Some Thoughts on the LaCour Scandal

So as I've learned this week, apparently there is at least one thing that will get me sucked back into reading and writing and thinking about academic work and the controversies therein. And that one thing is an instance of research fraud so massive that it almost defies imagination.

I mean......really, Michael LaCour? You published a huge study in Science with a fancy glittery co-author, and it turns out that you completely fabricated your data? And apparently didn't even bother to get IRB approval for a face-to-face survey until after you already "carried out the interviews?" (Scare quotes intentional, obviously.) And then you faked a few grants and a teaching award, just because the research fakery wasn't enough? And you even stopped to falsify a document of research integrity along the way?

Wow. Wow. That's...astounding.

(For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here is a good overview of both his fraud and of the excellent work by the grad student who uncovered it.

Or just google LaCour's name. Even if you think you're done reading about academia, this scandal might just suck you back in for an hour or two or ten. Or maybe that's just me.)

Anyway, many people smarter and more engaged in these issues than me have done great work writing about the underlying issues about research ethics and coauthor relationships, etc., that are related to this fraud. I don't have much to add on those issues since I haven't done research in almost five years, so I'll leave it to others to dig in on those important and relevant topics.

I do have a few things to say about this scandal, though, from the "postacademic, cynical-about-academia" side of the aisle.

Columbia University and the Continued Rise of Adjuncthood: Does Mentoring Even Matter Anymore?

Now that I am back from my blogging hiatus, one of my goals going forward is to work harder to raise awareness of "academic justice" issues - i.e., how faculty, adjunct instructors, and grad students are treated by their institutions and by higher education more generally.

(Hint: the treatment is oftentimes not very good.)

As I mentioned years ago on this blog, during graduate school I had no idea about how widespread the labor problems in academia actually were. In my program, the cheap teaching labor came from graduate students; therefore, the "fulltime adjunct" problem was not as obvious to me as it was to folks in other disciplines. In addition, my graduate program was highly ranked and seemed to be able to hire an endless stream of new tenure-track faculty, year after year. Meanwhile, I watched graduates of my program go on to solid tenure-track positions or good postdocs every single year. From my perspective, then, things in academia appeared solid and stable.

It wasn't until I left academia in 2011 and started reading about the wider academic job market and the working conditions in colleges and universities other than my own that I realized that things were not as rosy as I had assumed. To my surprise, I discovered the existence of full-time adjuncts. To my greater surprise, I discovered the graduating Ph.D. students who just sort of "disappeared," never to be tracked by their graduate institutions unless they got a tenure-track job. To my even greater surprise, I discovered the existence of faculty (both tenured and non-tenure-track) who were laid off from their institutions without notice and often without cause.

In the past few years as I've continued to read these stories and as my blog gained an audience, I've found that negative stories about academic labor just keep on coming. So even as my personal story about academia has come to an end, I want to use this blog to keep the conversation going about academia's working conditions.

So here we go...a few stories about academic labor justice to start off your week. One relates to general patterns of faculty and staff hiring, and the other to a series of worrisome faculty layoffs that are currently occurring at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

The Ph.D. Placement Project

Hey all! Long time no talk!!

I'm writing today because everyone who hasn't already done so should head over to the Chronicle of Higher Education and contribute to their new Ph.D. Placement Project. There are numerous ways to do this - you can take the anonymous survey (if you've completed your Ph.D.), follow them on Twitter, email them directly (PhDPlacement at Chronicle dot com) if you have any ideas for how they should proceed, or sign up for their email list to receive updates on the project.

(This wonderful project seems to primarily be a response to William Pannapacker's most recent column in the Chronicle, where he laments the lack of data on Ph.D. job placements. Kudos to the Chronicle for trying to tackle this challenge and to assemble the necessary data).

They've already received more than 600 responses, and they are clearly excited about the huge response to their initial survey. But as they write in that article, this is just the first step in what they intend to be a much larger project:

...the survey we've posted is only a starting point. We intend to use it to collect ideas and advice that will help us determine how best to proceed in collecting detailed, accurate placement information.

When we publish placement information about individual Ph.D. programs, it will be based on a formal research project, not on a Google survey.

In short, if you're interested in the issue of placement rates and Ph.D. programs, please keep communicating with us.

