Preparing PhD Students For Life Outside Academia

Bill Petti:

Curry was commenting here on changing the mindset of the students, but I would argue in many disciplines the problem isn't the students, but the professors.  There are still large groups of people in academia that not only disagree with this sentiment, but actively work to undermine students who choose to take their education and apply it outside of academia.  My experience has been in the realm of political science, but certainly know others that have had similar experiences in other disciplines.

The skills one learns in graduate school are absolutely applicable outside of academia.  In many cases, students may be better positioned to apply what they've learned and have a more fulfilling career in either government or business.  Not everyone is cut out for this type of career, but then again not everyone is cut out for a life in academia either.  In many cases, it takes a different set of talents and to thrive in either environment.  And when we take into account the utter dysfunction of the academic labor market, I don't think pressuring students to seek a career in that market is the most responsible thing to do.

Bottom line: the focus should be on the students and what will be the best move for them, not what professors think is the 'proper' career for those pursuing and holding a Ph.D.

Absolutely. While many students go into Ph.D. programs thinking that they want to be professors, the reality is that most them won't get tenure-track jobs. It's absurd to keep admitting students if you are only going to train them for academia.


Universities do a terrible job preparing students for anything outside of academia. This is natural in some sense--professors are the ones who succeeded. But to assume that all their students will also succeed in the academic job market is dishonest and almost fraudulent. Universities and the individual departments within them must do a better job of opening students' eyes to multiple career choices. Individual professors sometimes do this with their students, but they are usually anomalies within the department.


I've been in a series of visiting positions. I don't really know what to do if I don't get an academic job. At least I am conscious about trying to improve my job prospects outside of the academy, but I am by no means confident, nor do I have a strong plan of what to do if this all falls apart. I wish I understood the path to move into policy for instance. And I consider myself far better off for this transition than most people in my position.

Changes in the Historical Profession

Why the Times would be interested in the vagaries of the historical profession I do not know. But I think the cry over the decline of "traditional" fields of history is way overblown. Having just spent half a year reviewing Herring's From Colony to Superpower, a new overview of American foreign policy, I certainly feel that thinking about America's relationship to the world in a strictly diplomatic way has limited value. The article finishes by discussing how one department had to change the hiring line to "US and the World," as if this was a bad thing. Instead, such changes should be embraced, as this, admittedly amorphous, field, has an incredible amount of interesting things to say about how we have related to the world.

As for the rest of the article, it seems to me that legal history is on the rise and I think we are going to see a revival of economic history because of the financial collapse and the interest that has spawned. But ultimately, such an article is really an attack on studying race and gender. That race and gender is somehow disconnected from diplomatic or economic history is absurd, as many young scholars are aware.

Really this is much ado about nothing.

Dave Noon: Half Man, Half Liberal

Dave Noon of Lawyers, Guns, and Money just received tenure.

Now that he has accomplished this task, he writes in what is without question the best blog post of 2009, how he can reveal his true conservative colors.

And of course, congratulations to Dave on getting tenure, something that is an almost unthinkable accomplishment to me right now.

The Neoliberal University

I usually dislike Stanley Fish's columns on academia a good deal. In fact, there is much about this column I dislike as well. But he is right on in describing the neoliberal university.

This new narrative has been produced (and necessitated) by the withdrawal
of the state from the funding of its so-called public universities. If the
percentage of a state’s contribution to a college’s operating expenses falls
from 80 to 10 and less (this has been the relentless trajectory of the past 40
years) and if, at the same time, demand for the “product” of higher education
rises and the cost of delivering that product (the cost of supplies, personnel,
information systems, maintenance, construction, insurance, security) skyrockets,
a huge gap opens up that will have to be filled somehow.

Faced with this situation universities have responded by (1) raising
tuition, in effect passing the burden of costs to the students who now become
consumers and debt-holders rather than beneficiaries of enlightenment (2)
entering into research partnerships with industry and thus courting the danger
of turning the pursuit of truth into the pursuit of profits and (3) hiring a
larger and larger number of short-term, part-time adjuncts who as members of a
transient and disposable workforce are in no position to challenge the
university’s practices or agitate for an academy more committed to the
realization of democratic rather than monetary goals. In short , universities
have embraced neoliberalism.

In a time when neoliberalism is increasingly discredited around the world, the university system is embracing it more than ever. This leads to the devaluing of the humanities. Since we don't bring money into the university through our work, administration, boards of regents, and state governments don't care about us. I know that at the University of New Mexico, which is currently experiencing a titanic battle between faculty and administration, the school's president flat out told humanities faculty that they were irrelevant. Whereas even in this bad job market, math, the sciences, and to a somewhat lesser extent the social sciences, still are hiring some people because they can fulfill a role in the neoliberal model, there are virtually no jobs in the humanities.

