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

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?"

i mean, in my own field it usually turns out to be, "yes that all sounds great but what does this have to do with joyce?"

philosophy doesn't have contentual boundaries, though: it has methodological boundaries, modes of investigation, and even those are porous. tbh I don't really care about disciplines. one way that disciplines are bounded is by linking to previous literature, so that your traditional dissertation requires lots of ties to other secondary lit in the vicinity. I think we overdo that and it ties us back.

if some other discipline had the methodological views of philosophy and inquired with the depth and boldness of good philosophy into a wide range of questions then sure, replace philosophy with that. I care about knowledge and truth (and the interrogation of those), not patrolling boundaries.

I have had a few colleagues who agree with me on this but many more who have not, though.

eh i certainly agree with you in some respects, but "knowledge and truth" are not, imo, produced in and of themselves but within disciplinary boundaries where we have the particular means for evaluating them according to how knowledge and and truth are produced in those disciplines.

point being: i dont think the "knowledge and truth" that philosophy produces can be replicated in other disciplines so easily. so i guess im saying im not as sanguine about boundaries because i see a real risk when they are discarded. sometimes they should be! not always.

and, fwiw, I'm not sure many disciplines in the humanities have strict boundaries on content anymore. I guess "classics" does--and look what happened there.

when we're talking about getting students jobs in the real world, the means for evaluating knowledge and truth are going to be taken, in the first run at least, from the real world. think Moore "fuck yes one hand is here". I work on math where I think real world standards are pretty inapplicable a lot of the time, and that's why I love what I do; but a student who's going to work on a team helping some business improve its framework for managing product distribution or whatever, those standards are going to be set at first. then the philosopher on that team can play with the standards as well as work on the problems given, but in daily life it's not up to us to rebuild the capitalist system or whatever. my program would not be training revolutionaries, someone else can do that, it's a cool problem, but we just gotta get people fed.

Heh, my philosopher partner wrote a p good paper on the usefulness of 'useless' fields of study that I want to pull out now. I'm still having trouble seeing why this business would need a philosophy PhD on their team to improve their product distribution framework (as opposed to e.g. someone who took a couple of undergrad logic courses).

I have a good laugh when people advocate for music programmes moving wholesale into training people for the commercial music industries, as if those industries are thriving. At least a trad conservatory programme trains you pretty well to teach music lessons and play wedding gigs.

Anyway, I better shut off the internet for a few hours if I want to keep up my contingent academic employment.

yeah I'm not making a detailed case for the business in question, but just pointing out the "structure" of the fit between philosopher and business world that I have in mind. but the skills will definitely go well beyond logic: I'm talking about analysis. Logic is one part of that but by no means all of it. this is getting too vague at this point, I know; just saying that I think grad programs owe their students training toward productive work, and that what counts as "productive work" has to incorporate more than just teaching. each discipline will have to handle that in its own way. but grad training is very different from undergrad training so the expected outcomes of those programs should also be very different than what we've come to expect from higher education grads, particularly in disciplines that have traditionally seen the doctorate as leading exclusively to professorial work.

i dont think restructuring is enough, we just need fewer grad students

that's on students, then, not on me

you'd have to think that the tier 3 and 4 programs (if not the tier 2 eventually as well) will eventually wither away if only because there seems increasingly little to no point in attending those programs. id like to keep a close eye on undergraduate enrollment in different majors because that'll be the first sign of any big contraction in the graduate ranks.

yeah students should only attend top-ish programs. I dunno about seeing signs of wither in undergrad majors, though; so many American doctoral students come from outside the USA.

that's on students, then, not on me

i dont think any of it is 'on you'! its not even really on schools either. my take is the larger problem is 'credentialism' or w/e you want to call it. which really is the fault of a fundamental shift in the labor market which &c &c

from the years i spent teaching undergraduate classes i grew to feel like so much of it was a waste - of time, of resources, of spirit - and nothing has really managed to shake that conviction. many of my students were taking 'practical, useful' science courses they had no interest in or particular aptitude for. i think the only sin you could commit teaching one of those courses was to make a drastic changes to the final exam structure so that students couldnt simply just d/l past exams and use them to study from. and its rational for students to want to exert as little energy as possible in getting the best grade they can in a course they dont care about for a degree thats only a necessity. but why have this system at all?

idk i feel like schools need to be less connected to the business world, less focused on acting as a free filtering system for firms and be smaller, more 'useless'.

