ComeBackZinc

OK, and now I hop to the other foot, because this comment has many of the problems in the other direction. First, this: "You sound seriously goofy when you seem to compare yourself to people who are stuck in inescapable cycles of economic oppression with no resources and no support." is profoundly unhelpful. The race to the bottom of saying that you can only complain if you are below a certain threshold of poverty or hardship is a conservative argument that wouldn't be out of place at the Republican National Convention. There is no question that PhD students are in a cycle of economic oppression with very limited resources and support. Are PhD students Sudanese Lost Boys or Cambodian refugees, on the very bottom? No. But there are tons of PhDs and grad students who are in terrible shape. Saying that anyone who complains about exploitative labor conditions, a lack of benefits or security, and terrible wages amounts to "privilege" is just doing the work of economic conservatives for them. Many adjuncts make less than $30K a year. That's not sufficient to achieve basic material security under any definition, and there's no need for anyone to argue otherwise in the urge to defend the academy. Second, you make this move that I see around here constantly. First: "Everyone already knows there's an enormous problem with the American college educational system and enormous problems with job availability and security." And then: "Many, many career fields are uncertain now in terms of job availability. The economy sucks." The second statement demonstrates the inaccuracy of the first. The economy has actually been getting better for years. The overall employment picture is vastly better today than it was five years ago. But the academic job market is significantly worse. People constantly do this thing here where they say "everyone knows the academic job market sucks," and then turn around and demonstrate that they themselves don't know that. The academic job market is vastly worse than the job market writ large. Saying that the economy is tough all over demonstrates a failure to grasp the intensity of the problem. Finally, I will say again: I think a lot of people who have not yet been through their graduate education deeply underestimate the terrible, grinding debasement and emotional assault of the academic job market. I've been through a lot of shit in my life, and the academic job market ranks up there with the most unpleasant, unhappy experiences. And I've been quite successful compared to many! Similarly, leaving behind 5,6,7 years of work with nothing to show for it is a lot easier said than done. I will again say that adults are adults and that you all have the right to make your own choices, and if you make those choices as informed people, I wish you well. But please don't underestimate how much better leaving it all behind sounds now than it will when you are a half-decade older, poorer, and more ensconced in an academic lifestyle than ever.

Sure. Agree completely. However, I insist on pointing out: as a class, people with PhDs-- even recent graduates-- enjoy better employment and income conditions than workers writ large, and vastly better than those with only high school diplomas. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to get a PhD; in fact, as I have argued again and again, it very frequently is not. But there's a constant slippage around here between discussing the academic job market and discussing the general plight of those with doctorates. Yes, there are many anecdotes of people who are working as adjuncts under precarious, low-paying conditions, and that's awful. They are terribly served by the academy and by specific institutions, and they need better living and working conditions. I think that there is finally some positive movement in that direction, for which I'm grateful. In particular, adjunct faculty need to be unionized. You can lament that, cast blame where appropriate, and work for change without misrepresenting the actual average living condition of the average PhD, even the average humanities PhD. I've written and engaged on academic labor issues and grad school for years, and I've fallen firmly in the pessimist camp telling people not to go to grad school. I agree with and accept the structural claims that are being made here. I tell people not to underestimate the emotional and practical devastation of emerging with a PhD and no job. I know that alt-ac stuff is harder than people think to get into. I know all of that. And yet there is a persistent sense in which this is not enough, and I'm just being honest when I say that frequently what people seem to want is for me to share a particular emotional/affective relationship to the academy that I just don't. I find that frustrating and not practically useful.

Indeed. I agree with this. But another question presents itself: what does VirtualMessage want? What do you want? Because as I keep saying, there's this running-repeatedly-into-a-wall aspect here. I can't find anyone who disagrees with VirtualMessage about any of the particulars. When I asked "what do you want people to do?," that wasn't a rhetorical question. What is the purpose of this intervention? No one can accuse me of preventing people from telling the truth about the job market; usually, I am the guy telling people about the job market, often in a way that gets people mad. I've been trying to make the case that you are making for years here. But VirtualMessage seems to want something more, and I can't comprehend what it is. What would satisfy you? It seems like the answer is "have everyone here pledge not to go to grad school." Given that this is a message board all about getting into grad school, that seems remarkably unrealistic. So what's the point here?

