Ask the Radical: A Young Historian Seeks Advice On Overcoming Obstacles

A SLAC graduate in the midst of a prestigious PhD program in history asks us for advice, dear readers:

I write to you today with a very elderly cat sleeping next to me (she's 18, it's kind of ridiculous) and thoughts of the job market and my ability to provide food for the very elderly cat foremost in my mind. What I've been wondering, lately, is what I'm supposed to do with the knowledge BOTH that the job market is very bad AND that, as it happens, a graduate program is probably the best place for me right now.

(Brief aside: I say this not because I'm Special and Being A Historian Is What I Was Meant To Do, but because, in practical terms, it's true. It's sort of weird to tell a stranger this, but the flexibility inherent in graduate school--the ability to disappear for months at a
time and still have money to pay [most] bills has been vital. My parents are both dead and I am solely responsible for the care of a very ill younger sibling. I didn't know any of that would happen when I started, but at this point, bailing is just not logistically reasonable.)

So put another way, what do I do now, exactly? What steps can I take to make myself appear employable, maybe on the market, but maybe not? Like, yeah, I shouldn't have gone to graduate school, but I did and I can't really quit. So . . . now what? It's a question I don't really
see addressed in online conversations or, particularly, in my program.

I've done a lot of things to try to make it work, including cobbling together a bunch of odd jobs--as a museum docent, as a freelance researcher doing copy editing, image identification, and everything else in between, as an advisor to an undergraduate research program. I was invited to give a lecture in an undergraduate course as a pinch-hitter when a prof had a health crisis. I've a paper coming out in Prestigious History Journal and am giving a paper at Prestigious Conference next year. I've JOINED the Berks in the hopes of cultivating some friend/mentorships with Lady Historians. Is that all there is to the circus? That and, as everyone says, "Write a really good dissertation?"

I'm curious what you think about this--about how one might go about making the best of a bad lot, and whether it's specific to every person or there are more general ways to think about this.

My first piece of advice is that you need to go out and acquire a kitten immediately. Despite the fact that s/he would represent an additional expense, you could not only use an extra set of paws in your life, you need someone in the household who is relentlessly optimistic. Someone dashing about the apartment with her tail in the air sounds like just the ticket to me.

So let's get down to your real circumstances and the substance of your question: you went to graduate school in history under one set of assumptions about what your future held, and then your life changed dramatically. Although you have not indicated whether there are other relatives in the picture, you have been orphaned at an unusually early age and now are charged with the well-being of a sibling. You have not indicated whether said sibling has resources or other caregivers, but your point is clear: despite the lousy job market, you cannot afford not to work. You cannot even afford to work at a level that supports one person rather meanly, which is what some young historians can do when they only support themselves and/or can rely on others to bail them out when their cars die on I-95 on the way to a poorly paid adjunct job. Furthermore, even if you were willing to chuck your dream of being a historian, it doesn't seem realistic to quit graduate school now and retrain for something with a guaranteed future like bankruptcy law, refugee relief and disaster management, or the Border Patrol.

I agree. Let's look at the plus side for a moment.

Although you rightly portray your circumstances as mildly Dickensian, you also seem to have what all heroines of nineteenth century fiction require: pluck, ambition, prudence and character. You also have good judgement, and have focused at least some of your efforts on concrete accomplishments that will display your scholarly talents to others. You have done all the right things: gone to a great graduate school in a major city where there are jobs (teaching and non-teaching) a-plenty; you are publishing; and you are giving papers and reaching out to other historians to build a set of contacts that, while they can't necessarily get you a tenure-track job, will help to lift you out of obscurity. You have explored a number of other options for work, options that -- given the right circumstances -- will open paths to working in public history, or working in programs that help link the study of history to fields outside traditional academia.

I am also cautiously optimistic about the possibilities for academic employment over the next few years, barring a double-dip recession. The first issue of AHA Perspectives had a lot of good jobs, several of which were rank open, which suggests that purses are beginning to open up. Even big public universities that have taken a serious beating from their legislatures are advertising jobs -- Rutgers, Cal, CUNY and UI -- and Rutgers is committing to three more searches in the next couple years. My sense of things is that universities responded to the crash by closing their pocketbooks with a snap. That they were a little short of cash was one issue, but the bigger issue was not knowing where the bleeding would stop, so administrators did not want to make commitments that would make them look improvident down the line.

So I am cautiously optimistic that the job market is returning to normal bad, a state of things that will also bring with it the visiting positions, temporary work and post-docs that sustain this state of normal bad -- but were suspended immediately following the crash to cope with the cash crunch.

