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

i don't think that's implausible at all. i have lots of friends who got jobs primarily on the basis of (it seems) fitting in. just did a thing the boring-ass way one is expected to do it, when someone wanted it done without any questions.

everyone i know who got good jobs came from family money. undermines the entire value system of the humanities, but such is life in america

yeah, same here (re: doing things the boring-ass way leading to jobs). there's something about the endless factory-like production of (new or old) historicist literary criticism that depresses the hell out of me. it's not that the work is totally value-less (though let's be real about its relative value) but it's just lifeless at this point.

the "values" are 100% undermined by the class system that keeps funneling the well-to-do into lit-crit while keeping everyone else out

when they talk marx it's like schizophrenics talking freud. entertaining, but not helping

ha. during my interview they briefly asked about my research and i mentioned a particular theorist that is pretty central to my work and not a glimmer of recognition passed over either of their faces--and that's when i suspected i wasn't gonna get.

i had noticed this before, but recently i was working on an aesthetics project where i thought the central (and dumbfoundingly obvious) claims should be about work and its importance, and i wondered at how i got through a whole graduate program in philosophy with nary an exhortation to read marx, etc. not even from the ethicists and faculty radicals, who had other bidness to attend to.

there are historical reasons, of course (depoliticization of anglo philosophy w/ the importation of logical positivism, moderation of 60s radical generation once they became the establishment, corporatization of the university, topic capture by the theory-ized humanities), but at the time i just thought, well no shit, when the fuck have any of them had to care about work in the past 10-40 years.

meanwhile my parents are bankrupt and schlepping sandwiches and filling the refrigerators at convenience stores.

would be nice to put their money where their mouth is and start 'affirmative actioning' poor people, or at least admit they're no better than law schools and MBA programs when it comes to helping poor people. but don't hold your breath. in the meantime, have you read the latest by this ivy league grad, whose parents own your parents' apartment complex?

is it about how innovative thinking or big data or a touching personal backstory can help you get ahead in life and find personal fulfillment??

part of the reason i never got my ph.d. and dropped off from any serious attempt at literature/theory was the class issue. i started meeting people who were connected to the academic and literary world, and was told pretty candidly that you had to be part of the right class to have any serious attempt at joining. which was much appreciated advice, actually.

regardless, when i moved to nyc my interests put me in crowds with upper middle class/quasi-upper class types, and the lifestyle differences were insurmountable. some of these people had no job, took regular trips to Europe, ate at expensive restaurants everyday, questioned me about why I just couldn't do those things. America needs to get straight about its entrenched class system, imo.

it's unfortunate that intellectual and artistic pursuits have been captured by the elite, and have elitist branding, because they're something anyone from any social class can participate in, and should be encouraged to participate in.

totally

basically these days if you're from the class of people who had to take student loans to pay for undergrad or poorer, then you're not getting a tenure-track humanities position. maybe you'll get a book deal from your MFA. they don't want to tell anyone this because 1) who wants to admit that without nepotism you'd be some dumb slob like everyone else, 2) the universities need suckers to grade papers and TA lecture courses, and 3) the people who make money off the GRE would take a hit. etc. talk about the 1% in no way excludes the academy/arts . . . however much they base their champagne socialist pronouncements pretending otherwise. 'intellectual'/'artistic' cognitive dissonance is a neat trick!

i darkly suspect that among my several mortal flaws as a job candidate one of the most severe is that my degrees are not from sufficiently prestigious schools. my dissertation advisor once told me that the best way to level the playing field with ivy league types was to publish. and while it was perhaps naive of me to think a book contract with a very good press would be some kind of trump card, i did tend to think it would make more of a difference. perhaps the topic is too far afield from traditional "english" studies. of the two interviews i've gotten since the book was a done deal, i think i had at least as many books under contract or published as the people interviewing me! that's some sour grapes, but also sort of surprising how little difference it has made.

and just one more sour grape: the post-doc i interviewed for a while back was sort of complicated but in essence there was three positions. worth noting that two of the three selected were phds from the SAME (not ivy but close enough) school! a school, as it happens, that appears quite a lot in their "current postdoctoral fellows" bios.

