lifealive

I didn't think you were implying that about lower-ranked programs, so I'm sorry if that's the way it came across. But frankly, a lot of people think that there's no value in going to a non-top school. The content of and comments on the Slate article underscore that much. So do hiring practices more generally. Personally, I have never expected to get a job in academia, and I don't intend to be in academia long term. I had a previous professional life to fall back on, so for me academic life has never been a life-or-death prospect. I would not adjunct. But having said that, I have little patience for the rhetoric that tells people that they can't expect a good career--despite whatever they've achieved--simply because of the name on their diploma, and because they "should have known better." Now, I know that no one in humanities higher ed can expect a good career for reasons that have nothing to do with prestige. But it's the casual dismissal of non-top-10 PhDs' potential contributions that I take issue with. It's interesting to me that everyone expects a fair shake at the admissions process and the top schools, even if they don't come from the swankiest background. But on the other end of this thing--the job market--the rhetoric changes. Then it's: "Well, you knew before accepting that offer to the PhD program at University of Colorado that you'd never be competitive for a tenure-track job." Really? So it was okay to expect to be evaluated on "merit" when you were applying to graduate school, but apparently it's too much to ask on the job market? Think about the disconnect here: we favor the Horatio Alger narrative when we're talking about getting into a great grad program despite a less-than-ideal background. But we feel that narrative doesn't apply to grad school itself. Instead, it's considered perfectly acceptable to understand that where you get your PhD will limit where you will work. We accept that the "legwork" needs to be done during the application process. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't have the resources to do the legwork before they apply because they don't come from a place where they have access to good preparation. That's all I meant about Berkeley. It's terrific if you have a school in your area where you have access to this world-class education. But many people do not have that kind of a university system in their state.

Not everyone has a Berkeley in their state. Even more distressingly, not everyone has a public university in their state that ranks in the top 100 schools to which they can transfer CC credits. That's the problem. I don't think any of us here think that people here should actually turn down top offers because the system isn't fair. It's more like: people who got top offers shouldn't automatically assume that someone who only got accepted to UC-Santa Cruz should just give up now because they will not ever become a professor. That's the real tragedy here: that we will lose valuable scholars and valuable ideas because we've bought into the rhetoric that any education outside a very narrow ring of schools is essentially worthless. We do have a system in place to correct the imbalances wrought by prestige: the process of publication, which operates on a blind-review basis. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, this system isn't working very well anymore.

Okay, I really don't want to be the biggest Debbie Downer in the world here, but these are often the kind of jobs that people from "non-elite" institutions get, with the exception of Dr. Schwebel. And her MA was from McGill--and yes, having gone to an elite school, even if you didn't get a PhD there, can help on the job market. The other two jobs--okay, they have to do with Writing Centers and digital rhetoric. And those are great jobs, don't get me wrong, but they are geared more toward people who work in rhet/comp. Rhet/comp does not really exist at the top literary studies programs. Therefore, you will often see people from state schools doing rhet/comp jobs. The problem is for people who go to public universities and want to teach purely in literary studies. That's where things get dicier. Often times, these people have to far, far out-publish their elite peers just to get a very small piece of the pie, or they have to develop a rhet/comp skill set on the side in order to have any kind of job.( Zelany and Youngblood both have PhDs in English but marketed their dissertations as "multimodal" and "rhetoric-based." --I'm assuming they understood the market value of doing so.) But then they have to complete with people who have rhet/comp PhDs, and that can also be dicey. I also wonder about the teaching load that these people are doing. I don't know, but I'm just guessing that ECSU and Alvernia require a lot of teaching. Maybe 4/4. So that, unfortunately, often spells the end of whatever "research life" a scholar wants to have. And this is another way that academia ultimately screws over a lot of promising people. Delaware and Florida aren't even bad programs--they're actually really GOOD schools--and I'm guessing they produce great research scholars. But the job market has gotten so tight that these once-good programs are just not able to place their students anymore in traditional literary studies jobs. Those who do get jobs get jobs with heavy teaching loads; as a result, they take longer to publish books, if they publish them at all. Those who are funneled into 2/2 positions are able to publish and to participate in scholarly discourse at a higher rate. This fact once again cements the perception that the good schools just produce better scholars who are therefore more worthy of jobs and research fellowships. I have tons of stories I could tell about this stuff--some of them super personal--but I think I'll keep quiet for now. And once again, I don't mean this information to be discouraging for people who were accepted to state schools, and more encouragement for people to maintain a "top 10 or nothing" attitude. I went to a state school for PhD and I don't regret it. Despite my "state school" background, I feel I was able to make a contribution, and such a thing is invaluable to me. But it is very irritating to see your accomplishments devalued based on a system of prestige that was put in place before any of our grandparents were even conceived. I also know that these systems of currency/prestige are inevitable in a capitalist economy, but academia should really try to rise above that.

