There's another side to that coin, and I find it equally problematic.
When I was a doctoral candidate at Slightly Fancy University (not an Ivy, but just barely fancy enough to be snooty about things), the faculty in my program made their vision of my ultimate goal painstakingly clear: to secure employment at an R1. Why? Well, R1s are prestigious, of course. And I should be at a "prestigious" school, just like them.After all, here in academia, our primary goal is not to prepare doctoral students to critically think about the choices before them and choose a place of employment that will suit their priorities. Oh, no. Our goal is to clone ourselves--and our top priority is securing and maintaining our prestigious positions at research universities. Not families, not friends, not community. It's grabbing that prestige and clinging to it for dear life.
I have doubts about the validity of this perspective. My doctorate is in the field of snark, which is not a hard science. Therefore, I do not need the amazing resources offered by the best of the R1s--such access to top-level scientific equipment in order to continue developing a potentially world-changing cure for cancer/AIDs/the common cold/trolls on the internet.
No, no. I am a social scientist and a cultural critic, and I can do my work without kajillion-dollar resources. I also happen to like teaching, even if the little snowflakes in my classes piss me off on a regular basis.
So while I was a doctoral candidate, I asked a lot of questions of faculty at conferences, and I paid attention. Here's what I learned.
At most any R1 in my field, I would be obliged to publish in a specific set of scholarly journals in order to secure tenure. These journals have extraordinarily low acceptance rates, because everyone wants to publish in them ... as a path to tenure. Oh, brother.
These journals also privilege quantitative research, and although I am fully trained in the quantoid methods of my field, I specialize in qualitative feminist snarkology. So, when I read these journals? I don't like 'em. They are not me. They are stodgy, lame, intellectually stifling, and reek of desperation: "If this article is good enough to get published, OMG I CAN GET TENURE. So watch me do a little song and dance to overstate the importance of my quantitative research project, which explains nothing of cultural significance; it just proves, hey, I can do fancy maths and make tempests from teapots! It's academic alchemy. Woo."
At an R2, I would have to publish an even higher number of articles in these same journals to secure tenure, because R2s have R1 envy. Their administrators have something to "prove"--so in my field, faculty at R2s report they are beyond miserable, trying to measure up to standards even "higher" than those ar R1s.
At a teaching college or university, I would have to deal with a 3/3, 3/4, or 4/4 load, but the class sizes would be smaller (20 instead of 200), and I'd be able to publish wherever I wanted. As long as I had a series of publications in journals relevant to my interests, I'd be set; HMMMM.
I couldn't get a good lowdown on community colleges, because cc proffies presenting at conferences in my field were far and few between. Considering I wanted time to do my research, and that they often teach 5/5 loads, their absence seemed indicative that I wouldn't be able to strike a balance there. So, I knew I could scratch that.
Weighing my options, teaching colleges/unis seemed like the best avenue. So I applied to a range of positions, and when I accepted a position at Snarklepuss University--a teaching uni--well, let's say that my committee members were less than pleased. "You are perfectly poised for a job at an R1," they said. "Your publications are great. WHY would you take a job at a teaching college with a 3/4 load? I have a hard enough time with my grueling 1/2 load!!!!"
I explained that although the number of classes was higher, the total number of students I'd teach per semester was lower than the number they had me teaching at Slightly Fancy Uni. ("But the extra four hours of face-time per week will KILL you," they shouted.)
I explained that I wanted the freedom to pursue the research I enjoy, without worrying whether it would "fit" in top-tier journals. ("But you don't have to continue working on your current project. You are completely capable of shifting it into a foundation for a large-scale snarkophonic study that would work SO WELL in the American Journal of Snark." Um, but that project wouldn't hold my interest. I LIKE my current project. Actually, I have a passion for it. "Passion is overrated." Um....yeah.)
My answers made no sense to them, I'm afraid; we speak two different languages.
Besides all this, I have a family, friends, and interests that (surprise!) have NOTHING to do with the academy. They knew this from the get-go and always looked askance at it. ("You can't possibly have time for X, Y and Z and still be as productive as you are," they'd say suspiciously. "What's up with that?" Um, I dunno...why, does that threaten you???)
Unlike my doctoral faculty, who never made time to have families of their own, and who (truly) seemed to prioritize their friendships within the academy over any other form of social interaction, I wanted more flexibility--the society of people who are not fixated on publishing, tenure, promotion, etc.
