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

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

Key quote for the lightly engaged:

When you create “content” on Canvas, according to the standard terms of use, “Instructure does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, you grant Instructure a fully paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right (including any moral rights) and license to use, license, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform, and publicly display, Your Content (in whole or in part) for the purposes of operating and providing the Instructure Properties.”

horrifying indeed!

yeah and even more context for those who might not know: i guess nowadays instead of handing in your essays or emailing them to your professor, you upload them into a "learning management system" (which is what Canvas is), where your instructor can leave you comments, message you, and upload your grade, and where tech companies can do all the things with that content and those interactions that they want. and they further want to use it to harvest hyper-specific data about your participation, attendance, and other things as a student to sell to companies who can use it against you in the hiring process

My department is a never ending cavalcade of drama and pent-up animosity, stretching back years before I got this job. I don't understand wtf is wrong with these people and why they act like such selfish brats.

^^ evergreen post unfortunately

Starting to believe that our dean bears a lot of responsibility for this continuing, tho I don't think that will ever come to the fore in a serious way.

There needs to be a 77 version of this thread. I have stories.

I support that

There needs to be a 77 version of this thread. I have stories.

― cryptosicko, Wednesday, February 18, 2026 10:28 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

same tbh

There is one only it focuses on teaching and not the ivory tower of academia

Search “teachers”

paradoxical disparity between the egalitarian ideals of the humanities and actual campus working conditions is never the fault of academic winners, who feel terrible about it all in their tenure

otm

I was telling a colleague today "we didn't cause this problem and it's not on us to solve it"

I heard the exact same thing from a colleague in my department last week (and I agree).

would really do a 77 thread. i got stories too. and also… i need a resume, stat. boo.

Aw, that sucks. I have returned to the fray now, and am fighting my despair at AI permeating the entire assessment process. Students confidently presenting scientific information and being completely unable to define the most basic terms they used moments previously.

I think it’s the fact that they didn’t feel they needed to understand what they were saying that bothers me the most.

People! I already said there is a 77 thread. I even told you how to find it.

fwiw as the creator of the original 77 thraed i wouldn't mind if somebody made a new one. the original thread has a lot of cringe memories for me. but i know a lot of others have shared experiences in that thread that shouldn't be lost. so i'm cool either way!

https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=116664#unread

the original thread has a lot of cringe memories for me.
all of ilx could be described this way! i don't blame you for feeling that way, and I don't care if there is a new thread or not. I was wondering if the issue is that people who post here don't identify as teachers. I always have because that is my focus but maybe ivory tower dwellers feel differently.

Its like the movie Seniors with Quaid