Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun: The Radical Responds To Her Critics

Tenured radical faculty have too much, others have nothing.

This is a follow-up on yesterday's post, which unexpectedly turned into a brawl. Late-night anonymous commenters had issues with my inability to recognize that they are always right and that I am causing their oppression.  How did this happen? 

Let's roll the videotape:

I suggested (I deliberately did not make this a law, because I do not believe in coercion and I use my super powers with restraint and wisdom) that people who take full-time visiting faculty jobs should make themselves available to work full time, as opposed to teaching one or two days a week because they are traveling several hours each way from Big City.  Fulfilling this obligation (something that would be a normal expectation anywhere but in academia and e-trading) could mean moving to or near the place of employ, or making arrangements to spend several nights a week there.  I also suggested that if full time visitors were not going to do this, they should be responsible for actually getting themselves to the work site (a.k.a., skool) without assistance from the super-privileged tenured faculty who committed the crime of hiring them in the first place.

It turned out I was wrong about this, and that these are all not only highly retrograde notions unworthy of a true Radical, but also evidence of my secret affiliations with the radical right.  "About as 'Radical' as Don Chafin, I'd say," sniffs Anonymous 5:40 (I had to look that one up, not being well versed in the history of union-busting coal industry minions.) "TR, you say it's 'just advice,'" Anonymous 12:29 summed up in hir closing argument to the jury.  "Fine. But it's clear enough from your post that YOU are the one negatively judging those adjuncts who dare to hold on to their connections in other places. YOU'RE the one who feels offended by this practice, even though this practice is a totally rational labor response to a short-term, low-wage job contract."  Yes, and it would be a totally rational response on MY part to fire YOUR sorry a$$ for putting in minimal time for the actual job I had hired YOU to do.

Actually, I have had two homes for most of my adult life, which was expensive as all get out, particularly when I was in a visiting gig early in my career. Subsequently, I commuted between Zenith and New York for over fifteen years. I had two homes that I eventually gave up for one home in New Haven, from whence I commute 30 minutes a day, three to five days a week.  My point of view was that this was better than not working at what I wanted to do for a living.  But things have changed, I guess, since I was a young Radical (favorite comment from one of the multiple blog posts elsewhere sending me the hate?  "I want to rename her Tenured Liberal!" Yes, you do that.  Sounds like a devastating criticism anyone would take to heart, even me.)  The commenters above and others like them are clear: moving somewhere for a year, renting a room a couple nights a week, or taking responsibility for your own transportation to fulfill the terms of a full-time salaried, contract without any guarantee this will lead to future success or the lifetime security of tenure is something only ordinary people without PH.D.'s should have to do.

Well God Bless, and good luck. And the next time you decide to police the content of my blog, and reprove me for being condescending, be warned:  act like d00shb@g$, and the condescension veers way out of control.  Sorry.  Like the relentlessly condescending/entertaining Rachel Maddow Show,  Tenured Radical is not intended for children.  It may include adult themes, hard language, nudity, and all minors should be accompanied by a parent, guardian or dissertation advisor. )

In other news, readers who perceive tenured faculty as responsible for the death of their life prospects are going to be really upset when they see this one.  When we weren't looking, an administrator acquired two administrative jobs, 1,000 miles apart, that gross him $212 large a year.  Talk about a highway flyer! According to Inside Higher Ed:


Donald Green is executive vice president of instruction and student services at Florida State College at Jacksonville, where he has worked since 1998. He is also, concurrently, the acting senior vice president of academic affairs at Essex County College, in New Jersey, where he has been working 15-20 hours a week as a consultant since last October. 

Essex CC is actually paying Green as a consultant, at a rate of $130 an hour, which means he gets his benefits in Florida, Governor Chris Christie will be relieved to know.  This is probably about $127.75 more per hour than the adjunct profs teaching Humanities 101 are making, and $105.10 per hour more than full-time instructional staff.

While it isn't clear that Green has done anything illegal, it does appear that the guy had all kinds of paid sick days, vacation time and what not to fly up to the Garden State for a week or so at a time to be an adjunct administrator of sorts.  Marcella Washington, a political science prof at FSC, says that the faculty is investigating.  Full-time faculty members work "more than 40 hours per week" at FSC and administrators should at least be putting in their full forty.  "If we are truly giving all we have to our students, we don’t have time for another job. For [Green] to have another full-fledged job to put in 20 hours a week is just not giving all the attention and concern to Florida State College. It’s unacceptable behavior. [From an administrator], it just doesn’t set a good example.”