At this point they are only collecting survey data from people who have completed their Ph.D.s ... so if you're a current grad student or a dropout like me, you can't take the survey. However, you can still follow them on Twitter, email them with suggestions, and sign up for their email list. So if you haven't finished your Ph.D. but you are interested in this project, there are ways to get involved.

Adjuncts! Tell Your Story Here!

(Editor note: Please share this post far and wide - on twitter, on your blog, Facebook, wherever. I don't blog-flog as a general rule, but I welcome any sharing of this post that anyone wants to do. Let's get as many stories as possible, and then we'll see what we can do as far as getting them out to a wider audience.

Also: I'm not going to respond to comments because I just want this to be a comment thread of stories, with minimal distractions. But I am reading all of them and listening.)

So it's been a rough week in internet-land for postacademics and adjuncts (and their defenders).

If you have a strong stomach for condescending, insulting comments, click here or here. But if not, let's just say that there has been a lot of insulting nonsense posted recently at academic forums, with (presumably) tenure-track faculty and/or grad students implying that academia is still basically a meritocracy, that folks who don't get tenure-track jobs are deficient in some way, and that adjuncting isn't really a major problem (and that even if it is, adjuncts know the market is crap so they deserve what they get).

It's cruel nonsense, of course ... but it's still obnoxious, and I don't think we should let it sit out there unchallenged.

But in an era when data about adjuncts is hard to come by and where graduate departments don't publish their placement statistics, it's hard to refute what those people are saying.

A few of us were talking about this problem on Twitter, and came to the conclusion that one thing that should happen is for more adjuncts and other contract faculty to share their experiences in a public forum. If more of you "come out" publicly about your experiences, then we stand a better chance of drowning out the voices who are insisting that everything is equal, that the most deserving always get ahead, and that things really aren't that bad out there for folks in the social sciences and humanities.

We need, in essence, a chorus of people who are on the lower rungs of academia to stand up and tell their stories.

Ideally, every single adjunct would have a column in a major magazine where they could do this. :) But in reality, of course, most of you don't have that kind of platform, and/or may not be comfortable "outing" yourselves publicly in that way - using your real name, and opening yourself up to shame and criticism.

So, here's a public (anonymous) platform for you to tell your stories, adjuncts. Take over my blog!

I want to hear about your working conditions, about how grad school did (or did not) prepare you for what you encountered on the job market, and about how adjuncting makes you feel as a person and as a scholar. If we hear stories from a lot of you, then it becomes easier to drown out the nasty comments and Pollyannaish narratives that are out there.

It certainly won't end the problems in academia, of course, but it might help in some small way ... if only by shaping the discourse on adjuncthood around your experiences, rather than around the statements and assumptions of tenured faculty.

So leave a comment (or email me at leavingacademia at gmail.com). Tell us about your adjunct life.

Why I Won't "Just Shut Up"

So I've been thinking quite a bit about the whole U of M/postac kerfuffle over the past few weeks, and have been following the continuing debate over it (this reaction was particularly great) as well as the conversation surrounding Rebecca Schuman's new article in the Chronicle (behind the paywall, unfortunately) - which includes, incredibly, a full professor at an R1 university trying to invalidate her argument because she made a snarky comment about a few pioneering theorists. Sigh.

Anyway, I wrote my last post because I wanted to defend myself against the (untrue) assertion that I think grad students are all privileged jerks who can't get real jobs. As I wrote two weeks ago - that is not, never has been, and never will be true of my thoughts on privilege in academia.

But now that I've gotten that out of my system and have been following the ongoing postacademic debates, I've been thinking more and more about the silencing attempts I've been witnessing. First, of course, we have Amy Pistone telling all of us to shut up on an official graduate school website. Then, we see professors trying to deride and belittle critics like Schuman in the pages of a major magazine/website. And so on and so on. The critiques of postacademia, then, seem to amount to "shut up and stop talking!"

(I mean, unless I'm way off base, I haven't seen any other critiques of our work out there. No one can refute the horrific job outlook for many disciplines, nor can they argue with the fact that some people don't like certain types of work (even academic work) ... so all they're left with is "Well, I love my work, so you just shut up and stop talking and everything will be fine for everyone!!")

The more I've thought about the people who are saying those things to Schuman and William Pannapacker and the other critics of Ph.D. education, the angrier I've gotten. And now I feel compelled to write about why I haven't stopped updating this blog even though I'm officially out of academia, and why I'm not going to shut up and stop talking anytime soon.

