Tag: jobs

Wait, Why Do We Have Colleges Again?

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In keeping with a suggestion of the Radical Teacher board that (1) our blogs be more like provocations than like articles, and 2) we bloggers think of one another as our primary readership, with others hopping in as they choose, here’s a puzzle for you all. For 30 years, government and think tank reports have built on the premise that schooling and higher education are valuable chiefly for their contribution to US prosperity, and more particularly, US “preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation. . . .”  (A Nation at Risk, 1983).  International competitors were overtaking the US then, Read More …

Meanderthal, Part II

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Glorious, heroic, fruitful for his own Time, and for all Time and all Eternity, is the constant Speaker and Doer of Truth! If no such again, in the present generation, is to be vouchsafed us, let us have at least the melancholy pleasure of beholding a decided Liar. Thomas Carlyle, “Count Cagliostro” So here I am in my second year at ZU at a fall faculty meeting. And, after twenty minutes in, wondering, What the hell are you doing? Who is this person? Do I know you? The one suddenly shouting at the college’s President, Dr. D’main, and not only Read More …

Meandering, Part I

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Monsieur had all the varieties of incapacity which such a post required. –Balzac, Lost Illusions I almost thought that I began when it began, at Zirconium U., a county college dubbed by legislators, who had free miles on clichés, as the county’s “jewel in the crown,” which I had always thought means the Raj, but who knew? Not me. I didn’t know much thirty-eight years ago when I was hired full time as an instructor in the English Department, and where I realized the building I was interviewed and hired in was the building that housed almost all departments, administrative Read More …

What’s Wrong With Graduate Education in the U.S.?

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According to “The Path Forward; The Future of Graduate Education in the United States,” what’s wrong with graduate education is too little of it.  The Educational Testing Service and the Council of Graduate schools published this “landmark report,”on April 29; we know it’s a landmark report because ETS and CGS said so, in their press release.  OK, OK, minimal irony from here on, I promise. The reason we need more people graduating with Ph.D.’s and M.A.’s–overwhelmingly the main reason–is the “necessity of a graduate-level workforce to maintain US competitiveness and innovation” (April 29 News Release),  The United States “is in Read More …

Bad Times in Academia, Part IV

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This is my fourth and final post on the academic job market and the future of college teaching as a profession.  Quick review:  in earlier installments I noted the devastation that came to academic employment via the crash of 2008; proposed that recovery from that crash will not restore the jobs lost, either across the whole economy or specifically in higher education; suggested that our professionis a moribund institution; and laid out some lines of action it (for instance, the Modern Language Association) would need to take in order to have a chance of rebuilding its market haven. Now I Read More …

More on Bad Times in the Academic Profession

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There are not nearly enough jobs for people with new Ph.D. degrees. Two-thirds of those teaching English and foreign languages in colleges and universities (with or without the Ph.D.) are off the tenure track. The numbers are similar in most humanities and social science fields, and far from good in the sciences. I’m going to leave non-liberal arts fields out of this discussion, noting only that a lot of teaching in, say, law and business is done by adjuncts, too. In my last blog on this subject (March 12), I said I’d later discuss ways of fighting this change for Read More …

A New Job Crisis in the Humanities?

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By Kate Drabinski At the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia last month, shrinkage and decline were palpable.  The book exhibits that used to fill a large ballroom could have been accommodated in a small bar room.  Attendance was down:  I don’t know the figures, but elevators in the Marriott and Loews were nearly empty, and all the sessions I went to had more empty seats than occupied ones.  Hundreds of graduate students in English and foreign language departments were there without a single job interview, or with just one or two.To be specific about that last indicator:  Read More …