Romanista

At last year's C's, LSU hosted a party in their hotel suite, and I was invited just because I happened to to meet some LSU students at a panel that I attended. They had king cake and everything. They seem like a really friendly bunch, but I remember that they were worried about the recent decisions by LSU's administration and the increasing lack of funding given to the humanities.

This, to me, is the reason why the PhD seems like a better deal than trying to get full-time teaching work with an MA. Assuming that you won't have some high paying part-time or full-time job that you would pursue at the same time as when you adjunct, you probably won't make more money as an adjunct than you would as a graduate student in a PhD program with a teaching assistantship. This is especially true if your PhD program offers health insurance, and also consider that full-time adjuncting costs a lot for transportation. From what I've heard and read about getting TT jobs at a CC, hiring committees prefer the PhD because the market lets them be choosy, but also because CCs have an inferiority complex toward universities. CCs want their faculty to be concerned with teaching primarily, so research isn't usually emphasized unless it ties into pedagogy in some way. Fortunately in comp rhet a lot of research (but certainly not all) is about teaching anyway. I think you may change your mind about being ambivalent toward research in comp rhet, because you may find that it helps your teaching process. Research in this field is usually based on practice, not just theory. I think the best option is to get a PhD and get teaching experience at a CC while you are a PhD student. Some PhD programs will be OK with this and some won't. I would suggest researching whether current graduate students in your prospective programs teach at CCs. Another thing that I heard about why CCs prefer PhDs instead of MAs is that having just an MA means that you are ineligible for ever being an administrator at at least some CCs. Regardless of your career goals, a future interviewer may choose a candidate with a PhD because s/he anticipates an administrative position opening up soon, and it would save money for the CC to not have to hire someone else later on.

A couple people have mentioned spring admissions for MA programs in comp rhet. I can only speak from my limited experience, but even if a program has spring admissions, it is likely that you won't be able to teach during your first semester if you start in the spring. My program lets you teach during your first semester, but you have to take two teaching related courses at the same time. These courses are only offered during the fall term. If you start during the spring, you may still get a funded offer such as by working in the writing center, but the details of your assistantship would differ from getting one in the fall.

Thanks for the helpful responses. On a related note, do any of you include conference presentations at your home institution? I have presented 3 times, all at a semi annual conference organized by my department. Should I include those presentations? I mean, it was an actual conference but the presenters were only from my school.

This may be a paranoid question but do forthcoming conference presentations count? I got accepted to present at a RC conference in april and I'm wondering how to frame that on my CV, or even if I should include that.

For those of you applying to comp/rhet PhD programs...are you also sending your GRE subject test in English scores? I took the test for the 2014 cycle back when I was a literature applicant. I'm wondering whether it would be gratuitous to include them since my scholarly interests aren't literary. My guess is that it's worth including them if you have a terrific score (which I don't...66th percentile).

This topic came up about a week ago on the WPA-L (http://wpacouncil.org/wpa-l).

Sometimes I get jealous of the better situation of graduate students in the sciences, with their higher stipends and opportunities for collaborative (and government funded) research. But I wouldn't go so far as to question whether those were actual fields. Shouldn't you be writing the 78,000,000th article on wordplay in Ulysses?

I don't mean to hijack this thread but I have some questions about conferences. It looks like I have virtually no chance of presenting at a conference outside my institution by the time I send out my PhD applications this fall. Should I be worried? I have presented at 2 conferences at my school, one presentation on literature and one on composition pedagogy. I also attended (but didn't present at) CCCC. I'm planning on presenting at the same graduate student conference this fall and next spring, simply because the barrier to getting into these types of conferences is rather low. Do admissions committees really care if you have experience presenting as an MA student? Or is presenting at these types of conferences beneficial for the applicant in that he or she can practice public speaking, etc.?

I'm basically the opposite of you. I attended law school (at a TTTT) and got attritioned (is that a verb?) after the first year. I emailed a couple departments about how they approach a bad GPA in a different subject and they said that they don't really focus on it. I had a good undergraduate GPA in English and I got a couple of funded MA offers for my first application cycle. I think that in your case the fact that you can bridge your legal experience with literature would perhaps overshadow the low undergraduate GPA. I didn't attempt to argue that my legal studies prepared me for graduate school. I treated going to law school as a mistake so for that reason I don't think adcomms dwelled on it. Not like I would know what adcomms think though.

