"State of the Profession" Series at The Chronicle

Everyone should go over to the Chronicle of Higher Education's website immediately and read the linked series of articles on the humanities and the job market. It may not be news to anyone, particularly my regular readers who've heard me rant about the structural problems with academia before, but it's good to see it all linked up. In fact, they could see the problem in even more dire light if they read all the articles on the page against each other.

In "We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities," Peter Conn argues that we have mistaken a "bubble" in PhD employment, much like the subprime bubble, for the normal state of affairs. He sees a combination of long-term trends that are only going to get worse, from the casualization of the workforce, to declining support for public higher ed, to the rise in for-profit online instruction. He also makes the following important point about "perpetual ABDs," as I call them:

In addition, attrition in humanities Ph.D. programs amounts to academic carnage. According to estimates from the Council of Graduate Schools, something like 43 percent of the nation's graduate matriculants never earn Ph.D.'s. To be sure, attrition requires more interpretation than job placement: It is not self-defining as a quality indicator. Not all attrition is bad. We should encourage programs to make judgments about students who are not making satisfactory progress. However, that sort of attrition is exceptionally rare, at least at Penn and the other places I know something about. Most attrition represents a vast group of unsupervised students who spend as long as a decade enrolled in doctoral programs before resigning (or simply disappearing). In the years before their eventual departure, these students provide a pool of cheap and disposable labor that administrators at all levels can use to subsidize the salaries of more-expensive, long-term staff members.

He goes on to consider that doctoral programs should limit their sizes despite arguments that having lots of PhD students are necessary to the functioning of the university, the profession, or the egos of professors.

From a different perspective, Frank Donoghue writes about the difficulty of determining "what is our placement rate" in "An Open Letter From a Director of Graduate Admissions." I disagree with most of his article about how difficult it is to determine placement rates and the implication that prospective students are somehow being carreerist or annoying by asking the question ever more frequently. Elsewhere, people are constantly writing in the chronicle fora about how stupid and clueless prospective PhD students are: didn't they even ask about the placement rates? Well, the answer is when we did ask about placement rates, we often got misleading answers, cherry-picked data, or a fuzzy "sell" to get us to choose that program. All of Donoghue's equivocating can't hide the fact that his model year of placement, 11 ABD students getting 2 tenure-track jobs (no word of how many PhD-in-hand candidates from his dept. went out and tried again that year) --- this model year of placement is both an utterly shitty placement rate and par for the course for departments.

He also has this gem in his article: "No one spends eight or nine years getting a Ph.D. simply to take any job available," which leads me to think he hasn't been talking very closely with recent grads going on the market from his program.

However, near the end of the article Donoghue starts to make some interesting suggestions. He also notes the staggering attrition rates for the PhD and connects them to the low-wage labor we do, particularly once we run out of the "guaranteed funding":

Steward counts a total of 6,457 students in English Ph.D. programs in their first year through their fourth year and beyond who were supported by various teaching assignments: composition instructor, literature instructor, discussion leader, paper grader. His companion "Report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2004," however, notes that 933 Ph.D.'s in English and American language and literature were awarded that year (a typical number in recent years). That means roughly 5,500 Ph.D. students who were reported as holding teaching assignments during their first four years did not complete, or had yet to complete, their Ph.D.'s—and were thus stuck in professional limbo.

Any student who doesn't proceed nimbly through a Ph.D. program eventually runs out of funds, whether it be after four, five, or six years. If that happens, the student (and I'm speaking here from extensive anecdotal evidence) is less and less likely to complete the Ph.D. as the years go by. The abundance of A.B.D.'s bears directly on the problems of recording job place-ment in a responsible, accurate way, because so many A.B.D.'s end up working indefinitely as adjuncts.

And here is the money quote, where he points out that structurally, departments kick their "old" grads to the side to bring in a constant supply of "fresh blood" for the comp classroom:

Sadly, one of our profession's near universal practices is to use fresh graduate students to teach first-year writing courses. In other words, however much we debate the qualifications for faculty appointments, we've already established that the qualifications for a postsecondary teaching appointment need be no more than a B.A., a summer vacation, participation in a graduate program, and a teacher-training workshop. We can exhort our institutions to provide research support for the tenure-ineligible, and to include them in departmental governance, but so long as we set the qualifications for teaching as low as we do, we will guarantee a surplus of minimally qualified teachers, and we'll continue to make career placement in English a difficult struggle.

Yup. Why is it that untrained, inexperienced new grad students who have possibly never taken a comp class are preferable to the "old fogies" who have been teaching there for several years and become experienced and have a slate of syllabi already broken in?

