keeps reassuring me, over and over, that I'm going to get this). The fear of the ad hoc committee is the real killer for me, as I am going to be at the mercy of people who aren't in my field, and there are plenty of people in the sciences who really don't like critical theory-oriented work in the humanities (with good reason- some of it is junk).

yeah that's a lot of letters! it's a very mysterious thing: people who may not have heard of you are sent all of your work and asked to make a judgment on whether you'll lose your job or keep it for forever.

at my institutions departments don't send up the chain cases that they think stand a decent chance of failing.

just thinking about this stuff again gives me the willies, though. it's some comfort to know that we all go through this. but it's taken something out of me all the same. (though tbh so did grad school)

xp - why would they include scientists on the ad hoc committee? Is that standard for humanities depts?

The ad hoc folks may or may not be from the humanities. I just won't know.

As I lope towards the finish line, I gotta say I am increasingly struck by the push-pull of difference between the battle to get an academic book contract for a first book from a decent press and the battle to get tenure that comes in its wake. Post 2008 bank crisis and the new austerity that made university presses increasingly skeptical /skittish about first books, if you aren't saying something new, original, and different from the prevailing wisdom, then you aren't getting a book contract. But in order to get the approval of the older guard of senior scholars who are likely to be the sort of people approached for outside letters, you can't say something that bothers or pisses them off, repudiates their methodological commitments, re-directs the conversation away from their interests and habits and affiliations. So it seems like the very qualities that might help you get a book contract are the kind that might hurt you when it comes to getting approval from the mysterious outside letter writers. I guess the result is that it encourages a kind of "via media" of small c conservatism about the kind of arguments that you can make before you have tenure. If folks outside of academia wonder why it so often looks like people re-arranging the same intellectual furniture, this process seems to encourage that.

i think that's a very eloquent description of the double-bind faced by younger academics. i have a book manuscript in review at the moment and it's basically my only hope for landing a job.

my discipline (philo) doesn't require a book for tenure, or even for promotion to full, but we have the same issue with journal pubs, where acceptance rates in places that will count for tenure and promotion are 3%-5%. I said fuck it, I don't care about the same intellectual furniture as the bulk of my discipline, and I can do something else if this profession doesn't want me. I was warned about this from senior colleagues who are deeply sympathetic to my work, but I couldn't follow their advice and just write on what everyone else writes on; I can't do work that bores me. I'd have failed to get tenure on productivity grounds. but here I followed my nose, that what I was doing was something lots of other people *should* have considered interesting and worth promoting, and I wrote with that mission in mind.

being on outside of a job looking in, my thinking isn't much different. it's a wing and a prayer for me anyway so i figured might as well do something im passionate about and hope it's good enough and different enough that it stands out.

well re getting a job with that attitude the best thing to do is to get to know as many senior people as you can, and tell them about your work in short and crystal clear and compelling ways. when someone bites send them your work, and follow up on it. even if they don't hire you then maybe you can get a letter. junior candidates with outside letters have a leg up, especially if the outside letters provide with comparisons with other junior people, maybe even with their own students.

that's good advice, thanks! I'm definitely working on an outside letter.

i really don't know what compelled me to read through all of caek's lynx just now but christ

you're in academia too, right Lamp?

yeah that's a lot of letters! it's a very mysterious thing: people who may not have heard of you are sent all of your work and asked to make a judgment on whether you'll lose your job or keep it for forever.

how long do they typically spend doing that? cuz this would surely take a while to do properly once people have several articles, some chapters, maybe a book etc

i hope ttwp gets through successfully and with minimal agitation.....

usually a couple of weeks of devoted full-time work. it's a big deal.

My wife went through this two years ago, and since a very large % of our friends are also university faculty I've seen a whole lot of this recently. None of them really managed the fear so much as resigned themselves to the fact that once their materials were in there was nothing they could do to control the outcome so they at least stressed out in a different way, waiting for the letter to show up. Only one of these friends was denied tenure, and honestly his heart wasn't really in it anyway so it wasn't that surprising but still was pretty awful and he has since moved away which really sucks.

Now my wife's on the other side and it's kind of crazy and depressing for her to see how it all works - decisions overridden for shady reasons at very high levels, inappropriate things said at meetings that mean a of guarantee tenure or a lawsuit, etc.

power corrupts, even in academia

the american class system is unfair, even in academia

you're in academia too, right Lamp?

haha define 'in'

a series of thoughts on a friday afternoon: i wonder how many people are going to be able to get tenure spots in the next 5 years? 10 years? i wonder, somewhat desperately, about the value of my own research, abt the value of the undergraduate education students are getting, about the ways that universities serve to reinforce the growing inequality in our society and abt the values that universities (particularly elite universities) are instilling in their graduates. mostly i keep thinking about this article: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/on-quitting/

blah - hope yr tenure goes well dr3w but this thread is hella depressing for me

i really don't know what compelled me to read through all of caek's lynx just now but christ

Ha sorry man.

Tenure oh boy. Good luck USA.

Drew if its any help I am in basically the opposite discipline to you and find you writing compelling and your miserable blog radical.

aren't you in astronomy, or physics, caek? you'll find that engineering is more an opposite of the humanities than the pure sciences, in particular because the latter two domains are usually, in NA at least, lumped together in colleges or schools of arts & sciences, and thus hiring & promotion decisions for both humanities and pure sciences go through the same people at that level. whereas engineers have their own colleges/schools & their own rules. & they are as a rule friendly to neither the humanities nor the pure sciences.

tenure is a horrible system for faculty, students, staff and universities as a whole. at my place of employment the fucking librarians are tenured. which means you end up with 6-figure salaried morons who have been left behind by the past two decades of technological development and are not only unfireable but wield a disproportionately large hammer in terms of influence and power.

not to mention that the inherent inflexibility of the tenure system leads to lumbering faculty bodies capable only of noisily and unattractively blocking realistic and necessary policy changes.

the moribund atmosphere in a department due to what i assume were 80s/90s tenure decisions is precisely the reason i didn't take an otherwise good postdoc at an R1 a couple of years ago.

Yeah. It seems like the integral of productivity, total product I guess, is most important. Why not end tenure but also lower the productivity expectation a bit. Most engineers leaning toward academia seem to be trying the industry-to-tenure gambit these days, since a post doc no longer guarantees a professorship.

pretty isolated at the academic law library where i work, doing unsupported special collections stuff in tech services, no law degree just a library degree, making 15 bucks an hour (could be so much worse), at least the benefits are good. hearing word that my boss is the only non-j.d. librarian position here and she's just completely full of shit, 100% doo-doo brown, every last cell, but someone you don't want to try to push out, or at least i don't because i don't have it in me, i'm too inexperienced and raw. there's a new library director and i had some hope earlier this year because two tenured idiots are on the verge of retirement, but that's evaporated and i'm gritting my teeth covering for my boss's shitty work ethic and idiotic approach to everything. don't know how i can jump ship to something better since i feel like damaged goods, im almost 5 years past library school and still haven't had a professional-level job, my skill set seems way too skimpy for everything i see, oh yeah i hate this fucking place and all of the mormon breeders in it, doubt that good will is gonna carry me anywhere here. think it's finally time to save up for a year then get the hell out of here.

speaking of grim forecasts regarding academia today, has anybody else here checked out this book?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Faculty-Benjamin-Ginsberg/dp/0199975434

full disclosure: he's a colleague at my school, so I'm biased. I just read it last weekend. a really impassioned rant against the bloat of administration, there are some points at which he just reads schools to filth, I found it pretty addictive. That said, I wonder how it might read to someone who was not, themselves, a professor . . . The argument might simply come off as nostalgia for a lost moment of institutional dominance. But when he's on, he's on.

didn't read it yet, but it was discussed positively in this great frank piece from the latest baffler: http://thebaffler.com/past/academy_fight_song

you know when your boss has a ph.d. in communications, you're in trouble

that baffler piece is brutal and righteous

"That the people who hold the ultimate authority at our institutions of higher learning are dedicated to a notorious form of pseudo-knowledge is richly ironic, and it is also telling. The point of management theory, after all, is to establish the legitimacy of a social order and a social class who are, in fact, little more than drones."

poetic justice for humanities departments that travesty the socialism they tout by privileging privileged grad students over disadvantaged grad students

well since I barfed up all my tenure anxiety earlier in this thread, I thought I would share my good news: my department voted unanimously to support my tenure today. Now it goes up to the ad hoc committee so I will still have six months more of uncertainty and suspense, but my tenure could have simply ended today if my department had decided to deny me. The two hours of waiting around while they were at their meeting was a scary, scary time, and I was so freaked out when my chair called and started up by saying "I'm so sorry . . . " *I immediately assume he's about to tell me that I got shut down* " . . . to have taken so long to call you to tell you." Yikes!

I am really happy and really relieved. And I hope that I'm able to be mindful of the sheer luck and contingency that swaddles my "success" in the field- I think human beings are inclined to think that if they are happy and successful that it is somehow about their merit, that they deserve what they have and have earned it, even though they still know that the system as a whole is rigged and unfair and arbitrary in countless structural ways, no one wants that to apply too directly to their own case (we feel bathed in a tacit cloud of meritocracy). So, as much as I want to feel that this is the happy result of seven years of hard work in the department and beyond, I also know of so many talented and hard working people who are adjuncts who never even got the shot that I have had. Okay, gotta go to sleep so I can get up and teach my grad seminar.

congratulations

Congrats, tune!

congrats. it's a very big accomplishment, regardless of structural arbitrariness!

awesome; that's the hugest step at most places.

congratulations, inevitable contingencies aside you seem like a good work guy who's richly deserving of this.

WAY TO GO MAN

(and if your university works anything like mine, the ad hoc committee will be only humanities people)

congrats man!

huge congratulations, if your teaching is half as good as your writing your students are lucky indeed

Question for Euler, who mentioned on another thread that he was thinking of teaching a seminar on a topic he doesn't know well. How do you prepare for that? I guess re-read and perhaps read more, of course - but any particular strategies that you use to relate your reading to your teaching strategies?

it's a grad seminar, so I'll make it clear day 1 that it'll all be work in progress. that takes one edge off.

the subject will be an author I don't know well (Spinoza) on a topic I do know well (the "metaphysical" grounding of the inferential structure of mafemathiks) so I know what questions I'm looking for the text to shed light on. we'll work through the text each week knowing what our eyes should be kept upon.

I've done this a bunch of times, though, and usually in undergrad classes. my main "trick" is to make sure I'm psyched enough about the topics I choose to teach that I'll be able to base class time around what I take to be the "big questions" animating my interest, and then try to walk the students through the ways in which the text sheds light on those questions. I can never prep too long ahead of class, since so much of my prep work is getting excited about those animating questions, and that excitement can slip away if I prep a couple of days ahead of time. of course I write notes before class, but preparing those is easy if I know what I want to do.

and maybe the key thing is that I tend to teach texts, so tying class time to the texts is a requirement. I guess when I teach logic I just prepare like it's a math class, theorems, proofs, motivational questions, etc. if I didn't know ahead of time a technical topic I was teaching, I'd just write really good notes.

for me prepping for class isn't that different than prepping to give a research talk or write a paper. I'm trying to get something across to an audience and I've got to do it clearly because I only get one shot and everyone's attention is short. so it's got to be sharp and kinetic. I'm very easily bored and I assume my students are the same way.

Thanks, that's very useful and clear.

What does it mean in practice for the seminar to be 'work in progress' - that you will decide the following week's focus/trajectory based on the ideas that emerged this week? If so, does that include flexibility on picking the texts/parts of the texts themselves - 'at a minimum, we should read X, Y and Z and the rest is negotiable'? We have 'courses' rather than 'seminars', and the reading is pretty much set from the outset, although the prof might switch out readings 2-3 times if he/she finds interesting and relevant new papers.

we'll work through the text each week knowing what our eyes should be kept upon.

This is what I feel is lacking in my program. We often plough through experimental work without clear enough questions in mind. Only one course has been an exception, and that was a methods course.

yeah on the prof's part it depends on whether she wants to learn something new herself, or just communicate to others what she already knows. I have a hard time doing the latter: I get too bored. so I have to keep formulating things in terms I find interesting.

oh and on "work in progress" I just mean nothing is polished, I'm not presenting ideas that I already have under full control, and my hypotheses might be shattered by discussion. so what's being offered is def not a final product, ready for publication.

a little anxious venting: so i emailed my (potential) editor yesterday at the university press that is currently reviewing my book to check on its status. she tells me one of the reviews is in and they are simply waiting on the other one, but also that she has "a package ready to go to the board the minute the review arrives." is that a good, bad, or neutral comment?!? would an editor bother to prepare a package for a book that could still be rejected? i could probably ask her but i dont want to make any sudden movements.

It is neutral. It doesn't mean good or bad- it's just the process by which an academic book gets considered. My advice to you is to slow down, back off, and let their editorial process continue at the normal pace, because you don't want your editor thinking of you as pushy. It's fine and human to be curious, and they're used to that, but now that you've inquired, I would give them space. I know how hard that waiting time is, but you just have to do other things, work on other projects, and wait it out.

thanks! that's what i figured. i made a point to say it wasn't urgent so hopefully they believed me and took it as natural curiosity. my (potential) editor is exceptionally nice and pleasant, thankfully.

it's only a rough wait since im in the middle of applying for jobs and postdocs at the moment and it'd be real nice to mention a book in contract--feel like that's about the only thing on my cv that will make me stand out. and made a promise to myself to give up after this year.

the new academic job market: where you need a book before getting in the door!

believe me, I've been there, and waiting sucks but you have to just deal with it, and at least now you can say "under consideration at press X", and if there's a decision it's cool to pass that additional info on to schools that you're applying to. The weird part is that if you stay in the field the karma wheel turns and then you're the one who's late with your reader's report for an academic press that is about to have their meeting about potential book projects- you become the person you once speculated about, the mysterious anonymous reader. the press will need time for people on the committee to digest both reader's reports and come to their decision; the good news is that no press commissions reader's reports in the first place if they aren't potentially serious about a contract, but they can't make their case to the higher ups / board members without all the reports in place as that's just the procedure.

the academic job market is horrible and demoralizing and I'm sorry that my "deal with it" statement about the waiting part came off as kind of cold rather than compassionate- the point here is that you should be damn proud that you have a full ms under consideration at a press, and you should know how impressive that is to potential employers- the under consideration part is not AS great as "under contract", but it's still really fantastic and is IS going to make you stand out on the market. So . . . be good to yourself.

it did not come off "as deak with it" at all, fwiw. im happy to find some knowledgeable advice.

thanks for talking me off the ledge! i am going to embrace the limbo. back to composing cover letters...

ha, "deal with it," that is!

haha yes, I can't complain about late referees anymore, as I've sat on papers for a long time again and again. doesn't take me longer to review book projects than to review articles, since book proposals are just a précis usually, whereas with an article I have to read the whole thing carefully again and again. sitting on three articles right now, have refereed four articles and one book proposal so far this year. guessing that's a fairly normal to light load for tenured R1 faculty? but that's why I drag my feet sometimes.

yeah i dont blame them at all, and im sure i'd do the same. i've waited to hear about articles for totally insane amounts of time. (which makes even just publishing articles to polish your cv for the job market quite difficult).

by far the best front-page splash i have seen while visiting college web sites trolling for employment info:

http://www.dickinson.edu/uploadedImages/home_page/features/useful/Coe1.jpg

/useful/

clear message to freshman class

also, discovered/recalled that byu faculty swear to use CLEAN LANGUAGE

and live CHASTELY

'pending budgetary approval', always a solid sign

on search committee again this year

it won't take long just watch and see how the fellas lay their money down

another reassuring sign: 'customer service' link on a school's main page.

i am meeting grade grubbing for the first time in my career.

good luck usa.

it's repulsive. i want to take more points away.