I more or less agree with the OP's central thesis. I don't agree with him constantly trying to force everyone else into his psychodrama. Again: you and him constantly show up and yell at the rest of us for not believing what you believe, and yet I sincerely cannot find anyone disagreeing with most of your points. What do you want? Is it literally that everyone on this board abandon graduate school? I'm afraid that's not going to happen. But everyone here seems to think that there's a labor problem in the academy and that the labor situation is immoral and exploitative. The question of whether or not individuals should continue to pursue graduate school is a different question than the structural point you're making. Like it has been for me. I tell people not to go to graduate school all the time; going to graduate school was the best decision I ever made. Including from the standpoint of my own economic and professional interests. There's no contradiction here, as long as you permit individuals to be individuals and to make up their own minds about what is best for their own lives.

Again: this is a very self-satisfied post that says things that literally no one in this thread disagrees with. Capitalism and socialism aren't nebulous; they are in fact the most concrete things in our lives. Literally no one excuses school administrators in this thread, so I don't know why you would bring this up. If you think the system should change, I agree, but you're lecturing people who are not part of the system and not in control of it, which is weird. And despite constant evidence-free assertion otherwise, the skilled trades are not in good employment shape, as they are hugely susceptible to the housing market, so your HVAC guy may very well be just as precarious as an unemployed PhD student. All in all, this is yet another comment that condescendingly explains to people things that they all already admit to being true. And I am one of the lucky few to get a good job in academia. No scare quotes needed: it's a good job by any account. So I'll keep shuffling my zombie ass towards graduation, thanks.

My advice remains the same as it was in this thread: I think that you should decide whether you w ant to teach high school English or get a PhD, rather than see the former as a means to the latter. I don't know anyone who advocates for teaching high school English as a vehicle for improving an English PhD application. That's not to say that it hurts to have that kind of experience, of course, but that it's a major investment of time and effort to get to do that, and being a high school teacher is a career rather than a short term gig. If you just want teaching experience, I recommend adjuncting rather than teaching in high school. Just my 2 cents.

I would put it a little bit differently than the other people here while maintaining the spirit of what they've said: I was a dumbass before I went into my MA program. I was significantly less of a dumbass when I came out. I say that sincerely.

Yes, but as the rest of us have already established, VirtualMessage, you are not the cosmos.

1. I see literally no one in this thread who questions that there's a labor crisis in the contemporary university. 2. I see literally no one in this thread who questions that there's exploitation in the contemporary university. 3. I see literally no one in this thread who questions the deprofessionalization of the professoriate in this thread. 4. "The faculty" is not a monolithic bloc and describing them as such does not help us in the structural or in the particular. 5. Yes, it's important to describe and criticize the labor crisis in the university; in fact, many faculty members are among the most strident and vocal in doing so. Sure, there's also faculty members who are part of the problem, and they deserve criticism, and I have made that criticism, publicly, many times. But there is no question that the ultimate culpability lies in the hands of politicians and administrators. That's not displacement; that's a fact, a plain fact about who holds power in the contemporary university. It just doesn't fit in your ongoing psychodrama, which you are busily inflicting on the people here every da y. 6. People who are entering the profession (and I'm not sure what your scare quotes prove, other than that you escalate meaninglessly when pushed back against) are having that conversation. We have it all over the internet, and have, for years. We have it here all the time. The fact that you don't get to dictate every aspect of that conversation does not mean it doesn't happen. We are not here to serve the needs of your ego. 7. Putting capitalism in scare quotes does not diminish the plain reality that I'm describing, which is that almost every aspect of the academic labor situation you deride is a product of the system in which it is embedded and is not reducible to a morality play which pits those mean faculty members against our hero VirtualMessage. 8. No one is "theorizing" anything; we are talking about the real world, and many of us are doing so in a profoundly less romantic and more concrete manner than you are. 9. Labor issues are political issues and structural issues and material issues. Reducing them to a meaningless whinge about personal morality and the naivete you are so addicted to observing in others does nothing for anyone. 10. Things are bleak. Progress is possible. Both of those things are true. What is necessary is for people to formulate a plan to try to secure that progress. I see some of that from some faculty members. I see some of that from the people here. I see nothing resembling a plan from you. I just see bitterness and recrimination that plays out in the most emotional, least constructive terms possible. 11. I don't mind naivete. I don't mind cynicism. But your brand of naive cynicism is tiresome and narcissistic and personally I've had quite enough of it.

