Well, This is Upsetting

Hello, readers! (If any of you are still out there. :) )

Unsurprisingly, with the passage of time and distance from my grad school life, I haven't had as much free time or motivation to keep up with this blog as I did for the first several years. I periodically come on here to clear out the spam comments and/or to see what people in this world are reading and writing about, but in general - since I haven't made a career out of postacademia - I've just gravitated away from this world and into my "real life" world.

Which is definitely how it should be! Hopefully those of you who read my blog back in the day (who have fully left academia) have done the same thing. If you're making a writing or coaching or whatevering career out of the postacademic world, then of course you should still be watching and reading academic news on a regular basis. Otherwise, hopefully you've slowly gravitated away from a daily perusal of the job market forums and things like that.

However, I have been meaning to write an update to tell you all how I've been doing after all this time has passed, and I have read a few articles recently that I wanted to pass along to anyone who still finds themselves arriving at my blog and thinks that the problems I discussed several years ago have disappeared. They absolutely, 100% have not!


Also, I got an emailed guest post that I am going to publish as well, for the same reasons. I may have (mostly) stopped writing, but these problems in academia have not disappeared.

Anyway, I don't have a ton of time right now to post a long update on my life, so I'll just say for now that I'm still in the town I went to grad school in, still working in the same company, albeit with a slightly different job description. I'm content, happy, not stressed out by my personal or work life at all, and generally......do not regret for one single second having left grad school.

I can't stress that highly enough. It's been 6.5 years, and I have never wanted to go back, nor have I ever been sad that I don't have the completed Ph.D. It's just...kind of irrelevant to my life right now.

Anyway, I'll write more about myself - probably this weekend - and will post the guest post that a reader sent to me over the next week or two, but in the meantime I thought I'd post these two links I've come across in recent weeks/months.

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First, from my old postacademic comrade Rebecca Schuman comes this astounding job listing that was posted a couple of months ago. As always, Rebecca's hilarious in her writeup/reaction, but it's worth taking a minute to ruminate on what the actual job posting was asking for:

A 67% appointment...
To start in approximately 6-8 weeks (I assume).....
Where you'd be responsible for training up to ten people........
For FOURTEEN course sections.........
Along with presumably service and research responsibilities, since who are we kidding........
While you're moving to and acclimating to a new city............
All for the princely sum of $28,000.
On a non-permanent contract.

I can't write this up any better than Rebecca did, so I'll just tell you my reaction: NAH.

Look, I understand having dreams and wanting to read and write and get paid to be a professor.

But this ad is just an insult. To PhD candidates, to the students at this university, to the working world in general. You can earn more than this in any range of jobs...many of which would not require as much education, nor would they require you to work nights and weekends until you drop.

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The second piece I'm sharing with you just came across my radar today. Unsurprisingly, based on what I've been seeing, tenure-track jobs in the humanities are disappearing while the number of PhD candidates continues to swell.

Knowing what I know - and what I've detailed in this blog about the socialization to "an academic career or nothing!" that happens in (most) academic programs...I find these numbers incredibly depressing.

Universities are killing themselves. They're catering to wealthy students and bringing in more and more administrators while their grad students live in poverty and their "faculty" are just desperate people trying to cobble together enough adjunct contracts to feed their families.

But hey, they certainly can't cut their cohort sizes! That would be admitting there's a problem.

It's so demoralizing to see that nothing has changed since I left...and in fact, that things may actually be worse than they were in 2011.

If you're one of the people who stumbles across this blog for the first time these days, let me reiterate...you aren't crazy, you aren't wrong, and it's okay to leave.