is it pre-med students? yes it is pre-med students.

they are the worst

prepare for a call from the dean, srsly

yeah i am keeping copies of things.

since I already embarrassingly overshared on this thread i figured i owed an update on my book situation: split decision! well, the "negative" review wasn't all bad, it was "revise and resubmit." the editor, however, thinks the second reviewer "didn't get it" and wants to move on and try to get contract approval anyway. I have to write a diplomatic and polite response to the dissenting review for her to present to the board. fun times! i shouldn't complain though, this is (somewhat) good news!

is it pre-med students? yes it is pre-med students.

as someone who was once applying to med school i am half-sympathetic to these people (esp since here the gpa cut-off for the last 5 years has been 4.0) but lol yes, otm &c

ha i understand where it comes from. it's a bad situation. 4.0 is insane.

but in this case it isn't an a/a- borderline thing. this person is dreadful both academically (like my bet is she'll get a b-/c+ at the end of the semester on a course with an a- average, she's worse than the football players!) and in character, and the people who've told her she could be a doctor (her parents, her teachers?) have done her a terrible disservice.

ha caek like I dunno if you want to be a usa prof but if yes then this is like a daily thing

ha well 90% certain i'm not staying in academia, but if i were, the first thing i would do is leave the usa, but that's for unrelated reasons.

i have regular pre-med students who are a-/a and i expected that and can handle them. i can handle this girl too. it's just kind of shocking because it reflects so appallingly on whatever education and moral support and guidance she's had for the previous 17 years. i want to call her parents and ask to speak to any younger siblings in case they're doing the same thing to them.

perhaps she's a legacy admit

i almost never have gotten that anywhere except at the private school i taught at

i taught a class of 10 once in which 8 were either pre-med or pre-law. for the most part they were pretty great but you could tell school was very much a case of jumping through hoops for them. they simply wanted to perform well for me, and could probably take or leave any of the actual stuff discussed in class.

not that anyone should feel bad for getting a full-time college teaching gig, much less tenure

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2013/11/competing_for_tenure_is_like_competing_to_be_a_drug_lord.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/events/archive/2013/12/for-top-tier-universities-changes-in-higher-education-might-be-overblown/282180/

u of washington president:

Somebody once asked me how many professors work for me, and I said if you can ever find a professor who thinks he or she works for anybody, let me know.

heh

I jokingly call my chair my boss, but only when I want that person to take responsibility for something I don't want to bother with

i explained subordination to my students with the idea of an org chart, which only depressed me by how much institution seems to be bearing down on me for having so few people over me in the chart

if I just said "well the board of trustees and president and chancellor and provost and dean and chair are over me", it would be deceptive since it's really the *offices* of all those above me, which is like thousands of people since there are beaucoup deanlets and so on

and they're actually really, really nice

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/16/tenured-professor-boulder-says-she-being-forced-out-over-lecture-prostitution

worrying

my august employer http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2013/12/loyola_employees_camp_out_to_t.html#incart_flyout_news

how much of that is katrina-related and how much is just the usual academic budget disaster?

absurd mismanagement, overpriced c-list liberal arts school, faculty run amok.

katrina did wonders for private higher ed in new orleans as the city became a magnet for starry eyed do gooder types and profiteering "entrepreneurial" carpetbaggers. universities used sudden "financial exigencies" to purge faculty rolls of dissenters and underperforming-but-valuable programs (tulane axed CIVIL ENGINEERING after katrina ffs).

what's happening now is the inevitable easing of the post-k gold rush combined with the Death of Higher Education combined with a university so crippled by bureaucracy that librarians are tenured.

i think it's common for university librarians to be tenured.

i 'almost' got a job at loyno a few years back, seeing that makes me feel a tiny bit relieved, but then again i don't know anyone with a job whose institution isn't more or less on the brink of shutting down or turning into a degree mill

i don't think it's all that common these days. and from grueling firsthand experience it really shouldn't be. the real threats to academic freedom (a la your link earlier today) should be fought but diluting the pool with a bunch of frauds taking 6-month research leaves to assemble anecdotal evidence about library seating patterns doesn't help anybody and really just makes academia appear even more absurd to those not firmly attached to its teat.

haha ok sorry. so much rage.

what's going down here right now is that every college at loyno has to shrink its personnel budget by a certain percentage. that early retirement might help but what we were told is that only staff would be cut. the university wishes to retain the "special qualities" of its tenured/tenure-track faculty (all the adjuncts and extraordinary are p much gone already and there aren't any in the library anyway) so the entire burden of the layoffs falls on the (small, hardworking) staff. my job is not in danger as these morons wouldn't know what to fucking do with any of their tech shit if i weren't here but it's still infuriating.

this is all because they projected 975 freshmen this year and got, no joke, 625. and retention rate is in the toilet anyway.

some cuts, mainly to staff, were floated at my school to offset the same kind of enrollment-related shortfall.

as a precarious academic temp i was somewhat frustrated to see the faculty rallying themselves to 'solidarity' with staff who are essentially office workers. surely they have specialized expertise, career experience, etc., which would make losing a job hard (since there won't be that many employers looking for that specifically), but on the other hand, who's going to have a harder time finding work, the administrative staff or the adjuncts whose course assignments just turn out not to be there six months from now?

rage!!

precarious.

both, all, of my spring classes (starting january 13) just got cancelled because of low enrollment.

why does it have to be such a disaster to be a teacher??

: (

ugh I'm really sorry to hear that.

if some good things happen for me in the next few days I may have a shot at a postdoc somewhere but after that man I don't even know.

i learned today from a friendly student that my 'colleagues' have apparently been talking me down to the advisors, who play a heavy role in directing students during enrollment, so it's no wonder i didn't make the numbers for my courses that everyone else did.

this is some bullshit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KVyRqloGmk

i need to calibrate my anger, somewhere in between that and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7iOGfUdn0o

are you a temp?

yes, so i doubt i have any recourse, i wasn't guaranteed to get anything anyway.

it's one thing to not get the courses you were offered / promised / penciled in for because of being subject to the vicissitudes of enrollments and budget lines

but it's another thing to have full-time faculty actively contributing to it

once in grad school an older professor was describing the stupid pointless low-stakes decades-long intradepartmental spats that academics get into and i told him he wasn't really painting a rosy portrait of our future careers. he stopped and thought about it for a second and said, "well, you get summers off."

stakes = my rent and groceries

I hope things work out for you, j. this sort of thing is so shameful and depressing.

on a brighter note, I got some good news finally: my book is gonna be published!

haha you've just been waiting to bust that out huh

i have WRITTEN TO A VICE PRESIDENT, probably get a lotta empty sympathies in return

haha I literally just heard!

good luck with the vp. sounds like a super fucked up situation

i don't think joe biden is going to help here (hiyo!)

srsly though good luck. sounds nuts.

and i have gotten… the brushoff until after break, from a subordinate, near close of business on the last day of the semester.

nice how administrators who make $100k and $90k per can set things aside for a couple weeks and enjoy their holidayz

good work ryan

http://csufacultyvoice.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-dissertation-of-chicago-states-vice.html

none more righteous than those who uncover academic plagiarism by useless academic administrators

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/opinion/a-solution-for-bad-teaching.html?hp&rref=opinion

thoreau something something confirmed desperation

just had my first ever skype interview. now I'm preoccupied with how my face seemed super red somehow. interesting experience though. somehow it's easier for me since I'm not always the best at good eye contact. plus you can sweat like crazy and get away with it!

Just submitted my first grant application (an R03) yesterday, and it didn't end up being as shitty and blatantly uncompetitive as I'd feared! Still, the paylines are so low that it's a struggle not to think of it as a waste of time.

skype interviews are nice because no one has to travel for what'll be a 30-60 minute deal. I've been interviewed on skype once & have participated in skype interviews of job candidates about 40 times, and yeah, the physical things like eye contact, sweating, skin color, matters a lot less. I think they're pretty ideal for short-form interviews. fwiw my current department skips short-form interviews altogether; we just go right to flyouts

thankfully this is for a postdoc and there's no more interviews. so my my didn't-blow-it performance will stand.

i had a skype interview once, it was awkward, they had a whole committee huddled about two yards away from a computer

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/02/11/unemployed_professors_website_offers_student_papers_written_by_current_and.html

http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/d/da/Mr._Chunks.jpg/250px-Mr._Chunks.jpg

Leela: It's putrid. What do you feed him?
Bender: What comes out one head, we feed to the other. Also, Indian food.

wow. with essay grading being as arbitrary as it is im a little in doubt as to whether I could consistently produce A papers, frankly.

i might have to work to get an A from myself

i could swing a B on the regular no prob tho

when i was writing my masters dissertation (and hence filling my gmail with documents entitled 'dissertation' and such) i got a constant stream of google ads for those sites. i had a look and i think one of them claimed that they would, for some vast sum, produce a top quality phd thesis on a topic of your choice in something like three weeks. i think if i won the lottery i'd order one, i'm v curious as to what that would look like.

if you submit it and don't pass your defense do you get a refund?

I wish I could pay someone to write cover letters for me.

so I just woke up from my first, honest-to-god nightmare about tenure. in the nightmare I'm sitting down at a talk and somehow get into a horrible screaming argument with a helmet-haired older rich lady who starts letting me have it about the powerful donors to my university that she is friends with and telling me that she's going to speak to the university president about this outrage etc. I'm panicking and terrified and don't have any way to figure out how we even got into this argument about who sits where but as I wake up I realize, oh god, I'm now terrified about my tenure case in ways that are actually causing shit like this. I find out in late April / May and it looks good but right now my fate is in the hands of a mysterious ad hoc committee and I can't even talk to my colleagues about it, they're not allowed to tell me anything. So it's nightmares like this for me.

I can relate. The first time I got tenure, it wasn't that bad, because I traveled a lot that year and so didn't have to look my colleagues in the eyes very often. But the next year, I interviewed for a tenured position at another university, and so had to go through the whole tenure process a second time, at a significantly better university. That time was bad; the fear manifested itself physically. I got tenure both times and am now happily an employee at the second university, but yeah, I can relate.

haha I've been having weird kafkaesque nightmares about still being an *undergraduate*

tune I know I'm on the outside looking in, but based on your work you seem like an open and shut case imo. (in the positive sense)

Thanks guys, I really do just need some talking down from the ledge and reassurance now. I mean I know that my productivity is not in question (I published a book, a book chapter and four scholarly articles last year alone) but there's this endless terror of the unknown precisely because it is unknown that I can't shake. And since my colleagues already voted unanimously for me they're no longer the locus of the angest- it's all in the hands of the mysterious committee folk. I guess I have to take comfort in the fact that May isn't really all that far away and I'll just have to ride the waves til then.

I've become pretty zen about my fate thankfully--two articles and a book under contract and I'm still trying to get a foot in the door, not sure
there's anything more I can do at this point--and yet I think once you reach your point and have unanimous support you're golden unless there's really big changes afoot for your department.

if politics are going to get in the way of you getting a fair shake, there's nothing you can do about it now anyway, so you might as well just keep being awesome and see what happens! we don't have tenure at my institution, but i've long had the impression that it's a hazing ritual -- the sweating it is part of the experience by design, no? buck the system and don't sweat it!

(fwiw my way of fighting back at work is to get all my shit done and then some but not let it make me lose sleep. unfortunately, i learned this by losing a lot of sleep)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtQWPM4nERNNdHozb1lOVHZVN1p0a2pjOEtaUTVBSHc#gid=0

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html

'why I'm leaving harvard...for a sweet job at google'

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

beautiful world of bygone possibility

*nostalgia*

If an icon is animated it only means that the author of the page has better things to do than reading "10 worst web design mistakes". . . . Prof. Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid put an under construction sign on his site in 1998 and got the Nobel Prize in 2000.

Dammit, if I hadn't spent an hour raytracing a logo for my Geocities page who knows what prizes I could have won!

omg

To sum it up, through curiosity about the new medium, ignorance of w3c recommendations and passion to their profession, web users (irrespective of their scientific achievements) created an environment where everything seemed possible:

Prof. Dr. Winfried Kerkhoff presents his life and work via a site Deleuze and Guattari would give their limbs for

http://www.kerkhoff-w.de/

It's like the Mnemosyne Atlas of bad design decisions.....

the entire original site (for the article) is amazing, they're like passionate critical historians who have turned their inquiring gazes to my own dim past and made it an object of knowledge, there's a place where they speculate about what it could mean that yahoo never deleted its clear zero-pixel gif when it took geocities offline

and it's all written/designed in this awesome just-barely-tacky punk-zine-inflected pastiche of 90s web style, one of the authors' favorite ~phenomena~ is glitter gifs

<3

olia lialina is an old school net.artist and a treasure. her essays "a vernacular web" and "a vernacular web 2" are total classics. she and dragan espenschied (the other writer on contemporary home computing) also edited this book: http://digitalfolklore.org

wow I love all this, thanks for posting it!

That Digital Foklore book looks cool. A review on Amazon:

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Nice. 29 Mar 2010
By Ove R. Shair
Format:Perfect Paperback
This book is good. You will like it if you don't have attitude issues. Also it helps if you have critical reading comprehension skills.

+ CAT POSTER

these are my new favorite intellectuals, genuine proper scholars for our age

you should probably check out lialina's artwork too: http://art.teleportacia.org
not really the thread for this obviously

en garde!

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/breitbart-wingnut-says-liberal-professors

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/03/27/the_unc_fake_class_scandal_athlete_got_an_a_for_a_one_paragraph_paper.html

this story is killing me -- i can't believe people have tried to malign the learning specialist who works with these students for speaking out
i heard her and a history professor from UNC being interviewed on the radio maybe a week or so ago and the amount of crap they've gotten for speaking up about the poor education that profit-generating student athletes receive is O_O

college sports make me sad at this point

https://thebluereview.org/faculty-time-allocation/

DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO

HLC visit concludes today. Fingers crossed.

http://actualcasuals.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/no-time-to-be-complacent-about-replacement/

A few years ago I learned I would have to engage in the annual ritual of submitting an exhaustive Expression of Interest (EOI) in order to be on an eligibility list to do what I had done for the past seven years. Making it onto the list by no means equated to a guarantee of a teaching contract. Rather, the outcome was a determination made by phantoms in the faculty of my suitability to continue to be considered for casual academic teaching.

This shift in thinking was made clear to us all at an induction meeting.

The end of summer had truly arrived. Usually being invited to attend a staff induction meant momentary respite from the excessive stress and uncertainty of the casual academic lifestyle. Not this time. Instead, casual academics were schooled on our apparent complacency. We were told that our hard work and loyalty to the institution had been keeping inexperienced, but potentially dynamic casual teachers out of the system.

Sounds like being an adjunct in Australia isn't much different than being one here.

here = usa

HLC visit concludes today. Fingers crossed.

Crossed, boss!

Hello,

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okay that's weird

update: in a week the academic council will meet and hear my chair's case for my tenure and the ad hoc committee's independent view. they will either vote that day, or in a week, or in two weeks. And after that vote, the president gets another week to review the case and either ratify it or reverse it. So I might know my fate in two weeks. or three weeks. or four weeks. Hard to say.

This is a good article on the transition from being a student in an elite grad program to teaching at a regional public university.

what's said about teaching at a regional public university applies pretty well to teaching at non-flagship research universities also ime, esp wrt undergrad lives involving jobs, children, the military, etc

no sympathy for the sheltered elite

i really wish i had done a better job of creating some sort of life raft to get out of academics while i was in grad school.

what a fool, only one career, shoulda been working at two careers at once

so the book isn't generating nibbles?

I got an interview for a postdoc, but didn't get it. pretty sure the interview went well so hopefully it was factors beyond my control. didn't really get final confirmation on the book until late December so it wasn't a big factor in most applications. I'm a pretty weak candidate otherwise! my advisor thinks I shouldn't lose heart yet and give it one more shot in the fall since I'll have the book in my corner but eh. life is passing me by. no idea what else to do though.

