Dislodging the vines
Gosh. People are linking to my recent Simpsons post and my visitor traffic has gone way up. Hi, everyone who came here to read about the Bart Simpson Ph.D-taunting scene (including the person who got here by Googling "simpsons bookaccino"). Now I feel like I should be especially clever and witty for your benefit.
But anyway, the sudden upsurge in visitors is the the least of the reasons why I’m happy to see that the Invisible Adjunct is posting again. I’ve missed the conversations about academia on her site. I’ve been following this discussion, about whether adjuncts should be expected to "go the extra mile" in their teaching, with interest [edit: before it started turning into a shouting match between several of the participants, that is]. It’s the perennial question: why do people stay in wretchedly underpaid adjunct jobs, and where do you draw the line between doing right by your students and masochism?
On a related note, I’d also like to give snaps* to Laura at Apt. 11D for her comments on Ph.D. dropout rates:
Here’s another radical idea, why let in all those students in the first place? Why take their money and exploit their cheap labor, if nobody ever expects for them to get a job. It’s wrong, deceitful, immoral, reprehensible, and level eight in Dante’s inferno goes to university presidents who allow this practice to continue.
Amen to that. Maybe we should be asking why graduate students ever finish the Ph.D instead of why they drop out. In my case, it was mostly because my dissertation was nearly done by the time the big career doubts hit. But it’s very easy to think "I don’t know what else is out there, so I won’t look. I’ll stay here because at least I’ll be doing what I was trained for." I’ve thought it myself, even (especially) in the midst of trying to figure out what else to do.
Yesterday I talked with a professor who’s done various crossover-with-the-outside-world projects and who knows a bunch of people who’ve done the same. She gave me a ton of useful information, including the names of several people to call for informational interviews and some professional organizations I didn’t know of. At one point, the conversation turned to the University of Texas’s admirable "Professional Development" program, and why more graduate programs don’t provide at least some degree of exposure to basic workplace skills like managing people and grant-writing and using spreadsheets and the like — the kinds of skills that come in handy even for academics who stay in the fold. (My interlocutor had tried in vain to get the graduate school here to set up workshops of this type.)
Neither of us really had an answer for that question, but I had a sudden, vivid sense of just how insulated the world of academia is from awareness of how things work in other professions. Last week I had to define the phrase "informational interview" for one of my mentors here (a mentor, I hasten to add, who’s extremely supportive of my career change; but like many tenured faculty, he’s spent most of his professional life on the academic track). As one of the commenters on the discussion thread at IA remarks, "most people do not have jobs which neatly mirror their training/education"; why do we go on thinking that we can only do the very narrow kind of work we’ve been trained for, even at starvation wages?
I’m massively oversimplifying the question, I know; for one thing, I’m deeply skeptical of approaches to the academic job crisis that put the burden of reform with the individual job-seeker. But it’s like the university is a room with windows that stay closed. Lovely Gothic arched windows with rippling vines growing over them. But if you try to open the windows even a crack, to let in some air or to let yourself out, people insist that you’ll damage the ivy and the windows won’t open anyway and who are you, trying to open them when they’ve been closed for generations?
*I just re-watched Clueless, which I hadn’t seen in years. Now all that teenager-slang is stuck in my head.
You say in “about me” that you’re changing careers. What are you changing to?
I haven’t quite decided yet, to be perfectly honest. The current plan is to find a “transitional” job for next year and see what comes out of it. (Though I think I’m moving toward information science, or possibly publishing.)
Transitional is always good. I knew someone who started out as a temporary tube labeller and ended up as forensic scientist as a result. It’s always good to trust in fate.
trusting in fate is what got me here.
which, when all is said and done,
is very likely pretty close to where
i’m *supposed* to be. teaching math,
that is. obviously (to me) i should
have a position with somewhat more
autonomy than the quarter-to-quarter
“adjunct” stuff i’m doing now . . .
but very few people (full- or part- time)
do a *better* job at what i do than i do
and it’s a good thing *somebody*’s doing it.
as much as i love “invisible adjunct”
i consider its focus on careerism a tragedy.
the buddha is supposed to’ve said something
to the effect that “right living” is
an important part of the path. hipocrates
supposedly said “do no harm”. stuff like that.