Yes but, and again I find a lot to agree with you, what you're describing is the structure and function of capitalism. The entire economy is based on the exploitation of labor. The entire economy asks you to instrumentalize and commodify yourself and what you love. The entire economy shamelessly asks for uncompensated labor, as the reach of email and the smartphone compels us to work long into the night. What you're describing is what capitalism is. I don't excuse any of the academy's participation in these things, and they're as bad as you say. But they are system-wide, and someone going out and getting a job in the "real world" will not find the conditions any better. I'm increasingly convinced that you're someone who went into the academy with a series of illusions about it that were inevitably dashed. I don't pretend that no on in the academy perpetuates those myths, but I find it blindingly naive to think that what you're describing isn't an inherent function of capitalist society.

So, I really really don't intend to freak you out, or anything, but I just want to point out: I know for a fact that a lot of grad directors read this board, and I particularly know that quite a few in the Big Ten do. And I also think that anyone who has access to your application would probably be able to put together who you are from this information. I don't at all say that to intimidate you and 90% of the time I'm sure it won't matter. But I did just want to mention that.

I agree with most of this. I would just say that I am someone who is not independently wealthy and who did want a profession and a good income and went to a PhD program. I'm also someone who was and remains very plugged in and engaged with the academic job market and went in knowing how tough the market is. I still went for a couple of reasons. One, because rhetoric and composition still enjoys a sizable labor market advantage over English generally, although as I have been pointing out, that advantage has been significantly eroded since 2008. Second, because I have another life in non-academic publishing which has helped me survive grad school financially and has given me some professional opportunities now that I'm finishing. Third, because I'm finishing a PhD in 4 years and with minimal loan debt, something that I knew I could accomplish going in. But most importantly, because for two years I looked for a job in the so-called real world. I applied all over. I was willing to take almost anything. I submitted over a hundred applications. I slogged myself through round after round of applications. For hundreds of hours of effort, I earned seven telephone interviews, four in-person interviews, and ultimately two offers. Neither of them offered benefits, and neither of them offered more than $30,000/year in pay, for long hours and intellectually deadening work. So I went and got my MA and now my PhD, and the last six years have been the most rewarding and enjoyable of my life. Despite being poor. What I want very much is to be able to say both things at once: that everything VirtualMessage writes above is pretty much correct, and also that going to grad school was the best decision of my life.

1. It's incredible to be hearing this at the same exact time as I am arguing about the field's complete lack of standardization and top-down approaches. The current pedagogical work in the field is dominated by cultural studies and critical pedagogy and has been for some time. 2. That's a problem because the world of higher education is dominated by standardization efforts, so if we don't do anything to standardize a little bit, we'll just lose control of our programs entirely, and Pearson and ETS will swoop in and take over the teaching of writing entirely. Which would you prefer? That some lefty profs do a little research into best practices and provide some minimal structure for the writing classroom in an effort to maintain our disciplinary control over pedagogy? Or that some for-profit entity come in, install a completely standardized syllabus, implement a heavy-handed assessment mechanism, and completely de-professionalize the instruction of college writing? Because those are the alternatives. I'm afraid most people who teach don't enjoy the standing of Toni Morrison at Princeton. 3. If you think the average WPA is out to micromanage the teaching of the average writing instructor, I'm sorry, you're just misinformed. I must tell you again that you don't in fact have perfect perspective on the whole world of writing programs. 4. I think your complaints about the field and about WPAs have been registered.