Donoghue makes the interesting suggestion that we change admissions to a "space out, space in" model --- that is, you can't take in a new grad student until someone has filed and "opened up" that space. I like it:

What if Ph.D.-granting English departments across the country took a systematic inventory of those Ph.D. students who fall between the cracks that Steward's surveys revealed—those past the fifth year, probably out of funds, but not yet finished—and then tied those findings to admissions quotas?

Let me elaborate. I suspect that seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-year graduate students suffer most from lack of mentoring and advising, indeed from lack of connection with their home departments. Yet those departments all continue to admit new students. That is, we perpetuate the system that brings in fresh recruits, even as it tolerates the disappearance of advanced graduate students at rates comparable to that of casualties during the Gallipoli campaign. My rationale for tying admissions to placement is simple: If we can't keep track of the students who have been in our programs for years, we have no business admitting new ones. We'd all be better mentors if we capped admissions.

Of course, part of the problem with graduation rates is that we, the grad students, are not stupid. If we go on the market and can't get a job, we're going to stay in school and try to scrape up funding of some sort rather than file. I did that a couple times before finally deciding I needed the degree (turning off the trickle of ta support also edged me out). That's the basic point in a social science postdoc's column, "Just Stay There": "I took another swig of chardonnay, looked my A.B.D. friend in the eye, and said: "You're better off in graduate school. If I were you, I'd hang out there as long as I could."

Why haul ass on your dissertation if there are no jobs out there to apply for? Why move across the fucking country to a VAP or adjunct position as long as you have pretty much the same shitty prospect at your home institution? I know many of my friends who got offers for something, whether it be a postdoc, fellowship, or tenure-track position, were able to pump out that dissertation in a fraction of the time it had taken them until then. I think a lot of us get beaten down by the market and figure we'll just stick it out forever in our programs, and then get shoved out of the program abruptly. What starts out as "I'll just adjunct these few courses now while I get back on my feet" can easily turn into a treadmill of debt and low pay and time-consuming work and no visible means of escape.

Grr.

I *Cannot* Handle Any More Job Applications!

People, I am seriously going stir-crazy here. Supposedly it was going to be a great thing that I was done teaching and had a week off from my other part-time job, because I was going to haul ass on job apps of all kinds. But seriously, people, I got more done when I was taking an hour every morning before work! I hate this.

You go to HERC or whatever and find some jobs that potentially fit your experience, and you work up a cover letter from one of your templates, and spend 30 minutes or so re-entering all your damn cv resume information into their on-line forms, and then you upload your cover letter and resume, and then you're done. Except you're not, because you have nothing else to do all day except find another job and apply to that, and another, and another, and after about four, which, since you are doing them back to back, have had no time to move forward or gather any positive response yet, you feel like the whole project is futile.

Doing any more than four could put you into despair, because applying to the same type of admin job over and over really gives you the feeling that the whole exercise is pointless and you will never get this type of job --- I mean, you just applied to three! And you applied to a bunch of the same yesterday! And nothing has happened! And there is nothing else for you to do all day besides continue down this dizzying feeling of pointless insanity, or stop doing it and just sit around. Then, if you pick option 2, you get to beat up on yourself for not doing anything to get a job and your general lumpishness.

So yesterday I only applied to one thing. Today, none. And I am sooo glad I will be able to go back to my crappy pittance of a part-time job on Monday --- seriously, this was no vacation for me at all. And I should be able to send out more apps ---- when you're hurry hurry hurrying and yelling at the on-line system that it shouldn't crash any more because you have to get out four apps before going in to work, for some reason, it's just way easier to function. Plus there are people to talk to at work. Plus it's easier to make the time pass.

Today I worked all morning on a neglected part of my to-do list: my accepted article, which has to be proofed and fixed and permissioned and all that so that it can actually get published. It was pretty nice, reading in the coffee shop all morning, and saw a dude from film who I talk to regularly and got caught up on campus gossip, and then I went home and ate lunch and had a nap, and really, the day isn't much different than my grad school summer schedule was. I'm collating two different revision versions and then marking all the reviewer suggestions and made it through about a third of the article this morning.

This afternoon when I went back to the article, I started feeling really weird and depressed. I couldn't figure out why I was getting so upset, and then it hit me: this part of my article was my job talk.

I can't work on this any more right now. Maybe later. I'll go find something else to occupy the time while I wait for my job apps to work their way through their various systems. No idea how I'm going to make it through this shitty weekend.

I'm Bored.