i think the reliance on prestige or other in-group signals for feeder purposes is fostered by the endemic dismissiveness toward whatever can be deemed bad, threatening, bankrupt, suspect, etc. - on all sides, i think. i had a friend who was a real committed, personally engaged philosopher with a lot of integrity, doing what would be marked in other circles as unorthodox work but really dug right in to the heart of the discipline for all that, and in the rather choice place he ended up, he had to negotiate some real unabashed hostility toward what he did because they saw their thing basically more as a matter of providing moral embiggening and world-widening for their students and thought his stuff was perniciously perverse.

elsewhere, it would be feminism (or mere existence as a woman) that would get the stinkeye. or deleuze. or thomistic ethics. etc.

one wonders why more people don't stop at examine the complete distrust they must have in the system and how it can coexist with their other more trusting (or trust-endorsing, e.g. to students) behaviors.

yeah that "endemic dismissiveness" is a very real (and very depressing) thing. kind of like the typical (universal?) academic fear of having nothing of substance to say projected outward at sectors of the discipline. in an ideal world i suppose the academy would be a space for some kind of push-back against a culture of constant "out-bidding" but for now what you have instead is aggressively protected enclaves of class privilege or, perhaps just as dystopian, a kind of culture that is entirely captive to that out-bidding, faddishness, etc. and the deep underlying depression that must underly all that anxious production.

anyways, thanks guys for venting with me. think im gonna go read and alternate chapters of Negative Dialectics and Under the Volcano. my life as an "independent researcher."

you an author dawg, don't forget it

oh the ironies of writing a book principally about a failed academic condemned to poverty! ;)

no one who got a phd after the worst financial crash in 80 years should feel bad (except for maybe the phd's who've landed "good jobs" since) -- despite airs of intellectual superiority, the system that's either rejecting you (or rewarding you with lucrative prestige) didn't see the crash coming, much less acknowledge the fallout or their complicity. having to forget that during job interviews is symptomatic of the whole scam

2009 here

the fall before that, i remember sitting in a food court, watching bank-fail-bailout cable news, thinking like, well this is not a good time for this

the worst job market in MLA history, followed by . . . the worst job market in MLA history. but it's your fault, because you didn't professionalize enough. you should have seen coming what tenured theory-heads hadn't clue one was coming

2012, thought maybe i could wait it out!

sort of dispassionately interested to see exactly what's gonna go down in the humanities over the next 20 years or so. no surprise that as the cultural prominence of literature, philosophy, seems to be receding that it becomes theoretically interested in its own "political effectivity" or whathaveyou (the fulcrum of societal relevance does tend to shift). mounting pressures from outside the university are bringing those accounts into question (to say the least) but i've seen very little attempt to change course so far.

like this sort of thing i can only shrug at: http://chronicle.com/article/The-MLA-Tells-It-Like-It-Is/146983?cid=megamenu

missing from all that is a single compelling reason to get a phd--with all that implies--minus the training for the specific job a phd is supposed to do.

amusing that the MLA continues to parade as an intellectual/moral authority when it's taken those frauds and legacies till the spring of 2014 to recognize what was an obvious catastrophe by the fall of 2008. "dumb" or "cowardly" -- take your pick! either way, laissez faire "leadership" like that is a joke in the most nakedly conniving of industries -- in the academy, it's downright euthyphroic

congrats to the tune was space!!!

curious about the kneejerk hostility here to "flipping classrooms" -- i've seen some academics i know talk positively about wanting to experiment with it. is the problem with the concept itself or with the fact that its being treated as another mindless buzzwordy gimmick or with the fact that it seems to take a whole bunch more work and if yr already at yr wits end with too many courses for too little pay in a trad classroom than who the heck has the time?

#2, and a bit of #3

and a bit of the humanities-centric critique, #4, 'when will they have time to read', and #4a, 'a traditional humanities class is already flipped when the students read and come to class prepared'

and #5, railroading of onlineification under cover of pedagogy innovortion ('well delivering a course online is so much simpler if you're already flipping your classroom!' - actual thing i have been told in response to a serious q about online courses)

Yeah I was really thinking about 4a as well.

I suppose flipping really makes much more sense in STEM fields where you're already used to "labs" for a large portion of work, and the idea is to sort of make the lab the central environment.