I'd personally like to go a step further and advocate for a completely anonymous blind-review admissions process. No letterhead. No CV. Just your basic stats and your writing sample. It would be interesting to see if that kind of process would yield different results.

Your application was probably really compelling, and awesome. Like I said, certain factors can mitigate the obstacles that one faces, and there are always exceptions--just as there are exceptions with GRE scores and GPAs. But I don't think we should rush to exonerate this process as fair when there is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. I also resist the advice that people just "work harder" if only for the fact that people DO work really hard and still come up empty-handed. What I would like to see instead of this kind of encouragement is an acknowledgment that these kinds of longstanding institutional biases are wrong. It's wrong to discriminate against candidates because of their age or where they got their BA, even unconsciously. The problem with the "hard work/luck" narrative is that it obscures the fact that this line of work trades in privilege, and unfortunately this obsession with privilege is now compounded by the fact that academia has become a business. Programs are looking at candidates not just as potential grad students but as investments, and you want to invest your few resources in the students who will finish in as little time as possible and transition smoothly into jobs. It's basically all about "moving the risk off your books" now. So this has led programs to play it safe with graduate admissions. But I think we need to be aware of this issue if only for the fact that it's really easy to replicate this whole system. I see people who fought hard to get into a good school--and that's great--but because the process worked for them, they have a skewed sense of how it worked (or didn't) for other people. So those people who didn't get into the dream program become people who simply didn't work as hard, weren't as smart, or didn't have the "good sense" to keep trying until they got an acceptance to the top schools. And then people's scholarship gets viewed in that context, and it gets assumed that you can't produce good scholarship unless you've come from a certain type of school. And on and on.

I'm talking about both because the two things are very related. Grad programs like to take people who will be employable.

To provide a counter-anecdote, I was very closely tied to a search committee a few years ago, and I heard a few members articulate that they were deliberately looking to hire a "young" and "less experienced" candidate. They said they wanted someone with their entire careers ahead of them. The people we ended up bringing to campus were 28 and 29 respectively. In fact, we've made several hires in the past few years, and almost all those hires were under 33.

There are always exceptions, like I said. But I would always tell someone to bank on being the norm rather than the exception. Were there a lot of other older grad students in your program?

It varies by field (rhet/comp and creative writing actually value age and experience), but literary studies is particularly brutal. "Under 40" is generous; the number I've been hearing lately is "under 35"--as in, you need to be on the job market by the time you're 35. Very few people get accepted to top-ranked programs once they're past the age of 30 or so. I know there are exceptions, and that there are mitigating circumstances, but I'm never surprised when I see an entire incoming cohort composed of people under the age of 28 or so. Whether or not this is outright ageism is debatable, I guess: top programs like people who fit a certain "trajectory" or who have a certain "profile." Veering from that trajectory means that you'll probably be slightly older (took time off for work; went into the military after high school; had children). It might mean that your scholarship isn't quite as "hot" either. (Columbia actually recommends that people who have been out of college for 5 years take classes to get back into things--at least they're honest, I guess.) This is one of the more obvious ways that institutional prestige replicates itself: programs just generally favor people who came from the background and the means to have a fairly respectable and easy time of it at college, and who "set themselves up" to apply to grad school while still in their 20s. Some links about this: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/17/age http://theprofessorisin.com/2012/04/24/ageism-and-the-academy-my-thoughts-and-a-request-for-yours/

I'm guessing the rejections have nothing to do with your acumen as a scholar (because your interests sound awesome and much more focused than mine were at that level). Academia is extraordinarily ageist. Ageism and elitism play themselves out all over the job market, too. And I'm sorry that there is no solution to this problem. All I can tell you is that it's probably not you.