I Don't Think We're Saying What You Think We're Saying

So ... while I've been away taking care of work things and life things and computer things, it appears that my blog has gotten tangentially caught up in an academic/postacademic brouhaha.

It started when Amy Pistone, a Classics Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan posted this article (under the official U of M grad school masthead! Neato!!), instructing all of us in the postacademic world (and particularly those in the humanities) to sit down and shut up and stop talking, because she really really loves her work and that's all that matters. Not the crappy academic job market in the humanities, not the fact that grad school is something that a lot of people find depressing and demoralizing, and not the fact that there are a huge number of people out here who are reading and commenting (note: check out the years-long comment threads after each of those posts) and obviously gaining some value from those of us who are out here "writing these sorts of articles about grad students" that she doesn't like.

Sigh.

When I first noticed the traffic coming over from her article and skimmed it, I wasn't going to bother to respond. We postacademics get pushback from time to time, and I've got thick skin. And I'll be honest - when I glanced through Pistone's piece, my thoughts were basically: "mmmhmmm ... sure. Go ahead and vent, my dear ... but let's revisit this in five years and see how you feel then." Then I went on about my day.

But yesterday, I saw Rebecca Schuman's open letter to Amy Pistone, in which she expresses similar feelings to mine:

Do I dislike you, personally, Amy Pistone, even though you have misunderstood the dark humor in an article I wrote [...]? No, on the contrary, you remind me of a far more earnest version of myself at your stage (I’d say “at your age,” but I spent seven years working in the private sector between college and grad school, which is more than two, in case you’re wondering).

No, my reaction to you, personally, is “Oh, bless her heart—she’ll learn soon enough.”

(It was apparently Schuman's piece in Slate from earlier this year that inspired Pistone's university-sanctioned* temper tantrum.)

Reading Schuman's response inspired me to go back and read Pistone's article more closely. And boy, am I glad I did. Because now that I've read her post in full, I feel compelled to respond to what are clear and notable misrepresentations of my writing on this blog.

A Comment on Being #PostAc

If you haven't already seen it, everyone should go over to our new How To Leave Academia site and read the latest post that Lauren and Currer wrote, about the differences between the "alt-ac" and "post-ac" movements. It's a really interesting read, and it helps clarify the differences between the different groups of us who are out here, trying to identify problems in higher ed and to help people who want to leave academia.

Unsurprisingly, I call myself a post-ac. I have been and will continue to be immensely critical of the overall system of academia, which values obscure specialized knowledge over all else and which tells its grad students and faculty that the only job worth having is an academic one, even if it leaves you impoverished and miserable. I've found a job outside of academia, in a for-profit consulting company. I feel no qualms about this whatsoever. I no longer believe that academia (as an institution) is a benevolent entity working toward abstract goals like "providing education" or "advancing knowledge." They are working to minimize costs and maximize revenues, just like many nonacademic companies.

But at least here in the outside world, organizations are honest about it. I'd rather work for a company that is making money and being honest about it than one that tells me with a straight face that I should feel honored to work 60 hours per week for a salary in the teens because I'm contributing to the "life of the mind" ... while they jack up tuition rates on students by double-digits, cut classes and raise class sizes, build a multimillion-dollar athletic facility, and hire two new Vice Presidents of Something at salaries in the mid-six-figures.

I'm tired of the hypocrisy. I'm tired of watching people get hurt by the "bait-and-switch" of academia, and to then turn their disappointment inward, so that they blame themselves for not working hard enough or for not being smart enough. I'm tired of them believing that they should sacrifice because they're contributing to some benevolent institution or some "greater good."

The institution doesn't care about you. And there are ways to contribute to the "greater good" of society without impoverishing yourself or driving yourself crazy with anxiety and overwork.

So I'm a post-ac. Unequivocally.

Belated New Year's Roundup Post

Whew, finding time to blog is hard when you're also trying to work full-time, volunteer a few hours a week, start up a brand spanking new postacademic website, and find a little bit of time to hang out with your partner and pets and yourself! :)

But I really can't complain ... things are going pretty well for me right now. So, yay.

But given that we just had another new year sneak up on us, I wanted to write a brief "year in review" kind of post, to sum up how the year has gone and where I hope to go in 2013.

