greenmt

A friend shared this recently: the posting is for Assistant Editor of the Georgia Review. It may not be apposite for this list, but the job market has been much on my mind, particularly b/c of recent discussions here about the (inadequately named) alt-ac stream. Anyway, I tend to regularly have my eyes on job boards, and thought there ought to be a place here to list particularly interesting ones. This one is such a plum (assuming it's possible to live in Athens, GA on $35,000 to $40,000), and I am not seeing it on either higheredjobs or the Chronicle, and thought someone here might find it interesting.

Accepted off the wait-list at UMD, my first choice, for 19th C. American. Now I have to figure out how to move the family caravan to suburban Maryland. (Help!) I appreciate what a mutually supportive environment you all have made here this year.

Pas de upvotes, mais magnifique.

In terms of time to process, I was mostly thinking about shifts that happen before 4/15. For example, if I was accepted from one waitlist tomorrow, I might still wait on the other before finally deciding. It might be that different programs have varying ways of dealing with this. I have had a DGS say that their program sees movement into late April, but it's good to know that that is not the norm. Memo to self: charge phone 4/15.

In English Lit., that cutback in admissions has been happening for the last couple of years, at least. I agree that national politics matters here, and politics very much matter at the state level, as should be clear from recent kerfuffles in places like Wisconsin and North Carolina. The work that humanities departments do is happening in public, whether humanities departments would prefer that or not.

I've been told, in so many words, that cohorts often aren't finalized until the end of April. It does seem like, once the visits are over, things start to shift, but then the first round of people notified off the waitlist need a minute to process, too. Since some waitlists are apparently 4 people deep or more, it's understandable that it might take a while. It might be that this is the worst form of managing admissions "except for all the others." At least, under this system, everyone is treated equally, and all schools play by the same rules. It does seem like they could move the whole thing up a couple of weeks to make the aftermath (planning moves, etc.) a smidge easier, but the logistics of this stuff, on their end, must be crazy. If I were sitting on admissions but waitlisted for a program I preferred, I'd certainly hold on until the deadline. No hard feelings from this waitlisted person.

It's helpful to know what people are going through this spring, on the job hunt, and I appreciate how forthcoming you've all been. I've been unemployed during a recession, and it's terrifying. Congratulations are due to the people who've gotten jobs during a dismal job market, and good wishes to those who are still looking. I still say it's a mistake to extrapolate from what is going on now. No one can predict what the job market will be like 5 to 10 years from now. There are real indications that it will improve, maybe significantly, including Bureau of Labor Statistics projections (I've posted about them elsewhere on this board) that, for English Lit, hiring will outpace average hiring for all fields through 2022. The BLS projections could be wrong, but they have the virtue of impartiality. Since hiring has lurched upward and downward in recent decades, and another wave of aging faculty, having put off retirement during the crash years, may begin to retire now that their TIAA-CREF accounts are improving, there is every possibility that hiring will improve. Everyone here has been warned. If they sign on the dotted line for the fall, it doesn't mean they're naive. They might regret it later, but it's not a given and - I speak from experience - not doing it when you're young can come with its own set of regrets.

There have been times it's been as bad, and they seem to be followed by sharp increases in hiring. On Figure 1 (page 7, using their numbering system) of the most recent MLA JIL report, 1990-91 to 1997-98 looks a lot like 2008-09 to 2013-14. Looking at that chart, it's safe to say that it's difficult to predict what the job market will be like 5-10 years out, when one is applying to grad school. (It may also be harder than we think to predict the tenure status of the jobs listed in the future. On Figure 4 (page 9), you can see that, roughly speaking, the percentage of tenure-track jobs was greater when the number of jobs posted was over 1,200, and decreased after it dropped below 1,200.) Will 2015-16 or 2016-17 be like 1998-89? Maybe not, but maybe. The recession has been a factor, but there were recessions before, and there will be again. The main difference this time may be political: an entrenched Congress, with some who hold the purse strings willing to recklessly plain-old shut down things they don't like. The recession provided cover for diverting funding toward professional and trade school programs, and away from subjects they perceive, or they believe their constituents perceive, as frivolous. For example, the Feds haven't funded the Jacob Javits Fellowship since 2011. Most states are still funding higher education at pre-recession levels. The difference in this field (English Lit / Rhet-Comp) between bust and boom is less than 1,000 jobs per year, but it's tied to the overall higher-ed ecosystem that is controlled by state and federal funding. The people deciding whether to hire, and whether to offer the opportunity for tenure, are restricted by the funding available to them; tenure is a lifelong commitment, and times are uncertain. Wouldn't it be something if there could be an alliance of tenured faculty, adjuncts, and graduate students making the case in public for what we believe (I presume) are courses of study of value for everyone? What's it for? Why is it worth taxpayer money? You can be sure that the chunk of the 55% the defense industry gets - and it's a big one - is the result of intentional and concerted case-making in Washington.

