Random Observations from Inside the Belly of the Beast, Part II

Last year, I blogged here about having to attend a certain super conservative conference when I was still very new at Think Tank.

Back again this year, not a whole lot had changed. I still found it ironic that I had attended an MLA conference here at this same hotel a number of years ago. There were still women walking around in heels way too high to wear to a conference of any kind (it's a bad sign when you can tell they're having trouble walking yet still trying to be sexxy -- and since when are 6" heels "conservative" anyway?), security was still ridiculously tight (they wouldn't let me into the exhibit hall to go to Think Tank's booth to pick up my badge because, well, I didn't have a badge! Had to call someone to bring it), and the crazies were still abundantly present. Here are some questions of deep significance conference attendees inspire us to ponder:

Shall we build a time machine and return to the America of the 18th century? Things were just so awesome and revolutionary then!

Maybe Google will help with the software for that time machine. Hey! WTF is Google doing here? Whose side are they on anyway? Lest you thought otherwise ...

What can furries teach us about being conservative in the 21st century?

And one of my favorites, an impromptu performance that initially generated righteous outrage and hostility: "What, are those motherfucken hippies I see? Oh, I fucken HATE hippies!! Where are the cops? How did those Occupy shitheads get in here? Where are the cops? I'm just gonna go beat the mess outta those dirty sons-a-bitches!!!"

Actually, while the cops did appear soon enough, these guys were "legit" (See the badge hanging off the one sitting on the box?) and were singing, in the style of hipster troubadours, about how "America was great/Before we all had to hyphenate." You know, like, African-American, Latin-American, Indian-American -- when we were all "just Americans"!!

What would all these "Americans" (mind you, once again, I could count on one hand the number of nonwhite attendees who passed by Think Tank's booth over the course of about 6 hours) have done if the "Occupy shitheads" had gotten in and glitter bombed the place, as they were threatening to do? Oh, I was sooooooo hoping to witness that! Well, except for the large presence of NRA supporters also in attendance. Except for a few minor disturbances, for better or worse, the Occupiers mostly stayed outside.

For fuller coverage, go read what Wonkette has to say. Their people actually attended the speeches and events and whatnot, which I did not. Go here or here. Or even here! Go on, you owe it to yourself to check out those links!!

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Meanwhile, things have settled down back to normal here at the office, after all of last week's excitement. No shortage of protesters, though. Should we free Tibet? These people, seen today from my office window, think we should.

Ah, life in Crapitol City ...

Consensus: "The Outrage of Adjuncts"

Over at Minding the Campus, there's a good piece up entitled "The Outrage of the Adjuncts." The author doesn't say anything astoundingly new. You've heard it all here and at other post-academic blogs before, many times over. Her main points are that 1) "By systematically underpaying and mistreating the non-tenured faculty who bear the burden of basic education, colleges are systematically cheating their own students," and 2) adjuncts, taxpayers (since they fund student loans and public colleges and universities), as well as students and their parents have a right to be outraged.

What's new in this piece is that the author is a conservative, and yet the point-of-view she expresses is that ending the plight of adjuncts and thereby improving the quality of education should be a bipartisan issue. She doesn't get into specific strategies for reform and the divisive and ideological rancor they raise -- e.g. Where would the money for better adjunct salaries come from if not from higher taxes? Or, how do you fix the adjunct problem without destroying the tenure system? (My take on where the tenure system fits in is here.) But she lays a foundation for consensus, and I think that's an important first step.

The author's experience attending the New Faculty Majority "summit" recently also illustrates how rhetoric can inhibit reform. She was initially skeptical and put off by the "Neo-Marxist phrases [that] filled the air: "wage theft," "neoliberal agenda," "corporate America," "under assault from the right," "privatization of the production of knowledge," and "marketization of the university." But "NFM's sole Republican board member, Matthew Williams, was able to advocate for the non-tenured without invoking Karl Marx, the Occupy movement, or anti-globalization guru Naomi Klein."

Let's be clear: I personally don't think NFM is wrong for invoking Karl Marx, the Occupy movement, or Naomi Klein. However, the mainstream audiences who need to understand what's up -- because, fundamentally, it affects them, their kids, their pocketbooks, and the future of education in this country (and, hence, this country's standing in the world) -- are more apt to respond to centrist arguments tying the plight of adjuncts to the quality of education rather than "radical" abstractions or down-and-dirty demonstrations (which, these days, are getting more attention for rodent infestations than clear politics, anyway). Again, not that I think NFM is wrong at all for making these arguments, but the theory you use to analyze something and the rhetoric you use to present it to an "outside" audience need not exactly match.

