This is further evidence of the corrosive effect of capitalism. When education and research become only important in how they effect ‘business’—become a business itself—it drains the heart and joy, not to mention the expansion of human development, from the academics. I’ve seen more and more efforts to turn scholars into line workers since the business community began taking over funding of universities. As state legislatures continue to cut back on funding (so they can cut back on taxing the rich) it pushes the universities to find other revenue sources (the rich) who insist on conditions like that costs be cut and capitalism, and conservative views, be promoted.
I have noted with horror that some schools have cut back or eliminated liberal arts fields through the pressure from donors, because they are of no use in creating profit for their businesses—one university has even removed sociology as a general course credit.
Being picky about definitions for a reason: a PhD isn't a job.
A PhD is a credential, not homegrown in the U.S. but an invasive species from Germany that first took hold in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins and then spread like kudzu across the continent's higher educational system. Like the bachelor's degree, its main power and allure comes from employers (and ultimately in the case of the PhD this means the accreditors) choosing to use it as a requirement for employment. And that's arguably the failure point for American higher education. This requirement makes little or no sense.
In the case of the PhD, it's required for jobs that manifestly do *not* require one to be a national or international expert in a subject with specialized training (or at least experience) in original research and (especially in STEM) proposal-writing. Then why require it for a college faculty member anywhere outside of R1 universities? Hell, why require that even at R1 universities in many situations? Every field has examples of non-PhDs who were cleverer and more creative researchers than the deadened souls who got the doctorate and churned out crap for generations.
Of course, one key reason that the PhD is required is simply that it *can* be, thanks to PhD overproduction for at least the past 55 years. Until that glut disappears, one way or another, the universities and their accreditors will continue to require the PhD as the union card for being able to teach, serve, and do research--the PhD qualifies one to do maybe 1 out of 3 of those tasks. This is perhaps the central absurdity of higher education, but one *so* central that it's hard to dolly back far enough to get it in view.
The PhD isn't a job, or a person, or even a sure-fire indicator of a truly educated person. (We all know plenty of exceptions.) It's just a ticket stub or an ink stamp, basically, something you need to show to the bouncer to get into the club, signifying time served and blood, sweat and tears spent in addition to money, although all of those put together were insufficient to get your ticket punched. Some committee, not of your peers, decided that in your case the time, blood, sweat, and tears were enough for the PhD. I have read that Johns Hopkins didn't even require a dissertation for the PhD in the beginning; that was added later. So, even what we think of as utterly intrinsic to the PhD, wasn't always. It's just a credential that gets you in the club, although the room is SRO and you may never get a seat or a drink.
I assert that if you think the PhD guarantees anything more than that, you have at some level bought into the bullshit the system serves up to keep the whole "Profzi" scheme (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030909s.gif) going. A good advisor and a passionate student can definitely make more than that out of a PhD, but it's optional.
Good to have you back in the comments, John. Interesting history -- I was unaware of the back story of the PhD as a credential. There certainly is something arbitrary about seeing it as a "terminal" degree, because as you say there are plenty of scholars who *just* earn the PhD and don't grow much beyond it (or who never really became experts despite earning the credential), whereas there are others who truly become leaders in a field. It's kind of like the enormous spectrum of talent in the NFL, even if becoming a professional player is as high as you can go.
However, I want to push back on your last paragraph. "A good advisor and a passionate student can definitely make more than that out of a PhD." Exactly -- and this is what draws most of us in, some version of that mentorship at the undergraduate level and, if we are lucky, a continuation of it in graduate school. I had two excellent mentors as an undergraduate and two more as an MA and PhD candidate. It was perhaps unfair to expect my job to match those memories, but the part of the job that I loved was the chance to lean into that very kind of mentorship. It's not bullshit. But it often is untethered from market realities. And I think there is something to the Profzi scheme at many graduate schools, where exercising more birth control for PhDs would also mean thinning the faculty ranks.
