Broke-Ass Schools: The Literal Edition
Just a quick post: When we started the “Broke-Ass Schools” section, we focused more on departments shutting down and the like. Our emphasis was on the “broke,” not the “ass.”
Well, imagine my surprise when I discovered that Texas A&M plans to save money by not stocking dorms with toilet paper.
The toilet paper elimination would begin in August 2011, giving the university enough time to inform the students and ensure that campus stores are stocking it. At that point, toilet paper will no longer be provided in residence hall bathrooms shared by up to four people; the university will continue to supply it in larger bathrooms, administrative office areas, and public areas.
Okay, fine. The TP will be in the bigger bathrooms, and learning how to buy TP is part of growing up. But I am hoping this is some sort of desperate PR ploy so Texas A&M can get attention for its budget troubles. When you’re starting to squeeze the Charmin, either your priorities have gone awry or you need a new accountant.
What the guy on the airplane wants to know about academia
Recently, I was on a flight and became embroiled in a conversation that spanned the entire four-hour homebound trip. Those who know me will know that I did not initiate the chit-chat, since I try to look as surly and petulant and indifferent as possible around strangers, often with earphones in. Anyhow, the chatty guy next to me started talking to me about sports, which I enjoyed, and we eventually started talking about our jobs. Of course, I let him take the lead and just asked questions so 1.) I didn’t have to talk a lot and 2.) I was actually interested in what he did. About three hours in(!), I figured it would only be fair and neighborly of me to offer some quid pro quo and tell him about my own professional life, since he asked–hey, it’s probably good practice for a mumblemouth like me, too, to be engaged in a conversation where I’m talking a little about myself, but making what I say seem like it’s about my audience. After all, isn’t that what an academic interview is all about?
So, I figured I could talk about basically what I blog about: the academic job market. We started with him being surprised–or, “vexed” in his words–that I could train for so long for a Ph.D. and not have a job. For all the talk among academic-types about a general ressentiment against us smarty-pants, I do think your average joe respects those of us who’ve strived to get our advanced degrees. In some ways, I think we misperceive what misperceptions about academics are out there, something that I learned in the course of my flight-long talk…
More below the fold…
Breaking Down Big Tasks Into Small Chunks
Stress and freak-outs are par for the course in academia. You have one goal, especially in the humanities–getting a tenure-track job. All or nothing. That’s why individual grades mean so little. The whole situation seems like pass-fail, with an inclination toward fail.
To avoid failing, you have to trick yourself by breaking up this monster task into small tasks. Otherwise, you’re going to feel overwhelmed.
In the Hamster World, someone usually gets paid to break down large tasks for you. These people are team managers or producers, and good ones figure out who does what and when it should get done. Sometimes, it feels like they’re telling you what to do, but it’s also their job to take a lot of the worrying off your shoulders so you can focus on the task at hand. Here’s how:
Start a daily checklist. I’ve evangelized checklists before, probably to the point where regular readers roll their eyes, but I mention them because they work. Building a checklist is a critical psychological exercise. Instead of thinking “I HAVE TO FINISH MY DISSERTATION OR I WON’T GET A JOB AND I’LL BE A FAILURE … WHERE’S A PAPER BAG FOR ME TO BREATHE IN???” sit down and make a list of what books you have to read, who you need to talk to and what chapters you need to write. Throw in what you need to do to submit the dissertation officially. It might not look so bad.
Image of Legos from Wikimedia Commons under public domain.
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Who’s the best writer? A journalist’s point of view
Now that I’m spending my days editing academic writing, I’m reminded of a post I wrote a few months back making the case for and against academics as superior writers to their counterparts in journalists and creative writers. Seeing as I’m reading lots of scholarly essays day in, day out, I’m pretty sure what I wrote before goes double for the strengths and weaknesses of academic as writers. (And if you are an academic reading this post, please, please, please follow the style sheet and formatting guidelines of whatever journal you’re submitting to–it makes the lives of your editors much easier!)
Anyhow, I figured now would be a fine time to continue our battle royale between academics, journalists, and creative writers. (Gee, we sure are having a lot of competition-style posts these days, though that’s not really the way we mousy post academics roll.) Anyway, it’s a little hard for me to write this installment in defense of journalists, because I’m not really one, unless you really stretch the category and count freelance music critics. But I guess I’ve worked for some news publications and know some journalists, so I can at least try to step into those shoes.
Strengths: The strengths of good journalistic writing can come through loud and clear and quickly. Excellent journalism combines a variety of skills that would seem completely antithetical to academic types, constructing a good narrative that includes lots of helpful information while remaining concise. Writing style is one thing, but journalists are probably underrated when it comes to their skill sets, which require them to take care of their assignments on time, letting go of an article when it’s done, and to actually work with other people…
More on cases for and against the journalist as the best writer…
How to Write on a Deadline
Say what you will about deadline pressure and the 9-to-5 grind, but a little pressure is good every now and then. As a writer and an editor in the Hamster World, I lost the luxury of waiting until I had a good idea to write a long time ago. Deadlines forced words out of me whether I liked it or not. Here’s how to cope if you’re in the kind of work environment where you’re a writer, but you can’t ask for an extension:
Admit it won’t be perfect. This is the hardest one, so we’ll get it out of the way now. Academics are perfectionists, and perfectionists and deadlines do not mix. In fact, they clash, and the deadline will win every time. Your editor or manager will be happier with you if you meet the deadline, not if you turn in perfect copy.
Treat the content like gold. When producing an article, content or copy, the style is much harder to handle than the substance. In most cases, however, what people want to see is the substance. How on earth do journalists generate so many articles? Because they focus on the substance, and they use a template that delivers the most important content–who? what? when? where? why?–first. Yes, it seems simple, but it’s popular because it works.
More tips after the jump! The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Movie still, public domain on Wikimedia Commons.
The Post Academic Overeducated Rockers Virtual Music Fest
One of the tell-tale signs of a grad student is an eccentric taste in music. That can manifest itself in various ways, from being a jazz archivist to classical experimenalist to indie rock snob to some combination of all-of-the-above. I’m going to tackle indie rock snob because that’s what I am. So in honor of all the great rock festivals that happen over the summer months all around the world, we’re gonna have the first annual “Post Academic Overeducated Rockers Virtual Music Fest,” with a lineup of esteemed underground bands that feature PhD types. Play the YouTubes and just imagine the fest, complete with vegetarian food booths and a new-and-used book concession flanking the stage. I’d totally go see this bill, probably because I’m the one who came up with it.
Delorean: Let’s start with the hottest, most current act in our lineup–if you wanna know more, you can see the review I wrote on their latest album, Subiza. Frontman Ekhi Lopetegi earns these dance-influenced Spanish indie rockers some geek cred as a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy. Apparently, his research interests are in Foucault, though the band’s feel-good technoish rock doesn’t exactly bring to mind structuralism or biopower. Considering Delorean’s dancey-moves, let’s call it Post-Foucault, the sound of body and mind freed from biopower.
Matmos: How many English Ph.D.s can say they’ve toured with Bjork? Probably fewer than those who’ve made concept records based on sound clips from plastic surgery (A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure). But Matmos’ Drew Daniel is the only one who’s done both, while also achieving a high degree of success as an academic, graduating from UC Berkeley and taking a job as an Asst Prof in the English dept at Johns Hopkins. Matmos’s stuff is pretty high concept and the stuff of experimental art, which evokes, in my mind at least, a musical soundtrack to Deleuze’s notion of the rhizome, for whatever reason. The band has a new album that came out recently, Treasure State.
The New Year/Bedhead: Matt Kadane is an Asst Prof in History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in NY State, specializing in early modern Europe. He’s also one of the mainstays of two of the more underrated and underappreciate indie bands of the last 20 years, Bedhead and (currently) the New Year. I guess you can slap a “slow-core” tag on both bands, which means that they create songs that start our slowly and patiently, building up to some intense, frenetic moments, before slowing it back down. In that sense, history isn’t a bad disciplinary equivalent for either band, as moments of action pop up through mostly dormant times. You can check out an interview with Kadane about his day job on Stereogum.
Tender Trap: Last but not least is Amelia Fletcher, a trailblazer among the cute-punk cuddlecore set and an Oxford D.Phil. in economics. In fact, Fletcher has the lofty title of Chief Economist of the Office of Fair Trading in the UK. You wouldn’t have known Fletcher had such an official sounding occupation is you heard her music, which combines the sweetest girl-groupish melodies with a Do-It-Yourself aesthetic and barbed-wire-sharp wit. Tender Trap is her latest musical endeavor (with an album out now!), but her best and best-known work was with Talulah Gosh and Heavenly during the mid-1980s through the 1990s. I’d say the theory equivalent of Fletcher’s bands would be UK cultural studies, fun and cleverly trenchant at the same time.
Art and Commerce: What’s the Problem With “Work of Art”?
Obviously, we here at Post Academic are really into reality shows. I just watched a few episodes of the Bravo TV show “Work of Art,” in which aspiring artists who work in different media compete a la “Top Chef” and “Project Runway.” Apparently, people who are supposed to know something about art hate it.
Laurie Fendrich over at the Chronicle writes:
The show promulgates a massive deception that out-deceives all other reality programs: If we were to have a real reality show about artists, one that showed how artists really make art, it would bore the tears out of the audience. Artists are frequently quiet or dull sorts, and much of their art-making consists of sitting around, thinking, looking and puttering around in incomprehensible ways. No hissy fits, no artificial deadlines, and no visiting Euro-suaves like Simon de Pury, the auction-house exec, to give pats on the back and ask helpful questions.
And how is that different from a show like “Top Chef” or “Project Runway”? Cooking isn’t that fun to watch in and of itself, and I’m sure that clothing design involves plenty of “sitting around, thinking, looking and puttering around in incomprehensible ways.”
Okay, there are hissy fits on the show, and that’s a reality-show convention, but the benefit of “Work of Art” is that it emphasizes that art involves real work and skill. The contestants regularly throw verbal spears at each other about technique, and it is fun to watch how pieces come together in a single episode. The people who just slap something together and can’t explain it tend to be the ones who get the boot.
More after the jump!
The Journalism vs. PhD Showdown: One, Both or Neither?
In a relatively recent post, Michael Bérubé answered a letter from an individual thinking of leaving journalism for a PhD program. This individual is wisely evaluating the potential risk and how grad school might affect his life later on. Now that print journalism isn’t a stable career path, what’s a person who wants to work with words to do?
Bérubé writes,
If you were to start a PhD program in 2011-12, you’d be looking at another four-five years of study, followed by … well, maybe followed by a better market in the years 2015-17, but maybe followed by a bleak market in 2015-17 made bleaker by all the people who didn’t get decent jobs from 2011-15. You don’t want to be adjuncting when you’re 35, this I know. And I don’t see how it’s possible to raise a family on adjunct wages (though many people manage to do it nonetheless).
Okay, so maybe journalism is a better career choice than the academy after all. The odds are slightly better, even with the massive layoffs.
I thought about linking to the article and saying it was cool, but then I tried to think of an answer myself. Must the answer involve an either-or: journalism or the academy?
More after the jump! Image of Pound Choice, Omagh, by Kenneth Allen. On Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
I actually found my career through a series of lucky breaks and a fondness for computers. Now I am a content writer. Once I stopped thinking of literature and writing as a paper-only enterprise, my opportunities increased. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been tough (thank you, layoffs!), but there are many ways to apply writing talent that don’t involve journalism or the academy.
There’s also advertising and marketing, which doesn’t come up often enough as a legitimate career option. People view the field with skepticism, and for good reason, as it has a rep for pushing cigarettes on kids and pelting teens with sexualized and violent images. (Farting ponies during Super Bowl ads don’t help, either.)
As with anything else, good guys exist in advertising and marketing. The burden is on you to find them or to find a niche in the field that you are comfortable with. For example, I specialize in writing for the Web, not for print. Other people I know applied their teaching skills by becoming corporate trainers showing people how to use software. Still more become technical writers.
You don’t have to go into computers. There are surprising opportunities out there that allow you to work with words without a) starving to death or b) feeling like a sellout. I won’t lie: You have to dig deep to find them. Sometimes people will tell you that you are crazy for not taking a certain path. But, if you are already accustomed to the hard work of journalism or academic research, you can break into a new career.
“Top Grad Student” moves on: Round 2, Curriculum Builder
Don’t know if you have the same feeling (probably not!), but watching “Top Chef “ last night got me itching to keep our summer virtual reality programming going. To give y’all a brief update, English got the most votes (3) in Round 1, to no one’s surprise–not necessarily because lit-types are the best, but because they’re definitely our demographic here. But there’s no immunity for the win, since it’s not like these grad students have tenure yet! Surprisingly, History just squeaked through to the next round, getting the very last vote to be saved from the chopping block.
All this means that our Poli Sci contestant, for whatever reason, is the only one with zero supporters and has been voted off the island, to mix our reality show metaphors. We really need to come up with a great elimination line like all the best reality shows have, which shouldn’t be too hard because getting bad news is such a part of the profession. Post your suggestions in the comments section below! How about this for now: “Poli Sci…[pause of dramatic tension]…your application has been…REJECTED!”
"Padma Lakshmi" by Arthur (Creative Commons license)
We’re gonna try to put a little more forethought into our absurd imaginary contest for Round 2, thanks to Mackie’s comment regarding Round 1. I don’t know if we have a real goal or bias in eliciting responses and rounding up votes, though it might be interesting to find out what people think about different academic fields in a very limited way. To get some semi-constructive info, we’ll set up some better, clearer parameters for each contest.
So Round 2 is going to be a team contest which I’m calling the “Curriculum Builder,” where we get our contestants from all the disciplines to work together to create a curriculum for some hypothetical freshmen. Feel free to add your own mental picture of our contestants in some non-descript 1970s lecture hall as a bunch of frosh file in, with tense music in the background as our Padma-like host announces what our contestants have to do this time around. The goal of the challenge is to test how well our contestants can construct a relevant intro- level course and how well folks from different fields can work together to achieve this goal.
Here are some guidelines for what you might keep in mind when you’re at your virtual “Judges Table.” Criteria to think about would not only include classroom performance, but also intangible factors about co-existing in the academic workplace:
1. How much emphasis is put on teaching in any given discipline, particularly at a lower-division level?
2. Who could come up with an engaging, informative lesson plan at a moment’s notice? Consider how well people from different fields can think on their feet, which is definitely part of the “Top Chef” experience!
3. Which contestant would work best with others? You can think about who might be a good leader or administrator-type in putting together our imaginary curriculum. On the flip side, you might also think about whether or not certain fields create greater numbers of prima donnas or contestants who might go into a shell and not play nicely with their colleagues.
OK, vote away!
Taking Teaching Seriously by … Actually Training Teachers
Consider this a response to a response: Tenured Radical wrote about the New York Times’ article on how fewer students are getting into Teach for America. Tenured Radical asks why people think Teach for America is so great in the first place:
I dislike TFA because I am a teacher, and I am quite clear that you don’t learn to teach in five weeks, much less teach students who have a range of social, economic and developmental problems; who are often hungry, in pain, angry or frightened; and who come in unruly waves of 40-50 every 45 minutes.
Whether you like TFA or not (I am undecided, for the record), Tenured Radical’s point that five weeks isn’t enough time to train a teacher is crystal clear. It isn’t.
Like most TA’s, I got thrown into the deep end of the teaching pool with my first comp assignment. I was trained in terms of teaching and composition theory, but I had no clue how to handle day-to-day tasks or how to deal with problem students. I pulled a whole lot out of thin air. Of course, I also got the vibe that teaching was a temporary thing for me, to avoid as much as possible, so why do I need to train for it?
Image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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