Advice…

Now here’s some advice that’s actually useful:

You probably associate fads with fashion and junior high school, but fads are very much a part of modern academic culture. Whole disciplines and sub-disciplines rise and fall in popularity, as do certain ideas and personalities, the influence of which will often cross disciplinary boundaries. The pernicious effects of this faddishness are most often felt by those who study something that is out-of-fashion at the time they enter the job market. The most savvy (if un-idealistic) graduate students will choose their programs of study and dissertation topics with an eye to what is fashionable. Just hope that your choice is still fashionable a decade hence.

via 100 reasons not to go to graduate school.

 

Accountability Regimes and Academic Life

Great article by Gaye Tuchman in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, “The Future of Wannabe U,” in which she continues her analysis of the accountability regime that drives the academic life:

Annually, other job and tenure candidates list how many articles and books they have published, how many talks they have delivered (including how many to which they were invited, and by whom), how many students they have advised and taught. Now and again, senior professors, writing letters to evaluate a candidate’s suitability to get or keep a job, provide their own lists. Sometimes they, too, are so intent on constructing them that they forget to discuss a candidate’s intellectual contributions. Last year, when presenting a distinguished-research award, a top Wannabe administrator noted that the recipient had published well more than 100 articles. He never said why those articles mattered.

Intellectual Labor: Adjunct Hulk

A twitter feed about life as an adjunct, ADJUNCT HULK:

HULK ONLY GRADING 150 PAPERS TONIGHT. SO HULK HAVE PLENTY TIME TO LOOK FOR OTHER POSITIONS. OTHER ADJUNCT POSITIONS!!!

This is a good one:

HULK THINK JOB AT UNIVERSITY OF PHOENIX SOLVE ALL HULK’S PROBLEMS. HULK AS JANITOR AT PHOENIX WOULD MAKE MORE MONEY THAN ADJUNCT!!!

Read more here and a good interview with Mark Bousquet, “Higher Exploitation,” in the Minnesota Review, here

Job Interviews in the Bedroom (Awkward, at best)

Good discussion at The Philosopher Smoker about conducting interviews in hotel bedrooms/suites and sexism:

Over at Leiter, there’s been some interesting discussion about interviewing in bedrooms. Robert Allen says,

I should have thought that we philosophers were a little more relaxed in our dealings with each other than to fuss over interview settings (or even “stares and worse,” i.e., boys being boys). Whatever happened to being of good cheer and leaving the professionalism to the attorneys and politicians?

It has been my experience that “boys will be boys” is shorthand for “men are assholes, and you should put up with it, because they’re men and they like having fun at your expense.” This is one of the things I hate about being a man.

And I hate this “good cheer” argument more than anything. Why does everyone else have to have good cheer in the face of what an asshole you are? What happened to “good cheer yourself, and don’t be an asshole”? You can start by conducting your interviews sitting up, with shoes on like a civilized person, and not in a room dedicated to sleeping and/or fucking.

There’s much to agree with here. By the way, why is it every time I turn around somebody is complaining about Brian Leiter? Just saying.  Read the rest if the post and ensuing discussion over here

TNR review of Mark C Taylor’s “unbelievably misguided book”

TNR review of Mark C Taylor’s latest book about higher education :

The syndrome has become all too common. A provocative op-ed piece appears in a major newspaper (for preference, The New York Times). Its logic is fragile and its evidence is thin, but the writing is crisp and the examples are pungent, and the assault on sacred cows arouses a storm of discussion (much of it sharply critical, but no matter). It goes viral. And almost immediately, publishers comes calling. “This should be a book,” they coo, and the author, entranced by a bit of sudden fame (not to mention, perhaps, a decent advance), eagerly agrees. He or she sets to work, and soon enough the original 800 words expand to 50,000. But far from reinforcing the original logic and evidence, the new accretions of text only strain them further, while smothering the original provocations under thick layers of padded anecdote, pop sociology and oracular pronouncement. Call the syndrome Friedmanitis, after a prominent early victim, the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.

Just in time for the new academic year: on writing your own job description

It’s difficult to think about it while we still have three to four precious weeks of summer left. But on behalf of all the people who will begin full time teaching in the fall, I ask you to conjure — for a second — a week in mid-semester. Feel the pain as you stay up half the night to grade your papers! Experience the fear as you go into class half prepared! Recall being fatally short of sleep as you sit, dazed, through yet another search committee meeting, having driven yourself unsparingly through 100 applicant files the day before! Conjure the self-righteousness and hypocrisy, as you lecture yet another student that s/he could get hir work in on time if only s/he would get organized!