In a more seminar like setting its not necessarily a model that applies at all, since yr basically supposed to be in an interactive environment to begin with, so its that _plus_ also do a video lecture that the administration perhaps can resell.

nevertheless there's a lot of freely circulating animosity toward 'sage on stage' teaching in the humanities, partly because of an emphasis on student learning, partly because of an emphasis on participatory dialogue, so some humanists remain receptive to the whole flipping vibe

i think they are probably encouraged by that in a decline in student preparation, or at least student expectations. students aren't used to listening to lectures, they barely do their reading, they're reading way below level and shocked by the requirement to read things that are above their heads and to work at them and get better bit by bit; they often hate groupwork but also expect it (and often kind of half-ass their way through it, which suggests why they tolerate it), and they often like the chance to air their opinions or just get into it with people. a lot of humanities classroom management is not very pedagogically effective at letting students talk while also sustaining rigor, so the idea that we might get students up on the material in some other setting while still having the dialogical stuff is attractive, i guess.

i mean i went to a large campus so all my undergrad courses were big lectures and then sections. sections were pretty much all give and take interactive stuff and god they were terrible because who cared what my fellow students thought they were all young and stupid just like me

well teachers always say this of course but supposedly the NCLB generation is turning out to be incapable of all the traditional independent thinking, independent motivation etc etc stuff that goes into traditional humanities studying, so i think the idea is that since they can't profit from straight up small-section talky-talk or big-lecture droney-drone, somehow the content should be attractivized in digestible short video chunks for home viewing and in class… ? ? ? -> learning

just weighing in to say thanks to those on this thread who have helped me manage my anxiety about the tenure process. I'm very happy and relieved to say that I got tenure. The process was torturous, anxio-genic, ridiculously slow and crazy-making, but I've survived. I don't think it's really sunk in yet, and if/when that does happen I hope I never forget just how much contingency, luck, and arbitrary circumstances were involved in this outcome- i.e. I don't want to become a "lifeboater" or smug about it, or reify the distinction that it draws. I'm just relieved that I don't have that sword hanging over my head anymore. I'm not sure it makes me love the system that hangs such swords in the first place, but it makes me want to be as compassionate as I can be to those who are headed towards this path or on it already.

Congratulations TTWS!! You're not the sort for lifeboating or reification.

Congrats dude!

Currently writing a cover letter for a job I'm unlikely to get.

great news, the tune was space!

now you can do things like fall down embarrassingly in public, or drool on the metro, and shake it off saying to yourself "I have tenure"

this is pretty much the greatest thing about tenure & I think such a thought every single day

and congrats on the soft pink truth album too!

i missed the online course talk but:

a big part of my job is designing and implementing online courses from across the curriculum, from fully-online masters programs to hybrid undergrad stuff etc etc etc. the main thing i have learned from doing this for the past couple years is that online education is garbage, a waste of money for the student and a waste of time for the instructor. it only serves the lazy (both the credit-grubbing student and the set-it-and-forget-it professor) and the institution (in that these courses are cheap to produce and deliver but the student pays the same as for real courses).

the entire industry is composed of charlatans who borrow buzzwords from vaguely-related disciplines (software development, graphic design, pop psychology) and command vast fees from universities so bloated with administrators that no hand knows what the other 17 are doing.

my wife and i are moving very soon so i'm applying and interviewing for gazillions of jobs in this field and everywhere is the same.

congrats on the tenure! now if anyone asks you to teach an online course you can tell him or her to go fuck him- or herself.

same ole but putting it here for posterity: http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/

Last fall, Karen Gregory was teaching a labor studies course in the City University of New York system when she found herself the object of media scrutiny because she included in her syllabus a short text describing the adjunctification of CUNY, and what it means for students:

“To ensure that we remain conscious of the adjunctification of CUNY, we ask that you do not call us ‘Professor.’ We are hired as adjunct lecturers and it is important that you remember that. You deserve to be taught by properly compensated professors whose full attention is to teaching and scholarship.”

The text, which was developed by the CUNY Adjunct Project and distributed for teachers to include in their syllabi, briefly describes the history of CUNY’s increased reliance on adjuncts. It explains how adjuncts are paid and what that means for students:

“Adjuncts are not regular members of the faculty; we are paid an hourly rate for time spent in the classroom. We are not paid to advise students, grade papers, or prepare materials or lectures for class. We are paid for one office hour per week for all of the classes we teach. We are not paid to communicate with students outside of class or write letters of recommendation. Out of dedication to our students, adjuncts regularly perform such tasks, but it is essentially volunteer labor.”