There is more good news: because you are not a snob, because you had no backup, and because you look forward and not backwards, you have explored other kinds of work. I have one relative who, suddenly left as a single mom with a small child, decided overnight to suck it up and go to law school, despite the fact that she really might have preferred to be an entrepeneur. In a moment of useful hardheadedness, she put the interests of her dependent first, and developed her talents in another way. And yet, I am quite sure that her immediate need -- to have a salary and benefits -- will ultimately dovetail with the creative talents that caused her to explore another kind of life entirely. Similarly, while you might end up making a career in public history, this does not bar you from a satisfying life of scholarship (have I ever told you how much time, in my cushy tenured job, I spend doing work I do not value and that detracts from my own writing and teaching?)

Let me offer another piece of advice following from this thought: Administrators Make More Money. A lot more money. There are more administrative jobs, and administrators have more flexibility in terms of where they work geographically. Some of them even have tenure (ask Lesboprof if you don't believe me.) You really need to keep this path open, and think about doing so by amplifying your work experience in areas of university administration that are interesting to you. Knowing how to run a budget, how to supervise a staff, how to write an institutional grant, how to construct and supervise a curriculum - these are things that they don't teach in graduate school but that, in combination with your PH.D. and your publishing, could take you far, my friend. There are very few good academic jobs nowadays, particularly academic deanships and directorships, that do not require a PH.D. and a record of publication. Not infrequently, these ads ask for a "distinguished" record of publication as well. Hence, regarding administration as a fallback option for failed scholars is not only less true than it ever was, but it also seems that in the near future, having street cred as a scholar will actually be critical to moving up the ladder administratively.

A great many graduate students are instructed that doing such work takes them off the fast-track, making them look unserious, unfocused and lacking in commitment to their scholarship. To this I say: Balls. Since when did the allegedly virtuous path of eking out a living on adjunct pay, moving around the country, and becoming increasingly bitter about what you have sacrificed prove to be a guarantee of tenure-track labor? Furthermore, while some narrow-minded person at Prestigious Ivy U. might look at your vita, overlook all your academic accomplishments and say, "Hmmm. Assistant to the Dean of the College? Yeccch!" someone at Zenith, or State U - Calabash might say happily, "Now here's a person who won't have to be taught how to walk, talk and find the chalk!" It is also true that you can send vitae to different schools that emphasize different things.

So you see? It's all in your perspective, isn't it? You are, in fact, doing the right thing. And while we all wake up in the middle of the night from time to time with disaster on our minds (yes, even Tenured Radicals who are full professors), you, my dear, have your head screwed on just right. Keep up the good work.

Yes, it's job season again. Got a question? Ask the Radical! Submit questions for publication to: tenuredDOTradicalATgmailDOTcom.

Department of Radical Pedagogy: Or, A Few Easy Steps Towards Being A Good Academic Adviser

Thirty-four years ago this month, I packed an old steamer trunk, a duffel bag of jeans and tee shirts, a newish (manual) typewriter, and I headed off to Oligarch University to make my fortune. Having made a declaration of interest in the direction of the English Department, I was assigned a genteel, elderly male advisor who had wispy white hair, excellent manners and the nickname of a baby farm animal. I met with him exactly once, I think, and although he gave me very little advice he also did no harm. Being me, I also didn't really want any advice. I had been steered, by a high school mentor, to a member of the large staff that taught multiple sections of the introductory literature course to which those of us with an AP were admitted, and I cared about little else. My new professor wore sunglasses throughout our entire meeting and treated me with gravity and formality, all of which, more than anything, made me feel like I had truly arrived.

And yet my actual advisor, soon to be left in the dust, made a contribution to my first week at Oligarch that I will never forget, and it was in the grand old tradition of Men's Education. He had a little dinner party at his house about a week into the term for all his advisees (at least two of us are now teaching at liberal arts colleges, and one at an Ivy League university), at which -- in the middle of all the excitement of being at college and feeling very grown up - I suffered a sudden, acute and positively babyish pang of gratitude about spending a few hours in a real home.

Needless to say, I made some spectacular errors in that first two years and had some great successes, all of which had to do with the opportunities and pitfalls of a large university. Would things have been different with a more attentive advisor? I doubt it. It wasn't until, entirely by accident, I fell in with a group of graduate students and became invested in being regarded as -- not a good student, but scholarly -- that things straightened out for me. And I didn't really acquire the habits of organization and planning that I would have needed to become a good student until I went to graduate school myself.

Hence my investment in being a good academic adviser to the undergraduates with whom I am charged.