Yeah, baby. The problem is, there is almost no one I know in academia who has a job description that would give them a reasonable sense of where a professor’s job begins and ends. Couple this with the reality of being tenure-track (or worse, a full-time visitor), which often seems like an endless exercise in pleasing everybody, all the time, in every way we can. Top it off with the fact that we learn early on not to complain about being overworked because some jackass will look at us piously and say, “You just have to learn to say no to things!” (subtext: say no — except to me) as if you are overworked because, somewhere along the line, you forgot to say your safeword.

(Read the rest at Tenured Radical)

Tenure, RIP?

A recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Tenure RIP?  makes for interesting reading.  I’ve pasted it below.

Tenure,RIP
Some time this fall, the U.S. Education Department will publish a report that documents the death of tenure. Innocuously titled “Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2009,” the report won’t say it’s about the demise of tenure. But that’s what it will show.Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The new report is expected to show that that proportion fell even further in 2009, dropping below one-third. If you add graduate teaching assistants to the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere quarter of all instructors.

New Open Access Kant Journal

A new open-access, peer reviewed Kant journal, Kant Studies Online.  Details:

Kant Studies Online publishes articles written in English on all aspects of Kant’s works including historically informed studies, applications of Kantian thought to contemporary problems, the relationship between Kantian and Neo-Kantian thinking, and detailed scholarly works on interpretation of Kant’s works. It will also include review articles of secondary works on Kant. An issue of the journal will be deemed to exist whenever an accepted article is published. The journal is edited by Gary Banham in association with an editorial board and is published in the spirit of the open access movement. Whilst its target audience is academic philosophers and students it aims to attract non-academic readers by making all its material freely available without restriction.

(h/t Self and World)

Middlesex Saved?

UPDATE: Peter Hallward posted an extended explanation of the decision making process behind the move. I’m not sure how much it clarifies the situation, but it’s something.

This has been going around, but I find the news of “salvation” of Middlesex a bit strange – what exactly was saved? Senior staff? I’m sure they would have found jobs without the move to Kingston. Graduate students? They weren’t kicked out, they would still finish their degrees. The program? It’s still going to be closed. How is that a “victory” again? I tend to agree with this commenter:

I can not see how this latest development could be considered a ‘victory.’

There are some who have come out of it well, namely the high-salaried senior staff. But their sense of victory must certainly be dampened by a deeper feeling that they have thrown away far more than they have gained.

Given the strength of the campaign and the support from far afield throughout, I can’t see how this is a moment for celebration. The support that has come from philosophers worldwide is for the campaign to save philosophy at Middlesex, it was not intended to be diverted and used to save the jobs of just a few members of the department. It is shameful. The claim in this statement that the new development at Kingtson might offer ‘hope’ to other humanities departments facing cuts is empty. A gesture to fan away the smell of bad conscience. Anyone can see through it.

How do the ‘saved’ senior members of staff expect to be able to defend their own writings in public again? Particularly two of them who have always claimed a Left stance.

Rather than cheering, this leaves me uncomfortable, depressed and deflated. Some of those involved may have a new career to celebrate but I would not want to be in their position for all the money at Kingston.

Academia As Commons

I received this in one of the edu-factory email updates (full text and downloadalbe pdf here).  Now, I don’t really know if say, philosophical blogging, is going to amount to a sea-change within the discipline that many insist upon, but this article about open access technology and higher ed is interesting.

Academia as a Commons: How open technologies can help higher education expand collaboration, innovation and public access to knowledge.

By David Bollier

(David Bollier has been the Croxton Lecturer at Amherst College for the past semester, teaching a course, “The Rise of the Commons.” Below are remarks that he delivered at the Robert Frost Library on April 26, 2010).

I realize that any mention of digital technologies and copyright law can induce a certain mental stupor among many people. The topic is rife with many complicated legal and technical issues. But I believe that we commoners have too much at stake to leave copyright law to the lawyers and the Internet to the techies.

The very mission and identity of academia is implicated in the future of digital technologies, the Internet and copyright law. At stake is the ability of colleges and universities to act as inter-generational stewards of knowledge? to assure that their own scholarly output is freely accessible and usable?. to curate knowledge in better ways and to disseminate it as broadly as possible and to foster innovative research and learning.

Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a messy interregnum between the age of centralized mass media dinosaurs and the distributed, open, participatory platforms of the Internet. We are caught in a political and cultural morass filled with constant disruption, confusion, angst and uncertainty. There is one thing that I am certain of, however: This is the time to seize the initiative. Rarely have the forces for progressive change in education had such wide, inviting openings.