Great Employment Opportunity! #3: You know it’s time to quit when…
"Carrier Dome" by Lvklock (Creative Commons license)
I’m still frozen out of the MLA JIL, so it’s probably time to pay up rather than just rely on Una74 and the Academic Job Wiki. But I did find this “Great Employment Opportunity” on the wiki, which really is a great employment opportunity. I should know, because I interview for this position, more or less, at the Chicago MLA in December 2007.
Syracuse University’s English Department seeks a tenure-track assistant professor in Asian American Literature. This position enhances our strengths in American literature and supports the development of an Asian American Studies program in the College of Arts and Sciences. Ph.D. must be in hand at time of appointment.
The difference between the job posting this time and last time was that the earlier ad wasn’t focused only on Asian American lit, but was looking for a multiethnic lit specialist that could check off as many of Asian Am lit and/or Af Am lit and/or Chicano lit as possible. The gist of it is that Syracuse seems to want an Asian Americanist, which it must not have gotten the last time around–despite interviewing myself and two friends of mine working in the field.
Personally speaking, the job represents something I’ve been suspecting for a while now, but had been unwilling to recognize: that you know it’s time to quit when the same jobs you applied to before come around again. This has happened to me before, with mildly encouraging results, when I scored an interview with an Ivy League school the second time I applied to an Asian Americanist position. The first time was a way-too-early trial run that I mostly did because all my friends were testing the market, myself only halfway through the diss. The second time I applied for the same position, I did feel I was pretty legit, even though I coulda/shoulda done better with a pretty pleasant interview experience.
So when I saw this Syracuse position open up again, my initial thought was to try for it again, since I’ve had decent luck basically trying again. Plus, the pool would be smaller, with only Asian Americanists competing this time. Plus, I would have a strong publication to tout on my CV. Plus, I have more teaching experience in Asian American and multiethnic lit than before. Except that my Ph.D. is now three years older. And if they liked me enough in the first place, I probably would’ve gotten the consolation prize of a campus visit or something, at least.
In any case, I’m passing on this position, because I actually don’t believe in getting a second bite at what’s essentially the same apple. But this sloppy seconds situation goes to show how the academic job market is an enabler that can fool you into rationalizing what is really insane and compulsive behavior, applying over and over again hoping that the results will change even when you know they probably won’t. It’s just that it’s even harder to break the cycle when the options are so few and far between and you’re getting more and more desperate for a job.
Reading Getting Things Done So You Don’t Have To: Organizational Simplicity
One thing I’ve learned after sitting in on usability studies, which test how consumers respond to websites, is the following:
If it isn’t easy, people won’t do it.
It doesn’t matter how cool the widget you’re promoting is. It doesn’t matter how important your product is or if it is genuinely beneficial to someone. If the item isn’t easy to find or if the form isn’t easy to fill out, people will not do it. By extension, you’re not going to get organized if you don’t make it easy on yourself. Many of David Allen’s GTD ideas revolve around making filing systems easy.
Filing papers sounds as exciting as being dipped in a vat of boiling oil, and you went into academia so you could avoid being a lameass paperpusher. But Allen’s theory is solid–you won’t mind filing as much if you can file an item in under a minute. If it’s hard to file, you will let your papers get scrambled.
More after the jump! Image of a file cabinet by Elizabeth Roy from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
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Politics and academia
"Fictional flag of the fictional Communist Democratic Party of America" by Oren new dag (Public Domain)
Talk about stating the obvious: Politico, the blog I haven’t been able to stop reading since the 2008 election in spite of myself, posted a story the other day about how “College Professors Go Big for Democrats”, which hardly qualifies as news. As a liberal myself (duh!), I’m happy to say that employees of the UC system I’m a part of donated over $400,000 to the Dems–although the Boxer folks still want more and more, as my inbox can attest to. Anyway, that’s 86% of all political donations made by UC types. Then there’s the case of Princeton, where the employees gave $100,000 to the Dems and apparently $0 to the GOP.