I'm an English phd but would be best served by American Studies positions, but there's like a handful of those.

im in this weird limbo of not good enough for anything tenure track (or preliminary to that) and not a specialist in composition and rhetoric (so many jobs in that, comparatively).

yeah, i'm not prolific enough to even register as a researcher, don't tick enough boxes to make it into resource-constrained departments with narrow want-lists, and apparently i code as too rarefied and aloof for low-end pedagogues to think i would be good for their babies. all i want to do is teach, but it's as if i can't be trusted to do it.

i don't know what else to do either. i'm overqualified for most of the nonacademic jobs i apply for (i actually had an interviewer tell me i would be bored in a job) and nothing seems particularly set up to let anyone in to any line of work other than at the ground floor, which does the opposite of mitigate overqualification.

im in this weird limbo of not good enough for anything tenure track (or preliminary to that) and not a specialist in composition and rhetoric (so many jobs in that, comparatively).

― ryan, Monday, 5 May 2014 18:33 (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what is the success rate like for other recent phds within your dept?

needless to say, i wish you well

man, I feel you, j. some days I feel like im about to go full rust cohle on this motherfucker.

my class at rice (a decent but not top tier program) was only like 8. as far as I know 2 are currently tenure track. I think those of us that are actually gonna finish have actually finished. the 2 that made were totally plugged in and professional about career stuff from the get go. I, on the other hand, sort of pleasantly slept walked through grad school without too much thought for the future.

id say I only have myself to blame but there's far better talents and better teachers than me getting fucked over all the time.

j I feel weird offering this but iirc yr in philo; I'd be happy to look at yr cv/dossier & see if I see an angle that'll get you out of yr conundrum. I spent my morning going through apps for my dept's one year, so it's fresh on my mind. I've been on honey bunches of search comms in my not super long academic years

no pressure just a friend looking to help out

my own class was small, 4 i think, with one terminal master's bailout, one formidable eager beaver well-situated in an interdisciplinary program and well connected in field of choice, one polymath cobbling together research/lab funding at a place that can't/won't hire him as either a scientist or a philosopher for fiscal reasons, and me, five years out and only employed half that time in decreasingly prestigious teaching jobs with no security/permanence and little connection to my areas.

the people who made it all the way to defending in surrounding years have all kinds of stories—luck, hard work, sweet successes or steady gigs, mediocrity languishing or falling up, suffering, suicide—but the only sure lesson i have gleaned from them is how little any person's characteristics matter, good ones or bad ones. it's what the system wants (and in the frustrating cases, how narrowly it wants).

xp that's generous of you, euler, but it's kind of an embarrassment to me now. i think i know what my problems are (basically, i need to publish, i'm not competitive in any of the aoses or aocs in which hiring predominates, and i worked on the #4 most pernicious influence on modern phil so apparently i'm a pariah to all kinds of people i don't know from adam). i'm a generalist and a humanist, but nobody wants one.

this is a general suggestion not directed to any specific person here, but i'm finding a career as an academic librarian an awesome alternative to an attempted faculty career. after my undergrad i was planning on applying to philosophy phd programs, but decided to work for a few years before applying. i got a job in a library and went down that track instead (some library assistant jobs while i worked on my MSLIS degree, then on to a professional librarian position). it's been really good to me. basically every single day i am thankful that i never started a phd program. assuming one has a decent job as an academic librarian, the work is intellectually stimulating, environment is great, good vacation, good benefits, more security than i ever would have had in an adjunct position. i've been able to get good jobs at schools where i never would have had even a remote chance of securing a tenure-track job.

i don't want to create any illusions, though - the librarian job market is perhaps only minimally better than some faculty job markets. but it has definitely worked out for me, and i'm realizing more and more that i just would not have been cut out for a faculty job.

also candidates w/ phds are highly respected in libraries (they are seen as having some real-life insight into the research process and offer deep subject expertise) and in some cases aren't even required to have an MSLIS.

j surely you can teach early modern, that's something that lots of temp committees want at least, which can give you time to write

wonder if at yr stage if it wouldn't be best to write a book? seems like that's perfect for a self-described generalist. can't really ride the journal circuit as a generalist, but you don't ~need~ to do that to get hired

also are you willing to move to europe for a time? lots of post docs there, which buys time to get that book written.

that's a good idea, marcos. i think i'd be a good librarian!

if you want a job in English or literature of any sort i think the most in-demand specializations are rhetoric/composition and a number of varieties of ethnic literatures (african american, various diasporas, chicano/a, etc.). im a humanities type with a dreaded specialization in "theory" without any ability to hang my hat on the in-demand stuff.

i could teach modern, euler—never have and historical competency (quals etc.) wasn't key in my program, though i've found it most sensible to style myself as a late-modern historian (1800-1950 basically) who does aesthetics. but i'm pretty sure i don't pass muster there with temp committees who are overrun by ~serious~ spinoza and locke and newton experts or whatever, since i basically can talk in generalities about history and then point to the required seminar i took. i do better with ancient (taught it in my first job, an advisor does it), but the temp jobs that even ask for it tend to require greek, latin etc.

my experience, though, is that history is a loser at the lower end of the job market, even in the core areas.

i started turning my dissertation into a book not long after my first job ended, but i wasn't comfortable trying to just toss it out there, and there was an obscurity in my whole approach that i needed to come at from a different direction to be able to make my argument easier for people to understand. unfortunately it wasn't the kind of dissertation that's easy to dismantle for journal publication, or i would have just buckled down on that.

the different direction hasn't been very straightforward though, i've basically been muddling about to get a foothold in 19th c. phil and (kind of as the leading term/style for my intellectual identity) the wing of post-analytic that's friendly to continental (german, rather than french). i figured that was better for me than trying to work my way into scholarly acceptance in my diss. topic, since i find that scholarly subcommunity's insularity kind of lamentable and it has basically zero career currency for someone in my position anyway (though i do keep seeing the authors of mediocre conference presentations i've commented on landing in boring but secure posts on the strength of their subsequent publication of same).

that original book would have to be way rethought now, since i have a much more sophisticated understanding of my subject matter now—don't even know if i could make my old argument now—but along the way i'm starting to shape up the resources for what i can imagine as a second book (also w/ little probability of any prestige/interest, but at least in an area that has gaps to drive trucks through). we'll see if i can bring off any of the parts that would make it up first.

that's good to have as an intellectual project because i can actually believe in it (i find the usual conference/journal contribution triangulation strategy really repellent), but i try not to invest too much in its success (or consequent career success). crashing from one job to the next has been so depressing that just continuing to have thoughts of my own seems like success.

(i find the usual conference/journal contribution triangulation strategy really repellent)

yes, this.

i hope you do write that book. shaping my mess of a dissertation into one (and it was not easy) was the one gratifying experience in all of this.

basically no one should even attempt to get into the professional philosophy game in 2014, right?

no.

For a while I wanted very badly to do philosophy for a living. I abandoned ship three years ago with an MA from a terminal program, deciding not to bother applying to PhDs. It didn't take long in graduate school to realize that I wasn't cut out for it. I still quietly regard finishing that MA as an accomplishment, given that I had five incompletes racked up at one time and I'd fallen way behind the rest of my class in passing my exams and applying out. I still have bad dreams about incompletes.

No regrets now. It was a rough landing, but I know academia wasn't the place for me. I take a lot more pleasure in learning, now, than I ever did in school.

im in this weird limbo of not good enough for anything tenure track (or preliminary to that) and not a specialist in composition and rhetoric (so many jobs in that, comparatively).

My wife is a rhet/comp PhD and professor housed in an english department and it's pretty dramatically different how the grads out of both fields end up - most of hers seem to get tenure track jobs right away while the lit folks tend to be in adjunct or instructor land for quite a while.

Also I worked in a university library - as staff, no MLS, doing IT related stuff - for six years and I definitely saw the appeal in it and pondered that as a grad degree for a while. All the faculty librarian jobs there were tenure track which I didn't know was a thing; there were other staff gigs where the people may or many not have had a MLS but anything with the job title of "librarian" was a tenure track faculty job. They did interesting research in a really wide field of things from the technology stuff to history to book preservation and all sorts of things in between with a cool workplace and crazy job security.

I just finished my MFA and thanks to a variety of factors (my tech/art background, spousal accommodations, a major university interviewing my wife and giving her a big bargaining chip) I'll be starting a non-tenure-track faculty job this fall, teaching a 3-3 load. I'll have a nine month appointment and some more security and room for advancement than an instructor or adjunct and get to teach design and web dev kind of classes. It still kind of blows my mind that I'll have the word "professor" in my job title as it feels way too respectable or something.

wish i'd done a science tbh. think the best thing about doing philosophy may turn out to be that my politics are much better than they would've been otherwise, but that itself is probably a bit of a mixed blessing.

"my experience, though, is that history is a loser at the lower end of the job market, even in the core areas."

I don't agree! every dept needs ancient and modern taught at least once a year, and in few places are those hoarded by specialists like you're talking about.

I'd like all of my students to have at least AOCs in logic & modern so that they can have a chance at decent temps while they get their pubs in order. I just have my first students now so I have no track record on this.

i believe departments need that too! but there are few that have history past modern (even decent slacs or state schools), and the lower down you go, you are likely even to find places with a single 'history' course or no history at all. (even my own graduate department, respectable, had worse history coverage than my u.g. one.) it's certainly off the board at most ccs because it's regarded as an upper-division course in the discipline, so in programs designed to be lower-division, it's literally more than they need.

with logic i think it's more a matter of being able to teach a respectable intro course (all the way to AOC even would be deemed too much most places), which aside from the enrollment draw (esp. with math-req cross-listers) only carries market weight because of the logic phobia widespread among philosophers. in my program we did two semesters of logic, and the prevailing prejudice was that anyone could teach it. but in my last job i was, without knowing it, hired as a 'logician' and it was believed that i would basically be doing that and was not appropriate to teach other sorts of courses. but aside from that kind of mentality, i don't think there are enough logic courses out there in need of teaching to make it a draw. just something you want to be able to do so you can't have it counted against you come committee-deliberation time.

ethics, on the other hand. you just need it. i've lost out on too much work from not having it.

i'm not really sure about the hoarding either. i think the arrangement is more that settled departments have become comfortable with teaching what they're best at, and no one wants to move off the arrangement because of the strain it would cause (has the excuse of excellence on its side too: why make students take your half-assed modern survey when they could take dr. x's?). that would have a similar effect as actual hoarding.

true but those faculty go on leave and that's when temp positions open

19C aesthetics can be spun as ethics no? Enough to claim an AOC?

I recommend promiscuity with AOCs. It just means you can teach it. for temps specialists aren't really what's needed. ime

I feel like I'm being glib so I apologize; I'm saying things that amount to "here's how to market yrself" and you already know all that. I'd just like to help, now that I have a modicum of ~~~~influence (ugh but you know what I mean)

naw dawg, i appreciate it. i think i'm beyond help. i can either flourish as a writer or suck it up and grind things out, play the game. which given my lack of fit in the current market means chasing after unreliable shit that is coming to seem like a real affront to my professional/personal dignity. (you should see the regional job ad that came across my inbox this morning. full time, fixed term, move required, philosophy and humanities and made-up course subjects in unlikely combination, AND a mix of face to face and online teaching, w/ expectation of mysterious capabilities for synergistic technowhatever. this is not abnormal. and aside from the full-time part, it is not a lot different from the kinds of work many from my equally well qualified but unsuccessful neighboring cohorts have been getting in the last several years, occasionally in the process upselling these gigs into ft positions with commitment-skittish or resource-impoverished departments, more often not.)

i think the best thing that sympathetic successful academics can do, given how little they are able to affect systemic problems, is to be exceedingly good to their local visitors/temps/whatevers and to become their champions against local dean/budget/admin forces, as well as against whatever internal complacencies lead departments to be ok with grinding through temps because 'we gave them work, it's the least we can do' and 'we can only do so much, there are forces beyond our control'.

also, man, nikil saval

https://medium.com/book-excerpts/e95659e92dd9

you should see the regional job ad that came across my inbox this morning. full time, fixed term, move required, philosophy and humanities and made-up course subjects in unlikely combination, AND a mix of face to face and online teaching, w/ expectation of mysterious capabilities for synergistic technowhatever. this is not abnormal.

oh definitely. we could clog this thread up with ridiculously dystopian job ads.

when i make my escape (one can hope!) the thing i will miss least will be feeling stupid and confused all the time.

that saval article is great.

i went to a big state school for my MA, and a good private school (if far less rich than his) for my PhD, and i can attest to the vast difference between them that he talks about.

idk with those articles already

i hate them too but this one is a cut above imo.

this is nuts:

This isn’t to say that there isn’t any recourse at all; graduate students can band together, and the profession can be changed. At a certain point in my graduate career, it became evident that my department had decided to make a system-wide crackdown on graduate students it no longer had faith in. Several students who were on temporary leave, and who were seeking to return to the program, were expelled from the program by an authoritarian Director of Graduate Studies. Several others were given disciplinary warnings about their professional demeanor. And finally one student, an exceptionally young first-year, was singled out for being excessively combative in his seminars and put on academic probation. He was given a set of goals to complete—the administrators asked him to find a set of faculty who would act as his advisers, two years in advance of everyone else; and he was asked to complete a set of unfinished papers. He completed these goals handily, but students began to hear rumors through the faculty gossip mill that the graduate studies committee planned to expel him anyway. A number of us circulated a petition insisting that the student be kept in the program, which, under steady and organized pressure, a majority of students signed. (The ones who didn’t often said that they feared to append their names to a document that might later be used by professors as an informal blacklist.) Observers waiting outside the faculty meeting where this student’s fate was being decided could hear professors screaming at each other through the closed door. In the end, the student was spared; an official letter cited the petition as a key document in his salvation.

this has been my unofficial motto as well, im just bitching now because it's time to run and i got nowhere to go as of yet:

It might still be possible to carve out an independent existence in graduate school, reading widely and well, and, far from the madding crowd of the academy’s gatekeepers, to write an enriching and satisfying dissertation. And if you’re willing to endure insults and humiliations, the social world of graduate school may offer you a career. This is, however, very unlikely. So, if you must, go to graduate school, but only to read what you want, and learn what you want. Avoid every other blandishment, every grooming technique, every bit of professional advice. Get in, take the money, and run.

xxxp to ryan - mine was respectable but not that elite, so i think there was not much (or much intense) grooming/breaking going on, and from the student side not as much fawning/submitting. you could see it from time to time, but i think the predominant characteristic was kind of a general acceding to an impersonal disciplinary conception that was no one's own. and a soft conformism as a result, since the faculty were not generally strong enough to put anything else across in their research or teaching, and less so to impress it upon or make it understood to even weaker students. as a result i think few held in common any kind of relatively explicit, clear, shared idea of what we were about as a discipline, what we as workers were doing when we were trying to work—mostly just fumbling around in the sludge of the tail end of the most recent wave of scholasticism. (not uncommon in philosophy in general i think.)

in a climate like that i suppose no one will be very bold about thinking they know what philosophy is, or they know what teaching is, and they will generally feel safer acting under the prevailing sense of what it's supposed to be. ('das man' and all, emerson's joint stock company, etc.)

and the corresponding attitude toward careers and the job market is essentially the fully privatized one, esp. given the diminished role for or power of prestige, personal/professional connections, etc. at this level and in public institutional settings: 'best of luck to you out there, hope you did what you could to make yourself as employable as possible while you were in school'.

that i came out of this with any good experiences at all is, i think, my inadvertently following saval's advice and lucking into an advisor who was tolerant of my waywardness, even happy to let me do it. i once asked him if it was "ok" for me to be writing a phd dissertation in English on the sorta weird not really "literature" kind of topic i ended up writing about, and his response was "who cares?"