My ultimate take is this:
I have a sense of perspective. I feel the other interests and goals in my life are valuable and relevant. My advisers? I'm indebted to them, and grateful for what they taught me; but some of the lessons, they never intended. I learned that they are myopic, consumed by identities based too heavily upon their R1 positions to be healthy. The ivy has grown up over the windows in their ivy towers, blinding them to the validity of options outside those walls.
I wanted a view--and a doorway--to the world outside. So I took the job at to Snarklepuss U.
It was a great decision for me, even if I did "disappoint" my faculty. But that "prestige" they're all slaving to keep, and on which my faculty appointment is--in their eyes--a reflection, is not so prestigious as they believe. IMO, it's really only prestigious within a very narrow circle of likeminded people.
No Kool-Aid for me, thanks.
Personal prestige of your advisor can play a role but so can your advisor's real desire for you to advance your field of study.
ReplyDeleteI served on a thesis committee of a student who chose a similar career as you. I was pleased that she had a realistic idea of how her career and life could coexist. At the same time, I was disappointed that her scientific field would be losing a potentially excellent researcher.
Understood. What bugs me nevertheless is the general assumption that faculty can only advance their fields from the confines of a research university. In my discipline, at least, drive seems as significant a variable as location; I've published more than anyone else in my doctoral cohort, and in journals of equal ranking.
ReplyDeleteIt's not like they're magically publishing in the American Journal of Snark just because they're at the University of Slight Fanciness. On the contrary, managing their 200-student lecture courses and supervising their 4 TAs seems like a LOT more teaching-related work than what I do in a given week...
On a related note, the two most recent graduates from my mediocrely rated graduate program have ended up at community colleges...*but* with fast track tenure track positions at respectable wages, teaching just 3/3 loads, and with generous sabbatical terms. I wonder if these are isolated cases, or if some community colleges are seeing the opportunity to advance their status by upping the credentials of their teaching staff?
ReplyDeleteAlso worth noting that a 3/3 load at a community college is likely to comprise not just smaller classes, but also more basic ones. Boring, yes, but far less time consuming (at least in my subject area. I don't know if this generalises.)
One thing I learned when I started grad studies over 30 years ago was that originality really doesn't exist. Grad students are expected to work on what their supervisors are investigating, which is what everyone else in their field is doing as well. Part of the reason for that is because that's where the funding is and the fear of being too original with the possibility of being snubbed by one's colleagues. The result is that the system tends to become intellectually root-bound, few new ideas are generated, and the cloning referred to in the original post takes place.
ReplyDeleteFor my Ph. D., I did something different and worked on something that I was interested in and, as it happened, few people were investigating. I didn't have to worry about funding because I largely paid my own way, as I worked on my degree part-time for a few years while I was teaching. But the fact that I did something original meant that I took myself out of the cloning game and, thereby, out of the tenure-track sweepstakes as well.
I'm semi-retired now and I work whenever I can on the research I started on during my Ph. D. studies. There are distinct advantages to doing that. Not only don't I have to worry about the fun and games that comes with doing it in an academic setting, I can work, and publish, at my own place, if I choose to do so.
Well, it is inevitable that many (most?) academics who are lucky enough to get a job will wind up teaching at a less prestigious institution than the one where they pursued their doctorate. Fortunately you can't eat prestige (or do a lot of other things with it that I won't mention).
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, there is a lot of pressure to be hellbent on getting a certain kind of job, and not all of it from faculty. I remember other graduate students in my own doctoral program looking askance at me when I said I didn't care about all that. Of course, it is easy enough for me to say that now, as I wound up with one of the prestige jobs, while almost all my "more ambitious" peers are either out of the profession (good for them) or in jobs that are not all they hoped for.
But Snarky is right, in most fields you get no benefit from being at a top-tier university. As long as you can score funding and publish, nobody cares where you teach. Some of the most important people in my field are at second-tier schools.
The only context in which it matters is if you want to reproduce yourself (as opposed to fucking yourself) by having graduate students who might go on to have careers of their own. Then it helps to be at a top-tier place. Personally that never mattered much to me, although it turned out that I was pretty good at working with the upper-division flakes. But being a responsible advisor has actually affected my own productivity (which further reinforces Snarky's point about the devil's bargain that most R1's are offering). I'm not bitter about that. It is just a trade-off.
What leads to problems is when faculty can't separate their own egos from their students' job searches. I'm happy every time one of my students gets a job, any job, and I don't make the mistake of believing that a job says anything much at all about anyone's merits as a scholar.
