- No, I don’t want to teach high school, either private or public.
- No, I don’t want to adjunct or VAP anymore.
- Yeah, this is a highly emotional piece of writing and paints with a broad brush and you might disagree with a lot of the ways I’ve characterized academia.
- No, I don’t care that you disagree. My feelings, thank heavens, are not subject to peer-review.
Source:
http://erinbartram.com/uncategorized/the-sublimated-grief-of-the-left-behind/
This was a humbling read and put my issues with Batshit U into perspective.
ReplyDeleteThe FAQ is as worthwhile as the linked article, by the way.
I'm sorry this is happening to you, Erin. I know all too well how it feels: it took 14 years of lonely, penurious, chronic anxiety and over 150 applications between my last year in grad school and when I finally got tenure. And then when I did, that twinge of survivor's guilt immediately dissipated, thanks to the fresh abominations academia threw at me. Twenty five years since my Ph.D., I STILL get the feeling that the inmates have taken over the asylum reinforced REGULARLY: I'll post about the latest caper once the shouting about it is over.
ReplyDeleteI'd seen the original article, but not the FAQ, which is, indeed, excellent.
ReplyDeleteI've found myself thinking about Ph.D. programs lately, since I've had reason to be thrown together with some of our grad students. While our (recently-created) Ph.D. program strikes me as really good, and the students ditto, I don't have the impression that those of our grad students who plan to continue in academia (a number of them don't, and some are even having tuition paid by current employers -- a point in the program's favor, in my opinion), and aren't already established there (the current crop includes a fair number of people who were already working for the university), have a particularly realistic view of where they're most likely to land (i.e., in a job like mine, if they're lucky). I just don't see the whole thing as likely to be sustainable, but it's hard to say that to people (faculty and students) who are working hard to build a program. It's also probably useless to do so, so I mostly don't -- except I do occasionally ask questions in talks, etc. that allude to patterns that people seem more comfortable ignoring, and then wonder whether I should have done so.
In any case, I don't know whether people quitting -- or choosing not to go to grad school in the first place -- in droves would do any good (the higher-ups probably think they can get by with a few quasi-adminstrative TT faculty, some undergrad "teaching fellows," and a lot of automation; I'm not convinced they're right), but at least it's an eminently sane choice to make on a personal level.
And a related piece from the Curmudgucation blog, inspired by the WV teachers' strike: We don't have to do this, you know.
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