Never Say We Don’t Take Care of Your Tummy
If you are a regular reader, you know that we at Post Academic have a deep appreciation for free food, or at least cheap food. Arnold has devoted a whole post to the care and feeding of your grad student, and Adam Ruben, author of Surviving Your Stupid Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School, devotes much of his book to tips on finding free food.
Meanwhile, one PhD has taken the pursuit of free food to a whole new level and has turned it into a possible Post Academic Profession. Mike Prerau, a PhD in Neuroscience, began the Website the Food Monkey to share food deals with others. Eventually, the Food Network gave him a call.
Here’s his audition video, complete with free food tips for any academics, post academics, and lovers of free food in Boston:
Resources: EditTeach.org
This isn’t really a recap of the past week’s pieces on editing tests, but, since Caroline has been all over the topic, I thought I’d give a brief shout out to the wonderful, comprehensive website EditTeach.org, which is very helpful in a self-explanatory way. It’s pretty much a one-stop resource for anyone who wants to find out what goes into being an editor, whether you’ve edited before but need to brush up on skills that have gone rusty or if you’re a complete novice looking for some of the tricks of the trade. The site is chock full of useful links to what you’ll need to at least think about if you wanna be an editor, including some primers for various formatting styles, from AP to Chicago to MLA. EditTeach.org also covers important professional issues such as diversity in the workplace, First Amendment protections, and journalistic ethics. Of particular interest to post academics who might be interested in changing professions are some lists of average salaries for copyeditors, graphic artists, and photographers.
But for my money–though EditTeach.org is free!–the editing and basic current events tests are the best, most entertaining aspects of the site. There’s a test of the 100 most common usage errors, deciphering, you know, the correct occasion to use there/their/they’re and that sort of thing. There are some other tests, like ones for proper AP style and various sorts of subject tests. It’s geeky fun, and you can tell yourself that you’re helping yourself professionally by doing them! Which you actually might be.
The Alcoholic Horndog Tenured Professor Stereotype: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Here’s the latest in the Post Academic series “The Alcoholic Horndog Tenured Professor Stereotype,” which reviews movies that have helped contribute to the bad reputation of professors. Each movie is analyzed in terms of Hot Pepper Rating, Fashion Sense, Likeliness of Having an Undergrad Piece on the Side, Boozing and Drugging Quotient, Financial Fakery, Teaching Talent (or Lack Thereof), and Quotations. Then the stereotypes are debunked, lest you mistake your professor for an Alcoholic Horndog. Today’s installment covers the movie version of Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in which Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor guzzle and gorge on every piece of scenery in sight.
Meet the Professors: George, a history professor saddled with a dull job and a lame home life full of brawls with his wife Martha.
Hot Pepper Rating: Low, low, low.
Fashion Sense: Perhaps one of the schleppiest professor characters caught on film.
Likeliness of Having an Undergrad Piece on the Side: Low. Few would get near him unless they had a serious Daddy Complex.
Boozing and Drugging Quotient: No dialogue beats this film when it comes to capturing sheer drunkenness. See the quotations below.
Mental Condition: Speaking of Daddy Complexes, Martha is the daughter of the president of George’s university, which is the kind of incestuous job situation that might drive anyone to booze. These two are so bonkers that they manage to infect a younger professor and his wife who unwittingly go to their house after a party.
Financial Fakery: Pretty authentic here. Usually the quotations appear last, but one line in particular says so much: “I hope that was an empty bottle, George! You can’t afford to waste good liquor, not on YOUR salary!”
Teaching Talent: It’s a good thing the audience doesn’t get the opportunity to see George at work in the classroom. To extrapolate from the script, he’d probably wind up passed out with his head stuck in a wastebasket.
Quotations: “You can take over a few classes from the older men, but until you start plowing pertinent wives, you really aren’t working. The broad, inviting avenue to man’s job is through his wife, and don’t you forget it.”
“George is bogged down in the history department. He’s an old bog in the history department! That’s what George is. A bog! A fen! A GD Swamp! Swamp! Hey, swamp! Hey, swampy!”
Conclusion: This movie will give aspiring professors and maybe even a few current ones nightmares. Many of those nightmares will involve swamps. If you’re considering going into the profession, and your family members bring it up, change the subject quickly or make them watch “Tenure” as an antidote.