And your original post was completely valid. You were absolutely right about the necessity to not look at a certain type of job as an entitlement just because you're coming out of a certain type of program. I've heard people actually say things like, "I got into X Program, now I can write my own ticket." When really, there are so few TT R1 jobs these days that not even a PhD from the best school in the country means you'll get a job. But I just wanted to make clear that the opposite side of that attitude--that any job is a "dream job"--can also set one up for disappointment.

You should really ask your professors. Personally, however, I'd err on the side of USNWR. USNWR rankings are crap, but they do sort of have a ring of truth (a hollow ring, but a ring nonetheless). Yes, program reputation is still the most important currency on the job market, and many of the schools that USNWR picks out as good are generally regarded as good schools, and people coming out of them get good jobs. There are few surprises there. NRC has been sort of dismissed--not just because it's already out-of-date, but because it's difficult to understand and interpret. It also threw some wild curves that had people scratching their heads. I know that people at my institution didn't really take it seriously.

I know you've since followed up on this, but I just want to weigh in, since I've actually been on the academic job market ... I don't know if I'd call the hope of getting a good TT job an entitlement. I think that even calling it a "dream job" is problematic. So many of these jobs--even the really good ones--are just not that great in terms of what they offer us materially, i.e. the ratio of benefits/salary to expectations of productivity is crappy. The pay scale for TT professors is absolutely appalling--and I say this as someone who previously worked in nonprofit (so I know a thing or two about being "low-balled" in the interview room). I know that's not what you were talking about, and I know that no one goes into this line of work for the money, but I did just want to make this point if only because the "dream job" argument is one that university administrators make to deliberately keep the pay scale so low. It's all "well, this is the dream job! A TT job! So you should be happy to take whatever we're offering because you love to do this! And by the way, we have people lined up around the block, so if you make any noise about wanting more, we'll just rescind your offer!" It's pretty awful, actually. I know someone who got a really low-ball offer from a school in NYC, and they tried to justify paying him so little with the argument that the city offers such "cultural riches" so he should just be happy to get the opportunity. So, I just wanted to clarify this point, because I think that so many of us get into this mindset where we think we'll be just so lucky to land that "dream job." And truth be told, you ARE lucky if you land a TT job--really lucky. But it's also okay to want more. it's okay to say "I'm worth more than this," or "just because my position is teaching-focused, it doesn't mean that I shouldn't get paid as much as my research-focused colleagues." Yeah, there definitely are the really entitled people out there who have skewed expectations about the job market, and they are f'ing obnoxious. But we should be careful not to tilt to far to the other side of the spectrum, which might set us up to be exceedingly accommodating and deferential to the neoliberal university, i.e. "just be grateful that you have a job."

Really? Because I've encountered a lot of anti-LGBT and anti-gay marriage students at large public land-grant institutions. It's unclear to me on what grounds someone could make sweeping claims about their disproportionate presence at Catholic institutions. By googling around a little, I discovered that Catholics actually support gay marriage at a much higher rate than other Christian denominations. Moreover, a lot of non-religious students attend religious institutions. Whether you agree with religion or not, your post singled out students in Catholic schools as holding anti-gay attitudes. I would push back on that assumption because it seems, quite frankly, pretty baseless. It's true that the Catholic Church can be hostile to same-sex couples ... but so are a lot of non-religious and civic institutions and state governments. The people affiliated with them don't always share their views, and it's wrong to assume that they probably do.

It's not quite that simple. He's probably guilty of defamation. He wildly distorted what she said and made provocative blog posts, possibly with the intention of ruining her career. Moreover, she's a student, not a professor, and she didn't express opinions in a public setting--these were things she said after class to another student. I'm guessing that Marquette has a few lawyers on hand. Given the scrutiny this case is getting, I'm sure they've also reviewed the university's laws. These encounters happen at nearly all institutions. No need to compound the problem of anti-gay bigotry by adding a dash of anti-Catholicism.