When I accepted a long term contract job at a southern private university ... in the adult education department ... former profs assured me that it would do "until I got a real job." I'd had that "real job" and hated the politics. As a single woman, I clearly had nothing else to do save publish, publish, publish ... a personal life could include an already-existing husband and kids (being single was suspect) but that was the *only* excuse to have less than supersonic publishing rates. I am much happier here with my 4-3 load. I can teach anything I please in my area (we have only one survey!), and I actually enjoy teaching out of my area or general studies classes. Full time contract profs are eligible for promotion here, and many have been here over 2 decades. Despite the snowflakes-and there are plenty!--I would not trade my humble division for the most prestigious appointment in academe. The stress isn't worth it.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that were I to go back to my R-1 and find my dissertation committee members, they'd consider me a failure. When I had to scale back my research because I'd taken a VAP position (the TA ran out and I had to eat), one member assured me it would be ok because "even though you won't get a book out of this, you can still do several articles." When I took the tenure-track position I still hold today at Large Urban Community College, he expressed disappointment and said it would be a "stop-gap until you can at LEAST get on at a teaching college."
ReplyDeleteGuess what? Large Urban Community College does have a 5/5 load, but we also have a lot of flexibility and creativity in our course offerings. I teach many of the same courses I did during my SLAC adjunct time but at a slightly lower level (sophomore as opposed to junior). I do get to research, but it's in a more practical mode (pedagogy mostly). Since I really love being a teacher, it's a great fit. I think a lot of these folks don't understand that people can have different priorities and interests and still be part of the academic community.
But the funniest part is that I'm still touted as one of the great success stories of my department when they do the alumni roundup since, as we all know, tenure-track English jobs are becoming harder and harder to find.I was one of over 400 applicants for this job. So I guess Large Urban Community College turned out to be more prestigious than my mentor originally thought!
Ok, first, I think it’s great that so many people here have jobs they love, even if they’re outside of the narrow range of what seemed like acceptable options in grad school. Awesome. But tell me something (and perhaps I’m reading too much into this): Aren’t most of the posters who have chosen less prestigious positions women? And aren’t at least some of those choices about location? Women are always the ones who are telling me that their lives and families matter more than their careers, that their partners are really wonderful stars (even if they’re barely able to push a mop) and who are they to take away their dreams of mop-pushing?, and that their aging parents need them RIGHT HERE where they went to grad school, even though they’ve known all along that they’ll have to move to get a job. Refusing to move is the number-one career-killer in academia. So, 1. I don’t understand why women go to grad school, knowing they’ll have to move, and also knowing that they don’t want to, and 2. why their partners and families are always shocked – SHOCKED – at the end of 6 years that their baby can’t get a job in x or y fabulous urban center with a Starbucks on every corner and a wide range of Thai restos. Let me tell you (being one) your advisers are disappointed because they’re thinking that if you were male, you might be rocking an endowed chair in ten years and dammit, wouldn’t it great if a higher percentage of those chairs went to women? They’re thinking of the fact that, even though a recent survey of faculty in the humanities found that tenured or tenure-track faculty were evenly split along gender lines overall, that 80% of faculty in the humanites at R1s are men, and 80% of faculty in the humanities at teaching institutions are women, and dammit, wouldn’t it be nice if that changed? I get endless stories from women about how their individul situation is dictating this difficult choice, and I’m sympathetic to that (I hears you, BB), but all these “individual situations” are adding up to an academic context in which 80% of the most prestigious research positions go to men, and not because they’re actually achieving more, at least on the front ends of their careers. (The situation in the sciences seems to be different – don’t know much about that.) I see these columns in the Chronicle about work/life balance for women, and how having kids makes a research career a real challege and yada yada. Honestly, the women I know with kids and tenured or tenure-track jobs seem to be doing just fine on the research front. They maybe have one fewer book per kid or something; in the long run, this isn’t meaningful. Seems to me the biggest impact of family life on women’s careers is out of the starting gate, and has nothing to do with their productivity and everything to do with their determined immobility. Rant, rant, I know. But Dr. Snarky, since you specialize in feminist snark, can’t you talk me down from this ledge?
ReplyDeleteCass, I think you have a few valid points, but as I was reading your comment I kept thinking this question:
ReplyDeleteWith so many schools, and with women having the same talent level as men, why is it that women *have* to move to the other side of the country to get that "great" job at an R1?
