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

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/

fun shirt

the job market is pretty damn grim this year. not that that's news of course.

i feel like my barely suppressed disdain for this profession and the people in it (and by extension myself for "wanting" to be a part of it) must be still be coming through in my cover letters. gotta work on that.

the job market isn't grim for "top candidates" from "top schools"

ha, yeah i keep thinking about what i could have done differently and top of the list every time is "go to a more prestigious school."

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

― j., Monday, November 17, 2014 1:52 PM (1 month ago)

monday!! they can't cancel that shit on me NOW

did you figure out how the fuck to teach philosophy online?

welp

no, no i did not

so how is that going

i worked in online course design and implementation for years ama

boat's kind of sailed on design for the sucker at this point. i'm noticing some initial problems overcoming, on top of the usual difficulties students pose (new to school, general intellectual apathy and incuriosity, gen ed credit disengagement), a heightened rat-and-pellet orientation that the interface only seems to make worse. similarly w/ the atomization in the social experience of the course; way too many people seem unaware of anything else their classmates contribute, despite a few weeks of yammering and prodding on my part. interface doesn't help there, either; it actually makes it technically inconvenient to even -see- discussions as ongoing conversations rather than bags of disjoint squibs of opinionating, lobbed into the void for the sake of perfunctory discharge of course obligations.

i've been wondering if maybe i'm not just a little over-sensitive because i have too much exposure to my students' raw (unworked) intellectual productions now. i had plenty of that before, but in the social reality of the (physical) classroom, a more decorous inattention to the works-in-progress that are students' thoughts and utterances is possible.

scrap the infrstructure & make all your students join ilx

but we stopped counting people's posts years ago, what would i enter in the online gradebook that we also don't have

If it's an online course, then are many of your students distance learners, meaning that they may not have friends in the class? I'm guessing that this would exacerbate the problems an online interface already creates for doing the basic conversational background work of reading each others' body language, sizing one another up, assessing the mood in the room, etc.

If the interface allows for small group work, then that may be something to think about, if it puts students in connection with each other. Probably hard to monitor.

i have had success moving the discussion board to a blogspot to which all students have posting privileges. it flattens out the initial discussions a little bit so that it doesn't immediately look like a dozen barely-connected nodes and younger students are way more familiar with the blog-and-comment flow than with old fashioned treed discussion boards. also i suspect students have more of a feeling of ownership over posts and are thus more likely to get feisty.

group work is good, especially if the LMS facilitates it w/out too much work on your part, but for 100-level classes you can end up with one person from each group doing all the work.

I've taught one philo course online but I did it as an emergency overload and so my performance wasn't very important to e.g. keeping my job. that was good because the course sucked. I did what I was told, which was record myself giving lectures, and then giving assignments. there was a little offline chat associated with it too but I didn't really monitor that because it was like my fifth course that term. but yeah it sucked. it was something 101ish iirc

there are a couple offsite students, but the vast majority are campus-based (but taking courses online thanks to the state system push to… add value… somehow… but onlineifying as much of the curriculum as possible). been looking into getting them to meet up, at the very least for study group purposes, but *i* am not actually campus-based, so my powers of wrangling them are restricted.

group work isn't really facilitated well, although i've taken an unsuccessful stab at it already. not surprisingly, the supposedly 'native' intwebificommunication aptitude young people are supposed to have does not seem to be as much in evidence as one would like. ownership is a problem there (i've been reading a lot in the last year or two about educators' attempts to re-introduce structures for student ownership of course resources, activities, etc., online in the face of enterprise system tunnel vision, and i am FULLY ON BOARD but the lift for accomplishing that is pretty big when the default LMS is staring you in the face and students seem congenitally disinclined to do anything BUT log in to the LMS). why bother trying to manifest your presence and impress your stamp upon anything (as people do naturally in person) when you don't feel you're even involved in something that is 'yours'?

forget if we did this one already

https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/

Yes, college-level teachers should make more than cashiers at McDonald’s. Not because they hold advanced degrees—to pay someone for merely holding a degree is naked credentialism; to believe you deserve more money because of your credential itself rather than what you do with it is to misunderstand the value of work—but because as a culture, we value the dissemination of knowledge more than the distribution of hamburgers. Or at least we say we do.