Interestingly, if you scroll down yesterday's comments you will get to "Christopher" who also had two jobs for a year, his regular adjunct gigs (three different jobs, it sounds like) and a one-year visiting slot with benefits that he was able to land in the same town.  

The one year gig was a 3/3 and paid $46k. Except, I'm used to 6/6 and even 7/7, so 3/3 was a snap. I kept 3 of my adjunct gigs, and pocketed the $46k plus another $18k, give or take. Nice. Plus, the FT gig provided health insurance, and so I made sure during that year to have every test known to medical science done. I'm good. For now.

The more salient fact, though, is that when the FT gig was done, I still had employment. Yes, it was back to the adjunct pool, but that's certainly better than nothing.

I suppose folks could call me out for gaming the system. Right. Go for it. Sue me, or something.

Dude! I think people are not calling you out because they are in awe of you, as well they should be.  Consider yourself invited for a guest post.

Ask The Radical: Search Committee Smackdown, Part Eleventy

Buy this poster while you wait.

It's that time of the year again.  You've gotten all gussied up in your glad rags.  You polished your power point and talked the talk. You perfected the technique of subtly checking your teeth with your bread knife at dinner.  You left -- well, you left that fly-back academic interview feeling good about yourself.  And then:

Nothing.  They never call, they never write.....

Dear Professor Radical,

I have appreciated your blogs about the job market.   I've tried to follow the rules-- both written and unwritten.

Could you post another one about the rules for search committees? The closer I get to a job without getting it, the more their etiquette seems to break down. I'm a big girl and I can handle rejection. But I don't like this awkward silence for weeks after the interview.  It makes me feel like a dirty one night stand. 

 If a search committee chair doesn't know to write a letter of rejection -- well, no big deal except that neither place I interviewed has had the decency to tell me they've moved on. I'm smart and figured it out. But it just seems decent to tell me before I read it on the Wiki or, God forbid, from another candidate.

 Can't we elevate the job process to a level that is more professional than bad dating ??  Thank God for basketball or I don't know what I'd do.

Well, you should also thank the Goddess that you aren't in my NCAA men's fantasy bracket, because I'm shooting a honkin' 96%!

OK, seriously.  This sucks   And you know it's wrong, but the question is, why do they do it?  I'll tell you the top five excuses for not talking to the candidates.

#5:  "We haven't finalized the deal with the candidate we did offer the job to, so don't alienate the other candidates in case we have to go to our second choice."  You know the worst of it?  They really believe that it would cause an unrepairable breach if, in this crummy market, they offered you a job as the second choice candidate.  This is what often prevents them from making a call that says, "You know, it came down to field, but we've offered the job to someone else and s/he has two weeks to respond.  We'll get back to you the week of the 21st, for sure, and let you know what is happening."  You're thinking, "Those d00ds have their heads up their a$$es!"  Not really -- they have their heads back in the 1970s, when getting the job as a second choice really was a ticket to nowhere and the people who voted against your hire also voted against your tenure case, just on principle.  And they would have been heartbroken to be a second choice, so you would too, right?  Right?  Uh -- I can't hear you, the industrial dishwasher is too loud.....

#4:  "Was that my job?  I thought the dean was supposed to be in touch with the candidates."  At many schools, some people will never run a search in their lives, and in small departments, many people may never even be on a search committee.  I know at Zenith, you have a meeting with administrators prior to commencing your search.  They cover all the parts of the process that  have to do with affirmative action diversity hiring, but there is no instruction, written or otherwise, about how to run a search in a way that is gracious or efficient.  The assumption is that you have learned this by being searched for (the same goes for tenure:  everything you need to know to decide someone else's fate for the first time, you learn by coming up for tenure.)

As an added wrinkle, in many departments, once the candidates are produced, the search committee dissolves, and it may be no one's job to be in touch with the candidates.