And going stir crazy. Whyyyyy is there no one around to talk to these days? Mreh! My sister's not answering her phone. Pthththtthtpt.

I sent out some more applications, and of course, I could send out still more applications. Eh. I'm so over this stuff. The problem with applying to jobs is that then you want them. You don't want those stinky other jobs over there you have yet to apply to; you want to be instantaneously hired so that you don't have to do this stupid job applicating stuff and you can have one of these nice lovely jobs you have already researched and become invested in. Look, Craigslist says there are cheap little places that look nice over here! Clearly you must call me right now, interviewers, and tell me that I already have the job and that neighborhood x is better than neighborhood y, even though y has more places with picture listings.

Of course I know that I have to keep sending out stuff until I get something, because search committees don't actually work the way I have described above. One of the job books I read (on how to get a teaching job, but NCLB has basically made that impossible even for an emergency appointment without a credential) talked about the "interview funnel," where if you don't keep pouring job applications in the one end, you won't have interviews continue to trickle out the other end. Unfortunately I must have a defective funnel, for all that the applying to stuff is working for me.

Anyway, in the realm of depressing job-search-related crap I didn't need to hear about, here's a post by Dr. Isis on how she had an inside candidate and couldn't tell the pool of applicants. The economy is hurtin' people in the science and medical fields, too, Isis learned, and people with amazing credentials applied even though it was a temp. position. It was depressing all around, because the applicants thought they had a chance, when really, it was that Isis wanted to give more hours to someone and had to openly advertise the position to follow regulations. Sucks. And it brings up the question of how many jobs that get advertised are really viable jobs you're actually competing for, anyway?

In my various attempts to apply to college admin type positions, I saw Stanford did a very interesting thing: on one job description it said "this position has a strong inside candidate and prospective candidates are advised to be aware of this when they apply." Or some bureaucratic phrasing crap like that. This made me so thrilled! Imagine if this was acceptable practice everywhere! Ahhh, it would help so much with my stress levels. I didn't apply to that one, because there's no way they would take a "career changer" over their inside candidate, but if I felt I had the most amazing resume in that field ever, I'd slap my app down to compete with the best of 'em. And I sure wouldn't let that stop me if it was a professor type job in my field. But it's nice to know, you know?

And relatedly, California's unemployment rate is still at 12.5%, while in business, tiny companies are able to scoop up candidates far more qualified than they should be getting. People who ran multi-state or multi-national companies are now getting pulled into stuff barely a step above mom-and-pops, but "they're happy they at least have a job."

Ugh. It's a bad time to be retraining. I've been peeking around to see if moving into a multi-bedroom place with roommates and sticking at my part time jobs a while longer might be an option, but rent is the one place that's not budging these days. Ah, fucking houseflippers who are now trying to rent out their white elephants for 6 grand a month, you're fucking it all up for the rest of us!

Things you don't want to hear at the vet...

"Oh dear, I've expressed your cat's anal gland juices all over your purse."

Yeccch!

My silly and annoying little cat has been "scooting" his butt on my carpet intermittently for the past few days. Also yecch! When I called the office, they said, have you seen worms in his feces?" Ewwww, no: yecchh! So I made an appointment to bring him in and have the vet deal with him.

Luckily, or perhaps strangely, nothing was wrong --- no redness, no infection, no mites or worms or fleas. And she said he was "full," but not "impacted," so he might have solved or partially solved whatever was bothering him on his own with the scooting. Scooting, yecch!

Oh, he meowed and meowed when we were in the waiting room this morning. At least the vet showered him with the luvs while we were there (not that poor little Loquito was happy about it ---- many other unpleasant things happened in there!).The vet cooed about how big and heavy he was, but not at all fat, and said many things in a silly voice about his cuteness, his adorable soft coat, and how she would just take him home herownself if she had half a chance. Heh. And hey, since nobody was prodding at my butt, I thought it was a good visit.

I read on the internet, though, that in older cats this becomes a problem and sometimes you have to take the cat in to the vet regularly to be "expressed" or learn how to do it at home. Yecch! Listen, Mr: you can just express yourself as far as I'm concerned! And you better start looking for a job too, if you're going to need extra vet visits regularly --- to say nothing of paying to have the carpet cleaned occasionally!

Speaking of looking for jobs, I have uploaded/sent/emailed about 6 jobs, so I'm now going to celebrate by folding my laundry and taking a nap. Who knows, maybe I'll have a bidding war over me by the time I wake up. Or at the very least, I can awaken with the knowledge that my cat isn't swabbing his but all over everything.

Not much, how are you?

