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

well i dont think its very useful as a filtering system! i think you can send very good signals w/o learning anything - if anything i would argue that in 100 and 200 level courses a genuine desire to learn is probably disadvantageous if yr goal is simply getting the highest gpa possible. i dont think gpa is a useful sorting mechanism for the sort of system yr taking abt for lots of reasons.

also i think most work in the professional class isnt that highly skilled or technical really - i think that some kind of training or apprenticeship system is probably preferable? idk thats just a feeling really, not a serious proposal.

idk i feel like im trying to argue against a bunch of things and its not like i have any hard data to draw conclusions from. really my post was an emotional one rather than an incisive critique.

No, I think you're making good points!

we just need fewer grad students

grad programs owe their students training toward productive work, and that what counts as "productive work" has to incorporate more than just teaching.

I don't necessarily agree with either of these statements. I think the 'casualization' of university teaching work is unjust in that people are doing demanding, skilled work (for which students are paying increasingly large sums of money) and not being compensated or evaluated in what I would consider a fair manner. However, I don't think it is in itself necessarily an injustice if graduate education does not directly lead to a career for many students. I don't think that grad programs owe, or really should owe, their students anything more or less than an education and academic freedom. As long as students are not being misinformed about the job placement numbers and as long as the people who are admitted are actually capable of doing high-level scholarly work and are given adequate support to do so (three big "as long"s), I don't necessarily see a problem with people taking a few years to study something they love with the funding to do so. It can be comparable to a four-year contract, sometimes with better conditions than other entry-level jobs. Besides, generally, people do pick up some useful skills in the process and the extra credentials can make some difference.

i don't agree with either of those statements either. i think we need higher taxes on the rich to fund more generous education in this country. the concentration of privileged people in the academy defies the explicit ideals of the preponderance of thinkers taught in american colleges/universities and is more indicative of neo-feudalism than a functioning democracy

i see that this, from Robert Pippen, is from last summer, but it's new to me and seemed quite interesting on a skim, even if i dont agree with everything.

As I said, my understanding of what’s been happening is that the pressure on the humanities to demonstrate their relevance anew is caused by this financial panic. It doesn’t have a serious intellectual pedigree, there isn’t a serious case. Secondly, we ought to remember that the so-called new humanities aren’t new. I mean, what’s new is the invocation of empirical science. But attacks on the autonomy of the discussion of meaning and value have been going on for forty years in the academy. The movements toward it, like semiotics, structuralism, structuralist Marxism, Althusserian Marxism, psychoanalysis, discourse theory—a variety of ways of essentially denying the phenomenon of human intentionality, another fancier word for meaning—have been going on for a long time.

So we have this perfect storm of financial panic in 2008, gradual defunding of public universities and massive increases in tuition in private universities that were accelerated by the financial panic, coming just at the time when many humanities programs were coming out of a long, thirty- or forty-year period of nearly suicidal self-criticism, just at the wrong time for there to be massive amounts of evidence that humanities programs were as critical of the enterprise that they used to be engaged in as any Steven Pinker. So it was a terrible, terrible conflation of storm elements to produce this crisis in the organization of knowledge.

As I said, for me, the most interesting single fact about it—and I’ll just stop here before I go on too long—is just the one I’ve been mentioning throughout. There is no new intellectual argument that one can cite that is responsible for the diminution in the enterprise of teaching people what it is to mean and to value. I’m in philosophy—I can tell you, there’s plenty of materialist, reductionist, eliminitivist philosophy of mind out there, but there’s nobody who’s taken on the canon of classical texts or French literature in the nineteenth century and demonstrated that the attempt by methods of rigorous analysis, textual analysis, interpretive finesse, that those methods have been discredited by a discovery. This furor is about nothing intellectual. The people who are attacking are not really presenting a principled position for which they have arguments; they’re presenting small case studies, which they purport to be exciting because they’re new and they use new methods … But it also plugs into this anxiety about the legitimacy of autonomous disciplines within the humanities, like art history, or music, or philosophy, or literature, or classics. So I think that we shouldn’t be confused by the nature of the dispute. It’s a financial dispute fueled by panic—and coming right at the wrong time in the history of the university.

link: http://thepointmag.com/2014/criticism/ways-knowing

sooooo many rejection letters today. all expected, of course, but this is some kind of black Friday.

one of my grad student peers got tenure last night, after essentially doing… nothing at his low-level slac job, other than showing up for several years

: /

really trying hard to keep the bitterness at bay, but I've got a good record of publications and a fairly relevant, maybe even "sexy," up-and-coming specialization, but I can hardly even get more than an interview or two--I'm fucking up on some major level and I can't even figure out what I is. cut of my gib is showing, I guess.