I am again amused by VM's belief that tenured literature professors are any less complicit in managing people in a corporate structure. It's like he's never actually seen how a tenured lit professor works with his or her advisees.

Sure, I've dealt with that kind of resentment before. It's not uncommon, although I find it's a minority opinion. In a healthy labor market, I don't think it would exist. Unfortunately, in my opinion the field has responded in the worst way possible, which is by largely abandoning writing pedagogy at the height of the field's research arm-- in the most prestigious journals and conferences-- and embracing cultural studies to the point where a lot of rhet/comp scholarship is simply indistinguishable from cultural studies. That's a recipe for losing the disciplinary identity that gave us stronger institutional standing in the first place. Of course, I'm just a crank, and many people would disagree. I would recommend, though, Richard Haswell's "NCTE/CCCC's Recent War on Scholarship," Susan Peck McDonald's "The Erasure of Language," Davida Charney's "Empiricism is Not a Four-Letter Word," and "Sheep in Wolves' Clothing: How Composition's Social Construction Reinstates Expressivist Solipsisim (And Even Current-Traditional Conservatism" by Keith Rhodes and Monica McFawn Robinson. (The last one is in fact my pick for the most important state-of-the-field piece written in ages.)

I detect a consistent theme in your posts, VirtualMessage: a deep committed to over-extrapolating from your own experience.

Again: you are simply restating the basic presumption of literature for at least 40 years, which is that writing does not need to be researched and that best practices do not have to be developed in a rigorous way. Fine; you are simply opposed to the basic presumptions of this field. Which again invites the question of why you feel the need to pop in here to troll people who do believe in the need to research student writing and develop best practices for the good of students and instructors alike. It's like going to a philosophy thread and saying that philosophy doesn't need to exist anymore because we have science. A legitimate opinion, but what's the point of sharing it in that forum?

And the tenured lit professor who teaches a 1-2, two of which are graduate courses-- that's not an exploitation of the adjunct and graduate student labor that teaches a majority of university English classes? That's not exploitation of the underclass that they wouldn't deign to speak to in the hallway? You can play the class analysis card, friend, but I'm afraid it redounds to the benefit of my field, not yours. It's literature that has perpetuated a two-tiered employment system, literature that employs profs who live in a elevated state above the actual apparatus of teaching undergraduate students, literature that is so riven with class resentment and prestige and envy. A vast majority of rhetoric and composition scholars are employed at community colleges and teaching colleges, a fact that literature people make fun of constantly. Rhet comp people are out there teaching 4/4s while holding down administrative positions and trying to scratch out time to do research. But at least we work, in the academy, in TT jobs or long-term instructorships. We are a more ethical field because a vastly higher portion of our PhDs go on to secure employment in the academy than literature does. In your field, a tiny number of profs live disconnected from the day-to-day work of adjuncts and instructors, enjoying the life of a researcher. Well, good for them. But don't turn around and try to play working class hero when your field is still obsessed with status and prestige while a vast number of its graduates go on to lives of overwork, terrible pay, and perpetual contingency. You don't have a leg to stand on.

