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

while here i am just holdin my nuts

http://coreyrobin.com/2015/04/14/before-you-get-that-phd/

Max Weber, Science as a Vocation:

Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation [ advanced degree ], the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says lasciate ogni speranza [ abandon all hope, you who enter here ]. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.”‘ Yet, I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.

Just got called in for an on-campus interview for a VAP (maybe renewable) version of what would basically be my dream job. Did not expect this.

Private business had been picking up and I was starting to feel comfortable-ish here so I still wonder.

there's a VAP open near here next year, probably just far enough to have to move, kind of the best kind of place i could hope to have a permanent job, but it's unclear whether that's a real possibility

feeling ground down by my current jobs, tho, so the urge is coming back to just apply for shit and say whatever, i go where the winds blow

The nearby VAP seems like it might be a good move if you're not happy with your current jobs idk. What would be the cons?

rejection, turmoil, etc

i'm not a great fit, so i'm trying not to care much, but they do have a faculty to whom i'd be congenial, who know my people, etc.

congrats on the interview, Sund4r!

"not a great fit" used to seem like not a terribly big deal, but a few years into the job market it feels like the kiss of death.

Thanks!

I've never really known what 'not a great fit' means tbh.

good luck s

it means other things (too weird, likes hegel too much, etc.), but in this context it just means they want me to teach classes i am not actually qualified to teach other than because phd

Cmon if you have a PhD in the area you should be able to teach any undergrad class in the area

sure but when's the last time your department had you teach history of ancient e.g.

lol I'm on the books for it this coming year, did it three years ago too

augh well there's gotta be one where they're like euler hell no don't let euler teach that, get someone who knows what she's doing

no way dude

Maaaaaaybe aesthetics

so you read greek?!

no but I do kiss that way

Well I sorta can a bit but we're just talking sophomore level stuff. my chair's a classicist and he's cool with me doing it so

anyway that's not how the VAP market works now

if they want 6 courses that's more than half ethics and social/political, they hire an ethicist; there are four million ethicists

yeah it's true you gotta narrow down somehow but otoh you just need someone to cover classes so make a case in yr cover letter

Cmon if you have a PhD in the area you should be able to teach any undergrad class in the area

No one believes this in music unless you are counting theory/composition, musicology, ethnomusicology, music tech, performance as different "areas".

Private business had been picking up and I was starting to feel comfortable-ish here so I still wonder.

I guess my fear is that if I actually get the VAP, I run the risk of going away for a year and then having to build things up from scratch again. Can't really avoid these sorts of risks in this 'job market', I suppose.

"Cmon if you have a PhD in the area you should be able to teach any undergrad class in the area"

this is not at all true in the sciences

haha it is not true in philosophy (or literature i'd wager!) either despite what euler says, but we do have the remnants of this myth of the 'total philosopher' - also a widely-present ideology of 'it's all arguments innit'

natural sciences maybe

true in math though

it's true in philo, we are just talking undergrad! this is why you take prelims

also I have to listen to job talks every year in subjects I'm not an expert in, and yet my vote counts as the same as the experts.

like at research unis they don't *usually* ask the logician to teach ancient but at other places everyone teaches everything out of necessity; no money for a vap this year but Mill's on sabbatical, ok Tarski you're in on applied ethics

buddy of mine who's now famous was at a branch campus of his uni for 20+ years, a logician, taught aesthetics regularly. my thesis advisor, in a similar situation to that, taught philosophy of law and business ethics regularly. everyone teaches logic eventually. one of our formal types teaches our medical ethics classes. this shit counts for a lot in building tenure cases etc b/c it's service, and ime searches probe these questions a bunch: what *else* can this candidate teach besides her speciality? breadth counts a bunch when it comes to evaluating teaching, it's often how "fit" is cashed out

everyone teaches logic eventually

I mean, my resident philosopher could teach first-year logic, maybe second-year, but she would never teach an upper-year undergrad logic course and I can't imagine that she'd be asked to.

I teach intro-level ethnomusicology classes often enough but it would be kind of ridiculous for a department to ask me to teach an advanced course in the area. A department that could offer an upper-level ethno course could find an ethnomusicologist.

I can imagine it. it wouldn't be the first choice! & you might just cancel the class, usually senior level logic is pretty low enrollment as are all senior level classes. but if you need it taught, can't cancel it, then you'll get someone in your department to do it. might eat a month in prep.

but I can see that not every discipline is like this, was just talking about philo (though it's true in math too)

Is it really true in math? I think in practice most math faculty I know would really struggle to teach all 3rd/4th year undergraduate courses (and that's assuming that we're only talking about either pure or applied - I doubt I know anyone who could comfortably teach all 1st/2nd year pure + applied courses, tbh), and even some of the 1st + 2nd year courses would be quite a stretch for most.

'who teaches A also teaches B' is a lot different from 'everybody can each everything' (and both are different from 'who would teach A if we were asking can also probably teach B okay so hell why not hire the bastard')

yeah i have an undergraduate math degree and even at that age to us it was clear that the algebraists and the analysts, the pure and the applied had their own fiefs and were likely not comfortable teaching outside them, comps aside—proving lagrange's theorem 20 years ago and reteaching it/having it come up in regular work in your field are very different things.

