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

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.

onnee page teaching philosophy

onnnnneeeee

Good luck!

Anybody here do a music composition PhD? Were you glad you did it? Thinking of doing one.

https://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=56015

The University of Wisconsin-Madison invites applications for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship on the Plantationocene sponsored by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant. In addition to pursuing her/his research, the Postdoctoral fellow will be in charge of administrating a seminar that will run from the spring of 2019 through the spring of 2020 working in collaboration with faculty seminar leaders (Monique Allewaert, Pablo Gómez, and Gregg Mitman). This seminar will gather scholars from a range of disciplines to explore and deepen the concept of the Plantationocene. We will attend to other recent ways of naming our epoch (Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene) and interrogate the past and present of plantations: their materialities; the economic, ecological, and political transformations they wrought; and their significance to the making of human bodies, capitalism, and land over the course of four centuries.

Fredric Jameson termed this kind of thing "periodization."

attending to things, always a sign of a purposeless undertaking

don't forget "interrogate"

deathofhumanitiesocene.

Chthulucene
About 113,000 results (0.38 seconds)

Wow

haha. that one is donna haraway's fault. (xpost)

there really is something to be said for doing work that tries to evade it's own memeification.

The elder gods cannot be periodized, come on.

taxing tuition remissions. as if we needed more rich kid professors. i wonder too if grad school applications would drop below the current acceptance threshold

Just had a phone interview for a 'long term' position. I think it went ok?

Best of luck, Sund4r.

Thx!

hiring for a fixed-term job

i still don't know about this but i gather my application did not 'move forward'

ah well

http://erinbartram.com/uncategorized/the-sublimated-grief-of-the-left-behind/

:(

She hasn't even arrived at the worst part yet.

Leaving academia isn't so bad. It's very leave-able and there's a lot about it that's good to be done with. I imagine that most who leave academia are pretty happy about it in the long run.

But the problem is that not everyone can really leave (given their employment records, skills, etc.), and so they remain forever on the bubble of "contingent faculty"--with no real purpose or motivation to be an engaged "scholar" and also no real hope of any other kind of career.

another tenured friend

and another one

Mabna Institute?

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/23/politics/iranian-hackers-indicted-universities-government/index.html

I gave notice this morning that I will not renew my contract this fall, in order to attend to a personal matter. Walking away from a dream job: classic or dud?