I regret that post--I'll keep the self-pity to myself from now on!

you should light them all on fire

http://cdn.hark.com/images/000/503/062/503062/original.jpg

that might create a few openings, at least.

the inability of adjuncts to get how difficult the real faculty have it may be their tragedy. although somehow they can't/won't arrest/reverse trends the unsophisticated might deem 'unfair'/'inhumane', certainly tenured/tenure-track professors are superior to contingent instructors intellectually, work-ethically, and diplomatically

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/o-adjunct-my-adjunct

the show must go on! if only the less sophisticated would accept their betters couldn't achieve important marxian/theoretical/civil rights breakthroughs, subject to plebeian conditions

can i presume the requirement of a "statement of philosophy" for this job really means a "statement of teaching philosophy" or is this some new horrible thing i havent encountered yet.

I had a Skype interview on Monday for a VAP teaching position and am already seriously questioning whether I would even want to move halfway across the continent for a 4/4 teaching load. I'm growing oddly attached to my precarious lifestyle that (so far) leaves time for actual research and creative work.

(Think it went OK, although who ever knows?)

In other news, I just gave my last lecture of the semester.

i've gotten sent a couple (usual) long-shot short-term job opportunities lately by friends, and i'm feeling more than ever like, why would i want to move across the country for that. again (not that i've moved 'across the country' yet. but moving is moving.) i don't quite know how to justify myself to them, though - hard to sound sensible 'passing up' 'opportunities' when your status quo is far from peachy anyway.

perhaps justifiable if you believe the opportunity will somehow lead to further, and better, opportunities down the line. though this is increasingly hard to believe.

"the writing is just so turgid"; "I can't really see why he's insisting on..."; "This is a crazy set of pairs"; "this just doesn't work at all", &c &c. anonymous academic reviewers can be kinda mean.

I would write the second and fourth of those remarks, but not the first and the third: those are really mean, "crazy", "just so turgid". ime Brits are meaner in reports, and even in letters of rec where I've seen some quite faint praise and even meanness being dished out, and maybe in the UK those are good (I doubt it) but in the USA they're...not

how much of it is because the subject and perhaps style are recogniseable within small fields and personal antipathy seeps through

just in general not necessarily in relation to merdes, though whoever wrote that is a miserable cunt

iirc Merdeyeux is a doctoral student so his style wouldn't be recognized; and a good editor wouldn't send an article to a referee that s/he knew would have personal antipathy toward the subject of the essay. it is very hard to find referees (people say no to me about eight times as much as yes) and accordingly harder to find good referees but this separates well-run journals from badly-run ones. I got a silly report from a silly journal to which I was persuaded to submit as part of a group of people and it reminded me why that journal is silly. I get it: you don't get paid for editorial work, you don't get teaching reductions, it's just an additional professional burden that you do for the sake of service to the profession (and the concomitant ego boost for getting the position), and so the temptation to resort to bad referees is easy to justify.

ha yeah when I was applying for jobs I was encouraged to get recommendations from Americans, or at least people who would write "American-style" recommendation letters xp

anonymous academic reviewers can be kinda mean.

academics are mean, generally. especially to each other.

once the revolution comes that they're laying the groundwork for then they'll be as nice and humane as the values they teach suggest they should be

I'm actually not sure that Marxism has any real pride of place in my field but tbf, did Marxism ever have anything to do with people being nice and humane?

iirc, yes, but they made an exception for academics

can't happen here

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/04/north_carolina_education_bill_it_would_require_public_university_professors.html

from that article:

The North Carolina debacle-in-waiting serves as abject proof that, as tenured history professor and Slate contributor Jonathan Rees has written recently, adjunctification moves upward as well as downward. “Working conditions will gradually drift towards the level of the least compensated among us, not the best,” he writes. “What’s that you say? You think you’re special? You do research? Tell that to every professor at a public university in North Carolina.”

so are there any countervailing forces likely to turn this trend back or am i gonna watch the dismantling of higher education (public version) in my lifetime?

inner migration

am i gonna watch the dismantling of higher education (public version) in my lifetime?