this is just false; you have to tell a pretty fancy story to get it to work how how in fact 'we' value in this way or even say 'we' do

i would include myself in that "we", although i certainly think both groups should be paid more than they are.

our social system is rather peculiar when the majority of american humanities PhDs can't secure full-time teaching work, and the majority of american college students are taught by contingent faculty. the supposed progressives who run academic departments neither effectively warn the grad student suckers coming in nor care in any meaningful way once they're out the door jobless, any more than they're willing to make it clear to the undergrads that migrant workers teach their classes. this is of course all the fault of the undergrads and the grad students, and the market will sort the wheat from the chaff. the 99% - 1% dynamic the progressive faculty elaborate in marx-inflected classes is unrelated to the labor conditions in their entirely meritocratic departments

"the majority of american college students are taught by contingent faculty"

supposing that this is true, how does the data change when we remove English composition from the mix?

Why should we do that?

"first they came for the writing comp instructors..."

professors of the world, unite!

i haven't seen the data without english comp in the mix

http://www.aaup.org/report/contingent-appointments-and-academic-profession

maybe that changes everything, though, and the academy lives up to its professed ideals when you exclude english comp from the discussion?

The department where I taught for the past year and a half was up for its cyclical review this semester and had to publish statistics. In the 12-13 year, 54.6% of courses were taught by members of the part-time professors' association (definitely sessional faculty), 39.6% by members of the full-time profs' association, and 5.8% by 'other professors' (not sure what this means).

lol xp

I don't know what the data looks like when English comp is removed. But as the article in the revive points out, English comp courses get huge numbers of students, because they're (often) required of (nearly) every first-year. I am asking for the data because the practices chosen by English departments to staff their courses might not be the practices chosen by other departments. I am hesitant to conclude that what's happened is the fault of "the professoriate" when the decisions of English departments are made autonomously from other professors.

Sund4r, is that an English department?

No, music. Was tangential to the English comp question and is obv only one dept. (English comp = "foundations of academic writing" courses, I take it?)

Music numbers can be slanted because applied music instructors are often p/t. In the department's own notes, though, there is only a small majority when it comes to applied instructors and "[ i ]n the academic domain, all solfège sections are taught by a Sessional Professor with the assistance of several graduate student TAs. Many of the service courses have been taught by part-time professors and many of the core music theory and musicology requirements have been taught by part-time professors."

i've taught writing-intensive courses at more than one university that has distributed writing requirements throughout introductory and upper-division courses in order to make the writing instruction more 'relevant' and take the various pressures (labor, credit requirement and time to graduation) off the english or comp departments. but i don't see how forceful it is to aver that maybe other disciplines are different. not as bad, maybe, since they're less in need of cheap labor to serve large numbers of service course requirements. but consider this: adjuncts are likely to teach the lowest level courses, the ones most likely to be taken by non-majors. meanwhile ignatius p. featherbottom is sitting down the hall living the life of the mind with the much less popular upper division course students and a seminar with 6 people in it. the numbers thin out as you go up the status hierarchy.

"the numbers thin out as you go up the status hierarchy"

I've never taught in a department like this. all R1s though.

I am not trying to excuse or deny the problem, just trying to identify it better.

have we talked about the Colander article?

the original article is worth a read (if ouchy), the key points are spelled out in this interview/article about it:

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/897-where-do-english-ph-d-s-get-jobs-it-depends-on-where-they-studied

scary suggestions in the original article include: regarding a PhD as something that people who are already independently wealthy should pursue to add value to their lives, the degree as a kind of luxury good akin to a Patek Phillippe wristwatch, not an introdcution to an actual, y'know, career. Depressssssssssssssssssssing.

yeah but euler, yall got hella grad students to labor for you, i'm guessing. at an institution without grad students those lower-division courses wouldn't have as many ft faculty giving the lectures, i'm guessing?

When I first read that study, I thought the 44% figure for bottom-tier institutions seemed very high! Are there numbers for other disciplines?? A 1.9% difference between Tier 2 and Tier 4 is not bad.

i need to read the longer article, but i'd also be curious how those numbers reflect phds who have been on the job market for multiple years--there's just no way that 40% of new phds get TT jobs. i just cant fathom that. granted, i dont know that many people at "tier 1" schools.