And it says one thing that is so rarely part of the adjunct discussion: “CUNY’s reliance on adjuncts impairs the conditions under which courses are taught and the quality of your education” (emphasis mine).

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Is-Academic-Rejection-So/146883/

good article!

"The rejections themselves—the form emails; the eye-contact avoidance from colleagues who just voted against your tenure case; the deafening silence from a journal or press—are the symptoms. The totalizing academic self-conception is the disease."

I sorta wonder if this is worse for people who've thought of themselves as aspiring academics for a long time. I didn't even know what college was when I was in high school, until senior year; then the same for grad school when I was a senior in college. "oh, so I could be a professor? and to do that I'd have to go to more school after this?" so I never imagined myself as an academic until grad school: I didn't grow up in that world. so I still think of prof as my job, not my identity; and lots of other jobs out there would suit my identity as well.

otoh getting papers rejected still hurts, but less than it used to as I've had both more rejections and more acceptances. but really the onus of the pain is on those who don't have TT jobs yet since there the pain can be existential, as the article points out

when i was a kid i thought when i grew up i would be a scientist, an artist, or (a bit later) a writer. and i spent a lot of time in nerd enrichment activities that exposed me to scientists, people with phds; i had an uncle whose english phd graduation i went to even earlier than that. i wasn't set on it like in a hopeful or careerist way or anything, it was just the convergence point of almost everything about my early education.

and i went to school in small places. for high school, in a town on the edge of rurality, where the co-op was the only other thing in town besides the high school. but the talented and gifted education there was good and the school was part of a program that put us on the internet early, ahead of the big wave, in order to do nerd projects. but there must have been something about the culture. one of my teachers would bring in former students to help us with projects—phds or phd students all of them. i was walking around my graduate u campus one day and ran into a kid who had been several years behind me, like just into junior high when i was on my way out, and of course he was there because he was getting a phd (in something else).

but i didn't really start thinking seriously about being a professor (a teacher) until grad school got underway.

I basically bumbled my way into it. English was something like my 3rd major. Even now feel like something of a dilettante. Always working on my "professionalization" since I spent most of grad school sorta wandering through my curiosities. Being a professor, having a "specialization," always seemed on the far side of some distant horizon.

About rejection, I can't speak to jobs since they rarely explain themselves, but with articles it's not so bad anymore since they are often pretty clueless--or if not clueless then seemingly have read things in a highly distracted or uncharitable frame of mind. Constructive criticism can make for some forehead slapping though. Worse though is waiting to hear back. My record is 18 months!

as an editor of a journal now (!) I see the waiting to hear back thing differently, because I'm dealing with tons of referees, and moreover referee requests, many of which are declined (talk about daily rejection!) or never even acknowledged. mostly blame referees. and try to treat others as you would be treated. I referee about 10 papers a year in addition to editorial work, because it's necessary to keep good journals flourishing.

oh i don't blame them! "publish or perish" has just as much an adverse effect on journals as it does on writers.

when i am the Emperor of Academia I will institute a 10 year freeze on all new publications.

well referees take forever

I am guilty too

(hence posting here rather than reading)

does your journal do desk rejections?

i reviewed for a journal which i think has pretty laxly inclusive standards, and i was assigned something i thought was junk, but it was superficially competent enough and not too far afield from what the journal published, so i was kind of pressed to come up with a fair review and provide helpful feedback and etc etc, all the way up until the deadline -

at which point i punched in my rudimentary review to the journal's review management system, so i would have it in there and could go back and fill out the remainder, but since i had hit the deadline, it just took it, so i said aah, fuck it, and that poor incompetent author ended up getting no comments on why their paper was no good

when really if i could have just said from the beginning, this is not a scholarly contribution to this literature, sorry…

I can reject a paper myself, but it's not normal practice. we do two referees.

review management systems are horrible, including ours

i think now i just wanna write a decent phd and get out of academia, this is not a life i can imagine ever being enjoyable. tho where i go instead when i've spent the last ten years heading in one direction, i dunno.

congrats to tune is space! and on two great nights at cafe oto too. i'm glad i had to go home before the soft pink truth show, i wouldn't want to get bitter and resentful about how good you are at things.