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

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.

aka let's pretend the 70s and 80s never happened?

what even happened then

u didn't miss much

omg i'm reading that essay now we should discuss it on some other thread because this one feels inappropriate for me just complaining about how wrong it gets everything. his entire description of the "neoliberal" process in the 80s is just effectively making shit up, and leads me to suspect that he actually doesn't understand anything about the 50s and 60s at all.

ahahaha i mean: "In this sense what’s happened to universities since the 1970s—very unevenly, but pretty much everywhere—has represented a fundamental break of a kind we have not seen in eight hundred years."

he should read one (1) clark kerr or something jesus

does he even know what the free speech movement was protesting christ

maybe the graeber 80s is an alternate universe, let us not forget:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.

do i get a cash prize for spotting a typo (last sentence of the second footnote)

these academiatricians don't know NOTHING

I'm tipping toward the "he's mostly correct" position on the negligible political impact of academia in general over the past few decades, and his not very nice answer why (I'm not in anthro so I can't speak to particulars in that department). But ultimately his last sentence is very positive.

I'm cheering when he says "reflection [on one's power and privilege] takes the typically American puritanical form, in which members of said elite compete with one another for moral superiority based on claims of greater cognizance of their own compromised nature." Yep, having sat through hours of such reflection, yep yep yep.

there's an irony that seems remarkably unremarked on in how proponents of long-view historicism manage to always assert that now (for whatever value of now is current) is the moment when everything is changing in a way that has never been seen before.

Invoking the dynamic of American Puritanism would appear to be an endorsement of long term continuity.

i'm talking about all the other stuff in the piece not that point in particular

His idea that Foucauldians are projecting the professional context of academia onto their subjects of study strikes me as rather glib. Too easy a knockdown to be convincing.

He mentions Scheper-Hughes. She makes what I think are some similar points, that in "perilous times" perfectionism is an unaffordable luxury. This seems to me to be a correct take on the the drawbacks of "vulgar Foucauldianism":

What is the value of ethnography in such a sad contemporary context? Many young anthropologists today, sensitized by Michel Foucault (1975, 1980, 1982)) on "power/knowledge," have come to think of ethnography and fieldwork as unwarranted intrusions into the lives of vulnerable, threatened peoples. The anthropological interview has been linked to the medieval "inquisitional confession" (Ginsberg 1988) through which church examiners extracted "truth" from their naive and naturally "heretical" peasant flocks. We hear of anthropological observation as a hostile act that reduces our "subjects" to mere "objects" of our discriminating, incriminating scientific gaze. Consequently, some young anthropologists have given up the practice of descriptive ethnography altogether in preference for distanced and highly formalized methods of discourse analysis or purely quantitative of models. Others concern themselves with macrolevel analyses of world economic systems in which the experiential and subjective experience of human lives is left aside. Still others engage in an obsessive, self-reflexive hermeneutics in which the self, not the other, becomes the subject of anthropological inquiry.

I grow weary of these postmodernist critiques, and given the perilous times in which we and our subjects live, I am inclined toward a compromise that calls for the practice of a "good enough" ethnography. The anthropologist is an instrument of cultural translation that is necessarily flawed and biased. We cannot rid ourselves of the cultural self that we bring with us into the field any more than we can disown the eyes, ears, and skin through which we take in our intuitive perceptions about the new and strange world we have entered. Nonetheless, like every other master artisan (and I dare say that at our best we are this), we struggle to do the best we can with the limited resources we have at hand--our ability to listen carefully, empathically, and compassionately.

I think of some of the subjects of this book for whom anthropology is not a hostile gaze but rather an opportunity to tell a part of their life story. And though I can hear dissonant voices in the background protesting just this choice of words, I believe there is a still a role for the ethnographer-writer in giving voice, as best she can, to those who have been silenced, as have the people of the Alto by political and economic oppression and illiteracy and as have their children by hunger and premature death. So despite the mockery that Clifford Geertz (1988) made of anthropological "I-witnessing," I believe there is still value in attempting to "speak truth to power." I recall how my Alto friends grabbed and pushed and pulled, jostling for attention, saying "Don't forget me; I want my turn to speak. That one has had your attention long enough!" Or saying, "Tá vendo? Tá ouvindo?"--"Are you listening, really understanding me?" Or taking my hand and placing it on their abdomens and demanding, "Touch me, feel me, here. Did you ever feel anything so swollen?" Or "Write that down in your notes, now. I don't want you to forget it." Seeing, listening, touching, recording, can be, if done with care and sensitivity, acts of fraternity and sisterhood, acts of solidarity. Above all, they are acts of recognition. Not to look, not to touch, not to record, can be the hostile act, the act of indifference and of turning away.

http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/15954?utm_content=buffer46da0

'foucault kids' sigh

that's an awfully loaded term for describing what simply seems to be interdisciplinary work! maybe I'm missing something.

i think there was supposed to be a slight implication of quality-independent-thought too

tbh that basically describes my quasi-interdisciplinary dissertation. a lot of self-imposed and self-directed "training" as well.

http://www.extremesportstrader.co.uk/shots/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/rocky-snow-training.jpg

http://instagram.com/p/xpskLsLe29/