Again, none of what Politico reports should be any surprise, except, perhaps, for the overwhelming margins. This might explain why I don’t have any conservative friends (as far as I know), and why my wife and I are suspicious of nice strangers whose politics we don’t know, since we’ve met a few undercover libertarians. Heck, I can barely stand a lot of academics who share my worldview more or less, either because I don’t think they care enough about race-related issues or because they try to act holier-than-thou than me–unapologetic Ralph Nader 2000 boosters, I’m looking at you.
But I was wondering the other day about when it was I became a liberal and how it happened. Did my prolonged exposure to academia turn me into a lefty? Or was I already a latent liberal who found the right venue to bring my politics out of me?
At the risk of alienating and offending folks, we’re delving into politics and academics below the fold…
Reading Getting Things Done So You Don’t Have To: The Basic Principles
“So You Don’t Have To” is a series inspired by financial blog The Simple Dollar, in which author Trent Hamm reads books on finance, reviews them and sums up their most helpful points. I’m reading books that are useful to academics and post academics in particular. You guys already have enough to read, anyway.
I’ll cover Getting Things Done over a few posts, but I recommend buying the book, not because I don’t think I can cover everything but because this book is valuable and worth the money. The Simple Dollar also goes into GTD in great detail. For Post Academic, I’m covering the main concepts and not the exact items you need to purchase or methods to follow because you’ll need to adapt GTD to your own work day.
Now, on to the overall principles of GTD and how they relate to academics and post academics. Author David Allen offers many examples of how to implement GTD, but his strong suit is boiling everything down into three points that thread their way throughout the book:
Point #1: First of all, if it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you’ll come back to regularly and sort through.
In academia, it seems as if everything is unfinished. That paper can always be revised. You could always add more comments to student papers. You could read that book that doesn’t really relate to your research … but if you don’t, someone will ask you a question about it at a conference, and you won’t get a tenure-track job PANIC PANIC PANIC … and so forth. Nothing seems to finish, but you can trick the system if you trick yourself into gathering up all the tasks you need to do (that means all of them, even the ones that don’t seem important) and getting tasks out of your head so you aren’t gnawing on them. Then you can focus on the tasks at hand and get them done faster.
More after the jump! Image of an old-school electronic organizer from Wikimedia Commons, by Satmap under a Free Art License.
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Your latest James Franco update
By now, you probably know that James Franco has started his Ph.D. program at Yale, but that’s not all: Did you know that he’s apparently also taking classes at the Rhode Island School of Design? Haters who’ve gone through some grad school might be inclined to be a bit skeptical about how serious our favorite celeb grad student is about getting his Ph.D. at a really top-flight program if he’s dabbling in another program of study. Art + Auction’s “In the Air” blog is a bit dubious about Franco’s plans, thinking that “this is physically impossible (the schools are in different states)”; even if CT and RI are small states, that’s still 100 miles each way. (Wait, maybe he’s learning to fly too — see photo below — to cut down on the commute time.) That’s not to mention, you know, the actual coursework, though maybe he’s just auditing at RISD or something.
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a grad student..."James Franco Blue Angels", courtesy of the US Navy (Public Domain)
Still, despite its naysaying, In the Air does point out that Franco might just be taking his interest in art seriously, pointing out that he has been involved with some heavy hitters in the art world recently. In particular, it notes that current LA MOCA Director and noted gallerist Jeffrey Deitch is on record telling the LA Times that, “I wish Andy were here to meet James Franco. Andy would have been so enthusiastic” — Andy being Andy Warhol. And in a review of an installation art piece by Franco, the New York Times notes that Franco has had a life-long passion for the visual arts, even though it is less sanguine about his prospects as an artist, giving his exhibit a meh at best for its gratuitous violence and sex. These lines pretty much sum up Roberta Smith’s mixed review:
Some people would probably feel better to read that Mr. Franco’s Clocktower effort can be dismissed as bad beyond redemption, an outsider’s naïve dalliance in things he doesn’t really understand. I initially inclined toward that conclusion, although in the end it turned out to be more interesting and complicated than that.
Despite the second sentence, you just get the sense that Smith really wants to be “some people” hating on Franco’s art, don’t you?