i think the predominant characteristic was kind of a general acceding to an impersonal disciplinary conception that was no one's own.

yeah this jives with my experience quite a bit. it's really quite sad.

in english i would imagine that would have a lot to do with a long-term malaise about the incorporation of theory into the discipline, the canon wars, etc. the sense that it doesn't matter what you do but you still have to do it in exactly some predetermined way (given the armature of scholarship, professional norms etc).

i don't work on it, but in philosophy one similar example seems to be the work abutting ethics on action theory and the nature of 'reasons', which keeps churning stuff out but which seems to have only slight purchase on reality, especially as far as pedagogy goes. it hasn't led to the kind of framing of the problem space that makes it possible to introduce it to newcomers and say, 'here is what the problems are, here is what needs to be done'. instead it's more like: what is x? we have no idea, there are so many things that could be said! here, start reading the literature about those things. it doesn't trickle back to the discipline's identity, its outward face.

i think it's similar in philosophy of language. they have no picture of the world to place it in. instead they just start out, still, with frege and russell and think that the way to transmit the discipline is by working up a competency at playing with the puzzles so that it's possible to wade through the most recent literature. twin earth, still, guh.

in english i would imagine that would have a lot to do with a long-term malaise about the incorporation of theory into the discipline, the canon wars, etc. the sense that it doesn't matter what you do but you still have to do it in exactly some predetermined way (given the armature of scholarship, professional norms etc).

yeah and i dont think it's any accident that the two from my class that are TT now were pretty much cookie-cutter historicist types. that's a "job" you can prepare yourself for.

so, um, today the Academic Council at my school will vote on my tenure- they might be doing this now, I'm not allowed to know exactly when it all goes down, but it is happening or will happen today

then there is a grace period in which the Provost and the President can either ratify that vote or overturn it (which rarely happens, but sometimes happens- meaning that today's vote both is and is not decisive- it's rare that a vote gets overturned, but it supposedly can happen) and there's no clear information about how long that grace period will last- a week? two weeks? a month?

currently inhabiting this (yes, absurdly privileged and very lucky but nonetheless profoundly anxiogenic) netherzone of unverifiability and uncertainty

the profession has a sadistic side that is structurally built in, all the jocular references to this process as an academic form of hazing are utterly otm but it's not a cute metaphor

i am like 100% certain you will get it! but good luck (even though you don't need it)!

a friend is on the tenure track at a small slac here, and their department has a tradition of subjecting every new tt hire (or past employees once they become tt) to an open-ended grilling session ostensibly related to their subject area, after their status has become official, i guess to see how they stand up.

my guess is that psychologically/socially speaking it is about being able to never have to have a conversation like that again that exposes oneself intellectually, since they seem not to otherwise.

best of luck tune was space

"i don't work on it, but in philosophy one similar example seems to be the work abutting ethics on action theory and the nature of 'reasons', which keeps churning stuff out but which seems to have only slight purchase on reality, especially as far as pedagogy goes. it hasn't led to the kind of framing of the problem space that makes it possible to introduce it to newcomers and say, 'here is what the problems are, here is what needs to be done'. instead it's more like: what is x? we have no idea, there are so many things that could be said! here, start reading the literature about those things. it doesn't trickle back to the discipline's identity, its outward face."

would like to hear more about why you think that work has only "slight purchase on reality" and that "it doesn't trickle back to the discipline's identity, its outward face."

like, do you mean that neo-Anscombians are hard to read/understand?

no simplicity, naturalness. distinctions that seem invented or stipulated more than they are necessary or reflective of the facts.

I'm sympathetic; I think that "the facts" in that area need to be better illustrated, so that the distinctions emerge more naturally. it will help to look at examples that are a bit outside what is the norm in writing in that area

iow I'm on this

my concern is a little more austinian maybe, that the whole normal approach is a little over-eager to use examples to illustrate facts which are secretly the products of poor philosophizing, rather than extending the range of examples in order to maintain a more clearheaded sense for actual facts

but i really don't understand practical reasoning, it sucks actually, keeps me from making sense of a lot of very routine discussions in ethics

yeah the kinds of examples I have in mind are well outside of practical reasoning in the usual sense. think of my username on this message board.

in that area the "facts", such as they are, are a bit more stable than in what's normally considered the domain of practical reasoning

good luck ttws! the academy reflects the hierarchy it's supposed to diffuse like nobody's business

http://chronicle.com/article/TeachingLearning-About/146403/

^ hierarchies within hierarchies within

omg the comments are hilarious
hilarious all around, really

i had a discomfiting experience of a center for teaching and learning, it is reassuring to hear that that is what they are like in general (AS I SUSPECTED)

there is a lot of resistance to the teaching and learning of teaching and learning
your experience is commonly reported on our frequently administered surveys

yet never reflected in your frequently offered workshops

that saval piece is great writing but it feels so alien to me in that it describes professors that seem to pay attention to grad students as anything other than occasional potential reflections of their egos that every now and then surprise you with a neat idea "like watching a dog play the piano."

(perhaps this is a disciplinary distinction)

the description of mannerisms and the contrast to office life is spot on though.

the way you know saval is truly out is that he would say that shit about arcade - a truly horrifying blog hosted and preened over by his own dept

yeah I read that piece & it just made me glad I only took one English class in college. it sounds nothing like my daily lived experience.

but I am "doing ok" in the academy so I guess it wouldn't sound right to me.

i should say that, though i was an english phd, my own department was also far more chill (though not totally foreign to what he's talking about). but it was also far less prestigious and competitive.

we had a guy in my class who was an MA from uchicago, and i was really struck by how different his approach was. if you asked him what his final seminar paper was about, he wouldn't tell you because you might steal the idea! and of course the coda to this story is that he is currently employed as tenure-track faculty at a pretty good school.

i'll be interviewing (over skype) for a 1 year visiting assistant professor position this week. they are actually hiring for 3 of these positions (though i imagine they are targeting each position for different needs). still kind of surprising they have so many spots to fill. apparently there was a "early retirement" program which led to some vacancies. don't think my odds of getting it are terribly good in any case.

did i ever complain that in a skype interview once i was bushwhacked by a request to spontaneously teach my interviewers something?

because apparently they will do that. just say, hey, how bout teach something, right now. you know, just a little, real quick. into the leetle window dere.

ask whose house you would be staying in when you visit.

I've done i dunno forty of these as an interviewer and one as an interviewee. When people move up in the rankings on account of these ime it's because the research convos were more fun than we'd expected. You don't grok depth or trajectory very well from a one page research blurb, so a good convo can open things up.

that's pretty funny, j. no idea what I'd say to that! "ok everyone open your books to page 200..."

that's another weird thing about this. It's a one year 4/4 teaching load, and you're only allowed to teach courses already offered. so they said the interview will be mainly about teaching (another reason I probably won't get it). on the other hand, they've already said they will be hiring 3 (!) tenure track positions next year so whoever does get these will, I should think, be considered for those as well.

I had a phone interview for a postdoc and their bushwack question was 'what scientific discovery do you wish you'd made'. Sat in silence for nearly 20 minutes thinking about it, occasionally letting them know I was still on the line. They didn't pressure me to hurry up at all. It was a tough question but I knew there was an answer that wasn't Charles Darwin or whatever

ha! that's just bonkers. maybe they'll ask what book i wish i'd written. i'll make a list.

this will only be my third interview for an academic position. they said it'll be 30 minutes and focus on teaching. and they are looking for someone to teach upper division english courses. which is strange considering that my teaching experience thus far has been limited to introductory composition courses and some intro to literature courses. im strong on research and publications, not so much teaching (which would make this a great opportunity to beef up my cv). so i feel like they may see me as a risk. hope i can say the right things.

i looked again at the email they sent me and it talks about wanting to add faculty in areas "deemed vital to the 21st century university." anyone know what this is code for? digital humanities?

it means u flip ur classroom, become video producer, make dean feel dean erection over toutable blended course offerins, huge gains in efficiency, HUGE

should i allow the phrase "student centered" to pass my lips or is that passe now.

they luvvvv it. but they also love PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES. you may have to do some recon to get a feel for how into faddish b.s./the wave of all future education they are.

i did use the phrase "the future of the humanities" in my cover letter. i knew that would pay off eventually.

BIG TEXT

damn I think I'm gonna be near the last of 14 to be interviewed.

my theory about this has always been that they already have their favorites picked out and just making sure they're not total weirdos in the interview.

Yup
Also if you're appealing to their teaching side, mention your commitment to student persistence (if you have one).

your persistence re their persistence

if they're interviewing you, they think you can do the job. this has more to do with their weird intangibles. someone must have liked what they imagine to be your intangibles.

thanks for the advice, guys. this feels like my last best shot at a foot in the door, so im a little frenetic about it.

committees usually don't have collective favs so interviews are a way to make a good impression on the collective, make the committees' convos about you. in a good way. there's usually some who blows it in a noteworthy way and gets a silly nickname to make it easy for the committee to explain what they're NOT getting "thank goodness"

o yeah remember poopface, lol what were we thinking srsly

p much

interview went....ok. it's funny, i spent so much time preparing for questions about teaching that when they asked about my research i blanked a little! ha.

no poop on face but my hair looked a little funny.

as expected, did not get the visiting prof gig. back to plotting my escape...

aaaaaaaaaaaa

probably didn't have ENOUGH poop on your face

ha!

the rejection letter was pretty boilerplate. "specific needs" cited and all that. (ironic that that phrase so often used vaguely.)

it's complimenting myself WAY too much to conclude that i dont have a home in the academic world, that im doing my own thing and it's just not gonna fit into the career molds provided, but that's what i like to tell myself.

i don't think that's implausible at all. i have lots of friends who got jobs primarily on the basis of (it seems) fitting in. just did a thing the boring-ass way one is expected to do it, when someone wanted it done without any questions.

everyone i know who got good jobs came from family money. undermines the entire value system of the humanities, but such is life in america

yeah, same here (re: doing things the boring-ass way leading to jobs). there's something about the endless factory-like production of (new or old) historicist literary criticism that depresses the hell out of me. it's not that the work is totally value-less (though let's be real about its relative value) but it's just lifeless at this point.

the "values" are 100% undermined by the class system that keeps funneling the well-to-do into lit-crit while keeping everyone else out

when they talk marx it's like schizophrenics talking freud. entertaining, but not helping

ha. during my interview they briefly asked about my research and i mentioned a particular theorist that is pretty central to my work and not a glimmer of recognition passed over either of their faces--and that's when i suspected i wasn't gonna get.

i had noticed this before, but recently i was working on an aesthetics project where i thought the central (and dumbfoundingly obvious) claims should be about work and its importance, and i wondered at how i got through a whole graduate program in philosophy with nary an exhortation to read marx, etc. not even from the ethicists and faculty radicals, who had other bidness to attend to.

there are historical reasons, of course (depoliticization of anglo philosophy w/ the importation of logical positivism, moderation of 60s radical generation once they became the establishment, corporatization of the university, topic capture by the theory-ized humanities), but at the time i just thought, well no shit, when the fuck have any of them had to care about work in the past 10-40 years.

meanwhile my parents are bankrupt and schlepping sandwiches and filling the refrigerators at convenience stores.

would be nice to put their money where their mouth is and start 'affirmative actioning' poor people, or at least admit they're no better than law schools and MBA programs when it comes to helping poor people. but don't hold your breath. in the meantime, have you read the latest by this ivy league grad, whose parents own your parents' apartment complex?

is it about how innovative thinking or big data or a touching personal backstory can help you get ahead in life and find personal fulfillment??

part of the reason i never got my ph.d. and dropped off from any serious attempt at literature/theory was the class issue. i started meeting people who were connected to the academic and literary world, and was told pretty candidly that you had to be part of the right class to have any serious attempt at joining. which was much appreciated advice, actually.

regardless, when i moved to nyc my interests put me in crowds with upper middle class/quasi-upper class types, and the lifestyle differences were insurmountable. some of these people had no job, took regular trips to Europe, ate at expensive restaurants everyday, questioned me about why I just couldn't do those things. America needs to get straight about its entrenched class system, imo.

it's unfortunate that intellectual and artistic pursuits have been captured by the elite, and have elitist branding, because they're something anyone from any social class can participate in, and should be encouraged to participate in.

totally

basically these days if you're from the class of people who had to take student loans to pay for undergrad or poorer, then you're not getting a tenure-track humanities position. maybe you'll get a book deal from your MFA. they don't want to tell anyone this because 1) who wants to admit that without nepotism you'd be some dumb slob like everyone else, 2) the universities need suckers to grade papers and TA lecture courses, and 3) the people who make money off the GRE would take a hit. etc. talk about the 1% in no way excludes the academy/arts . . . however much they base their champagne socialist pronouncements pretending otherwise. 'intellectual'/'artistic' cognitive dissonance is a neat trick!

i darkly suspect that among my several mortal flaws as a job candidate one of the most severe is that my degrees are not from sufficiently prestigious schools. my dissertation advisor once told me that the best way to level the playing field with ivy league types was to publish. and while it was perhaps naive of me to think a book contract with a very good press would be some kind of trump card, i did tend to think it would make more of a difference. perhaps the topic is too far afield from traditional "english" studies. of the two interviews i've gotten since the book was a done deal, i think i had at least as many books under contract or published as the people interviewing me! that's some sour grapes, but also sort of surprising how little difference it has made.

and just one more sour grape: the post-doc i interviewed for a while back was sort of complicated but in essence there was three positions. worth noting that two of the three selected were phds from the SAME (not ivy but close enough) school! a school, as it happens, that appears quite a lot in their "current postdoctoral fellows" bios.

i think the reliance on prestige or other in-group signals for feeder purposes is fostered by the endemic dismissiveness toward whatever can be deemed bad, threatening, bankrupt, suspect, etc. - on all sides, i think. i had a friend who was a real committed, personally engaged philosopher with a lot of integrity, doing what would be marked in other circles as unorthodox work but really dug right in to the heart of the discipline for all that, and in the rather choice place he ended up, he had to negotiate some real unabashed hostility toward what he did because they saw their thing basically more as a matter of providing moral embiggening and world-widening for their students and thought his stuff was perniciously perverse.

elsewhere, it would be feminism (or mere existence as a woman) that would get the stinkeye. or deleuze. or thomistic ethics. etc.

one wonders why more people don't stop at examine the complete distrust they must have in the system and how it can coexist with their other more trusting (or trust-endorsing, e.g. to students) behaviors.

yeah that "endemic dismissiveness" is a very real (and very depressing) thing. kind of like the typical (universal?) academic fear of having nothing of substance to say projected outward at sectors of the discipline. in an ideal world i suppose the academy would be a space for some kind of push-back against a culture of constant "out-bidding" but for now what you have instead is aggressively protected enclaves of class privilege or, perhaps just as dystopian, a kind of culture that is entirely captive to that out-bidding, faddishness, etc. and the deep underlying depression that must underly all that anxious production.

anyways, thanks guys for venting with me. think im gonna go read and alternate chapters of Negative Dialectics and Under the Volcano. my life as an "independent researcher."

you an author dawg, don't forget it

oh the ironies of writing a book principally about a failed academic condemned to poverty! ;)

no one who got a phd after the worst financial crash in 80 years should feel bad (except for maybe the phd's who've landed "good jobs" since) -- despite airs of intellectual superiority, the system that's either rejecting you (or rewarding you with lucrative prestige) didn't see the crash coming, much less acknowledge the fallout or their complicity. having to forget that during job interviews is symptomatic of the whole scam

2009 here

the fall before that, i remember sitting in a food court, watching bank-fail-bailout cable news, thinking like, well this is not a good time for this

the worst job market in MLA history, followed by . . . the worst job market in MLA history. but it's your fault, because you didn't professionalize enough. you should have seen coming what tenured theory-heads hadn't clue one was coming

2012, thought maybe i could wait it out!

sort of dispassionately interested to see exactly what's gonna go down in the humanities over the next 20 years or so. no surprise that as the cultural prominence of literature, philosophy, seems to be receding that it becomes theoretically interested in its own "political effectivity" or whathaveyou (the fulcrum of societal relevance does tend to shift). mounting pressures from outside the university are bringing those accounts into question (to say the least) but i've seen very little attempt to change course so far.

like this sort of thing i can only shrug at: http://chronicle.com/article/The-MLA-Tells-It-Like-It-Is/146983?cid=megamenu

missing from all that is a single compelling reason to get a phd--with all that implies--minus the training for the specific job a phd is supposed to do.

amusing that the MLA continues to parade as an intellectual/moral authority when it's taken those frauds and legacies till the spring of 2014 to recognize what was an obvious catastrophe by the fall of 2008. "dumb" or "cowardly" -- take your pick! either way, laissez faire "leadership" like that is a joke in the most nakedly conniving of industries -- in the academy, it's downright euthyphroic

congrats to the tune was space!!!

curious about the kneejerk hostility here to "flipping classrooms" -- i've seen some academics i know talk positively about wanting to experiment with it. is the problem with the concept itself or with the fact that its being treated as another mindless buzzwordy gimmick or with the fact that it seems to take a whole bunch more work and if yr already at yr wits end with too many courses for too little pay in a trad classroom than who the heck has the time?

