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

a taxonomy of the exceptions in the otherwise heartfelt egalitarianism of 'successful' professional american academics could never get published in one of the journals they edit

another grad school peer tenured : /

:-/

more or less why i don't keep in touch with my cohort.

meanwhile....

http://www.journalgazette.net/news/local/IPFW-restructuring--Geology--philosophy--women-s-studies-to-be-eliminated-15839023

geology???

getting harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that going to graduate school was a catastrophic life decision for me. not so much that i blame my naive 25 year old self entirely for that decision but i wish i had seen the writing on the wall much earlier.

my projected means of coping with that conclusion is that it's not really like any other career path i could have taken would have been wonderful (though financially better? no doubt), so let's be pleased that i at least managed to drop out of the rat-race for a few years and pursue something i am perversely and pointlessly interested in.

also having a book is something to be proud of, and feels like the kind of thing ppl eventually look back on and are glad they did.

i think that's the right attitude. i was listening to some alan watts lecture (lol at me, don't judge) and he was talking about advising students and the old question: "what would you do with your life if money was no object?" and i thought "well, i was able to do it!" it just looks like it won't be for my whole life. and while there's undeniably been some sacrifices entailed i can't regret it entirely.

perhaps it is interesting to compare your life decision with that of a person who decided to be an artist. if they make it through their 30s with some successes but never really the kind that let them 'be artists', need they regard themselves as having failed 'at life' in the same ways as academics do?

that's a helpful way to look at it--and really i always did look at it that way, as if the phd was just some accreditation or rubber stamp that allowed me to do what i thought was really important. meanwhile i grew up and discovered my dismal career prospects. but yes to recall the ~thing itself~ that drew you in the first place is the best antidote to the internal monologue of failure.

i mean there is a real difference. artists can generally look to audiences, performances, sales, even if they're modest, to sit alongside whatever personal value the doing of their art has for them. academic work at its least accessible end doesn't seem to have the same outlets, and the analogues all seem to put you in kind of an advisorial/conferential role, if not that of a retailer of your knowledge (writing blog posts, academic journalism, etc.). maybe it has to do with the effect hoped for in each case.

oh i see. a big part of it (at least for me) is that you can more or less call yourself an artist for the rest of your life and continue to do art, but to call yourself a scholar while not being a professor of some kind seems wrong. i try to imagine if i'll ever have the will to try to write another book but doing it outside the institutional support of academia seems somehow pointless (not to mention that the odds of it getting published are then greatly diminished). particularly since the kind of work i want to do is only gonna find an academic audience...

what's the best way to track the work of scholars that you like? can you create like a 'favorites' list on google scholar or something?

you can!

lots of them use academia.edu lately, which is a (for-profit, trying to find a way to turn a profit on it per usual these days for website startups) social network that academics use to follow each other, share papers (often in versions that are easier to access than paywalled journal content), etc.

you don't have to be affiliated with a university to start an account.

Researchgate.net is similar as well - I guess also for-profit, not sure.

and ssrn for social science, and arxiv for mathematical sciences and physics

I recently got an email from academia.edu notifying me that someone had cited my research (presumably my master's thesis, or maybe some stuff i RA'd?), but I had never made an account before

creepy!

yeah that's one of the ways they're trying to monetize it, you pay to access information about that kind of 'mention'. they also have search result logs for individual pages and hosted papers that sometime in the past year or two started blocking out host information from academic visitors, so that you pay to unlock that too, and either gather information from it or, more likely, just stoke/stroke your ego.

Depends on your field, but ResearchGate allows following others' output - I think it's mostly biomed but maybe that's just the part I see.

'Best practices' docs are so much better than academic papers.

low bar

needs placement on trenchant / challop quad diagram

the writing center info page for faculty at my university provides 'workshops' in the form of… videos… by writing center staff

Got to sit on the other side of the interview table today, which was interesting.

Without giving too much away, my role was obv minor but it was a little nerve-wracking to be reminded that within a year or two, after my appointment runs out, I'll probably be lucky to be in their shoes at an interview (if I stay in this mill). Felt empathetic. Also notable to get a sense of what it's like when a committee has to deliberate between frankly overqualified candidates in a pinch.

Btw, does anyone know of literature on the job search experiences/career paths of people who got faculty jobs in the 70s and 80s?

I want to study more--about to look into a class :)

Alert: https://chroniclevitae.com/jobs/0000375169-01

Five Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities are available for the 2018-2019 academic year on the general theme of STUFF.

the general theme of STUFF

Perfect ILE board description, but I'll steal it for myself, for now.

the whatever turn in the humanities

I feel like these cutesy postdoc themes have really become a popular trend in the last 5 years or so.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/swarm

Today, during a Q&A session at a major conference in my field, the first question was: “You claim that your paper is novel, but I don’t see the novelty. What’s the novelty?” The author of the paper tried to explain, but the questioner was relentless and kept insisting that the paper was “less than minor” and “bad for science.” Thankfully, the questioner, after a few minutes (and some boos and jeers from the audience) sat down. It was insane and terrible. Academia can be the worst.

It also had the trifecta of class, gender, and racial undertones (the presenter is a female post-doc at a Chinese university and the questioner is a well-known male professor as an elite Germany university).

'was ist das noveltee??'

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/swarm🕸

This looks good. Is it?

ugh tfw your peers are making FULL professor behind like doing nothing

?!?!?

I have some grad colleagues (who finished after me) at full who've published NOTHING not even from their theses but they're at regional unis in the American Midwest fwiw

there's no direct route to full here, can't be promoted but have to apply when full spots open, so I'll probably have to go to a provincial city to be full and I don't wanna though profs in the provinces often live here and take the train to teach their one day a week or whatever so it's not that bad, plus I hear e.g. Grenoble is nice

atm my academic career is also mostly watching my peers zoom ahead of me. admittedly my current status of fruitlessly striving for exploitatively low-paid temporary lecturing positions doesn't exactly seem like a difficult marker to surpass, but,

yeah euler that's exactly the kind of career i'm goggling at, some other schools - not top ones - it even looks more like it's tenure-denial-ready

a la 'well we appreciate that you did good work, but it's just not enough'

this was making the rounds:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/28/more-humanities-phds-are-awarded-job-openings-are-disappearing

the chart at the bottom is oof but conforms with my perception of the trends.

i can hardly believe jobs doubled during my grad school tenure, for just long enough for the market to fall apart after the financial crisis

good old reliable classics, that's the way to go, no surprises, no letdowns

i would be interested in seeing those job numbers broken down into specializations. ime a LOT of those "English" jobs are Comp/Rhetoric, Creative Writing, ie not Literature and I think they are taking up a greater and greater share of what's available as well. So pure Lit jobs have dropped even more precipitously.

gotta claw together enough enrollments to keep the doors open with those service courses

I'm pretty sure my first year college physics lab partner was made full professor before I'd finished grad school! He is a smart cookie though and doubtless deserves it.

via the table is the table

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/28/adjunct-professors-homeless-sex-work-academia-poverty

took a look, out of morbid curiosity, at the MLA job list for English and wow is it a disaster.

my employer (one of my employers) is hiring for a fixed-term job like mine but better. it has some criteria that i could fail to meet or could be beaten out in by a better candidate, but it certainly seems ripe for the internal-hire-we-know-can-do-the-job scenario that is the adjunct's fantasy. (and i won't lose the job i do precariously have in any case.) so i'm gonna apply. but it's been so long since i applied for anything seriously that the prospect of shaping up my materials is anxiety-inducing.

nice. good luck! i've only intermittently looked at the MLA list this year. i actually feel relieved that there's almost nothing to apply to.