Part of it is definitely choice related to proximity (to husband, family, etc.), but why is it (at least when there *were* job options) a women couldn't score an R1 job in a nearby state as opposed to another region?
I mean, with the dearth of available jobs in academia, the point's almost moot for a few years anyway.
Oh, Cass... the short answer: I blame the patriarchy.
ReplyDeleteI'll write a longer, more nuanced answer when time permits. I don't know if it'll get you down from your ledge; but couldn't you back away from it all the same?
It's an interesting point, Cass (slowly leading you away from the ledge). In some ways I fall into both categories. I was familially-encumbered at the initial stages of my graduate career with grandparents who needed help, and a parent who was herself a grad student; we needed all the family income to survive, At the same time, I was firmly told to put off marriage until after the PhD--and so now I am unencumbered by spouse, family, or kids. I suppose I could have been rockin' the R2 departmental chair instead of teaching in the adult division of Rapidly Rising Private Southern No-Longer-Religious U and, like English Doc, doing most of my research in pedagogy and out-of-area competencies. (Likely not an R1; not only did I not go to the correct school launching pad for that, but I did do all my degrees at one school--those early familial encumbrances. I *did* travel across the country, but as for the rest of it, I suppose I am also unencumbered by that kind of interest or ambition. And yes, that is *also* a gender issue (though I am pleased to say that our faculty is pretty evenly divided between male and female, and that we've got a pretty even racial split as well. Neither fact changes the essential problem.)
ReplyDeleteDid anyone else see the recent list of "best" paying college degrees? While there is less of a division between traditional liberal arts and sciences than some might think, the gender gap between stereotypically male occupations and stereotypically female ones is as wide or wider than ever.
Progress, schmogress.
Thanks guys -- I'm no longer teetering...
ReplyDeleteTo MPE: because *everyone* does in my discipline. Except the very, very few wildly exceptional lucky ones, and they're evenly split, in my experience. (And they never expect it!) When I emerged from grad school, there were 11 jobs posted in my field. In the world. None of them were closer than a 22 hour drive away. This was before the economy collapsed. If I hadn't taken the one I was offered, I would have kissed my career goodbye. The job situation is such that, if I'd passed and adjuncted, it's likely that I would never have landed a job at all. Taking that job was also the only way I could have landed my current job; everyone they interviewed for that position had a job already. If there are, say, 20 jobs posted every year in your field in the world, what are the chances that one of them will be commutable? You do the math. (It doesn't sound like you're in humanities, or you'd already know this...)
Cass, you may be surprised to learn that I agree with much of what you have to say. I think women, especially at the outset of their careers, are treated differently. In my high-prestige R1 department we actually have excellent gender and racial balance. So in some ways we are a good model. But if you scratch below the surface you'd immediately notice that we achieve that balance by hiring a lot of mid-career and senior women. Where we fail, by and large, is in hiring junior women. So we place our bets on men for entry level hires and snag women once they've established themselves as major players in their fields. At least that's been the pattern lately. There is a significant cohort of mid-career women in the department who were hired right out of the gate. But lately we haven't been doing as well on that front.
ReplyDeleteI've spent a lot of time thinking about why this is so and whether or not it is just a short-term statistical trend that will reverse itself on its own (the coin's been coming up tails for a while, so we should expect to see a run on heads soon). But I actually think it is more than that. Junior hires are tricky, because you are really betting on someone's potential, which is hard to divine when everyone has a super CV with publications and great letters. So my conclusion is that we are "seeing" more potential in the early career men than in the early career women. Why we decide not to see potential in the junior women is a topic for a longer post, but I'm pretty convinced that this is at the heart of the issue.
This is somewhat different from the issues you and others have pointed to, but I suspect it is worth thinking about.
Hm. That *is* interesting, Archie -- thanks for raising the issue. Does it have anything to do with even earlier career choices like the ones Picky is talking about? (Staying at the same institution because of ailing grandparents, etc.) Or perhaps it's something less tangible? Levels of confidence early on in the career? That fits, anecdotally. What's your experience?
ReplyDeleteAnd MPE: it just occurred to me to ask: What's *your* explanation?