I have a hypothesis: what would happen if one school that did what pretty much all schools did in paying their adjuncts way too little with no benefits, etc, had a decrease in funding from alumni and a decrease in the number of applicants as a result of their profit driven actions? Would that cause a kind of ripple effect in which the same thing happened at other schools? Could we see a situation in which only some schools mistreat adjuncts, and as a result they suffer in terms of enrollment and funding, which may cause them to rethink their greed? I'm skeptical because I feel like some students and parents and alumni know what's going on but they still don't really care. But you gotta hope.

My first thought on the Chronicle piece is that it's not that big of a deal since the decrease is so small. But, like one of the commenters on that page, I would really like to see how this breaks down in terms of arts vs humanities. My program offers MA, MAT and MFA. In terms of funding and teaching there's very little difference. However, the new cohort is predominantly MFAs. I feel like MFAs kind of complicate this job market situation because a lot of them are frank about how they don't want a PhD and are just in school for the time to write. I'm rather skeptical of the point of MFAs in creative writing, in fact I find the idea that one should have a graduate degree to be a writer to be elitist if not condescending toward so called "uneducated" writers. But that's a different rant, it's just that I don't have many places to vent, what with all the MFAs around.

Also, in a way VM is doing us all a favor. I remember someone commenting on this anti law school blog about how every post directly or indirectly causes someone to reconsider enrolling in law school. VirtualMessage is basically doing the same thing; limiting the number of applicants for PhD programs and TT jobs. Yeah this is just one poster on one forum but still.

Um...he basically just told us what his intention was in the last post. His aim is to dissuade the person who wants to get a PhD but who is torn between that decision and just getting a regular job. VM lets that prospective student know what he is getting himself into, because very often English department websites downplay the lack of jobs. Just because you and I have already decided to give academia a go doesn't mean that there's no purpose to why VM visits this forum.

The conflict that many in this forum have with VirtualMessage is basically that we don't get it. We don't know shit. VirtualMessage can correct me if I'm wrong, but he or she graduated with a PhD and is now an adjunct/NTT faculty/working outside of academia. VM was probably a terrific graduate student. VM probably spent at least 10 years in school (from BA to PhD) being fawned over by his or her professors. Very likely these same professors either glossed over the increasingly nonexistent academic job market or (worse) they simply never discussed it, because why would they given that they have their tenure security already in hand, and given that they hold no accountability over whether their graduate students ever get a TT job. Now VM is bitter about it and I can't blame VM for being bitter about it. And I'm big enough to admit that I cannot empathize with the sheer weight of that disappointment. I won't be able to do that until and unless I find myself in the same situation (hopefully not). And I would wager that this is true of all of us. It's easy to think like Wyatt's Terps and say well, just get out of academia if TT doesn't work out. This is easy to say. This is much harder to do. I bet that a lot of adjuncts thought (while they were in grad school) that they would get out when it became clear that TT wasn't going to happen. Then they fell in love with research and teaching and now they are trapped there. I think it's disingenuous to just think that we can put ourselves in VM's shoes. We cannot. You may have noticed that ComeBackZinc hasn't posted recently. I know who he is (not personally but he's very active in the R/C field) and I'd wager that his disappointment at not getting a TT position has something to do with why he hasn't been around recently. The point is, you can't theorize this shit until it happens to you, and calling VM a whiner just confirms that. VM is here to remind us that this is a difficult path, and if you feel uncomfortable about that then I don't know how you will deal with the job market once you get your PhD. All this being said, the problem with VM's pessimism is that you can't get any work done if you stress too much. I've spent weekends reading about how academia is gradually destroying itself and in that period I only made myself worry even more. But perhaps more importantly, I got no work done during those CHE binges. And I'm not getting any work done by posting this, because my research isn't about the shrinking of the tenured professoriate.

This recent article by Rob Jenkins comes to mind: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1051-is-adjuncting-the-kiss-of-death. Unfortunately it only really says that those that adjunct at community colleges can sometimes get TT jobs at the same or other community colleges. I think this all depends on how you define a teaching institution. Certainly R1 schools will care about research either primarily or exclusively. And certainly CCs will care about your teaching skills either primarily or exclusively. Of course it helps if you are a dual threat but ultimately if you don't have the publication record then you won't get hired at an R1 and if you don't have the teaching record then you won't get hired at a CC. But what about the institutions that fall between those poles? Satellite campuses of research institutions, SLACs, schools with a religious affiliation, for profit schools. The market is so flooded that perhaps you have to excel at both teaching and research, and it's really difficult to conduct research if you adjunct, especially if you have to have an outside, non-academic job to stay afloat. I attended a panel on CC hiring led by Rob Jenkins at the 2015 CCCC and he said that many applicants for TT jobs at CCs were flustered by having to do a teaching demonstration during the interview. They assumed that their research experience, while not enough to get them hired at an R1 or SLAC, would be enough to get them hired at a CC.

