Sunday Comics

"A Valentine's Story." By Soon-to-be-Jaded Dissertator, with a credit to his GF, the Ambivalent Psychbot, for the idea. (Click to make it big.)

Five Passengers Set Sail that Day, For a Three Hour Tour, A Three Hour Tour

I know it's not exactly the season for this sort of issue anymore, but this piece by a law prof in Inside Higher Ed's got me thinking again about how academics dress. I'm actually one for profs dressing reasonably well to teach, and that obviously goes for candidates in interview and job-talk situations too. But something was really rubbing me the wrong way about this clown's finger-wagging defense of wearing tie and creased pants to teach. Part of it was the patent vacuity of his "arguments". ("The tie is important because it’s always been important; its importance makes it important." Got that?) I mean, I think the author thinks this is funny. Tough to say, though.

But the real problem was, the guy's got no actual fashion sense. He pretty plainly hasn't passed his eyes over the cover of a GQ while waiting in the grocery store check-out line since at least 1978. Get a load of this: "For men, Fussell’s default rule works: “You can’t go wrong with the classic navy blue blazer and khakis”." A "classic" navy blazer and khakis? Seriously? This is supposed to be advice for academics? But that's Mr. Howell, asshat, not the Professor.

Hold the Line, Love Isn't Always on Time, Oh Oh Oh

In response to my last post, Anon. 4:59 says,

This is just false about VAP positions and lectureships; there is no other way to spin it. . . . If the CHE author is being sincere, I don't understand at all what his department SC is doing, unless it's just an accident and coincidence that the finalists ended up that way. But then the author shouldn't draw the general and sweeping conclusions that he does. If the author is not sincere, or if he is just being careless and not thinking, then that's pretty awful, given the demoralizing force of his message. But it's just not true.

The claim at issue is whether doing one-years after you finish your can negatively affect your odds of getting a tenure-track job. I don't want to pick on Anon. 4:59, because I think his or her reaction's both common and pretty natural. But I also think it's wrong.

Of course you can offset the negative influence by getting some teaching experience, getting into a more structured groove working or whatever. But you're still offsetting negative influences. Finding a more structured routine for working is the only upside of having to teach three or more times as much as you'd have taught as a grad student. And most of those classes are probably going to be new preps, since grad students usually don't get to teach upper level classes. You're also going have to start worrying about picking up the taint of loserdom. No, not that kind of taint. The taint some search committees see on candidates who've been kicking around from one-year to one-year for a few years. "No one else thought this guy was worth hiring, so do we need to look all that closely at him?" Again, that's not all search committees, and those negatives can hopefully be offset. But it is some search committees, even if we wish it weren't, and we're still dealing with negatives.

I Don't Like the Odds You're Giving

I'm trying to get my head around the idea that in all likelihood I'll be on a one-year next year. For various reasons, it's not an easy thing to reconcile myself to. But one of the reasons is, I know the more my paycheck depends on my teaching--the more time I spend teaching--the harder it's going to be to do research. But research is what's going to get me the job I want.

So when I read this, from a someone on an English department search committee, it hurt:

Of the 30 candidates who made our initial cut, almost all were in the final year of their Ph.D. programs. Four were in their first or second year as postdoctoral fellows, two were in their first year as visiting assistant professors, and one was in her first year as a full-time lecturer. In other words, the odds were against you if you were applying for our position as an adjunct or a lecturer -- not because we wanted a fresh Ph.D., but because we wanted promising research. And those who don't have the luxury of a graduate stipend or a light teaching load have a hard time producing scholarship on par with those who do.

I know it's possible to publish your way off the teaching treadmill, but I also know teaching more is only going to make it harder, not easier, to publish. Looking ahead to next year, I can see my odds getting longer.

I Don't Want to Talk About it Now

I'm tired of getting asked about the job market. I'm tired of people who know I'm on the market asking me how it's going. You know? The line that goes, "Hey, PGS, how are you doing? You're on the market this year, right? How's it going?"

When I say I'm tired of the question, I mean it actually makes me tired. It sort of deflates me a little, like it takes some of the air out of my lungs. What the fuck am I supposed to say? "Well, gosh, friend, it really fucking sucks. All the work I did this year made no fucking difference getting me closer to a job than I got last year, and I'm spending a lot of time trying to convince myself I'm not a complete fucking failure at the only thing I've ever really wanted to do with my life. How the fuck are you?"