How to Handle an Editorial Test, Part 2: During the Test
Two days ago, Post Academic gave tips for anyone who faces an editorial test, which is usually the first step to applying for a job as an editor, copy editor, or proofreader. Now here are tips to help you make it through the test while the clock is ticking:
Pace yourself. Speaking of, editorial tests are usually timed. Not only will you be graded on how many errors you catch, but you will also be graded on how quickly you can edit. Successful editors can strike a balance between the two. It’s fine if you can produce perfect copy, but not if you take all day to do it. Publishers have deadlines to meet.
Read the instructions for the test. Any employer wants to know if you can follow directions. I cannot tell you how many people shot themselves in the proverbial foot by not paying attention.
Go over the document multiple times. Truth is, you will not catch every error in a single pass, unless you are the best editor in the world. Read through the document once to catch the big, glaring errors. Then read through it for more subtle errors.
More after the jump! Caricature of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo from Kay’s Portraits, public domain on Wikimedia Commons.
How to Handle an Editorial Test, Part 1: Before the Test
Yeah, you thought you were done with tests when you chose to enter the Hamster World. Not so. If you decided to parlay your Humanities MA or PhD into an editorial career, you will likely encounter the dreaded editorial test as you apply to jobs. Here are some tips to prepare for yet another test:
Get to know the editorial test format. Editorial tests are administered to applicants as a weed-out process. Not only does the employer want to know if you can catch edits, but the employer also wants to know if you can handle the content they publish. Typically, you will have to edit a piece of content that the employer has published before, only the employer has packed it with errors for you to find.
Ask for a copy of the employer’s style guide. Before you take any editorial test, you need to know the employer’s standards. The employer might not give you the company’s entire style guide, but he or she will probably say if the company uses The Chicago Manual of Style or the AP Stylebook.
More after the jump! Still from the movie Rock River Renegades. Public domain on Wikimedia Commons.
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So What Are You Going to Do with That College Degree?
I am a little late to give pats on backs to our recent college grads, but UC Irvine just had its commencement ceremonies this past weekend. I guess it’s better late than never to say, “Congratulations”! Since Post Academic is geared more towards career/journeyman scholars than undergrads, we don’t have much advice to give ‘em unless they are heading for grad school or thinking about it. But of course, there’s plenty of advice and doomsday scenarios for the Class of 2010 (and beyond), so I figured I would compile some of the things we’ve found.
"David Brooks" courtesy of the Library of Congress (public domain)
David Brooks column in The New York Times, “History for Dollars”
Summary: A conservative who proves that liberals aren’t the only ones who complain, Brooks sticks up for humanities majors, despite the odds facing them in the big, bad real world. Trying to find what’s practical about the humanities, like the ability to read-and-write and the skill of identifying analogies (that’s scraping the barrel a bit?), Brooks boils down the need for lit and history types to understand and interpret what he calls “The Big Shaggy”, which basically describes the messy, inexplicable aspects of behavior and emotion that drive people to achieve the highest highs and lowest lows. That the well-educated Brooks, who has a bigger bully pulpit for such things than just about anyone, can’t describe what he’s talking about in any more precise way than “The Big Shaggy” doesn’t exactly bode well for future humanists, does it?
More about “The Big Shaggy” and what your college degree might earn you below the fold…
Academics Breeding *WITH* Academics, Where the Magic Happens
Last week, I came up with the only empirically proven thesis that academics breed with academics, following up on Caroline’s post testing whether the claim that academics breed academics was true. Based on the very small sample sizes of our polls, my premise seems to hold (67% of academics did breed with other academics, though there are only 6 voters!), while responses to Caroline’s question seem to show that becoming an academic isn’t necessarily part of a family inheritance (only 20% of academics answering the poll are children of academics). To expand a little more on my assertion that academics tend to breed with academics (at least in the humanities), I wanted to give you a peek into some of the situations and scenes where academic mating rituals happen, like the seminar room and the department party. Of course, none of what I describe below has *ever* happened to me! No, never…at least the creepy, stalker jr. parts!