I'm researching PhD programs in rhetoric and composition (both standalone programs and specializations within English departments) and I found a school that tends to hire its own PhD graduates as lecturers, or WC directors and other administrative (teaching and non-teaching) posts. Obviously not everyone ends up back at the same school, but in recent years I've counted 9 out of 23 of the alumni from 2010-2015 currently employed at the school in various capacities. This is a large state university and the PhD is interdisciplinary. I'm assuming these lecturer positions are NTT but they seem to get paid more than adjuncts. It seems to vary from 30k to 70k. I know this because this is in a state that allows public access to government worker salaries. Should this be comforting, going to a school that may be able to provide somewhat respectable employment should a TT job not be in the cards? Or else is this not any different from adjuncting? I'm curious because I've always heard that PhD programs rarely employ their graduates. Perhaps this is more so the case for TT positions.

Well I didn't even know that there was a difference between cognitive and cognitivist so you can see how I'm new to the field. In that case I'm more interested in a cognitivist approach. I admit that my last post was influenced by a scathing critique of the field that I read yesterday (http://www.nas.org/articles/english_compositionism_as_fraud_and_failure). I agree with your first and second points. Your third point brings me great relief.

I was being sarcastic about the trigger warning. That topic has shown up often in the CHE recently.

Does anyone know which comp rhet PhD programs are open to cognitive approaches to writing; studying process more so than product? I'm guessing that these schools would be a good fit: CUNY Grad Center (Perl) Minnesota (Berkenkotter) Carnegie Mellon (Flower) I know that empirical research in writing isn't nearly as empirical and pure as it would be in the actual sciences but I feel like composition has to go this route for any sort of legitimacy, otherwise it's just going to be known as a service discipline composed of writing instructors who teach well but don't publish, and tenured scholars who publish without referencing student writing and or the writing process (because postmodernism and cultural studies are supposedly so much more interesting). Composition can be just as insular and subjective as literary studies but it need not be.

The idea of banning makes me uncomfortable. Perhaps a trigger warning would be better?

I moved from PA to FL twice. Insurance does tend to be cheaper in PA than FL. But it could be inconvenient if you actually need to "use" your auto insurance considering that you won't be living in PA anymore. You could get away with keeping your PA insurance but it will work against you if you want to prove residency in FL, which you should probably do. The reason being that the tuition and academic fees are always lower if you are a FL resident. You can't get a FL driver's license unless you get insurance from a FL agency so you would have to drop your PA insurance. It usually takes 12 months of residence in FL to get the FL rate. There are no exceptions for the 10 day rule. I've been pulled over while driving with out of state plates and I didn't get a ticket or anything (albeit it was for a different reason). It's kind of hard for anyone to prove that you've lived in FL for a set number of days, especially if you don't have a FL address. As long as your PA license isn't expired I don't see how you would get caught. So you have time to get the car registered. I registered mine after the semester started. If your car hasn't ever been registered in FL then expect to pay at least $300 for the plate, registration, title (not including insurance which you have to show proof of at the DMV). FL has no income tax so they use the DMV as big source of revenue (which is probably why you can get so many different vanity plates, unlike in PA).

I mean courses that my department describes as comp rhet courses. The course in question is called Studies in Writing and Rhetoric, which is taught by the director of the writing center. I'm probably worrying too much about this. It's just that I've wanted to pursue a PhD in English for a long time but I recently changed my focus to from literature to rhet comp and I'm worried that I need to show adcoms that I've taken the right courses to show that. I mean this time last year I didn't even really know what comp rhet was.

I'll be applying to a couple rhet comp PhD programs, 4 or 5 max. I'm debating whether to audit or take this undergraduate course in rhet comp this fall. If I don't take it I will graduate having taken only 3 rhet comp courses (not counting dissertation related research): a composition pedagogy course, a special topics course related to rhetoric and the other is TBA as I have to take it next spring. The reason I'm interested in taking an undergraduate course it is that at least one of my programs wants a writing sample that was written for a course and as of now I have only one paper that I could use. I'd like to have the option of choosing between writing samples but this course will cut into my research time.

Exactly. The largest university in terms of enrollment in the US does not even have tenure. If all universities (or most at least) are run like corporations then the next logical step would be to eliminate tenure. Once the tenured professors of today retire, there will be no outrage because unfortunately we're used to being taught by NTT faculty. This is depressing stuff but I think it's better to not believe that naive retirement trope. It's going to take some serious outrage to change academia. Serious outrage cannot come from graduate students and adjuncts alone.