I haven't really thought this through. It's more a matter of impressions, arising out of the variety of voices, from AE to streetvendors, perfectly rendered. But I think the thing I'm interested in digging into is what the different kinds of humor tell us about the people and their collective situation. There are funny episodes. But, for example, Buck Mulligan's Ballad of Joking Jesus made me laugh out loud, like the British student, but Stephen's response tells you that he's a ham, a one trick pony. Stephen's humor is abstruse, kind of hard to untangle, the ultimate dyspeptic university student. Simon Dedalus's spluttering insults keep everyone at a distance. The newspapermens' humor is broad and cutting, slapsticky, because their business is so cutthroat. The students' is physical / scatalogical. Bloom thinks snarky thoughts, then silently apologizes for them, or leaves them half-finished. When Joyce brings these different groups together, you get pathos, as when the newspapermen mock gentle Bloom walking away, being mimicked by the delivery boys. As Joyce takes you around the geography of Dublin, he represents not just its visual / tangible 1904 self, but also the variety of its musical life (in the snippets of jingles, popular songs, and operas that pop up), the accents and dictions, and the jokes. Sound is what has been on my mind, anyway, lately, and I agree: sound is a big part of what he's up to.

No, goldfinch, please do. I'm going to step away for a while - fighting off a bad cold, and my mac keeps freezing up - but I'll check back. I wanted to relate a story that might give others heart. I worked for a while alongside a Columbia MFA (a couple of books published) who was hired by the nonprofit I worked for - a youth chorus - to write grant proposals and other things. He sort of became the in-house writer. They were very impressed with the imprimatur his degree provided, and he was happy to leave behind the adjuncting grind... he earned more money, and had more time to write. He previously had no experience writing grant proposals but he picked it up very quickly. There's a good deal of overlap between the kinds of activities that make up nonprofit fundraising - research, writing, planning activities out a month or three months or a year or more in advance, talking with people - and those that make up academic work. I have a main gig and a bunch of shifting consulting gigs on the side. If I get in this fall, I'll likely hold on to one or two of these to supplement stipends and such. There's always a need, there are many small 501c3s that can't afford full-time fundraisers, and many people learn on the job. There are also lots of 501s that need smart people to serve on their boards, so if your locality has a small museum or cultural institution or film festival, they might be happy to have you join their board... another chance to learn on the job, and get the big-picture, and service is smiled upon in the nonprofit sector.

Current, germane, and unusually brave... most of these that I've read are from people who either already have tenure or have once and for all turned their backs on academia. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/o-adjunct-my-adjunct?mbid=social_facebook

I've noted elsewhere that I have worked in the nonprofit world for 20+years. I've struggled a lot with whether it's a good idea or a bad idea to take a break & go into a PhD program. Most of that has to do with my age, and family commitments. But there is a subset of work within that world that requires a PhD, or for which PhDs are favored - i.e. typically end up in the job - for which I'm otherwise qualified. Often these are people who leave academia; or they combine some teaching with university-affiliated institutions. Having thought about this a lot, I'm going to try to lay out a couple of problems I see with the alt-ac narrative, at least as they relate to nonprofit-land. First, there is no professional development for alternative career tracks within the programs themselves. (The Slate article points out the option of looking for non-teaching work, but 1) tuition reimbursement is tied to a commitment to teaching for most, and 2) teaching *and* working outside makes you an outlier within your program, and from what I understand is often actively discouraged.) It surprised me that this is the case, because most reputable PhD granting institutions have either in-house humanities centers, or relationships with such institutions; all have libraries; many now have digital-research arms. There's a lot these programs could be doing to actively support students who envision themselves doing something other than teaching, or in addition to teaching (including providing tuition assistance for service, with time commitments equivalent to current prep / teaching loads). There's also no reason that paid positions within this sub-sector could not include a research component, related to the work of the HC, library, or what have you. I for one am very interested in the role that the humanities play - or could play - in public life, and I don't see a lot of rigorous inquiry into that subject. Humanities centers tend to offer semi-public scholarly conferences, presentations, etc. by tenured folks, with audiences typically comprising those who have, or seek, tenure. The arts, by contrast, have opened up a lot during the last 20-30 years; not all to the good, necessarily, but at least museums and performing arts institutions have some sense that they have a role to play in public life, and act like it. I suspect that this will not change until a greater proportion of recession-PhD faculty get tenure and enter the ranks of academic administration. Universities and colleges are living things, but having popped in and out of them during my working life, they change glacially. It's my sense that faculty, whether on admissions or hiring committees, look and listen for people who look and sound like they looked and sounded before they had tenure. When I told my recommenders, and others I know with tenured gigs, that I planned to apply for PhD but had a non-teaching track in mind, without exception they told me not to say so in my SOP. I did anyway, because I did not want to be dishonest. When I asked a very kind DGS for feedback on my unsuccessful application to his program last year, he said the same thing. (I said so again this year, but qualified it because I have in fact become more intrigued with teaching, having done a bit of it in the intervening year.) Anyway, change happens from within, and with life-tenured people responsible for change, sometimes there ain't much. The second problem is that, in nonprofit land, it was possible when I started to enter with a BA, or even begin in an administrative role with no college degree at all, and work your way up. Now it's common for management-level gigs to expect a MA (often in "fields" like "arts management" whose degree programs are unfunded, and sometimes cash cows, or subject-based degrees, such as a MA in art history or art education for museum gigs). I worry that as PhDs (grudgingly, from the way I often hear it discussed) enter the nonprofit sector, what one might call degree-inflation will kick in, and PhDs will begin to be expected for more / most management / program gigs.

