I've received a number of emails about my "Popularity" post from yesterday. (And some gentle jibes in the comments...nothing, really, no offense taken at all.)So, yes, I do wish the page reached more academics. I write almost NONE of the content - though I'm sometimes desirous of the freedom to vent alongside the rest - but I'm still proud of what we do.
If that's childish or something, or vain, or "sad, sad, fucking pathetic and sad," then so be it. I think the academy is in ruins, and I think some of what we
I know the page is satisfying personally for many folks, because I hear it all the time; I just had sort of hoped it'd have more reach.
Cheers,
Fab
PS: That
Yaro must really be living it up in the Beehive State in his cabin with the Mrs. I haven't heard a word from him!
I also think the academy is in ruins....and where is Yaro to light up our "dark teatime of the soul?"
ReplyDeleteDid you just use "discourse" as a verb?
ReplyDelete;-P~
Frankly, I think 80,000 unique visitors to the site per month is quite well done.
ReplyDeleteLike it or not, academia is a fairly small niche to begin with - and once you start working with the subset of English-reading academics who A) regularly use 'the interwebs' and B) are aware of (let alone interested in) the blogging community, you're looking at a comparatively small target audience.
You're doing a great job. By comparison, my own blog only draws in about 10,000 unique visitors per month. Do I wish I had a broader readership? Sure. But not that many people care about the life of a grad student in the classics. So it goes.
We can be happy that more than just our family reads along.
"that fucker Yaro?"
ReplyDeleteYou have profaned the second coming of the Christ, sir!
I'm torn. I, too, think that the picture of academe that emerges from our collective posts is valuable, and potentially illuminating, and I wish more people saw it. On the other hand, the size of the community feels pretty good, and all the scenarios I can think of that would drive lots of the traffic all at once to the site involve scandal or controversy or something else along those lines, most likely caused by someone quoting very selectively from our exchanges. That would not be positive in the long run, I'm pretty sure.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that one way to build the kind of audience we want would be for correspondents to comment on other blogs using our CM monikers (but not obnoxiously touting the blog in the process), and/or for more of our re-posts and links to be to/from other academic blogs (with proper credit, of course, and in keeping with their licenses), rather than to/from more traditional published sources. I've done a bit of both, not as a deliberate strategy to publicize CM, but because there was something I wanted to say in a comment that I felt most comfortable saying as Cassandra, or because I saw something in a blog that was relevant to a conversation over here. I think we've also had a few shout-outs from the ProfHacker teaching carnival, which, whatever you think of ProfHacker, implies a degree of recognition (especially since, so far as I can remember, we have most often cited ProfHacker in order to mock it).
Or we could combine the two observations/strategies above, and start citing CM as an example of all that's wrong in the academy in comments on conservative blogs using identities created for the purpose, and/or making obnoxious comments on said blogs using our CM personae. I suspect that would bring up the traffic numbers, but I don't think we'd like the results.
And yes, referring obscenely to Yaro is not appropriate. Every community has its sacred cows, and Yaro is ours.
But I like the martini glass, or whatever it is, in the address line. Very summery.
Roustabout? What are you talking about?
ReplyDelete"Rascal" works, I think (as would rapscallion); it seems of a vintage, and a vocabulary, with Yaro.
ReplyDeleteThanks to everyone for the suggested revisions to my text. I'll be sure to submit material ahead of time in the future so that it better meets the guidelines.
ReplyDelete"Thanks to everyone for the suggested revisions to my text. I'll be sure to submit material ahead of time in the future so that it better meets the guidelines."
ReplyDelete- Fab Sun
Nay, sir....I was but trying to save your soul from the blasphemy of our Lord and Saviour, Yaro, who came from God armed not with a sword but a mere pen and the long-suffering soul of a 19th century Russian novelist. May ye prostrate yourself before one of his posts and beg forgiviness.
Amen.
Surely Yaro is a sacred bull?
ReplyDeleteI like CC's idea, of commenting - on other academic blogs - with our CM monikers, and perhaps linking back to relevant posts, to increase traffic. If we want to increase traffic. This would entail spending more time reading academic blogs and commenting, though, which ... well i suppose one could do it occasionally.
Agreed with Fab, sadly: the academy is in ruins. We've forgotten why we're here; even if we haven't, our paymasters have. I think there's going to a be a crisis they haven't foreseen, though. The Chronicle of Higher Education's report on "The College in 2020" predicts increased reliance on "adjuncts and freelance" labour for work in the classrooms. When 75% of the teaching is already being done by adjuncts, what are they expecting to see? 100%?
However, here's the thing: everyone capable of doing university teaching, everyone capable of getting an MA or a PhD for that matter, is also capable of doing many other things. People who go into academe do it for love of their fields, of course - but we're not idiots. We also saw that there was a decent chance of a secure job with reasonable benefits, which was worth putting all those extra years of training in to get.
If that ceases to be true, as it is already, well, even those of us in Humanities can add. And putting in an extra 6-8 years of training for a life spent teaching 11 courses a year at three different institutions for a gross income of $16,500/yr with no benefits, no health insurance, and office hours held in your car in the parking lot behind the gym, is not going to be tempting. So that pool of cheap labour that the universities are counting on to balance their budgets while increasing their enrollment is going to dwindle sharply.
I no longer recommend that any student go into graduate school. The ones that insist on doing so, I tell them to think of it as a pleasure, as a chance to spend a few years studying something that really interests them and getting really good at it, before they go out into the real world and get likely the same job they would have got before grad school. And I tell them to be finished before they're 30, because they will need time to build another career.
The link for the Chronicle report: https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=76319&PK=N5N11FA
ReplyDeleteBut they want money for it.I'm just relying on hearsay for what it says.
However, here's the thing: everyone capable of doing university teaching, everyone capable of getting an MA or a PhD for that matter, is also capable of doing many other things. People who go into academe do it for love of their fields, of course - but we're not idiots. We also saw that there was a decent chance of a secure job with reasonable benefits, which was worth putting all those extra years of training in to get.
ReplyDeleteSome of us DID do other things, but came back to academia. God save us..
Here's something that will make this blog more "bloggy". When you find an article, don't just paste the lede. Write your views about it. Include relevant passages to support your point. Any news aggregator can give me a list of education-related links. I'm more interested in hearing what you have to say about it. That initiates more comments too. A reader might not have anything important to say about the article but may want to respond to tha post's author's remarks.
ReplyDelete