The right to grieve
February 16, 2018 12:16 PM Subscribe
"I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what I’m good for. I don’t know how to come to terms with the fact that I have so much in my head, and so much in my Google Drive, that is basically useless right now. I don’t know how to come to terms with the fact that the life I imagined is not going to happen. I’ve already stopped doing my scholarship, other than editorial work for forthcoming pieces. In a few months, I’ll be done teaching. I don’t know how to come to terms with never doing those things again.
I can only come up with half-formed thoughts today, but while I'm not in the same situation Erin Bartram is in, I am at a major transitional point, and I've been thinking about a lot of the same stuff. It all feels so frivolous sometimes, like a product of pure privilege. We need historians, and we need humanities in general, but on a personal level, it feels incredibly selfish of me to want and expect to get paid to do what I'm doing. There's a homeless encampment two blocks away from me, and I'm fretting over whether it's fair that I should waste my talent at historical research.
I'm finishing up my first major work of scholarship, and on the one hand it's very exciting, but on the other hand I feel exploitive. I study the lives of black people, and the one thing that keeps coming back to me is that I can't just let myself be another white person building a career by exploiting black lives. But if I can't connect my work to living people, and if it just remains a bunch of knowledge in my head, than what is it going to mean? Everyone agrees that the subject material sounds fascinating, and it is, but is it enough for something to be fascinating? Why did I deserve to be paid for this, and why should I expect to be able to build a career out of it?
I'm sure everything I'm asking is very trite and will betray how far along in the academic process I am (not very). But in a country where there's a strong correlation between class and education level, I can't help but feel like I'm not exactly transforming society by thinking I deserve to go further. I'm sure I've internalized some right-wing talking point, or something, but whatever it is, it's hard to let go of.
I have long wondered what it would be like to be really good in a field where there are close to zero slots, (thinking acting, music, basketball,) and not get a spot.
I was playing guitar last night and telling my girlfriend that I'm sure that a great source of sadness later in my life will be the memory of having figured out all the John Fahey songs by ear when I was 15. She said, why is that sad? I guess there's a feeling of wasted potential. I was so talented back then. I never played guitar before I was 15, and within a few months I'd taught myself so much. Maybe it's something unique to capitalism, but it feels like anything you're particularly good at should somehow be a marketable skill (I think of, like, the rise of pro gamers). I know I'm a talented musician, and there's a part of me that feels like I wasted my potential by not working harder and becoming a professional, however that would have worked out. Now I just play a little here and there in the evenings when I don't feel like doing anything else.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:49 PM on February 16, 2018 [25 favorites]
I'm finishing up my first major work of scholarship, and on the one hand it's very exciting, but on the other hand I feel exploitive. I study the lives of black people, and the one thing that keeps coming back to me is that I can't just let myself be another white person building a career by exploiting black lives. But if I can't connect my work to living people, and if it just remains a bunch of knowledge in my head, than what is it going to mean? Everyone agrees that the subject material sounds fascinating, and it is, but is it enough for something to be fascinating? Why did I deserve to be paid for this, and why should I expect to be able to build a career out of it?
I'm sure everything I'm asking is very trite and will betray how far along in the academic process I am (not very). But in a country where there's a strong correlation between class and education level, I can't help but feel like I'm not exactly transforming society by thinking I deserve to go further. I'm sure I've internalized some right-wing talking point, or something, but whatever it is, it's hard to let go of.
I have long wondered what it would be like to be really good in a field where there are close to zero slots, (thinking acting, music, basketball,) and not get a spot.
I was playing guitar last night and telling my girlfriend that I'm sure that a great source of sadness later in my life will be the memory of having figured out all the John Fahey songs by ear when I was 15. She said, why is that sad? I guess there's a feeling of wasted potential. I was so talented back then. I never played guitar before I was 15, and within a few months I'd taught myself so much. Maybe it's something unique to capitalism, but it feels like anything you're particularly good at should somehow be a marketable skill (I think of, like, the rise of pro gamers). I know I'm a talented musician, and there's a part of me that feels like I wasted my potential by not working harder and becoming a professional, however that would have worked out. Now I just play a little here and there in the evenings when I don't feel like doing anything else.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:49 PM on February 16, 2018 [25 favorites]
I feel for this person and it does really suck when your chances don't play out.
However, there is a part of me that wonders if encouraging so many young people to pursue careers in close-to-zero-slot fields is perhaps the root of all this evil; we don't need that many more anthropologists, but what we do need are a lot of skilled trades people.
as a new parent I think about this future a lot, and wonder when we'll reach a tipping point.
posted by EricGjerde at 2:00 PM on February 16, 2018 [14 favorites]
However, there is a part of me that wonders if encouraging so many young people to pursue careers in close-to-zero-slot fields is perhaps the root of all this evil; we don't need that many more anthropologists, but what we do need are a lot of skilled trades people.
as a new parent I think about this future a lot, and wonder when we'll reach a tipping point.
posted by EricGjerde at 2:00 PM on February 16, 2018 [14 favorites]
we don't need that many more anthropologists, but what we do need are a lot of skilled trades people.
Please don't fall into this trap. This simply isn't true. We need anthropologists and we need skilled tradespeople. And individuals aren't fungible; someone who would be a great anthropologist will not necessarily make a good tradesperson, and vice versa. We don't have a terrible shortage of people in the trades; while it's possible to make a good living, it's no more a guaranteed ticket to success than a STEM degree and plenty of people struggle.
And we don't have an excess of people trained in the humanities -- not even the people earning higher degrees and looking to enter teaching are truly surplus-to-requirements. There are lots of teaching positions. Universities and colleges in the US are simply refusing to pay people a living wage to fill them, preferring to take advantage of student teachers (who often aren't sufficiently trained to take on the work; I know I wasn't) and contingent labour. There are teaching jobs for the author of this article, but universities and colleges refuse to offer benefits or permanent work. She's not leaving because her work isn't needed; she's leaving because she's not being paid what it's worth. Because the people who run our universities and colleges are very happy to let their students go into debt, and to starve their employees, and to plow ever more money into sports programs and yet more Administration.
posted by halation at 2:09 PM on February 16, 2018 [151 favorites]
Please don't fall into this trap. This simply isn't true. We need anthropologists and we need skilled tradespeople. And individuals aren't fungible; someone who would be a great anthropologist will not necessarily make a good tradesperson, and vice versa. We don't have a terrible shortage of people in the trades; while it's possible to make a good living, it's no more a guaranteed ticket to success than a STEM degree and plenty of people struggle.
And we don't have an excess of people trained in the humanities -- not even the people earning higher degrees and looking to enter teaching are truly surplus-to-requirements. There are lots of teaching positions. Universities and colleges in the US are simply refusing to pay people a living wage to fill them, preferring to take advantage of student teachers (who often aren't sufficiently trained to take on the work; I know I wasn't) and contingent labour. There are teaching jobs for the author of this article, but universities and colleges refuse to offer benefits or permanent work. She's not leaving because her work isn't needed; she's leaving because she's not being paid what it's worth. Because the people who run our universities and colleges are very happy to let their students go into debt, and to starve their employees, and to plow ever more money into sports programs and yet more Administration.
posted by halation at 2:09 PM on February 16, 2018 [151 favorites]
I'm just not really a fan of discouraging people from pursuing their passions. There's nothing wrong with paying for your kid's fine art degree so long as they understand that they might end up painting their masterpieces on the weekends and doing soulless graphical scutwork for pennies at their 9 to 5. But I'm biased--my dad refused to pay for anything but nursing or teaching for me, and refused to let me consider fine art or even the law because they "weren't practical." I ended up quitting school, teaching myself how to write code, admin unix boxen, tune kernels, that sort of thing, and getting a job as a sysadmin without even a high school diploma by working my way up from customer service. I'll never forget the night my dad asked me, after I told him I'd be making 65 grand a year before I could drink in a bar, "But why do you think you're qualified for this?"
Crushing the dreams of young people seems to be just as evil as paying for a full ride majoring in Philosophy without so much as a conversation about the future. There's a middle ground. And while I haven't been in the job market since 2001, I still know network admins with advanced degrees in Buddhist philosophy and secret service agents with environmental science degrees.
posted by xyzzy at 2:13 PM on February 16, 2018 [38 favorites]
Crushing the dreams of young people seems to be just as evil as paying for a full ride majoring in Philosophy without so much as a conversation about the future. There's a middle ground. And while I haven't been in the job market since 2001, I still know network admins with advanced degrees in Buddhist philosophy and secret service agents with environmental science degrees.
posted by xyzzy at 2:13 PM on February 16, 2018 [38 favorites]
The law wasn't practical? Or just not for women?
posted by holborne at 2:20 PM on February 16, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by holborne at 2:20 PM on February 16, 2018 [3 favorites]
Too many lawyers. I guess.
posted by xyzzy at 2:23 PM on February 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by xyzzy at 2:23 PM on February 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
That was a sad, eloquent piece; thanks for posting it. I love "No, I don’t care that you disagree. My feelings, thank heavens, are not subject to peer-review."
posted by languagehat at 2:30 PM on February 16, 2018 [24 favorites]
posted by languagehat at 2:30 PM on February 16, 2018 [24 favorites]
I'm fretting over whether it's fair that I should waste my talent at historical research.
You're not wasting your talent. I haven't read any of your work, but I can tell you for certain that the world needs MORE of you and not less.
How can I tell? How can I possibly know that?
Check out this document, the California State Standards for K-12 Social Studies Standards. Start at page 47, and glance at standards 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, and 11.4. Guess what's missing?
(Spoiler Alert: The Civil War.)
The US needs more people who understand why things like the the Civil War are important.
posted by dfm500 at 2:33 PM on February 16, 2018 [6 favorites]
You're not wasting your talent. I haven't read any of your work, but I can tell you for certain that the world needs MORE of you and not less.
How can I tell? How can I possibly know that?
Check out this document, the California State Standards for K-12 Social Studies Standards. Start at page 47, and glance at standards 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, and 11.4. Guess what's missing?
(Spoiler Alert: The Civil War.)
The US needs more people who understand why things like the the Civil War are important.
posted by dfm500 at 2:33 PM on February 16, 2018 [6 favorites]
We don’t want to face how much knowledge that colleague has in their head that’s just going to be lost to those who remain, and even worse, we don’t want to face how much knowledge that colleague has in their head that’s going to be utterly useless in the rest of their lives.My wife has an encyclopedic knowledge of the state of psychology research. Turns out dedicating many years of your life to a subject has that effect. But now that tenure isn't a realistic possibility and adjuncting has been an unrewarding, crushing grind, what becomes of that knowledge and those years? There has to be a less wasteful system- a way to put her (and many other people's) talents to use.
I teach my undergrads skills through content, and I keep the amount of content low, but as both a teacher and a scholar, I personally know so much stuff.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 2:59 PM on February 16, 2018 [6 favorites]
We need historians so badly. We need teachers, good ones, and they're hard to find and harder to train up under the systems we have. It's not that we don't need this work.
It's that we're not willing to pay for it. And I don't think it's coincidental that any field which fills with women finds that the pay grades and the respect start to erode, on top of the increasingly minimal pay available to workers of any stripe.
God, our system is so fucking wasteful.
posted by sciatrix at 3:01 PM on February 16, 2018 [44 favorites]
It's that we're not willing to pay for it. And I don't think it's coincidental that any field which fills with women finds that the pay grades and the respect start to erode, on top of the increasingly minimal pay available to workers of any stripe.
God, our system is so fucking wasteful.
posted by sciatrix at 3:01 PM on February 16, 2018 [44 favorites]
Sciatrix, you reminded me of this paragraph from David Graeber's rant On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs:
In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.posted by perplexion at 3:10 PM on February 16, 2018 [53 favorites]
Maybe it's something unique to capitalism, but it feels like anything you're particularly good at should somehow be a marketable skill
Can't there be satisfaction in doing something creative just for the joy of doing it? After all, that's the way it's been for the vast majority of even the most talented musicians, writers and artists throughout human history. No matter how talented you are, it's always been true that you'll probably have to pay the rent with a far less enjoyable day job, but that doesn't make your passion project worthless - it just delivers its rewards in other ways.
posted by Paul Slade at 3:54 PM on February 16, 2018 [6 favorites]
Can't there be satisfaction in doing something creative just for the joy of doing it? After all, that's the way it's been for the vast majority of even the most talented musicians, writers and artists throughout human history. No matter how talented you are, it's always been true that you'll probably have to pay the rent with a far less enjoyable day job, but that doesn't make your passion project worthless - it just delivers its rewards in other ways.
posted by Paul Slade at 3:54 PM on February 16, 2018 [6 favorites]
Can't there be satisfaction in doing something creative just for the joy of doing it?
It's being teased with the thought that you might have been able to craft a more comfortable or enjoyable life for yourself if you had done, or been willing to do, things differently. I love the research that I do now, but I'm also constantly under stress and pressure, and sometimes I think "jeez, with my talent maybe I would have been happy just playing music, or becoming an apprentice instrument maker, or something." I mean, everyone has their regrets, but when you know that you're very good at something, it can feel disappointing to know that you haven't gone as far as you might have been able to go.
I did actually pursue music for a while, and I have been paid for playing music, which I guess means that I was a professional musician on occasion. I was stressed out then, too. Performance can be nerve-wracking! But that can still come back to "well, everyone gets nervous about performance" and you can start thinking about it as if you just needed a little extra push. Was the discomfort I experienced as a musician a sign that it was something I really wouldn't have enjoyed, and I should be grateful to be out of it? Or was it just something I needed to overcome in order to really fulfill my potential?
It's not just about money. I mean, sometimes I wonder how much better I would be as a musician if I'd just practiced more. So I can imagine it's the same thing with academic stuff, too (and might be fore me in the future). Sometimes it's nicer to know that a door was locked than to think you just never put enough energy into opening it.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:05 PM on February 16, 2018 [9 favorites]
It's being teased with the thought that you might have been able to craft a more comfortable or enjoyable life for yourself if you had done, or been willing to do, things differently. I love the research that I do now, but I'm also constantly under stress and pressure, and sometimes I think "jeez, with my talent maybe I would have been happy just playing music, or becoming an apprentice instrument maker, or something." I mean, everyone has their regrets, but when you know that you're very good at something, it can feel disappointing to know that you haven't gone as far as you might have been able to go.
I did actually pursue music for a while, and I have been paid for playing music, which I guess means that I was a professional musician on occasion. I was stressed out then, too. Performance can be nerve-wracking! But that can still come back to "well, everyone gets nervous about performance" and you can start thinking about it as if you just needed a little extra push. Was the discomfort I experienced as a musician a sign that it was something I really wouldn't have enjoyed, and I should be grateful to be out of it? Or was it just something I needed to overcome in order to really fulfill my potential?
It's not just about money. I mean, sometimes I wonder how much better I would be as a musician if I'd just practiced more. So I can imagine it's the same thing with academic stuff, too (and might be fore me in the future). Sometimes it's nicer to know that a door was locked than to think you just never put enough energy into opening it.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:05 PM on February 16, 2018 [9 favorites]
If you want to get paid, you have to make yourself valuable to others who are willing to pay you. This is the way of the world. We all wish we were one of the exceptions, but you can't count on it. It will be this way under capitalism or socialism.