On that note I came across this the other day:

http://chuckrybak.com/uw-struggle-real-people-edition/

kinda lol but mostly sad that the first named example of the talent drain from Wisconsin left to go to... North Carolina

as long as kids from wealthy families can still get PhDs and tenure track jobs, i don't see what the problem is

The UNC bill is dismaying, no doubt. However, I disagree with this, unless "hard" means "physically demanding":

Teaching college, especially if you’re good at it, isn’t particularly hard.

Also, it is hard for me to see how someone could teach four courses in one semester and only be putting in 'full-time' (40h/wk) hours. Going by the figure of 2-4h or prep for every hour of teaching (http://americanfacultyassociation.blogspot.ca/2012/02/hours-for-teaching-and-preparation-rule.html), 12h of lectures a week would require 24-48h of prep and a minimum of 2h of office hours. 10h of marking/wk seems like a conservative estimate for that courseload. Someone who is teaching only courses that he or she has taught before with relatively light marking loads would still be putting in more than standard f/t hours.

I mean, one could cut back on those hours by becoming more of a textbook facilitator and using a lot of Scantron, which is the only way I can really understand the loads that people are being asked to take on. This does compromise pedagogy (not just research) imo.

it's not often that a 4/4 amounts to 4 totally different courses, in my experience (though it does happen--usually to adjuncts).

I've taught 5 courses in a semester before; what gives more than prep time is emotional labor. I gather that this isn't labor that matters to bureaucrats and their enablers; what's in question is its role in learning. I think it's enormous, particularly for more marginal students whose motivation is constantly under barrage from distractions. make me teach more students and I will not be as good as motivating them.

the last place i worked had a 5/5 load for all full-time staff, from what i could see they tried to rarely assign more than 2 preps at a time, tho sometimes 3, but their course assignments were extremely siloed (no one ever outside their 'area')

pedagogically, some courses really don't take much - plug and chug calculus e.g.; 12 sections at a time may all be using the same texts for institutional reasons, and those things are so highly refined that they basically walk both student and staff through what to do, so you just do it and then do some problems

otoh i teach from primary texts and try to reread them before each time i teach (the more i've taught, the less i _have_ to, but still it makes the teaching better), and it's a pretty wasteful approach resource-wise, takes a lot out of you to have to delve back into them rather than just running w/ yr standard story come classtime

yeah with literature i tend to re-read along with the class and that can be time consuming when also prepping.

the weird irony of all this is that never (in the humanities) have research demands been higher. i dunno about you, but im sorta ok with every english professor in the world not needing to churn out a half dozen books in their career.

yeah at this point in my life I have prep down, but it's the emotional part that can't be prepped, and I can't/don't want to give it up, turn into some automaton up there, b/c I think it's the only thing that keeps students involved. I agree with Plato and Augustine that learning comes from love, and while the object of love isn't the teacher, the teacher plays a role in conducting and focusing that love, and her person is involved in that.

i think that's a big part of why i stick w/ rereading, to a certain extent i find it hard to give a proper shit w/o getting caught back up in the texts, they're a major part of what i love about the discipline

absolutely

I need to give a shit for the students to give a shit

& if "they" want to make it so that I can't give a shit anymore, then I'm done with teaching

prohibited

it's not often that a 4/4 amounts to 4 totally different courses, in my experience (though it does happen--usually to adjuncts).

A new Temporary Lecturer position was advertised on the Music Vacancy List yesterday that does this. (There are actually five courses in the fall and six in the winter but some of them are worth less credits such that they amount to a 4.33/4 load, assuming that one course is 3 credits. I'm not sure why a 4th-year analysis course would be two credits if a second-year theory course is three credits, though.)

I know someone who did 5/6 (with two sections of one course in the second semester so he was actually teaching 5 distinct courses that semester) at a VAP job. He worked 12h days 7 days a week.

12h days 7 days a week is the tt life at an R1 tbh, on the low end really. well, and grad school too if you want that r1 tt fun. ish is def nuts though

I mean, I don't know how he counted his hours. I didn't take much time off at all when I taught three courses in a semester tbh so 4/4 or 5/6 seem hard to fathom for me. (In the 2014 winter, when I had two heavy courses + a fair bit of private/music-school teaching + was performing, composing, and interviewing, I got sick at least four times, which I mostly attribute to overwork.) Currently have something approaching work/life balance, which feels hard to let go of.

I kind of doubt I'd get an R1 TT, whether or not I wanted it, tbh.