But I digress, because the big news for those of us interested in Franco’s foray into grad school is the big news making the rounds of the gossip columns is that Franco has admitted to earning a “D” in, get this, acting, while earning his master’s at NYU. As he tells Showbiz 411:
“I did the work, I did well in everything else,” he said. “But the acting teacher probably felt uncomfortable with a working well known actor in his class. It was not the norm.” Also, as Franco pointed out, he missed a lot of classes because he was shooting “127 Hours.”
Excuses, excuses — though he might have a point, because a grad school “D” sounds like a pretty vindictive grade. But is this what he’s gonna pull come December when his first round of papers are due and he needs to take incompletes to finish a film or something? It’s time for Franco to buckle down on that Walt Whitman class he’s apparently taking, which, he tells Showbiz 411, has a “massive amount of reading.” It must be this one taught by Michael Warner, so Franco better make sure not make the chair who accepted him into the Ph.D. program look bad. In any case, his advisor at Yale might want to sit the school’s prized first-year student down and get him focused, provided s/he can figure out where Franco is, between New Haven, Providence, NYC, and Hollywood.
Somebody at UNM Must Have Watched “Doctor Detroit”
A friend let me know of some wild happenings at the University of New Mexico, where a tenured English professor was discovered working for a dominatrix phone-sex hotline … along with her grad students. Here’s the Chronicle of Higher Ed attempting to take an Enquirer-esque turn:
Life has become extremely complex in the University of New Mexico’s English department in the three years since Lisa D. Chávez, a tenured associate professor, was discovered moonlighting as the phone-sex dominatrix “Mistress Jade,” and posing in promotional pictures sexually dominating one of her own graduate students.
Well … when we were thinking of jobs that grad students could take to supplement their income, the word “submissive” did not come to mind. But, if that’s your thing and it’s legal, who are we to judge? It’s a rough economy. But … you might not want to take on one of these gigs if you’re doing it to please or impress your professor. The dominant-submissive thing puts a whole new twist on an imbalance of power in the classroom. But, in the end, it’s up to UNM to sort this one out, if it’s possible given the number of lawsuits that have ensued. Of course, these kinds of lawsuits are to be expected once people start mixing business with pleasure.
If Lisa Chavez wanted to destroy academic stereotypes, she did a hell of a job. Even her phone-sex scripts name-checked her day job and played on the professor persona: “Do you want a biker bitch, an imperious goddess, or a stern teacher ready to punish unruly students?” While Post Academic is more focused on the job landscape, I had to bring this up because I never imagined that a professor would be working for a phone-sex hotline. That sounds like something you’d see in old ’80s comedies like “Doctor Detroit.” I also never imagined that the Chronicle of Higher Ed would be writing about phone sex.
This legal matters swirling around this case are epic–so all charges alleged until proven under law or sorted out by lawyers.
Now There’s No Excuse for Not Making Checklists
If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m obsessed with checklists, and a good job-application checklist might help save your sanity as you go on the academic job hunt. So I went on a hunt for a checklist-generating program. So I typed “checklist generator” into Google, and voila! There was printablechecklist.org.
If you want a paper checklist, look no further than printablechecklist.org, created by Adam Pash at Lifehacker. It’s faster to print it out than to hand-write the checklist, and a sign-in isn’t required.
Sure, creating a checklist and drawing little boxes on a piece of paper or buying a checkbox notepad is easy. But the easier it is to make a checklist, the more likely it is that you’ll get in the habit of making them.
A little fun fact–I ran a search for “checklist” and “academia,” along with “checklist” and “professor,” wondering how academics handled checklists. Here are two that might help a few of you, even though school has already started:
Your 10-Point Checklist Before Sending Off That Manuscript (by a biology prof, but there’s no reason you can’t modify it for a humanities publication) I’m a fan of “Replace long words with short words.”
Creating a Checklist for the Semester (from ProfHacker) This one reminds you to get your office snacks now because you’ll be sad if you don’t.
… and for aspiring Post Academics, I have a special one on career changing:
Checklist for Career Change This article is a little old, but it does help you get in the mental and physical shape needed to make a move.
Alas, I didn’t see as many checklists as I hoped. Have any of you used checklists to prepare for your job applications?