I speak as a former Art and English major, who found out the way of the world is not as unkind as I thought it would be.
posted by Modest House at 4:08 PM on February 16, 2018 [7 favorites]
I speak as a former Art and English major, who found out the way of the world is not as unkind as I thought it would be.
posted by Modest House at 4:08 PM on February 16, 2018 [7 favorites]
the meaning of 'valuable to others' is highly variable, and further varies depending upon the system in which one is operating. the metrics for 'valuable' in capitalism as it is currently operating in the US are both pitifully narrow and actively harmful.
posted by halation at 4:11 PM on February 16, 2018 [40 favorites]
posted by halation at 4:11 PM on February 16, 2018 [40 favorites]
The only good metric for what you are worth is what someone is willing to pay you. It’s painful when this fails to align with own estimate, as I well know. But everything else is subjective.
posted by Modest House at 5:03 PM on February 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Modest House at 5:03 PM on February 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
Even that is subjective.(getting paid what you’re worth)
posted by Annika Cicada at 5:07 PM on February 16, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by Annika Cicada at 5:07 PM on February 16, 2018 [7 favorites]
What hurts the most, in a way, is that my loss has been replicated a thousand times over, and will be replicated a thousand times more
I'm reminded of Matt Damon's character in Interstellar: "It’s funny. When I left Earth, I thought I was prepared to die. The truth is, I never really considered the possibility that my planet wasn’t the one. Nothing worked out the way it was supposed to."
I'm not sure there's a warning so strong that students would heed it. And certainly I see no reason to expect tenured faculty to stop the turmoil.
barring some mass rejection of capitalism
Yes, because the socialist systems had a great reputation with historical scholarship.
posted by pwnguin at 6:17 PM on February 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
I'm reminded of Matt Damon's character in Interstellar: "It’s funny. When I left Earth, I thought I was prepared to die. The truth is, I never really considered the possibility that my planet wasn’t the one. Nothing worked out the way it was supposed to."
I'm not sure there's a warning so strong that students would heed it. And certainly I see no reason to expect tenured faculty to stop the turmoil.
barring some mass rejection of capitalism
Yes, because the socialist systems had a great reputation with historical scholarship.
posted by pwnguin at 6:17 PM on February 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
Actually, we do need more anthropologists. There are so many open questions and problems that an anthropological perspective could help us answer and solve. I am a great anthropologist. I am an excellent educator. I am helping solve conservation problems and I am helping us understand evolution and how it helped mold our species. My work doesn't feed directly into industry and generating a product with capital, but that doesn't mean my work and knowledge are not valuable.
I don't understand why I have to justify the work that I do and the value I add to society. Nobody looks at a hedge fund manager or a quant on Wall Street or a mid-level manager at a defense contractor or a software engineer or an army officer and asks them to explain what they contribute to society and why they didn't choose a practical career in the trades. I think I am contributing every bit as much as an artist, or a software engineer, or an insurance adjuster. I hate the way the American University has been turned into a neoliberal exercise of pleasing customers and paying the fewest employees the lowest possible price, the way that the government has devalued research that isn't immediately monetized, and the way the failure of the educational system is blamed on the people currently being exploited.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:50 PM on February 16, 2018 [65 favorites]
I don't understand why I have to justify the work that I do and the value I add to society. Nobody looks at a hedge fund manager or a quant on Wall Street or a mid-level manager at a defense contractor or a software engineer or an army officer and asks them to explain what they contribute to society and why they didn't choose a practical career in the trades. I think I am contributing every bit as much as an artist, or a software engineer, or an insurance adjuster. I hate the way the American University has been turned into a neoliberal exercise of pleasing customers and paying the fewest employees the lowest possible price, the way that the government has devalued research that isn't immediately monetized, and the way the failure of the educational system is blamed on the people currently being exploited.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:50 PM on February 16, 2018 [65 favorites]
Check out this document, the California State Standards for K-12 Social Studies Standards. Start at page 47, and glance at standards 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, and 11.4. Guess what's missing?
(Spoiler Alert: The Civil War.)
Uhm, no, it isn't.
1. Bottom of page 47: "Examine the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction and of the industrial revolution, including demographic shifts and the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the United States as a world power."
2. Standards for grade eleven: Students in grade eleven study the major turning points in American history in the twentieth century.
3. Students in grade eight study the ideas, issues, and events from the framing of the Constitution up to World War I. . . . They learn about the challenges facing the new nation, with an emphasis on the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War.
4. Page 37: 8.10: Students analyze the multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War.
Also there are a couple of issues from the start...
1. That document is from 2000.
2. Two words. Delaine. Eastin.
Former-CDE employee. It may not be perfect, but it actually DOES make sure that California's children are learning about the Civil War, thanks. History is just learned in certain years. Any native Californian can tell you that fourth grade is all about California history and that they probably made a mission out of sugar cubes.
posted by elsietheeel at 7:33 PM on February 16, 2018 [19 favorites]
(Spoiler Alert: The Civil War.)
Uhm, no, it isn't.
1. Bottom of page 47: "Examine the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction and of the industrial revolution, including demographic shifts and the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the United States as a world power."
2. Standards for grade eleven: Students in grade eleven study the major turning points in American history in the twentieth century.
3. Students in grade eight study the ideas, issues, and events from the framing of the Constitution up to World War I. . . . They learn about the challenges facing the new nation, with an emphasis on the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War.
4. Page 37: 8.10: Students analyze the multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War.
Also there are a couple of issues from the start...
1. That document is from 2000.
2. Two words. Delaine. Eastin.
Former-CDE employee. It may not be perfect, but it actually DOES make sure that California's children are learning about the Civil War, thanks. History is just learned in certain years. Any native Californian can tell you that fourth grade is all about California history and that they probably made a mission out of sugar cubes.
posted by elsietheeel at 7:33 PM on February 16, 2018 [19 favorites]
It wouldn't be quite so bad if I believed that academia truly was a meritocracy. But as anyone who's ever entered the grounds of a university can tell you, it most assuredly is not.
posted by adam hominem at 7:42 PM on February 16, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by adam hominem at 7:42 PM on February 16, 2018 [5 favorites]
And we don't have an excess of people trained in the humanities
Well, it's kind of interesting that an English, History, or Humanities degree doesn't exactly translate to an immediate job skill, but I've got to admit at least the people that I've met who have studied in those fields can at least think! When they go to the polls or discourse on social problems, they general have astute arguments and rational ideas.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:58 PM on February 16, 2018 [3 favorites]
Well, it's kind of interesting that an English, History, or Humanities degree doesn't exactly translate to an immediate job skill, but I've got to admit at least the people that I've met who have studied in those fields can at least think! When they go to the polls or discourse on social problems, they general have astute arguments and rational ideas.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:58 PM on February 16, 2018 [3 favorites]
I think the baby boomers just gave us some really bad advice. “Go to college,” they said, “follow your dreams,” they said. “You’ll get some kind of office job.” And that was true for them because having a college degree was a lot more impressive back then. But now that college degrees are more commonplace, they just don’t help you out like they used to. Also, the kinds of jobs you could get by just having a college degree aren’t as good anymore. Wages have been stagnant since the late 70s.
We were given obsolete advice because the world changed very quickly.
And dear lord do I feel for my friends who went to law school. So. Much. Debt.
posted by panama joe at 7:59 PM on February 16, 2018 [5 favorites]
We were given obsolete advice because the world changed very quickly.
And dear lord do I feel for my friends who went to law school. So. Much. Debt.
posted by panama joe at 7:59 PM on February 16, 2018 [5 favorites]
and yet unemployment numbers are markedly lower for college graduates than high school graduates
posted by kokaku at 8:11 PM on February 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by kokaku at 8:11 PM on February 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
Get out of the academy and get into the streets with the rest of us. nothing like a good historian to help pass the time when we are starving for wages and being robbed by the latest transnational fiction processed in Panama, Delaware, and the City of London.
it's 2018, start a mechanics' hall. sheesh, it's like punk never happened.
posted by eustatic at 8:23 PM on February 16, 2018 [6 favorites]
it's 2018, start a mechanics' hall. sheesh, it's like punk never happened.
posted by eustatic at 8:23 PM on February 16, 2018 [6 favorites]
I don’t know much about this world but I work with someone who is an effortlessly brilliant mathematician who should by all rights be in acedemia but became a programmer instead because at least then he can stay employed. He’s too smart for most of the problems he gets paid to solve, but in his own words, going back and struggling for a coveted tenure spot is “soul crushingly futile”.
It seems really messed up to me. A waste of a mind.
posted by Doleful Creature at 8:28 PM on February 16, 2018 [10 favorites]
It seems really messed up to me. A waste of a mind.
posted by Doleful Creature at 8:28 PM on February 16, 2018 [10 favorites]
I followed the academic path as long as I could... until the money ran out (the big scholarship that kept us for a couple of years, and the RRSPs I liquidated, all of them) and I had a son to support (and no child support payments, as his father was a ragged-ass broke artist, and to be fair he had never claimed he'd be anything else). I returned to campus no longer one of the blessed (I'm still a romantic about knowledge and research, as you can see) but as a secretary. I'm a good secretary; but I was a very good teacher, too. It's fair to say that I mourn the loss every day, and it's always in front of me as I work with the graduate students in our department: help them find their way through paperwork and visas and various crises. I'm good at that, too.
I grieved for the vision of the future that floated out of my hands. They told us that the Boomers were retiring, and that waves of vacant professorships were coming. They were wrong. By the time I knew there was nothing else I wanted to do for the rest of my life, it was already too late. I felt this essay like a suckerpunch.
posted by jokeefe at 8:38 PM on February 16, 2018 [27 favorites]
I grieved for the vision of the future that floated out of my hands. They told us that the Boomers were retiring, and that waves of vacant professorships were coming. They were wrong. By the time I knew there was nothing else I wanted to do for the rest of my life, it was already too late. I felt this essay like a suckerpunch.
posted by jokeefe at 8:38 PM on February 16, 2018 [27 favorites]
They told us that the Boomers were retiring, and that waves of vacant professorships were coming.
Since the 80s, they've been saying that
posted by thelonius at 8:46 PM on February 16, 2018 [17 favorites]
Since the 80s, they've been saying that
posted by thelonius at 8:46 PM on February 16, 2018 [17 favorites]
I was offered a technical instructor position at a local university at the beginning of the summer a couple of years ago. They needed someone to develop and teach hands-on coursework, build labs around virtual machines, that kind of thing. I was offered me a salary that was almost exactly half of the last instructor, but I was fine with that because I was going to teach! My dream job, a chance to finish a doctorate, benefits, an office, the whole thing. I spent a few hundred hours that summer working with the former instructor who was retiring, developing courses, studying the books and materials. Not to mention a bunch of time working on finding a replacement for me at my tiny little consulting company. It was a busy busy summer. But I was going to teach!
Two weeks before the semester starts I get a call from the assistant dean who had promised me the job. The money for the position was "gone" but she promised that she’d try to get me the maximum salary possible for teaching adjunct. No benefits, no office and at 1/3 of the promised salary. She told me that she was sorry but that I should think of the students and how much they needed me to teach. Just not enough to actually pay me anything. Maybe someday they’d be able to fund the position again. In fact they’d push for it for the next semester.
I’d like to tell you that everything worked out but it didn’t. I spent a week agonizing over it and then called to say I wasn’t coming, that my time and skills were worth more than $9 per hour. "But you’re important" they said. "Think about the students" they said.
So in the perverse universe of academia it made sense to pay other professors approximately 3 times my original offer to teach those courses. I suspect there never really was a position. I think they strung me along thinking that they’d throw that curve at the last minute and I’d just capitulate. Because I was going to teach!
Academia is a caste system these days. You have the upper echelon prima donnas who may not be able to teach their way out of a wet paper bag, but they’ve published stuff. And everyone else is a throw away.
People ask me sometimes if they should pursue a doctorate because they want to teach! My answer? Fuck no.
posted by ensign_ricky at 9:26 PM on February 16, 2018 [32 favorites]
Two weeks before the semester starts I get a call from the assistant dean who had promised me the job. The money for the position was "gone" but she promised that she’d try to get me the maximum salary possible for teaching adjunct. No benefits, no office and at 1/3 of the promised salary. She told me that she was sorry but that I should think of the students and how much they needed me to teach. Just not enough to actually pay me anything. Maybe someday they’d be able to fund the position again. In fact they’d push for it for the next semester.
I’d like to tell you that everything worked out but it didn’t. I spent a week agonizing over it and then called to say I wasn’t coming, that my time and skills were worth more than $9 per hour. "But you’re important" they said. "Think about the students" they said.
So in the perverse universe of academia it made sense to pay other professors approximately 3 times my original offer to teach those courses. I suspect there never really was a position. I think they strung me along thinking that they’d throw that curve at the last minute and I’d just capitulate. Because I was going to teach!
Academia is a caste system these days. You have the upper echelon prima donnas who may not be able to teach their way out of a wet paper bag, but they’ve published stuff. And everyone else is a throw away.
People ask me sometimes if they should pursue a doctorate because they want to teach! My answer? Fuck no.
posted by ensign_ricky at 9:26 PM on February 16, 2018 [32 favorites]
and yet unemployment numbers are markedly lower for college graduates than high school graduates
The benefit (economic and otherwise) of a bachelors degree, in practically any major, is pretty well-established. I don't think anyone is really questioning that—except occasionally in the general sense that "hey maybe we should teach that stuff in highschool if it's now basically a requirement to get into most jobs?"—and the data is pretty much irrefutable, outside of criminally overpriced for-profit "colleges" that basically exist to defraud government programs.
PhD programs are where it really gets suspect, because a large number of people in those programs get into them specifically because they want to get a job in academia, and in some cases are counseled when they're in undergrad and graduate school to keep going, racking up debt and opportunity costs as they go along. Perversely, it's often really smart students who get this advice—well-meant, probably, because they would be good at teaching and research, but perverse because it's wasting chunks of the lives of brilliant people, who end up like the author, full of knowledge they'll sadly never really use and ideas for papers they'll never write, because nobody is going to pay them enough for food and housing while they do either.
The recurring arguments over "whether the world needs more [pick your favorite humanities profession]" rarely advance productively, because they almost always reduce down to a profound difference in determining what the world 'needs'. It just ends up being groups of people operating from different assumptions talking past each other.
The market doesn't seem to be demanding, in the sense of creating living-wage jobs for, highly skilled and passionate people in many humanities fields. This doesn't seem especially controversial. The supply of PhDs who are going all the way to that terminal degree expressly to pursue academic jobs (there being pretty few commercial-sector jobs where you need a PhD), vastly outstrips the decent academic jobs they're competing for.
Entirely separate from this is a discussion over whether we'd be better off as a society if there were more people spending their time writing about the lives of 19th c. women instead of pushing the new frontiers of financial-instrument chicanery or whatever. It's possible to believe that we certainly would be better if there were more people involved in history as a profession (or anthropology, or whatever), but also that it's hugely irresponsible under current conditions to direct people down that path, or even fail to warn them adequately, given that there's an economic killing field at the end of it.
