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

they got the one in the other over there, i hear

eat em in their little hats, with their little mustaches trimmed so they never get any cheese on em

First lectures of the new semester tomorrow! I've spent most of today and yesterday and, still, things feel a little loose.

Ditto, good luck out there!

Thanks, you too! I'll need it.

First day of class in a liberal arts college: we didn't get through everything because people were caught up in describing how Ligeti made them feel. I could get used to this.

How was yours, bentelec?

First day of class in a liberal arts college: we didn't get through everything because people were caught up in describing how Ligeti made them feel. I could get used to this.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Tuesday, 25 August 2015 20:41 (15 minutes ago) Permalink

Haha. That's sweet.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/business-executive-named-university-iowa-president-33517754

How was yours, bentelec?

― EveningStar (Sund4r)

Just seeing this now - it was pretty good! It takes a while for those in-class powers of improvisation to come back. I just moved from teaching mostly grads at a mid-sized private university to mostly undergrads at a giant public university, so it's going to take some time to feel out who I'm working with.

Having come out of a highfalutin liberal arts college, Ligeti ~feelings~ are a very warm memory - it's possible but unlikely to get in a comparable situation in my field! Just be sure to sensibly prune back the 2.5 students who eagerly want to turn the class into a private discussion.

Just be sure to sensibly prune back the 2.5 students who eagerly want to turn the class into a private discussion.

This seems wise, yes.

MLA job list time! English is a brutal wasteland again, but this phrase amused me:

"Located approximately 30 minutes from culturally rich downtown Indianapolis..."

uh, if you have to say it...

i've been telling other academics that i plan for this to be my last year on the job market, no matter what. (I have said this before.) but i've noticed that to a man/woman, they unfailing respond with "what will you do?" (i have no idea.) at first i was thinking this might just be natural curiosity but now im starting to detect an amount of real interest, as if i might have figured something out, some hopeful alternative. alas.

that's so generous of them, they're assuming you would only be giving up if you had some actual plan, like a rational actor

i picked up another couple online courses late in the summer, and then just in the past week an emergency fill-in at a school in town here, so now i am adjuncting 3. not a lot at these rates, and no benefits anywhere, but enough to quit my side job that i hated, and maybe have enough money for some much-needed health care this semester. it's nice to think of being in a classroom again, too.

oh nice. congrats on that!

are other fields in the humanities as maddeningly specific as English? like, yes, i know you need to find some poor sucker to teach your undergraduate shakespeare course, but do they really need to specialize as a shakespeare scholar to do that? i find this assumption that you can only effectively teach an undergraduate course in something if you wrote your dissertation (itself highly specialized and probably of no interest to undergrads) about it really bizarre. i guess im saying, whither the generalists?

OMG music is not like that. With a composition PhD, I've taught so many popular music and world music (and popular music of the world) courses. I've seen theory classes taught by clarinettists or percussionists. This is the first year that I'm teaching what I did specialize in in my doctoral work, actually, unless you count post-tonal theory, which I've taught twice.

they tend to apply that attitude in philosophy, although they just as often take any warm body in a pinch (so we're all assumed equally competent to teach intro, ethics and political, some ancient and modern, logic, with all of those assumptions actually ill founded). might apply more with upper-division courses.

woe to all generalists. : (

Yeah, what I said mostly applied to sessional/adjunct teaching or to more undergrad teaching-oriented f/t positions, especially with lower-level courses. For TT jobs at high-ranking or research-oriented places, you'd need to be very specialized. And, even then, music used to be more of a field for generalists, I think.

so we're all assumed equally competent to teach intro, ethics and political, some ancient and modern, logic, with all of those assumptions actually ill founded

c'mon we're talking undergrad here. if you can't teach all of those competently then you shouldn't have a phd in philosophy. but I think I've said this here before.

anyway I'd love to hire generalists. to get through a relatively open-area search though there have to be some upper level courses that the search committee can tag you as covering, courses already on the books (since adding courses is often pretty complex and time-consuming). the easiest thing to do is just to pick some pretty standard course that's relatively close to your dissertation topic / current projects.

anyway I have just climbed into an ivory tower made of cheese and it is weird kinda starting all over again wrt knowing how things work

shoulds and realities are different. i've had credentialed colleagues who could have only taught logic under duress, if at all.

i don't think i complained about being passed over for not being able to teach upper-level courses.

humblebrag hall of fame xp

humblebrag? nah it kicks ass, but it's weird going into a different academic system, in a different language to boot. like I guess going to/from oxford/usa is weird b/c of the tutorial system, but at least it's all in english. maybe I can get a slate pub out of this or something.

did we do this one http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/09/how_do_professors_get_hired_the_academic_job_search_explained.html

“Well,” you soldier on, “have you ever thought of moving to [ major metropolitan area ] and working at [ world-renowned institution ]?"

I was once visiting the campus of [world-renowned institution] for reasons totally unrelated to a job and my dad, bless his heart, suggested i go to the english department and introduce myself and let them know i was looking for a job.

your dad knew it would brighten their day with a good hearty laugh

dad

dad, dad, dad

no

i feel bad for him because this whole thing, from studying literature (and even worse now, "theory") to now he's been totally supportive despite not understanding a whit of what im doing or why.

it would be kinda fun if jobs in academia worked that way. just hanging around campus, waiting for a "help wanted" sign to pop up.