Today I finally made a pilgrimage to Target. Unfortunately I was not impressed by the Liberty for Target collection --- the amount of stuff at my store was very small and kinda dumped in a corner somewhere. There was only one of the peacock pillows, no blanket or duvet in that pattern, and I didn't like it as much in person.

Plus, the big jumble of riotous prints reminded me of my late-70s early childhood in the house of my "I don't know what psychedelics are, but big clashy prints just get even more cheerful when you put them next to each other!" mom.

(My favorite picture of all of mine is from when I'm a little toddler in the house I was born in. I think mom decorated it at the height of the "giant psychedelic mushrooms with faces" wallpaper craze. I will bring it back here and upload it for you some time.)

So, no print stuff, but I bought a bunch of t-shirts and stuff I can't really afford ... I gotta toss some of my beloved-but-ratty Ts anyway. The patterned blouses and dresses won't work in my workplace with the arctic-level air conditioning, and they were all a bit too patterny for my taste. I like bright colors, or weird pops of color with accessories (shoes!), but wild patterns bring me flashbacks of my mom. Or, really, present-day images of my mom. I just can't handle that. Maybe someday when I have money I will be more experimental in dress.

I had to buy a new floor lamp, as the old one must have a short and it will only turn on sometimes after a lot of thwacking and jiggling the knob. Buying a something as boring as new lamp to replace an old one has to be the epitome of replacement shopping, eh? It doesn't really add any snazzy new decorating look to the room (which needs some wall art or something), just makes it so I don't go blind trying to read by the flickers of my computer screen. At least it works.

But I got a lot done today after the shopping ---- shredding last year's essays and cleaning the living room and the catbox and cubic fuckloads of dishes and getting groceries and a half a dozen other errands and then I made a nice simple little dinner and all. Not very exciting, but pretty necessary.

It remains to be seen whether I tackle the other half of my to-do list tomorrow and go back to working on the job apps or play hooky and go outside somewhere. I have to hunt up quarters and scale mountains of laundry, among other things.

Anyway, my cat is pestering me again, so that must mean I should close this post with a cat picture:

Leaving Iron Island

I watched a movie tonight! Shocking. (It's just my pattern that I put all sorts of depressing and/or artsy movies on my queue and then don't feel like I have the stamina to face them after working, and then they sit there near the tv as the Big Art Movie Pile Of Guilt.) It was an Iranian film, Iron Island. I liked it. (Just to get that part of the movie review out of the way.)

Iron Island is a fairly light film, portraying the everyday lives of a group of poor Iranians who are basically squatting, living on an abandoned oil tanker. Not much explanation is given for how it got there or how they got there, but the reason they can live there is through the strong will of "Captain" Nemat, who runs the complex economy of the whole ship. Everyone who moves on to the ship does work for the community, whether it is baking bread, or sewing burqas, or sawing off bits of the ship to sell for scrap metal, and everyone pays Captain Nemat for their space on the ship and the resources they use.

It's a tough environment to live in --- everything from food to lamp oil must be brought on board, and despite one tiny scene of an older man watering some spindly shoots growing from a box bed filled with earth, you can't really grow anything or make anything in this economy. This makes it an economy that is both utterly dependent and fragile, but also thriving and with unexpected richness in places. One boy, Ahmad, who becomes a central character, earns his living by keeping the one cell phone working and dialing it for the residents, predominantly women who are calling their husbands and other male family members wherever they are off looking for work or sending back money.


It's also a tremendously isolating place --- there are wonderful profile shots of the tanker, immense and high up in the water, and yet dwarfed by the scale of the sea around it. On board, the teacher, who has set up a makeshift schoolroom by using homemade chalk on the walls, leads his students through a dictation exercise: the sea is immense and the boat is on the sea. We are on the boat which is in the middle of the sea. The sea is beautiful. (I don't remember the exact subtitles.)

One little girl excitedly asks, "Teacher, where is the world?" We are in the world, the teacher responds. "Well, where are we in the world? she asks again. Later the Captain gives the schoolteacher some newspapers he has requested, but they turn out to be quite old. The children use them to practice reading out loud, their phrasings about "we are phenomena and we exist in a world full of phenomena" almost as absurdist as the teacher's dictation exercises. In another scene teenage boys pay money to sneak into an improvised illegal cinema; the fare is German-language infomercials, picked up by a jerry-rigged satellite dish. Someone manages to pick up a music station with someone singing in Arabic (what I assumed was unsubtitled Arabic), but all too soon a crisis on the boat forces them to leave, their bootleg technology left exposed and soon destroyed by the Captain.