I have no idea how to fix this, although I'm pretty sure that the universities' apparently-favored solution—which has been to scale up PhD programs and try to get the commercial world to manufacture demand by making the PhD necessary to be competitive for various non-academic jobs via the oversupply of PhD-bearing candidates—is pretty crappy.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:23 PM on February 16, 2018 [25 favorites]
The benefit (economic and otherwise) of a bachelors degree, in practically any major, is pretty well-established. I don't think anyone is really questioning that—except occasionally in the general sense that "hey maybe we should teach that stuff in highschool if it's now basically a requirement to get into most jobs?"—and the data is pretty much irrefutable, outside of criminally overpriced for-profit "colleges" that basically exist to defraud government programs.
PhD programs are where it really gets suspect, because a large number of people in those programs get into them specifically because they want to get a job in academia, and in some cases are counseled when they're in undergrad and graduate school to keep going, racking up debt and opportunity costs as they go along. Perversely, it's often really smart students who get this advice—well-meant, probably, because they would be good at teaching and research, but perverse because it's wasting chunks of the lives of brilliant people, who end up like the author, full of knowledge they'll sadly never really use and ideas for papers they'll never write, because nobody is going to pay them enough for food and housing while they do either.
The recurring arguments over "whether the world needs more [pick your favorite humanities profession]" rarely advance productively, because they almost always reduce down to a profound difference in determining what the world 'needs'. It just ends up being groups of people operating from different assumptions talking past each other.
The market doesn't seem to be demanding, in the sense of creating living-wage jobs for, highly skilled and passionate people in many humanities fields. This doesn't seem especially controversial. The supply of PhDs who are going all the way to that terminal degree expressly to pursue academic jobs (there being pretty few commercial-sector jobs where you need a PhD), vastly outstrips the decent academic jobs they're competing for.
Entirely separate from this is a discussion over whether we'd be better off as a society if there were more people spending their time writing about the lives of 19th c. women instead of pushing the new frontiers of financial-instrument chicanery or whatever. It's possible to believe that we certainly would be better if there were more people involved in history as a profession (or anthropology, or whatever), but also that it's hugely irresponsible under current conditions to direct people down that path, or even fail to warn them adequately, given that there's an economic killing field at the end of it.
I have no idea how to fix this, although I'm pretty sure that the universities' apparently-favored solution—which has been to scale up PhD programs and try to get the commercial world to manufacture demand by making the PhD necessary to be competitive for various non-academic jobs via the oversupply of PhD-bearing candidates—is pretty crappy.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:23 PM on February 16, 2018 [25 favorites]
I think there need to be more opportunities for people with day jobs to participate in research, teaching and scholarship. If the jobs aren't there, but the passion is, then find a way for people to participate on the margins while getting their primary income from another source.
I don't see any reason you couldn't be, say, an actuary and a world expert in medieval French literature. Some people build yachts. Some people have 19 kids. Some people are volunteer firefighters. One of my friends just took a week off to go on a game show (which he has been preparing for for years). Another has written 3 fantasy novels. I know a group of folks who spent 5 years of nights and weekends making a very intricate and fascinating video game. Lots of these can even produce some income, although not enough to live on.
I help organize multiple informal conferences a year in my field (branch of software engineering), as well as a monthly meetup and a nonprofit board. It's not easy, and I'd certainly be doing a better job if I didn't also work 40 hours a week at a different job. But I've got bills to pay, and it works well enough. Of course in something like history, the vast majority of current experts in the field are at universities, and they won't work with non-affiliated strangers. I think that's a shame.
posted by miyabo at 11:41 PM on February 16, 2018 [17 favorites]
I don't see any reason you couldn't be, say, an actuary and a world expert in medieval French literature. Some people build yachts. Some people have 19 kids. Some people are volunteer firefighters. One of my friends just took a week off to go on a game show (which he has been preparing for for years). Another has written 3 fantasy novels. I know a group of folks who spent 5 years of nights and weekends making a very intricate and fascinating video game. Lots of these can even produce some income, although not enough to live on.
I help organize multiple informal conferences a year in my field (branch of software engineering), as well as a monthly meetup and a nonprofit board. It's not easy, and I'd certainly be doing a better job if I didn't also work 40 hours a week at a different job. But I've got bills to pay, and it works well enough. Of course in something like history, the vast majority of current experts in the field are at universities, and they won't work with non-affiliated strangers. I think that's a shame.
posted by miyabo at 11:41 PM on February 16, 2018 [17 favorites]
I don't see any reason you couldn't be, say, an actuary and a world expert in medieval French literature.
There are many excellent independent scholars in the humanities, but very few of them are independent by choice. Nothing else provides the opportunity to focus on your subject like academia, whether its through interactions with colleagues, using books and journals that aren't online and that local libraries won't hold or, above all, through teaching. It's much, much harder for someone to sustain critical attention on their subject when it's done as a hobby outside your working day - and I speak as someone who is on the margins of academia and not getting paid to teach or do my own research. I also speak at conferences and help to run non-profits in fields where the majority of my colleagues aren't academics, but there aren't too many fields where that model is sustainable. Volunteer labour can only get you so far, despite academia's routine exploitation of it, but there are ways of leveraging voluntary work and academic resources to mutual advantage. Extra-mural teaching and collections-based outreach are good examples of this.
Something like art history would be a better supposition than medieval French literature, as there you do have a tiny community of practitioners outside academia, working for auction-houses and so forth. However, their critical and historical judgment tends to be rather more guarded than those of academics, as market forces as well as hierarchies of taste are part of the conversation. It still tends to be the academics (whether in universities or museums) who have the time and freedom to change the way people think about something.
Of course in something like history, the vast majority of current experts in the field are at universities, and they won't work with non-affiliated strangers.
Some will, some won't - it depends on the field - but it's self-evident that the risks and rewards are different if you are getting paid to do something than if you are not, and so are the outcomes.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:26 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
There are many excellent independent scholars in the humanities, but very few of them are independent by choice. Nothing else provides the opportunity to focus on your subject like academia, whether its through interactions with colleagues, using books and journals that aren't online and that local libraries won't hold or, above all, through teaching. It's much, much harder for someone to sustain critical attention on their subject when it's done as a hobby outside your working day - and I speak as someone who is on the margins of academia and not getting paid to teach or do my own research. I also speak at conferences and help to run non-profits in fields where the majority of my colleagues aren't academics, but there aren't too many fields where that model is sustainable. Volunteer labour can only get you so far, despite academia's routine exploitation of it, but there are ways of leveraging voluntary work and academic resources to mutual advantage. Extra-mural teaching and collections-based outreach are good examples of this.
Something like art history would be a better supposition than medieval French literature, as there you do have a tiny community of practitioners outside academia, working for auction-houses and so forth. However, their critical and historical judgment tends to be rather more guarded than those of academics, as market forces as well as hierarchies of taste are part of the conversation. It still tends to be the academics (whether in universities or museums) who have the time and freedom to change the way people think about something.
Of course in something like history, the vast majority of current experts in the field are at universities, and they won't work with non-affiliated strangers.
Some will, some won't - it depends on the field - but it's self-evident that the risks and rewards are different if you are getting paid to do something than if you are not, and so are the outcomes.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:26 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
It still tends to be the academics (whether in universities or museums) who have the time and freedom to change the way people think about something.
It does tend to be, and probably it always will mostly be the academics who do that—it’s their job, after all. But we (as a civilization) haven’t even experimented with a system where non-academics could contribute seriously in the same way. There’s the enormous barrier of for-profit academic publishing, for example—a whole industry dedicated to preventing academic knowledge from being disseminated beyond academia.
posted by No-sword at 12:47 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
It does tend to be, and probably it always will mostly be the academics who do that—it’s their job, after all. But we (as a civilization) haven’t even experimented with a system where non-academics could contribute seriously in the same way. There’s the enormous barrier of for-profit academic publishing, for example—a whole industry dedicated to preventing academic knowledge from being disseminated beyond academia.
posted by No-sword at 12:47 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
we (as a civilization) haven’t even experimented with a system where non-academics could contribute seriously in the same way.
Academia isn't as old as people think, as well as being much more fragile. Almost all subjects began outside of academia, whether observational sciences, critical pursuits or forms of making and professional practice. It's telling that, after a certain point, the advantages of doing geology, astronomy, pure maths or theoretical physics by way of something that looks like a university became compelling (I'm using scientific examples, but there are plenty of humanistic fields, like art or literary criticism, that only joined the academy in the last century or so, as well as most professional fields). That's not to say that those advantages are insuperable, not least because...
There’s the enormous barrier of for-profit academic publishing, for example—a whole industry dedicated to preventing academic knowledge from being disseminated beyond academia.
.. I completely agree that this is one of the ways that academia is eating itself, along with casualisation and corporatisation. It's becoming prohibitively expensive for universities to buy back their own output, let alone disseminate it more broadly. Some business models are being worked out to try to address this, mostly driven by academic libraries rather than academics, who tend not to be as aware of the problem. I absolutely worry that unless academia continues to reinvent itself in relation to changes in the communications landscape it may not survive, in the same way that monasteries for the most part did not survive the Reformation (there was good money to be made in liquidating monasteries, too). Lately, I've seen a lot of low-level hostility towards academia come to the surface, often justifiably around issues such as debt. Now, I'm totally up for a debate about whether or not universities can be cleanly replaced by MOOCs, meetups and voluntary labour. What worries me a bit is this persistent low-level signal I hear that we've already had that debate and that it's been settled.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 1:18 AM on February 17, 2018 [11 favorites]
Academia isn't as old as people think, as well as being much more fragile. Almost all subjects began outside of academia, whether observational sciences, critical pursuits or forms of making and professional practice. It's telling that, after a certain point, the advantages of doing geology, astronomy, pure maths or theoretical physics by way of something that looks like a university became compelling (I'm using scientific examples, but there are plenty of humanistic fields, like art or literary criticism, that only joined the academy in the last century or so, as well as most professional fields). That's not to say that those advantages are insuperable, not least because...
There’s the enormous barrier of for-profit academic publishing, for example—a whole industry dedicated to preventing academic knowledge from being disseminated beyond academia.
.. I completely agree that this is one of the ways that academia is eating itself, along with casualisation and corporatisation. It's becoming prohibitively expensive for universities to buy back their own output, let alone disseminate it more broadly. Some business models are being worked out to try to address this, mostly driven by academic libraries rather than academics, who tend not to be as aware of the problem. I absolutely worry that unless academia continues to reinvent itself in relation to changes in the communications landscape it may not survive, in the same way that monasteries for the most part did not survive the Reformation (there was good money to be made in liquidating monasteries, too). Lately, I've seen a lot of low-level hostility towards academia come to the surface, often justifiably around issues such as debt. Now, I'm totally up for a debate about whether or not universities can be cleanly replaced by MOOCs, meetups and voluntary labour. What worries me a bit is this persistent low-level signal I hear that we've already had that debate and that it's been settled.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 1:18 AM on February 17, 2018 [11 favorites]
I sympathize with her pain and hope she finds a way to cope with this that doesn't leave her bitter about the experience.
At the same time I think it's important to acknowledge that being able to make a living doing something you are passionate about is a privilege granted to a very precious few. I hope there's a place in hell reserved for those who advise "do what you love and the money will follow".
Re: I think the baby boomers just gave us some really bad advice. ..We were given obsolete advice because the world changed very quickly.
Once again, "baby boomers" are not a monolithic age cohort united in an effort to fuck things up for subsequent generations. Nor is there a single "we" to be targeted, should we (boomers) ever collectively decide that's how we want to spend our last couple of decades on this planet.
Finally, the "go to college" message was based on at least a few generations worth of evidence that it was a fairly reliable path to success. While things may not be as simple as they used to be (e.g. student debt is out of hand), it's still not bad advice to extend one's education after high school - especially considering the state of US high schools.
posted by she's not there at 2:34 AM on February 17, 2018 [9 favorites]
At the same time I think it's important to acknowledge that being able to make a living doing something you are passionate about is a privilege granted to a very precious few. I hope there's a place in hell reserved for those who advise "do what you love and the money will follow".
Re: I think the baby boomers just gave us some really bad advice. ..We were given obsolete advice because the world changed very quickly.
Once again, "baby boomers" are not a monolithic age cohort united in an effort to fuck things up for subsequent generations. Nor is there a single "we" to be targeted, should we (boomers) ever collectively decide that's how we want to spend our last couple of decades on this planet.
Finally, the "go to college" message was based on at least a few generations worth of evidence that it was a fairly reliable path to success. While things may not be as simple as they used to be (e.g. student debt is out of hand), it's still not bad advice to extend one's education after high school - especially considering the state of US high schools.
posted by she's not there at 2:34 AM on February 17, 2018 [9 favorites]
However, there is a part of me that wonders if encouraging so many young people to pursue careers in close-to-zero-slot fields is perhaps the root of all this evil;
Its not the root of the evil (thats the complete lack of jobs), but this outcome shouldn't be surprising.
Every single one of her mentors in undergrad failed her. The reality is that this outcome is almost guaranteed for anyone getting a PhD in History from a program currently tied for the 69th best PhD program in History. Her mentors should have told her that.
The UConn History department failed her. I just browsed their website-- where are the placement statistics?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:35 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
Its not the root of the evil (thats the complete lack of jobs), but this outcome shouldn't be surprising.
Every single one of her mentors in undergrad failed her. The reality is that this outcome is almost guaranteed for anyone getting a PhD in History from a program currently tied for the 69th best PhD program in History. Her mentors should have told her that.
The UConn History department failed her. I just browsed their website-- where are the placement statistics?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:35 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
This problem is actually easily solved. The vast majority of classes being taught by an adjunct ought to be taught by a full-time professor with benefits. This used to be true. The biggest change has been in state universities, and that is because state legislatures decided to stop funding state universities. There are several reasons for that (racism against a changing student body and anti-intellectualism in general are both large contributors), but they all boil down to the fact that we have one political party in this country that is intent on destroying everything for everybody but the 1% and calling the rest of us names while they do it.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:00 AM on February 17, 2018 [42 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 5:00 AM on February 17, 2018 [42 favorites]
Evidence: I got my PhD at a fancy pants private university. There were no adjuncts there. Classes not taught by tenure track/tenured faculty and their grad students were taught by permanent non-tenured faculty, either instructors or "professors of the practice" (seasoned veterans of an industry).
posted by hydropsyche at 5:02 AM on February 17, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 5:02 AM on February 17, 2018 [8 favorites]
Re the "you're only worth what they'll pay you" bullshit, haha, isn't it funny how that intersects with the well documented trend I mentioned in the second comment? The one that notes that as women enter a field, pay and prestige drop--and as a field concentrates with men, the same things rise?
Golly, it's almost as if "they" value some people more than others for purely arbitrary traits rather than the output of skills! It's almost like the free market doesn't solve structural wage inequality without intervention, too.