#3:  "When the heck are we going to get budget approval for this hire?  Can someone call the dean, fuh Chrissakes?"  Believe it or not, at many small schools, the administration approves multiple searches, but only actually has funding for X% of them.  Departments propose their candidates, and the administration decides which ones are the "best" -- and only those departments get a new hire.  This, and other budgetary shenanigans, can hold up a process for weeks.  Throw a spring break in, and it's a real clusterf**k for the candidates.

#2: "We got our first choice! We got our first choice!  Uh -- What other candidates?"  This is what you fear, and I am afraid it is often true.  Academics can be narcissistic a$$hats, and unfortunately, because you no longer have anything to do with them, it's as if you never existed.

#1:  "That's a really awkward and unpleasant call to make and I would really rather not."  Really, this is the reason that most finalists never hear from anyone.  It's gotten too personal, and they don't want to disappoint you in person.  What they don't get, because they can't cope with this, is that you already know and you would rather be treated like a person!

But seriously, guys. This is the second person I have heard from this week who was told they would hear something in a certain time frame, and they haven't even gotten a call to be told that nothing is decided yet.

WTF, search committees?  Don't you read Tenured Radical?

Playing The Blame Game: Or; How Should Graduate Schools Respond To The Bad Job Market?

Over at ConfessionsOf A Community College Dean your favorite administrator and mine, Dean Dad, asks: "Why do people still go to grad school in the liberal arts?"

Good question. Although I have no former undergraduates making the leap into a Ph.D. program this year, the bigger picture is quite different. As Dean Dad notes, "the adjunct trend is so well-established at this point, and the economic irrationality of grad school so screamingly obvious, that it's fair to wonder why many departments are actually experiencing record applications." While he explores various irrational explanations -- love for learning, self-delusion, and hiding out until the recession is over -- there is, he argues, some rationality to the choice:

academia still offers a surface legibility. Yes, the odds are daunting, but good students have spent years rising to the top of academic competitions. There's still a path, there are still hoops, there are still rules. They don't really work very often anymore, but they're there. As the rest of the economy has become less legible, this holds real (if misguided) appeal.

I think this explains some of the wounded indignation people express when they can't get the tenure-track jobs they wanted. In many other lines of work, it's simply understood that the climate of opportunity fluctuates, and you'll get both good breaks and bad. But academia holds tenaciously to the myth of legibility. When you follow the rules for twenty years, only to find nothing waiting for you at the end, it's easy to move to angry disbelief. Academia likes to tell itself that it's immune to economics, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It's supposed to be clear and fair, economics be damned. So some people hang on for years on end, waiting to redeem what they think they're owed.

I find this very persuasive, particularly since I am not a huge fan of rational choice arguments, and Dean Dad's explanation addresses the rational and the irrational. I speak as someone whose success as an academic was relatively unplanned, and in fact, a great surprise. My original decision to go to graduate school was both wildly irrational (I had a very hazy idea of what the outcome would be) and pretty rational (I knew I was good at school.) I believed that becoming more knowledgeable would push my plan of being some kind of intellectual ahead, but I just wasn't sure what kind of intellectual that would be. What I now consider in retrospect to have been wildly good luck on a really bad job market (the year I got the job at Zenith there were exactly four tenure-track openings advertised in my field in the entire nation) meant that I never committed emotionally to having a tenure-track job prior to getting one; nor did I have to make a difficult decision about what to do if I were not employed as a university professor.

Furthermore, I went to a graduate school that had many flaws but at least one signal virtue: it supported us by putting us to work in a surprising variety of ways. When I first matriculated we had an entrepeneurial chair, a historian of the Jacksonian period, who believed in and operated by the spoils system. Whenever financial aid allotments to the department were insufficient, he called in favors and found ways of stashing us in jobs all over the university that gave us stipends and whatever degree of tuition remission we required. As a result, my graduate school cohort includes people who now work in film, archives, libraries, labor organizing, museums and administration as well as in full-time tenure track lines. It wasn't just that no work was beneath us, but that many of us found that we actually preferred and chose intellectual labor that occurred outside the classroom. Why? Well the reasons differ from person to person, and the job market was terrible in the 1980s -- but the fact is we had the chance to try out many ways of using a history degree.