But what should advising be nowadays? Many schools hire "professional advisers" to guide students through their core requirements and a curriculum that is often heavily staffed with adjunct labor. A big state university where I interviewed last year has advising drop-in centers, where someone who may have never met you helps adjust your schedule. In contrast, we liberal arts colleges tend to distribute students through some system that at least gestures to their interests, and many of us also have systems of peer advising, in which upper level students attend to --- well, what do they do? I don't know. We don't seem to have them anymore at Zenith, although I had a marvelous peer advisor assigned to me once who -- to the mixed embarrassment and delight of many of the new students -- handed out safe-sex kits in our first meeting.

The truth is, however, that as the cost of education has escalated, so too have expectations from parents about what advisers will do. In one memorable telephone call, a parent told me that he expected his son to show up in my office every afternoon for an enforced study hall because the young man could not be trusted to get his work done on his own. NOT! But lest we get sidetracked on helicoptering, there are two utterly reasonable explanations for this. One is that students who have gone to good schools often received the kind of individual attention (it's called good teaching, friends) that has never been the norm at college, and won't be most places. The other is that, as the price of tuition rises, it's normal to think that you are getting something special for your money, not just throwing your wonderful kid in with all the other swimmers and hoping s/he doesn't sink to the bottom.

Of course, since faculty never agreed to these outlandish tuitions in the first place, they tend not to get the nature of the trade-off. But in getting ready to greet my own new advisees this fall, let me give you a list of five easy things you can do to get off on the right foot.

Clean your office. OK, you may not have time to clean out years of dreck in the next week or two, but can you neaten up the piles a little? Throw away the old papers you never returned? Shelve as many books as possible? Dust? While many students will feel that they have entered a special academic heaven when they enter your cluttered lair, many will get the message -- particularly if they have to move a pile of crap in order to even sit down -- that they aren't welcome. Spending five dollars on some fresh flowers wouldn't kill you either.

If the college makes student files available, pick them up and read them. Seems basic, but some faculty just don't, and not always out of laziness. One person I have a lot of respect for believes that a young person should be allowed to leave the past behind and start entirely fresh. But I disagree. Students are coming from a place where they are well-known and to a place where they are anonymous. This can be a good thing: leave a geek and arrive a star; leave a girl and arrive a boy; leave with a name you have always hated and choose a new one. But it is also really scary. Being able to greet a student by recognizing something about who s/he is can be a great comfort, and it can make that student feel welcome to return.

Try to bring yourself to have them in your home in the first couple weeks of classes. If you live far from campus, as I do, team up with another member of the faculty who lives near campus and do it together. One of the things that is newly strange about their lives is the food, and having a home cooked meal can be anchoring. Another thing I do is have lunch with each of them, individually, about a month into the semester. That's when things start getting rough academically, and a moment where a small intervention (for example, encouraging a student to visit a prof in office hours) can go a long way.

Don't be opinionated, and don't retaliate when students ignore your unsolicited opinions. Being opinionated is not the same thing as giving advice: the latter requires listening to what students think or want, and linking it to what the institution offers. For example, a student who comes to Zenith and says s/he is interested in a business major (no, we don't have one; yes, it has happened) can be guided to the economics department; to introductory courses in sociology and psychology; to the internship coordinator; to economic history; to the Victorianist in the English department who has planned a first-year seminar around Das Kapital. This is advice.

But you should not give an opinion without permission: simply asking a student "Are you asking my opinion?" will clarify whether your opinion is being solicited or not. The worst offenders, in my view, are the advisers who tell students that they will refuse to sign off on any schedule that does not meet their personal approval (as opposed, say, to curricular requirements that are mandated by the university.) I have also heard from students whose advisers go out of their way to voice their disapproval of participation in varsity sport, This is particularly thoughtless, and borderline nasty really, since athletic excellence can be a big part of an individual student's identity and self-esteem, something that creates a platform of confidence for academic achievement too.

Seeking this kind of authority in a student's life is ethically wrong, in my view. Worse, it will cause many students to avoid you and only check in when necessary.

Encourage students to do their own research about professors and academic programs and bring it to you for discussion. Perhaps your most important job as an advisor is to support students in becoming informed and authoritative about their own educations. This is what helps them learn to make good choices when you are not around to discuss them, and to eventually be independent of you. One way to launch this process is to write them before they come to school, if you can, and encourage them to explore the curriculum. Should a student come to see you with no ideas, it may not be because s/he is lazy, but because s/he has never had the opportunity to make free choices. Make sure you reserve time during advising period for such people, so that you can send them away for a few hours to do this work -- a peer advisor or RA would be good back-up. Reassure them that their preferences matter, and ask them to come back with, say, ten courses that they think would be fun.