Huh.
posted by sciatrix at 5:13 AM on February 17, 2018 [40 favorites]
Golly, it's almost as if "they" value some people more than others for purely arbitrary traits rather than the output of skills! It's almost like the free market doesn't solve structural wage inequality without intervention, too.
Huh.
posted by sciatrix at 5:13 AM on February 17, 2018 [40 favorites]
Adjunct here. I can afford to do it because I'm retired and because the work is worth doing. But it was a cruel, cruel system for my daughter getting her Ph.D. who, as she said last night, endured crushing bureaucracy, instability, absent or incoherent administrative supervision, and poverty in order to teach while being tossed in the maelstrom of dissertation advice from someone who kept thinking of new squirrels she had to chase so that it took far longer than it should have. She too mourned the loss of her lifelong dream of being a professor in a university, but when she finished her dissertation she got out and got a job with a contract and benefits.
To be fair, I did the same thing when I finished my Ph.D at a more prestigious university in the 90s. I looked around, said, "Nah," and got a job teaching in K12, even though I was better positioned than most to land something.
Last night, just to cheer her up (I work in the same university she did now), I ranted about losing an entire day trying to submit mileage, navigate the mandated database my student teachers have to use, and chasing down student teachers, plus dealing with a student who thought it was okay to sit blankly staring into space instead of taking notes in his observation classroom in an urban public school because and I quote, "I forgot my pencil." I do it all without any supervision because I don't cause trouble.
"Twelve years, Mom," she said. "I did that for twelve years."
It's a system that does not reward people who really like doing research and really like to teach.
posted by Peach at 5:16 AM on February 17, 2018 [4 favorites]
To be fair, I did the same thing when I finished my Ph.D at a more prestigious university in the 90s. I looked around, said, "Nah," and got a job teaching in K12, even though I was better positioned than most to land something.
Last night, just to cheer her up (I work in the same university she did now), I ranted about losing an entire day trying to submit mileage, navigate the mandated database my student teachers have to use, and chasing down student teachers, plus dealing with a student who thought it was okay to sit blankly staring into space instead of taking notes in his observation classroom in an urban public school because and I quote, "I forgot my pencil." I do it all without any supervision because I don't cause trouble.
"Twelve years, Mom," she said. "I did that for twelve years."
It's a system that does not reward people who really like doing research and really like to teach.
posted by Peach at 5:16 AM on February 17, 2018 [4 favorites]
And--to be blunt, it's almost as if "what they'll pay you" isn't a marker of actual fucking value.
The economy of a nation should serve its citizens, not the other way around. How is this that controversial? It hasn't always been this way; why am I seeing so many lazy arguments for the status quo here on Metafilter of all places?
posted by sciatrix at 5:16 AM on February 17, 2018 [30 favorites]
The economy of a nation should serve its citizens, not the other way around. How is this that controversial? It hasn't always been this way; why am I seeing so many lazy arguments for the status quo here on Metafilter of all places?
posted by sciatrix at 5:16 AM on February 17, 2018 [30 favorites]
That doesn't seem to be what's driving this though--philosophy, for one, has an abysmal job market and is male-dominated. In political science, political theorists enter a very bad job market but that discipline also remained male-dominated. It probably wouldn't help job prospects if those fields were seen as more appropriate for women but its not whats driving it.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:17 AM on February 17, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:17 AM on February 17, 2018 [4 favorites]
I'm in a female-dominated field, education, FWIW. And there is more money in that (educating student teachers is what provides the income for ed schools) but not enough to make it workable. In the interests of full disclosure I make $500 per student teacher per term, and can just about manage four student teachers. I make more than that for the weekly practicum class I teach, but not enough in any decade since the 1960s to actually live on. I don't even notice the paycheck. I use it as a tax withholding bucket because my partner is self-employed.
posted by Peach at 5:27 AM on February 17, 2018
posted by Peach at 5:27 AM on February 17, 2018
Evidence: I got my PhD at a fancy pants private university. There were no adjuncts there. Classes not taught by tenure track/tenured faculty and their grad students were taught by permanent non-tenured faculty, either instructors or "professors of the practice" (seasoned veterans of an industry).
I went to fancy pants private schools for both undergrad and grad school, and yes, there were almost no adjuncts. The only ones I recall in grad school were practitioners (brought in to teach specialized classes based on their professional work) and a couple of spousal hires; adjuncts weren't used as primary staffing. But that was at very well-funded, elite institutions; it's not a model that is currently financially viable for most public and private schools in the US, unfortunately. Along with better funding (duh) I'd be in favor of making percent teaching by adjuncts part of both rankings and accreditation and forcing change from that direction, since all the incentives currently are in the other direction.
The reality is that this outcome is almost guaranteed for anyone getting a PhD in History from a program currently tied for the 69th best PhD program in History.
History is at the apex of this, but this is true of in-demand fields, too. I went to a top-10 grad program; almost everyone who finished their PhD and wanted to be a professor got a tenure-track job when I was there, and that's still the case today. It would not be the case, however, for the graduates of the 69th best program. I don't know what those programs are promising, but I hope they are being open and realistic about the opportunities.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:43 AM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
I went to fancy pants private schools for both undergrad and grad school, and yes, there were almost no adjuncts. The only ones I recall in grad school were practitioners (brought in to teach specialized classes based on their professional work) and a couple of spousal hires; adjuncts weren't used as primary staffing. But that was at very well-funded, elite institutions; it's not a model that is currently financially viable for most public and private schools in the US, unfortunately. Along with better funding (duh) I'd be in favor of making percent teaching by adjuncts part of both rankings and accreditation and forcing change from that direction, since all the incentives currently are in the other direction.
The reality is that this outcome is almost guaranteed for anyone getting a PhD in History from a program currently tied for the 69th best PhD program in History.
History is at the apex of this, but this is true of in-demand fields, too. I went to a top-10 grad program; almost everyone who finished their PhD and wanted to be a professor got a tenure-track job when I was there, and that's still the case today. It would not be the case, however, for the graduates of the 69th best program. I don't know what those programs are promising, but I hope they are being open and realistic about the opportunities.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:43 AM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
The reality is that this outcome is almost guaranteed for anyone getting a PhD in History from a program currently tied for the 69th best PhD program in History. Her mentors should have told her that.
Interesting and important point that, frankly, makes her article seem a little bit whiney, i.e., why did she ever expect to land a tenure-track position given the circumstances. And assuming people weren't outright lying to her, I don't hold her mentors or UConn accountable for her not proactively looking into info re job opportunities and placement stats sometime during the years she's been preparing for her PhD.
posted by she's not there at 6:10 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
Interesting and important point that, frankly, makes her article seem a little bit whiney, i.e., why did she ever expect to land a tenure-track position given the circumstances. And assuming people weren't outright lying to her, I don't hold her mentors or UConn accountable for her not proactively looking into info re job opportunities and placement stats sometime during the years she's been preparing for her PhD.
posted by she's not there at 6:10 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
Blaming the victim with 20/20 hindsight is an Olympic sport with a long tradition, of course; but any student of decision making knows that human beings tend to overestimate their chances of achieving success in situations where the odds are against them. Ask any youth soccer player if she’s going to turn professional or even play in college. That said, universities continue to accept doctoral students even though master’s degrees rake in more income because there is an institutional incentive to admit them. They provide most of the labor (and I went to a fancy-pants university and they rely heavily on adjuncts). They have a financial incentive not to be blunt about the odds, too. And we have a cultural worship of the word “professor” that has to be experienced to be understood. I made seriously good money as a middle school teacher and my job required more professional judgment by far, but when I told people I taught middle School they said, “Oh,” with a falling ntonation and when I tell them I’m an adjunct professor they say “Oh!” In a Very Impressed Way. There are many forces conspiring to fool the student.
Am I glad I got a PhD? Sure. It has social cachet and I learned a lot. But it wasn’t worth the time and money. I could be adjuncting without one. My boss didn’t even realize I have a doctorate.
posted by Peach at 6:35 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
Am I glad I got a PhD? Sure. It has social cachet and I learned a lot. But it wasn’t worth the time and money. I could be adjuncting without one. My boss didn’t even realize I have a doctorate.
posted by Peach at 6:35 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
The economy of a nation should serve its citizens, not the other way around. How is this that controversial? It hasn't always been this way; why am I seeing so many lazy arguments for the status quo here on Metafilter of all places?
It's sad to see people wondering if their desire to be paid a living wage for working themselves to the bone, expanding human knowledge, doing a job an institution wishes to be done so badly that they've actually hired someone to do it, and educating people who are spending fantastic amounts to have that education, is simply a sign of their own decadence, entitlement, and privilege. Please, stop. The money you're not being paid is not being given to the homeless in any way. It is being accumulated by people who will never be able to spend it in their entire lifetimes, who would rather see you and me and every other ordinary person made into sausage than making money they can imagine having in their pockets instead. Stop breathing this ideological poison gas. Stop wafting it around. And if you are a working person in a better position, for now, who thinks people need to face economic reality, YOU need to face economic reality. It is a matter of time before people start spending money to spread the message that you also don't deserve to eat. We have to stop digging each other's graves.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 6:37 AM on February 17, 2018 [43 favorites]
It's sad to see people wondering if their desire to be paid a living wage for working themselves to the bone, expanding human knowledge, doing a job an institution wishes to be done so badly that they've actually hired someone to do it, and educating people who are spending fantastic amounts to have that education, is simply a sign of their own decadence, entitlement, and privilege. Please, stop. The money you're not being paid is not being given to the homeless in any way. It is being accumulated by people who will never be able to spend it in their entire lifetimes, who would rather see you and me and every other ordinary person made into sausage than making money they can imagine having in their pockets instead. Stop breathing this ideological poison gas. Stop wafting it around. And if you are a working person in a better position, for now, who thinks people need to face economic reality, YOU need to face economic reality. It is a matter of time before people start spending money to spread the message that you also don't deserve to eat. We have to stop digging each other's graves.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 6:37 AM on February 17, 2018 [43 favorites]
Interesting article particularly as my son is literally finishing up his dissertation in time for review RIGHT NOW. Since he promised himself the minute his stipend was done he would be too.
He saw the writing on the wall and has different plans than academia, which in his case will turn out well and involves work he enjoys but he did get a front row seat for what this article describes.
I have to be honest tho, I think the posted article was a very well written whine. Anyone with any sense at all could have foreseen this possibility from the very beginning if willing to look. Life does not owe us our dream job.
And if something is valuable and worth doing, it does not necessarily follow that it will be our day job. Nice if it is, but it is not a reality for most of us. My talents and skills do not generally pay me a cent, with a few exceptions. I have a day job that I really enjoy and that pays my bills but even that is way more than many people have. My passions are on my own time and my own nickel.
Once time and perspective have their time to work, perhaps the writer of the article will find a way to use what she has learned and worked so hard for in a different way. Her time in academia will be wasted only if she wastes it, even if using it looks different than what she had planned. And yes, the system stinks. Like lots of systems.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 6:38 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
He saw the writing on the wall and has different plans than academia, which in his case will turn out well and involves work he enjoys but he did get a front row seat for what this article describes.
I have to be honest tho, I think the posted article was a very well written whine. Anyone with any sense at all could have foreseen this possibility from the very beginning if willing to look. Life does not owe us our dream job.
And if something is valuable and worth doing, it does not necessarily follow that it will be our day job. Nice if it is, but it is not a reality for most of us. My talents and skills do not generally pay me a cent, with a few exceptions. I have a day job that I really enjoy and that pays my bills but even that is way more than many people have. My passions are on my own time and my own nickel.
Once time and perspective have their time to work, perhaps the writer of the article will find a way to use what she has learned and worked so hard for in a different way. Her time in academia will be wasted only if she wastes it, even if using it looks different than what she had planned. And yes, the system stinks. Like lots of systems.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 6:38 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
but any student of decision making knows that human beings tend to overestimate their chances of achieving success in situations where the odds are against them.
This isn't a case of being optimistic. Being optimistic is going to a top program and betting that you will get a tenure-track job. This outcome was a forgone conclusion; its like grieving that you didn't win the lottery.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:43 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
This isn't a case of being optimistic. Being optimistic is going to a top program and betting that you will get a tenure-track job. This outcome was a forgone conclusion; its like grieving that you didn't win the lottery.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:43 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
That's not really true. If you and your work (and teaching where appropriate) are good enough to get what sounds like a multi-year VAP, thinking you could get a tenure-track line seems optimistic but not nuts.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:09 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:09 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
Remember that she probably made this decision around age 18. As someone who is currently a college student I can tell you that there is very, very little practical advice given to students about life after college beyond jokes that you can only get a job if you're an engineer or doctor. And most liberal-arts types preemptively disqualify themselves from those majors because they 'aren't good at math.' I hate programming but I've stuck it out in my CS degree because after years of searching I couldn't find a realistic alternative. I was lucky enough to have had the sense to double-major in it when I was a senior in high school. There's no way I could have transferred into it, not with the department already stuffed to bursting.
My circle of very high-achieving liberal arts major friends are pretty much exclusively going to grad school or doing Teach for America or teach abroad stints. The one exception I can think of looked for a job for a year and sent hundreds of applications before eventually landing somewhere that sort of used her skills. She is also one of the most connected, ambitious, accomplished, career-focused women I know. You'll take the tiny chance of landing a professorship at program #69 if you really can't think of any other alternative. See also: the astonishingly large percentage of liberal arts majors who plan on becoming lawyers.
posted by perplexion at 7:18 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
My circle of very high-achieving liberal arts major friends are pretty much exclusively going to grad school or doing Teach for America or teach abroad stints. The one exception I can think of looked for a job for a year and sent hundreds of applications before eventually landing somewhere that sort of used her skills. She is also one of the most connected, ambitious, accomplished, career-focused women I know. You'll take the tiny chance of landing a professorship at program #69 if you really can't think of any other alternative. See also: the astonishingly large percentage of liberal arts majors who plan on becoming lawyers.
posted by perplexion at 7:18 AM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
I don't understand why I have to justify the work that I do and the value I add to society. Nobody looks at a hedge fund manager or a quant on Wall Street or a mid-level manager at a defense contractor or a software engineer or an army officer and asks them to explain what they contribute to society and why they didn't choose a practical career in the trades.
Amen to this. And if y'all knew what people get paid big bucks for in vaunted professions (ones I happen to cross regularly in my own work), let's just say I know dirt poor musicians who are more disciplined, more knowledgeable, and better managers.
Western society, especially the US (I'm saying this as an American who sees how different it is elsewhere), seems to have become "who can I have contempt for today to justify how awful things are without actually doing anything about it."
There are entire other ways of seeing the world that do not go into judgements on assumptions of intrinsic value. But those other ways of seeing the world are swept aside when the humanities are held in contempt.
posted by fraula at 7:19 AM on February 17, 2018 [35 favorites]
Amen to this. And if y'all knew what people get paid big bucks for in vaunted professions (ones I happen to cross regularly in my own work), let's just say I know dirt poor musicians who are more disciplined, more knowledgeable, and better managers.
Western society, especially the US (I'm saying this as an American who sees how different it is elsewhere), seems to have become "who can I have contempt for today to justify how awful things are without actually doing anything about it."
