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

i feel like my barely suppressed disdain for this profession and the people in it (and by extension myself for "wanting" to be a part of it) must be still be coming through in my cover letters. gotta work on that.

the job market isn't grim for "top candidates" from "top schools"

ha, yeah i keep thinking about what i could have done differently and top of the list every time is "go to a more prestigious school."

jesus christ, it looks like i might actually have a couple courses to cover come late january.

now i just have to figure out how the fuck to teach philosophy online

― j., Monday, November 17, 2014 1:52 PM (1 month ago)

monday!! they can't cancel that shit on me NOW

did you figure out how the fuck to teach philosophy online?

welp

no, no i did not

so how is that going

i worked in online course design and implementation for years ama

boat's kind of sailed on design for the sucker at this point. i'm noticing some initial problems overcoming, on top of the usual difficulties students pose (new to school, general intellectual apathy and incuriosity, gen ed credit disengagement), a heightened rat-and-pellet orientation that the interface only seems to make worse. similarly w/ the atomization in the social experience of the course; way too many people seem unaware of anything else their classmates contribute, despite a few weeks of yammering and prodding on my part. interface doesn't help there, either; it actually makes it technically inconvenient to even -see- discussions as ongoing conversations rather than bags of disjoint squibs of opinionating, lobbed into the void for the sake of perfunctory discharge of course obligations.

i've been wondering if maybe i'm not just a little over-sensitive because i have too much exposure to my students' raw (unworked) intellectual productions now. i had plenty of that before, but in the social reality of the (physical) classroom, a more decorous inattention to the works-in-progress that are students' thoughts and utterances is possible.

scrap the infrstructure & make all your students join ilx

but we stopped counting people's posts years ago, what would i enter in the online gradebook that we also don't have

If it's an online course, then are many of your students distance learners, meaning that they may not have friends in the class? I'm guessing that this would exacerbate the problems an online interface already creates for doing the basic conversational background work of reading each others' body language, sizing one another up, assessing the mood in the room, etc.

If the interface allows for small group work, then that may be something to think about, if it puts students in connection with each other. Probably hard to monitor.

i have had success moving the discussion board to a blogspot to which all students have posting privileges. it flattens out the initial discussions a little bit so that it doesn't immediately look like a dozen barely-connected nodes and younger students are way more familiar with the blog-and-comment flow than with old fashioned treed discussion boards. also i suspect students have more of a feeling of ownership over posts and are thus more likely to get feisty.

group work is good, especially if the LMS facilitates it w/out too much work on your part, but for 100-level classes you can end up with one person from each group doing all the work.

I've taught one philo course online but I did it as an emergency overload and so my performance wasn't very important to e.g. keeping my job. that was good because the course sucked. I did what I was told, which was record myself giving lectures, and then giving assignments. there was a little offline chat associated with it too but I didn't really monitor that because it was like my fifth course that term. but yeah it sucked. it was something 101ish iirc

there are a couple offsite students, but the vast majority are campus-based (but taking courses online thanks to the state system push to… add value… somehow… but onlineifying as much of the curriculum as possible). been looking into getting them to meet up, at the very least for study group purposes, but *i* am not actually campus-based, so my powers of wrangling them are restricted.

group work isn't really facilitated well, although i've taken an unsuccessful stab at it already. not surprisingly, the supposedly 'native' intwebificommunication aptitude young people are supposed to have does not seem to be as much in evidence as one would like. ownership is a problem there (i've been reading a lot in the last year or two about educators' attempts to re-introduce structures for student ownership of course resources, activities, etc., online in the face of enterprise system tunnel vision, and i am FULLY ON BOARD but the lift for accomplishing that is pretty big when the default LMS is staring you in the face and students seem congenitally disinclined to do anything BUT log in to the LMS). why bother trying to manifest your presence and impress your stamp upon anything (as people do naturally in person) when you don't feel you're even involved in something that is 'yours'?

forget if we did this one already

https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/

Yes, college-level teachers should make more than cashiers at McDonald’s. Not because they hold advanced degrees—to pay someone for merely holding a degree is naked credentialism; to believe you deserve more money because of your credential itself rather than what you do with it is to misunderstand the value of work—but because as a culture, we value the dissemination of knowledge more than the distribution of hamburgers. Or at least we say we do.

this is just false; you have to tell a pretty fancy story to get it to work how how in fact 'we' value in this way or even say 'we' do

i would include myself in that "we", although i certainly think both groups should be paid more than they are.

