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

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