There are entire other ways of seeing the world that do not go into judgements on assumptions of intrinsic value. But those other ways of seeing the world are swept aside when the humanities are held in contempt.
posted by fraula at 7:19 AM on February 17, 2018 [35 favorites]
> This problem is actually easily solved. The vast majority of classes being taught by an adjunct ought to be taught by a full-time professor with benefits.
Oh, you think that's an easy fix, do you? Want to provide a step-by-step explanation of the easy way we get from here to there, including the motivation for the players at each level to make the necessary changes?
posted by languagehat at 8:06 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
Oh, you think that's an easy fix, do you? Want to provide a step-by-step explanation of the easy way we get from here to there, including the motivation for the players at each level to make the necessary changes?
posted by languagehat at 8:06 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
Jesus christ, calm down. There's a difference between diagnosing a problem/offering a solution and having a concrete plan on how to achieve it.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:11 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:11 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
There was a follow-up and interview with her in the Chronicle (as well as republishing her essay).
That's not really true. If you and your work (and teaching where appropriate) are good enough to get what sounds like a multi-year VAP, thinking you could get a tenure-track line seems optimistic but not nuts.
If I'm reading her essay correctly, she has had one multi-year visiting position (defending and starting the job both in 2015), and at least at the time of writing the essay says she is not interested in another visiting position. That's totally valid, but in academia today, having criteria like "tenure track or nothing" (or perfectly reasonable decisions like not being willing to repeatedly move across country) make what is already a long shot into something more like winning the lottery.
Regardless, fun as it is to second guess her choices, the real point of the essay was talking openly about the emotions about leaving, which I appreciated. I left academia before even getting my PhD, and I still have complicated feelings about it; leaving later when you have so much more invested would be really hard.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:20 AM on February 17, 2018 [7 favorites]
That's not really true. If you and your work (and teaching where appropriate) are good enough to get what sounds like a multi-year VAP, thinking you could get a tenure-track line seems optimistic but not nuts.
If I'm reading her essay correctly, she has had one multi-year visiting position (defending and starting the job both in 2015), and at least at the time of writing the essay says she is not interested in another visiting position. That's totally valid, but in academia today, having criteria like "tenure track or nothing" (or perfectly reasonable decisions like not being willing to repeatedly move across country) make what is already a long shot into something more like winning the lottery.
Regardless, fun as it is to second guess her choices, the real point of the essay was talking openly about the emotions about leaving, which I appreciated. I left academia before even getting my PhD, and I still have complicated feelings about it; leaving later when you have so much more invested would be really hard.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:20 AM on February 17, 2018 [7 favorites]
> Jesus christ, calm down.
I'm perfectly calm, but I'm sick to death of people claiming some problem is "easily solved." No it's not, or it would be solved already.
posted by languagehat at 8:43 AM on February 17, 2018 [9 favorites]
I'm perfectly calm, but I'm sick to death of people claiming some problem is "easily solved." No it's not, or it would be solved already.
posted by languagehat at 8:43 AM on February 17, 2018 [9 favorites]
the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic.
Unfortunately, what our world really needs, more than artists or historians or anything that goes with your skills and interests, is helpers, fixers, and problem solvers. We need people to wipe butts, make the dinners, take out the trash, fix the toilets, and take abuse with a smile because they have no other option and someone has to be there to abuse to make higher ups feel better. These jobs are draining as fuck and while other people tell me they just looooove helping and it's so rewarding, I feel drained beyond dry at the end of the day of helping, solving, and fixing. And they are low pay because why, exactly? Helpers, fixers, and problem solvers are disposable and another desperate one will come along in a minute, probably. This is what we turn creatives and intellectuals into so that they can afford to live. They don't have huge money making special skills like, I dunno, engineering, so they're not valuable. The few that can get jobs that don't suck got lucky and know how to cling.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:48 AM on February 17, 2018 [10 favorites]
Unfortunately, what our world really needs, more than artists or historians or anything that goes with your skills and interests, is helpers, fixers, and problem solvers. We need people to wipe butts, make the dinners, take out the trash, fix the toilets, and take abuse with a smile because they have no other option and someone has to be there to abuse to make higher ups feel better. These jobs are draining as fuck and while other people tell me they just looooove helping and it's so rewarding, I feel drained beyond dry at the end of the day of helping, solving, and fixing. And they are low pay because why, exactly? Helpers, fixers, and problem solvers are disposable and another desperate one will come along in a minute, probably. This is what we turn creatives and intellectuals into so that they can afford to live. They don't have huge money making special skills like, I dunno, engineering, so they're not valuable. The few that can get jobs that don't suck got lucky and know how to cling.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:48 AM on February 17, 2018 [10 favorites]
Mod note: Couple deleted; it's been a real fighty few days and we don't need more, please refrain from trolling.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:11 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:11 AM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
Grief at the loss of identity is FREAKING HUGE. I've been through it a couple of times, and you feel so alone because you don't even have yourself to turn to anymore.
I really hope when she's doing better she puts her research to use as a fiction writer, because I would read the shit out of novels about 19th-century American Catholic women, with guest appearances from Martin van Buren.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:27 AM on February 17, 2018 [19 favorites]
I really hope when she's doing better she puts her research to use as a fiction writer, because I would read the shit out of novels about 19th-century American Catholic women, with guest appearances from Martin van Buren.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:27 AM on February 17, 2018 [19 favorites]
Oh, you think that's an easy fix, do you? Want to provide a step-by-step explanation of the easy way we get from here to there, including the motivation for the players at each level to make the necessary changes?
I never said it was easy. It is a state by state process to properly fund our public institutions of higher education. Here is my plan for Georgia:
1) Fight like hell to get people registered to vote and with proper ID and to get voter turnout up so that we can
2) Elect Stacey Abrams as governor, elect a Democrat as Secretary of State, and increase the number of Democrats in the legislature.
3) Rewrite our unconstitutional voter suppression laws and change the way we do state elections so that we have real accountable voting and not the corrupt kleptocracy currently being run by the Republican party. This will restore Democratic control to the legislature.
4) Raise income taxes on the rich assholes in our state.
5) Restore the funding cuts to higher education that have been made over the past 20 years. (Also restore the cuts to PK-12 education, while we're at it).
posted by hydropsyche at 1:45 PM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
I never said it was easy. It is a state by state process to properly fund our public institutions of higher education. Here is my plan for Georgia:
1) Fight like hell to get people registered to vote and with proper ID and to get voter turnout up so that we can
2) Elect Stacey Abrams as governor, elect a Democrat as Secretary of State, and increase the number of Democrats in the legislature.
3) Rewrite our unconstitutional voter suppression laws and change the way we do state elections so that we have real accountable voting and not the corrupt kleptocracy currently being run by the Republican party. This will restore Democratic control to the legislature.
4) Raise income taxes on the rich assholes in our state.
5) Restore the funding cuts to higher education that have been made over the past 20 years. (Also restore the cuts to PK-12 education, while we're at it).
posted by hydropsyche at 1:45 PM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
Characterizing this as “whiny” sends the message that you shouldn’t feel complain if you’re in her situation, because it was your fault and you should have seen it coming. Jeez, she makes it pretty clear that she’s grieving over a major life change. It’s hard to give up a huge part of your life and identity, even if (especially if) you or other people think it’s because of your own mistakes or bad decisions.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:52 PM on February 17, 2018 [26 favorites]
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:52 PM on February 17, 2018 [26 favorites]
Erin Bartram is a close friend of mine.
For folks who seem to think that she should have decided to do something more useful with her life, I'd like to let you know that she was crucial in organizing the grad union at UConn, which among other things resulted in paid parental leave, protections against sexual harassment (directly saving at least one engineer's career), protections for highly exploited international students, and many other things that have noticeably improved the lives of thousands of students at UConn. She was very aware at that point of how precarious the employment chances were, but yeah, she'd sunk seven years into it, so she worked hard to make sure that being a PhD student, at least, wasn't a crushing experience with no job at the end, but rather, was a slightly not unpleasant experience with no job at the end. She was asked by administrators and faculty if she wasn't afraid that us unionizing might lead to fewer PhD students being admitted and she laughed in their faces. "That's what should happen!" She stepped back from leadership roles to ensure that people of color were at the forefront of negotiations, and she said, many times, "this is the most important thing I'll have done with my PhD." And she was right.
Then she got that VAP. And like, it all sounded like it was going to lead to a permanent job there, full time instructor if not TT. It wasn't just wishful thinking, they were telling her they wanted to find her a permanent position. And she did know better than to trust that. But what was she supposed to do, quit the job that she'd trained to do, when she had it?
What you should take away from this is not that Erin is a whiny striver who should have known better, but that she DID know better, and still the denialism and unrealistic expectations of her mentors, employers, and elder colleagues drew her in. I bet that they DID want to make her a permanent instructor at [VAP institution], and just weren't honest with themselves that it was never going to happen.
The point is that, even when you the grad student know that "alt-academic" is actually the main academic track, and you know that you are there to teach low level courses and amuse the faculty, the elders around you just won't admit that, and in order to graduate you have to buy into their bullshit, and when you finally get to the end, a bunch of people tell you that you shouldn't even feel any grief about it because you knew all along that this would happen. The point is that that kind of dishonesty enables this exploitation treadmill, and maybe it's like, actually a good idea to instead say, "you know what? This SUCKS."
Cause it sucks. She'll be fine, she knows she'll be fine, she doesn't know how yet, but she will be. But, like, can't you still be unhappy that you got so close to the life everyone said you were going to lead and then it didn't happen and never was going to? Isn't that still sad? Anyway, if you didn't get all that I feel like you maybe didn't give it a close reading.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 1:59 PM on February 17, 2018 [72 favorites]
For folks who seem to think that she should have decided to do something more useful with her life, I'd like to let you know that she was crucial in organizing the grad union at UConn, which among other things resulted in paid parental leave, protections against sexual harassment (directly saving at least one engineer's career), protections for highly exploited international students, and many other things that have noticeably improved the lives of thousands of students at UConn. She was very aware at that point of how precarious the employment chances were, but yeah, she'd sunk seven years into it, so she worked hard to make sure that being a PhD student, at least, wasn't a crushing experience with no job at the end, but rather, was a slightly not unpleasant experience with no job at the end. She was asked by administrators and faculty if she wasn't afraid that us unionizing might lead to fewer PhD students being admitted and she laughed in their faces. "That's what should happen!" She stepped back from leadership roles to ensure that people of color were at the forefront of negotiations, and she said, many times, "this is the most important thing I'll have done with my PhD." And she was right.
Then she got that VAP. And like, it all sounded like it was going to lead to a permanent job there, full time instructor if not TT. It wasn't just wishful thinking, they were telling her they wanted to find her a permanent position. And she did know better than to trust that. But what was she supposed to do, quit the job that she'd trained to do, when she had it?
What you should take away from this is not that Erin is a whiny striver who should have known better, but that she DID know better, and still the denialism and unrealistic expectations of her mentors, employers, and elder colleagues drew her in. I bet that they DID want to make her a permanent instructor at [VAP institution], and just weren't honest with themselves that it was never going to happen.
The point is that, even when you the grad student know that "alt-academic" is actually the main academic track, and you know that you are there to teach low level courses and amuse the faculty, the elders around you just won't admit that, and in order to graduate you have to buy into their bullshit, and when you finally get to the end, a bunch of people tell you that you shouldn't even feel any grief about it because you knew all along that this would happen. The point is that that kind of dishonesty enables this exploitation treadmill, and maybe it's like, actually a good idea to instead say, "you know what? This SUCKS."
Cause it sucks. She'll be fine, she knows she'll be fine, she doesn't know how yet, but she will be. But, like, can't you still be unhappy that you got so close to the life everyone said you were going to lead and then it didn't happen and never was going to? Isn't that still sad? Anyway, if you didn't get all that I feel like you maybe didn't give it a close reading.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 1:59 PM on February 17, 2018 [72 favorites]
But, like, can't you still be unhappy that you got so close to the life everyone said you were going to lead and then it didn't happen and never was going to? Isn't that still sad? Anyway, if you didn't get all that I feel like you maybe didn't give it a close reading.
Of course you can. And it was beautifully expressed. But there are a lot of people here and everywhere who like to characterize any displays of emotion or regret as weak, and probably think any success or failure is due to one individual's actions, or "bootstraps" or something.
I consider this an institutional failure, not necessarily Bartram's. If going to a school ranked anything other than whatever the arbitrary metric isn't enough to get one employment, why does that school exist? And is that even for armchair opinion-givers to decide? I don't think so.
posted by 41swans at 2:37 PM on February 17, 2018 [11 favorites]
Of course you can. And it was beautifully expressed. But there are a lot of people here and everywhere who like to characterize any displays of emotion or regret as weak, and probably think any success or failure is due to one individual's actions, or "bootstraps" or something.
I consider this an institutional failure, not necessarily Bartram's. If going to a school ranked anything other than whatever the arbitrary metric isn't enough to get one employment, why does that school exist? And is that even for armchair opinion-givers to decide? I don't think so.
posted by 41swans at 2:37 PM on February 17, 2018 [11 favorites]
Relevant article about academia: Why I Collapsed on the Job.
posted by Peach at 2:38 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Peach at 2:38 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
In all this, I just wanted to add that I believe, unshakeably, that knowledge is a good in and of itself, whether the “market” cares or not. (Fuck the “market, really.) Knowledge of history is a common good; the research is just as important.
The price of everything and the value of nothing, indeed.
posted by jokeefe at 2:41 PM on February 17, 2018 [8 favorites]
The price of everything and the value of nothing, indeed.
posted by jokeefe at 2:41 PM on February 17, 2018 [8 favorites]
If you want to get paid, you have to make yourself valuable to others who are willing to pay you.
History professors do provide lots of value to their institutions though. If you teach 200 students a year, that's probably $500,000 of tuition for your institution -- granted some of that goes to overhead and administration, but a good chunk of it is "profit." Plus, you can get grants (typically half goes to the institution), and help with donations and such. Your average engineer or even small-firm lawyer probably doesn't provide that much value.
The reason it's so hard to get hired as a history professor is that there are at least 100 qualified applicants for every single job. And that is true because each history professor (at a PhD-granting institution) is producing many more potential history professors during their career.
Not that I have any real solutions though.
posted by miyabo at 3:46 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
History professors do provide lots of value to their institutions though. If you teach 200 students a year, that's probably $500,000 of tuition for your institution -- granted some of that goes to overhead and administration, but a good chunk of it is "profit." Plus, you can get grants (typically half goes to the institution), and help with donations and such. Your average engineer or even small-firm lawyer probably doesn't provide that much value.
The reason it's so hard to get hired as a history professor is that there are at least 100 qualified applicants for every single job. And that is true because each history professor (at a PhD-granting institution) is producing many more potential history professors during their career.
Not that I have any real solutions though.
posted by miyabo at 3:46 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
I think it's pretty obvious from what she wrote that she didn't think life owed her her dream job, and that she knew she didn't have good odds of getting a tenure track position.