'just coming in to fill out an application'

these highly specific topics for postdocs are always so weird to me:

The Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto seeks 4 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows for a two-year appointment 2016-2018 with research relevant to the 2016-17 theme:

Time, Rhythm, and Pace
The modern experience of time is often characterized by its increasing speed, its linearity, and its emphasis on now. But time does not have to be regarded as the flight of an arrow, a race track, or a forking path. If we consider the body, the planet, or the longue durée of history, it becomes clear that rhythm, cycle, pace and temporality pervade the human condition, now as they have always done. Occurring at multiple scales (neuronal firing, diurnal habits, menses, calendars, life cycles, the rise and fall of civilizations), rhythm is concrete, existential, and profound. How do rhythm and cycle, rather than velocity, characterize human life? What are the politics of chronology? How can a deeper understanding of time, rhythm, and pace -- from literary theorists, historians, phenomenologists, political scientists, and diverse other sectors of the academy -- provide us with guidance in an increasingly frantic and fast-paced world?

rhythm is concrete, existential, and profound

classic case of "uh i need a third word here...uh, profound! yeah that's it."

i should apply for that, pleased that ilx is doing my job-hunting for me

good luck! it seems like a really nice one. I was trying to think if i could spin my own work to fit that topic and was then hit with a wave of exhaustion that basically wiped my mind clear of any thoughts at all.

I did an undergrad fellowship there, and my supervisor is a current fellow, so I can attest it is in fact a very nice position.

It's not a department but an autonomous humanities institute, hence the themes, which aren't specific to the postdocs but structure the entire year's programming. That said, I'm really hoping whatever the subsequent year's theme will be at least marginally relevant enough for me to apply.

Canadian haemorrhoid Rex Murphy on the uselessness of the Arts and Humanities, complete with a healthy dollop of transphobia.

jane austin??? cura te ipsum

Does anyone think Sulkowicz knows anything about the Holocaust, or that she could even spell Auschwitz?

What the hell?

Oh man. A commenter points out that Sulkowicz's grandparents were Auschwitz survivors.

If, against my better judgment, I have to parse Murphy's logic, I gather that it seems to be this: Alex Johnstone claimed she didn't know what Auschwitz was when people started jumping on her for making a tasteless dick joke on Facebook years ago. Murphy: i) took this at face value instead of assuming that it was a weak excuse/deflection and ii) concluded that this means that no one under 40 learns about the Holocaust anymore (even though I had to read a book about it in Grade 4 and it is the subject of a million Hollywood blockbusters). He then concluded that this is because university humanities departments, whose undergrad course catalogues I assume Murphy has not perused, have become wholly devoted to the study of pop culture and social justice issues and no one reads the classics or, um, learns basic 20th century history. However, there is no problem with science or engineering or business departments, which presumably find plenty of time to teach young adults about the Holocaust in between calculus and cell biology or whatever they're doing. (But maybe they're suspiciously indoctrinating young minds about climate change instead?)

Also, Emma Sulkowicz probably doesn't know how to spell "Auschwitz" because she did a performance art project for her MA thesis.

If you're gonna give up, give up soon:

http://chronicle.com/article/On-the-Academic-Job-Market/233559

In most disciplines, at least half of the assistant professorships went to candidates who were A.B.D. — having finished "all but dissertation" — or had graduated during the previous calendar year[...] At least three-quarters of tenure-track jobs for assistant professors are filled by scholars no more than four years removed from earning their Ph.D.s. In many fields, that proportion surpasses 80 percent.

i'll be at the 3 year mark this december. and considering how poorly the last few years have gone i think 3 years (4 if you count my ABD year) is plenty.

is there a thread somewhere on ilxor.com that isn't visibel to the public where we can whinge about horribly-conducted job searches and the general awfulness that comes with seeking a faculty position?

it might save everyone a lot of grief if tenure were awarded at birth to rich kids and the children of the already tenured to accept or reject when they come of age, depending on how they want to spend their time as adults. pretending that the extreme unfairness afflicting the rest of the US doesn't apply to the academy doesn't do anyone disadvantaged any favors, much less help fix the unfairness itself

hard not to wonder sometimes, especially regarding the humanities, what scholarship / higher learning might look like if we acted like intelligence were equally distributed among all the classes, instead of conveniently concentrated in rich connected families. but that's silly talk

huh?

i've met much a lower percentage of tenure-track and tenured faculty who come from poor families than i've met people in general who come from poor families. if my experience is not somehow unique, and this is a trend, then I wonder what the academy in general and the humanities in particular would be like if it were less dominated by people who grew up privileged or at least financially secure. if my experience is an exception, and not the rule, how unlucky i am

doesn't it have more to do w/ it being harder for people without family support to begin -- and more important, finish -- graduate school? once you're over that hurdle, i'm not sure if there are any bigger barriers to the tenure track to people from poor or working-class backgrounds..... of course it's nearly impossible for /anyone/ to get tenure-track jobs these days.

maybe i'm naïve though. i honestly don't know the backgrounds of all my professors in any detail. a few of them are following in their parents' footsteps (they were faculty brats), but a few of them definitely had working-class origins (parents were farmers/factory workers).