I don't teach math anymore but I know what you mean about that. ime math depts are concerned to craft (lower level) classes that can support having a wide variety of instructors plugged in & still "succeed". I hope those courses are replaced by something genuinely automated then: that's what (ime) math depts want in those classes as it is.

in philo I don't get the grade grubbers the way I did in math, so I think this varies from discipline to discipline.

also I don't think "schools" need to be more/less connected to the business world---my current american uni has almost 2000 tt faculty, there's no unity of thought among them. departments are a better unit to have something like unity of thought, and there I think it varies by discipline: my discipline needs better contacts with the "real world" (not just business world), for math it's different, etc.

I don't entirely disagree with Lamp's last post. If companies need a trained labour market, there's an argument to be made that they should bear the cost of workplace training.

you'd have to think that the tier 3 and 4 programs (if not the tier 2 eventually as well) will eventually wither away if only because there seems increasingly little to no point in attending those programs.

If the Colander study is to be believed, the numbers don't seem to support this. The bottom tier programs are doing just about as well as the Tier 2 programs (and not horrendously worse than Tier 1 programs) when it comes to job placement.

that's true, but i have to imagine it's gonna get (even) worse--particularly as you can't go "up" a tier. (a tier 4 phd won't be getting a TT placement in a tier 2 school, for instance). there's something weird about the numbers in this respect--logically you'd think they would drop off because upper tier phds have a better shot at lower tier jobs than lower tier phds do. isn't there also a backlog of upper tier phds sitting around as well? how does this backlog figure into projections? does the study take 1 year on the job market to be equivalent to 10?

princeton phds ain't about southeast bumblefuck community college

and vice versa really

yeah that's what I was starting to think, "oh maybe they're just being snobby."

my take is the larger problem is 'credentialism' or w/e you want to call it. which really is the fault of a fundamental shift in the labor market which &c &c

from the years i spent teaching undergraduate classes i grew to feel like so much of it was a waste - of time, of resources, of spirit - and nothing has really managed to shake that conviction. many of my students were taking 'practical, useful' science courses they had no interest in or particular aptitude for. i think the only sin you could commit teaching one of those courses was to make a drastic changes to the final exam structure so that students couldnt simply just d/l past exams and use them to study from. and its rational for students to want to exert as little energy as possible in getting the best grade they can in a course they dont care about for a degree thats only a necessity. but why have this system at all?

idk i feel like schools need to be less connected to the business world, less focused on acting as a free filtering system for firms and be smaller, more 'useless'.

― no (Lamp), Tuesday, March 3, 2015 12:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you were probably teaching a first year course though, right? from the credentialist pov wouldn't the value of taking `practical, useful' science courses not be the kids in 1st year courses with no interest or aptitude memorizing past finals but the signal sent/skill acquired by the ones who ace the 1st year classes then opt to take advanced upper year electives, etc? like schools aren't just a `free-filtering system for firms' in that some of the kids who don't get filtered out actually learn the skills too.

also like, assuming we're moving towards some autor-ean dual labor market with a highly educated technocracy and a low-skilled service sector, isn't a function of college to give kids a taste of what they're in for if they decide to try and make it in the former? despite having a horrible undergrad gpa i actually kind of believing in the sorting equilibria function of higher ed. someone once told me the only prerequisite for studying law was not being bored by dry texts. i thought that kind of made sense. like, most people hate reading dry texts. if you realize that you like it, and can make a wage premium from doing it full time, there's a social benefit to be captured. if not, join the precariat service underclass lol

well i dont think its very useful as a filtering system! i think you can send very good signals w/o learning anything - if anything i would argue that in 100 and 200 level courses a genuine desire to learn is probably disadvantageous if yr goal is simply getting the highest gpa possible. i dont think gpa is a useful sorting mechanism for the sort of system yr taking abt for lots of reasons.

also i think most work in the professional class isnt that highly skilled or technical really - i think that some kind of training or apprenticeship system is probably preferable? idk thats just a feeling really, not a serious proposal.

idk i feel like im trying to argue against a bunch of things and its not like i have any hard data to draw conclusions from. really my post was an emotional one rather than an incisive critique.