When she started her job:
posted by Secret Sparrow at 3:51 PM on February 17, 2018 [29 favorites]
When she started her job:
"I started as a VAP where I currently teach in the fall of 2015 ... I remember feeling really sad at the end of that first month, coming out of the first A&S faculty meeting. I wasn’t sad because I didn’t think I could do the job, I was sad because I realized that I could do it really well. Of course I could do it really well! This was what I had been trained to do. This was what I wanted to do. I was sad because I knew that I might already be on borrowed time – that I probably wouldn’t get to do it for my whole life."When she found out (most recently) that she wouldn't be getting tenure track (again):
"I was sad and upset, but I didn’t even start to grieve for several weeks, not because I hadn’t processed it, but because I didn’t feel I had the right to grieve. After all, I knew the odds of getting a tenure-track job were low, and I knew that they were lower still because I didn’t go to an elite program. And after all, wasn’t this ultimately my failure? If I’d been smarter, or published more, or worked harder, or had a better elevator pitch – if my brain had just been better, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. But it had happened, and if I were ultimately to blame for it, what right did I have to grieve?"She (and others in her position) should be allowed to grieve and to talk about that grief without it being considered whining.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 3:51 PM on February 17, 2018 [29 favorites]
The thing is, people who are graduating from programs that aren't top-ten programs are still doing everything that's supposed to be done. They're publishing in high-impact journals. They're teaching. They're researching. They're advocating for students. They're involved in service. They are getting grants. Their CVs are just as impressive - in some cases, more impressive because they are not getting the same level of access as students at Harvard. And so much of graduate work is predicated on having an advisor who studies what you study - maybe that's just not possible at an elite program.
If we take away all the research and contributions from non-elite programs, science and the humanities get a lot smaller, a lot less diverse, and a lot less beneficial. I wish there was a way to remove bias about institutions from the hiring process, because I think it would make evaluating job candidates much more fair.
posted by ChuraChura at 3:58 PM on February 17, 2018 [20 favorites]
If we take away all the research and contributions from non-elite programs, science and the humanities get a lot smaller, a lot less diverse, and a lot less beneficial. I wish there was a way to remove bias about institutions from the hiring process, because I think it would make evaluating job candidates much more fair.
posted by ChuraChura at 3:58 PM on February 17, 2018 [20 favorites]
I don't see any reason you couldn't be, say, an actuary and a world expert in medieval French literature. Some people build yachts. Some people have 19 kids. Some people are volunteer firefighters.
I'm an amateur musician in an area (classical/chamber) that barely tolerates such. I've compared notes (no pun intended) with a colleague who has a music degree (I don't - I just have a ton of private lessons and a lot of practical experience, because I never intended to make my living doing this) and it's not just my imagination - the hostility that a non-credentialed person faces in fields where the practitioners are generally credentialed is intense. She is also somewhat of an avocational player, or at least isn't currently working in the field in an obvious way. So she's sat in rehearsals where she's played right next to someone for an hour, they've given her the brushoff, then somehow they learn she's got a music ed degree and all of a sudden all is right with the world.
And that's somewhat understandable, although it irritates and saddens me sometimes. Because the poor market conditions, or the academic bubble, or the jerks running the show, or what/whoever you want to blame this on, has created a situation where talented people are forced to compete with each other. Even more unfortunately, it's also created a situation where those who end up with a degree in something, especially a terminal degree, often end up pretty much hating their subject, because of the stress they associate it with - the drive for perfectionism, and the constant fear of unemployment. They can't see themselves continuing to pursue their subject in some "second tier" because it's a constant reminder of their rejection, AND because they then become part of something that their colleagues who DID make it hate.
In addition to this, this country (don't know if it's better in others) is highly suspicious of anyone doing something academic, artistic, or both, for the fun of it. Risking injury and illness to train yourself to do a triathalon - perfectly understandable. Spending all your free time rooting for a sports team - that's the American way. You spend your free time researching the Civil War or practicing clarinet, and you're an accountant? You must be insane.
This article was heartbreaking to me, and the only sliver of hope I could offer, having experienced some dead-ends in life that are remotely similar, is that the drive and ambition that got them this far will take them over the top in some other endeavor entirely. I know that seems such a facile thing to say, but I've seen it happen a number of times.
posted by randomkeystrike at 5:31 PM on February 17, 2018 [15 favorites]
I'm an amateur musician in an area (classical/chamber) that barely tolerates such. I've compared notes (no pun intended) with a colleague who has a music degree (I don't - I just have a ton of private lessons and a lot of practical experience, because I never intended to make my living doing this) and it's not just my imagination - the hostility that a non-credentialed person faces in fields where the practitioners are generally credentialed is intense. She is also somewhat of an avocational player, or at least isn't currently working in the field in an obvious way. So she's sat in rehearsals where she's played right next to someone for an hour, they've given her the brushoff, then somehow they learn she's got a music ed degree and all of a sudden all is right with the world.
And that's somewhat understandable, although it irritates and saddens me sometimes. Because the poor market conditions, or the academic bubble, or the jerks running the show, or what/whoever you want to blame this on, has created a situation where talented people are forced to compete with each other. Even more unfortunately, it's also created a situation where those who end up with a degree in something, especially a terminal degree, often end up pretty much hating their subject, because of the stress they associate it with - the drive for perfectionism, and the constant fear of unemployment. They can't see themselves continuing to pursue their subject in some "second tier" because it's a constant reminder of their rejection, AND because they then become part of something that their colleagues who DID make it hate.
In addition to this, this country (don't know if it's better in others) is highly suspicious of anyone doing something academic, artistic, or both, for the fun of it. Risking injury and illness to train yourself to do a triathalon - perfectly understandable. Spending all your free time rooting for a sports team - that's the American way. You spend your free time researching the Civil War or practicing clarinet, and you're an accountant? You must be insane.
This article was heartbreaking to me, and the only sliver of hope I could offer, having experienced some dead-ends in life that are remotely similar, is that the drive and ambition that got them this far will take them over the top in some other endeavor entirely. I know that seems such a facile thing to say, but I've seen it happen a number of times.
posted by randomkeystrike at 5:31 PM on February 17, 2018 [15 favorites]
Yeah I’m considering not going to grad school for the sake of quality of life, and one of the big things I’m hung up on is that I wouldn’t be able to write about anything without credentials. You can be an amateur historian, but you’ll be treated like an amateur. It’s not unreasonable for people to expect credentials, but it sets a limit on what you can do on your own.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 6:14 PM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 6:14 PM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
Adding to what randomkeystrike says: We seem to have lost the ability to enjoy and appreciate most pursuits that create beauty and enjoyment. If a person isn't talented or accomplished enough to be a professional musician, or artist, or academic, we discourage them at a very early age from developing interests that can be very fulfilling and important in their lives. Some brave people overcome this, but most of us just let those things fall away while we wear ourselves out making a living. As a result we look to our "careers" to be that one fulfilling thing outside of relationships, and even there we foster unrealistic expectations about romance and life.
I have no illusions about turning the clock backwards. I do believe that we have left behind things that enlarge us as individuals and as members of our communities. Why don't we expect that most people should be able to do a competent sketch, play a little music, share a discovery, and discuss important concerns and make a good argument for their views, or at least some subset thereof?
posted by Altomentis at 6:25 PM on February 17, 2018 [7 favorites]
I have no illusions about turning the clock backwards. I do believe that we have left behind things that enlarge us as individuals and as members of our communities. Why don't we expect that most people should be able to do a competent sketch, play a little music, share a discovery, and discuss important concerns and make a good argument for their views, or at least some subset thereof?
posted by Altomentis at 6:25 PM on February 17, 2018 [7 favorites]
If going to a school ranked anything other than whatever the arbitrary metric isn't enough to get one employment, why does that school exist?
There's been a lot of discussion on this thread how history, art, etc. is valuable for its own sake. So the obvious answer is these programs exist because they provide value, even when it can't be monetized. Scaling things way back would, or course, just cut off people's career options earlier, and also reduce the total number of paying positions.
Which sort of ties into my other point. There's something unavoidably pyramid-schemey about academic careers. Unless each professors only trains 1-2 grad students you are going to have a lot more qualified people than you have positions. All the proposals here about more funding or more pay don't change that. It's not deliberately dishonest of course but it just can't work out the way people want it to.
(Incidentally, this happens in STEM too. I know a lot of people in my field in industry who are frustrated because they have the resume and now want to run a good research project, which requires maybe 10 FTE or so. Giving everyone that chance is mathematically impossible.)
I don't know what you do. I'm in STEM but a close relative did a vocal music degree, super talented, enough to have a 'patron' for a while and some other external success. But eventually trying to make it got to be too much and she gave up it. I remember talking to her after one of her last auditions, it was so heartbreaking for me, and she obviously had it 100 times worse. There are only so many people who want to pay $100 for an opera, or for that matter read more than one Martin van Buren biography. I always pretend excess money doesn't matter but in retrospect one thing I regret is I didn't have my late career funds earlier in life, I could have maybe helped her keep her going.
posted by mark k at 7:34 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
There's been a lot of discussion on this thread how history, art, etc. is valuable for its own sake. So the obvious answer is these programs exist because they provide value, even when it can't be monetized. Scaling things way back would, or course, just cut off people's career options earlier, and also reduce the total number of paying positions.
Which sort of ties into my other point. There's something unavoidably pyramid-schemey about academic careers. Unless each professors only trains 1-2 grad students you are going to have a lot more qualified people than you have positions. All the proposals here about more funding or more pay don't change that. It's not deliberately dishonest of course but it just can't work out the way people want it to.
(Incidentally, this happens in STEM too. I know a lot of people in my field in industry who are frustrated because they have the resume and now want to run a good research project, which requires maybe 10 FTE or so. Giving everyone that chance is mathematically impossible.)
I don't know what you do. I'm in STEM but a close relative did a vocal music degree, super talented, enough to have a 'patron' for a while and some other external success. But eventually trying to make it got to be too much and she gave up it. I remember talking to her after one of her last auditions, it was so heartbreaking for me, and she obviously had it 100 times worse. There are only so many people who want to pay $100 for an opera, or for that matter read more than one Martin van Buren biography. I always pretend excess money doesn't matter but in retrospect one thing I regret is I didn't have my late career funds earlier in life, I could have maybe helped her keep her going.
posted by mark k at 7:34 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
I don't see any reason you couldn't be, say, an actuary and a world expert in medieval French literature.
Being a top scholar is, really, a full-time job. Especially if you are in a field (like history) that requires travel to archives.
posted by praemunire at 9:00 PM on February 17, 2018 [14 favorites]
Being a top scholar is, really, a full-time job. Especially if you are in a field (like history) that requires travel to archives.
posted by praemunire at 9:00 PM on February 17, 2018 [14 favorites]
A fair few people, including faculty members, have suggested that I'd be a good fit for academia. I write well (and often), I love research, I'm very resourceful with a lot of ideas and plenty of curiosity to follow through on them. And in some ways I think they're on to something - I do tend to approach a lot of things, including my creative pursuits in a rather intellectual, cerebral fashion.
Yet academic writing bores me to tears. I don't get much engagement from it; it's like talking to a brick wall. The formal education system is not a good match for my brain (as multiple breakdowns can attest). The people I know who did Ph.Ds were all super depressed and regretted it - many of them were people with no significant mental health concerns beforehand.
Last year I wrote a massive, 6000-word-ish article about LGBTQ rights in Asia. It was the longest thing I'd ever written that wasn't a NaNoWriMo project or a multi-year blog. I went all out with the research - making a list of every country in Asia, tracking down at least one organisation or activist from as many countries as I could find, doing a lot of secondary research. It took me months and two massive rewrites. It was exhausting at times.
I loved it. It scratched my research itch - I enjoyed learning about all of these countries and cultures that I was only barely familiar with. I had so many people invested in the project. It reached a much wider yet also more targeted audience than if I'd written this as an academic paper and sent it to some journal most laypeople wouldn't have heard of before. I wasn't paid as much as I could have for the piece (given small budgets) but this is the sort of thing I would happily do.
We need more opportunities like these, more paid jobs: ones where those of us with academically-inclined brains can continue researching and interviewing and exploring without being tied to the university system. Journalism was my outlet, but not many places will necessarily be into deep dives when news needs to be fast and timely. People get advances to write books, but getting those advances can be difficult. I've noticed that YouTube seems to be a pretty good avenue for video essays that have a similar essay feel to them - but, like many other artistic pursuits, just because people find your work valuable doesn't mean they'll pay for it. (I know so many artists and activists who are heralded for contributing so much to their field and community, and are always asked to give their intellectual and emotional labour for The Cause, but who struggle to get by financially.)
posted by divabat at 12:17 AM on February 18, 2018 [7 favorites]
Yet academic writing bores me to tears. I don't get much engagement from it; it's like talking to a brick wall. The formal education system is not a good match for my brain (as multiple breakdowns can attest). The people I know who did Ph.Ds were all super depressed and regretted it - many of them were people with no significant mental health concerns beforehand.
Last year I wrote a massive, 6000-word-ish article about LGBTQ rights in Asia. It was the longest thing I'd ever written that wasn't a NaNoWriMo project or a multi-year blog. I went all out with the research - making a list of every country in Asia, tracking down at least one organisation or activist from as many countries as I could find, doing a lot of secondary research. It took me months and two massive rewrites. It was exhausting at times.
I loved it. It scratched my research itch - I enjoyed learning about all of these countries and cultures that I was only barely familiar with. I had so many people invested in the project. It reached a much wider yet also more targeted audience than if I'd written this as an academic paper and sent it to some journal most laypeople wouldn't have heard of before. I wasn't paid as much as I could have for the piece (given small budgets) but this is the sort of thing I would happily do.
We need more opportunities like these, more paid jobs: ones where those of us with academically-inclined brains can continue researching and interviewing and exploring without being tied to the university system. Journalism was my outlet, but not many places will necessarily be into deep dives when news needs to be fast and timely. People get advances to write books, but getting those advances can be difficult. I've noticed that YouTube seems to be a pretty good avenue for video essays that have a similar essay feel to them - but, like many other artistic pursuits, just because people find your work valuable doesn't mean they'll pay for it. (I know so many artists and activists who are heralded for contributing so much to their field and community, and are always asked to give their intellectual and emotional labour for The Cause, but who struggle to get by financially.)
posted by divabat at 12:17 AM on February 18, 2018 [7 favorites]
Which sort of ties into my other point. There's something unavoidably pyramid-schemey about academic careers. Unless each professors only trains 1-2 grad students you are going to have a lot more qualified people than you have positions. All the proposals here about more funding or more pay don't change that. It's not deliberately dishonest of course but it just can't work out the way people want it to.
Not all professors train grad students. In the US, most undergraduates attend schools without PhD programs (i.e., with associates and bachelors and maybe master's programs). In STEM fields, and I think many others as well, the master's is not just a path to a PhD, but a credential in its own right.
There is far more to academic life than the R1 schools that train PhD students. I know plenty of people who would not be happy without that R1 job, but many of us, including me and the author in the FPP, are just fine in those other places.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:53 AM on February 18, 2018 [7 favorites]
Not all professors train grad students. In the US, most undergraduates attend schools without PhD programs (i.e., with associates and bachelors and maybe master's programs). In STEM fields, and I think many others as well, the master's is not just a path to a PhD, but a credential in its own right.
There is far more to academic life than the R1 schools that train PhD students. I know plenty of people who would not be happy without that R1 job, but many of us, including me and the author in the FPP, are just fine in those other places.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:53 AM on February 18, 2018 [7 favorites]
all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish
I know most of the public has no idea what I do (I didn’t even know what it was until I decided to pursue it) but lumping me in with telemarketers (been one of those too once!) and private equity CEO’s is just mean. Actuaries are useful! Really!
posted by LizBoBiz at 5:41 AM on February 18, 2018 [13 favorites]
I know most of the public has no idea what I do (I didn’t even know what it was until I decided to pursue it) but lumping me in with telemarketers (been one of those too once!) and private equity CEO’s is just mean. Actuaries are useful! Really!
posted by LizBoBiz at 5:41 AM on February 18, 2018 [13 favorites]
I went to a top school and landed a tenure-track job. I quit. I hated it. It is just as isolating as grad school but with more responsibilities. I now teach at an elite high school. I can publish if I want and I can teach what I want.
Everyone knows the system when they go into graduate school. We get trapped into thinking success means a tenured job when in fact there are more alternatives out there that provide opportunities for creativity and freedom. I think it's a failure on the part of the schools not to help grad students see that.
posted by CtrlAltD at 6:00 AM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
Everyone knows the system when they go into graduate school. We get trapped into thinking success means a tenured job when in fact there are more alternatives out there that provide opportunities for creativity and freedom. I think it's a failure on the part of the schools not to help grad students see that.
posted by CtrlAltD at 6:00 AM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
There's this really interesting misguided notion that academics are following a passion, and that this is somehow at the root of it all incredibly selfish. And because academics care deeply about something, and because investing in that is framed as if it is focusing on the self, people who go into the academy deserve what they get. "Nobody should be allowed to just follow their passion, and that's a great privilege on the rare occasion when it does happen." Be grateful for what you get. And if you don't get the tenure-track job, if you don't somehow line up the dominos of fate in such a way that it works out, well: screw you for doing something you cared about. You should never have tried to do something that selfish.
That this is the prevailing attitude about people who don't get tenure track jobs astounds me. That the idea that doing science, or contributing to knowledge, is actually just a venal, selfish activity is frankly completely backwards. But somehow we have collectively bought into this notion that caring about the humanities, for example, is pointless and selfish. It's probably because it's hard to understand wanting to do something without a financial reward in our culture? I don't know. Somehow it's fine to want to be a hedge fund manager, nobody ever says "oh you're just following your passion and if it doesn't work out you shouldn't have done something that you cared about" to hedge fund managers. But that is the dialogue that I hear constantly in the academy and outside of the academy about people who do not have the luck to succeed. Because it is luck, most people do not get tenure track jobs -- about 90% of biology phds do not work as faculty members after they get their PhD.
Somewhere along the way we have decided that knowledge is not valuable in and of itself and so people who pursue it must just be selfish and foolish. This is profoundly sad, and incredibly misguided, and very toxic.
posted by sockermom at 6:00 AM on February 18, 2018 [36 favorites]
That this is the prevailing attitude about people who don't get tenure track jobs astounds me. That the idea that doing science, or contributing to knowledge, is actually just a venal, selfish activity is frankly completely backwards. But somehow we have collectively bought into this notion that caring about the humanities, for example, is pointless and selfish. It's probably because it's hard to understand wanting to do something without a financial reward in our culture? I don't know. Somehow it's fine to want to be a hedge fund manager, nobody ever says "oh you're just following your passion and if it doesn't work out you shouldn't have done something that you cared about" to hedge fund managers. But that is the dialogue that I hear constantly in the academy and outside of the academy about people who do not have the luck to succeed. Because it is luck, most people do not get tenure track jobs -- about 90% of biology phds do not work as faculty members after they get their PhD.
Somewhere along the way we have decided that knowledge is not valuable in and of itself and so people who pursue it must just be selfish and foolish. This is profoundly sad, and incredibly misguided, and very toxic.
posted by sockermom at 6:00 AM on February 18, 2018 [36 favorites]
about 90% of biology phds do not work as faculty members after they get their PhD.
The situation in the sciences is a lot better than in the humanities overall, but it may actually be worse relative to the amount of bilge we're sold about "STEM" skills being highly in demand. Even in engineering.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 7:15 AM on February 18, 2018 [3 favorites]
The situation in the sciences is a lot better than in the humanities overall, but it may actually be worse relative to the amount of bilge we're sold about "STEM" skills being highly in demand. Even in engineering.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 7:15 AM on February 18, 2018 [3 favorites]
about 90% of biology phds do not work as faculty members after they get their PhD.
At least in chemistry, most PhDs don't work as faculty members, but many of them work as industrial chemists - in positions that, even if they don't require a PhD, often have a serious boost up the career ladder when you have one. I'm not sure how that works for other fields.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 8:48 AM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
At least in chemistry, most PhDs don't work as faculty members, but many of them work as industrial chemists - in positions that, even if they don't require a PhD, often have a serious boost up the career ladder when you have one. I'm not sure how that works for other fields.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 8:48 AM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
I don't see any reason you couldn't be, say, an actuary and a world expert in medieval French literature.
PhDs take years to complete, and many people go into debt to pursue them -- not necessarily tuition-based debt, although that happens sometimes, but most grad students don't make enough money to start paying back their undergraduate loans. Some don't make enough in stipends to make ends meet, or they lose their funding before they finish, so they take out more loans. If you don't end up with a TT job, and you want to go become something 'practical,' you may not be in a financial position to go out and get another degree so you can become an actuary. Heck, despite 5+ years of teaching experience, I can't even apply for a K-12 position in my state, since I don't specifically have an Ed degree, and I can't take on the burden of more loans, to be honest.
Making a leap from an academic track can be really challenging, depending on field; those in the humanities often have a tough time, because many employers don't believe that the research and teaching skills developed in academia translate to the private sector. For all the talk of 'alt-ac' tracks, there's not much for people from the humanities, at least in my experience. Pursuing an advanced degree means a lack of the direct experience that employers want; they may not think an MA or PhD has any relevance for hiring. In fact, it can sometimes work against people; (specifically humanities-based) academics are often perceived as being 'tainted' somehow by private employers. Or else automated software bounces their resumes out before they're even reviewed by a human. Those leaving academia sometimes end up competing for entry-level positions with people straight out of college, who are perceived as younger and cheaper and who probably have more recent relevant experience thanks to internships.
posted by halation at 9:20 AM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
PhDs take years to complete, and many people go into debt to pursue them -- not necessarily tuition-based debt, although that happens sometimes, but most grad students don't make enough money to start paying back their undergraduate loans. Some don't make enough in stipends to make ends meet, or they lose their funding before they finish, so they take out more loans. If you don't end up with a TT job, and you want to go become something 'practical,' you may not be in a financial position to go out and get another degree so you can become an actuary. Heck, despite 5+ years of teaching experience, I can't even apply for a K-12 position in my state, since I don't specifically have an Ed degree, and I can't take on the burden of more loans, to be honest.
Making a leap from an academic track can be really challenging, depending on field; those in the humanities often have a tough time, because many employers don't believe that the research and teaching skills developed in academia translate to the private sector. For all the talk of 'alt-ac' tracks, there's not much for people from the humanities, at least in my experience. Pursuing an advanced degree means a lack of the direct experience that employers want; they may not think an MA or PhD has any relevance for hiring. In fact, it can sometimes work against people; (specifically humanities-based) academics are often perceived as being 'tainted' somehow by private employers. Or else automated software bounces their resumes out before they're even reviewed by a human. Those leaving academia sometimes end up competing for entry-level positions with people straight out of college, who are perceived as younger and cheaper and who probably have more recent relevant experience thanks to internships.
posted by halation at 9:20 AM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
This if you love something you’ll find tons of hours a week or whatever to devote to it really makes me cringe. Maybe I’m just a bad life hours manager, but when I’m working I’m fully engaged in my work for that many hours. Then I’m commuting back-and-forth from my job to my home. Then I’m taking care of my children, making healthy meals, trying to get a bit of exercise in, taking care of the home. None of this seems crazy excessive to me. Then I do have free time after that, which is partly for passions but also for building community, having friends, and maybe a bit of relaxing.
I don’t have an answer to how many historians the world needs to find but arguing that research in your free time is an easy path seems suspect if you mean over a lifetime. Which is what I think most scholars want, and mourning that loss is legitimate.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:28 AM on February 18, 2018 [24 favorites]
I don’t have an answer to how many historians the world needs to find but arguing that research in your free time is an easy path seems suspect if you mean over a lifetime. Which is what I think most scholars want, and mourning that loss is legitimate.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:28 AM on February 18, 2018 [24 favorites]
I don’t have an answer to how many historians the world needs to find but arguing that research in your free time is an easy path seems suspect if you mean over a lifetime.
Also none of this scholarship is produced in isolation. Good work is the product of conversations, interactions, comments, revisions, reviews, feedback with other scholars. You can't do that on your own.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:12 AM on February 18, 2018 [14 favorites]
At the same time I think it's important to acknowledge that being able to make a living doing something you are passionate about is a privilege granted to a very precious few. I hope there's a place in hell reserved for those who advise "do what you love and the money will follow".
Yeah, the people who say that rarely seem to realize they are the lucky few. They apparently think if everyone else could just be more like them, everyone would then have all the same opportunities they did, somehow.
posted by wondermouse at 11:35 AM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
Yeah, the people who say that rarely seem to realize they are the lucky few. They apparently think if everyone else could just be more like them, everyone would then have all the same opportunities they did, somehow.
posted by wondermouse at 11:35 AM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
Somewhere along the way we have decided that knowledge is not valuable in and of itself and so people who pursue it must just be selfish and foolish. This is profoundly sad, and incredibly misguided, and very toxic.
This! This! This!!
Americans are so proud of their ignorance and inability to reason logically. We elected a president with the vocabulary skills of an 8 year old. I just cringe when I hear him speak.
Everybody needs a job--given. People need to eat. But why is there no respect for teachers, researchers, thinkers, and makers? There are so many creative people that can't make money because they're not salesmen. Anymore, there isn't any sausage, we buy into the sizzle. Pundit no longer means intellectual, it is another name for celebrity. And if someone does call you an intellectual, it's an insult, implying someone pretentious or not connected with reality.
I had a great visit with my horse shoer this morning. Chatting with him is amazing--he is an iconoclast, an intellectual and is extremely articulate. He is a rancher, horse/dog trainer, and does horseshoeing; is a mechanic, forges knives; he sketches, writes excellent poetry (not doggerel) using amazing metaphors and kenning; he is a silversmith. His current evening reads are Plutarch and the history of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. He was raised in the Owyhee desert, and there were three people in his high school graduating class. I'm a college graduate, and I find it hard to keep in up with him in conversation. He's sad that his oldest boy doesn't particularly care to ride out and tag the calves that are being born, but after we were done working the horses feet, his eight year old climbed out of the truck and showed me some of his drawings and problems in Cartesian geometry. The kid then explained to me about fusing Euclidean geometry and algebra, and told a horrible joke about putting Decartes before the horse. How many people could be like this if we only valued education instead of entertainment?
posted by BlueHorse at 12:59 PM on February 18, 2018 [13 favorites]
This! This! This!!
Americans are so proud of their ignorance and inability to reason logically. We elected a president with the vocabulary skills of an 8 year old. I just cringe when I hear him speak.
Everybody needs a job--given. People need to eat. But why is there no respect for teachers, researchers, thinkers, and makers? There are so many creative people that can't make money because they're not salesmen. Anymore, there isn't any sausage, we buy into the sizzle. Pundit no longer means intellectual, it is another name for celebrity. And if someone does call you an intellectual, it's an insult, implying someone pretentious or not connected with reality.
I had a great visit with my horse shoer this morning. Chatting with him is amazing--he is an iconoclast, an intellectual and is extremely articulate. He is a rancher, horse/dog trainer, and does horseshoeing; is a mechanic, forges knives; he sketches, writes excellent poetry (not doggerel) using amazing metaphors and kenning; he is a silversmith. His current evening reads are Plutarch and the history of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. He was raised in the Owyhee desert, and there were three people in his high school graduating class. I'm a college graduate, and I find it hard to keep in up with him in conversation. He's sad that his oldest boy doesn't particularly care to ride out and tag the calves that are being born, but after we were done working the horses feet, his eight year old climbed out of the truck and showed me some of his drawings and problems in Cartesian geometry. The kid then explained to me about fusing Euclidean geometry and algebra, and told a horrible joke about putting Decartes before the horse. How many people could be like this if we only valued education instead of entertainment?
posted by BlueHorse at 12:59 PM on February 18, 2018 [13 favorites]
How does one do independent scholarship outside of the university system? I'm asking this both sincerely, but also with a little bit of push back to some of the thoughts in this thread.
I have made the smart choice. Over and over again, I've decided not to go to grad school. I adore teaching, but each time I look into grad school with the specific intent of joining the system, I also look at my friends who are adjuncting with no hope of a tenure track position. I look at how many qualified applicants are available for even adjunct positions, and I decide it is not worth it.
But I've been working for 10 years in the non-profit industry... and I'd love for something more. I get that we all can't have jobs that we're passionate about. And just because I work for non-profits does not mean that I'm passionate about grant writing. My day job is a day job. But if I wanted to return to studying 19th century American literature by women or the work of the Federal Theatre Project -- things that I loved studying in undergrad but are not what I'd be going back to grad school to study even if I went to grad school -- how do I even begin as an adult out of the system with a day job?
I wish our culture valued learning for learning's sake -- as opposed to learning for the sake of earning money in the future.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 1:49 PM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
I have made the smart choice. Over and over again, I've decided not to go to grad school. I adore teaching, but each time I look into grad school with the specific intent of joining the system, I also look at my friends who are adjuncting with no hope of a tenure track position. I look at how many qualified applicants are available for even adjunct positions, and I decide it is not worth it.
But I've been working for 10 years in the non-profit industry... and I'd love for something more. I get that we all can't have jobs that we're passionate about. And just because I work for non-profits does not mean that I'm passionate about grant writing. My day job is a day job. But if I wanted to return to studying 19th century American literature by women or the work of the Federal Theatre Project -- things that I loved studying in undergrad but are not what I'd be going back to grad school to study even if I went to grad school -- how do I even begin as an adult out of the system with a day job?
I wish our culture valued learning for learning's sake -- as opposed to learning for the sake of earning money in the future.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 1:49 PM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
If you want to pursue research as a non-university researcher, you can work in a foundation, institute, or other non-university organization (though most of those are affiliated with universities). You can belong to professional organizations that pursue research, present at their conferences, and contribute to their journals (though affiliation with a university carries weight for acceptance).
If you are a teacher, you can belong to your subject-matter or grade level organization (for history, National Council for History Education); for instance I was a member of NCTE, NCTM, and NSTA (yes I taught English, math and science at various points), or to the ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), all of which accept contributions and conference proposals. The quality and rigor of the presentations and publications of those organizations are not going to be up to what you might encounter in a university-oriented organization, and in my experience more theory tends to be promulgated than actual research, but as an elementary school teacher and a middle school teacher I participated in site-specific teacher research projects and presented at international conferences.