It's surprisingly soothing in the car... maybe because the landscape rises up and passes by as Bloom's thoughts do. The reader is terrific. My parents were Dubliners, and hearing the words aloud, you glean the variety of mini-dialects Joyce gathered together. I also didn't quite get, when I read it, how funny it is, and in a particularly Irish way. Whenever a group of men get together, they start bursting each other's little bubbles of self-satisfaction, as much by what they don't say as what they do. It's led me to think a bit about a subtopic of research, for later on: Joyce is so erudite that it seems people overlook how integral the humor is... at least I did. The Joshua Redman is called something like Trios Live. It ends with a fun rendition of Led Zeppelin's The Ocean, which is of course in a weird time signature, and so was secretly waiting for a jazz interpretation.

I read, "The selfie is the art form of torture."

Thank you for that wiki link. I for one was not aware of it. Can someone explain what a VAP is?

Bill Evans makes the waiting easier.

How about something related to their scholarly interest, but in a different medium? An Anonymous 4 CD for a medievalist, for example, or a print of a Winslow Homer painting for a 19th C Americanist?

I'm grateful for all the new music suggestions. Around the house, we've been listening to the Clash (my kid, who's 9, has picked up on London Calling) and Tuneyards, and new records by Mary J. Blige and Joshua Redman and D'Angelo. In the car, I've been listening to Ulysses on (30!) CDs. I mostly listen to oldish music - special interest in jazz. Nineteenth century Americanists might be interested in one that John Zorn put out last year, On Leaves of Grass. It's instrumental but captures the wild expansiveness and yearning of Whitman, and like Whitman, Zorn is good at the jarring turn that shakes the reader / listener back into consciousness. NB: the CD package is illustrated with pictures of leaves and flowers from Emily Dickinson's herbarium book.

My sense is that in most instances it's only gotten worse. This is my second time around, and a couple of programs I applied to have said that they accepted fewer students than last year. Last year, another one told me that they'd cut back from 10 to 8, and seems to be staying at that level this year. So, I googled Harvard last night because I wanted to confirm the year it was founded. (1636, for the record. Thoreau was an 1837 graduate, but - in what might be considered a shot across the bow to polite New England - refused to pay for his diploma.) Anyway, according to this article, Harvard accepted "a record low" of 5.7% of applicants into its 2013 undergraduate class. Seems it may have creeped up to 5.9% in 2014. Yes, folks, getting into some PhD English programs - not even necessarily those in the top 20, or even the top 50 (I'm looking your way, BU), is harder than getting into Harvard. For me, this is more reassuring than the opposite. For a middle-aged, second-career-seeking guy, with a BA from a hippie-liberal-arts college, and an MA from a no-name city college (fill in your own "pretty damn unlikely" story here), to even get to the "we're thinking about it" stage must mean I'm / we're doing something right.

This is very impressive. Thank you!

It's been stressful. There happens to be a lot up in the air, for my family, these days, and I kind of just want the whole thing to be over, and know which way to jump. That said, the frozen north is starting to unfreeze, and the days are longer, which helps.

Riverside the place is kind of horrid, but I'd go with the program that feels right. LA is not a terrible drive from there in the context of Southern California driving, and there's good, interesting stuff happening in and east of downtown LA. Also, if this matters to you, east of Riverside has a lot of natural beauty on protected land, and the area around Palm Springs is fun.

Tick tock. I went looking for stock footage that would show time passing - calendar pages falling away, etc. - but found this, which is much better.

Yes! I saw this in the first run, in New York, with this cast. Magic Johnson was in the audience. OMG. Parks is utterly fearless.

My area of specialized interest (a kind of mashup of 19th C sentimentalism / prosody / music) arose organically while I was getting a MA degree a few years ago, but has roots in work I did as an undergrad (writing) major, and was refined through discussions with my former advisor and faculty in my MA program, and the difficult work of writing a brief statement of purpose that adequately summarized my thinking. I also applied (to four programs, as this year) and did not get in last year, and that experience / process made me look more deeply into my motivations and interests. I visited one of my waitlist schools last year - it was UMD - to meet faculty, and to attend a conference they were hosting on the subject of literature and music; and those combined experiences enriched and expanded my thinking a great deal. Since you're going to be in grad school, you'll be doing all these kinds of things (talking with faculty, attending conferences, digging more deeply into the subjects you're interested in), and I bet your subject interests will distill naturally.