And the author does a good job of tying the plight of adjuncts to the quality of education without blaming adjuncts for being bad teachers, as often happens. It goes without saying (since you all know it and I've said it many times before and many of the blogs I link to regularly discuss it) that many adjuncts are very talented teachers. If you doubt or have forgotten, just go read what Anastasia currently has up to refresh yourself. Yet, I don't care how talented you are. Living on a salary under $20K, having no job security, no benefits, and no career future after you've spent a decade earning an advanced degree -- not to mention having no decent office space, no resources for research, no departmental support, and having to commute to multiple campuses -- will cause your teaching to suffer, no matter how talented you are. It's only a matter of time. So, it's a fine line to talk about the plight of adjuncts and how this impacts quality of education, but we have to do it. It's the only way we're going to get the attention of people outside acadene.

I tried to leave a comment over there, but I kept getting error messages. Here's what I wanted to say:

Absolutely right on with this: "By systematically underpaying and mistreating the non-tenured faculty who bear the burden of basic education, colleges are systematically cheating their own students."

I walked away a semester after finishing my Ph.D., but academic culture perpetuates the myth that if you hang on for a while and keep trying and keep up with your research and publication while you're adjuncting, you'll eventually get onto the tenure track. This has a powerful resonance for a lot of people, and it's not that easy just to "walk away," as many, including myself, often tell others. But I looked around and saw adjuncts who were great teachers AND had strong publication records, even books, and yet had been trying unsuccessfully year after year -- 6-10 years in a few cases. I didn't want to be them years down the line and so I left, but it wasn't without anger, frustration, and bitterness at giving up doing what I loved, what I was good at, a career I'd spent a decade of my life working towards, and a job that arguably was making a more valuable contribution to society than the general admin work I now do for a nonprofit (by which I simply mean you don’t need an advanced degree to do it well). Shouldn't university faculty, especially those with Ph.D.s, earn at least as much as their department secretaries?*

And I'm so glad you find common ground here between Right and Left. It's something we should all care about and work together to reform.

 *Department secretaries at Grad U earned between $40K and $70K when I was there, depending on how long they'd been there and what their responsibilities were.

Invitation to Help Develop Grad U Graduate Writing Website

The following found its way to my inbox today. I found it amusing. I thought you might, too:

Dear recent Ph.D.,

In Fall 2010, Dr. Very Important Campus Administrator established a Graduate Writing Task Force to devise a plan to enhance existing graduate writing resources and the quality of graduate student writing. The task force’s recommendations included the creation of a writing resources website that focuses on general resources, but also discipline-specific needs.

Because you were previously selected for Prestigious Graduate Fellowship and thus identified as an outstanding doctoral student who has acquired useful knowledge of the dissertation writing process, the Graduate School invites you to participate in a focus group that will help determine the design and content of the Graduate Writing Resources website. We anticipate convening the focus group sometime in February.

If you are willing and available to serve as a focus group member, please contact me by February 3.

Sincerely,

 Postdoctoral Associate for Graduate Education Administration

Hmmmmm. Well, I guess it isn't exactly a surprise that just because you're a graduate student working on a dissertation you're necessarily a good writer. I can cut the STEM folks some slack in this area. They just need to write well enough to communicate their research. However, while I can't speak for the social sciences, it seems that the primary fields in which writing really matters are the humanities. In the humanities, because your work engages so closely with other written texts, what you have to say (your research) is intimately caught up in how you communicate it to others.

Sorry, I'm rambling. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this seems like campus administrative bloat to me -- another attempt by overpaid campus managers to justify their existence (just reread the job title up there -- couldn't make that shit up if I tried). Such a resource for undergrads makes sense, and many such sites already exist, at Grad U and other institutions. But for graduate students? If you're a STEM person and your writing is so bad people can't understand you, you should hire a tutor and possibly an editor. You deserve to have to pay extra if you're that horrible. If you're in the humanities and you can't write, you probably should drop out long before you finish your diss and hit the job market ... because you will be TOAST. Burn your early diss drafts and maybe give business school a shot.

Maybe I'm being overly harsh and judgmental. Why not help graduate students? A website of writing resources that targets dissertation writing could be just the support some poor struggling ABD needs to get through to the end.

Except ... did it occur to Dr. Very Important Campus Administrator that, since I haven't adjuncted at Grad U in a year, I might have some other job, like, off campus and during normal business hours? How in the world would I be "available" to commute an hour each way for a one-hour focus group? And I should do this, even if I were still adjuncting or otherwise working on campus, as a form of "service," I suppose??