our social system is rather peculiar when the majority of american humanities PhDs can't secure full-time teaching work, and the majority of american college students are taught by contingent faculty. the supposed progressives who run academic departments neither effectively warn the grad student suckers coming in nor care in any meaningful way once they're out the door jobless, any more than they're willing to make it clear to the undergrads that migrant workers teach their classes. this is of course all the fault of the undergrads and the grad students, and the market will sort the wheat from the chaff. the 99% - 1% dynamic the progressive faculty elaborate in marx-inflected classes is unrelated to the labor conditions in their entirely meritocratic departments

"the majority of american college students are taught by contingent faculty"

supposing that this is true, how does the data change when we remove English composition from the mix?

Why should we do that?

"first they came for the writing comp instructors..."

professors of the world, unite!

i haven't seen the data without english comp in the mix

http://www.aaup.org/report/contingent-appointments-and-academic-profession

maybe that changes everything, though, and the academy lives up to its professed ideals when you exclude english comp from the discussion?

The department where I taught for the past year and a half was up for its cyclical review this semester and had to publish statistics. In the 12-13 year, 54.6% of courses were taught by members of the part-time professors' association (definitely sessional faculty), 39.6% by members of the full-time profs' association, and 5.8% by 'other professors' (not sure what this means).

lol xp

I don't know what the data looks like when English comp is removed. But as the article in the revive points out, English comp courses get huge numbers of students, because they're (often) required of (nearly) every first-year. I am asking for the data because the practices chosen by English departments to staff their courses might not be the practices chosen by other departments. I am hesitant to conclude that what's happened is the fault of "the professoriate" when the decisions of English departments are made autonomously from other professors.

Sund4r, is that an English department?

No, music. Was tangential to the English comp question and is obv only one dept. (English comp = "foundations of academic writing" courses, I take it?)

Music numbers can be slanted because applied music instructors are often p/t. In the department's own notes, though, there is only a small majority when it comes to applied instructors and "[ i ]n the academic domain, all solfège sections are taught by a Sessional Professor with the assistance of several graduate student TAs. Many of the service courses have been taught by part-time professors and many of the core music theory and musicology requirements have been taught by part-time professors."

i've taught writing-intensive courses at more than one university that has distributed writing requirements throughout introductory and upper-division courses in order to make the writing instruction more 'relevant' and take the various pressures (labor, credit requirement and time to graduation) off the english or comp departments. but i don't see how forceful it is to aver that maybe other disciplines are different. not as bad, maybe, since they're less in need of cheap labor to serve large numbers of service course requirements. but consider this: adjuncts are likely to teach the lowest level courses, the ones most likely to be taken by non-majors. meanwhile ignatius p. featherbottom is sitting down the hall living the life of the mind with the much less popular upper division course students and a seminar with 6 people in it. the numbers thin out as you go up the status hierarchy.

"the numbers thin out as you go up the status hierarchy"

I've never taught in a department like this. all R1s though.

I am not trying to excuse or deny the problem, just trying to identify it better.

have we talked about the Colander article?

the original article is worth a read (if ouchy), the key points are spelled out in this interview/article about it:

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/897-where-do-english-ph-d-s-get-jobs-it-depends-on-where-they-studied

scary suggestions in the original article include: regarding a PhD as something that people who are already independently wealthy should pursue to add value to their lives, the degree as a kind of luxury good akin to a Patek Phillippe wristwatch, not an introdcution to an actual, y'know, career. Depressssssssssssssssssssing.

yeah but euler, yall got hella grad students to labor for you, i'm guessing. at an institution without grad students those lower-division courses wouldn't have as many ft faculty giving the lectures, i'm guessing?

When I first read that study, I thought the 44% figure for bottom-tier institutions seemed very high! Are there numbers for other disciplines?? A 1.9% difference between Tier 2 and Tier 4 is not bad.

i need to read the longer article, but i'd also be curious how those numbers reflect phds who have been on the job market for multiple years--there's just no way that 40% of new phds get TT jobs. i just cant fathom that. granted, i dont know that many people at "tier 1" schools.

the english job market was particularly brutal this year--and the so-called "secondary market" looks like a wasteland as well.

j I dunno, my previous job was in a gradless department, without adjuncts, usually with one vap with same salary / bennies as new assistant profs, one more course a year than tt fac but no committee work. Now I have grads but it just means our (fac) intro lectures are bigger. still no adjuncts, minimal vaps again with good salaries (more than I made pretenure at last job) and course loads.

