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

can i presume the requirement of a "statement of philosophy" for this job really means a "statement of teaching philosophy" or is this some new horrible thing i havent encountered yet.

I had a Skype interview on Monday for a VAP teaching position and am already seriously questioning whether I would even want to move halfway across the continent for a 4/4 teaching load. I'm growing oddly attached to my precarious lifestyle that (so far) leaves time for actual research and creative work.

(Think it went OK, although who ever knows?)

In other news, I just gave my last lecture of the semester.

i've gotten sent a couple (usual) long-shot short-term job opportunities lately by friends, and i'm feeling more than ever like, why would i want to move across the country for that. again (not that i've moved 'across the country' yet. but moving is moving.) i don't quite know how to justify myself to them, though - hard to sound sensible 'passing up' 'opportunities' when your status quo is far from peachy anyway.

perhaps justifiable if you believe the opportunity will somehow lead to further, and better, opportunities down the line. though this is increasingly hard to believe.

"the writing is just so turgid"; "I can't really see why he's insisting on..."; "This is a crazy set of pairs"; "this just doesn't work at all", &c &c. anonymous academic reviewers can be kinda mean.

I would write the second and fourth of those remarks, but not the first and the third: those are really mean, "crazy", "just so turgid". ime Brits are meaner in reports, and even in letters of rec where I've seen some quite faint praise and even meanness being dished out, and maybe in the UK those are good (I doubt it) but in the USA they're...not

how much of it is because the subject and perhaps style are recogniseable within small fields and personal antipathy seeps through

just in general not necessarily in relation to merdes, though whoever wrote that is a miserable cunt

iirc Merdeyeux is a doctoral student so his style wouldn't be recognized; and a good editor wouldn't send an article to a referee that s/he knew would have personal antipathy toward the subject of the essay. it is very hard to find referees (people say no to me about eight times as much as yes) and accordingly harder to find good referees but this separates well-run journals from badly-run ones. I got a silly report from a silly journal to which I was persuaded to submit as part of a group of people and it reminded me why that journal is silly. I get it: you don't get paid for editorial work, you don't get teaching reductions, it's just an additional professional burden that you do for the sake of service to the profession (and the concomitant ego boost for getting the position), and so the temptation to resort to bad referees is easy to justify.

ha yeah when I was applying for jobs I was encouraged to get recommendations from Americans, or at least people who would write "American-style" recommendation letters xp

anonymous academic reviewers can be kinda mean.

academics are mean, generally. especially to each other.

once the revolution comes that they're laying the groundwork for then they'll be as nice and humane as the values they teach suggest they should be

I'm actually not sure that Marxism has any real pride of place in my field but tbf, did Marxism ever have anything to do with people being nice and humane?

iirc, yes, but they made an exception for academics

can't happen here

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/04/north_carolina_education_bill_it_would_require_public_university_professors.html

from that article:

The North Carolina debacle-in-waiting serves as abject proof that, as tenured history professor and Slate contributor Jonathan Rees has written recently, adjunctification moves upward as well as downward. “Working conditions will gradually drift towards the level of the least compensated among us, not the best,” he writes. “What’s that you say? You think you’re special? You do research? Tell that to every professor at a public university in North Carolina.”

so are there any countervailing forces likely to turn this trend back or am i gonna watch the dismantling of higher education (public version) in my lifetime?

inner migration

am i gonna watch the dismantling of higher education (public version) in my lifetime?

On that note I came across this the other day:

http://chuckrybak.com/uw-struggle-real-people-edition/

kinda lol but mostly sad that the first named example of the talent drain from Wisconsin left to go to... North Carolina

as long as kids from wealthy families can still get PhDs and tenure track jobs, i don't see what the problem is

The UNC bill is dismaying, no doubt. However, I disagree with this, unless "hard" means "physically demanding":

Teaching college, especially if you’re good at it, isn’t particularly hard.

Also, it is hard for me to see how someone could teach four courses in one semester and only be putting in 'full-time' (40h/wk) hours. Going by the figure of 2-4h or prep for every hour of teaching (http://americanfacultyassociation.blogspot.ca/2012/02/hours-for-teaching-and-preparation-rule.html), 12h of lectures a week would require 24-48h of prep and a minimum of 2h of office hours. 10h of marking/wk seems like a conservative estimate for that courseload. Someone who is teaching only courses that he or she has taught before with relatively light marking loads would still be putting in more than standard f/t hours.

I mean, one could cut back on those hours by becoming more of a textbook facilitator and using a lot of Scantron, which is the only way I can really understand the loads that people are being asked to take on. This does compromise pedagogy (not just research) imo.

it's not often that a 4/4 amounts to 4 totally different courses, in my experience (though it does happen--usually to adjuncts).