Can't say that, can I? Wouldn't be polite. But as I've been getting more tired with the question, my answer's been changing a little. There's pressure to be upbeat about it all, to show you're keeping your spirits up. Actually admitting in public that you're getting the shit kicked out of you is sort of an unseemly embarrassment, like pissing your pants in public. And at first, when people asked me how I was doing, I'd clench my face up into my best happy-optimistic-simpleton smile and say, "Nothing happening so far! We'll see!" or some thing just as insipid. Then I'd keep the same idiotic expression on my face while me and whoever I was talking to went through some bullshit about how something was sure to come up or whatever.

But fuck it. Right now, the job market's not small talk for me, and I don't have it in me to pretend it is. So now when someone asks me about the market, they get a blank look from me and I tell them, "Nothing's happening." Then they figure out it's time to talk about something else.

'Cause What You Say is What You Say

Just a quick housekeeping note. As you can see down on the left, we've added a recent comments feed, which will hopefully make it easier to scan for whatever you're looking for in comments.

Also, here's a shout out to PJMB reader DC for patient instructions on how to do something so easy, I should retroactively fail my qualifying exams for not knowing how to do it.

Travel fund for female grad students.

There's been a lot of discussion here lately about the dearth of women in philosophy and what the hell we can do about it. (Which discussion I will confess to having mostly sat out because I tend to just get too freaked out and pissed off when so many of the people who are supposed to be my colleagues in this discipline show themselves to be so mindbogglingly misogynistic. It's like I'd almost rather not know what the dickheads really think of me, you know?)

Well, Feminist Philosophers brings news of some of the good people at ESWIP putting their money where their mouths are. They've set up a fund to help female grad students defray some of the (sometimes prohibitively expensive) costs of attending the Eastern APA. Go. Donate if you can.

Come on Pretty Baby Call My Bluff, 'Cause for You My Best Was Never Good Enough

So here's an admission that hardly puts me in the minority of grad students. I have some perfectionist tendencies. I'm almost never happy with my work. I know perfectionism's supposed be bad because it's keeping me from being happy and it's unhealthy and blah, blah fucking blah, but fuck that. I want the work to be good, so cram it Dr. Phil.

Except that right now I happen to be gunning to finish my dissertation, so spending two days getting the language and organization of a single paragraph exactly right isn't going to work. The problem, of course, is that you can't just turn the perfectionism off when it won't work with your schedule. So I'm fucked, right?

Actually, no. It turns out getting the shit kicked out of me on the job market's been really awesome for making me not fucking care about the quality of my work. I wrote a sucky paragraph this morning, and when I reread it and realized just how deeply sucky it was, I thought, "Fuck, that paragraph sucks. I should really fix that." Then I stared at it for another minute or two before thinking, "Fuck it." And then I kept writing.

Sunday Comics

Soon-to-be-Jaded Dissertator tells us we need to "watch out for search committee pirates." Sounds smart to me. I sure as hell feel like holing up with some real work for a while, and not having to worry about search committees. (Click to make it big.)

I Hope that Someone Gets My Message in a Bottle

Leiter's posted an e-mail from someone whose department's hiring, and who got recommendation letters from students in some application packages. There's the question of how useful those letters could be. (Answer: it depends on the letter, doesn't it?) But there's also the question of why anyone sent them in the first place.

Well, as one of Leiter's commentors points out, letters from students were required by at least one school that posted an ad in one of the fall JFPs. I can't remember what school it was (and I'm too lazy to look it up), but I remember the ad. It asked for (I think) at least six letters, three of which had to be from former students.

I remember, because it made me think, "Hey, maybe I should get some letters from students to go in my teaching portfolio." To be a little more precise, it made me think that for about 30 seconds, before I realized I had no way of contacting most of my students. Even if I could get in touch with some of them, I'm just not sure I could get good letters from them. (Taking a barely literate kid, and working with him over only a single semester, getting him to the point where he was only a terrible writer--that's actually something I'm pretty fucking proud of. But I still don't want my letters written by terrible writers.)

Anyway, here's the thing. A lot of people applied to that job asking for student letters, because a lot of people apply to every job. So a lot people got letters from students. Now, they were also applying to a bunch of other jobs, and a lot of those asked for "evidence of teaching excellence" or something just as vague. Why the not send the letters? Because who the fuck really knows what "evidence of teaching excellence" is?

Update: Okay, thanks to Jennifer in comments, who says the schools asking for letters from students was Oxford College at Emory University. Also, she's curious to know if people did send student letters, and if it helped at all.