A motionless ship with a sputtering economy and its young residents hungering for contact with the outside world ---- sound like a political allegory yet? Further adding to the theme of entrapment is the Fish Boy, who is obsessed with netting fish in the flooded bottom of the hold. "They get in there, from a hole down below, and then they can't swim back out," he explains to Ahmad, and we see him take buckets of fish up top and gently toss them, one by one, over the side.

But the boat-villagers do leave, and far before the end of the film. Are they being forced out, as the authorities have tried multiple times? Or is the Captain finally heeding the warnings of the schoolteacher that the tanker has been slowly sinking for years now? Is he legitimately caring for the villagers in organizing their resistance against the evacuating forces, or is he using them to drive up the price of the boat? And is he a benevolent community leader, or an exploiter? None of these ever really become clear, and I couldn't tell whether Nemat's plan of finding the entire village land and a permanent home turned out to be madness or a sign of hope.

There's a scene where Nemat punishes --- nay, tortures --- Ahmad that reminded me exactly of George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant." Does he hate to do this and feel forced to by the watching eyes of the entire boat? Does he want to make this punishment? Is this part of his plan to consolidate his power and continue to rule over the village once they are all on land? Or is this the act of someone who can't think of any other actions to take? Like I said, I can't tell whether the film's ending was meant to be a happy one or not, but it had lovely images and framing, and closes not with the villagers but a gorgeous and peaceful shot of the sea.

Application Break

Ok, I sent off four more apps this morning and have about an hour before I have to go to work. So I'm taking a break. Neener neener. All you people who laughed at my car trials and tribulations should be ashamed of yourselves: I got a parking ticket. Sigh. That job only has pay parking or reserved permits near it, so usually I take the bus down there. But I was running late trying to buy milk and cat food and all sorts of other things the other morning so when I put everything away I had to run for the car instead of the bus. Then, because I bought a one-day permit, the parking people got me the next morning. Argh.

Anywhoo, I'm pluggin' away at various applications these days --- while I was grading and finishing classes and all that other stuff, some more tt jobs came up on the chronicle, so I have a little pile of those to whip through. They are definitely the "second-tier" jobs, and I am sure they know that. 4-4s of only comp at a teeny tiny college that has to describe the number of hours driving distance to a minor city, that's second tier.

My dept. has only placed a couple people in postdocs this year (and one weird, overseas teaching position), but I think all the people who are still enrolled have given up for the year, as have a lot of the recent grads who have some sort of steady income. I'm hoping that this the case all over, and the pools for these late blooming jobs are smaller. Considering how crappy the market was this year, I'm doubtful. But, hey, I'm getting through these apps pretty fast, so whatever. Hopefully they will be trying to take advantage of their purchasing power in this bad market and I will look like a feasible choice rather than a flight risk.

After I catch up on these academic jobs and hit up some more contract teaching jobs, it's back to the admin postings, although I haven't had any signs of luck in them yet. And then, when I catch up on those, I get to venture back out into the scary wilds of craigslist. Sigh. I pretty much *don't* want anything that is showing up locally on craigslist. I will move back in with my family and search over there for openings at slightly larger companies. I think I would go crazy in these weird incestuous tiny 3-people office situations I've seen. And the only thing I've found worse than having too much to do in a tiny office is to have *nothing* to do, but having to look busy because otherwise they will eliminate your position. It's a particular mind-numbing stress.

And I happened to run into the department staff lady who offered me my course again next year (discussed in my previous "beige" post). She said I got good evaluations again and asked what else I can teach. So we went into her office and looked through the course catalog. I dunno --- I can do comm-type stuff, and I've TAd in social science departments, but where they have holes and where I have expertise don't really match up. Still, she said I should contact the dept. chair about Y and Z because the chair might be able to move things around. And if I fill all the curricular holes next year (about 3 or 4 classes) this department won't even run a call for lecturers. *That's* what I mean about beige. It's about having a flexible go-to person that saves the department effort, not so much about my lack of qualifications or my desperation. If you've ever looked on the course listings and wondered why the hell *that* adjunct is there (or still there, despite being a crappy teacher), "beige" is the answer. It frees up the dept. to work on other, more critical, crises.

So, hunting for enough classes to fill a year next year will be my back up plan. I'm not allowing myself to do any work towards it at the moment; must first apply to all the permanent stuff and then I can eat the dessert. If it comes to that, I'll try hitting up the local CCs to get a comp class or two to balance it out ---- I'm wondering if having only very old comp teaching experience is hurting me on the resume.

Oops gotta go.