I've taught 5 courses in a semester before; what gives more than prep time is emotional labor. I gather that this isn't labor that matters to bureaucrats and their enablers; what's in question is its role in learning. I think it's enormous, particularly for more marginal students whose motivation is constantly under barrage from distractions. make me teach more students and I will not be as good as motivating them.

the last place i worked had a 5/5 load for all full-time staff, from what i could see they tried to rarely assign more than 2 preps at a time, tho sometimes 3, but their course assignments were extremely siloed (no one ever outside their 'area')

pedagogically, some courses really don't take much - plug and chug calculus e.g.; 12 sections at a time may all be using the same texts for institutional reasons, and those things are so highly refined that they basically walk both student and staff through what to do, so you just do it and then do some problems

otoh i teach from primary texts and try to reread them before each time i teach (the more i've taught, the less i _have_ to, but still it makes the teaching better), and it's a pretty wasteful approach resource-wise, takes a lot out of you to have to delve back into them rather than just running w/ yr standard story come classtime

yeah with literature i tend to re-read along with the class and that can be time consuming when also prepping.

the weird irony of all this is that never (in the humanities) have research demands been higher. i dunno about you, but im sorta ok with every english professor in the world not needing to churn out a half dozen books in their career.

yeah at this point in my life I have prep down, but it's the emotional part that can't be prepped, and I can't/don't want to give it up, turn into some automaton up there, b/c I think it's the only thing that keeps students involved. I agree with Plato and Augustine that learning comes from love, and while the object of love isn't the teacher, the teacher plays a role in conducting and focusing that love, and her person is involved in that.

i think that's a big part of why i stick w/ rereading, to a certain extent i find it hard to give a proper shit w/o getting caught back up in the texts, they're a major part of what i love about the discipline

absolutely

I need to give a shit for the students to give a shit

& if "they" want to make it so that I can't give a shit anymore, then I'm done with teaching

prohibited

it's not often that a 4/4 amounts to 4 totally different courses, in my experience (though it does happen--usually to adjuncts).

A new Temporary Lecturer position was advertised on the Music Vacancy List yesterday that does this. (There are actually five courses in the fall and six in the winter but some of them are worth less credits such that they amount to a 4.33/4 load, assuming that one course is 3 credits. I'm not sure why a 4th-year analysis course would be two credits if a second-year theory course is three credits, though.)

I know someone who did 5/6 (with two sections of one course in the second semester so he was actually teaching 5 distinct courses that semester) at a VAP job. He worked 12h days 7 days a week.

12h days 7 days a week is the tt life at an R1 tbh, on the low end really. well, and grad school too if you want that r1 tt fun. ish is def nuts though

I mean, I don't know how he counted his hours. I didn't take much time off at all when I taught three courses in a semester tbh so 4/4 or 5/6 seem hard to fathom for me. (In the 2014 winter, when I had two heavy courses + a fair bit of private/music-school teaching + was performing, composing, and interviewing, I got sick at least four times, which I mostly attribute to overwork.) Currently have something approaching work/life balance, which feels hard to let go of.

I kind of doubt I'd get an R1 TT, whether or not I wanted it, tbh.

keep in mind I am not very smart so maybe the real deals can work a lot less than me and still make bank research-wise

i left academia before i had much contact with non-departmental administration but now i am on an an academic committee. oof.

right?

i mean we're trying to do something really interesting curriculum wise, but jeeeeeeeeeez

i think the problem is more pronounced because we're trying to do something related to data $cience and startups, and there's the way this is done in startups, and it doesn't map particularly well onto academia right now because it's still an embryonic prof discipline, and then you've got all these middle-aged administrators who read about it in a copy of business week, or got into a conversation about it in a united club...

lol suddenly i have the eerie feeling you are an ex-university physicist i know who just left to do a data $cience startup

everybody's doing it

while here i am just holdin my nuts

http://coreyrobin.com/2015/04/14/before-you-get-that-phd/

Max Weber, Science as a Vocation:

Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation [ advanced degree ], the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says lasciate ogni speranza [ abandon all hope, you who enter here ]. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.”‘ Yet, I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.

Just got called in for an on-campus interview for a VAP (maybe renewable) version of what would basically be my dream job. Did not expect this.

Private business had been picking up and I was starting to feel comfortable-ish here so I still wonder.

there's a VAP open near here next year, probably just far enough to have to move, kind of the best kind of place i could hope to have a permanent job, but it's unclear whether that's a real possibility

feeling ground down by my current jobs, tho, so the urge is coming back to just apply for shit and say whatever, i go where the winds blow

The nearby VAP seems like it might be a good move if you're not happy with your current jobs idk. What would be the cons?