Archive for April 2009

Turning Away From Academia

When one is engaged in the process of earning a Ph.D., especially in the Humanities & Social Sciences (where opportunities outside the academy, despite programmatic claims to the contrary, are rare), the utterance of one's intention to seek employment outside the academy is often met with incredulous stares and queries to the effect of, "Couldn't you find a tenure-track position?" or assurances that if one keeps trying, "you could at least adjunct for a year, and I'm sure the market will get better." Never is the idea that this is a legitimate choice, one that has been weighed heavily and thought out to the fullest, given any merit. Never mind the fact that the tenure system as we know it is likely dying, as a quick search of sites such as The Chronicle of Higher Education [ Link ] or Inside Higher Ed [ Link ] will reveal. Never mind the fact that the majority of college courses are taught by adjuncts with no benefits, no chance for tenure, no stable setting (search "freeway fliers") at either of the aforementioned sites for more on this), and a semester-to-semester employment that has been likened to wage slavery in the Wal-Mart sense. No, the only worthwhile employment, according to tenured faculty in HSS disciplines, is in the university system, ideally at a Research Intensive university, on the tenure track.

For an outsider to really grasp the indentured servitude that looms for doctoral students who reach for the tenure track, think of the medieval apprenticeship system. You work, for several years, as a nearly unpaid apprentice in a Ph.D. program, "training" for your future employment by teaching introductory courses and writing research papers designed to get you to think in LPI units (Least Publishable Increment) of the smallest scope possible, learning a highly specialized vocabulary that only insiders speak, and placing all your self worth on how well you absorb these lessons: the better you can write and understand articles entitled, "The Ontological Revelations of the Irish-American Epistolary Movement of Boston Between March and May 1904," the more worthy you feel and the more likely it is that you'll feel incredibly important by developing such a minor expertise. Never mind the fact that the entire piece can be summarized by stating, "We can learn a lot about the way Irish immigrants thought by writing letters just by examining two months in 1904," you have to fill 30-plus pages with crap, tripe, and pseudo-insight in order to get your precious research published, this being the only way you can enter a professorship and continue writing such earth-shattering research for the rest of your life. Often, scholars who learn the game well enough can republish the same paper six or seven times, changing only the wording and the importance of a few "insights" around in order to make it seem new and different; after all, only 2-3 other people on earth will ever read your stuff, and the likelihood of them exposing your work, and thereby theirs, as tripe is quite negligible.

After your indentured servitude/Ph.D. program, you'll move on to the equivalent of the medieval "Journeyman" position. Depending on your teaching, as measured by sections of annoyed first year students with no insight as to what makes a good teacher beyond the answer to the statement, "Gives easy A's," and your "scholarship," you'll land a position as either an adjunct, a Visiting Assistant Professor, or an Assistant Professor, with only the latter offering possible tenure. As any one of the above three, you'll work 70 hour weeks, teach the heaviest loads, and sit silently during all discussions of departmental governance (making waves, showing original thought, and challenging authority being anathema to the open thinkers of the tenured faculty, who are, despite the "liberal" label attached to many of them, the most conservative bunch on earth when it comes to their vaunted profession). If you landed either an adjuncting or VAP position, you'll have to try again to reach that Assistant Professorship, but in any case, once you've landed that job, you'll be making less than a public schoolteacher for seven years while you try to prove to your colleagues that you're worth their time. In this case, think fraternity hazing as much as medieval apprenticeship.

I suppose that after a decade of forced self-delusion that "this is all worth it," the attitudes of the professoriate are inevitable. One percent of them, after all, do end up with comfortable positions that allow them to truly experience all that the vaunted tenure system has to offer: a guaranteed job, cushy teaching schedule, and the expectation that one write about that which most interests oneself, as well as a fairly respected title that affords one the opportunity to pontificate about all sorts of subjects from an inscrutable position of intellectual authority. These are the masters of the universe, the Wall Street jocks of the academic world, and it is lives like theirs that the myriad members of the lower rungs of the ladder will think of when they caution you against leaving the academy.

Sorry. I'm not convinced. Teaching the current generation of narcissistic, lazy, perpetual children is not my idea of a great time (for the first time in a long time, full professors will field calls from worried parents, who haven't yet realized that faculty look on students who have mommy intervene as lower than worms). I'm also convinced that I can write and publish, engage in a productive life of the mind, and at the same time enjoy a similar starting salary to that of a fully tenured faculty member in other venues. I didn't just focus on the skills of the graduate student, you see: I broadened my interests, rather than narrowed them, and at the same time learned how to do things that others have dismissed as unnecessary but are, at the same time, valued everywhere but in academia. So in this, the final weeks of my funding as a graduate student, I am finally relinquishing the hold of academia on my mind: faculty positions are now, and will remain, my second choice -- one that I could fulfill ably, but not one that I prefer.

27 Apr, 2009 | Chris |

Rediscovered: Young Fresh Fellows

The Young Fresh Fellows were a witty, punky, pop-rock band before They Might Be Giants popularized a watered down version of the genre. They used everything: fuzz distortion, ska-instrumentation, and a DIY punk rock sensibility that made them heroes of the Seattle music community years before anyone thought of the place as having a "Scene," when the so-called scene was comprised of the Melvins and the Fastbacks. The Fellows formed in 1982, but the two albums I most love were 1987's The Men Who Loved Music and 1991's Electric Bird Digest.

Men Who Loved Music The Men Who Loved Music was their first fully realized album, the one that established their "sound," and was clever and goofy to the oft-compared Replacements' dumb. To be honest, if one listens closely to this album, the beginning of the music evolution that would bring about Weezer's intelligent geek rock become clear. On the sampler file, below, the first two samples, of "TV Dream" and "When the Girls Get Here," will show the range of the Fellows' playing and lyrics. Among my favorite Fellows lyrics are the opening stanzas from the latter, about the extent to which young fresh frat geeks will go to get attention from the fairer sex:

When the girls get here / We'll talk about integrated circuits and things / Show them how smart we are / We'll set our hair on fire / Spill beer all over our t-shirts / We'll show them what kind of guys we are...

Electric Bird Digest - 1991Electric Bird Digest is quite possibly the finest album ever put out by the Fellows. Kurt Bloch & Scott McCaughey's guitars sing, grind, wail, and pluck out some incredible themes, and while they display some of their former goofiness in tracks like "Hillbilly Drummer Girl," the third song on the sampler below, much of the former goofiness has been replaced by a harder, more aggressive sound, likely the result of the recent addition of Bloch (of the Fastbacks) to replace the departed Chuck Carroll. To hear a great example of this latter variety of virtuoso punkiness, the fourth song on the sampler, "Tomorrow's Gone (And So Are You)" is provided. Metallica would be hard pressed to pound out a faster intro.

Young Fresh Fellows SamplerSampler songs: "TV Dream" - Men Who Loved Music, "When The Girls Get Here" - Men Who Loved Music, "Hillbilly Drummer Girl" - Electric Bird Digest, "Tomorrow's Gone (And So Are You)" - Electric Bird Digest.

To purchase Fellows music, go to Amazon's MP3 store - they've got a pretty good selection for such an obscure band.

27 Apr, 2009 | Chris |

Here I am Now... Entertain Me

Well, here it is... a new blog with its own domain name, since the world seemed to have problems subscribing to one on a subdomain. I'll be snobbing and complaining, pontificating and more at this address for the forseeable future.

24 Apr, 2009 | Chris |