Hey, I got news for you, you high level college administrator types, "service" only counts if you're on the tenure track. Can we work on converting some of those adjunct positions maybe? In my old department, adjuncts outnumber tenure-track faculty 2 to 1. If you could do that and pay me, oh, roughly what I'm currently earning as a freakin' secretary, and offer, maybe, if not tenure, at least multi-year renewable contracts so I'd have some job security, I might consider coming back and doing for a living what you are here acknowledging I'm very good at.

Then I'd be happy to participate in your focus group ...

I Taught an SAT Prep Class Last Night

I know. I know. Technically, it's adjuncting, since the class is run through a community college, but I teach it at a high school and the pay works a little differently. There's no grading and no prep (since I've done the same class 100 times in the past and the curriculum doesn't change), and so it's a pretty decent on-the-side wage for just showing up, giving practice tests, explaining answers, going over strategies, and going home -- forgetting all about teh kiddies until teh next class. And I must be doing something right, because their scores always go up.

Though, why their parents subject some of them to this torture -- and pay for it to boot -- is beyond me. These are good little suburban kids. They're well-behaved and totally freaked out that their already relatively good scores aren't good enough, yet they are bored shitless by the test itself. As much as I think the standardized testing industry is a ripoff and that the tests themselves don't necessarily predict all that well how well some kids will (or won't) do in a college environment, there's something to be said about curiosity for curiosity's sake and engagement with challenges. Back when I took the SAT, I actually WANTED to know what all the words meant (I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't look them up!), and I'd get into the readings in spite of myself. And I didn't even study that much, just flipped through a book after my other homework was done. I certainly NEVER would have paid money (nor would my parents have) to have somebody tell me things like "look for the definition of the word you're trying to find in the surrounding context" and "use process of elimination to narrow down your choices."

Shouldn't these things be obvious to college-bound high school juniors and seniors who have attended reasonably "good" schools and earned reasonably good grades?

Well, on the one hand, I'm happy to get them up to speed, but, on the other, aren't curiosity and engagement the qualities we'd like to see in college students rather than the regurgitation of test-taking strategies they've acquired in expensive prep classes?

Seems to me that priorities all up and down academe's spectrum are screwed up.

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But you know what? I miss being in a classroom. I mean, not enough to go back to adjuncting or the academic job market or the culture of denial, delusion, and bullshit that surrounds it. But I do miss that environment. A classroom. It's a place where your purpose, in theory at least, is to think freely, to express yourself freely, to learn, to explore, to dream, to aspire, to discover, to grow, to grow up, to expand, to take risks, to push your limits ... maybe even to evolve into your humanity.

Maybe I'm being too idealistic (feel free to throw up a little in your mouth), but I've never said here or anywhere else that I didn't believe in the value or importance of an education. I just think something has gone very, very wrong with our system. I don't know how or why it went wrong, and I don't know how to fix it. But it will be a scary world 100 years from now -- if we don't destroy ourselves first -- if we can't figure out how.

WTF Has Graduate School Come To?

Literally, just as I was about to begin a post about the "band camp" adventure I am about to embark upon this weekend (you'll have to wait for that!), Random Guy wanders purposefully into the office here at Think Tank and, without saying hello or introducing himself or anything, walks over to our wall of publications and starts looking through them.

Me: "Excuse me. Hi there. Can we help you with something?"

Random Guy: "This is Think Tank, isn't it? I am doing some research and someone told me you had some publications that would be useful."

Me, looking over at Coworker with mild puzzlement, "Yes, this is Think Tank. What is the subject of your research? Perhaps we can help you find what you're looking for."

Random Guy: "I'm a master's student, and I'm writing a paper for a graduate course I'm taking on Policy X. Somebody told me you guys had done some work on Policy X."

To myself, I am wondering if Random Guy has tried the library yet. Or, if that's too much trouble, a simple Google search? A Google search of Policy X would have brought up Think Tank pieces, as would, more directly, a search of Think Tank's very own website. I stifle something resembling a laugh and clear my throat.

Random Guy, rifling through our materials, clearly not finding what he's looking for: "Did you say something?"

Me: "Excuse me ... I don't think we have any of our publications on Policy X out on the shelves at this time. Have you been to our website?"

Coworker: "You know, we do more work on Policy Y at this office, which is why there's nothing on Policy X on the shelves, but recent Ph.D. is right. If you go to our website and search Policy X, you'll find a number of publications that will be of interest."

Random Guy, scribbling furiously on a notepad: "OK, thanks. Where do I find your website?"

Me, stifling something caught in my throat again, something large: "Ahhhem, you'll find us at www.ThinkTank.org."

Random Guy: "Oh, OK. Thanks. Are there any particular publications you recommend? Or authors?"

