Student Loans: Now With Punchlines
Are any of you keeping up with “Last Comic Standing”? One of the finalists, a comedian named Roy Wood Jr., has a clever bit on student loans:
Yes! It is the for-profit model of education at work! Full refund for material not learned! Or, even better, full refund for jobs not received. Then grad students (who always learn all the class content) can get in on this deal, too.**If Hulu shows the full clip, the student loan part starts about one minute in.
The Tenure Debate, Again: You First. No, You First.
More or Less Bunk took a page from Bill Maher and set a New Rule: “Any professor who thinks tenure should be scrapped must give up theirs first.”
That rule sure would stop the endless circular debates that never result in anybody doing anything about the number and quality of jobs in academia (or the education provided to students, for that matter). There are a few individuals, though, who are either letting go of tenure or just letting go, period. Consider the following examples:
1. The Self-Described “Worst Professor Ever”: This philosophy PhD got a job and left it. On her way out, she torched her PhD while wearing a Bettie Page wig. Best of all, she shared the photos with the online masses. That’s the best job departure since the one seen in the Dave Chappelle stoner opus Half Baked.
2. The Tenured Prof Who Moved for Love: This professor entered the Hamster World when his girlfriend decided she wanted to get a PhD herself. He said, “It wouldn’t be a story if I were a woman, because thousands of women do this every year.” True, that. But you don’t see professors giving up a tenured job for the Hamster World, either.
3. Leaving Academia and Escape From the Ivory Tower. Okay, no Bettie Page references or romantic undercurrents, but solid advice for anyone wondering what else can be done with a PhD.
The words and actions of just a few people show that tenure may not be the end-all, be-all for the intellectually inclined. Again, I am a Hamster, not an academic, and I am pro-tenure because I don’t want market forces to determine who teaches what when. But skepticism toward institutions is always healthy. Skepticism built more than a few academic careers, didn’t it?
Even more awkward academia-related interactions
As promised, I’m continuing with my series of *even more* awkward academia-related interactions. While the last post dealt with the uncomfortable run-ins that might happen with people you don’t know well or only a little bit, this piece covers some squirm-inducing experiences I’ve had with people I know pretty well to very well. The thing is, those crossed signals can sometimes be worse unbeknownst to you, because it’s easy to take your interactions with the folks you’re familiar with for granted…
"Union Station Urinals, Toronto" by Jason Doucette (Creative Commons license)
Don’t get stuck in the bathroom: So I was attending MLA a few years ago, when I opened the door to a convention hall bathroom only to notice one colleague of mine ask another colleague of ours about his job interviews. I was in a purely voyeuristic position (*not* in that way!), because they were over at the urinals or on the other side of something or other and couldn’t have known that I was there and listening. Anyhow, the first colleague–someone I know fairly well and known from this point on as “PQ” for “Prying Questioner” –asked with brutal shamelessness the question most of us never ask in such a bald-faced way: “Where did you interview?” I don’t know if the other fellow was caught off-guard or is a networking-type himself, but he answered that he was interviewing at one of the best, best schools in the country! Now “PQ” was probably the one who was blindsided, since I can imagine that someone who’s nosy enough not have any scruples is also prone to measure himself against others.
Maybe they didn’t mind getting stuck in the bathroom together since they were comparing notes, but it’s not anywhere I’d want to be trapped, forcing to answer with no escape hatch. And yet, I got my comeuppance for the spying, even though I fled the men’s room…
Find out how I got my comeuppance below the fold…
Lawyers Gone Wild … Or At Least Post Academic
Another burst of “Advanced Degrees Are for Suckers” articles has hit the Internet. The Wall Street Journal profiled various law school grads who are un- or underemployed, and Gawker rebroadcast the story with a beyond-depressing image of a guy hanging himself.
Suicide snark and scary job shrinkage aside, the WSJ article had some optimism. The lawyers are starting to go Post Academic:
Bar associations say more lawyers are asking for tips on ways to apply their skills in other fields.
When the New York State Bar Association originally created the Committee on Lawyers in Transition, it was meant to help attorneys re-join the profession after an absence. But when the economy declined in 2008, the committee changed its focus to help attorneys who were laid off and exploring other industries.