#2, and a bit of #3

and a bit of the humanities-centric critique, #4, 'when will they have time to read', and #4a, 'a traditional humanities class is already flipped when the students read and come to class prepared'

and #5, railroading of onlineification under cover of pedagogy innovortion ('well delivering a course online is so much simpler if you're already flipping your classroom!' - actual thing i have been told in response to a serious q about online courses)

Yeah I was really thinking about 4a as well.

I suppose flipping really makes much more sense in STEM fields where you're already used to "labs" for a large portion of work, and the idea is to sort of make the lab the central environment.

In a more seminar like setting its not necessarily a model that applies at all, since yr basically supposed to be in an interactive environment to begin with, so its that _plus_ also do a video lecture that the administration perhaps can resell.

nevertheless there's a lot of freely circulating animosity toward 'sage on stage' teaching in the humanities, partly because of an emphasis on student learning, partly because of an emphasis on participatory dialogue, so some humanists remain receptive to the whole flipping vibe

i think they are probably encouraged by that in a decline in student preparation, or at least student expectations. students aren't used to listening to lectures, they barely do their reading, they're reading way below level and shocked by the requirement to read things that are above their heads and to work at them and get better bit by bit; they often hate groupwork but also expect it (and often kind of half-ass their way through it, which suggests why they tolerate it), and they often like the chance to air their opinions or just get into it with people. a lot of humanities classroom management is not very pedagogically effective at letting students talk while also sustaining rigor, so the idea that we might get students up on the material in some other setting while still having the dialogical stuff is attractive, i guess.

i mean i went to a large campus so all my undergrad courses were big lectures and then sections. sections were pretty much all give and take interactive stuff and god they were terrible because who cared what my fellow students thought they were all young and stupid just like me

well teachers always say this of course but supposedly the NCLB generation is turning out to be incapable of all the traditional independent thinking, independent motivation etc etc stuff that goes into traditional humanities studying, so i think the idea is that since they can't profit from straight up small-section talky-talk or big-lecture droney-drone, somehow the content should be attractivized in digestible short video chunks for home viewing and in class… ? ? ? -> learning

just weighing in to say thanks to those on this thread who have helped me manage my anxiety about the tenure process. I'm very happy and relieved to say that I got tenure. The process was torturous, anxio-genic, ridiculously slow and crazy-making, but I've survived. I don't think it's really sunk in yet, and if/when that does happen I hope I never forget just how much contingency, luck, and arbitrary circumstances were involved in this outcome- i.e. I don't want to become a "lifeboater" or smug about it, or reify the distinction that it draws. I'm just relieved that I don't have that sword hanging over my head anymore. I'm not sure it makes me love the system that hangs such swords in the first place, but it makes me want to be as compassionate as I can be to those who are headed towards this path or on it already.

Congratulations TTWS!! You're not the sort for lifeboating or reification.

Congrats dude!

Currently writing a cover letter for a job I'm unlikely to get.

great news, the tune was space!

now you can do things like fall down embarrassingly in public, or drool on the metro, and shake it off saying to yourself "I have tenure"

this is pretty much the greatest thing about tenure & I think such a thought every single day

and congrats on the soft pink truth album too!

i missed the online course talk but:

a big part of my job is designing and implementing online courses from across the curriculum, from fully-online masters programs to hybrid undergrad stuff etc etc etc. the main thing i have learned from doing this for the past couple years is that online education is garbage, a waste of money for the student and a waste of time for the instructor. it only serves the lazy (both the credit-grubbing student and the set-it-and-forget-it professor) and the institution (in that these courses are cheap to produce and deliver but the student pays the same as for real courses).

the entire industry is composed of charlatans who borrow buzzwords from vaguely-related disciplines (software development, graphic design, pop psychology) and command vast fees from universities so bloated with administrators that no hand knows what the other 17 are doing.

my wife and i are moving very soon so i'm applying and interviewing for gazillions of jobs in this field and everywhere is the same.

congrats on the tenure! now if anyone asks you to teach an online course you can tell him or her to go fuck him- or herself.

same ole but putting it here for posterity: http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/

Last fall, Karen Gregory was teaching a labor studies course in the City University of New York system when she found herself the object of media scrutiny because she included in her syllabus a short text describing the adjunctification of CUNY, and what it means for students:

“To ensure that we remain conscious of the adjunctification of CUNY, we ask that you do not call us ‘Professor.’ We are hired as adjunct lecturers and it is important that you remember that. You deserve to be taught by properly compensated professors whose full attention is to teaching and scholarship.”

The text, which was developed by the CUNY Adjunct Project and distributed for teachers to include in their syllabi, briefly describes the history of CUNY’s increased reliance on adjuncts. It explains how adjuncts are paid and what that means for students:

“Adjuncts are not regular members of the faculty; we are paid an hourly rate for time spent in the classroom. We are not paid to advise students, grade papers, or prepare materials or lectures for class. We are paid for one office hour per week for all of the classes we teach. We are not paid to communicate with students outside of class or write letters of recommendation. Out of dedication to our students, adjuncts regularly perform such tasks, but it is essentially volunteer labor.”

And it says one thing that is so rarely part of the adjunct discussion: “CUNY’s reliance on adjuncts impairs the conditions under which courses are taught and the quality of your education” (emphasis mine).

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Is-Academic-Rejection-So/146883/

good article!

"The rejections themselves—the form emails; the eye-contact avoidance from colleagues who just voted against your tenure case; the deafening silence from a journal or press—are the symptoms. The totalizing academic self-conception is the disease."

I sorta wonder if this is worse for people who've thought of themselves as aspiring academics for a long time. I didn't even know what college was when I was in high school, until senior year; then the same for grad school when I was a senior in college. "oh, so I could be a professor? and to do that I'd have to go to more school after this?" so I never imagined myself as an academic until grad school: I didn't grow up in that world. so I still think of prof as my job, not my identity; and lots of other jobs out there would suit my identity as well.

otoh getting papers rejected still hurts, but less than it used to as I've had both more rejections and more acceptances. but really the onus of the pain is on those who don't have TT jobs yet since there the pain can be existential, as the article points out

when i was a kid i thought when i grew up i would be a scientist, an artist, or (a bit later) a writer. and i spent a lot of time in nerd enrichment activities that exposed me to scientists, people with phds; i had an uncle whose english phd graduation i went to even earlier than that. i wasn't set on it like in a hopeful or careerist way or anything, it was just the convergence point of almost everything about my early education.

and i went to school in small places. for high school, in a town on the edge of rurality, where the co-op was the only other thing in town besides the high school. but the talented and gifted education there was good and the school was part of a program that put us on the internet early, ahead of the big wave, in order to do nerd projects. but there must have been something about the culture. one of my teachers would bring in former students to help us with projects—phds or phd students all of them. i was walking around my graduate u campus one day and ran into a kid who had been several years behind me, like just into junior high when i was on my way out, and of course he was there because he was getting a phd (in something else).

but i didn't really start thinking seriously about being a professor (a teacher) until grad school got underway.

I basically bumbled my way into it. English was something like my 3rd major. Even now feel like something of a dilettante. Always working on my "professionalization" since I spent most of grad school sorta wandering through my curiosities. Being a professor, having a "specialization," always seemed on the far side of some distant horizon.

About rejection, I can't speak to jobs since they rarely explain themselves, but with articles it's not so bad anymore since they are often pretty clueless--or if not clueless then seemingly have read things in a highly distracted or uncharitable frame of mind. Constructive criticism can make for some forehead slapping though. Worse though is waiting to hear back. My record is 18 months!

as an editor of a journal now (!) I see the waiting to hear back thing differently, because I'm dealing with tons of referees, and moreover referee requests, many of which are declined (talk about daily rejection!) or never even acknowledged. mostly blame referees. and try to treat others as you would be treated. I referee about 10 papers a year in addition to editorial work, because it's necessary to keep good journals flourishing.

oh i don't blame them! "publish or perish" has just as much an adverse effect on journals as it does on writers.

when i am the Emperor of Academia I will institute a 10 year freeze on all new publications.

well referees take forever

I am guilty too

(hence posting here rather than reading)

does your journal do desk rejections?

i reviewed for a journal which i think has pretty laxly inclusive standards, and i was assigned something i thought was junk, but it was superficially competent enough and not too far afield from what the journal published, so i was kind of pressed to come up with a fair review and provide helpful feedback and etc etc, all the way up until the deadline -

at which point i punched in my rudimentary review to the journal's review management system, so i would have it in there and could go back and fill out the remainder, but since i had hit the deadline, it just took it, so i said aah, fuck it, and that poor incompetent author ended up getting no comments on why their paper was no good

when really if i could have just said from the beginning, this is not a scholarly contribution to this literature, sorry…

I can reject a paper myself, but it's not normal practice. we do two referees.

review management systems are horrible, including ours

i think now i just wanna write a decent phd and get out of academia, this is not a life i can imagine ever being enjoyable. tho where i go instead when i've spent the last ten years heading in one direction, i dunno.

congrats to tune is space! and on two great nights at cafe oto too. i'm glad i had to go home before the soft pink truth show, i wouldn't want to get bitter and resentful about how good you are at things.

"higher education is only for the privileged"

http://www.kmtr.com/news/local/Wil-Hi-Cognress-student-loans-debts-264471061.html

i know this was on quidag too, but it belongs here for posterity

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/provost-prose/cruising

The tragedy is, I'm not sure how wrong he is, from a purely "getting butts in the seats" point of view. I do think prospective students like it when there's a standalone nacho bar in the dining hall or a big screen with ESPN in the student union or whatever, and these things are extremely cheap compared to hiring one more professor or one more staffer.

But a provost, whose job is to look after the academic life of the university -- right? -- should have a different point of view.

students should do what their parents tell them unless they're paying their own tuition

bracing myself for what I've decided will be my last foray into the academic job market (one way or another). honestly looking forward to not having to think about it anymore.

a quick one? or do you mean this fall?

i went for an interview to work in a grocery store produce department. it was more philosophical than a lot of the philosophy job interviews i've had - asked me to say what kind of a person i was, define democracy, accountability etc.

i'm afraid i made it sound too much like i thought of myself as a philosopher who was deigning to work at their job. : /

oh just this fall. I figure my cv is never gonna look any better than it does now since my willingness to churn out work minus any real institutional support is rapidly dwindling.

did you disclose yourself as an actual philosopher? maybe you just came across as exceptionally thoughtful and trustworthy!

had to, resume couldn't be spun any other way

that's the big dilemma isn't it? English at least allows you to plausibly tout some writing skills (though I am in fact a terrible writer). trying real hard to spin myself into thinking that grad school was a worthwhile experience, and I suppose in the existentialist sense it was, but boy do I ever regret it in low moments of job searching.

MLA job list comes out on friday. i hope it's not as big a disaster as last year. i've been preparing all my job application stuff (cover letters, research proposals of varying lengths, course proposals, etc) but without the misguided hope of prior years. definitely feeling pretty zen about it all, though i have to say it's kind of crushing to be asked for a "dissertation abstract" at this point in my publishing career.

anyway, good thoughts to anyone else about to embark on this. (I'm assuming the other humanities are on a similar time table and system).

A lot of old bitterness over how badly grad school went has been coming back lately. I procrastinate by reading any anti-grad-school articles I can find, no matter how how specious, just for consolation and existential fortification. I guess it's easier to dwell on a perceived irremediable vacancy than to actually deal with current life.

i need a terminal degree in order to climb the ranks of higher ed administration and stop getting shit on by faculty. should i do what i ~~~~love~~~~ (ie english) or do something boringly practical and easy (education or information science or whatever)?

OKAY

so last year (as i love to reiterate miserably), a grad school friend and i had both been picked up for some part-time work at a local c.c.; by the end of the semester, he had quit out of indifference/distaste for the place, and they cancelled all my spring work unexpectedly (this year, the entire place is doing a program review to decide what to shut down!).

in the meantime he picked up a bit of adjuncting in a neighboring state for the current semester, amid the usual vagaries of adjunct hiring (broad asks, vague promises, surprising discoveries about simultaneous hires, suspicions about meagerness of assignment, compensation, etc); liked the place ok enough but couldn't help but feel kind of embittered about the very fact of being an adjunct; and found a high school teaching job that starts in december (he used to teach high school, before he entered academia), and pretty promptly informed them of when he would no longer be coming in (before the end of the semester!).

now they're hankering for a spring replacement, and one of my local protectors in my old department turned them in my direction. but thinking about the assignment, the non-credible assurances about possible next-year courses, the inability to do the job by commuting (no car at all, i am a city dweller now), the probable necessity of picking up and moving there to even do the job (which would make it the… fifth move in six years?)—let alone a look through their catalog and their mess of a curriculum and their current way of delivering it—

and i actually feel like telling these people off rather than taking the job to try to get out of, or change, my currently miserable circumstances of barely scraping by with temp work, work-from-home drudgery, and (way too many) gifts of money from friends. even thinking about taking the job, making the move, sitting in my office, prepping, teaching, etc all the while going back to those grinding feelings of humiliation that i somehow magically started to suffer just by -being- an adjunct - it makes me feel like a sucker.

my degree is officially at the widely believed-in point of staleness, my cv is meager and static. since i don't know how to get out and i still can't help but imagine myself as a teacher, it kind of seems like i have to just take the job - it's right there, i don't think i will even have to do anything to get them to offer it to me. rather, not the job; the WORK. there is no job; that's the problem. folk wisdom says you have to stay in the game, show that you haven't atrophied or whatever, cross your fingers at any opportunity that COULD magically turn into a job or a means to one in the future. but i literally don't know if i find any of that shit believable. it seems i have just been tossed from one set of circumstances to another, and forced to accept each one just because i had no other option. and none of them seems to have led to anything or made anything better, taken me further along toward anything. and looking at this place, in terms of what they have, what they're likely to offer me, it seems like exactly the kind of work that i can expect to lead exactly nowhere.

is there not something to be said for refusing to bite when you're offered shit?

sounds like an awful decision to have to make.

just curious for personal reasons (haha): what's the point of staleness?

i guess the question is: what would have to be different to make this job different from the others? that's what im asking myself anyway...trying to discern the difference between the dead-end jobs (or my own dead-endedness professionally) and ones that might somehow lead to something else.

in any case, keep us (or just me) apprised on how it goes

five years out, is the figure i hear - which i hit this summer.

update! my friend tells me, something he maybe only just found out, that it is a known fact that the program is not long for this world. it's a mixed department, with my discipline the inferior one, one full-timer, one emeritus picking up some work for just this year or the next, and a few adjuncts (hired with some redundancy intended to ensure the courses ran - gee, thanks for deliberately putting benefits out of reach, guyz). but the administration has already decided that the program (within its hosting department) WILL be eliminated once the full-timer is gone (and he's somewhat old, and he went blind recently). after that, it seems adjuncts will be used to teach a few courses, presumably whatever outside curricular requirements force them to continue, or maybe just like some scraps of intellectual integrity that make them think, huh, maybe a university should offer a course in that.

apparently, were the anticipated courses for next year to be available too, it would not even make me full-time - just enough to qualify for benefits, at 60% proration.

oh good I have a few years :-/

with a phd you can make a comfortable if boring living in higher ed administration and teach a class or two on the side. your research would suffer but you get to fuss at people.