At this point, I remain polite but do not even try to disguise my mystification at Random Guy's approach to graduate level "research." What, am I supposed to do it for him?

Me: "Well, there's Supreme Expert on Policy X. He's done some work for Think Tank. You'll find his work on our site, but he also has his own site with more materials on Policy X, which you can find if you Google his name."

Random Guy stops scribbling and looks at me blankly.

Me, spelling it out for him: "That is, his name is spelled S U P R E M E   E X P E R T   O N  P O L I C Y  X."

Random Guy scribbles that down and then asks: "Do you have any general information about Think Tank? Any pamphlets that describe what you do?"

Me, picking up one such item from the shelf right in front of Random Guy: "Yes, here you are. This tells all about Think Tank and the work we do, and there's more information on our website, too."

Random Guy, heading for the door: "Thanks ... "

Me: "Good luck with your paper!"

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Was Random Guy actually a graduate student? I hope not. Given our proximity to street traffic, neighborhood oddballs, and the occasional policy nutjob who wanders in, Random Guy's clueless strangeness is far from the strangest behavior I've witnessed from a visitor. That prize goes to Barefoot Mumbling Guy, who was convinced the baristas at Starbucks down the block wanted to give him AIDS and wanted to use our phone to let his brother know. (You betcha that warranted some Lysol!) And, likewise, people that know who we are will sometimes stop by to say hello and tell us they think we're doing a good job. Sometimes they ask for publications, too, usually more general things we always keep around.

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So, yes, I really do hope Random Guy was just some random guy who wanted to know more about Policy X, had heard something about Think Tank, and simply wasn't that educated or otherwise familiar with ordinary research methods but thought we'd respect him more if he said he was "doing graduate research." Because ... really? You know as well as I do that graduate school isn't a meritocracy anymore, not anymore than academe itself, but we would like to believe there are at least SOME standards, no?

Via

Blast from the Past

Saw one of my charter high school students on the subway today. I taught 11th and 12th grade there before starting grad school.

Kid used to sit in class and draw. And draw and draw. Never paid much attention but was otherwise a nice kid.

Former student: "Wow! Ms. recent Ph.D! Nice to see you! Are you still teaching?"

Me: "No. I left Charter School and taught at Grad U for awhile, but it didn't work out. I work at a think tank now. What are you doing these days?"

Former student: "I'm a freelance artist and graphic designer."

Me: "That's great!"

Former student, who seemed both happy with hir life and happy to see me, is older now than I was when I started teaching at Charter School.

The most distinct memory I have of this student involves an incident with hir and another calling each other "motherfucker" in class. They wouldn't stop, and so I told them they had to look up the word and copy down the definition -- 25 times. "Is that what you really meant to call each other?" I asked.

No, of course not, but reaching that conclusion was very dramatic and difficult, involving a trip to the principal's office and detention.

I'm glad ze is doing well now, leading a normal adult life.

Would that us postacademics, especially those currently unemployed or adjuncting, will end up doing at least as well as our students in the not too distant future

Three Blogs for 2012 (and Some Dead Turkeys and a Rat, Too)

I have a million things on my mind but few fit for expression here. I don't feel like doing a banal New Year's "Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012" post. The rest of the blog already tells the 2011 story. Go back and read the posts you missed if you want a retrospective. And 2012 is still anybody's guess. I also tried to do an entertaining review of Christmas dinner with the Tea Party Branch of the Family of Peaches, but I ended up on an angry vegan rampage with nothing to show for it but pictures of factory farmed turkeys (Ha! You get those anyway!):

But lest I further spoil your appetite and until I come upon thoughts of my own more fit for blogging, go check out, if you haven't already, new postacademic blogs by:

Currer Bell at Project Reinvention 2012 and WTF have I done with my life at Unemployed PhD for Hire. Both add to the growing chorus of academics -- for a host of excellent reasons -- who are beginning to walk away.

Also, I stumbled on Notes from Babel today, which I recommend visiting if you love words like I do. Although the author is a conservative and the political posts are distasteful (yet thoughtful), the language posts illustrate that just because we might disagree about what's good policy doesn't mean we can't wholeheartedly agree about what's good English. I was poking around the Internet to see if someone else might have an explanation for why my brain dead, 5:00 PM self found the phrase "yeoman's work" out of place in a Think Tank "annual report," and this post nails it. Although the author appears to be migrating here (and it is unclear if he will continue writing about language), go read this post and this post at the very least.What was it 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School said waaaaaaaay back at the beginning about the smart people being somewhere else?

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And, well, this is just a cute little something in case you need something to make yourself feel better about eating dead turkeys: