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

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.

"higher education is only for the privileged"

http://www.kmtr.com/news/local/Wil-Hi-Cognress-student-loans-debts-264471061.html

i know this was on quidag too, but it belongs here for posterity

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/provost-prose/cruising

The tragedy is, I'm not sure how wrong he is, from a purely "getting butts in the seats" point of view. I do think prospective students like it when there's a standalone nacho bar in the dining hall or a big screen with ESPN in the student union or whatever, and these things are extremely cheap compared to hiring one more professor or one more staffer.

But a provost, whose job is to look after the academic life of the university -- right? -- should have a different point of view.

students should do what their parents tell them unless they're paying their own tuition

bracing myself for what I've decided will be my last foray into the academic job market (one way or another). honestly looking forward to not having to think about it anymore.

a quick one? or do you mean this fall?

i went for an interview to work in a grocery store produce department. it was more philosophical than a lot of the philosophy job interviews i've had - asked me to say what kind of a person i was, define democracy, accountability etc.

i'm afraid i made it sound too much like i thought of myself as a philosopher who was deigning to work at their job. : /

oh just this fall. I figure my cv is never gonna look any better than it does now since my willingness to churn out work minus any real institutional support is rapidly dwindling.

did you disclose yourself as an actual philosopher? maybe you just came across as exceptionally thoughtful and trustworthy!

had to, resume couldn't be spun any other way

that's the big dilemma isn't it? English at least allows you to plausibly tout some writing skills (though I am in fact a terrible writer). trying real hard to spin myself into thinking that grad school was a worthwhile experience, and I suppose in the existentialist sense it was, but boy do I ever regret it in low moments of job searching.

MLA job list comes out on friday. i hope it's not as big a disaster as last year. i've been preparing all my job application stuff (cover letters, research proposals of varying lengths, course proposals, etc) but without the misguided hope of prior years. definitely feeling pretty zen about it all, though i have to say it's kind of crushing to be asked for a "dissertation abstract" at this point in my publishing career.

anyway, good thoughts to anyone else about to embark on this. (I'm assuming the other humanities are on a similar time table and system).

A lot of old bitterness over how badly grad school went has been coming back lately. I procrastinate by reading any anti-grad-school articles I can find, no matter how how specious, just for consolation and existential fortification. I guess it's easier to dwell on a perceived irremediable vacancy than to actually deal with current life.

i need a terminal degree in order to climb the ranks of higher ed administration and stop getting shit on by faculty. should i do what i ~~~~love~~~~ (ie english) or do something boringly practical and easy (education or information science or whatever)?

OKAY

so last year (as i love to reiterate miserably), a grad school friend and i had both been picked up for some part-time work at a local c.c.; by the end of the semester, he had quit out of indifference/distaste for the place, and they cancelled all my spring work unexpectedly (this year, the entire place is doing a program review to decide what to shut down!).

in the meantime he picked up a bit of adjuncting in a neighboring state for the current semester, amid the usual vagaries of adjunct hiring (broad asks, vague promises, surprising discoveries about simultaneous hires, suspicions about meagerness of assignment, compensation, etc); liked the place ok enough but couldn't help but feel kind of embittered about the very fact of being an adjunct; and found a high school teaching job that starts in december (he used to teach high school, before he entered academia), and pretty promptly informed them of when he would no longer be coming in (before the end of the semester!).

now they're hankering for a spring replacement, and one of my local protectors in my old department turned them in my direction. but thinking about the assignment, the non-credible assurances about possible next-year courses, the inability to do the job by commuting (no car at all, i am a city dweller now), the probable necessity of picking up and moving there to even do the job (which would make it the… fifth move in six years?)—let alone a look through their catalog and their mess of a curriculum and their current way of delivering it—

and i actually feel like telling these people off rather than taking the job to try to get out of, or change, my currently miserable circumstances of barely scraping by with temp work, work-from-home drudgery, and (way too many) gifts of money from friends. even thinking about taking the job, making the move, sitting in my office, prepping, teaching, etc all the while going back to those grinding feelings of humiliation that i somehow magically started to suffer just by -being- an adjunct - it makes me feel like a sucker.

my degree is officially at the widely believed-in point of staleness, my cv is meager and static. since i don't know how to get out and i still can't help but imagine myself as a teacher, it kind of seems like i have to just take the job - it's right there, i don't think i will even have to do anything to get them to offer it to me. rather, not the job; the WORK. there is no job; that's the problem. folk wisdom says you have to stay in the game, show that you haven't atrophied or whatever, cross your fingers at any opportunity that COULD magically turn into a job or a means to one in the future. but i literally don't know if i find any of that shit believable. it seems i have just been tossed from one set of circumstances to another, and forced to accept each one just because i had no other option. and none of them seems to have led to anything or made anything better, taken me further along toward anything. and looking at this place, in terms of what they have, what they're likely to offer me, it seems like exactly the kind of work that i can expect to lead exactly nowhere.

is there not something to be said for refusing to bite when you're offered shit?

sounds like an awful decision to have to make.

just curious for personal reasons (haha): what's the point of staleness?

i guess the question is: what would have to be different to make this job different from the others? that's what im asking myself anyway...trying to discern the difference between the dead-end jobs (or my own dead-endedness professionally) and ones that might somehow lead to something else.

in any case, keep us (or just me) apprised on how it goes

five years out, is the figure i hear - which i hit this summer.

update! my friend tells me, something he maybe only just found out, that it is a known fact that the program is not long for this world. it's a mixed department, with my discipline the inferior one, one full-timer, one emeritus picking up some work for just this year or the next, and a few adjuncts (hired with some redundancy intended to ensure the courses ran - gee, thanks for deliberately putting benefits out of reach, guyz). but the administration has already decided that the program (within its hosting department) WILL be eliminated once the full-timer is gone (and he's somewhat old, and he went blind recently). after that, it seems adjuncts will be used to teach a few courses, presumably whatever outside curricular requirements force them to continue, or maybe just like some scraps of intellectual integrity that make them think, huh, maybe a university should offer a course in that.

apparently, were the anticipated courses for next year to be available too, it would not even make me full-time - just enough to qualify for benefits, at 60% proration.

oh good I have a few years :-/

with a phd you can make a comfortable if boring living in higher ed administration and teach a class or two on the side. your research would suffer but you get to fuss at people.

I think people used to say three years but, yeah, I think it's been pushed up to five these days. My friend just got a TT position this fall five years after finishing iirc. (He has had infinite tolerance for crisscrossing the continent for term positions and residencies.)

(Sorry to hear, j.)

xpost

So yeah, two years left, I guess?

I've actually taken to puttng the exact date of my conferral (dec 30) on my cv to sort of bump mine up a bit. No longer being eligible for a few postdocs this year was an eye opener.

i wonder to what extent things would be different if those who spent 5 (or more) years in the wilderness were picked up for TT positions more often.