(my graduate program actually did not have comps, and likewise had faculty who in no way could have jumped on from their phil sci courses to teach undergraduate ancient, etc etc for ethicists who i do not recall having taught any first-year logic in the several years i was there.)

well I did say should be able to do teach any undergrad course, with "ought to be able ≠ is willing" tacitly thought disapprovingly held. I've done course scheduling enough to see how these things play out in practice. & I trust philosophers more the more widely they teach (don't mean publish though).

& yeah people have their fiefs but that's at least largely the result of laziness: if I prep my regular rotation of courses then I can snooze on teaching. which is deplorable imo

i had a english professor who would change her syllabi every year to incorporate books she hadn't read. i think you can get away with this in english, especially in seminars. however i am pretty sure she was behind in the reading a few times!kk

i try to incorporate one new course into every year i teach, by which i mean, i try to get a job, and it requires me to teach something i've never done, so i prep that

this sounds like a joke but it is also true, in the 4 terms of employment i have had since my phd (none was even a full load, though one was close) i have had to design and prep 3, 1, 1, and 1 new course(s). i wish i could have a rotation, some regularity.

i try to incorporate one new course into every year i teach, by which i mean, i try to get a job, and it requires me to teach something i've never done, so i prep that

This is basically my life too. (Private teaching requires this as well.)

I don't think I've ever had a term without at least one new prep. I even rewrite my notes for classes I've already prepped for the most part. I get so bored with teaching rotations that it drives down my research even. this is probably related to why I am constantly looking for new ~~~career opportunities~~~ (sooooo easily bored)

I'm not sure it's laziness - I mean a pure math department can easily have 50+ undergraduate courses, even if you teach new courses every year you'll find yourself teaching something you haven't used/taught/thought about in 20+ years. So even if you aced it as an undergraduate (by no means a given, I would assume) then it's pretty unlikely you'll do a good job of teaching it.

But actually the more I think about it the more I doubt the existence of many faculty who even took these courses as an undergraduate - I just glanced back at the undergraduate syllabus from my own days, and I'm sure no-one in my year took/read up on every 3rd year pure course (first couple of years are more reasonable, though).

but most of those undergrad courses are just lower division right? every math PhD should be able to teach upper division undergrad courses in all the core areas: I mean topology, real analysis, complex analysis, algebra (groups, rings, fields). I guess probably an analyst isn't going to teach combinatorics or number theory often at big places but in smaller depts I wouldn't see why not. my beau-père is a mathematician at a decently sized lib art college & has taught everything on the books over his 30+ year career there.

I mean I take it we're not just talking about research unis here

"Cmon if you have a PhD in the area you should be able to teach any undergrad class in the area"
...
haha it is not true in philosophy (or literature i'd wager!)

My experience with tons of rhet comp people who are often housed in english departments and outnumbered greatly by lit folks is that the literature profs are aghast at suggestions that they teach anything outside of their incredibly small area of specialty but can't understand why the rhetoric profs can't just teach classical rhetoric and tech comm equally well.

euler otm re:math depts, ime. if u think about a math dept, the UG classes are m/l the same everywhere. year of analysis & algebra required, ode, pde, prob, stats, and then electives like combo, number theory, topo, numerical. that doesn't mean each department is going to hire analysts in the same proportion to their undergrad classes; the incentives of hiring committees are totally independent of teaching needs. like when i was in undergrad, my topo prof (a geometric group theorist) won a fancy prize so they hired a bunch of group theorists to keep him happy. but they didn't increase the number of group theory courses offered

when i taught at a slac w/ a very small dept my major students were like 'we like the teachers in the dept ok but it's like the same course over and over again'

yeah the connection between permanent hires and teaching needs at a research uni will matter inasmuch as that'll affect how the dept sells the post to the admin, but once the hire is done then the dept will determine its own course offerings. new hires will bump up the grad offerings maybe but the undergrad courses will be chosen by what the faculty want to teach, how majors there are, and what other departments need (for math that's key, even at the upper division undergrad level)

the "same course over and over again" thing is bad for students, and for the aspiring vap a good way to spin what you can bring to soup things up, esp if you can get that across w/o saying "I'll mix up your tired course offerings fools"

other thing I was thinking j is that if you can have your advisor or other senior folks who know you contact a dept where you're worried about fit, that can help. they can reinforce what you explain in your cover letter: this person's AOS and AOC are blah but s/he can teach X Y Z too, here's why (tell a story based on what they know about you). that kind of reassurance can make a big difference b/c o/w searches even for vaps involve a lot of guess work ("well she took a class on Hegel but can she teach existentialism I dunno and what about aesthetics and what about applied ethics ......."

basically don't knock the hustle

oh i feel pretty well connected to this place, all things considered, don't know them but they have alums working there and are big on my committee members who are big on me. it's just, really, i'm no ethicist, and they're a dime a dozen.

yeah I wouldn't think about whether you're an ethicist, rather make it clear that you are ready and excited to teach the courses they need, give the right syllabi, and have people testify on your behalf. AOS etc is just fluff ime

apparently you have never been hired 'as a logician' at a community college, aos shit is bonkers now as a culling tool

i mean god damn, i am fully on board with the comprehensive vision - i am better suited to be a generalist than most of the people who have ever hired me, probably than many who have declined to hire me. but ppl need their boxes ticked.

shit really? I have a student who's trying to find a cc job, for geo reasons, hasn't been winning, maybe this is why

cc jobs are pretty great too