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

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.

so

i declined the 'offer' on grounds of not it being feasible, reliable, etc., and dude writes back, 'thank you for writing to me, and being frank. you are absolutely right'.

then he comes back with 'what if we could come up with a 4/4 for $32k for the academic year starting next fall only?'

: /

you should say yes

also isnt there some other kind of work you could/want to do?

come back with "start in the spring or gtfo" imo.

i think he may have meant, the shit spring plus this (closer to, but not completely) full load for next year.

32k is a slight improvement on their standard adjunct rate but it's still well below full-time (which 4/4 is there) compensation at their own institution or in the area. they're one of those charming schools whose aaup salary survey says they have no one at instructor rank (one, at the whole university, actually) because they don't actually give any of the many instructors they employ full-time loads (or benefits, which may have something to do with why - not sure if they're one of the places that made an obamacare policy change).

lamp, i don't know about want - i like editing ok, i was once a computer programmer and could probably take to that given time to reacclimate (given a chance), got a math degree too and some long-ago competence working technically - but my sporadic attempts to even GET other kinds of work in the past several years have been pretty thankless. i'm experienced, skilled, talented, but not in any literal outside-world terms (recruiter on the phone, trying to sell me on a cold-calling sales job: 'yeah… i wasn't really sure what you were trying to do there on your resume'), and because of that apparently too much of a hiring gamble / cost burden. i guess i could try harder to find a place in business, but i so am not cut out for that, so i think i'm right not to.

haha, i edited that over a length of time - i think it is in fact a full load.

actually, they put permanent FT at 4/4 and 'academic staff' FT at 5/5, probably to reflect the slight additional committee/advising type work permanent staff have, but of course that makes attaining 100% (for various pro-rating purposes) harder to do on the temp staff scale too, which might have something to do with why they're reported as having ~0 full-time instructors despite using instructors.

anyway, i talked to my parents, and they started looking into the possibility of getting me into an old beater or something to commute to this job so i wouldn't have to pick up and move there under the unreliable circumstances. and once they got a clearer picture of this newer possible offer, and how it compared to the area (about 20-25k short of positions with comparable responsibilities for comparable qualifications and experience, and maybe even another 25k short in total compensation) my dad said about the most complimentary thing i've heard about my academic career in forever, that i was worth more than that and if they weren't willing to pay me what i was worth they should just forget about it. my parents both work for a convenience store chain in the area now, the same kind of shit work they've had ever since the financial crisis bankrupted their mom-and-pop business, and they pointed out that brand-new assistant store managers with only high school diplomas and no real experience at the job made more than i had been offered. and they didn't think that was right, so even if it meant not grabbing for something rather than nothing, it was worth it to demand a real show of respect for my work.

which is where i was leaning anyway. but it was nice to hear. so i counter-offered basically asking for a 1-year visitor's position instead of a full-time temp's position. i doubt there's anything the faculty can do about it, and i doubt the school will give a shit, but i feel good.

thanks for updating us. and good for you!

anyone here ever refused to give a letter of recommendation before (and not on grounds of i dunno not knowing the student well enough)?

a few years back i happened to be assisting on a class, with supervision, and i got a student who was trying his darnedest but only ever turning in totally atrocious work. with my supervisor's blessing basically ended up passing him out of charity, particularly since he was close to graduation, but we never really managed to come out and say to him, this work is off the radar as far as basic competency goes.

now he's applying to graduate school, apparently to go into a teaching-related field. : /

yea definitely seems like a good idea to refuse to give it

thing is he used to be a factory worker and since graduating (besides still that probably) he's been doing at-risk- and nontraditional-student mentoring, apparently successfully… so it does seem like he's doing some good?

on the other hand if any of his teachers ever puts their foot down he seems fairly likely to bomb graduate school, rack up lots of debt, etc

aw I'd be tempted to write it anyway--seeing as a lot of students in that position are simply trying to acquire the required 3-4 letters from whatever suitable authoritative sources they can find. would figure that if his work is as bad as you say then a lukewarm letter isn't gonna make a difference in the end wrt to getting accepted. but then of course I totally understand your concern with putting your name on it. maybe ask to see something more recent from him?

i'd sit down and talk with him first and then write an honest (and short) letter highlighting his strengths while avoiding the parts that i couldn't honestly recommend

i gave a luke warm (i.e. awful) one once. i made sure she understood that's what it would be like, and she still wanted it, so *shrug*

yeah I've told a student that they probably should find another referee but if they really need one from me I can write it

jesus christ, it looks like i might actually have a couple courses to cover come late january.

now i just have to figure out how the fuck to teach philosophy online

Bullying-to-death story from Imperial is horrible and scary: http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-college-london-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/

still no idea of the cause?

I haven't seen it stated anywhere, just lots of insinuation.

http://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/speculative-diction/stressful-systems/

reflection on the case, no new facts

http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau4.3.007/1598

Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class
David Graeber

Abstract

Many of the internal changes within anthropology as a discipline—particularly the "postmodern turn" of the 1980s—can only be understood in the context of broader changes in the class composition of the societies in which university departments exist, and, in particular, the role of the university in the reproduction of a professional-managerial class that has come to displace any working-class elements in what pass for mainstream "left" political parties. Reflexivity, and what I call "vulgar Foucauldianism," while dressed up as activism, seem instead to represent above all the consciousness of this class. In its place, the essay proposes a politics combining support for social movements and a prefigurative politics in the academic sphere.