An Update on Colorado State's "No Olds Need Apply" Ad

The chair of the English department at Colorado State has responded to questions about their discriminatory highly controversial job ad, which I posted about earlier this week:

By specifying 'between 2010 and time of appointment' we indicated that we are interested in applicants with up to three years in a tenure-track position as well as those who are just beginning their careers. In examining the pool of applicants, we have actually given the true 'entry-level' applicant an advantage in that such applicants will not have to compete with others who have as much as six years' more experience.

Now, this sounds reasonable, if you are looking from the outside and have absolutely no idea what the academic job market looks like - especially in the humanities.

But from the inside of the academic job market - you know, the exact position that the chair of the English department should be looking from - this is still just as clueless and problematic of a statement as the original job ad was.

First, the chair is naively identifying "true 'entry level'" applicants as only those who are new Ph.D. graduates - or those who have jumped out of grad school directly into a tenure-track job. Wow, is that a blindfolded look at the academic job market! It's kind of staggering.

In a robust academic job market, this might be true. Every graduate will get a job, and then after a year or two young professors will reshuffle into different positions. That might make sense in a perfect-world academic job market ... but in the actual academic job market we have today? It doesn't. At all. And everyone in academia should understand that. No exceptions.

Posted Without (Much) Comment

So, Colorado State University has posted an ad for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English position, to start in the fall of 2012.

Great news, huh? A tenure-track position in English!!!! An opportunity for one of those English Ph.D.s who've been toiling in crappy adjunct positions for the past five years to finally break through and get the kind of job they've been working towar ......

.... Wait a minute.

I'm Back! (Sort of...)

Hey everyone, I'm back!!

Apologies for never setting anything to auto-post last week. It's been so long since I took a vacation that I forgot how long it would take me to, you know, pack and prepare for one. So the week before we left was full of laundry and shopping and packing and car maintenance and house maintenance and errand-running and various other tasks that always become Immediate Pressing Needs when you're preparing to leave town for a week. And now, the post-vacation week has been full of work and catching up on sleep and restocking the groceries and otherwise adjusting to being back home.

Vacations are stressful!!

But it was all worth it. Vacation was awesome, and much needed. I left town a total crab, tired of work and stressed and aggravated and bored. I came back rested and relaxed and refreshed. Partner and I drove to a favorite beach location and spent four awesome nights sightseeing, eating great food and drinking great booze on sun-filled patios, swimming in large bodies of water, and wandering through adorable touristy shops while spending way too much money.

We then drove back through our hometown to pick up our dog (who was being doted on by very loving doggie grandparents) and spent the night visiting family, friends, and our friend's brand new baby. It was a great trip ... even worth the exhaustion, empty bank account and giant work to-do list that was waiting for me at home.

Anyway, my brain is still not "back from vacation" enough to think through and write a coherent post, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I survived vacation, I'm back, and I will be back to my regularly scheduled blogging soon ... probably later this week. I do have ideas for posts ... just need to find the time and motivation to sit down and finish them!

Tonight, though, I have to finish our post-vacation laundry and run a couple of errands and do some cleaning. I'll be back soon! In the meantime, read the great stuff that my fellow bloggers have been putting out - check the blogroll on the right. Talk to you all soon!

Ask a Postacademic #7 ... and Yet Another New Blog!

Hey all!

Posting is going to be super-light and I won't be around much for the next week or so ... I have a busy workweek ahead of me, and then my partner and I are going out of town for a much-needed relaxing beach vacation over Labor Day weekend. Yayyyyyyyyy!!!!!

Anyway, I wanted to put something up quickly today and will probably try to dig up another postacademic rant or something similar to auto-post later this week, just to give you something to look at. But I won't be around much for comments or questions until next week. I've been feeling a little bit overwhelmed and "blah" lately, and am desperately committed to making this trip be as unplugged and relaxing and enjoyable as humanly possible. Wish me luck!

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However, before I go I did want to link everyone to another new postacademic blog. Post-Medievalist is a humanities (obviously :) grad student who has already written a lot of terrific stuff at her blog ... so far, there are posts about academic guilt, about the stress that an international research trip placed on her relationship and finances, and a particularly insightful post that compares the process of leaving academia to a sort of lingering sickness that develops and worsens over time.

New Blogs (and Crappy Advice from Advisors)

Hey, everyone! Sorry for my relative lack of posting this month ... it's been a crazy one!

Today, I have two new postacademic blogs to link you to, along with some brief additional commentary stemming from a conversation I had with a grad student friend of mine this week...

(Seriously, I cannot believe how many postacademics we have out here! Maybe the group of us will someday be able to really get the word out that Grad School Is Not Necessarily A Great Life Plan, or that Academia Kind of Sucks For Some People. Maybe...)

Also, don't be surprised if you see me ramping up my complaints about academia in the next few months. My one good grad student friend is on the job market this year, and is currently at the annual national sociological conference, starting the process of trying to network herself* into a job somewhere. As someone who occupies the weird space of (1) having gone through the whole market process, having been reasonably successful with interviews, and having survived, but (2) ultimately winding up very cynical about the whole thing, I've become a huge sounding board for her. Which is great - I genuinely want to help her stay sane through this whole process and to help her keep some perspective on the whole thing ... while genuinely hoping that she is able to get an academic job, since that's what she really wants.