But this is not all laid at the feet of professors -- I think the idyll of mentorship was once sustainable when there was more public support for higher education, etc, etc. It does indeed look like the future of higher ed depends on *not* depending on that public support, and so the entire system will need to be rebuilt. Where the mentorship idyll fits into that new mix remains to be seen, but it is the heart of the enterprise; without it, the PhD makes almost no sense at all.
It's interesting that you brought up Gail Boetticher.
In 2008, I was waiting at a bus stop and saw an advertisement for Breaking Bad, with the "Br" "Ba" elements from the periodic table. I had just flunked grad school, and began my first industry job (and substantially below a research position I was interested in). At the time, I didn't think academia was a business, and I ended up watching the entire first season of Breaking Bad. It was very interesting, but I stopped watching it, quite turned off by the cycle of violence that profitable routine enabled. When it started out it was just to pay the cancer bills. By the end of the first season, he was planning his kid's college funds with that. So while it worked as a entertaining show, I avoided becoming the "bad fan."
A couple years ago, I decided to watch the remaining seasons. I had heard so much about its popularity, and Chemistry being my minor, I wanted to find out what was so compelling. I am glad I did reach this scene with Gail, because it did address a wrinkle of truth in the fiction. Granted, some are just trying to survive (Walt), but the popularity of the show meant they could write another season like in Ozark and he could keep getting richer/greedier in a "What if?" scenario. I am not so sure it applies to Gail, but the love for pure science exists in a time and a place. I don't think some would go to those extremes if they didn't have a bill to pay (and even then some still wouldn't), but it makes for good TV. Quoting Walt Whitman was excellent.
Thanks for sharing your own story. Yes, I was put off by some of it, but almost immediately I found myself drawn to Walt as an underappreciated academic. The Grey Matter subplot, how Gretchen and Elliot made it big while Walt, their equal, was grinding away in the public schools, and the humiliation that teachers suffer from eroding public respect -- all of this spoke to me.
The speaker of Whitman's poem, who grows sick and sad in the lecture hall and wanders outside to gaze at the stars in silent wonder, has many affinities with the teachers fleeing the profession because of assessment, branding, and other corporate influences.
Thanks for that, I hadn't noticed the poem's significance to the university. One often overlooked scene with Gretchen and Eliot is that they DO offer him a job after finding out he has cancer, but Walt refuses it, out of pride. In that regard, I think Walt was terribly flawed, because his job as meth cook was not greater than corporate scientist. That was in the 1st season. When Gretchen calls him to ask if it was because of their past relationship, he denies that, which is plausible. Thus I think it was more because he wanted to earn his money without their help.
I agree -- there is also some class tension between Gretchen and Walt. When Gretchen discovers that Walt is lying to Skylar about their contribution to his cancer treatment, and they meet afterward to talk, it's clear that Walt has been carrying resentment of Gretchen's privilege for a very long time. We don't really learn how Walt was raised (his mother is in a nursing home somewhere, and they don't have a great relationship), but the strong implication was that he grew up poor or middle class and earned his professional career. We don't know anything about Gretchen and Eliot, really, other than that they were Walt's classmates. But Eliot seems to have come from a similar background, given that he and Walt subsisted on ramen as graduate students. The wealth from Grey Matter seems to have combined with Gretchen's family wealth to inflame the class differences between these friends.
I don't think this excuses Walt's refusal of the job offer. It would have been far more rewarding than his high school teaching. It would have been a different path to supporting (and preserving) his family. And it wouldn't have been charity if he contributed significantly to the research that launched the company. In that case, his pride really is a curious paradox -- he maintains his independence, but only by suffering other substantial indignities which would seem to directly weaken his pride (?).
I view a PhD as a meaningful credential of intellectual achievement. That achievement adds to a society's cultural capital, which ought to be an important goal, even if it can't be reduced to a quantitative measure. And as mentors, holders of PhDs are crucial to "producing" other PhDs.
If the holders of PhDs only receive wages inadequate to their time and financial investment in getting their degree and no other benefit, then that's ultimately going to be a big societal loss.
So, I'd say that if a PhD becomes solely a job with inadequate wages, that's a huge unforced error that will hurt America.