I have no explanation for trends in general. I can speak only for myself. My choices in colleges I attended were geographically limited because of finances and family ties, but once I finished, my job search was worldwide. I live 1000 miles away from my hometown. My husband is the trailing spouse, and we chose not to have children. I'm doing what I wanted in the type of institution I wanted to do it in. The location isn't necessarily ideal in terms of geography, but it's livable. And nowadays, ANY TT position in English is desirable to most graduates (or at least they think it is).
ReplyDeleteWell, I think it is a combination of things, but two stand out to me. First, and this is very clear, men who are fresh out of grad school are better at projecting confidence (i.e. bullshitting), which many colleagues mistake for competence. Most (not all) women at that stage tend to be more hesitant and hang back, which many colleagues mistake for incompetence. Second, and this is harder to demonstrate, candidates' research gets read in very gendered ways. For example, men who work on very technical stuff are erudite, while women who do the same exact work are boring or antiquarian. It is hard to pinpoint in abstract terms, but like obscenity, I know it when I see it. The location/same school issues don't come up for us, because, let's face it, we are really only hiring from a handful of other R1 departments that we view as our peers. So those conditions tend not to apply at the schools we hire from (or if they do, someone who did both their degrees at a university starting with H, Y, or P is not looked at askance or questioned about it). But I imagine at a different kind of department in a different kind of institution, those factors also tend to come into play. I can't see how they wouldn't.
ReplyDeleteHuh. Wow. That's really instructive, Archie. I have no experience in the kinds of departments you're talking about, so I suppose I'd imagined that the insidious discrimination you're seeing couldn't really still be infecting the departments with the *really* smart people. Because they're smart. (I'm being completely sincere, here, and marvelling now at my own naivete...) And just to change the topic once again: do you hire only from H, Y, & P because the top grads from those schools are genuinely better than the top grads from public schools, or because your department is firmly committed to that idea? (Again: sincere question.)
ReplyDeleteEnglishDoc: Yes, absolutely, and you're in the top 1/3 of your discipline, I know, to have landed a TT job at all. Very few people have choices. I'm just observing that the list of people who *have* been lucky enough to have prestigious choices and who have turned them down is made up almost entirely of women. I think the folks who are interviewing and being hired at Archie's institution are generally part of an academic culture that's a bit more immersive and, if they're being interviewed there, they've already made their decisions about what an academic life means.
I wouldn't say that they are better per se. But they have benefited from better resources and support, which makes a huge difference in a social science discipline that requires extensive time in the field. Grads at top tier programs get funding to travel early on, which sets them up to win the outside grants--fulbright, ssrc, etc.-- that make it possible for them to spend the time far away from campus doing the research needed to produce a good dissertation that might have a chance of being revised into a book at a good press, which in turn means we won't have to fire them later on.
ReplyDeleteSo it isn't about chasing prestige exactly. It is more that in a discipline like mine the deck is stacked against those who don't get the resources that the students at the top-tier programs get. They may not be better going into grad school, but they do wind up being better coming out in ways that are pretty evident. Parenthetically, it is not a private-public split. We hire from public institutions, and not always from the obvious suspects (of course students from those schools have benefited from the resource edge too, so their outcomes are just as good). I used to teach at a public university in a department that had a boutique specialization in a particular geographical region. Our grad students in that specific field won lots of grants, did great research, and got jobs at the H, Y, and P's of the world. Our grads in all the other fields did not and never could.
I stress these points, because a lot of these issues are discipline specific. A friend from undergrad days (at a public university) who is in Beaker Ben's field did his Ph.D. at a big public university in the mountain west, and he's doing fabulously. That can happen in a field where all your work is right there in the lab or the library, but it is a de facto impossibility in a field like mine where you need specialized language training that is often not available on campus, and a year or two living overseas to complete a credible dissertation. If you are at a second-tier program where your funding is 100% tied to teaching, or, heaven forbid, you are forced to self-fund, you are, to put it bluntly, fucked from the get go, because you will never get into the field for long enough to produce something credible.
It sucks, I guess, but it is reality. I always tell undergrads who come to me with an interest in grad school that if they can't get into a program with full funding, they would be total morons to pursue it further.
That makes good sense. I think in my discipline, in which it's possible to do reasonably good work even if you've got only a half-decent library, the deck is less frequently stacked the way you're describing. On the other hand, your mentorship becomes exponentially more important.
ReplyDeleteI tell them exactly the same thing! And they go, nonetheless, in droves, to marginal programs from which they're highly likely to emerge jobless, broke, and . . . married.
Nice chatting, Archie -- wish you'd post about some of this stuff on the main page.