That's a bizarre little story. I pretty much agree with what's already been said here--that "academic freedom" doesn't protect all things. It certainly doesn't protect the right to violate a student's privacy. I know it's debatable whether or not grad TAs have privacy rights ... but come on. I think this case best illustrates how the non-academic world totally misinterprets the meaning and purpose of tenure. Tenure is meant to protect academic freedom; it's not diplomatic immunity. It doesn't mean that you can never, ever get fired. In any case, I think her rationale for "shutting down" his discussion was inartful and illogical, but she still has the right to run her own classroom as she sees fit. I don't know what goes on in ethics classes--I don't know, for instance, if it's common to spend all class talking about current events--but I think it's okay to say "we're just not going to have this debate in this class." I would personally never tell a student that they "don't have the right" to say whatever, or that I needed to "shut them down" to protect other students, but I might instead take the tack of "we have a lot of material to get through, so we're not going to have this discussion now. But if you want to write a paper about Michael Brown/abortion/gay marriage, feel free." I could see how same-sex marriage debates might completely derail the class. Then again, I don't teach ethics, so I don't know if it's super common to bring these hot button issues up in every class period. In my literature classes, we do occasionally bring up current events, but I'm quick to steer things back to the text when they start to get too far afield. I don't know if ethics classes operate in the same way. Generally, though, I think that professors and instructors get to set their own classroom agendas. Classrooms aren't a free-for-all or an open forum; they're not even the editorial page of your local newspaper or the comments section of Slate. If a professor doesn't like the direction of a classroom conversation, he is well within his right to stop the discussion. That's not violating free speech. That's running a class. And yes, students have the right to seek out another class if they don't care for a professor's particular style. So I find it irritating that people are trying to use this case to cry censorship when it really seems to me to be about professor autonomy. Professors are not required to give each and every perspective equal floor time. They don't even have to give anyone the floor if they don't want to--they can lecture the entire time, or they can use the Socratic method. They don't have an obligation to satisfy the public's yearning for "fair and balanced."

Nope, I won't police my tone for you. And my response to you was perfectly civil. However, when someone trots out the dim and anti-intellectual framework of evolutionary psychology to justify discrimination, or to justify dismissing other people's claims of experiencing discrimination, that doesn't exactly deserve some quiet and pleasing diplomatic response. I mean, it's evolutionary psychology. Sorry, but this is a forum for people devoted to higher education. Evolutionary psychology is going to get denounced for the bullshit that it is. No one here said that the world is out to hurt everyone. What people here have done, however, is dismiss others' experience with gender discrimination, telling them that they're imagining things, or they're seeing what they want to see, or making too big a deal of discrimination. At the same time, other people in this thread have voiced extraordinarily sexist sentiments. So as much as you want to argue that people here are simply making unsupported assumptions about the existence of gender bias in their everyday lives, the very content of this thread proves you wrong. Additionally, if you think that my "vitriol"--or, in other words, my objection to people's dismissive attitudes--is the equivalent to the societal power imbalance that gender discrimination creates, you need to rethink some things. See telkanuru's post at the top of this page. I'll requote it quickly here: "You cannot balance the scales by adding inequality to one side as a counterweight to inequality on the other and achieve justice thereby. When someone provides an anecdote to illustrate how they felt injured, ignored, or discriminated against because of some inherent feature they happened to possess (race, sexual or gender identity), the correct response is not to provide a counter-anecdote which shows that you, too, have once been injured, ignored, or discriminated against." To the best of my knowledge, no one called anyone evil. it's interesting, though, that that's what people hear when others call them on their sexism. To recap: "Hey, guess what, it's not cool to excuse male students for their bad behavior simply because the female TA is attractive. It's also not cool to say things like 'women are just more organized' and 'men are just more entertaining because of mating rituals.'" "You think people are EVIL. You're attacking me!" No. That, my dear, is called derailing.

Actually, what most people have done in this thread is corroborate their personal experiences with outside studies demonstrating the gender bias that runs through course evaluations, classroom dynamics, and student perceptions of authority. Fascinatingly, few people have engaged with this material, instead choosing to dismiss (and dare I say mansplain away) personal experiences as evidence of myopic confirmation bias. Why isn't the burden on you to demonstrate that the world is as fair and unbiased as you think it is? After all, we've seen people right here in this thread espouse creepy, sexist, and essentialist viewpoints--that women use their looks to manipulate male TAs; that it's okay for male students to want to be familiar with attractive female TAs; that women are just more cooperative and approachable like that; that women's objections to these sentiments is just evidence of "a bunch of women" complaining; that women should just get back to work and stop noticing these pesky incidents because it's inconvenient and distracting. So while it might be safe to say that one can rarely prove that they're the victim of discrimination, it's also safe to say that this thread has been a real eye-opening example of the truly off-kilter attitudes that people hold about gender relationships.