2012 was a weird year. Upon first glance, it looks like a pretty uneventful year, primarily because nothing much happened for me career-wise. But when I think about it more closely, I actually do think it was a big year for me in my journey out of academia. And even more importantly, I'm hopeful that I'm finally in a good position to make 2013 a really great year.

So Many Ph.Ds...So Few Jobs

I'm going to read the whole thing this weekend and will probably have more to say about it in future posts, but the newest NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates is out, and the picture about jobs isn't a pretty one.

According to the IHE, the percentage of folks who graduate with Ph.D.s and have firm employment commitments on hand at graduation has fallen sharply ... across every discipline.

Here's the table from the IHE article, which is drawn directly from the report:

(Side note - I am really surprised to see that the percentage of new grads with job commitments is highest among social scientists. Though I suppose if you include economists and psychologists in that group, you may be catching a number of people who are moving into industry. But still...).

At any rate, these numbers are pretty scary. Note that the comparison year is 2006 - which is at least a year or two before the academic job market is perceived to have started its collapse.

And as everyone knows, the next few years were awful. Fewer schools had money to hire new faculty, and many schools cancelled their searches when they were already underway. Graduate programs (like mine) where students who graduated in 2004 or 2005 were often mulling over 2 or 3 job offers as ABDs were suddenly seeing students who got nothing more than a single VAP offer or (if they really got lucky), an offer from a school that was at the end of their desirability list.

But now, in 2011 and 2012, we keep hearing that the market across multiple disciplines is rebounding. There are more job listings than in previous years, and schools are finally getting the go-ahead to hire tenure-track faculty. Don't worry, Ph.D. students! Everything is back to normal! Just keep working hard, and it'll all work out!

Some Miscellaneous Ramblings...

Hi all! Long time no talk!!

So apparently I'm posting a little less frequently these days ... a pattern I'll chalk up to my growing determination to focus on my offline life. Rather than spending my days holing up in front of a computer when I get home from my computer-oriented job (which was reminding me a little too much of my days in academia), I've been trying to get out and do things more often ... or to just spend timeoffline when I'm at home.

So for the past few weeks I've been holiday shopping, and meeting friends for dinner, and reading fun books, and started volunteering for a local charity. All stuff that is helping me move fully away from the mindset that I'm still kinda-sorta an academic, and into the mindset of being a regular person who has a regular job and does regular things with her spare time ... rather than just coming home and going back on the computer all night long. So far, so good!

Now, don't worry ... I won't shut down the blog or stop writing. As I've mentioned before ... it turns out that, to my surprise, I like blogging! And I'm still interested in reading and thinking about academic structure and culture and about the changing academic job market.

So don't worry - I'm not going anywhere for awhile, dear readers. Posts may be a little less frequent, but I'll still be around.

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In "me" life, things are just fine. Work is okay, family is good, life is pretty alright. Partner and I went out of town for a weekend and had a relaxing Thanksgiving, and I'm looking forward to Christmas.

And things here in Grad U City are good. An old grad student friend of mine was in town last weekend, so I had drinks with him and several of his (current grad student) friends. I was a little apprehensive about showing up as a grad school dropout ... but to my surprise, a few of the people started spontaneously talking about how nice it would be to have a regular job with actual free time for once. I kept my mouth shut about my own thoughts, but I admit ... I felt pretty good.

The New Normal In Academic Hiring

Colorado State University has now updated their job posting, so that now it only indicates that they are looking for an "entry-level" tenure-track assistant professor, with no further specifications listed about year of degree or anything else.

It's a nice gesture, I suppose ... but I'd still love to see how many long-term adjuncts they bring to campus for interviews. I'm thinking that the "best qualified candidates" will still mysteriously be the folks who are newly graduated, not those who've been already working as (non-tenured) faculty for five or more years.

I mean, I have a different definition of who your "qualified candidates" would be, but what the hell do I know, right? I'm not a professor, so clearly I know nothing.

So that's encouraging, I suppose. (Although I'm also open to the argument that it's better to see this kind of thing out in the open in job ads, to work against the myth that long-term adjuncting is the path to a tenure track job. It's a valid point, but it doesn't alleviate my anger...)

But if you're in the latter category - the ones who think that universities being blatant about this is a good thing? You'll be happy to hear (via a commenter on yesterday's post) that there is another job posting for a tenure-track assistant professor of Comparative Literature position at Harvard, which specifies that the Ph.D. must have been received since 2009. 

