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

"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.