The Seminar Room: Unless you’ve come to grad school already paired up, it’s likely the first time you’ll meet folks with similar interests and might appear vaguely attractive to you at some point is in class. Without the built-in social scene of a dorm to force you to meet others, the classroom might be the only place where you get to know people who aren’t your new random roommate–and when I say classroom, I don’t mean the ones where you’re teaching starry-eyed, easily impressionable undergrads! So at the same time you’re sizing up who’s likely to be your intellectual competition offering jargony answers when the prof opens up her lecture for discussion, you might be keeping an eye out for someone with an appealing fashion sense, cool stationery, compatible books, or whatever floats your boat. Of course, you probably glance past the more seasoned grad students, since they intimidate you, with that extra year of seminar papers under their belts. And you also mentally cross off your list people who are interested in topics you have no idea about, particularly those freaky Medievalists or all those Renaissance types who remind you too much of high school and college overachievers.
More about the places where academic mating rituals take place, below…
The Decline of Film Criticism: A Glimpse of the Future for Academia?
Film critics have been laid off in droves as newspapers change their structure. Understandably, the critics who have been laid off aren’t happy about it, and the debate regarding the role of the film critic sounds similar to the debate regarding the role of the academic, especially in the humanities.
In the latest Vanity Fair, James Wolcott describes the responses of critics scorned, and one in particular surprised me. On a panel, Richard Schickel from Time magazine said, “I don’t honestly know the function of reviewing anything.”
I don’t know Mr. Schickel’s work. He may be a brilliant writer, but those who want to keep their jobs ought to be able to justify what they do. If he can’t think of a function for reviewing anything, then why is he a reviewer?
Perhaps if film critics could better justify what they do, more of them would still have work. I can think of many ways film critics do the public a service. For starters, they save us money by telling us if a movie is worth watching or worth renting. They are also cultural historians. Pauline Kael’s “For Keeps” is, in my opinion, a work of history as much as a work of film criticism. Why didn’t Schickel try to make a better worded, more sophisticated version of this argument?
Wolcott hat-tips Roger Ebert because he was able to adapt, and now he has created a niche for Twitter film criticism. It’s proof that you can’t make your job last solely by complaining and navel-gazing. You must be able to justify what you do and be willing to adapt. After all, Ebert hasn’t changed what he’s done for a living. He certainly hasn’t sold out. He’s just finding new ways to reach new audiences.
A manual film projector with a mini-film and box. Photo by Mattia Luigi Nappi from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
Broke-Ass Schools: The Tenure Track
(Programming note: Our regular readers might be expecting the week-in-review we usually do on Sundays, but those same folks might have noticed that that Caroline and Arnold–along with Dr. E. Clair this week!–have been taking turns posting every other day, instead of both posting daily. That’s because we’re switching to a more relaxed pace for the summer, since our academic audience out there is probably doing more fun stuff during their vacations and there might not be as much news to cover during the next few months–plus, as post academics, we’re also used to a slightly slower summer schedule, even if it doesn’t apply to us any more! Anyway, it would be pretty lame recapping a week when there isn’t too much material to work with, so we’ll just be offering regular posts on Sundays through the summer.)
Right now, we’re going to try and launch the first “Broke Ass Schools” spinoff–”Broke-Ass Schools: The Tenure Track”. Here’s where we could use your help too: Please pass along any questions about tenure you might have, as well as news stories about the tenure process you seen online. Also, any kinds of info you know about the bureaucratic absurdities of tenure would also be much appreciated. Things we’d like to cover include:
* The differences between how the process works at various institutions
* Quantitative vs. qualitative assessment
* How much crazy documentation do you really have to fill out?
* Is it true that some schools *never* tenure Asst Profs, and what do you do if you’re teaching there?
* What happens if or when you don’t get tenure?
We would prefer that any leads you send our way aren’t too personal or scandalous, because we don’t really want to trade in gossip or get anyone in trouble! But learning about the process would be helpful in demystifying it as well as maybe possibly practical for folks putting together their tenure files. And who knows, maybe this series of posts can become a support group for those of you in that stressful position?