But as you'll see in a minute, these conversations are also drawing my attention - yet again! - to the ridiculousness of the academic job market and to the utterly cruel and deluded things people will say to you while you're going through it.

So I'm sure I will have Many Further Thoughts About Academia and the Academic Job Market (tm) to share with you over the next few months.

Blog intros after the jump...

On Compensation

Postacademic in NYC wrote an interesting post last week, where she discussed the somewhat disconcerting feelings she's been having as an hourly wage worker in the world outside of academia. In this post, she wrote that the lump sum payments she received every month or so in academia were fine with her, while the hourly pay she gets now is causing her to have some uncomfortable feelings about how her work is "quantified" in dollars.

More specifically, she's been calculating how many hours of work at the temp agency she needs to put in in order to earn enough money for the things she likes to buy - a sandwich or a coffee or a bottle of booze. This, in turn, is (I think) making her feel a bit discouraged. I got the feeling from her post that her pay in academia was lower, possibly ... but that despite that, she felt less exploited/dehumanized because it wasn't as easy to translate her work hours into a dollar amount.

I enjoyed the post, and some of it definitely rang true to me. Until I got my promotion and raise this spring, I was also an hourly wage worker at my current office. And while I was paid fairly well and could afford a decent quality of life as an hourly worker, I would occasionally catch myself thinking "if I buy those concert tickets, I'll have to work a full day to pay for them," or "damn, I'm working 4-5 hours for a tank of gas? Ridiculous."

So, I've definitely done the "quantifying what I'm purchasing in work hours" thing, and it did feel a little weird. Now, I never found myself calculating the amount of work that would "pay" for a sandwich or coffee - I really never got down to the nitty-gritty of what, say, 15 minutes of my labor was "worth" in terms of consumer goods. But if I wanted to spend a decent chunk of money? Yeah, I'd sometimes find myself calculating the number of hours I'd need to work to earn that money back.

And I agree, it's kind of an odd feeling to be able to directly calculate how much money your work time  is "worth," in such concrete, calculable terms.

But looking back on my time in academia and then on my time as an hourly wage worker outside of academia, I can honestly say that I preferred being paid hourly to the pay I got in academia. And I'd still go back to hourly work any day before I'd go back to academia. With absolutely no hesitation.

Now, PAINYC's outlook on her job is totally valid. Her job is far different from mine, and her work environments sound challenging, to say the least. I'd have a hard time not feeling like a cheap cog in the wheel of my workplace if I was working in buildings that have butlers (WTF?), doing basic tasks for the top 0.1% of wage earners in this country, alongside miserable and exploited support staff. There's absolutely no question in my mind that I'd feel pretty damned exploited and underpaid if I were in that position.

But I wanted to put up a post here that explains the outlook that I had on my life and my compensation as an hourly worker. Because my outlook and my experiences have been different from PAINYC's ... and while I don't think there's anything wrong with her outlook, I want readers of both blogs to understand that there's no guarantee of how you will feel about a job that pays hourly until you have one. Perhaps you will feel like PAINYC ... but perhaps not.

So as food for thought ... here are three reasons why I found hourly pay to be preferable to my academic salary.

Ask a Postacademic - Question 6

Here's another great postacademic question from a reader. I've covered versions of this Q/A before, but have never seen the question about time usage in and outside of academia asked to succinctly before. So I'd like to answer it, to make my viewpoint on this absolutely clear.

I'd also like to ask the other postacademics who are adjusting to nonacademic jobs to chime in if they have a minute, either in comments or at their own blogs. We all have different jobs and live in different cities, so my opinions and experiences certainly aren't going to be representative of everyone's. I'd love to hear a few more people talk about how they feel about their flexibility of schedule since leaving academia.

Anyway, onto the question...

I'm starting to get the idea that despite my "flexible" schedule [in academia], these 8-5ers have more of a life than I do and an easier time living it (with the schedule). Is this accurate?

I think your hunch is accurate.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Having to be in the office for a regular 40 hour schedule every week can be frustrating. My family and friends are about a half day's drive away from where I live now, and I do occasionally miss the grad school days, where even with my part-time job I only had to be in the office 3 days per week and was free to take long weekends to visit them without having to count vacation days.

But all is not lost. I do have vacation time and flextime, which gives me enough time to take about one long weekend a month and a few extra days at Christmastime. That might not seem like a lot ... but even in my grad school days, I wasn't going on weekend vacations more than once a month. (And as an aside - weekends away are a lot more satisfying when you don't have a pile of academic work to do!)

So if you're a grad student who takes long weekends every single weekend and who takes extended, weeklong vacations multiple times per year? You may find a regular 8-5 work schedule pretty difficult to manage while still keeping up that travel schedule.

But if you usually only take a few trips a year, most of which are just a few days at a time? Then I don't think you'll feel egregiously oppressed by only having a few weeks off per year. Really and truly. Most nonacademic jobs aren't that inflexible - particularly the types of jobs you'll be getting with your MA or Ph.D.