I am fully convinced that next year is my last in academia. There aren't going to be any jobs. The few universities that are hiring are going to have their pick of Ivy League graduates. Since I am unwilling to debase myself as a poorly paid and powerless adjunct, I am going to have to try and find something else to do. I have nothing to offer a neoliberal university. Of course, I am not giving up. Maybe a miracle will happen. I am certainly doing what I can to make that miracle take place. This is why I've been less active on the blog in the last 2 weeks--I have an article due on March 15 and I am incredibly nervous and stressed about it. So I'm doing what I can. But in a neoliberal academic world, what chance do historians have?

One final note--one reason why I dislike Fish is his opposition to politically engaged academics. He is totally wrong about this--many students want politically engaged professors, political engagement makes our work stronger, and most importantly, gives us a voice in the world where we can use our expertise to try and influence policy debates and larger social issues. Giving that up makes us irrelevancies that reinforce the neoliberal institution, which Fish seems to begrudginly accept. I do not accept this.

Could Ezra Klein Be More Wrong?

The answer is no.

Building on AnthonyS' post from yesterday, it's amazing that Klein (and I'd guess a few other progressives here and there) actually buy into the idea that paying professors based on course evaluations is a good idea. He says he grew up around academics. Well, we all rebel over something from our childhood and I guess he is rebelling over what I assume are his academic parents. But that doesn't excuse his promoting such a shockingly stupid idea. For someone who grew up around academics, he clearly knows very little about the academy.

As for Klein's claims that academics hate teaching and are terrible teachers, I suppose there is a kernel of truth there. But only a kernel. Maybe his parents and childhood acquaintances taught at the most elite institutions and did feel this way. But while I agree that institutions do not emphasize teaching enough, either in their hiring practices or their tenure evaluations, the reality is that the large majority of academics work very hard in their teaching. I know I do. Whether that makes me good or not is not for me to judge. But basically everyone I know also works hard in teaching. To say that we don't like or care about teaching is an insult and a stereotype.

And to answer his question, paying someone $10,000 for good teaching evaluations is NOT going to provide incentive for professors to take teaching seriously. It's going to have the exact opposite effect.

It's sad to see someone who is right about so many issues be so irresponsibly wrong when discussing higher education.

UPDATE (1/15)--Klein apologizes for his post.

It's also worth reading the comment thread to Klein's post, where he gets roundly slammed, including by me.

Congratumalations on the Honorifications

Quick-- what do Nancy Reagan, Mike Tyson, Kermit the Frog, Maya Angelou, Billy Graham, Tim Allen, Pierce Brosnan, Dan Marino, Yusuf Islam (the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens), Bob Barker, Jeremiah Wright, Milton Babbitt, Dick Cheney, and Gloria Estefan all have in common?

They are all doctors. Of the honorific kind. That is, all have recieved honorary doctorates from various universities-- ranging from the University of Rochester (Milton Babbitt) to BYU (Dick Cheney) to Western Michigan (Tim Allen) to the Dublin Institute of Technology (Pierce Brosnan).

I was thinking about this because we received an e-mail from our university's president soliciting nominations for honorary doctorates. These generally go to community leaders, celebrities or politicians with ties to an institution, people who have served the community or a university in an extraordinary way, etc. I was also thinking how fun it would be to send a random list of nominees to the Board of Regents-- something like Joe Buck, Dame Edna, and Rene Montagne. Or Bill Ayers, Gordon Lightfoot, and Tom Clancy. Frequent commenter Gustav came up with Plaxico Burress, Leona Helmsley, and Michelle Bachmann.

So just for fun, who are your three?

Collapse of the Academic Job Market

This is incredibly depressing.

There are approximately 1/2 of the tenure-track jobs in history this year that there has been in each of the last few years.

I assume the job market is equally grim in other fields.

Ugh. Hope the high schools are hiring in the next few years.

Blogging and the Academy

An adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University was fired this week for posting the names and grades of his students on a blog. The professor was trying to humiliate them after catching people plagiarizing.

Katherine Haenschen at Burnt Orange Report calls this "a worrisome precedent." I'm not so sure. This person was an idiot who deserved to be fired. Anyone who publicly humiliates students by name and gives out personal information about their performance is not fit to teach.

On the other hand, certainly the issue of blogging and the academy is on my mind. I blog under my own name. There is a risk involved. Theoretically, a school could google my name, see that I have a blog, and consider that too much of a risk to hire me. I hope this doesn't happen. I try to be professional here. I occasionally talk about teaching. Usually this is to work out a question or issue I am having, but occasionally I am frustrated with students. I would never ever give a name or any personal information. But it is a fine line. Being on the job market right now makes me nervous about everything I write.

