Can you imagine what the current gang of newly elected state legislators would do if they could get their hands on the people who teach at public universities?The abolition of tenure would represent the final defeat of American academic research in economic terms, because no one would go through a PhD program if they didn't have the illusory hope of a tenure-track job at the end. But also, even before the economic disaster would come into play, American academic research would get shivved by idiot legislators opposed to stem cell research, or queer studies, or research done by people who think that Palestine should be a state, or, well, research in general.
At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts.I'm pretty sure that the people who don't get "positions" don't actually end up unemployed. There are plenty of things you can do with a humanities or social sciences PhD other than a tenure-track faculty position or a crappy life of cobbling together adjunct positions.
Yes, plenty of them (us!) do. Not jobless for the rest of their lives (with any luck), but bouts of short-term unemployment are very common these days, punctuated by casual term-to-term teaching (or the usual shit temp jobs that any college grad might do) and more job searching. The non-academic jobs that these people eventually find their way into are mostly not fairly described as "things you can do with a humanities or social sciences PhD" — since they're things you could've done without one just as well.Fascinating. Among my grad school colleagues, that's really only been true of people who continue to hold out for the elusive tenure track job. People who have cut their losses have generally ended up finding satisfying jobs at libraries and archives, in university administration, working for the government, etc. Historically, those things have been considered marks of enormous failure, but my sense is that this is changing.
Uh-huh, if they want to be under-compensated and overqualified in the private sector, there are quite a few part-time, contract positions with little or no benefits and job security they can go for as they struggle to pay off their student loans.As I said, I know a number of people who have landed full-time, benefits-providing jobs that aren't tenure-track positions. Hell, I've done that, and I'm still ABD.
Nonsense. Name those jobs. As a person who did graduate work on Aristotle and medieval philosophy, I would like you to name those jobs.You probably won't be able to get a job that has anything to do with Aristotle or medieval philosophy. However, there are a lot of university administration jobs that require a PhD in something. Have you considered looking into those?
Guess what? Not a single one of them has the least interest in starting a job, after seven to eleven years of school, making $29,000.Well, tough luck. If you went to grad school to make a lot of money, you're a dingbat. I don't make much more than that, but I have great benefits and good job security and am not under the impression that I'm entitled to be wealthy.
The leading exponent of Chebyshev's ideas was his devoted student Markov, to whom there belongs the indisputable credit of presenting his teacher's results with complete clarity. Among Markov's own significant contributions were his pioneering investigations of sums of independent random variables and the creation of a new branch of probability theory, the theory of dependent random variables that form what we now call a Markov chain.I suspect he'd never make professor at a research university today based upon that first sentence, well except he's a probabilist of course, just control for "appliedness inflation".
4th year? You're expected to finish in 4? That's brutal.I was guaranteed funding through my fourth year. After that, I had to find my own. I think the model was that you were supposed to finish in six years: four years funded, one year with a research grant, and one year with a write-up grant. My reality has been much, much more complicated than that, and so has the path of almost everyone else I know. Assuming that I finish next year, which is my goal, I'll have spent my final three years working at a full-time job in an unrelated but still university-affiliated area. I'm actually not at all sure at this point that I want a tenure-track job, but I wasn't sure of that until I started working a 9 to 5 job and realized there were some really nice things about that.
I wonder if the adjunct market is also a place that those with outside support can go? (Parental or spousal or whatever...)That's my sense. The two people I know who are doing it now both have working spouses/ partners. And I know one guy who did it for a couple of years and then landed a tenure-track job, and he has a wife with a full-time job.
What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a wholeyou are someone making over $250,000 in the US saying, sure I've had to cut back a little since my investments tanked but the economy is fundamentally sound.
We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever.In short, there is a clear population model underlying academia which produces an exponential growth phase that's followed by a starving phase, think Malthus except all technological improvements increase consumption instead of production.
deans, provosts and presidents are no longer professors who cycle through administrative duties and then return to teaching and research. Instead, they have become a separate stratum of managerial careerists.Huh. So do tenured faculty want to take over those functions? Because my sense is that they don't, and wouldn't necessarily be very good at them, and sometimes have a hard time seeing why they're important.
There have always been enough academics with the necessary skills for those roles, craichead.I think that's complete bullshit, to be honest. First of all, in the bad old days, a lot of those functions were fulfilled by faculty wives, and sadly for academia but happily for women, wives don't exist as unacknowledged, unpaid labor anymore. You actually have to hire people to organize things. And second of all, faculty whine a lot about unprepared students and their skills deficits, but they're not the people figuring out how to pick up the slack. They don't organize the study skills workshops, and they seldom teach them. They don't set up the mentoring programs. They don't know the first thing about how to sell yourself on the job market with a humanities degree, and they're not the people helping kids from blue-collar families figure out what to wear to a job interview or how to flanagle some meaningful work experience if you can't afford to take an unpaid summer internship. They don't do the day-to-day work of fund-raising or recruiting out-of-state students, which is a kind of fund-raising. There are a lot of important things that go on at big universities that faculty don't do, and would probably do a pretty bad job of if they did do them. And it kind of gets on my nerves, as someone who does some of those things, that we get dismissed as bloat.
We're talking about faculty administrative positions like deans, president, etc., not functionaries, craichead.First of all, we're not. The top part of the quote reads as follows:
What we have seen instead over the past forty years, in addition to the raising of a reserve army of contingent labor, is a kind of administrative elephantiasis, an explosion in the number of people working at colleges and universities who aren’t faculty, full-time or part-time, of any kind. From 1976 to 2001, the number of nonfaculty professionals ballooned nearly 240 percent, growing more than three times as fast as the faculty.Most of those people are "functionaries." And also, the "careerist" career path often starts in pretty lowly areas of university administration, and then you move up. That's the way that careers work.
The real problem here involves the actual value of a specialized non-trade-based education.The problem with this is the same at the undergrad level as it is at the grad level: a lot of students get "specialized trade-based education" that doesn't actually prepare them for careers that they will be able to enter. At my institution, everyone's talking about this recent NYT article about business majors, which points out that business majors have the lowest average GMAT scores of students in any major. Students who want jobs in PR or corporate communications often feel that they need to be Communications Studies majors, but I'm not convinced that you're any more likely to get one of those jobs with a communications degree than with an English degree and a lot of PR experience. So maybe you're better off majoring in what you want and figuring out which student groups on campus need people to do publicity.
The most obvious explanations for increasing quality of life in the '50s and '60s include the postwar manufacturing dominance of the United States and the fact that organized labor was powerful enough to have major leverage over employers.I don't think you can dismiss the GI Bill quite that easily. One of the really big changes in American life in the post-war era had to do with rapidly expanding opportunities for higher education. I'm not sure how to tease out the relationship between that and the factors you mentioned.
That metric is not encouraging, especially if you consider the success of people like Stephen Ambrose (kicked out of the historical profession for plagiarism), Jared Diamond (who opines on issues unrelated to his specialty and has no real liberal-arts background), and Malcolm Gladwell (no graduate degree).Seriously? Do you think the world doesn't need biologists because Gina Kolata doesn't have a PhD?
Biologists aren't evaluated as a profession on the basis of their ability to write books. Liberal-arts scholars are.Liberal arts scholars are evaluated on their ability to produce scholarship that adds significant new insights to the field. Rehashing other people's stuff in a simplistic way that makes readers feel smart is a good way to make some money, but it doesn't qualify.
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posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 8:55 AM on May 8, 2011 [2 favorites]