Food stamps: An Oldie, but a Goodie

[mahagonny]

These all seem like good ideas to me.

Personally I'd like to see our various national associations (ALA, APA, MLA, AAUP, etc.) work more like lobbying groups. 

The MLA, at least, has been very complacent for a number of years---it used to be, in the era before Internet job lists, the prominence of the phone interview, and Skype, etc.---that if one wanted an initial interview one needed access to the MLA job list and the annual conference.  Now, of course, things have changed and MLA membership has seen a steady decline as its grip on the employment process has seen a steady declining.  Issues such as adjunctification and loss of undergraduate majors were simply not on the Association's radar.  Now MLA is trying to act more like a player, which is good, but too little too late. 

If the MLA is going to stay relevant it needs to reinvent and reinvigorate itself.  No one entity can resolve the issues facing the humanities, but certainly these national groups can play a role.

These have no power because no one needs them. Accreditation is something schools need. US News and World Report Rankings have something people need. They influence. Academia pretends to have a hunger for ideas, but responds to rewards, like all businesses do.

[lightning]

The most relevant and largest problem, the dis-investment in higher education and education in general, is a problem that "we" can only help to reverse. "We" can't do it alone, but each of us can certainly answer the call when we are asked to engage the larger population. This can come in many forms, but the important part is that "we" all participate in the engagement.

Simple probability tells me that investment in higher education is as likely to go down in the future as it is to go up. Academics tend to talk about this as though it is obvious some wrong has been committed. The rest of the world does not think so.

A realistically attainable goal would be, through faculty governance of some sort (and if you don't have it, then it's time to work to get it back), to reverse admin bloat and mission creep  that contributes to admin bloat, and restore the faculty positions replaced by administrative positions. Yeah, the remaining tenured faculty members have to get in people's faces.

So why haven't they?
Is this what you really want? The way it is now, faculty blame administration for using low paid adjuncts. That's still a pretty good deal for someone with a good stable job, pension, promotions, etc. Who gets blamed when you are the ones who govern?

Why haven't they? What makes you think we are not trying? It's because admin doesn't want to give up power and their cushy jobs. Duh.

Yes, we blame admin for using low paid adjuncts, because that's what they do and will continue to do unabated, if someone doesn't consistently get in their face about it. The tenured faculty are always fighting for more tenure-track faculty lines, or at the least stemming the conversion of TT lines to NTT adjunct positions.

You're right. It's a great deal for administrators--they get the pension, promotions, and certainly more job security than the adjuncts that they displaced. I'm glad you recognize that, at least.

Who gets blamed when faculty governs? They faculty don't fully govern and they never have. The governance is shared. The faculty governance eroded (vs. the administrators) when the percentage of full-time tenure track faculty members were reduced, swinging the pendulum power, towards administration. But I tell you what. Faculty will take the blame, if given full governance. Let's see what happens.

As for what the rest of the world thinks, you're wrong.

[mahagonny]

What is your plan for how to pay for a tenure track only workforce? It won't happen, not on a large scale. Everything costs more than it did on the old days. Building construction and maintenance, utilities, facilities for students who cannot walk, diversity staff to get funds from the government, counselors and support groups for grief-stricken students, tenure track faculty unions that need dues, HMO's that cost more every year. The tenure system works by having a second class have-not 'we don't even want them here' faculty. The only debate is going to be over how many sacrificial teaching-only positions will be maintained.

As for what the rest of the world thinks, you're wrong.

I've been to adjunct faculty demonstrations and I've met the public. Enough to take their temperature. Some will say 'of course you should be able to get health insurance and benefits' and some will say 'so, you wish you had tenure at your job. So do I. How much will it cost me to get what you're after? I'm paying enough tax and tuition & fees for my kid already.' You can win people over if you're charming and lucky but it's not fast work. It's like cutting the grass at a golf course with a push-mower.

[marshwiggle]

The elephant in the room here is the declining student-age population. No amount of advocacy or protests can change that, and that is the iceberg that the post-secondary Titanic is approaching.

[pigou]

The second elephant in the room is that a lot of PhD students are also not very good at doing research and/or teaching. It's just not socially optimal to get all of them employed in academia. Many of them need to be doing something else. I'd also really enjoy being a world class violinist, but I learned early on that it's not going to happen.

I've noticed a few students in economics (but way more so in other fields) coming in motivated by activism. E.g. "I want to get a PhD to show how X is causing Y..." -- that's a recipe for disaster. Research is not an exercise in confirming what you already know about the world. And you don't need a graduate degree to engage in selective interpretation of information.

Of course this is true for virtually everything. Most doctors aren't great either, which is why new surgical innovations often decrease average life expectancy: overconfident doctors start doing it, even though they're not properly trained for it, and their patients end up dying. But that's still after we weed out the worst of the worst.

But that's also why efforts to keep failing hospitals open are so destructive: they end up attracting low-information patients who don't know how to evaluate hospital quality (often the poor and minorities) and get them killed. The stakes in education aren't quite as high, but I really wonder if universities that are struggling to stay open really end up serving their students.

[mahagonny]

The second elephant in the room is that a lot of PhD students are also not very good at doing research and/or teaching.

How do they get awarded the PhD if they are not good at doing research? I thought the thesis defending session was pretty intense.

[ciao_yall]

The second elephant in the room is that a lot of PhD students are also not very good at doing research and/or teaching.

How do they get awarded the PhD if they are not good at doing research? I thought the thesis defending session was pretty intense.

They do it once to get the PhD, then either don't have many good followup ideas, or decide it's not what they want to do for the rest of their lives.

[marshwiggle]

The second elephant in the room is that a lot of PhD students are also not very good at doing research and/or teaching.

How do they get awarded the PhD if they are not good at doing research? I thought the thesis defending session was pretty intense.

They do it once to get the PhD, then either don't have many good followup ideas, or decide it's not what they want to do for the rest of their lives.

I figured that out doing my master's, so i never went for the PhD.

[tuxthepenguin]

The second elephant in the room is that a lot of PhD students are also not very good at doing research and/or teaching.

How do they get awarded the PhD if they are not good at doing research? I thought the thesis defending session was pretty intense.

It's one thing to do research when you're getting constant feedback from committee members, and something else to do research on your own. Also, standards can sometimes be low, as there's an incentive for students to finish. A graduated advisee doesn't take any of your time.

[pigou]

The second elephant in the room is that a lot of PhD students are also not very good at doing research and/or teaching.

How do they get awarded the PhD if they are not good at doing research? I thought the thesis defending session was pretty intense.

As the saying goes, "a good dissertation is a done dissertation." It's generally a learning experience and the product is never perfect, nor meant to be. But being able to finish a large project, while not trivial, is not necessarily an indication that you can produce journal articles that are well executed and of a broad interest to the field.

The norm in my field is to have 3 papers that are "publishable" -- which is quite different from "are published." Part of that is, of course, just the time it takes to push a paper through the publication process. But a lot of it captures research that was promising, but for some reason just didn't work out and hence won't be of interest to selective journals. Or research that is a small extension of existing work that is of interest to people in a narrow niche.

That's not necessarily the fault of the student, but there are a lot of dissertations that consist of 3 papers, none of which end up in selective journals. That can suggest either bad luck (research is naturally hard) or problems with mentoring. And some of that can be fixed with a postdoc. But it can also suggest that the student just wasn't able to generate any novel ideas, or coasted through grad school, doing the bare minimum to get the degree. An academic department just doesn't hire people as Assistant Professors to then teach them how to do good research. At that point, they're supposed to be the experts already.

I have friends who early-on decided they didn't want to pursue an academic career with their degree and they worked maybe a third of the hours of the others in the program. It worked out fine for them, but at the end of the program, there was just no way that they would have been competitive on the academic market. In some cases, the decision may be less deliberate -- but the outcome is the same. The dissertation is the bare minimum, which nowhere in life is sufficient to get the most desirable and competitive jobs.