Haenschen doesn't defend the said professor either; rather, her concern is that the story was spun so that it seemed he was fired for blogging rather than for violating professors' privacy. Instead of cracking down on plagiarism, TAMIU fired the professor. Personally, I think both sides are right here. Too often, by which I mean virtually always, universities are extremely lax on issues of plagiarism. I have an enormous problem with it. My sense is that professors just don't want to be bothered and don't care enough about teaching to deal with it. I now teach at a school that does it take seriously. It still happens, but it is nice having institutional support to fight it.

Nevertheless, the guy needed to be canned. Freedom of speech battles seem to always take place over cases where the person in question has done a loathsome thing that is hard to defend. And while TAMIU did not handle the matter particularly professionally themselves, there is no excuse for not canning his butt.

One Down

The first American history that I had applied for was cancelled because of the financial crisis. How many more will it be? I hope those unemployment checks pay OK. Or maybe I'll end up living with my parents....

Why I Am Not a Cultural Anthropologist

From Kay Warren's Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. From what I understand, a well-respected book.

"That night I got quite drunk as I wrote my field notes. I felt I had been absorbed by a variant of the transforming-selves notion of personhood in Maya culture- which holds that the self is not stable or fully knowable. It appeared that I had been apprehended in a way that offered little chance for escape. How could I prove I was just myself, that there was nothing menacing to unmask?"

Oh boy. While I fully support getting drunk during both the research and writing processes, the navel-gazing self-reflection could be avoided. Not to mention the jargon.

Sure, I'm a historian and we are conservative on these matters. But can't academics just do their research without constantly thinking about their subjective position within the topics they work on?

Potato Conference

Presented without comment. Mostly because I'm not sure what to say. If I did work on potatoes, I would surely apply.

Within the framework of the project to list culinary and gastronomic heritage with UNESCO's intangible heritage, CeHVi and IEHCA are organising a major international conference on the Potato in Tours in 2009, which also corresponds to France's hosting of the World Potato Congress.

A seemingly commonplace vegetable, in that it is so embedded into our customs, the potato is however a product whose appearance on the plate of Westerners is only relatively recent, in the 18th century, and is still unknown in whole regions of the globe.

This international conference is aiming to cover all of the themes that have anything to do with the potato and there are no limits, not only from a historical standpoint, but also from standpoints of an economic and geographical, artistic and sociologic, scientific and medical nature. It is not limited to the contemporary period, and it is not restricted to France; this conference wants to attempt to provide an overall view of the place held by the potato across civilisations. For this, communications materials could cover subjects as diverse as the technical aspects, whether concerning production or transformation, the economics of the sector, consumption, imaginary forms, and treatment of this tuber in the arts.

My Upcoming Anti-US Rant

As some readers know, I have a job interview next week at a Canadian school. One of the things I have to do is come up with a 15 minute talk about why to learn about U.S. history. It's not a hard thing to put together, but it's weird. I've never had to explain this question before. For Americans, I can just say that you should learn about your damn country. But for Canadian students, it's an interesting challenge.

I didn't really plan it this way, but the whole talk, and in fact just about everything I am putting together for this interview, is basically an anti-American rant. I don't want it to be necessarily, but if they want to know my feelings about these issues, well, I guess they are going to get them. My classes are notoriously depressing anyway. So I guess they will know what they are going to get. Still, I could see my images of lynchings, Wounded Knee, anti-Chinese riots, and massacres of Filipinos not going over well, particularly since there are exactly 0 images that view the US in a positive way.

On the other hand, maybe they'll think I'm trying to get out of the country! Which isn't really true, but whatever.

This is my first on-campus interview and I have this feeling of impending disaster. Who knows though. I am pretty underprepared. After a very hard year and a week after defending my dissertation, my energy to prepare three different talks is really not there.

In other news, the high in said Canadian city is supposed to be about 20 and snow. So that ought to be interesting at least.

And if anyone can suggest any good Canadian jokes to tell, let me know.

Article of the Year

Article title of the year:

"The Ocean's Hot Dog: The Development of the Fish Stick,"

By Paul Josephson in the new issue of Technology and Culture.

Given that I am teaching a course titled, "Food, Drugs, and Sex: The History of Human Bodies and the Environment" for the fall, I will be reading this awesome looking piece.

Those Damned Lefty Professors!!!

Kate Sheppard reports on the new Family Security Matters list of the top 10 most dangerous classes in American colleges.

This list is absurd on so many levels. First, it clearly reflects the bias of Jason Rantz, the wingnut who put it together. Thus, there are two courses from Occidental College, including "Movements in Social Justice," which seems to have made the list because Rantz didn't like the professor when he took it. Leave it to the right to make only the most theoretically rigorous decisions.

Other courses on there include "Islam in Global Context," "Introduction to Labor Studies," and "Imperialism in American History." Sounds like a pretty awesome semester to me.

