Other than blog, that is. Jodi has a post on this, which has sparked some somewhat heated discussion. I started to write a comment but it got long enough that I figure it’s politer to post it here.
I thought the post was funny, and instructive in an over-the-top way. I do take issue with some of the comments in discussion, though. I agree that there’s nothing heroic or radical about going to grad school. On the other hand, I find Jodi’s remarks that every grad student knows what they’re in for as simply inaccurate.
I’m in my second year of a PhD program and I’m nearing thirty. I went to grad school because I didn’t know how to do anything else. I worked in NGOs as an organizer for several years but I couldn’t do the 50-80 hour work weeks anymore (and not in the sense of the high workload of academics either, I was out of the house the whole time and had very little flexibility). I was part of a unionization attempt to improve things at one place, and we lost. My options at that point were stay in the field or stay with my partner. I chose the latter, and worked really crap jobs (seven and eight bucks an hour for night shift) where I got laid off and fired repeatedly. I couldn’t find other work due to a combination of lack of marketable skills and employers being weirded out by resume. After about two years of this, grad school seemed like the only option. I was not aware of the employability aspects of grad school except in a dim way. Now, one could say, quoting or paraphrasing Jodi, that I “should be” or should have been “fully aware of [my] prospects and not delude [myself]” but that ought doesn’t help anyone with the is of the present conditions in the higher education industry. Similarly, I think Jodi’s simply wrong when she says the following about incoming or prospective graduate students:
“you know that you have a less than a 25% chance at a tenure track job in a 4 year college or university. You don’t go for the career. You go out of passionate idiocy, because you can’t think of yourself as doing anything else.”
This is undoubtedly true in some cases, but not in all. I didn’t know this coming in, and I didn’t feel like I had much of an alternative by the time I became more aware of this. In any case, between the 8$ night shift at the grocery store, I’ll take this gig, but for a lot of people in grad school we stay not so much because we can’t imagine doing anything else but rather because there’s not much of another economic option, at least not in the short term (2-5 years can be forever when it’s chronic unemployment and lack of insurance, especially when you want to start having kids) – the silent compulsion of the market operates in our industry too, making the move to something else given the economic circumstances some of us are in is a real trial.
Schools are not up front about this in anyway, grad programs being moneymaking and cheap labor institutions. I’m still happy to be here, compared to my other options – I like to teach, I generally like what I get paid to read and write, it’s nice to know I don’t have to job hunt again for a few years, and conditions are reasonable (but not incredible) compared to other jobs I’ve had. That doesn’t change the fact that in many ways conditions are poor and pay is low – I’m glad that one of the discussants, Candice, can live on $1200 a month in Chicago, but I had a really hard time living on that in Chicago, and I always had roommates. I want to suggest that that amount of money looks different when it feels temporary (as grad programs are quick to claim to keep grad students from getting too upset) and when you’re not trying to start a family. I also want to suggest that claims about and outrage over lowering standards of living and declining real wages aren’t compatible with justification of low wages in academic work without some rhetorical jumping through hoops.
And I think it’s really problematic when Jodi says “[i]f you get a job, it is an extraordinary privilege. You are not entitled to it–in the US no one is entitled to work.” One can’t be consistent and on the one hand morally decry the absence of a right to work then on the other uphold the status of a job in higher education as a privilege. That there is no entitlement to a job actually makes _every_ job a privilege according to Jodi’s argument here. I doubt she really thinks that or approves of it.
I expect that Jodi thinks that there is a moral right, so to speak, to employment but that this right doesn’t hold or doesn’t hold the same way in higher education – something about higher education is different from other work such that employment in higher education is _really_ a privilege, one with more substance (ie, one that is less morally problematic) than the being-a-privilege quality of every job according to her argument. That’s not the case, though. Just as there’s nothing heroic or radical about higher education work, there’s nothing special about it either. It’s waged labor like any other, no more and no less unique than any other.
All of that said, Jodi’s rule of thumb about making candidate need one criterion for hiring (such that ABDs are less likely to get selected than fully minted PhDs because the ABDs still have some access to things at their home U as students) strikes me as a decent upstanding way to proceed.
The above is part of why I don’t find defenses of tenure compelling – given present market trends, tenure is for a labor aristocracy that shades into lower and middle management. I’d rather see tenure ended and have security on the job result from unionization. If that happened the only people who’d end up less secure are faculty who serve as management (power to hire and fire excludes them from the bargaining unit), which wouldn’t trouble me at all.
Hey Nate,
Interesting thoughts, but I wonder about your unionization solution. What happens if the NLRB ruling on Nurses as managers ends up hitting academia as well, so that it’s not just “faculty who serve as management” who are excluded from the bargaining unit, but any faculty member with power over, say, a research assistant or a TA? Tenure seems like an obviously mixed bag, but I’m not sure unionization provides any real alternative at this point…
Solidarity,
Mike
Hey Nate–
A very intersting discussion, including the contributions over at i.cite.