The MLA JIL Cottage Industry
I promise that this is the last post you’ll see from me about the MLA Job Information List — at least until I actually log on to it, either through buying my own affiliate account or poaching off the UCI English dept whenever it decides to renew its account. But you’d be surprised by all the stuff you can find online typing in “MLA JIL” or “JIL MLA” or “ADE JIL” (which includes one of our very own posts near the top of the Google search list). So here’s what I found searching for the JIL and trying to backdoor it and not being able to do so.
"Cottage Industry!" by Colin Smith (Creative Commons license)
The mlaconvention Twitter account: This is where all the action is if you want to find out all the JIL news, even if you’re not actually able to get on it. We’ve linked to and been linked by the MLA’s Exec Director Rosemary Feal’s Twitter before responding to a call about reforming the dissertation, but who knew she would give a play-by-play on the status of the JIL while hosting and responding to comments by MLA members? If you dig a little into the older Tweets, you’ll notice that the JIL had a very shaky and frustrating launch. We’ve dogged the MLA quite a bit on this blog, but you can’t beat their customer service when the Exec Director responds to pretty much anyone who Tweets @ ‘em.
MLA JIL LOLCAT: And to keep the restless natives entertained while they’re in the virtual line trying to get onto the JIL on the geeks’ equivalent to day-after-Thanksgiving shopping, the MLA has created its own gallery of…LOLCATs: “This #MLALOLCat is for all you patient #mlajoblist users!http://cheezburger.com/View/3977057024“. You gotta give the MLA credit for trying to amuse the unamused masses, though isn’t “I Can Has Cheezburger?” so 2008 — which is also around the time the job market plunged and we probably needed the humor the most.
The Academic Job Wiki’s Una74: One of the best things about the Academic Job Wiki was the virtual community aspect of it, where people shared job info, advice, and a feeling of doom. Those of you who are on the wiki might have noticed that many of the early listings have been put up by a user named Una74, who describes her/himself as a “Professional Lurker, Part-time Administrator of Academic Jobs Wiki.” On the one hand, you wanna thank Una74 for the thankless job of posting all the job listings as they come up, especially when you, ahem, don’t have access to the JIL. On the other, you wanna ask who made Una74 the boss of the Job Wiki–I mean, could we have applied for this position and can Una74 put it on a CV? Considering that the Wiki has always been a communal effort, we’ll see if the presence of Una74 as a shadowy majordomo will change the dynamic of how folks contribute when we really, really need to find out about interviews, campus visits, gossip, and job offers. (Seriously, I’ve been thinking about that!) I imagine probably not, if some of the frustrated jobseeker posts already up on the Wiki are any indication: As one Wiki commenter noted, once the JIL technical problems were resolved, ”yeah, now all we gotta deal with is how sh*tty the list is so far. at least in my field”.
Chronicle MLA JIL sites: I didn’t want to link this Chronicle message board, since we’re going head-to-head with it to see who’s higher on the “MLA JIL” Google search, but to heck with it. All these message boards and Wikis do serve the function of being online support groups for those who need the support, even if you’re just lurking. The we’re-all-in-the-same-boat gallows humor does help, like the shared experience of not being able to explain how the profession works to people outside it, as in this case:
A couple of years ago I was visiting my mother and told her there were only X number of jobs out there in French and she didn’t believe me. I popped open the laptop and went through the MLA JIL with her. When she saw how many Francophone jobs there were she said, “Well, you must be wrong about what ‘Francophone’ means.”
Right mom. I was totally mistaken and am indeed a Francophone specialist without my knowing it. Thanks.
There’s also a breakout message board about “Predictions for 2010-2011 job season”, which is good vicarious viewing for those without proper JIL access. While the numbers seem *relatively* encouraging — how could they not be after the worst market ever? — the comments are still caustic: When someone queried what the growth fields might be, the two sad-but-true replies were “adjunct studies” and “administration”. Just because it’s depressingly true doesn’t mean it isn’t still kinda funny…
The Queen Bee in Her Native Habitat
The offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce on “Mad Men” shouldn’t be taken as an example of a functional, realistic workplace. Yet a recent episode stuck in my head because a character displayed all the classic traits of a Queen Bee.