Because this happens to be my own experience, and because I work with a lot of intelligent, intellectual people at Zenith who are employed in IT, athletics, arts administration, academic administration and whatnot, I must be honest about one thing. While I am deeply sympathetic to those whose dreams of a teaching life are discouraged and perhaps dashed by a foul job market that gets only fouler, I am entirely unsympathetic to claims by disappointed job seekers that they have been lied to and bamboozled by the schools that admitted them to the Ph.D. because they were not cautioned at the very beginning of their education that they might not succeed in finding a tenure-track job.

In fact, I don't know a single form of professional education that guarantees its graduates a job, whether the market is good or bad, and why Ph.D. granting programs have a special moral responsibility to do this is unclear. But on the job wikis and the blogs there is an emerging consensus that the jobless should have received a waiver of liability with the letter of admission (which Brown University actually used to send its graduate students in English back in the sad old 1980s, and most of us who knew someone who received one were horrified by the practice.) Resentful job seekers , in other words, speak in the language of fraud rather than regret. This I find astonishing, given that an hour of research prior to applying, or accepting an offer of admission, could tell any prospective graduate student what their academic job prospects might look like six to seven years hence.

The only thing that makes this phenomenon less astonishing is that today's prospective graduate students were yesterday's undergraduates, and undergraduate education has been trending towards nanny-ism and false guarantees for several decades. But what is it that graduate programs and professional associations could do to intervene in this situation? I have three suggestions.

Ph.D. programs should not allow graduate students to matriculate within three years of having attained the bachelor's degree. This would significantly reduce the number of young people who use a Ph.D. program to prolong a love affair with books and ideas, or who are bored by the ill-paid, entry level jobs they are eligible for immediately following graduation. My students who go on to graduate school in history or American Studies usually contact me for a recommendation within four or five months of graduation, when they have barely had time to think about work at all or how they might make an intellectual life without an advanced degree. Interestingly, and perhaps because of the greater financial investment involved, my students who go on to a professional school in the law, business, or the health professions average a 2-4 year gap between the B.A. and matriculating for a graduate degree.

Ph.D. programs should consider devoting at least one year of graduate support to administrative labor. This would have several advantages, the primary one being that everyone with a Ph.D. would have some idea of how a university actually functions and how to participate in faculty governance in a responsible, business-like way. Over time, it could reduce the mutual contempt that often exists between faculty and non-faculty laborers. But a third advantage would be that administrative work would become a viable option for Ph.D.'s who cannot find a tenure track job, who need to work in a particular region because of family responsibilities, or who find that teaching and writing are not all they were cracked up to be. Plenty of administrative jobs require the Ph.D. now, and there are in all universities talented administrators who have hit the ceiling because they lack the degree, or are not tenurable. University presses would also be an outstanding place to spend this fellowship year, since becoming a book editor, a writer or a literary agent is a viable (and often more vital) way to perpetuate an intellectual life.

Professional associations, particularly in history and literary studies, need to think about accreditation of graduate programs. More surveillance is not necessarily a good thing, I know, but there are too many Ph.D. programs that are perpetuated, not because they are a path to a career, but because the faculty in the department want to teach graduate classes and have teaching assistants. I'm not saying that all programs with poor placement records should close, but many of them (including some very prestigious ones) might want to retain their accreditation by creating multiple career paths within the Ph.D. One of the reasons my cohort at Potemkin University was as successful as it was in finding employment for everyone was that we had thriving Public History and Archives programs. A program might consider certificate programs in oral history, publishing, museum studies, public policy, speechwriting, journalism -- be creative! Ph.D. students could enroll; other students might matriculate for an M.A. and be full payers. This would acomplish three things simultaneously: create tenure-track jobs, generate the money to pay for them, and expand opportunities for post-graduate employment and consultancy.

While I don't think Ph.D, programs are responsible for unemployed graduates, they could do a better job of imagining what an intellectual life in the twenty-first century looks like and how the university can connect to the public sphere is more vital ways. While the vast majority of Ph.D. candidates are clear they want an academic job, it is simply a fact -- and not a secret -- that fewer than half of them will be able to get teaching jobs for the foreseeable future. But one might also add the following: not everyone should be teaching, not everyone wants to become good at it, and there are few people who are brave enough to admit that in an atmosphere where the teaching career is the only stamp of approval for an intellectual. This is the world that graduate schools may not have made, but it is the one to which they must respond.