WPA work exists because institutions and stakeholders continue to value the importance of teaching college students how to write, despite the terrible assault the humanities has endured for decades. And thank god that they do, because it is the teaching of writing, above and beyond anything else, that keeps the lights on in English departments writ large. It is the teaching of writing that pays our bills. You might find the teaching of writing to be unglamorous "service" labor; I find it to be invigorating and important. But then, I'm a member of my field, and we take writing seriously. Part of taking writing seriously means acknowledging that running a writing program effectively-- developing curricula and training teachers and assessing our progress-- requires specially trained labor. That's not the only work of rhet/comp, but it's valuable work that can have a deep, meaningful impact on the lives of the students who go through our writing programs and whose future academic and professional success requires strong writing skills. As far as not being able to stomach the work-- well, nobody asked you to. I don't go around medievalist threads and insult their discipline because it's none of my business. Perhaps you should consider doing the same.

I mean, among other things, this is just pure historical illiteracy. Literature departments vociferously fought against the creation of separate departments of writing, they still do, and the MLA constantly agitates against rhet/comp. One of the fiercest battles was right here at Purdue. I mean, I've seen the documentation. I've talked to Janice Lauer. She was told not to put some of her pedagogical work in her tenure file, that's how resistant lit was to treating student writing as a subject that matters. To no avail, though; even with r/c's downturn, we're on the order of 4% of English PhDs and yet 33% of annual hires. Which, you know, cuts against the whole adjunct crack; a far higher percentage of lit PhDs are out there adjuncting than r/c PhDs. But then, you knew that, didn't you?

Speaking as a resident job market pessimist, I will say that it's often claimed the the academic job market trails the overall economy by a couple of years, and the overall US economy has seen significant gains in employment in the past 18-24 months. So there may be structural reasons for optimism.

Tell a story with your CV. As you learn more in the field and decide how you want to define yourself, say, "how can I write a cover letter that expresses who I am as a scholar, and how can I integrate evidence from my CV to make that story concrete?" You can get a job, but you've got to be prepared to lay yourself out in that way-- claim about who you are, what you research, and what you can teach on your cover letter, then references to a CV that backs it up. In order to do that, you've got to fill that CV. So be relentless in sending things out for publication, whether it's researched articles to the biggest journals in the field or little reviews to online pubs. It's so valuable, in the long run, to have a string of smaller CV lines that add up to a lot. There's lots of opportunities! But you must fill your CV. If you want more specific recommendations for where to look, let me know. You'll be fine.

So let's just say, please, to everyone writing and reading here: don't be fooled. You will not be the exception. The odds of you getting a TT job at any institution are punishingly low. Massively qualified people have emerged from the highest ranked programs with books written and not gotten jobs. So understand all of this, going in. Understand that the question for the large majority is not whether they get that cush R1 gig but whether they will be one of the lucky few to grab on to an instructor position with a non-punishing teaching load and at least decent salary and a long-term contract. And when you're done, if you're saying that you'll be one of the ones who can move on from academia without regret, make it your responsibility to not become the embittered academic we're talking about. Don't graduate and write that essay we've all read a thousand times. We have a responsibility too, though, those of us who are sounding the alarm: we should respect that it is possible to make this choice and to see it through and to emerge without regrets like these people are saying they won't. I in fact know more than a few people like this. So it is possible and in the end, everyone has the right to determine their own path in life.

I don't like the term "duped" because it turns a structural problem into a personal morality play. And while there are plenty of faculty that bear some blame, the reality is that state legislatures and higher administrations are ultimately responsible for the collapse of the academic job market.

As far as advice... 1. You must publish. You must publish. 2. Hiring committees like round pegs for round holes. You want to be as easy to interpret as possible. That means you need to choose a particular lane of rhet comp and be that as thoroughly an as obviously as possible. In other words, if you're going to be a WPA, you need to be a WPA through and through. If you're going to be a queer scholar, be just that in the most obvious and clear way possible. The field says it likes interdisciplinarity, but when the rubber meets the road, it wants people who fit into certain slots. So pick a slot and make sure you fit it securely. Start crafting a CV now. Start crafting a cover letter now. And when you do, sit down and say "how can I tell the story of how I perfectly fit Slot X in a way that's comprehensible and supportable?" 3. Be a busy beaver at conferences. Meet everyone you can. Ingratiate yourself. It really does matter.