Yes, exactly. I am a disagreeable, not-nice woman who calls evolutionary psychologists on their bullshit. I guess I won't be "mating," as you put it, anytime soon. Anything else? Would you care to share links about how women are automatically attracted to the color pink because they spent their cave years picking berries?

The internet also told me that women are more likely to be chronic hoarders. Ergo, it must be basic biology--a difference to be cherished and "protected" and evidence of the way the female brain works.

What you've written here is just gender essentialism masquerading as the "hard truth" or "simple facts" and "basic biology." Women "in general" are "more organized and willing to go the extra mile to help others"? Gee, I wonder why that is. Moreover, do you want to cite a source for that? And the whole idea of needing to "protect" the special strengths and weaknesses of both genders smacks of paternalism. Seriously, we're grad students. Can't we do any better than this post-feminist backlash biological determinism crap?

It's more like R1 jobs are virtually non-existent. I think that my entire subfield had about 20 jobs total this year. That's 20 jobs for the entire country. A truly terrible year. Almost none of those jobs were at R1s; a few were at high-end SLACs (the new R1s in terms of hiring) and the rest at very out-of-the-way places for low pay with high loads. Think $35,000 a year for a 4/4 load in northern Iowa. That kind of job. And no, having a degree from an elite institution won't save you in that case. While graduate school has been very good for me--the time of my life, really--and while I would never tell anyone just not to go, I am a little worried about some of the sentiments I see cropping up in this thread, i.e. "I can't do anything with my English major" or "if I don't get into grad school I'll have to take some extremely low-rent, low-paying job." That's just not true. Moreover, it's hard to keep promoting the English major to our young undergrads when the very people invested in the English major believe it offers no tangible work opportunities. The reason we're losing majors is all a matter of perception: people think that studying English will lead to a life as a Starbucks shift manager, so they go study business instead. In truth, English probably prepares you more for the fast-paced business world than any canned business degree, but people don't know this. It's a question my undergrads ask me all the time. I never tell them that the English major doesn't offer any "real world" opportunities--instead I tell them about the work I did between degrees, i.e. editing, drafting documents for a government agency, and managing a non-profit. But more importantly, you will probably have to consider these questions again as you near the completion of your PhD. What do I do with my PhD in English if it's not teach/publish? So ... I think it's really good to consider them now, and to come up with viable options. And if you end up having to take an unexpected year "off" before going to graduate school, pursue those options as best you can. Keep a "shadow" resume of the things you've done that apply more widely to a different workforce. And, oh yeah, have fun. Getting to take time away from the university can be extremely rewarding. Finally, while it's true that the economy has been bad for nearly all sectors of society, and that a lot of job markets are suffering, it's incorrect to believe that this explains why universities aren't hiring. Universities actually aren't in terrible shape. Many have bounced back. They're not hiring because they don't have to. They've figured out quite ruthlessly how to get by on hiring the fewest number of professors possible. And I wasn't being hyperbolic or overly dramatic when I said that universities were trying to figure out how to eliminate the humanities. As I speak, my own alma mater is trying to figure out how to reduce the size and the scope of the English department. (The solution is always to increase the number of part-time adjuncts.) But just know that universities are becoming increasingly antagonistic to the humanities, and this doesn't even have much to do with the economy anymore. It's almost ideological, not economic, and hence very discouraging.

As someone on the academic job market myself, I have to second this, but with caution. While I would never discourage anyone from going to grad school, I would very much recommend that you cultivate this "Plan B" not just for when you don't get into grad school, but for life in general. I feel fortunate that I worked between college and undergrad because I do have other skills I can "fall back" on. I think that graduate school is a valuable thing to do in and of itself, but you cannot rely on the prospect of ever being employed as an academic. I lost my job during the Recession, and I was told that going to grad school was fine because the economy would recover in 5 years and there would be academic jobs again. Well, as ComeBackZinc has pointed out, job prospects are actually WORSE now than they were in 2008. We're not talking a Recession anymore; we're talking about the fact that the university has decided it no longer needs people to teach English. You are not wanted in academia. Universities are in the process of dismantling the humanities. There's money sloshing around in universities (they can't blame bad hedge funds anymore), but it's not going to go to you. So if you go to grad school, cultivate a Plan B the entire time you're there.

I actually don't think it would be a terrible thing to call or contact someone after receiving such an email. They're the ones who opened the door by sending this email. I think it's really bad form to send an email like this if you're not willing to then deal with the obvious questions that arise from it.