A law degree is well known for being flexible, and is it really a sign of failure that lawyers are taking their skills elsewhere? Even the guy in the WSJ article who is a comedian is using his legal abilities. After all, a keen understanding of slander must help anyone in charge of writing punchlines.
More after the jump! Image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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More awkward academia-related interactions
"Hotel elevators" by Wesha (Public Domain)
My last post about talking to the guy on the airplane about academia–and postacademicinnyc’s comment about how to extricate oneself from such chit-chat–got me thinking about other awkward conversations I’ve been in or seen. This time, we’ll limit the uncomfortableness to academic-on-academic action. I guess the anecdotes would be more timely for convention-interview time, but these cringingly entertaining stories might whet your appetite for what’s just around the corner. (By the way, the new 2011-12 academic job wiki is already up!)
After reading the stories, you can decide how you want to read the “more” in the title, whether in quantity–as in “more examples of awkward interactions”–or in degree–as in “more embarrassingly awkward interactions.” Let us know about your own good (or bad) ones, too.
Getting stuck in the elevator: This awkward situation involved my friend being caught in the elevator with someone who had just interviewed him at MLA. I was in there with them and happened to know the interviewer socially, better than my friend did actually. So in some ways, I could be to blame here, because my greetings to the interviewer probably set a friendly, casual tone that may have gotten my friend in trouble…
You’ll have to go below the fold to find out what happened!
How Pending Legislation Can Affect Colleges
My rough impression is that education in the United States has not been much of a political priority for the last few decades. Much of the little debate that does take place is dictated by the libertarians, who have been more active than the left on this issue. It seems that the most powerful new idea brought to these debates has been, lamentably enough, the privatization of education. To call the right’s agenda privatization is only part of the story, though, since capitalism has been accompanied by its usual paradoxical bedfellow, statism. (In his histories of the rise of capitalism, Perry Anderson keeps coming back to the point that the growth of capital markets depended on the extension of state authority, rather than on democratization. Recent history shows that this process is ongoing, our current weird twins being national testing and charter schools.)
The latest chapter in this history has been the education initiatives currently before Congress. I’ll take a quick look at these, and consider possible implications for higher education.
Congress is dealing with the problem that state budget declines will cause between 100,000 and 300,000 teachers to lose their jobs this year. A first attempt to provide funding, known as “Edujobs,” failed after Republicans and even some Democrats have denounced the proposed funding as “bailout.” (Consider the baffling logic of this attack: If state governments announced that they were having trouble paying for some of the unfunded Homeland Security mandates, and Congress stepped up to fund those mandates, would anyone have dared to call it a bailout?)
More after the jump!
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“Top Grad Student” Round 3, Extracurricular Activities
"Henry Louis Gates, Jr." by Jon Irons (Creative Commons license)
So it looks like our Engineering, History, and Physics contenders for the title of “Top Grad Student” got the dreaded “Your application has been…rejected!” from round 2, which really speeds up our virtual/reality show competition. That got me thinking about who the hosts and judges for “Top Grad Student” would be. I’d say that our head judge would have to be Henry Louis Gates, because he’s definitely got crossover appeal with those family tree specials and is on TV all the time as it is. As for the eye-candy host, let’s mix things up gender-wise and go with our unofficial “Post Academic” mascot, James Franco–you wouldn’t believe how much random traffic we get from searches and links to our post about his grad school decision. And he went on “General Hospital” after all, so I think he’d do our show. Of course, these picks are slanted towards the humanities and men, so please give us your much better ideas in the comments section below for hosts, if you’re so inclined.
Now, onto round 3: The latest competition in our virtual/reality contest show involves the personal skills every grad student should possess. This round would involve two challenges. The first would have the grad student competitors throw a party–sponsored by Trader Joe’s, of course!–to see how and how well they might socialize among each other and with other peers. This part of the episode would also be the most entertaining, what with awkward wallflower behavior, the effects of cheap wine and generic foreign cheeses, and inappropriate relations you might not have expected that professional geeks would be capable of. The luxe “Top Grad Student” glorified dorm complex would probably be trashed and some unlikely pair of students might be found together, making life more uncomfortable for the hyper-driven contestants left.
The second and more important challenge would center around networking. Anyone who reads our site knows how queasy we get about networking, but would also realize that we realize how important it is both as a skill that can get your foot in the door as well as a powerful tiebreaker that might be what it takes to get you across the finish line. Our networking contest might be judged according to the following criteria:
1. How well s/he can explain her/his faculty to specialists
2. How well s/he can describe her/his project to people outside of the field
3. What her/his likability factor would be–or, conversely, whether s/he seems like a sleazy schemer
4. How many folks s/he talks to in any reasonably sustained way
5. Striking the right balance between tooting one’s own horn tastefully and being convincingly humble
While it would be easy to presume that a chatty humanities type would have an edge, especially since bullshitting is a skill you’ve gotta possess, keep in mind that being too full of one’s self and rubbing folks the wrong way would be the risk of schmoozing. Getting carried away with one’s own project and describing the finer points of critical theory could get you into trouble, much more so than a science-type who might be able to explain the stakes and objectives of her/his project. I think of this in terms of odds–the more stuff you say, the odds are greater that you might eventually say the wrong thing! Just know that a smooth talker doesn’t necessarily equate with being the best networking in our book.
So who moves onto round 4 and who’s gotta go back to doing job applications the old-fashioned way? Time to vote below!
Vote late, vote often: “Top Grad Student”, Round 2 polls close tomorrow!
For anyone who’s following our “Top Grad Student virtual/reality contest,” be sure to cast your vote for Round 2 before we post Round 3 tomorrow. Not that you care, but if any folks out there want our fake Engineering, English, History, and/or Physics contestants to advance, you better vote for ‘em. If you want to skip the premise for Round 2, “Curriculum Builder” linked above and just head to the poll, it’s below.
Academic Writing Fun With I Write Like
I Write Like is a nifty little site that lets you paste in a chunk of text and find out which famous author might turn out similar work.
Who knows if the results are randomly generated or tied to a complexity rating? But I thought it would be fun to plug in the classic examples of Bad Writing to find out who these academics wrote like.
First, a famous chunk from Homi Bhabha:
“If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalize’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.”
Hmmm …. let’s try Judith Butler and find out if we can crack the code:
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
I predicted that I Write Like would return a 404 error, but I guess not. Then again, I put in some of my own writing and found out that I write like David Foster Wallace, which is flattering, but I certainly do not write like Judith Butler, so I think they still need to work out a few bugs.
A Middle Ground Between Tenured Faculty and Adjuncts?
The New York Times set up a debate called “Rethinking College Tenure.” You’ve probably already read it, and it’s the usual Tenure Debate stuff, in which various types who should know something about the subject make their points, some dude whines that conservatives are oppressed and someone gently hints that tenured professors are lazy, oblivious or both. (Read Arnold’s in-flight adventure to figure out how to respond to that myth.)
If you read through the NYT articles again, you’ll notice a thread in which tenured faculty members are pitted against adjuncts, or a “more flexible” job model. If adjuncts are treated fairly and receive the pay and benefits they deserve, where does that put tenured professors? What’s the real difference between the two? Should there be a difference?
Or, are debates like these a manifestation of a divide-and-conquer strategy, a setup for a Tenure Vs. Adjunct Showdown? One of the writers, Mark C. Taylor, attempts to offer a “middle ground”:
It is a mistake to pose this question in all-or-nothing terms – either you have permanent tenured faculty or itinerant adjuncts. A middle ground will address most of the problems. After a trial period of three to five years, faculty members who merit promotion should be given seven-year renewable contracts. For this system to work effectively, these reviews must be rigorous and responsible.
Since I’m not an academic, a guaranteed job for three to five years followed by seven year periods sounds nice, especially since I’ve been through layoffs. But the Hamster World is a different matter since it is more subject to market forces, and Taylor’s solution doesn’t address how to protect academic freedom so that the market isn’t determining the curriculum. How does Taylor’s idea sound to you? If it sounds like BS, is a middle ground possible?