I want to see how disciplinary lines are involved here.

“The real problem is there’s a disconnect in the training. Something has to be done about that. And it goes far beyond English.”

This is way otm

To that point, Colander puts forth four main recommendations. Among them, he suggests programs make their job-placement data publicly available, and that they redesign their curricula and job training to better match what new doctorates will experience after graduation.

“My own feeling is that putting the information out there will not make a big difference; it will make one feel better knowing they gave students the warning,” he said, comparing the posted job data to the warning on a cigarette pack. “The real problem is there’s a disconnect in the training. Something has to be done about that. And it goes far beyond English.”

'training' is the great imaginary solution to all kinds of hard problems, but it doesn't make more jobs appear in Detroit or in academia.

what isn't discussed is 'should there be fewer grad programs?'

Yeah, I always wonder when people suggest that: what sorts of pragmatic workforce-oriented arts/social sciences/humanities graduate programmes are people envisioning, exactly?

when i was in an english ph. d. program our department secretary did send out an email about reps from the CIA looking to hire us. i was not interested.

he suggests programs make their job-placement data publicly available

lol right now my department is listing the small handful of jobs i've had since graduation in the half the time i wasn't unemployed or working shit sub-minimum wage work as if they were different jobs gotten by different people placed at different institutions and not just careening from one abandoned post to another. sometimes i get an urge to call them up and be like, i want you to put on your website that i did not get a permanent job and have been an employment disaster.

that is infuriating. the program i dropped out of just doesn't list your job if it's not a tenure-track universityty/college job. but it doesn't list that you didn't get one either. it's like you just disappear. friends who finished the program and ended up doing something other than professing, often after trying to get a position for years, are livid about this.

i think mine must be doing it because if they didn't list temp jobs for the last several years things would look super dire, as if they had shut down

because of this thread I looked up my former department's "job placement" page and they've placed around 8 TT positions in the last 10 years.

and yeah they are definitely leaving a LOT of us off that list.

the "training" thing varies from discipline to discipline. I have no idea what English departments can do, but I have ideas about what my discipline can do. one idea is to bifurcate our program between research/teaching and research/application. the first track is the one we have now; the second would integrate their research with applications of that research in "the real world". obv that will change the sorts of work these students do in their dissertations. & it should change the time in program (aim at 4 years) plus pay (I envision work with a company during the second summer). Why do this instead of just going from undergrad into those jobs? because the training we provide, in analysis chiefly, will be accordingly improved with doctoral work. I'm not thinking of mere credentialism at all. as faculty we have to have confidence that our work really does improve the work students can do in the real world; most of my colleagues have no experience in that world, and often look down at that world (because of snobbery or Marxism or some other ideology). So that's the internal battle. Finding companies who want to play: that's another battle, though I think that's easier than the internal battle.

Well, what are the practical 'real-world' applications of PhDs in philosophy? What are the numbers like? Would you actively discourage students from doing research in less marketable areas and steer them towards more marketable ones? (So idk, semi-informed guessing here but maybe less medieval philosophy and philosophy of religion but more mainstream contemporary social theory work that might directly lead to a career in the public service and math-oriented work that could have some sort of technological application? And would those dissertations be as pragmatic as straight-up social science or computer science or math degrees? Or translation? Would you encourage students to leave your discipline if those other options were more practical?).

I don't think philo doctorates are going to fit naturally into pre-existing job descriptions, but that's not shocking: there's not been many philosophers available to craft job descriptions for! But as I said, analysis is what we're trained to do: conceptual analysis, analysis of arguments, analysis of the space of possibilities for problems: and we do so in quite general arenas (including within history of philosophy, yes). the generality means we're not bound to problems in "just" one area, or beholden to jargon and vogue-y frameworks. I suppose I see consultant-like teams forming with an economist, a philosopher, a software person, etc. I have friends with physics doctorates who've moved into the real world and they do things like this: bring their skills in experimental design and analysis to bear on problems quite remote from their training in substance but not form. for reasons I pointed at earlier philosophers have resisted doing this, and don't individually have the financial or social support to get it off the ground: but that's something a graduate program can do, in the way they do in the sciences and engineering.

these kinds of ideas are floated a lot but they tend to run aground on the conflict between what such "training" would really require and the traditional requirements of a dissertation--and if, fine, we change the dissertation then we in fact pretty substantially change the discipline and then all of a sudden people start asking "what's the point of philosophy when we have all these other disciplines that do similar things in a more focused way?"