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.

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...

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.

On Guilt, Self-Blame, and Magical Thinking in Academia

I've got a few links to share with you today, all of which are loosely related to the basic theme of Your Brain on Academia. As you know, the other postacademic bloggers and I have written at length about the effect grad school and academia has on your mind - the guilt, the self-doubt and self-blame, the boredom and the isolation and the frustration and the possible ill-effects all of it can have on the mental health of someone trying to work in academia.

Despite all of the discussion we've had, though, I always think there's room for a little bit more. And I ran across a couple of things this week that got me thinking - yet again - about the mindset of an academic. And more specifically, about how the academic guilt that grad students feel and make jokes about is actually not funny at all.

In reality, I believe that this guilt is seriously problematic. Not only is it terrible for your self-esteem, but it also clouds your reality when you look around at the structure of academia and the state of the job market.

Let's talk about this.

First, we have this post, which is by another postacademic and addresses academic guilt. The author writes:

...as graduate students, we are discouraged from discussing our 'personal lives.' We are supposed to be completely dedicated to our work. I can't count the number of times I talked about or heard others talk about all the work we have to do, how we haven't left the house in days, how we fell asleep in our office because we had to hand in that paper in the morning. Even though we talk about these things and we are aware that they are not necessarily positive things, we try to top each other in our stories of academic agony. We do it because we believe, deep down inside, that a committed graduate student does not have a life.

This description definitely mirrors my experiences in my graduate program. Discussions between grad students would often devolve into some kind of weird Competition of Misery, where we'd all talk about "how late we had stayed in the lab last night" or about "how long it'd been since we watched a movie" or visited our families or went out to dinner. We wore the overwork (whether it was real or not) as a badge of honor, with the people who worked hardest and longest being characterized as the models we should all be looking up to. And faculty would chime in when needed, assuring us that "if we just worked hard enough" we'd get a great job in the end.

But how hard was "hard enough?" No one ever seemed to know. So we just worked constantly. Or tried to, anyway. And if we didn't work on any given day or evening or hour in the lab, we'd talk about what "slackers" we were. How "unmotivated" we were. How we "really needed to step it up next week." Anything short of working every single day and evening was unacceptable.

The author of the linked post continues by pointing out that this mindset is not a good one:

Graduate student guilt, as I like to call it, is a dangerous thing. This is what it sounds like: when we take time to watch a movie, we complain that we wasted our evening. When we have some free time we think first about what we should do for work when our body and mind probably needs a break. When we can't write down 10 pages for the day, we curse our inability to produce. Grad student guilt can harm us because it can prevent us from seeing all the work we really are doing and [instead] focus on our shortcomings.

Pay careful attention to that last sentence; we'll come back around to it.

Odds and Ends ... and You're Still Not Alone

A few random thoughts for today......

First, let's take a look at the google searches that have been bringing folks to this place over the past couple of weeks. I'll be honest - this group of them have been more striking than usual. I was expecting the people showing up here over the summer to be less stressed out and negative about academia, and more relaxed. After all, it's the summer! That doesn't seem to be the case, unfortunately:

-i am miserable in grad school
-i want to drop out of grad school
-academia overwhelmed workload
-feeling angry for no reason grad school
-i hate being a researcher
-what to do if you hate your grad school program
-am i weak for quitting phd
-academic job market stinks
-my phd research is worthless
-i feel like my research is shit phd

It's also worth noting that the two posts at this blog that have gotten the most pageviews since I started - and continue to get fresh new pages views every single day - are the ones in which I wrote about how I hated my research and about how grad school messes with your mental health. And when I say that they get more page views, I mean that they each have more than five times as many page views as any other post on this blog.

Why Chronicle Readers Love their Academic Jobs

I found myself on the Chronicle of Higher Ed's "Leaving Academe" forums a few weeks ago, after following some links from their food stamps article. I've been writing and editing this post ever since, trying to streamline and shorten it up ... but somehow it keeps just getting longer. So that's it - I'm just going to post it as-is. You all are used to me being wordy, right??? :)

The thread in question I'd like to link you to is this thread, in which current faculty were asked by a potential academic leaver to describe what they love about their jobs.