Some of this is related to our conversations about marriage and self-selection within elite bubbles. If intellectual achievement as a cultural good is a luxury, rather than a collective investment in our national heritage, then it no longer makes sense for people from my background to pursue it.
The other side of this is that the academic jobs that do offer attractive wages -- the endowed chairs with light teaching loads, the posh positions like Joyce Carol Oates's perch at Princeton -- are subsidized by the army of adjuncts and other ill-compensated faculty. There just is not enough money in the system to offer fair compensation across the board. And so anyone who says that their position is more than adequate is the beneficiary of an externalized cost that a contingent PhD bears.
Next thing you know, I'll be carrying banners through the street for Fair Trade Education! (Only half joking)
Josh, it’s hard for me to think of the PhD as a job when it’s something people pay for. I mean, I know sometimes fellowships and research grants might be large enough to help the person earning the PhD into the black (as opposed to the red) but not by much. Eee. I need to check out the interview, but I’m afraid higher education has become a business, and there isn’t a whole hell of a lot we can do about that. And this is on a global scale. I suppose there might be a handful of small, well endowed liberal arts schools that can maintain some distance from the market, but that is only because some donors who've done very well in the market make the decision to prioritize liberal education over learning market tools. As far as PhDs (in the case of writers, MFAs), i need to study the interview before making pronouncements. But the combination of factors contributing to the lack of leverage held by faculty in these situations isn't getting better. Whether or not AI is problematic has no impact on the universities who are considering dropping composition requirements. I definitely couldn't have predicted the direction employment in higher ed has taken. I remember being encouraged to keep acquiring graduate degrees because there was going to be a huge demand for our skills when baby boomers retired. Do you remember that? It's painful to accept that all those years, all those all-nighters, all that reading, grading freshman composition essays, all of it would fail to take us to the promised land of tenure and a 2/2 load with plenty of travel funding, but here we are. There's a great facebook group called "The Professor is Out," where members advise one another about how to make transitions away from academia into other fields. I find reading the posts a cathartic activity.
Quite right, Ben -- we could not have foreseen these changes. It's a good reminder of how stupid it is for administrators to talk about strategic planning for the next 10 years, as if anyone can foresee a future that distant. No one saw ChatGPT coming, right? No one predicted COVID. Those were rapid, overnight game changers.
I did have tenure, full rank, and a 3/3 teaching load, and I gave it up. It still was not nirvana because of how much the air changed around that job.
Incidentally, I and many others have been banned from The Professor Is Out for running afoul of the very rigid rules that govern the site. This discussion thread, for instance, would not be welcome there because it talks too much about problems within academe (which the admins think will be triggering to people who have left?). I have come to understand that the primary purpose of that group is to recruit business for the owners. Good for them, but it's not really the open support group that it claims to be.
That’s interesting about the fb group. I’ll pay closer attention. I’ve had a good experience there to this point. But I’m really curious about why you would leave that job situation. I see others leaving tenured positions, as well. And I just don’t get it. I mean, I know certain departments are more toxic than others, and committee work can be a pain, but compared to some of the stories i hear from people who work three different adjunct jobs to make ends meet, full tenure, benefits, and a 3/3 load sound like heaven.
I hope this doesn't come across as a rebuttal? The last thing I want to do is invite people on the podcast and then punk them with a surprise rebuttal later in the week. 😊 What I mean to examine here is just the cognitive dissonance that I still feel when I hear statements about academic work as *just* a job, even as I recognize how necessary that mindset shift seems to be for a truly successful transition into industry. Exchanging the original premise of academic work for the corporate premise of what that experience means, or what value it has for business, seems a practical necessity. And Fawzi offers very helpful advice for embracing that shift in thinking. It's just a shift that I find myself (as of yet) unable to make.
I always balked at students who called me their “boss” and asked me if they could take time off. I was adamant that I was NOT their boss, I was their advisor. But they really did choose to see their PhD as a job, something I never did. Maybe they are the smarties!
The jury is still out on whether the work boundaries lead to longer-term wellbeing, don't you think? Let's check back in with those smarties in twenty years, shall we?
I am neither an academic nor a monk, so take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve always seen academics as people who are motivated far more by passion than by money. Same with monks. Same with artists.
The traditional status benchmarks don’t work on this demographic. That makes them suspicious characters to everyone else, subjects of scorn and envy.
Artists, monks, and artists would rather study their passions than drive a new car. I consider myself an artist, and all I really want to do is write and read and hang out with people talking about art and life.
This puts us at a disadvantage because the world can offer us a chance to live that way and offer very little in return and we will take it. Monks to their cells, artists in their garrotes, and professors in their offices (far off campus, the good offices are for administrators).
Sean, I hear you, but when you use the word "monk," I also think of Ettarh's idea of "vocational awe," in which a field is rendered sacred and therefore "beyond critique." She makes this point about librarians, who are thought to be priest-like and who therefore are shamed for complaining about their salaries or work conditions. I don't think professors or artists need to throw themselves wholly into that vocational awe or the all-consuming calling. However, I think many of the jobs that require some of this creativity or passion need to be framed in ways that explicitly value those motivations. For that reason, I don't think academic work continues to make sense if reduced to purely commercial terms. There's too much expertise required for too little compensation. If you take things like respect or relationship out of the equation -- the deep "why" of the field -- or you minimize those things for market priorities, I think you reduce the value proposition of the job as *just* a job to nil.
Absolutely agree! If people are doing something because it means more to them than money, then the accountants can simply reduce the amount of money that they are paying. That’s another horror of capitalism, it commodifies passion, makes it part of the salary and compensation, and then drains the viability out of the vocation.
the fact that a meth lab is a place to reclaim one's soul explains the horror of academia pretty succinctly.
Ouch. But yes.
This is further evidence of the corrosive effect of capitalism. When education and research become only important in how they effect ‘business’—become a business itself—it drains the heart and joy, not to mention the expansion of human development, from the academics. I’ve seen more and more efforts to turn scholars into line workers since the business community began taking over funding of universities. As state legislatures continue to cut back on funding (so they can cut back on taxing the rich) it pushes the universities to find other revenue sources (the rich) who insist on conditions like that costs be cut and capitalism, and conservative views, be promoted.
I have noted with horror that some schools have cut back or eliminated liberal arts fields through the pressure from donors, because they are of no use in creating profit for their businesses—one university has even removed sociology as a general course credit.
Captialism will be the end of us all.
Wholeheartedly agree about turning scholars into line workers. Not sure if you've seen these two essays, but they elaborate on your closing line:
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/branding-will-be-the-end-of-us
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-positive-thinking-comes
100%
Being picky about definitions for a reason: a PhD isn't a job.
A PhD is a credential, not homegrown in the U.S. but an invasive species from Germany that first took hold in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins and then spread like kudzu across the continent's higher educational system. Like the bachelor's degree, its main power and allure comes from employers (and ultimately in the case of the PhD this means the accreditors) choosing to use it as a requirement for employment. And that's arguably the failure point for American higher education. This requirement makes little or no sense.
In the case of the PhD, it's required for jobs that manifestly do *not* require one to be a national or international expert in a subject with specialized training (or at least experience) in original research and (especially in STEM) proposal-writing. Then why require it for a college faculty member anywhere outside of R1 universities? Hell, why require that even at R1 universities in many situations? Every field has examples of non-PhDs who were cleverer and more creative researchers than the deadened souls who got the doctorate and churned out crap for generations.
Of course, one key reason that the PhD is required is simply that it *can* be, thanks to PhD overproduction for at least the past 55 years. Until that glut disappears, one way or another, the universities and their accreditors will continue to require the PhD as the union card for being able to teach, serve, and do research--the PhD qualifies one to do maybe 1 out of 3 of those tasks. This is perhaps the central absurdity of higher education, but one *so* central that it's hard to dolly back far enough to get it in view.
The PhD isn't a job, or a person, or even a sure-fire indicator of a truly educated person. (We all know plenty of exceptions.) It's just a ticket stub or an ink stamp, basically, something you need to show to the bouncer to get into the club, signifying time served and blood, sweat and tears spent in addition to money, although all of those put together were insufficient to get your ticket punched. Some committee, not of your peers, decided that in your case the time, blood, sweat, and tears were enough for the PhD. I have read that Johns Hopkins didn't even require a dissertation for the PhD in the beginning; that was added later. So, even what we think of as utterly intrinsic to the PhD, wasn't always. It's just a credential that gets you in the club, although the room is SRO and you may never get a seat or a drink.
I assert that if you think the PhD guarantees anything more than that, you have at some level bought into the bullshit the system serves up to keep the whole "Profzi" scheme (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030909s.gif) going. A good advisor and a passionate student can definitely make more than that out of a PhD, but it's optional.
Thanks for listening.
Good to have you back in the comments, John. Interesting history -- I was unaware of the back story of the PhD as a credential. There certainly is something arbitrary about seeing it as a "terminal" degree, because as you say there are plenty of scholars who *just* earn the PhD and don't grow much beyond it (or who never really became experts despite earning the credential), whereas there are others who truly become leaders in a field. It's kind of like the enormous spectrum of talent in the NFL, even if becoming a professional player is as high as you can go.
However, I want to push back on your last paragraph. "A good advisor and a passionate student can definitely make more than that out of a PhD." Exactly -- and this is what draws most of us in, some version of that mentorship at the undergraduate level and, if we are lucky, a continuation of it in graduate school. I had two excellent mentors as an undergraduate and two more as an MA and PhD candidate. It was perhaps unfair to expect my job to match those memories, but the part of the job that I loved was the chance to lean into that very kind of mentorship. It's not bullshit. But it often is untethered from market realities. And I think there is something to the Profzi scheme at many graduate schools, where exercising more birth control for PhDs would also mean thinning the faculty ranks.
But this is not all laid at the feet of professors -- I think the idyll of mentorship was once sustainable when there was more public support for higher education, etc, etc. It does indeed look like the future of higher ed depends on *not* depending on that public support, and so the entire system will need to be rebuilt. Where the mentorship idyll fits into that new mix remains to be seen, but it is the heart of the enterprise; without it, the PhD makes almost no sense at all.
It's interesting that you brought up Gail Boetticher.
In 2008, I was waiting at a bus stop and saw an advertisement for Breaking Bad, with the "Br" "Ba" elements from the periodic table. I had just flunked grad school, and began my first industry job (and substantially below a research position I was interested in). At the time, I didn't think academia was a business, and I ended up watching the entire first season of Breaking Bad. It was very interesting, but I stopped watching it, quite turned off by the cycle of violence that profitable routine enabled. When it started out it was just to pay the cancer bills. By the end of the first season, he was planning his kid's college funds with that. So while it worked as a entertaining show, I avoided becoming the "bad fan."
A couple years ago, I decided to watch the remaining seasons. I had heard so much about its popularity, and Chemistry being my minor, I wanted to find out what was so compelling. I am glad I did reach this scene with Gail, because it did address a wrinkle of truth in the fiction. Granted, some are just trying to survive (Walt), but the popularity of the show meant they could write another season like in Ozark and he could keep getting richer/greedier in a "What if?" scenario. I am not so sure it applies to Gail, but the love for pure science exists in a time and a place. I don't think some would go to those extremes if they didn't have a bill to pay (and even then some still wouldn't), but it makes for good TV. Quoting Walt Whitman was excellent.
Thanks for sharing your own story. Yes, I was put off by some of it, but almost immediately I found myself drawn to Walt as an underappreciated academic. The Grey Matter subplot, how Gretchen and Elliot made it big while Walt, their equal, was grinding away in the public schools, and the humiliation that teachers suffer from eroding public respect -- all of this spoke to me.
The speaker of Whitman's poem, who grows sick and sad in the lecture hall and wanders outside to gaze at the stars in silent wonder, has many affinities with the teachers fleeing the profession because of assessment, branding, and other corporate influences.
Thanks for that, I hadn't noticed the poem's significance to the university. One often overlooked scene with Gretchen and Eliot is that they DO offer him a job after finding out he has cancer, but Walt refuses it, out of pride. In that regard, I think Walt was terribly flawed, because his job as meth cook was not greater than corporate scientist. That was in the 1st season. When Gretchen calls him to ask if it was because of their past relationship, he denies that, which is plausible. Thus I think it was more because he wanted to earn his money without their help.
I agree -- there is also some class tension between Gretchen and Walt. When Gretchen discovers that Walt is lying to Skylar about their contribution to his cancer treatment, and they meet afterward to talk, it's clear that Walt has been carrying resentment of Gretchen's privilege for a very long time. We don't really learn how Walt was raised (his mother is in a nursing home somewhere, and they don't have a great relationship), but the strong implication was that he grew up poor or middle class and earned his professional career. We don't know anything about Gretchen and Eliot, really, other than that they were Walt's classmates. But Eliot seems to have come from a similar background, given that he and Walt subsisted on ramen as graduate students. The wealth from Grey Matter seems to have combined with Gretchen's family wealth to inflame the class differences between these friends.
I don't think this excuses Walt's refusal of the job offer. It would have been far more rewarding than his high school teaching. It would have been a different path to supporting (and preserving) his family. And it wouldn't have been charity if he contributed significantly to the research that launched the company. In that case, his pride really is a curious paradox -- he maintains his independence, but only by suffering other substantial indignities which would seem to directly weaken his pride (?).
I view a PhD as a meaningful credential of intellectual achievement. That achievement adds to a society's cultural capital, which ought to be an important goal, even if it can't be reduced to a quantitative measure. And as mentors, holders of PhDs are crucial to "producing" other PhDs.
If the holders of PhDs only receive wages inadequate to their time and financial investment in getting their degree and no other benefit, then that's ultimately going to be a big societal loss.
So, I'd say that if a PhD becomes solely a job with inadequate wages, that's a huge unforced error that will hurt America.
Some of this is related to our conversations about marriage and self-selection within elite bubbles. If intellectual achievement as a cultural good is a luxury, rather than a collective investment in our national heritage, then it no longer makes sense for people from my background to pursue it.
The other side of this is that the academic jobs that do offer attractive wages -- the endowed chairs with light teaching loads, the posh positions like Joyce Carol Oates's perch at Princeton -- are subsidized by the army of adjuncts and other ill-compensated faculty. There just is not enough money in the system to offer fair compensation across the board. And so anyone who says that their position is more than adequate is the beneficiary of an externalized cost that a contingent PhD bears.
Next thing you know, I'll be carrying banners through the street for Fair Trade Education! (Only half joking)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/08/dept-of-data-academia-elite/
Nice find! Also, https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-elite-overproduction-hypothesis & https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/how-geniuses-used-to-be-raised (I don't think overproduction of smartness is a bad thing in any case, but it helps that there are resources that can be utilized to allow their wings to spread, like 3 geniuses being able to design robotics or something, instead of 2 of them mopping floors)
Come teach high school! It’s not as bad as the internet makes it seem :)
Josh, it’s hard for me to think of the PhD as a job when it’s something people pay for. I mean, I know sometimes fellowships and research grants might be large enough to help the person earning the PhD into the black (as opposed to the red) but not by much. Eee. I need to check out the interview, but I’m afraid higher education has become a business, and there isn’t a whole hell of a lot we can do about that. And this is on a global scale. I suppose there might be a handful of small, well endowed liberal arts schools that can maintain some distance from the market, but that is only because some donors who've done very well in the market make the decision to prioritize liberal education over learning market tools. As far as PhDs (in the case of writers, MFAs), i need to study the interview before making pronouncements. But the combination of factors contributing to the lack of leverage held by faculty in these situations isn't getting better. Whether or not AI is problematic has no impact on the universities who are considering dropping composition requirements. I definitely couldn't have predicted the direction employment in higher ed has taken. I remember being encouraged to keep acquiring graduate degrees because there was going to be a huge demand for our skills when baby boomers retired. Do you remember that? It's painful to accept that all those years, all those all-nighters, all that reading, grading freshman composition essays, all of it would fail to take us to the promised land of tenure and a 2/2 load with plenty of travel funding, but here we are. There's a great facebook group called "The Professor is Out," where members advise one another about how to make transitions away from academia into other fields. I find reading the posts a cathartic activity.