I definitely agree that programs don’t sufficiently prepare students either for the job market or for interviews, and are not up front about students’ job prospects. While my university has a decent placement record, It certainly isn’t because they’ve given students good advice or made sure they knew what was expected of them and what they were in for. When I was interviewing, I asked what percentage of the program’s graduates were hired in tenure-track positions, and the director of graduate studies told me “all of them.” The only way that could be true is if she meant “all of them (except those who aren’t hired for tenure track jobs, or drop out).” Also, they typically tell us not to worry about publishing until we’ve finished with our dissertations.
I also know a number of students (not so much in my department, but in a department I’ve had a lot of contact with)feel compelled to lie to incoming students, to gloss over the abuse they’ve suffered as a result of the faculty’s and other students’ mental health problems, the low quality of the instruction and advice they receive, and the fact that graduate students shoulder the entire (!) undergraduate teaching load of the department. It takes new students a year or a year and a half to figure out how things really work in that (again, not my) department, and what their future prospects are.
On tenure. Tenure is only partially a job-security issue. It’s also a freedom of speech issue. I think unionization could conceivably or in principle provide a defense for faculty’s right to free speech, to follow the demands of their research against scholarly consensus, and to publish politically unpopular or dissenting work. But I’m not quite so willing to make arguments against the institution which serves those purposes at present. It may be dying, and it may not be worth doing too much to save, but I’m not sure it’s advisable to join in the chorus advocating the revocation of tenure.
hi Colin, Mike,
Thanks for your comments. I’m not an advocate of tenure abolition, and I certainly wouldn’t work toward ending it. I miss-spoke if that’s the impression I gave. Rather, defenses of tenure fail to move me and attacks on tenure don’t get me worked up, in part because my impression (based on only the sparest of anecdotal information) is that tenure is increasingly the privilege of management anyway – tenure or not, unionization is still terribly needed. As for the NLRB ruling, should that interpretation be extended that only applies to private universities, not public ones – public board rulings will likely follow in that event, but it will take a while because there’s one such board per state. Plus, the law is important as a tactical concern but doesn’t delimit our options. The UE has a campaign of university employees in North Carolina where the state is legally prohibited from signing union contracts. It’s certainly hard to organize in those conditions, but not impossible.
take care,
Nate
ps- Colin, I understand your feeling the need to take pains to say “this is NOT my department”, I think I know what department it is (we hung out w/ someone from that department when I visited you, didn’t we?), I would do exactly the same if I were you, which is I think indicative of the level of insecurity we feel in our jobs. Someone should set up a site with anonymous discussion forums for people in the university industry, analogous to retailworker.com to facilitate slightly less nervous and freer speech – not that I have anything bad to say personally! 🙂
Nate this is right on the money.
Sadly I’m someone who really knows ..
David, I thought of you as I was working on this. Yours is one situation I think of when I ever I encounter arguments – or, more often, gut level intuitions people hold – that there is anything resembling a meritocracy in the university industry. I’ve been meaning to write a post on that, intuitions of meritocracy, for a long time. Must get round to doing that.
How are you anyhow? It’s been ages. How’s Japan?
I’ve been meaning to write a post on that, intuitions of meritocracy, for a long time. Must get round to doing that.
Please, please. Do it. Do you take requests? There needs to be so much more discourse on the academic labor system as “job market.” The combined and uneven levels of hypocrisy, naivety, bad faith, and complacency in matters of academic/intellectual/teaching labor are, to be blunt, fucking obscene.
Cheers,
Andrew
hi Andrew,
You’re kind, and I agree completely. I’ll work on this when I can. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts too. Here’s one thing I wrote at least tangentially related to this a while ago –
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/07/10/is-the-structurally-absent-third/
which includes links to some other stuff.
There’s also this –
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/11/02/am-i-doing-here/
which I believe you commented on before (I assume it’s the same Andrew).
take care,
Nate
dress for success.
is it that it’s an academic doling out the advice to the lowly screw ups on how they are ensuring their own failure that’s disconcerting? it’s the most common thing in the world everywhere else. Everyone does this; this monologue and its mindset is a rite of passage to management, though normally the age for it is 27 or 28; your first WGA writing job, you can teach everyone how to pitch; you sell your first ten million dollar house, you can give lessons in ‘being a closer’; you’re hired as an associate at a law firm, you can give snarky lessons to interviewees for internships; after three months post promotion at Ogilvy and Mather, you’ve got advice for everyone how to dazzle in bizniz. You cross that all important line into management/money/status and suddenly everyone’s an idiot.
there was a great story in the New Yorker years ago called “The Target Audience”, two former inimical acquaintances from university, now professionals, seated together on a plane; they’re turning thirty and they’re just getting over that stage where they like to tell other people what they’re doing wrong that they themselves have done right. They now have intimations of what’s happened to them, how they got to be on “their dirty little errands” for the man.
it is a testimony to the anxiety though of a shrinking industry that signs of confidence now valued in expanding big money industries (sweatpants, leg swinging) are warned against, as likely, I suppose, to spark the fears of those in power of allowing a possibly better, more aggressive competitor into the field, as well as signifying the loss of the specific prestige that used to be associated with tweed.