I think people used to say three years but, yeah, I think it's been pushed up to five these days. My friend just got a TT position this fall five years after finishing iirc. (He has had infinite tolerance for crisscrossing the continent for term positions and residencies.)

(Sorry to hear, j.)

xpost

So yeah, two years left, I guess?

I've actually taken to puttng the exact date of my conferral (dec 30) on my cv to sort of bump mine up a bit. No longer being eligible for a few postdocs this year was an eye opener.

i wonder to what extent things would be different if those who spent 5 (or more) years in the wilderness were picked up for TT positions more often.

so

i declined the 'offer' on grounds of not it being feasible, reliable, etc., and dude writes back, 'thank you for writing to me, and being frank. you are absolutely right'.

then he comes back with 'what if we could come up with a 4/4 for $32k for the academic year starting next fall only?'

: /

you should say yes

also isnt there some other kind of work you could/want to do?

come back with "start in the spring or gtfo" imo.

i think he may have meant, the shit spring plus this (closer to, but not completely) full load for next year.

32k is a slight improvement on their standard adjunct rate but it's still well below full-time (which 4/4 is there) compensation at their own institution or in the area. they're one of those charming schools whose aaup salary survey says they have no one at instructor rank (one, at the whole university, actually) because they don't actually give any of the many instructors they employ full-time loads (or benefits, which may have something to do with why - not sure if they're one of the places that made an obamacare policy change).

lamp, i don't know about want - i like editing ok, i was once a computer programmer and could probably take to that given time to reacclimate (given a chance), got a math degree too and some long-ago competence working technically - but my sporadic attempts to even GET other kinds of work in the past several years have been pretty thankless. i'm experienced, skilled, talented, but not in any literal outside-world terms (recruiter on the phone, trying to sell me on a cold-calling sales job: 'yeah… i wasn't really sure what you were trying to do there on your resume'), and because of that apparently too much of a hiring gamble / cost burden. i guess i could try harder to find a place in business, but i so am not cut out for that, so i think i'm right not to.

haha, i edited that over a length of time - i think it is in fact a full load.

actually, they put permanent FT at 4/4 and 'academic staff' FT at 5/5, probably to reflect the slight additional committee/advising type work permanent staff have, but of course that makes attaining 100% (for various pro-rating purposes) harder to do on the temp staff scale too, which might have something to do with why they're reported as having ~0 full-time instructors despite using instructors.

anyway, i talked to my parents, and they started looking into the possibility of getting me into an old beater or something to commute to this job so i wouldn't have to pick up and move there under the unreliable circumstances. and once they got a clearer picture of this newer possible offer, and how it compared to the area (about 20-25k short of positions with comparable responsibilities for comparable qualifications and experience, and maybe even another 25k short in total compensation) my dad said about the most complimentary thing i've heard about my academic career in forever, that i was worth more than that and if they weren't willing to pay me what i was worth they should just forget about it. my parents both work for a convenience store chain in the area now, the same kind of shit work they've had ever since the financial crisis bankrupted their mom-and-pop business, and they pointed out that brand-new assistant store managers with only high school diplomas and no real experience at the job made more than i had been offered. and they didn't think that was right, so even if it meant not grabbing for something rather than nothing, it was worth it to demand a real show of respect for my work.

which is where i was leaning anyway. but it was nice to hear. so i counter-offered basically asking for a 1-year visitor's position instead of a full-time temp's position. i doubt there's anything the faculty can do about it, and i doubt the school will give a shit, but i feel good.

thanks for updating us. and good for you!

anyone here ever refused to give a letter of recommendation before (and not on grounds of i dunno not knowing the student well enough)?

a few years back i happened to be assisting on a class, with supervision, and i got a student who was trying his darnedest but only ever turning in totally atrocious work. with my supervisor's blessing basically ended up passing him out of charity, particularly since he was close to graduation, but we never really managed to come out and say to him, this work is off the radar as far as basic competency goes.

now he's applying to graduate school, apparently to go into a teaching-related field. : /

yea definitely seems like a good idea to refuse to give it

thing is he used to be a factory worker and since graduating (besides still that probably) he's been doing at-risk- and nontraditional-student mentoring, apparently successfully… so it does seem like he's doing some good?

on the other hand if any of his teachers ever puts their foot down he seems fairly likely to bomb graduate school, rack up lots of debt, etc

aw I'd be tempted to write it anyway--seeing as a lot of students in that position are simply trying to acquire the required 3-4 letters from whatever suitable authoritative sources they can find. would figure that if his work is as bad as you say then a lukewarm letter isn't gonna make a difference in the end wrt to getting accepted. but then of course I totally understand your concern with putting your name on it. maybe ask to see something more recent from him?

i'd sit down and talk with him first and then write an honest (and short) letter highlighting his strengths while avoiding the parts that i couldn't honestly recommend

i gave a luke warm (i.e. awful) one once. i made sure she understood that's what it would be like, and she still wanted it, so *shrug*

yeah I've told a student that they probably should find another referee but if they really need one from me I can write it

jesus christ, it looks like i might actually have a couple courses to cover come late january.

now i just have to figure out how the fuck to teach philosophy online

Bullying-to-death story from Imperial is horrible and scary: http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-college-london-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/

still no idea of the cause?

I haven't seen it stated anywhere, just lots of insinuation.

http://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/speculative-diction/stressful-systems/

reflection on the case, no new facts

http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau4.3.007/1598

Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class
David Graeber

Abstract

Many of the internal changes within anthropology as a discipline—particularly the "postmodern turn" of the 1980s—can only be understood in the context of broader changes in the class composition of the societies in which university departments exist, and, in particular, the role of the university in the reproduction of a professional-managerial class that has come to displace any working-class elements in what pass for mainstream "left" political parties. Reflexivity, and what I call "vulgar Foucauldianism," while dressed up as activism, seem instead to represent above all the consciousness of this class. In its place, the essay proposes a politics combining support for social movements and a prefigurative politics in the academic sphere.

aka let's pretend the 70s and 80s never happened?

what even happened then

u didn't miss much

omg i'm reading that essay now we should discuss it on some other thread because this one feels inappropriate for me just complaining about how wrong it gets everything. his entire description of the "neoliberal" process in the 80s is just effectively making shit up, and leads me to suspect that he actually doesn't understand anything about the 50s and 60s at all.

ahahaha i mean: "In this sense what’s happened to universities since the 1970s—very unevenly, but pretty much everywhere—has represented a fundamental break of a kind we have not seen in eight hundred years."

he should read one (1) clark kerr or something jesus

does he even know what the free speech movement was protesting christ

maybe the graeber 80s is an alternate universe, let us not forget:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.

do i get a cash prize for spotting a typo (last sentence of the second footnote)

these academiatricians don't know NOTHING

I'm tipping toward the "he's mostly correct" position on the negligible political impact of academia in general over the past few decades, and his not very nice answer why (I'm not in anthro so I can't speak to particulars in that department). But ultimately his last sentence is very positive.

I'm cheering when he says "reflection [on one's power and privilege] takes the typically American puritanical form, in which members of said elite compete with one another for moral superiority based on claims of greater cognizance of their own compromised nature." Yep, having sat through hours of such reflection, yep yep yep.

there's an irony that seems remarkably unremarked on in how proponents of long-view historicism manage to always assert that now (for whatever value of now is current) is the moment when everything is changing in a way that has never been seen before.

Invoking the dynamic of American Puritanism would appear to be an endorsement of long term continuity.

i'm talking about all the other stuff in the piece not that point in particular

His idea that Foucauldians are projecting the professional context of academia onto their subjects of study strikes me as rather glib. Too easy a knockdown to be convincing.

He mentions Scheper-Hughes. She makes what I think are some similar points, that in "perilous times" perfectionism is an unaffordable luxury. This seems to me to be a correct take on the the drawbacks of "vulgar Foucauldianism":

What is the value of ethnography in such a sad contemporary context? Many young anthropologists today, sensitized by Michel Foucault (1975, 1980, 1982)) on "power/knowledge," have come to think of ethnography and fieldwork as unwarranted intrusions into the lives of vulnerable, threatened peoples. The anthropological interview has been linked to the medieval "inquisitional confession" (Ginsberg 1988) through which church examiners extracted "truth" from their naive and naturally "heretical" peasant flocks. We hear of anthropological observation as a hostile act that reduces our "subjects" to mere "objects" of our discriminating, incriminating scientific gaze. Consequently, some young anthropologists have given up the practice of descriptive ethnography altogether in preference for distanced and highly formalized methods of discourse analysis or purely quantitative of models. Others concern themselves with macrolevel analyses of world economic systems in which the experiential and subjective experience of human lives is left aside. Still others engage in an obsessive, self-reflexive hermeneutics in which the self, not the other, becomes the subject of anthropological inquiry.

I grow weary of these postmodernist critiques, and given the perilous times in which we and our subjects live, I am inclined toward a compromise that calls for the practice of a "good enough" ethnography. The anthropologist is an instrument of cultural translation that is necessarily flawed and biased. We cannot rid ourselves of the cultural self that we bring with us into the field any more than we can disown the eyes, ears, and skin through which we take in our intuitive perceptions about the new and strange world we have entered. Nonetheless, like every other master artisan (and I dare say that at our best we are this), we struggle to do the best we can with the limited resources we have at hand--our ability to listen carefully, empathically, and compassionately.

I think of some of the subjects of this book for whom anthropology is not a hostile gaze but rather an opportunity to tell a part of their life story. And though I can hear dissonant voices in the background protesting just this choice of words, I believe there is a still a role for the ethnographer-writer in giving voice, as best she can, to those who have been silenced, as have the people of the Alto by political and economic oppression and illiteracy and as have their children by hunger and premature death. So despite the mockery that Clifford Geertz (1988) made of anthropological "I-witnessing," I believe there is still value in attempting to "speak truth to power." I recall how my Alto friends grabbed and pushed and pulled, jostling for attention, saying "Don't forget me; I want my turn to speak. That one has had your attention long enough!" Or saying, "Tá vendo? Tá ouvindo?"--"Are you listening, really understanding me?" Or taking my hand and placing it on their abdomens and demanding, "Touch me, feel me, here. Did you ever feel anything so swollen?" Or "Write that down in your notes, now. I don't want you to forget it." Seeing, listening, touching, recording, can be, if done with care and sensitivity, acts of fraternity and sisterhood, acts of solidarity. Above all, they are acts of recognition. Not to look, not to touch, not to record, can be the hostile act, the act of indifference and of turning away.

http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/15954?utm_content=buffer46da0

'foucault kids' sigh

that's an awfully loaded term for describing what simply seems to be interdisciplinary work! maybe I'm missing something.

i think there was supposed to be a slight implication of quality-independent-thought too

tbh that basically describes my quasi-interdisciplinary dissertation. a lot of self-imposed and self-directed "training" as well.

http://www.extremesportstrader.co.uk/shots/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/rocky-snow-training.jpg

http://instagram.com/p/xpskLsLe29/

fun shirt

the job market is pretty damn grim this year. not that that's news of course.

i feel like my barely suppressed disdain for this profession and the people in it (and by extension myself for "wanting" to be a part of it) must be still be coming through in my cover letters. gotta work on that.

the job market isn't grim for "top candidates" from "top schools"

ha, yeah i keep thinking about what i could have done differently and top of the list every time is "go to a more prestigious school."

jesus christ, it looks like i might actually have a couple courses to cover come late january.

now i just have to figure out how the fuck to teach philosophy online

― j., Monday, November 17, 2014 1:52 PM (1 month ago)

monday!! they can't cancel that shit on me NOW

did you figure out how the fuck to teach philosophy online?

welp

no, no i did not

so how is that going

i worked in online course design and implementation for years ama

boat's kind of sailed on design for the sucker at this point. i'm noticing some initial problems overcoming, on top of the usual difficulties students pose (new to school, general intellectual apathy and incuriosity, gen ed credit disengagement), a heightened rat-and-pellet orientation that the interface only seems to make worse. similarly w/ the atomization in the social experience of the course; way too many people seem unaware of anything else their classmates contribute, despite a few weeks of yammering and prodding on my part. interface doesn't help there, either; it actually makes it technically inconvenient to even -see- discussions as ongoing conversations rather than bags of disjoint squibs of opinionating, lobbed into the void for the sake of perfunctory discharge of course obligations.

i've been wondering if maybe i'm not just a little over-sensitive because i have too much exposure to my students' raw (unworked) intellectual productions now. i had plenty of that before, but in the social reality of the (physical) classroom, a more decorous inattention to the works-in-progress that are students' thoughts and utterances is possible.

scrap the infrstructure & make all your students join ilx

but we stopped counting people's posts years ago, what would i enter in the online gradebook that we also don't have

If it's an online course, then are many of your students distance learners, meaning that they may not have friends in the class? I'm guessing that this would exacerbate the problems an online interface already creates for doing the basic conversational background work of reading each others' body language, sizing one another up, assessing the mood in the room, etc.

If the interface allows for small group work, then that may be something to think about, if it puts students in connection with each other. Probably hard to monitor.

i have had success moving the discussion board to a blogspot to which all students have posting privileges. it flattens out the initial discussions a little bit so that it doesn't immediately look like a dozen barely-connected nodes and younger students are way more familiar with the blog-and-comment flow than with old fashioned treed discussion boards. also i suspect students have more of a feeling of ownership over posts and are thus more likely to get feisty.

group work is good, especially if the LMS facilitates it w/out too much work on your part, but for 100-level classes you can end up with one person from each group doing all the work.

I've taught one philo course online but I did it as an emergency overload and so my performance wasn't very important to e.g. keeping my job. that was good because the course sucked. I did what I was told, which was record myself giving lectures, and then giving assignments. there was a little offline chat associated with it too but I didn't really monitor that because it was like my fifth course that term. but yeah it sucked. it was something 101ish iirc

there are a couple offsite students, but the vast majority are campus-based (but taking courses online thanks to the state system push to… add value… somehow… but onlineifying as much of the curriculum as possible). been looking into getting them to meet up, at the very least for study group purposes, but *i* am not actually campus-based, so my powers of wrangling them are restricted.

group work isn't really facilitated well, although i've taken an unsuccessful stab at it already. not surprisingly, the supposedly 'native' intwebificommunication aptitude young people are supposed to have does not seem to be as much in evidence as one would like. ownership is a problem there (i've been reading a lot in the last year or two about educators' attempts to re-introduce structures for student ownership of course resources, activities, etc., online in the face of enterprise system tunnel vision, and i am FULLY ON BOARD but the lift for accomplishing that is pretty big when the default LMS is staring you in the face and students seem congenitally disinclined to do anything BUT log in to the LMS). why bother trying to manifest your presence and impress your stamp upon anything (as people do naturally in person) when you don't feel you're even involved in something that is 'yours'?

forget if we did this one already

https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/

Yes, college-level teachers should make more than cashiers at McDonald’s. Not because they hold advanced degrees—to pay someone for merely holding a degree is naked credentialism; to believe you deserve more money because of your credential itself rather than what you do with it is to misunderstand the value of work—but because as a culture, we value the dissemination of knowledge more than the distribution of hamburgers. Or at least we say we do.

this is just false; you have to tell a pretty fancy story to get it to work how how in fact 'we' value in this way or even say 'we' do

i would include myself in that "we", although i certainly think both groups should be paid more than they are.

our social system is rather peculiar when the majority of american humanities PhDs can't secure full-time teaching work, and the majority of american college students are taught by contingent faculty. the supposed progressives who run academic departments neither effectively warn the grad student suckers coming in nor care in any meaningful way once they're out the door jobless, any more than they're willing to make it clear to the undergrads that migrant workers teach their classes. this is of course all the fault of the undergrads and the grad students, and the market will sort the wheat from the chaff. the 99% - 1% dynamic the progressive faculty elaborate in marx-inflected classes is unrelated to the labor conditions in their entirely meritocratic departments

"the majority of american college students are taught by contingent faculty"

supposing that this is true, how does the data change when we remove English composition from the mix?