If you want your work to be accepted by university researchers, that's going to be a tough sell, though there are organizations and conferences geared toward the teacher-researcher. To be honest, even if you're doing research within the university, your work isn't going to be accepted by anyone except those within your particular sub-discipline and ideological angle.
posted by Peach at 2:42 PM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
If you are a teacher, you can belong to your subject-matter or grade level organization (for history, National Council for History Education); for instance I was a member of NCTE, NCTM, and NSTA (yes I taught English, math and science at various points), or to the ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), all of which accept contributions and conference proposals. The quality and rigor of the presentations and publications of those organizations are not going to be up to what you might encounter in a university-oriented organization, and in my experience more theory tends to be promulgated than actual research, but as an elementary school teacher and a middle school teacher I participated in site-specific teacher research projects and presented at international conferences.
If you want your work to be accepted by university researchers, that's going to be a tough sell, though there are organizations and conferences geared toward the teacher-researcher. To be honest, even if you're doing research within the university, your work isn't going to be accepted by anyone except those within your particular sub-discipline and ideological angle.
posted by Peach at 2:42 PM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
Another thought: A friend who has a Ph.D. in musicology is pursuing her passion for research by writing a thoroughly researched musical based on the lives of Frederick Douglass and his loves. You don't have to publish scholarly articles to conduct research.
posted by Peach at 2:44 PM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Peach at 2:44 PM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
After a lot of thinking, I think this essay is an example of the psychological phenomenon of splitting -- literally an example in the Wikipedia article is "My efforts are either a success or they are an abject failure." Unfortunately, as a person who has had depression off and on for years, I am very familiar with this. But the world does not judge people as successes or failures, instead their are a thousand shades of gray in between. As we've already noted in this thread, she could do another VAP, or become an adjunct, or move across the country to try for tenure track at smaller colleges, or teach high school, or teach community college, or become an independent scholar/adjunct instructor, or write pop history books. The fact that she chooses not to do any of these things is her choice, not something imposed by an Elder God intent on punishing her for not quite being good enough.
I went through the same feelings when I left academia (ABD) -- feeling that I would never achieve my True Destiny, feeling like there was a black-and-white distinction between success and failure in the first place. But in the 7 years since I've quit, I've had a relatively successful career, including publishing original research and (like I said before) starting a number of different educational events that are totally unaffiliated with any university. Of course not finishing my PhD was a kind of failure, but it wasn't an abject failure, it was a speed bump on the road to a destination that I still got to eventually. Of course I felt like it was an abject failure at the time.
I think we'd all be a lot healthier if we could recognize that there are many different ways to succeed at the same goal, and failing at one doesn't mean failing at all of them.
posted by miyabo at 11:22 PM on February 18, 2018 [3 favorites]
I went through the same feelings when I left academia (ABD) -- feeling that I would never achieve my True Destiny, feeling like there was a black-and-white distinction between success and failure in the first place. But in the 7 years since I've quit, I've had a relatively successful career, including publishing original research and (like I said before) starting a number of different educational events that are totally unaffiliated with any university. Of course not finishing my PhD was a kind of failure, but it wasn't an abject failure, it was a speed bump on the road to a destination that I still got to eventually. Of course I felt like it was an abject failure at the time.
I think we'd all be a lot healthier if we could recognize that there are many different ways to succeed at the same goal, and failing at one doesn't mean failing at all of them.
posted by miyabo at 11:22 PM on February 18, 2018 [3 favorites]
After a lot of thinking, I think this essay is an example of the psychological phenomenon of splitting -- literally an example in the Wikipedia article is "My efforts are either a success or they are an abject failure."
But is this really a psychological phenomenon when it's actually an accurate description of reality for most in the academic world? Like if a typical medical school grad who failed to become the top neurosurgeon at Hopkins didn't end up as a successful specialist at a regional hospital but instead was mostly unemployed with some hope of part-time work giving anatomy talks to middle schools or something?
posted by Ralston McTodd at 8:02 AM on February 19, 2018 [16 favorites]
But is this really a psychological phenomenon when it's actually an accurate description of reality for most in the academic world? Like if a typical medical school grad who failed to become the top neurosurgeon at Hopkins didn't end up as a successful specialist at a regional hospital but instead was mostly unemployed with some hope of part-time work giving anatomy talks to middle schools or something?
posted by Ralston McTodd at 8:02 AM on February 19, 2018 [16 favorites]
Ralston McTodd has hit on something important that academics tend to lack compared to more conventionally lucrative careers - they do not provide their own fallback plan in a real obvious way. There are several steps between "top neurosurgeon at Hopkins" and "assistant manager at the auto parts store" that make that field worth pursuing. You can even fail to get IN to medical school and still be positioned for some lucrative careers (like pharmaceutical sales) by virtue of having been the kind of student who was even gunning for it.
While it adds cost and complexity to the academic path, and wouldn't work in all cases, the old parental adage about "having a fallback plan" wouldn't hurt for the more esoteric academic and artistic paths. The orchestra I've played in had a fellowship program for the lead violinist and cellist, and one of our more successful cellists also had a degree in (wait for it) - neurology. There is room in most brains for more than one thing, and frequently job acquisition and/or security comes from multidisciplinary knowledge. If you were to run a music store, it wouldn't hurt to be a musician AND know accounting.
But I think the entire culture has a bad case of "splitting" and an obsession with hyperspecialization - I tend to not mention my classical music playing around professional colleagues because they think it's weird, and I've already mentioned the disdain some (insecure) players have for me because I "do web sites. Or something." Even within business, where my job role requires accounting, HR, and marketing, within the web/tech industry, there is a feeling among some that I'm too much of a generalist. Bah.
posted by randomkeystrike at 4:49 AM on February 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
While it adds cost and complexity to the academic path, and wouldn't work in all cases, the old parental adage about "having a fallback plan" wouldn't hurt for the more esoteric academic and artistic paths. The orchestra I've played in had a fellowship program for the lead violinist and cellist, and one of our more successful cellists also had a degree in (wait for it) - neurology. There is room in most brains for more than one thing, and frequently job acquisition and/or security comes from multidisciplinary knowledge. If you were to run a music store, it wouldn't hurt to be a musician AND know accounting.
But I think the entire culture has a bad case of "splitting" and an obsession with hyperspecialization - I tend to not mention my classical music playing around professional colleagues because they think it's weird, and I've already mentioned the disdain some (insecure) players have for me because I "do web sites. Or something." Even within business, where my job role requires accounting, HR, and marketing, within the web/tech industry, there is a feeling among some that I'm too much of a generalist. Bah.
posted by randomkeystrike at 4:49 AM on February 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Ralston McTodd has hit on something important that academics tend to lack compared to more conventionally lucrative careers - they do not provide their own fallback plan in a real obvious way.
I'm honestly not sure how you can read the FPP article and this entire thread and still think this. There is an entire world of "alt-ac" that is completely devoted to helping grad students in fields that don't have an obvious non-academic outlet gain skills that make them employable elsewhere. The author in the original article specifically called this culture out because she really wanted to be in academia, but nobody has their heads in the sand about fallback plans.
For example: Alt-Ac Careers on Inside Higher Ed and a simple search on Chronicle of Higher Ed.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:11 AM on February 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
I'm honestly not sure how you can read the FPP article and this entire thread and still think this. There is an entire world of "alt-ac" that is completely devoted to helping grad students in fields that don't have an obvious non-academic outlet gain skills that make them employable elsewhere. The author in the original article specifically called this culture out because she really wanted to be in academia, but nobody has their heads in the sand about fallback plans.
For example: Alt-Ac Careers on Inside Higher Ed and a simple search on Chronicle of Higher Ed.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:11 AM on February 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
the old parental adage about "having a fallback plan" wouldn't hurt for the more esoteric academic and artistic paths . . . I think the entire culture has a bad case of "splitting" and an obsession with hyperspecialization - I tend to not mention my classical music playing around professional colleagues because they think it's weird
When my (now tenure-track) friend was on the academic job market in the humanities, she was warned not to let job committees know that she had a blog about baking (even in casual conversation during her campus visit), because if they thought she had any hobbies other than her job and her research, they would pass her over for a more "dedicated" candidate. Being a whole person with an interest in work-life balance is seen as a professional downside, and people who believe in work-life balance are described as "selfish" and "throwing themselves away" and "a waste" (the last one was used by a faculty member to describe a different friend, who had two tenure-track job offers and chose the slightly less prestigious one because it would allow her to live closer to her family).
Having a fallback plan requires two things: spending time nurturing other interests and skills (all but verboten in academia), and employers outside the academy being more open to hiring people who are ABD or get the PhD before leaving. People who have left academia shouldn't have to take their degrees off their resumes and make up excuses for "what have you been doing for the last six years?" in order to get jobs where their skillsets (project management, attention to detail, ability to live on hilariously low pay) are in high demand.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:42 AM on February 21, 2018 [6 favorites]
When my (now tenure-track) friend was on the academic job market in the humanities, she was warned not to let job committees know that she had a blog about baking (even in casual conversation during her campus visit), because if they thought she had any hobbies other than her job and her research, they would pass her over for a more "dedicated" candidate. Being a whole person with an interest in work-life balance is seen as a professional downside, and people who believe in work-life balance are described as "selfish" and "throwing themselves away" and "a waste" (the last one was used by a faculty member to describe a different friend, who had two tenure-track job offers and chose the slightly less prestigious one because it would allow her to live closer to her family).
Having a fallback plan requires two things: spending time nurturing other interests and skills (all but verboten in academia), and employers outside the academy being more open to hiring people who are ABD or get the PhD before leaving. People who have left academia shouldn't have to take their degrees off their resumes and make up excuses for "what have you been doing for the last six years?" in order to get jobs where their skillsets (project management, attention to detail, ability to live on hilariously low pay) are in high demand.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:42 AM on February 21, 2018 [6 favorites]
I'm well aware of the "alt-ac" phenomenon, but it seems to lump together a lot of very different kinds of work, from industry research to jobs with no research component at all (teaching K-12) or a very minor one. The advice offered by IHE (think entrepreneurially! beef up your resume by working for free!) points to less-than-plentiful opportunities. Again, there's no "alt-med" track.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 1:33 PM on February 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Ralston McTodd at 1:33 PM on February 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
Yes. The alt-ac phenomenon demonstrates that everyone knows this and has known this for decades. Because there is not an obvious fallback, people have come up with alternatives with varying degrees of success.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:59 AM on February 22, 2018
posted by hydropsyche at 10:59 AM on February 22, 2018
My career in archaeology was over before it began. During the first few weeks of classes at Northwestern University, the Anthropology department held a meeting for freshmen anthropology majors.
I only remember one thing about the meeting. The person leading it said something to this effect: "Anthropology is a fascinating major. But don't even think about going into the field. There are no jobs."
Being an impressionable youth, I believed him and so did not pursue a doctorate. I went to law school instead and discovered there were no jobs, at least not for me, and not at a law firm. So I became a solo practitioner, which was about as viable as having earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and then tried to make it as an "independent researcher" in archaeology.
I never did find a fulfilling vocation.
In the meantime, since I graduated from college in the late '70s, I'm sure that many people have earned doctorates and made names for themselves in archaeology. I also have a feeling that ten times as many (or more) are starving as adjuncts or have abandoned the field.
posted by A. Davey at 4:34 PM on February 22, 2018 [1 favorite]
I only remember one thing about the meeting. The person leading it said something to this effect: "Anthropology is a fascinating major. But don't even think about going into the field. There are no jobs."
Being an impressionable youth, I believed him and so did not pursue a doctorate. I went to law school instead and discovered there were no jobs, at least not for me, and not at a law firm. So I became a solo practitioner, which was about as viable as having earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and then tried to make it as an "independent researcher" in archaeology.
I never did find a fulfilling vocation.
In the meantime, since I graduated from college in the late '70s, I'm sure that many people have earned doctorates and made names for themselves in archaeology. I also have a feeling that ten times as many (or more) are starving as adjuncts or have abandoned the field.
posted by A. Davey at 4:34 PM on February 22, 2018 [1 favorite]
A follow-up post from the poster with FAQs related to the original article. It addresses a lot of the criticisms here (c.f. her answer to "You didn’t have a Plan B and that was stupid. What did you think would happen?") and includes many gifs. One comment from her that spoke to me:
"In a part of the interview with the Chronicle that didn’t get included, I argued that we, as a discipline, either think it’s possible for people to change systems and institutions, or we think it isn’t. We seem to have one standard for the agency of the people we study and another for ourselves. I just thought maybe we could imagine something better, even if it’s hard to know how to make it happen. But imagining something better requires accepting all the ways that what we have is not good. That might mean acknowledging that what happened to me was not good, even if you think my project was dumb and I shouldn’t have gotten a job anyway."
posted by hydrobatidae at 8:27 AM on February 23, 2018 [5 favorites]
"In a part of the interview with the Chronicle that didn’t get included, I argued that we, as a discipline, either think it’s possible for people to change systems and institutions, or we think it isn’t. We seem to have one standard for the agency of the people we study and another for ourselves. I just thought maybe we could imagine something better, even if it’s hard to know how to make it happen. But imagining something better requires accepting all the ways that what we have is not good. That might mean acknowledging that what happened to me was not good, even if you think my project was dumb and I shouldn’t have gotten a job anyway."
posted by hydrobatidae at 8:27 AM on February 23, 2018 [5 favorites]
Also:
"All I can say is that the time required to do Plan A as well as I could was significant enough, and Plan A was what I wanted to do, so I tried to do it as well as I could until I couldn’t do it anymore."
posted by ChuraChura at 7:02 AM on February 25, 2018 [6 favorites]
"All I can say is that the time required to do Plan A as well as I could was significant enough, and Plan A was what I wanted to do, so I tried to do it as well as I could until I couldn’t do it anymore."
posted by ChuraChura at 7:02 AM on February 25, 2018 [6 favorites]
I'm sorry people have been so nasty to her. I'm sorry about my first comment on this thread, too. Reading it now, it looks way more negative than I meant it to be, especially knowing that so many people were writing to her to tell her how privileged she was, and that she shouldn't complain. That's not what I meant, but I hadn't considered how it might look to other people. This essay actually helped me a lot when it came to thinking about grad school over the past couple weeks, and I thought it was one of the best thing I've read in a while. I wanted to write to her to say thanks, but she's gotten a ton of responses already.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:15 PM on February 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:15 PM on February 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
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I have long wondered what it would be like to be really good in a field where there are close to zero slots, (thinking acting, music, basketball,) and not get a spot. How much it must hurt to not be able to do what you do, to really do what you do. True, its not cancer or prison or whatever but it is the passing of a part of who you were and that is really sad. It is like the death of a loved one or the dissolution of a relationship, the future you believed in has died and all those meant to be's are not. Very sad indeed.
posted by Pembquist at 1:18 PM on February 16, 2018 [15 favorites]