No, I think you're making good points!

we just need fewer grad students

grad programs owe their students training toward productive work, and that what counts as "productive work" has to incorporate more than just teaching.

I don't necessarily agree with either of these statements. I think the 'casualization' of university teaching work is unjust in that people are doing demanding, skilled work (for which students are paying increasingly large sums of money) and not being compensated or evaluated in what I would consider a fair manner. However, I don't think it is in itself necessarily an injustice if graduate education does not directly lead to a career for many students. I don't think that grad programs owe, or really should owe, their students anything more or less than an education and academic freedom. As long as students are not being misinformed about the job placement numbers and as long as the people who are admitted are actually capable of doing high-level scholarly work and are given adequate support to do so (three big "as long"s), I don't necessarily see a problem with people taking a few years to study something they love with the funding to do so. It can be comparable to a four-year contract, sometimes with better conditions than other entry-level jobs. Besides, generally, people do pick up some useful skills in the process and the extra credentials can make some difference.

i don't agree with either of those statements either. i think we need higher taxes on the rich to fund more generous education in this country. the concentration of privileged people in the academy defies the explicit ideals of the preponderance of thinkers taught in american colleges/universities and is more indicative of neo-feudalism than a functioning democracy

i see that this, from Robert Pippen, is from last summer, but it's new to me and seemed quite interesting on a skim, even if i dont agree with everything.

As I said, my understanding of what’s been happening is that the pressure on the humanities to demonstrate their relevance anew is caused by this financial panic. It doesn’t have a serious intellectual pedigree, there isn’t a serious case. Secondly, we ought to remember that the so-called new humanities aren’t new. I mean, what’s new is the invocation of empirical science. But attacks on the autonomy of the discussion of meaning and value have been going on for forty years in the academy. The movements toward it, like semiotics, structuralism, structuralist Marxism, Althusserian Marxism, psychoanalysis, discourse theory—a variety of ways of essentially denying the phenomenon of human intentionality, another fancier word for meaning—have been going on for a long time.

So we have this perfect storm of financial panic in 2008, gradual defunding of public universities and massive increases in tuition in private universities that were accelerated by the financial panic, coming just at the time when many humanities programs were coming out of a long, thirty- or forty-year period of nearly suicidal self-criticism, just at the wrong time for there to be massive amounts of evidence that humanities programs were as critical of the enterprise that they used to be engaged in as any Steven Pinker. So it was a terrible, terrible conflation of storm elements to produce this crisis in the organization of knowledge.

As I said, for me, the most interesting single fact about it—and I’ll just stop here before I go on too long—is just the one I’ve been mentioning throughout. There is no new intellectual argument that one can cite that is responsible for the diminution in the enterprise of teaching people what it is to mean and to value. I’m in philosophy—I can tell you, there’s plenty of materialist, reductionist, eliminitivist philosophy of mind out there, but there’s nobody who’s taken on the canon of classical texts or French literature in the nineteenth century and demonstrated that the attempt by methods of rigorous analysis, textual analysis, interpretive finesse, that those methods have been discredited by a discovery. This furor is about nothing intellectual. The people who are attacking are not really presenting a principled position for which they have arguments; they’re presenting small case studies, which they purport to be exciting because they’re new and they use new methods … But it also plugs into this anxiety about the legitimacy of autonomous disciplines within the humanities, like art history, or music, or philosophy, or literature, or classics. So I think that we shouldn’t be confused by the nature of the dispute. It’s a financial dispute fueled by panic—and coming right at the wrong time in the history of the university.

link: http://thepointmag.com/2014/criticism/ways-knowing

sooooo many rejection letters today. all expected, of course, but this is some kind of black Friday.

one of my grad student peers got tenure last night, after essentially doing… nothing at his low-level slac job, other than showing up for several years

: /

really trying hard to keep the bitterness at bay, but I've got a good record of publications and a fairly relevant, maybe even "sexy," up-and-coming specialization, but I can hardly even get more than an interview or two--I'm fucking up on some major level and I can't even figure out what I is. cut of my gib is showing, I guess.