Why should we do that?

"first they came for the writing comp instructors..."

professors of the world, unite!

i haven't seen the data without english comp in the mix

http://www.aaup.org/report/contingent-appointments-and-academic-profession

maybe that changes everything, though, and the academy lives up to its professed ideals when you exclude english comp from the discussion?

The department where I taught for the past year and a half was up for its cyclical review this semester and had to publish statistics. In the 12-13 year, 54.6% of courses were taught by members of the part-time professors' association (definitely sessional faculty), 39.6% by members of the full-time profs' association, and 5.8% by 'other professors' (not sure what this means).

lol xp

I don't know what the data looks like when English comp is removed. But as the article in the revive points out, English comp courses get huge numbers of students, because they're (often) required of (nearly) every first-year. I am asking for the data because the practices chosen by English departments to staff their courses might not be the practices chosen by other departments. I am hesitant to conclude that what's happened is the fault of "the professoriate" when the decisions of English departments are made autonomously from other professors.

Sund4r, is that an English department?

No, music. Was tangential to the English comp question and is obv only one dept. (English comp = "foundations of academic writing" courses, I take it?)

Music numbers can be slanted because applied music instructors are often p/t. In the department's own notes, though, there is only a small majority when it comes to applied instructors and "[ i ]n the academic domain, all solfège sections are taught by a Sessional Professor with the assistance of several graduate student TAs. Many of the service courses have been taught by part-time professors and many of the core music theory and musicology requirements have been taught by part-time professors."

i've taught writing-intensive courses at more than one university that has distributed writing requirements throughout introductory and upper-division courses in order to make the writing instruction more 'relevant' and take the various pressures (labor, credit requirement and time to graduation) off the english or comp departments. but i don't see how forceful it is to aver that maybe other disciplines are different. not as bad, maybe, since they're less in need of cheap labor to serve large numbers of service course requirements. but consider this: adjuncts are likely to teach the lowest level courses, the ones most likely to be taken by non-majors. meanwhile ignatius p. featherbottom is sitting down the hall living the life of the mind with the much less popular upper division course students and a seminar with 6 people in it. the numbers thin out as you go up the status hierarchy.

"the numbers thin out as you go up the status hierarchy"

I've never taught in a department like this. all R1s though.

I am not trying to excuse or deny the problem, just trying to identify it better.

have we talked about the Colander article?

the original article is worth a read (if ouchy), the key points are spelled out in this interview/article about it:

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/897-where-do-english-ph-d-s-get-jobs-it-depends-on-where-they-studied

scary suggestions in the original article include: regarding a PhD as something that people who are already independently wealthy should pursue to add value to their lives, the degree as a kind of luxury good akin to a Patek Phillippe wristwatch, not an introdcution to an actual, y'know, career. Depressssssssssssssssssssing.

yeah but euler, yall got hella grad students to labor for you, i'm guessing. at an institution without grad students those lower-division courses wouldn't have as many ft faculty giving the lectures, i'm guessing?

When I first read that study, I thought the 44% figure for bottom-tier institutions seemed very high! Are there numbers for other disciplines?? A 1.9% difference between Tier 2 and Tier 4 is not bad.

i need to read the longer article, but i'd also be curious how those numbers reflect phds who have been on the job market for multiple years--there's just no way that 40% of new phds get TT jobs. i just cant fathom that. granted, i dont know that many people at "tier 1" schools.

the english job market was particularly brutal this year--and the so-called "secondary market" looks like a wasteland as well.

j I dunno, my previous job was in a gradless department, without adjuncts, usually with one vap with same salary / bennies as new assistant profs, one more course a year than tt fac but no committee work. Now I have grads but it just means our (fac) intro lectures are bigger. still no adjuncts, minimal vaps again with good salaries (more than I made pretenure at last job) and course loads.

I want to see how disciplinary lines are involved here.

“The real problem is there’s a disconnect in the training. Something has to be done about that. And it goes far beyond English.”

This is way otm

To that point, Colander puts forth four main recommendations. Among them, he suggests programs make their job-placement data publicly available, and that they redesign their curricula and job training to better match what new doctorates will experience after graduation.

“My own feeling is that putting the information out there will not make a big difference; it will make one feel better knowing they gave students the warning,” he said, comparing the posted job data to the warning on a cigarette pack. “The real problem is there’s a disconnect in the training. Something has to be done about that. And it goes far beyond English.”

'training' is the great imaginary solution to all kinds of hard problems, but it doesn't make more jobs appear in Detroit or in academia.

what isn't discussed is 'should there be fewer grad programs?'

Yeah, I always wonder when people suggest that: what sorts of pragmatic workforce-oriented arts/social sciences/humanities graduate programmes are people envisioning, exactly?

when i was in an english ph. d. program our department secretary did send out an email about reps from the CIA looking to hire us. i was not interested.

he suggests programs make their job-placement data publicly available

lol right now my department is listing the small handful of jobs i've had since graduation in the half the time i wasn't unemployed or working shit sub-minimum wage work as if they were different jobs gotten by different people placed at different institutions and not just careening from one abandoned post to another. sometimes i get an urge to call them up and be like, i want you to put on your website that i did not get a permanent job and have been an employment disaster.

that is infuriating. the program i dropped out of just doesn't list your job if it's not a tenure-track universityty/college job. but it doesn't list that you didn't get one either. it's like you just disappear. friends who finished the program and ended up doing something other than professing, often after trying to get a position for years, are livid about this.

i think mine must be doing it because if they didn't list temp jobs for the last several years things would look super dire, as if they had shut down

because of this thread I looked up my former department's "job placement" page and they've placed around 8 TT positions in the last 10 years.

and yeah they are definitely leaving a LOT of us off that list.

the "training" thing varies from discipline to discipline. I have no idea what English departments can do, but I have ideas about what my discipline can do. one idea is to bifurcate our program between research/teaching and research/application. the first track is the one we have now; the second would integrate their research with applications of that research in "the real world". obv that will change the sorts of work these students do in their dissertations. & it should change the time in program (aim at 4 years) plus pay (I envision work with a company during the second summer). Why do this instead of just going from undergrad into those jobs? because the training we provide, in analysis chiefly, will be accordingly improved with doctoral work. I'm not thinking of mere credentialism at all. as faculty we have to have confidence that our work really does improve the work students can do in the real world; most of my colleagues have no experience in that world, and often look down at that world (because of snobbery or Marxism or some other ideology). So that's the internal battle. Finding companies who want to play: that's another battle, though I think that's easier than the internal battle.

Well, what are the practical 'real-world' applications of PhDs in philosophy? What are the numbers like? Would you actively discourage students from doing research in less marketable areas and steer them towards more marketable ones? (So idk, semi-informed guessing here but maybe less medieval philosophy and philosophy of religion but more mainstream contemporary social theory work that might directly lead to a career in the public service and math-oriented work that could have some sort of technological application? And would those dissertations be as pragmatic as straight-up social science or computer science or math degrees? Or translation? Would you encourage students to leave your discipline if those other options were more practical?).

I don't think philo doctorates are going to fit naturally into pre-existing job descriptions, but that's not shocking: there's not been many philosophers available to craft job descriptions for! But as I said, analysis is what we're trained to do: conceptual analysis, analysis of arguments, analysis of the space of possibilities for problems: and we do so in quite general arenas (including within history of philosophy, yes). the generality means we're not bound to problems in "just" one area, or beholden to jargon and vogue-y frameworks. I suppose I see consultant-like teams forming with an economist, a philosopher, a software person, etc. I have friends with physics doctorates who've moved into the real world and they do things like this: bring their skills in experimental design and analysis to bear on problems quite remote from their training in substance but not form. for reasons I pointed at earlier philosophers have resisted doing this, and don't individually have the financial or social support to get it off the ground: but that's something a graduate program can do, in the way they do in the sciences and engineering.

these kinds of ideas are floated a lot but they tend to run aground on the conflict between what such "training" would really require and the traditional requirements of a dissertation--and if, fine, we change the dissertation then we in fact pretty substantially change the discipline and then all of a sudden people start asking "what's the point of philosophy when we have all these other disciplines that do similar things in a more focused way?"

i mean, in my own field it usually turns out to be, "yes that all sounds great but what does this have to do with joyce?"

philosophy doesn't have contentual boundaries, though: it has methodological boundaries, modes of investigation, and even those are porous. tbh I don't really care about disciplines. one way that disciplines are bounded is by linking to previous literature, so that your traditional dissertation requires lots of ties to other secondary lit in the vicinity. I think we overdo that and it ties us back.

if some other discipline had the methodological views of philosophy and inquired with the depth and boldness of good philosophy into a wide range of questions then sure, replace philosophy with that. I care about knowledge and truth (and the interrogation of those), not patrolling boundaries.

I have had a few colleagues who agree with me on this but many more who have not, though.

eh i certainly agree with you in some respects, but "knowledge and truth" are not, imo, produced in and of themselves but within disciplinary boundaries where we have the particular means for evaluating them according to how knowledge and and truth are produced in those disciplines.

point being: i dont think the "knowledge and truth" that philosophy produces can be replicated in other disciplines so easily. so i guess im saying im not as sanguine about boundaries because i see a real risk when they are discarded. sometimes they should be! not always.

and, fwiw, I'm not sure many disciplines in the humanities have strict boundaries on content anymore. I guess "classics" does--and look what happened there.

when we're talking about getting students jobs in the real world, the means for evaluating knowledge and truth are going to be taken, in the first run at least, from the real world. think Moore "fuck yes one hand is here". I work on math where I think real world standards are pretty inapplicable a lot of the time, and that's why I love what I do; but a student who's going to work on a team helping some business improve its framework for managing product distribution or whatever, those standards are going to be set at first. then the philosopher on that team can play with the standards as well as work on the problems given, but in daily life it's not up to us to rebuild the capitalist system or whatever. my program would not be training revolutionaries, someone else can do that, it's a cool problem, but we just gotta get people fed.

Heh, my philosopher partner wrote a p good paper on the usefulness of 'useless' fields of study that I want to pull out now. I'm still having trouble seeing why this business would need a philosophy PhD on their team to improve their product distribution framework (as opposed to e.g. someone who took a couple of undergrad logic courses).

I have a good laugh when people advocate for music programmes moving wholesale into training people for the commercial music industries, as if those industries are thriving. At least a trad conservatory programme trains you pretty well to teach music lessons and play wedding gigs.

Anyway, I better shut off the internet for a few hours if I want to keep up my contingent academic employment.

yeah I'm not making a detailed case for the business in question, but just pointing out the "structure" of the fit between philosopher and business world that I have in mind. but the skills will definitely go well beyond logic: I'm talking about analysis. Logic is one part of that but by no means all of it. this is getting too vague at this point, I know; just saying that I think grad programs owe their students training toward productive work, and that what counts as "productive work" has to incorporate more than just teaching. each discipline will have to handle that in its own way. but grad training is very different from undergrad training so the expected outcomes of those programs should also be very different than what we've come to expect from higher education grads, particularly in disciplines that have traditionally seen the doctorate as leading exclusively to professorial work.

i dont think restructuring is enough, we just need fewer grad students

that's on students, then, not on me

you'd have to think that the tier 3 and 4 programs (if not the tier 2 eventually as well) will eventually wither away if only because there seems increasingly little to no point in attending those programs. id like to keep a close eye on undergraduate enrollment in different majors because that'll be the first sign of any big contraction in the graduate ranks.

yeah students should only attend top-ish programs. I dunno about seeing signs of wither in undergrad majors, though; so many American doctoral students come from outside the USA.

that's on students, then, not on me

i dont think any of it is 'on you'! its not even really on schools either. my take is the larger problem is 'credentialism' or w/e you want to call it. which really is the fault of a fundamental shift in the labor market which &c &c

from the years i spent teaching undergraduate classes i grew to feel like so much of it was a waste - of time, of resources, of spirit - and nothing has really managed to shake that conviction. many of my students were taking 'practical, useful' science courses they had no interest in or particular aptitude for. i think the only sin you could commit teaching one of those courses was to make a drastic changes to the final exam structure so that students couldnt simply just d/l past exams and use them to study from. and its rational for students to want to exert as little energy as possible in getting the best grade they can in a course they dont care about for a degree thats only a necessity. but why have this system at all?

idk i feel like schools need to be less connected to the business world, less focused on acting as a free filtering system for firms and be smaller, more 'useless'.

I don't teach math anymore but I know what you mean about that. ime math depts are concerned to craft (lower level) classes that can support having a wide variety of instructors plugged in & still "succeed". I hope those courses are replaced by something genuinely automated then: that's what (ime) math depts want in those classes as it is.

in philo I don't get the grade grubbers the way I did in math, so I think this varies from discipline to discipline.

also I don't think "schools" need to be more/less connected to the business world---my current american uni has almost 2000 tt faculty, there's no unity of thought among them. departments are a better unit to have something like unity of thought, and there I think it varies by discipline: my discipline needs better contacts with the "real world" (not just business world), for math it's different, etc.

I don't entirely disagree with Lamp's last post. If companies need a trained labour market, there's an argument to be made that they should bear the cost of workplace training.

you'd have to think that the tier 3 and 4 programs (if not the tier 2 eventually as well) will eventually wither away if only because there seems increasingly little to no point in attending those programs.

If the Colander study is to be believed, the numbers don't seem to support this. The bottom tier programs are doing just about as well as the Tier 2 programs (and not horrendously worse than Tier 1 programs) when it comes to job placement.

that's true, but i have to imagine it's gonna get (even) worse--particularly as you can't go "up" a tier. (a tier 4 phd won't be getting a TT placement in a tier 2 school, for instance). there's something weird about the numbers in this respect--logically you'd think they would drop off because upper tier phds have a better shot at lower tier jobs than lower tier phds do. isn't there also a backlog of upper tier phds sitting around as well? how does this backlog figure into projections? does the study take 1 year on the job market to be equivalent to 10?

princeton phds ain't about southeast bumblefuck community college

and vice versa really

yeah that's what I was starting to think, "oh maybe they're just being snobby."

my take is the larger problem is 'credentialism' or w/e you want to call it. which really is the fault of a fundamental shift in the labor market which &c &c

from the years i spent teaching undergraduate classes i grew to feel like so much of it was a waste - of time, of resources, of spirit - and nothing has really managed to shake that conviction. many of my students were taking 'practical, useful' science courses they had no interest in or particular aptitude for. i think the only sin you could commit teaching one of those courses was to make a drastic changes to the final exam structure so that students couldnt simply just d/l past exams and use them to study from. and its rational for students to want to exert as little energy as possible in getting the best grade they can in a course they dont care about for a degree thats only a necessity. but why have this system at all?

idk i feel like schools need to be less connected to the business world, less focused on acting as a free filtering system for firms and be smaller, more 'useless'.