"DePaul University's downtown Chicago campus" by Kmf164 (Creative Commons license)
To get things started, we came across this story posted on Inside Higher Ed about some discrepancies about the tenure process at DePaul U in Chicago. Apparently, what generated the controversy was the tenuring of 2 faculty members who were initially not on the tenure track, but were placed on it and became made men, so to speak. The beef that other faculty had was not so much with these individual folks, but with a process they viewed as arbitrary, since the tenured faculty in question never had to face the rigorous review that begins when you start on the tenure track. The quote-of-quotes in this matter belongs to Associate Prof of computing and new media, Robin Burke, who described the decision made at discretion of the Provost as “the Leona Helmsley tenure process”–as in “only the little people are reviewed for tenure”, riffing off the Queen of Mean’s chestnut that “only the little people pay taxes”.
As the story points out, this one-time deal isn’t exactly starting a trend at DePaul where quality adjuncts and contingent faculty are going to get similar treatment. It’s more a matter of self-preservation and self-promotion for a program to hold onto some valuable contributors. That does beg the question, though, as to why this can’t happen more often, where people who have offered a lot to a given program and have proven themselves can’t get reclassified and promoted up the ranks or given a chance to do so by the dept opening up a new line for ‘em (though I’m imagining that budgets don’t exactly allow for this). The cynical answer would be that adjuncts and contingent faculty will continue to teach for you because they have to, so why pay more for their services?
Footnotes: Gleek edition
Footnotes is a semi-regular series that collects some stories and postings that are semi-relevant to the semi-academic focus of the blog. This time around, we found a bunch of music-related things we’ve read–or, in this case, watched–online. And, if you’re asking, no, I’m not a Gleek myself, but we did get snookered by the American Idol lead-in ploy into watching a few episodes.
"Glee premiere party" by Kristin Dos Santos (Creative Commons license)
Glee Club, Copyright Infringers?: I’m not an intellectual property lawyer (obviously), but this posting by Yale Law fellow Christina Mulligan on the Balkinization blog about Glee and imagined copyright infringement seems kinda humorless in an academic kinda way. It is pretty interesting, though, that Mulligan uses the hit show as a case study for copyright law, surmising that if the fictional Glee kids really did produce that faux “Vogue” video of Sue Sylvester, they would be owing Madonna something like $150,000. But by trying to carry over her hypothetical example over to real life, Mulligan overlooks the realities of the culture industry: I imagine the actual licensing of all the pop hits on the show is legally airtight and done with the permission of the copyright holders as cross-promotion that helps both the original artists and the show. Put it this way: I’m betting that whoever licensed “To Sir with Love” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” for the season finale aren’t worrying so much about dreamed-up copyright transgressions, not when the soundtrack to the show is the #1 downloaded album on iTunes.
Or maybe Mulligan is just trying to become a Glee scriptwriter on the sly, because an episode with the glee club having to stage a fundraiser to pay off licensing fees after being caught for infringing on, say, Hall and Oates’s catalog sounds like it could work?
Librarians Gaga for Gaga: And if Mulligan had her wish, Lady Gaga would have to go after these U Washington information studies folks for some kind of violation. Their geeky revamping of “Poker Face” into something about search databases and catalogs (see below) is clever enough, even if it’s not as impressive as the choreographed “Telephone” redux by the U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. If there’s one thing Lady Gaga knows, any free promotion at the expense of a little copyright infringement is better than paying for it.
Classics Rock: There’s little chance that the band Glass Wave will be fretting about copyright infringement or piracy violations by Gleeks or YouTube amateurs, though they’ve been cribbing the classics–no doubt out of copyright! That’s because the great books-inspired kinda rock made by this band of Stanford and UCLA lit profs is anything but the stuff of pop music, with songs that are supposed to turn “old stories into new forms” and “revitalize the source texts that inspire the music”. According to that trendsetting tastemaker Inside Higher Ed, the band supposedly combines 1970s prog rock sound with the Western canon, evidenced by songs named after Ophelia, Mrs. Bennet, and Lolita. For scholars invested in lit, they seem to take the music end even more seriously, as Stanford Prof Robert Harrison explains: “This kind of music really stands or falls on how much it translates into aesthetic pleasure,” he says. “It has to succeed musically first and foremost. The lyrics can be absolutely fantastic. But if the music sucks, it’s going nowhere”. I’m tempted to put my music critic hat on right now, but you can judge for yourself if the music stands or falls on the YouTube below.