Some of the posts really resonated with me - people described those terrific moments in the classroom (rare as they may be) where students really seem to "get it." How much they loved the long summers off or being able to take sabbaticals. Being around young people. That stuff really can be pretty great.

But at the same time, I wanted to highlight some comments over there that compare academia to the "real world," which I think you can take with a HUGE grain of salt.

I'm not trying to be a huge Negative Nelly here, or to encourage everyone to cut and run from academia. But as as all of us postacademic bloggers have written a million times ... current faculty need to stop encouraging grad students and fellow Ph.D.s to stay tethered to academia for the wishy-washy reason that "it's the best job in the world!" There aren't enough tenure-track jobs for all graduating Ph.D.s anymore. A thousand comments about how totally awesome academia is (like you find in that thread) aren't going to magically open up ten thousand tenure-track jobs. So academics need to quit denigrating nonacademic work and start encouraging grad students to explore other options.

So while I read that thread with interest, it gradually started to bother me. I could picture miserable adjuncts who want to leave academia reading that thread, thinking "...I want to leave, but nonacademic jobs are all so awful!! Academia is the only good job out there!!!" As we've discussed before ... that's not true. But that's not something you're going to hear in that thread.

But you'll hear it from me, again and again. Academia is not the only good workplace in the world. Every nonacademic job is not awful. And many of the things you like about academia can also be found in the nonacademic world.

Let's talk about what we find in that thread that needs a little elaboration...

Drama at Work ... Nonacademic Style

I keep meaning to write a longer post in which I talk about how the "new" job is going ... but haven't really had much to say. I have a managerial role and higher pay in exchange for not much more work than I was previously doing ... so that's good. There was a little bit of minor drama when my promotion was still announced, due to the fact that some of my coworkers had their egos bruised because I'd been given the promotion over them.

But the drama has blown over by now ... the coworkers see that I'm not some crazed tyrant now that I have some managerial power, and they see that I'm still the same old JC that I always was - I still joke around with them and come to them for advice and brainstorming, and in general am still an okay person. It seems to be all back to normal, and it's all good.

(One of these days, by the way, I'll write up a post about job-hunting and job-seeking in this industry, with some information about how I got this job, what I do, and how we go about looking for new hires - which we're doing right now. Just give me a little bit of time to collect my thoughts.)

But for today, I just wanted to post this little tidbit of humor...

When my promotion was first announced a couple of weeks ago and a few of my coworkers got a little testy about everything, my first reaction was to get kind of angry. "Why did I take this stupid promotion? Why did I decide to keep working here with these catty people? Why did I ever leave grad school?"

Then I calmed down and thought about it a little more, and started to, you know, actually remember grad school. And remembered how academics can be some of the cattiest people in the world.

Just In Case Anyone's Wondering...

...Seventeen months. That's how long it took anyone at my department to notice I was gone.

Well, anyone who hadn't run into me out on the town, that is. In the interest of full disclosure, I've seen a few faculty members out and about and have given them updates on my situation. But I still haven't heard from my advisor since December 2010, and at no point in the past 17 months has anyone from my department contacted me to see if I was still working on my dissertation, if I needed anything, whether I had found a job, etc. Nothing.

I purposely waited to officially notify them that I was dropping out, by the way. Since my advisor was not communicative and I still wanted to stay "enrolled" for this academic year to defer my student loans, I figured I had nothing to gain by announcing to anyone that I was leaving before this academic year. And after a few more months passed and no one had checked up on me (other than to ask me to teach, of course), I decided that I wanted to see how long it would take them to notice I was gone. Or if they ever would.

And now I have my answer. Seventeen months. It took them seventeen months to drop me a quick email to see how/what I was doing.

Let's put that in perspective: I could have carried and birthed two children during this time frame.

My department is clearly not illustrative of every department in the world, but I urge you to think about this. If your advisor wasn't checking up on you, how long would it take your department to actually notice your absence?

If I stopped showing up at my current job, it probably wouldn't take a full day for my boss and coworkers to check on me. If I didn't show up for a second day? They'd probably drive by my house. Three days? They'd probably call the cops.

Now, of course, graduate school is different than my current job ... you're not on campus every day, and you don't see everyone every day. But still ..... seventeen months??? From a department that is supposed to be mentoring you and advising you and helping you out every step of the way until you find a real job?

I mean, I know I was nothing more than teaching fodder for them, but still.......