What disappoints me is that I am not on the list. I know I'm new and everything, but I hate America as much as these other professors (which is to say not at all). Certainly my "Hurricane Katrina in Historical Perspective" course this spring should be competitive. After all, I'm assigning a chapter from Michael Eric Dyson's Come Hell or High Water, entitled "Does George W. Bush Care About Black People." Of course, the answer is no. But hey, telling the truth means you hate America.

So come on Rantz--include me on your next list! I'll even pay you for the honor!!!!

How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read

There is something really tempting about assigning Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Of course, we all don't really read most of the books we read. This is something any academic has to learn to survive. But it's not really talked about at the late undergraduate/early graduate level. Luckily, I had a great advisor in my master's program who worked with me on this skill, but a lot of people just had to figure it out yourself. I resisted at first, thinking this wasn't really reading. That changed after I spent my entire Thanksgiving break my first semester reading Irving Bernstein's Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941, which clocks in at about 800 pages. I realized I simply could not survive without learning how to read without reading everything.

The problem with teaching this book, or the ideas within it, is that it could easily be interpreted by undergraduates as an excuse not to read at all or to just do a quick skim before class. Such an experiment could be a major disaster.

On the other hand, a lot of my students do some version of this anyway. Teaching them how to do it right could, in theory anyway, go a long ways toward creating really good discussions. Plus I think one of my jobs as a teacher is to help my students build useful skills for the rest of their lives. Given that something like 2/3 of graduates at my school go onto to some kind of advanced work, I could easily justify teaching this book as skill-building.

Still, the prospect of complete and unmitigated disaster scares me too much to probably go through with it.

Jay McInerney has an amusing review of the book here.

I'm Not That Desperate...At Least Not Yet

Like most young academics, I am desperate for a tenure track job.

So how does that position at the American University in Iraq look?

Ask me in a year.

Notorious B.I.G. Gives You Academic Advice

We all know that rappers are really speaking to privileged white people like me. Thus, Phil Ford's application of the Notorious B.I.G.'s lyrics to academic life at Inside Higher Education is a true guide to success.

For example,

Number nine shoulda been number one to me: If you ain’t gettin’ bags stay the fuck from police. Don’t snitch. Academic bloggers especially, don’t talk about the inner workings of your department, and don’t talk shit about your colleagues. This is why a lot of academic bloggers are anonymous, of course, but sooner or later you’ll make a mistake and drop an incriminating detail, and your cover will be blown.

Or,

For me, Biggie’s commandments five and seven are really two sides of the same coin: Never sell no crack where you rest at and keep your family and business completely separated. I like to keep professional and personal stuff separate. Sure, we all work at home sometimes, but when you’re off the clock, you’re off the clock. Don’t go ruining your daughter’s fourth birthday party by sneaking out to answer department e-mails. Don’t screw up a good dinner party by getting in a shouting match with the orthodox Schenkerian over the ontology of background structure. And you can be friendly with your students, sure, but don’t forget the sexual harassment lecture they gave you on orientation day.

Sounds like solid advice to me.

The best part about this post is the comments, particularly the outraged (likely older) faculty members who are shocked that an academic journal would use such vulgar language.

Take Allweather's comment:

No time for profanity
I can’t believe Inside Higher Ed would subject the unsuspecting public to this outrageous profane diatribe with no warning or disclaimer! Disgusting! The decent thing to do would have been to put a disclaimer so that the reader could be warned that what follows is “profane and has absolutely no educational value.
Shameful!

Deeply, deeply shameful. Now I'm going to get back to my motherfucking academic work and shit.

The Worst Part About Being An Academic

I suppose it will be different once I get a tenure-track position, but I must say that the worst part of being an academic is saying goodbye to friend after friend as they move on. And now I am moving on to and I can see that people are sad about that. After saying goodbye to yet another close friend this evening, I can say that this is the most frustrating thing about this profession. Sure, I have friends that I can visit across the country, but it's not the same. At times, I wish for a normal job. Tonight is one of them.

A New Job

Remarkably, Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas has decided to hire me to teach environmental history for the next 1-2 years. Given this school's high reputation, the fact that the two people I know who went there absolutely loved the place, and that it is 25 miles from Austin, I'd say this is a mighty fine first job.

Of course, I'll be moving to Texas this summer, which is of course the best time to do it weather wise...

And I also now get to find out which are more annoying, Cowboys fans or Longhorns fans.

When in doubt, blame the faculty

In a world where professors at universities are increasingly the object of wingnut paranoia, a "third front" in America, this effort to try to pin the VT shootings on the VT English Department is particularly repugnant, even by the low standards of the David Horowitz group. Of all the factors - gun control, mental instability, the disjuncture between state and federal laws on who can get a gun - the faculty, here or anywhere, has as little to do with these shootings as lyme disease does. As Hilzoy says, the faculty members are not only particularly leftist by any standards, they tried to get Cho to get help. Of all the useless, ineffective, and baseless smear jobs on academia, this is perhaps the lowest of the low.