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The Queen Bee is one of the most dangerous office types because not only is she smart, but she’s also ferocious–and other women are often the target of her wrath. If you’re a “Mad Men” fan, you know I’m talking about office manager Joan Holloway.
If you don’t watch the show, a quick plot summary for the Queen Bee episode in question: An male employee made numerous comments and left a lewd picture on Joan’s wall when she told him to stop shaking the vending machine. Another employee, Peggy, is appalled and gets permission to fire the employee, which she does. Instead of bonding over this as two women in a male-dominated workplace, Joan rips into Peggy for not minding her own business and letting Joan handle it her way.
“Queen Bees” still exist in the wilds of the Hamster World today. It’s more likely that they earned their position through talent rather than sexuality, but they still defend their turf from upstarts. Even if other women try to make friends with the Queen Bee, she’ll prefer the company of the men in the office.
Just because there’s other women in the office doesn’t mean you have to be friends with them. The sisterhood only goes so far. But a Queen Bee is special. Instead of tolerating you, she will do her best to get you out of the picture.
Tips on how to avoid Queen Bee stings after the jump! We didn’t want to court copyright drama, but we found an image of Christina Hendricks out of character from Wikimedia Commons, by watchwithkristin, under a Creative Commons license.
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Remember this?: “Worst Salary Year” meets “Worst. Job Market. Ever.”
To christen the opening of yet another academic job market, we thought it would be a good time to revisit what’s happening with academic salaries. I know, I know, you’re just getting excited about the fact that the first JIL has gone online, even if I personally still haven’t been able to log on because my Ph.D. alma mater has yet to renew its account! I don’t mean to be a wet blanket or a sore sport–though it’s probably ingrained into my very being after whiffing my 5 times on the market!–but it’s not a bad idea to know what you’re about to get yourself into, if you’re that lucky in 1-in-200 (or more) who lands a position. And if you’re not holding the winning ticket, maybe you won’t feel quite as bad if you don’t get that academic job. (Probably not much consolation still?)
Below is basically some info we gathered about salaries at the end of the last job application cycle, which explains that salary increases were, not surprisingly, the lowest ever. But as with the job market, here’s hoping that you can only go up from the “worst [fill in the blank] ever”…
"Handshake (Workshop Cologne '06)" by Tobias Wolter (Creative Commons license)
The AAUP’s annual salary survey is not only being covered in education-oriented publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, but also in the New York Times. Great–what we really need the “worst salary year” to complement the ”Worst. Job Market. Ever.” (at least in English and Comp Lit), which we covered a few weeks ago on the blog.
The key take-away point from the high-altitude perspective of the survey is that the average pay increases across different disciplines and different ranks were outpaced by the rate of inflation. As the Chronicle article sums it up:
In 2009-10, the average salary of a full-time faculty member rose only 1.2 percent. That’s the lowest year-to-year increase recorded by the association in the 50-year history of its salary survey.
To make matters worse, an inflation rate of 2.7 percent meant that many professors actually had less buying power than the year before. In fact, two-thirds of the 1,141 institutions surveyed over two years gave their faculty members either a pay cut, no raise, or an increase of less than 2 percent, on average.
If you take a brief look at the AAUP summary, what’s most shocking is the breakdown of percentage increase of salaries across different types of institutions: you’ll notice that about 20% of faculty received a raise of 0-.99% and that 30% or so had their salary decreased. So basically around HALF the faculty around the country had a raise of less than 1% or took a pay cut, which means that 1/3 of faculty who received raises of 2% or more really pulled up the average. Below are links to the AAUP survey itself, and to some of the news articles covering it:
2009-10 Report on the Economic Status of the Profession [American Association of University Professors]
“Professors’ Pay Rises 1.2%, Lowest Increases in 50 Years” [Chronicle of Higher Education]; the Chronicle also offers an easily searchable database for salary comparisons from the survey results that can be broken down by school, state, and institution type.
“Study Find 1.2 Percent Increase in Faculty Pay, the Smallest in 50 Years” [NY Times]
We also compiled some links to salary information, from salary search databases and self-reported job offers on the Academic Job Wiki:
University Salaries Revealed. Kind Of (April 1, 2010)
Show me the money!: More university salaries revealed (April 1, 2010)
