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

Thanks guys, I really do just need some talking down from the ledge and reassurance now. I mean I know that my productivity is not in question (I published a book, a book chapter and four scholarly articles last year alone) but there's this endless terror of the unknown precisely because it is unknown that I can't shake. And since my colleagues already voted unanimously for me they're no longer the locus of the angest- it's all in the hands of the mysterious committee folk. I guess I have to take comfort in the fact that May isn't really all that far away and I'll just have to ride the waves til then.

I've become pretty zen about my fate thankfully--two articles and a book under contract and I'm still trying to get a foot in the door, not sure
there's anything more I can do at this point--and yet I think once you reach your point and have unanimous support you're golden unless there's really big changes afoot for your department.

if politics are going to get in the way of you getting a fair shake, there's nothing you can do about it now anyway, so you might as well just keep being awesome and see what happens! we don't have tenure at my institution, but i've long had the impression that it's a hazing ritual -- the sweating it is part of the experience by design, no? buck the system and don't sweat it!

(fwiw my way of fighting back at work is to get all my shit done and then some but not let it make me lose sleep. unfortunately, i learned this by losing a lot of sleep)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtQWPM4nERNNdHozb1lOVHZVN1p0a2pjOEtaUTVBSHc#gid=0

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html

'why I'm leaving harvard...for a sweet job at google'

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

beautiful world of bygone possibility

*nostalgia*

If an icon is animated it only means that the author of the page has better things to do than reading "10 worst web design mistakes". . . . Prof. Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid put an under construction sign on his site in 1998 and got the Nobel Prize in 2000.

Dammit, if I hadn't spent an hour raytracing a logo for my Geocities page who knows what prizes I could have won!

omg

To sum it up, through curiosity about the new medium, ignorance of w3c recommendations and passion to their profession, web users (irrespective of their scientific achievements) created an environment where everything seemed possible:

Prof. Dr. Winfried Kerkhoff presents his life and work via a site Deleuze and Guattari would give their limbs for

http://www.kerkhoff-w.de/

It's like the Mnemosyne Atlas of bad design decisions.....

the entire original site (for the article) is amazing, they're like passionate critical historians who have turned their inquiring gazes to my own dim past and made it an object of knowledge, there's a place where they speculate about what it could mean that yahoo never deleted its clear zero-pixel gif when it took geocities offline

and it's all written/designed in this awesome just-barely-tacky punk-zine-inflected pastiche of 90s web style, one of the authors' favorite ~phenomena~ is glitter gifs

<3

olia lialina is an old school net.artist and a treasure. her essays "a vernacular web" and "a vernacular web 2" are total classics. she and dragan espenschied (the other writer on contemporary home computing) also edited this book: http://digitalfolklore.org

wow I love all this, thanks for posting it!

That Digital Foklore book looks cool. A review on Amazon:

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Nice. 29 Mar 2010
By Ove R. Shair
Format:Perfect Paperback
This book is good. You will like it if you don't have attitude issues. Also it helps if you have critical reading comprehension skills.

+ CAT POSTER

these are my new favorite intellectuals, genuine proper scholars for our age

you should probably check out lialina's artwork too: http://art.teleportacia.org
not really the thread for this obviously

en garde!

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/breitbart-wingnut-says-liberal-professors

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/03/27/the_unc_fake_class_scandal_athlete_got_an_a_for_a_one_paragraph_paper.html

this story is killing me -- i can't believe people have tried to malign the learning specialist who works with these students for speaking out
i heard her and a history professor from UNC being interviewed on the radio maybe a week or so ago and the amount of crap they've gotten for speaking up about the poor education that profit-generating student athletes receive is O_O

college sports make me sad at this point

https://thebluereview.org/faculty-time-allocation/

DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO

HLC visit concludes today. Fingers crossed.

http://actualcasuals.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/no-time-to-be-complacent-about-replacement/

A few years ago I learned I would have to engage in the annual ritual of submitting an exhaustive Expression of Interest (EOI) in order to be on an eligibility list to do what I had done for the past seven years. Making it onto the list by no means equated to a guarantee of a teaching contract. Rather, the outcome was a determination made by phantoms in the faculty of my suitability to continue to be considered for casual academic teaching.

This shift in thinking was made clear to us all at an induction meeting.

The end of summer had truly arrived. Usually being invited to attend a staff induction meant momentary respite from the excessive stress and uncertainty of the casual academic lifestyle. Not this time. Instead, casual academics were schooled on our apparent complacency. We were told that our hard work and loyalty to the institution had been keeping inexperienced, but potentially dynamic casual teachers out of the system.

Sounds like being an adjunct in Australia isn't much different than being one here.

here = usa

HLC visit concludes today. Fingers crossed.

Crossed, boss!

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okay that's weird

update: in a week the academic council will meet and hear my chair's case for my tenure and the ad hoc committee's independent view. they will either vote that day, or in a week, or in two weeks. And after that vote, the president gets another week to review the case and either ratify it or reverse it. So I might know my fate in two weeks. or three weeks. or four weeks. Hard to say.

This is a good article on the transition from being a student in an elite grad program to teaching at a regional public university.

what's said about teaching at a regional public university applies pretty well to teaching at non-flagship research universities also ime, esp wrt undergrad lives involving jobs, children, the military, etc

no sympathy for the sheltered elite

i really wish i had done a better job of creating some sort of life raft to get out of academics while i was in grad school.

what a fool, only one career, shoulda been working at two careers at once

so the book isn't generating nibbles?

I got an interview for a postdoc, but didn't get it. pretty sure the interview went well so hopefully it was factors beyond my control. didn't really get final confirmation on the book until late December so it wasn't a big factor in most applications. I'm a pretty weak candidate otherwise! my advisor thinks I shouldn't lose heart yet and give it one more shot in the fall since I'll have the book in my corner but eh. life is passing me by. no idea what else to do though.

I'm an English phd but would be best served by American Studies positions, but there's like a handful of those.

im in this weird limbo of not good enough for anything tenure track (or preliminary to that) and not a specialist in composition and rhetoric (so many jobs in that, comparatively).

yeah, i'm not prolific enough to even register as a researcher, don't tick enough boxes to make it into resource-constrained departments with narrow want-lists, and apparently i code as too rarefied and aloof for low-end pedagogues to think i would be good for their babies. all i want to do is teach, but it's as if i can't be trusted to do it.

i don't know what else to do either. i'm overqualified for most of the nonacademic jobs i apply for (i actually had an interviewer tell me i would be bored in a job) and nothing seems particularly set up to let anyone in to any line of work other than at the ground floor, which does the opposite of mitigate overqualification.

im in this weird limbo of not good enough for anything tenure track (or preliminary to that) and not a specialist in composition and rhetoric (so many jobs in that, comparatively).

― ryan, Monday, 5 May 2014 18:33 (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what is the success rate like for other recent phds within your dept?

needless to say, i wish you well

man, I feel you, j. some days I feel like im about to go full rust cohle on this motherfucker.

my class at rice (a decent but not top tier program) was only like 8. as far as I know 2 are currently tenure track. I think those of us that are actually gonna finish have actually finished. the 2 that made were totally plugged in and professional about career stuff from the get go. I, on the other hand, sort of pleasantly slept walked through grad school without too much thought for the future.

id say I only have myself to blame but there's far better talents and better teachers than me getting fucked over all the time.

j I feel weird offering this but iirc yr in philo; I'd be happy to look at yr cv/dossier & see if I see an angle that'll get you out of yr conundrum. I spent my morning going through apps for my dept's one year, so it's fresh on my mind. I've been on honey bunches of search comms in my not super long academic years

no pressure just a friend looking to help out

my own class was small, 4 i think, with one terminal master's bailout, one formidable eager beaver well-situated in an interdisciplinary program and well connected in field of choice, one polymath cobbling together research/lab funding at a place that can't/won't hire him as either a scientist or a philosopher for fiscal reasons, and me, five years out and only employed half that time in decreasingly prestigious teaching jobs with no security/permanence and little connection to my areas.

the people who made it all the way to defending in surrounding years have all kinds of stories—luck, hard work, sweet successes or steady gigs, mediocrity languishing or falling up, suffering, suicide—but the only sure lesson i have gleaned from them is how little any person's characteristics matter, good ones or bad ones. it's what the system wants (and in the frustrating cases, how narrowly it wants).

xp that's generous of you, euler, but it's kind of an embarrassment to me now. i think i know what my problems are (basically, i need to publish, i'm not competitive in any of the aoses or aocs in which hiring predominates, and i worked on the #4 most pernicious influence on modern phil so apparently i'm a pariah to all kinds of people i don't know from adam). i'm a generalist and a humanist, but nobody wants one.

this is a general suggestion not directed to any specific person here, but i'm finding a career as an academic librarian an awesome alternative to an attempted faculty career. after my undergrad i was planning on applying to philosophy phd programs, but decided to work for a few years before applying. i got a job in a library and went down that track instead (some library assistant jobs while i worked on my MSLIS degree, then on to a professional librarian position). it's been really good to me. basically every single day i am thankful that i never started a phd program. assuming one has a decent job as an academic librarian, the work is intellectually stimulating, environment is great, good vacation, good benefits, more security than i ever would have had in an adjunct position. i've been able to get good jobs at schools where i never would have had even a remote chance of securing a tenure-track job.

i don't want to create any illusions, though - the librarian job market is perhaps only minimally better than some faculty job markets. but it has definitely worked out for me, and i'm realizing more and more that i just would not have been cut out for a faculty job.

also candidates w/ phds are highly respected in libraries (they are seen as having some real-life insight into the research process and offer deep subject expertise) and in some cases aren't even required to have an MSLIS.

j surely you can teach early modern, that's something that lots of temp committees want at least, which can give you time to write

wonder if at yr stage if it wouldn't be best to write a book? seems like that's perfect for a self-described generalist. can't really ride the journal circuit as a generalist, but you don't ~need~ to do that to get hired

also are you willing to move to europe for a time? lots of post docs there, which buys time to get that book written.

that's a good idea, marcos. i think i'd be a good librarian!

if you want a job in English or literature of any sort i think the most in-demand specializations are rhetoric/composition and a number of varieties of ethnic literatures (african american, various diasporas, chicano/a, etc.). im a humanities type with a dreaded specialization in "theory" without any ability to hang my hat on the in-demand stuff.

i could teach modern, euler—never have and historical competency (quals etc.) wasn't key in my program, though i've found it most sensible to style myself as a late-modern historian (1800-1950 basically) who does aesthetics. but i'm pretty sure i don't pass muster there with temp committees who are overrun by ~serious~ spinoza and locke and newton experts or whatever, since i basically can talk in generalities about history and then point to the required seminar i took. i do better with ancient (taught it in my first job, an advisor does it), but the temp jobs that even ask for it tend to require greek, latin etc.

my experience, though, is that history is a loser at the lower end of the job market, even in the core areas.

i started turning my dissertation into a book not long after my first job ended, but i wasn't comfortable trying to just toss it out there, and there was an obscurity in my whole approach that i needed to come at from a different direction to be able to make my argument easier for people to understand. unfortunately it wasn't the kind of dissertation that's easy to dismantle for journal publication, or i would have just buckled down on that.

the different direction hasn't been very straightforward though, i've basically been muddling about to get a foothold in 19th c. phil and (kind of as the leading term/style for my intellectual identity) the wing of post-analytic that's friendly to continental (german, rather than french). i figured that was better for me than trying to work my way into scholarly acceptance in my diss. topic, since i find that scholarly subcommunity's insularity kind of lamentable and it has basically zero career currency for someone in my position anyway (though i do keep seeing the authors of mediocre conference presentations i've commented on landing in boring but secure posts on the strength of their subsequent publication of same).

that original book would have to be way rethought now, since i have a much more sophisticated understanding of my subject matter now—don't even know if i could make my old argument now—but along the way i'm starting to shape up the resources for what i can imagine as a second book (also w/ little probability of any prestige/interest, but at least in an area that has gaps to drive trucks through). we'll see if i can bring off any of the parts that would make it up first.

that's good to have as an intellectual project because i can actually believe in it (i find the usual conference/journal contribution triangulation strategy really repellent), but i try not to invest too much in its success (or consequent career success). crashing from one job to the next has been so depressing that just continuing to have thoughts of my own seems like success.

(i find the usual conference/journal contribution triangulation strategy really repellent)

yes, this.

i hope you do write that book. shaping my mess of a dissertation into one (and it was not easy) was the one gratifying experience in all of this.

basically no one should even attempt to get into the professional philosophy game in 2014, right?

no.