One form of research is to send students to the college bookstore to browse the books for individual courses. It's one thing for a course to look good in the catalogue, but can the student envision spending the semester reading those books? Again, does the course look fun?

I always try to discourage students writing off a course or a professor on the basis of rumors or on-line chatter. Even when such information is not highly selective (which it is), unless you actually know the faculty member is impaired or abusive, encourage the student to try the class or section out if they would otherwise be interested in it. Many teachers that are not "popular" have a significant and devoted following, and a great many of them are wonderful teachers who teach in fields that are under the radar of many students. Many teachers with a large and devoted following of like-minded thinkers often miss having the students who will challenge, or be challenged, by them.

What's the take-away point here? Invite them in; make them welcome; find ways to indicate that you like and respect them and encourage them to come back. You can't ensure any student's success, but the best adviser is the one that the student actually wants to see.

Positively 30th Street Early For The Train Cheesesteak Blogging

There has been radio silence for the past several days because, although she has many virtues and resources, the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR) -- with whom I have been visiting -- does not have WiFi. Fortunately, however, Amtrak now provides a WiFi connection in its Philadelphia station, and I have arrived here early enough for my Shoreline train to have a cheese steak sandwich for lunch. Hence, I am inspired, and wish to debunk the following three myths about what is known elsewhere as "the Philadelphia Cheesesteak Sandwich," or "Philly Cheesesteak."

First of all, there is no such thing as "the Philadelphia Cheesesteak Sandwich." It is called a cheesesteak, and the only place you can actually get an authentic one is in Philadelphia or its immediate environs. If you are anywhere else in the country -- with the exception, perhaps, of the portions of New Jersey that are in proximity to Philadelphia, and towns no further south than Wilmington, DE, what you are being offered is a simulacrum of a cheesesteak. But no one who actually lives, or has lived, in Philadelphia would call it a "Philly cheesesteak." The modifier is utterly and completely redundant: when you see it in use, you know you are dealing with a poseur of a restaurant (or more likely, a restaurant chain.)

Second, there are people -- most of whom have not been raised in and around Philadelphia -- who think that cheesesteaks are nutritionally unsound. This is crazy talk. The basic ingredients of the cheese steak are: American cheese; a portions of cow so tough and unwanted that they must be shaved razor-thin, frozen, fried and chopped up in order to be chewed at all; a white Italian roll with thick crust; salt; and grease. Lots of grease. I ask you -- under whose rules are these things not good for you? Particularly when you add fried onions and peppers, you have at least three parts of the food pyramid covered. In other words, you are practically done for the day in terms of nutrition, and should feel free to eat ice cream for all other meals.

Third, I have heard non-Philadelphians say that after a cheesesteak, you will be so full of calories you won't have to eat for hours. This is absolutely not true. You will need to eat again immediately. You will need a Tastykake for dessert.

This concludes today's advice from the City of Brotherly Love. Stay tuned for an item later in June on the nutritional value of Scrapple.

The College Catalogue Goes Bye-Bye: Harvard Catches Up With Zenith At Last

Why does John Harvard look so depressed and defeated? Is it the endowment? Is it the quality of the entering class? No! It's the death of the course catalogue as we know it.

Following the Harvard Crimson, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Harvard University has eliminated printed course catalogues, faculty and student handbooks, and something called the "Q-Guide," in favor of on-line versions of all these documents. The "Q-Guide," which publishes summaries of teaching evaluations, is undoubtedly a grisly publication full of accurate, witty and devastating humor about our colleagues who work at an institution commonly known as the Northern Zenith. I am sure the Harvard faculty are glad to see the back of that one, Mary.

The move to web-based publishing is budgetary to be sure, but one administrator points out that the course catalogue will now be much more accurate than it has been. I believe this. I speak as a program chair who was adding and subtracting courses as late as last week for a pre-registration period that begins in two days. The Chronicle also reports that Harvard's dean of undergraduate education, Jay Harris, promises that "the online system will be much more dynamic." What they mean by this is not clear. A free laptop for all students registering for third year German who are willing to answer the following quiz? Pop-ups advertising the writing workshop? The ability to post your courses to Facebook? Tweets from your advisor?

I'm surprised that Harvard has not explained that this move is far more eco-friendly, which is the fashion of the day when it comes to explaining budget cuts that may affect the teaching mission. Using less paper is of course eco-friendly, although I wonder how the use of X amount of paper stacks up to the endless computer waste we now generate as campus commnities. "Eco-friendly" is what we were told at Zenith when they eliminated all the same documents several years ago, a move that was made without consulting students or faculty. Fortunately we at Zenith, in addition to being toadies of Moscow, Havana and Beijing, are all very friendly to things eco-friendly.

