The McWetlog

Why, oh why, did an academic career ever seem like a good idea? Andrew Potter, filling in for Andrew Coyne on his blog, is, like me a refugee from academia, and notes with some gratification that starting professors in New York earn half the salary of starting plumbers.

And Philip Greenspun tackles the question of women in science — the question that got now-former Harvard prez Larry Summers fired — by taking a similar tack: “Adjusted for IQ and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.” He argues that even schoolteachers are better off, especially once you figure in job security (rock solid for teachers at the point where profs are denied tenure) and the fact that teachers start earning a living wage sooner.

It reinforces the suspicion I’ve had that many academics are where they are because they can’t function well anywhere else — it doesn’t surprise me that profs are employees from hell. Those that can go elsewhere, do. As Potter writes (in the first link), “The simple fact is, trying to be an academic didn’t make me happy, it made me miserable. And, slowly, it dawned on me that there are more remunerative ways of being miserable. Or at least, less miserable ways of being ill-paid.” (Oddly enough, I’ve done both.)

(See previous entry: The road to poverty is paved with graduate degrees.)

That universities are trying to cope with incoming students lacking basic skills is not new; when I was a teaching assistant in the mid- to late 1990s, I too was surprised by how poorly written some of the papers handed into me to mark were. At the time my reaction was to blame the high schools for not preparing the kids properly for university — we were doing their job for them, I fumed — and the Globe and Mail article echoes that line of thought.

Except that now I hear from high school teachers who complain that students are leaving elementary school with virtually no math or reading skills. If you think it’s bad to have first-year university students with a 90 average but only Grade 9 writing skills, how about a Grade 7 student who reads at a Grade 2 level? (Granted, that student is not likely to be university-bound.) And then I hear from elementary teachers who have to play catchup with kids who are way behind the norm for their age group, and they’re spending a good chunk of their limited time playing catchup. Once a kid falls behind, it seems that it’s almost impossible for the system to bring them back up. But where does it start? Blaming the teachers (or the system) at the earlier level, it seems, is at best incomplete.

Via Richard, a year-old article in the Village Voice about the perils of the academic job market that makes me think I’m better off financially than I would be had I not quit the PhD in 1999. Of course, I thought that back when I was pulling down $52,000 a year from the federal government. Now I think that even in my present, far less lucrative circumstances, I’m better off. Because at least I’m not trapped in a system that routinely exploits graduate students and sessional instructors.

Grad students have always resigned themselves to relative poverty in anticipation of a cushy, tenured payoff. But in the past decade, the rules of the game have changed. Budget pressures have spurred universities’ increasing dependence on so-called “casual labor,” which damages both the working conditions of graduate students and their job prospects. Over half of the classroom time at major universities is now logged by non-tenure-track teachers, both graduate teaching assistants — known as TAs — and adjuncts. At community colleges, part-timers make up 60 percent of the faculties.

Even if the job market is dire, there is no real disincentive to a department having as many graduate students as it can. Apart from the prestige, they’re a cheap labour pool now, and ensure that there will be a ready supply of desperate sessional instructors to work for low pay.

The also pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton was a frequent contributor to Invisible Adjunct’s blog and has penned a series of cautionary columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is even more blunt than IA. “The premise of graduate education in the humanities is a lie: Students are not apprentices preparing for a life of scholarship and teaching,” he says. “They are a cheap source of labor and status for institutions and faculty and, after they earn their degrees, most join the reserve army of the academic underemployed.” Benton, a professor at a small liberal arts college, warns his students about trying to follow in his footsteps. “My experience as a working-class kid who finally earned an Ivy League Ph.D. is that higher education is not about social mobility or personal enrichment; it is one trap among many for people who are uninitiated into the way power and influence operate in this culture.”

The article goes on to point out that PhDs do much better once they leave the academic job market, which I can certainly attest to. Of course they’re talking about better in financial terms; while graduate school is a case study in deferred gratification, it’s usually ego and prestige that motivate academics — not money. Leaving academia behind is a tremendous blow to your self-image: after years of relentless focus, you’re no longer sure what your purpose in life is. Not easy to walk away, even if it’s in your interest to do so. Small wonder that that’s exploited.

The news today that Jaroslav Pelikan and Paul Ricoeur have both won the second John W. Kluge Prize in the Human Sciences (AP wire story in The Globe and Mail and other sources; cf. The Washington Post) was the first time I’d heard of the prize, which is deliberately aimed at those disciplines in the humanities and social sciences not covered by the Nobels. Unfortunately, many of the historians I think would be obvious candidates for such a prize are deceased; this is an idea that would have been welcome 30 years ago. (More on the obscure media tycoon who endowed the eponymous prize from The Museum of Broadcast Communications and Wikipedia.)