Quite right, Ben -- we could not have foreseen these changes. It's a good reminder of how stupid it is for administrators to talk about strategic planning for the next 10 years, as if anyone can foresee a future that distant. No one saw ChatGPT coming, right? No one predicted COVID. Those were rapid, overnight game changers.
I did have tenure, full rank, and a 3/3 teaching load, and I gave it up. It still was not nirvana because of how much the air changed around that job.
Incidentally, I and many others have been banned from The Professor Is Out for running afoul of the very rigid rules that govern the site. This discussion thread, for instance, would not be welcome there because it talks too much about problems within academe (which the admins think will be triggering to people who have left?). I have come to understand that the primary purpose of that group is to recruit business for the owners. Good for them, but it's not really the open support group that it claims to be.
That’s interesting about the fb group. I’ll pay closer attention. I’ve had a good experience there to this point. But I’m really curious about why you would leave that job situation. I see others leaving tenured positions, as well. And I just don’t get it. I mean, I know certain departments are more toxic than others, and committee work can be a pain, but compared to some of the stories i hear from people who work three different adjunct jobs to make ends meet, full tenure, benefits, and a 3/3 load sound like heaven.
Excellent rebuttal to Abou-Chahine's comments. I never watched Breaking Bad (though I know the premise). Loved the clip.
I hope this doesn't come across as a rebuttal? The last thing I want to do is invite people on the podcast and then punk them with a surprise rebuttal later in the week. 😊 What I mean to examine here is just the cognitive dissonance that I still feel when I hear statements about academic work as *just* a job, even as I recognize how necessary that mindset shift seems to be for a truly successful transition into industry. Exchanging the original premise of academic work for the corporate premise of what that experience means, or what value it has for business, seems a practical necessity. And Fawzi offers very helpful advice for embracing that shift in thinking. It's just a shift that I find myself (as of yet) unable to make.
I always balked at students who called me their “boss” and asked me if they could take time off. I was adamant that I was NOT their boss, I was their advisor. But they really did choose to see their PhD as a job, something I never did. Maybe they are the smarties!
The jury is still out on whether the work boundaries lead to longer-term wellbeing, don't you think? Let's check back in with those smarties in twenty years, shall we?
I am neither an academic nor a monk, so take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve always seen academics as people who are motivated far more by passion than by money. Same with monks. Same with artists.
The traditional status benchmarks don’t work on this demographic. That makes them suspicious characters to everyone else, subjects of scorn and envy.
Artists, monks, and artists would rather study their passions than drive a new car. I consider myself an artist, and all I really want to do is write and read and hang out with people talking about art and life.
This puts us at a disadvantage because the world can offer us a chance to live that way and offer very little in return and we will take it. Monks to their cells, artists in their garrotes, and professors in their offices (far off campus, the good offices are for administrators).
I have no idea what to do about all this.
Sean, I hear you, but when you use the word "monk," I also think of Ettarh's idea of "vocational awe," in which a field is rendered sacred and therefore "beyond critique." She makes this point about librarians, who are thought to be priest-like and who therefore are shamed for complaining about their salaries or work conditions. I don't think professors or artists need to throw themselves wholly into that vocational awe or the all-consuming calling. However, I think many of the jobs that require some of this creativity or passion need to be framed in ways that explicitly value those motivations. For that reason, I don't think academic work continues to make sense if reduced to purely commercial terms. There's too much expertise required for too little compensation. If you take things like respect or relationship out of the equation -- the deep "why" of the field -- or you minimize those things for market priorities, I think you reduce the value proposition of the job as *just* a job to nil.
Absolutely agree! If people are doing something because it means more to them than money, then the accountants can simply reduce the amount of money that they are paying. That’s another horror of capitalism, it commodifies passion, makes it part of the salary and compensation, and then drains the viability out of the vocation.