Nevertheless, there were tears at Zenith, and I expect there will be at Harvard too. Members of the faculty took most umbrage at the elimination of the course catalogue, although in varying degrees (none=1, lots=10: I was about a 2.) Some umbrage was due to the view that faculty should be consulted in all things; additional umbrage was taken on the theory that faculty ought to be consulted about everything associated with the curriculum and with their work as advisors. Still other umbrage was taken because faculty do tend to take umbrage at administration initiatives.

I understood both sides, and in the scale of available battles decided to save myself for another day while other colleagues marched and sang "We Shall Overcome." We still throw away tons of paper at Zenith. But back then nearly everything was duplicated in electronic and paper versions. Hence, like Harvard, in addition to the printed catalogue, we had an online system that had been created so that students could pre-register instead of submitting their requests on ancient, ladder-like paper documents which were processed by the registrar's office. On the other hand, I know intelligent people, of quite various political persuasions, who feel strongly about the elimination of the course book to this day. So there you go.

The comments section of the Chronicle article pretty accurately replicates the range of responses at Zenith to the demise of a printed curriculum. Deborah, who thinks the decision makes sense, feels "sorry for printers who are losing business nationwide," but not for the students or the faculty (whose handbooks, by the way, can now be easily changed by administrative fiat or by someone hacking into the system.) "While I love the 'going green' effort," says Jillian, "I hope that they are at least allowing those of us doing the advisement a few copies… some students just can’t grasp concepts when reading them on a screen…they need something tangible."

Is there research on this? Because what is there to grasp about, say, T, Th 2:40-4:00? Scroll down, and you see that, like me,"a CU alum" asks: "If the concept is literary theory, say, or an intricate chemical reaction then I can understand. If the concept is that Professor X is teaching seminar Y on Thursdays at 2:00 p.m., then I can’t. A student who can’t grasp that on a computer screen probably isn’t going to get into Harvard anyway." (Don't be so sure. According to one source, Harvard students were "bewildered" by the new version of Word released in 2007.) CU alum continues,"Of course, there will be some students with disabilities who will be unable to use the monitor, and some of them may be able to use a printed catalog instead. I’m sure Harvard will accommodate these students. That doesn’t seem to be what commenter #4 had in mind." No, it wasn't. And I'm trying to imagine what disability would make a printed catalogue more accessible than an on-line catalogue.

"I just think this is wonderful," says Lila, undoubtedly thinking of the bales of waste paper that there is little market for in the current recession. Nowadays much of what we think we are "recycling" is either filling warehouses or is being redirected from the Big Blue Bin to a waste dump, where it becomes a Big Wet Rock of pulp. Other commenters ask some version of, "It took Harvard this long to figure out....." One of the more interesting comments is from "JMC," who writes,

I’ve had two college-age children in last 5 years, both at small liberal arts colleges; one publishes course catalog on paper, the other only online. The paper catalog is SO much more useful—we have had no problems figuring out requirements for majors, minors, and distribution. The online version, while equally well written, is much more difficult to navigate. Like most people, I need to be able to flip between pages to compare things, to mark details with a pencil or highlighter, to dog-ear pages and scribble in the margins, in order to digest information like this. I’m truly sorry to see that Harvard has caved to this false economy. Use paper when paper is appropriate and necessary; the internet is great for many, many things, but this is not one of them.

Now JMC is exactly right about this, and it captures a core complaint of the Zenith faculty about the on-line system, which is that you can't "read" a website in the same way that you can read a book. In other words, you can't read it from beginning to end and mark it up. Many advisers used to do this, and it was a method for learning the whole curriculum prior to beginning the advising period. It was a particularly useful way to prepare for advising non-majors, or majors in interdisciplinary programs. (My one question, JMC, is -- "we?" Who were -- uh, "we?" I can hear the helicopter blades turning.)

But here's a quiz for Harvard, and for my loyal readers. The Zenith faculty ended up successfully drawing a line in the sand over the right to receive paper copies of which one of the following documents?

a) the faculty handbook;
b) responses to inquiries about missing library books and protested library fines;
c) the telephone directory;
d) the student handbook;
e) invitations to the President's Christmas party.

The answer will be revealed in the next post. And Zenith faculty, no fair telling (if, in fact, you remember) although it is completely fair to mislead others with your responses. While the world is waiting for an answer, check out the new episode of Farmer Radical's Garden News in a widget which is, of course, on the Left.