― no (Lamp), Tuesday, March 3, 2015 12:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you were probably teaching a first year course though, right? from the credentialist pov wouldn't the value of taking `practical, useful' science courses not be the kids in 1st year courses with no interest or aptitude memorizing past finals but the signal sent/skill acquired by the ones who ace the 1st year classes then opt to take advanced upper year electives, etc? like schools aren't just a `free-filtering system for firms' in that some of the kids who don't get filtered out actually learn the skills too.

also like, assuming we're moving towards some autor-ean dual labor market with a highly educated technocracy and a low-skilled service sector, isn't a function of college to give kids a taste of what they're in for if they decide to try and make it in the former? despite having a horrible undergrad gpa i actually kind of believing in the sorting equilibria function of higher ed. someone once told me the only prerequisite for studying law was not being bored by dry texts. i thought that kind of made sense. like, most people hate reading dry texts. if you realize that you like it, and can make a wage premium from doing it full time, there's a social benefit to be captured. if not, join the precariat service underclass lol

well i dont think its very useful as a filtering system! i think you can send very good signals w/o learning anything - if anything i would argue that in 100 and 200 level courses a genuine desire to learn is probably disadvantageous if yr goal is simply getting the highest gpa possible. i dont think gpa is a useful sorting mechanism for the sort of system yr taking abt for lots of reasons.

also i think most work in the professional class isnt that highly skilled or technical really - i think that some kind of training or apprenticeship system is probably preferable? idk thats just a feeling really, not a serious proposal.

idk i feel like im trying to argue against a bunch of things and its not like i have any hard data to draw conclusions from. really my post was an emotional one rather than an incisive critique.

No, I think you're making good points!

we just need fewer grad students

grad programs owe their students training toward productive work, and that what counts as "productive work" has to incorporate more than just teaching.

I don't necessarily agree with either of these statements. I think the 'casualization' of university teaching work is unjust in that people are doing demanding, skilled work (for which students are paying increasingly large sums of money) and not being compensated or evaluated in what I would consider a fair manner. However, I don't think it is in itself necessarily an injustice if graduate education does not directly lead to a career for many students. I don't think that grad programs owe, or really should owe, their students anything more or less than an education and academic freedom. As long as students are not being misinformed about the job placement numbers and as long as the people who are admitted are actually capable of doing high-level scholarly work and are given adequate support to do so (three big "as long"s), I don't necessarily see a problem with people taking a few years to study something they love with the funding to do so. It can be comparable to a four-year contract, sometimes with better conditions than other entry-level jobs. Besides, generally, people do pick up some useful skills in the process and the extra credentials can make some difference.

i don't agree with either of those statements either. i think we need higher taxes on the rich to fund more generous education in this country. the concentration of privileged people in the academy defies the explicit ideals of the preponderance of thinkers taught in american colleges/universities and is more indicative of neo-feudalism than a functioning democracy

i see that this, from Robert Pippen, is from last summer, but it's new to me and seemed quite interesting on a skim, even if i dont agree with everything.

As I said, my understanding of what’s been happening is that the pressure on the humanities to demonstrate their relevance anew is caused by this financial panic. It doesn’t have a serious intellectual pedigree, there isn’t a serious case. Secondly, we ought to remember that the so-called new humanities aren’t new. I mean, what’s new is the invocation of empirical science. But attacks on the autonomy of the discussion of meaning and value have been going on for forty years in the academy. The movements toward it, like semiotics, structuralism, structuralist Marxism, Althusserian Marxism, psychoanalysis, discourse theory—a variety of ways of essentially denying the phenomenon of human intentionality, another fancier word for meaning—have been going on for a long time.

So we have this perfect storm of financial panic in 2008, gradual defunding of public universities and massive increases in tuition in private universities that were accelerated by the financial panic, coming just at the time when many humanities programs were coming out of a long, thirty- or forty-year period of nearly suicidal self-criticism, just at the wrong time for there to be massive amounts of evidence that humanities programs were as critical of the enterprise that they used to be engaged in as any Steven Pinker. So it was a terrible, terrible conflation of storm elements to produce this crisis in the organization of knowledge.

As I said, for me, the most interesting single fact about it—and I’ll just stop here before I go on too long—is just the one I’ve been mentioning throughout. There is no new intellectual argument that one can cite that is responsible for the diminution in the enterprise of teaching people what it is to mean and to value. I’m in philosophy—I can tell you, there’s plenty of materialist, reductionist, eliminitivist philosophy of mind out there, but there’s nobody who’s taken on the canon of classical texts or French literature in the nineteenth century and demonstrated that the attempt by methods of rigorous analysis, textual analysis, interpretive finesse, that those methods have been discredited by a discovery. This furor is about nothing intellectual. The people who are attacking are not really presenting a principled position for which they have arguments; they’re presenting small case studies, which they purport to be exciting because they’re new and they use new methods … But it also plugs into this anxiety about the legitimacy of autonomous disciplines within the humanities, like art history, or music, or philosophy, or literature, or classics. So I think that we shouldn’t be confused by the nature of the dispute. It’s a financial dispute fueled by panic—and coming right at the wrong time in the history of the university.

link: http://thepointmag.com/2014/criticism/ways-knowing

sooooo many rejection letters today. all expected, of course, but this is some kind of black Friday.

one of my grad student peers got tenure last night, after essentially doing… nothing at his low-level slac job, other than showing up for several years

: /

really trying hard to keep the bitterness at bay, but I've got a good record of publications and a fairly relevant, maybe even "sexy," up-and-coming specialization, but I can hardly even get more than an interview or two--I'm fucking up on some major level and I can't even figure out what I is. cut of my gib is showing, I guess.

I regret that post--I'll keep the self-pity to myself from now on!

you should light them all on fire

http://cdn.hark.com/images/000/503/062/503062/original.jpg

that might create a few openings, at least.

the inability of adjuncts to get how difficult the real faculty have it may be their tragedy. although somehow they can't/won't arrest/reverse trends the unsophisticated might deem 'unfair'/'inhumane', certainly tenured/tenure-track professors are superior to contingent instructors intellectually, work-ethically, and diplomatically

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/o-adjunct-my-adjunct

the show must go on! if only the less sophisticated would accept their betters couldn't achieve important marxian/theoretical/civil rights breakthroughs, subject to plebeian conditions

can i presume the requirement of a "statement of philosophy" for this job really means a "statement of teaching philosophy" or is this some new horrible thing i havent encountered yet.

I had a Skype interview on Monday for a VAP teaching position and am already seriously questioning whether I would even want to move halfway across the continent for a 4/4 teaching load. I'm growing oddly attached to my precarious lifestyle that (so far) leaves time for actual research and creative work.

(Think it went OK, although who ever knows?)

In other news, I just gave my last lecture of the semester.

i've gotten sent a couple (usual) long-shot short-term job opportunities lately by friends, and i'm feeling more than ever like, why would i want to move across the country for that. again (not that i've moved 'across the country' yet. but moving is moving.) i don't quite know how to justify myself to them, though - hard to sound sensible 'passing up' 'opportunities' when your status quo is far from peachy anyway.

perhaps justifiable if you believe the opportunity will somehow lead to further, and better, opportunities down the line. though this is increasingly hard to believe.

"the writing is just so turgid"; "I can't really see why he's insisting on..."; "This is a crazy set of pairs"; "this just doesn't work at all", &c &c. anonymous academic reviewers can be kinda mean.

I would write the second and fourth of those remarks, but not the first and the third: those are really mean, "crazy", "just so turgid". ime Brits are meaner in reports, and even in letters of rec where I've seen some quite faint praise and even meanness being dished out, and maybe in the UK those are good (I doubt it) but in the USA they're...not

how much of it is because the subject and perhaps style are recogniseable within small fields and personal antipathy seeps through

just in general not necessarily in relation to merdes, though whoever wrote that is a miserable cunt

iirc Merdeyeux is a doctoral student so his style wouldn't be recognized; and a good editor wouldn't send an article to a referee that s/he knew would have personal antipathy toward the subject of the essay. it is very hard to find referees (people say no to me about eight times as much as yes) and accordingly harder to find good referees but this separates well-run journals from badly-run ones. I got a silly report from a silly journal to which I was persuaded to submit as part of a group of people and it reminded me why that journal is silly. I get it: you don't get paid for editorial work, you don't get teaching reductions, it's just an additional professional burden that you do for the sake of service to the profession (and the concomitant ego boost for getting the position), and so the temptation to resort to bad referees is easy to justify.

ha yeah when I was applying for jobs I was encouraged to get recommendations from Americans, or at least people who would write "American-style" recommendation letters xp

anonymous academic reviewers can be kinda mean.

academics are mean, generally. especially to each other.

once the revolution comes that they're laying the groundwork for then they'll be as nice and humane as the values they teach suggest they should be

I'm actually not sure that Marxism has any real pride of place in my field but tbf, did Marxism ever have anything to do with people being nice and humane?

iirc, yes, but they made an exception for academics

can't happen here

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/04/north_carolina_education_bill_it_would_require_public_university_professors.html

from that article:

The North Carolina debacle-in-waiting serves as abject proof that, as tenured history professor and Slate contributor Jonathan Rees has written recently, adjunctification moves upward as well as downward. “Working conditions will gradually drift towards the level of the least compensated among us, not the best,” he writes. “What’s that you say? You think you’re special? You do research? Tell that to every professor at a public university in North Carolina.”

so are there any countervailing forces likely to turn this trend back or am i gonna watch the dismantling of higher education (public version) in my lifetime?

inner migration

am i gonna watch the dismantling of higher education (public version) in my lifetime?

On that note I came across this the other day:

http://chuckrybak.com/uw-struggle-real-people-edition/

kinda lol but mostly sad that the first named example of the talent drain from Wisconsin left to go to... North Carolina

as long as kids from wealthy families can still get PhDs and tenure track jobs, i don't see what the problem is

The UNC bill is dismaying, no doubt. However, I disagree with this, unless "hard" means "physically demanding":

Teaching college, especially if you’re good at it, isn’t particularly hard.

Also, it is hard for me to see how someone could teach four courses in one semester and only be putting in 'full-time' (40h/wk) hours. Going by the figure of 2-4h or prep for every hour of teaching (http://americanfacultyassociation.blogspot.ca/2012/02/hours-for-teaching-and-preparation-rule.html), 12h of lectures a week would require 24-48h of prep and a minimum of 2h of office hours. 10h of marking/wk seems like a conservative estimate for that courseload. Someone who is teaching only courses that he or she has taught before with relatively light marking loads would still be putting in more than standard f/t hours.

I mean, one could cut back on those hours by becoming more of a textbook facilitator and using a lot of Scantron, which is the only way I can really understand the loads that people are being asked to take on. This does compromise pedagogy (not just research) imo.

it's not often that a 4/4 amounts to 4 totally different courses, in my experience (though it does happen--usually to adjuncts).

I've taught 5 courses in a semester before; what gives more than prep time is emotional labor. I gather that this isn't labor that matters to bureaucrats and their enablers; what's in question is its role in learning. I think it's enormous, particularly for more marginal students whose motivation is constantly under barrage from distractions. make me teach more students and I will not be as good as motivating them.

the last place i worked had a 5/5 load for all full-time staff, from what i could see they tried to rarely assign more than 2 preps at a time, tho sometimes 3, but their course assignments were extremely siloed (no one ever outside their 'area')

pedagogically, some courses really don't take much - plug and chug calculus e.g.; 12 sections at a time may all be using the same texts for institutional reasons, and those things are so highly refined that they basically walk both student and staff through what to do, so you just do it and then do some problems

otoh i teach from primary texts and try to reread them before each time i teach (the more i've taught, the less i _have_ to, but still it makes the teaching better), and it's a pretty wasteful approach resource-wise, takes a lot out of you to have to delve back into them rather than just running w/ yr standard story come classtime

yeah with literature i tend to re-read along with the class and that can be time consuming when also prepping.

the weird irony of all this is that never (in the humanities) have research demands been higher. i dunno about you, but im sorta ok with every english professor in the world not needing to churn out a half dozen books in their career.

yeah at this point in my life I have prep down, but it's the emotional part that can't be prepped, and I can't/don't want to give it up, turn into some automaton up there, b/c I think it's the only thing that keeps students involved. I agree with Plato and Augustine that learning comes from love, and while the object of love isn't the teacher, the teacher plays a role in conducting and focusing that love, and her person is involved in that.

i think that's a big part of why i stick w/ rereading, to a certain extent i find it hard to give a proper shit w/o getting caught back up in the texts, they're a major part of what i love about the discipline

absolutely

I need to give a shit for the students to give a shit

& if "they" want to make it so that I can't give a shit anymore, then I'm done with teaching

prohibited

it's not often that a 4/4 amounts to 4 totally different courses, in my experience (though it does happen--usually to adjuncts).

A new Temporary Lecturer position was advertised on the Music Vacancy List yesterday that does this. (There are actually five courses in the fall and six in the winter but some of them are worth less credits such that they amount to a 4.33/4 load, assuming that one course is 3 credits. I'm not sure why a 4th-year analysis course would be two credits if a second-year theory course is three credits, though.)

I know someone who did 5/6 (with two sections of one course in the second semester so he was actually teaching 5 distinct courses that semester) at a VAP job. He worked 12h days 7 days a week.

12h days 7 days a week is the tt life at an R1 tbh, on the low end really. well, and grad school too if you want that r1 tt fun. ish is def nuts though

I mean, I don't know how he counted his hours. I didn't take much time off at all when I taught three courses in a semester tbh so 4/4 or 5/6 seem hard to fathom for me. (In the 2014 winter, when I had two heavy courses + a fair bit of private/music-school teaching + was performing, composing, and interviewing, I got sick at least four times, which I mostly attribute to overwork.) Currently have something approaching work/life balance, which feels hard to let go of.

I kind of doubt I'd get an R1 TT, whether or not I wanted it, tbh.

keep in mind I am not very smart so maybe the real deals can work a lot less than me and still make bank research-wise

i left academia before i had much contact with non-departmental administration but now i am on an an academic committee. oof.

right?

i mean we're trying to do something really interesting curriculum wise, but jeeeeeeeeeez

i think the problem is more pronounced because we're trying to do something related to data $cience and startups, and there's the way this is done in startups, and it doesn't map particularly well onto academia right now because it's still an embryonic prof discipline, and then you've got all these middle-aged administrators who read about it in a copy of business week, or got into a conversation about it in a united club...

lol suddenly i have the eerie feeling you are an ex-university physicist i know who just left to do a data $cience startup

everybody's doing it

while here i am just holdin my nuts

http://coreyrobin.com/2015/04/14/before-you-get-that-phd/

Max Weber, Science as a Vocation:

Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation [ advanced degree ], the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says lasciate ogni speranza [ abandon all hope, you who enter here ]. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.”‘ Yet, I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.

Just got called in for an on-campus interview for a VAP (maybe renewable) version of what would basically be my dream job. Did not expect this.

Private business had been picking up and I was starting to feel comfortable-ish here so I still wonder.

there's a VAP open near here next year, probably just far enough to have to move, kind of the best kind of place i could hope to have a permanent job, but it's unclear whether that's a real possibility

feeling ground down by my current jobs, tho, so the urge is coming back to just apply for shit and say whatever, i go where the winds blow

The nearby VAP seems like it might be a good move if you're not happy with your current jobs idk. What would be the cons?

rejection, turmoil, etc

i'm not a great fit, so i'm trying not to care much, but they do have a faculty to whom i'd be congenial, who know my people, etc.

congrats on the interview, Sund4r!

"not a great fit" used to seem like not a terribly big deal, but a few years into the job market it feels like the kiss of death.

Thanks!

I've never really known what 'not a great fit' means tbh.

good luck s

it means other things (too weird, likes hegel too much, etc.), but in this context it just means they want me to teach classes i am not actually qualified to teach other than because phd

Cmon if you have a PhD in the area you should be able to teach any undergrad class in the area