Can You Have a Rewarding Intellectual Life Outside Academe? CHE article

[marshwiggle]

When I say that college doesn't teach critical thinking, teachers accepting deferred payment while the state unions were clearly going under and the adjuncts death-marching for peanuts are two recurring examples of the kinds of situations that I mean: educated people had access to the qualitative and quantitative data for areas that matter greatly to their own lives and yet continued to choose poorly.

This behavior may seem less of a conundrum if we changed the title of the thread to "can you have a rewarding intellectual identity outside academia?"  Identity is what keeps those not-likely-to-mine-again "coal miners" in West Virginia against every signal the economy can send their way. Attributing the stubbornness to stupidity is inaccurate, and will lead to bad policy choices by those who would like to improve the situation.

Can you elaborate on this? What would you attribute the stubbornness to?

[spork]

People who believe the government when the government promises things it can't do and the evidence is so overwhelming that the government can't keep the promise means people are failing at critical thinking.  The pensions for state unions have been so underfunded for so long in some places, which has regularly made the national news as well as the local news, that anyone claiming now that they didn't know pretty much means they didn't want to know or at least they didn't want to believe all the evidence. 

I'd expand this. Can anyone name a single western country that isn't running a budget deficit, and hasn't been doing so for the past few decades? It's always easiest in a democracy for the party in power, of whatever political stripe, to promise money to voters in order to get elected. And that money is going to come from their grandchildren. (Parties of the right offer it by lowering taxes below what is needed to fund government programs; parties of the left offer it by expanding programs beyond the revenue they take in.) The system is not sustainable, and there isn't a secret pot of gold somewhere that they just need to dip into to make everything unicorns and rainbows.

Yes. If "Western" includes Europe, then Luxembourg, Iceland, Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Germany, based on 2017 estimates. All countries that I would argue tend to be better governed than the USA.

[Hibush]

When I say that college doesn't teach critical thinking, teachers accepting deferred payment while the state unions were clearly going under and the adjuncts death-marching for peanuts are two recurring examples of the kinds of situations that I mean: educated people had access to the qualitative and quantitative data for areas that matter greatly to their own lives and yet continued to choose poorly.

This behavior may seem less of a conundrum if we changed the title of the thread to "can you have a rewarding intellectual identity outside academia?"  Identity is what keeps those not-likely-to-mine-again "coal miners" in West Virginia against every signal the economy can send their way. Attributing the stubbornness to stupidity is inaccurate, and will lead to bad policy choices by those who would like to improve the situation.

Can you elaborate on this? What would you attribute the stubbornness to?

Most people have a sense of identity that includes some characteristics that are very tough to shift. If you come from a long line of miners and have always lived among miners in a mining town, you may identify as one. Even if you move elsewhere, you are a miner among strangers doing work that puts food on the table but isn't the work you were meant to do. I'm using a bit of a caricature in this example, but it is one that is familiar to many. That's the way people are.

People who have been the intellectuals in their family and secondary school find an intellectual community in academe and identify as academics though years of training among like-minded people. Their worth to themselves as a human becomes tied closely to their position in the academy.

In either case, abandoning your identity is not a matter of economic logic. The fear of not knowing who you are is pretty substantial.

[downer]

In either case, abandoning your identity is not a matter of economic logic. The fear of not knowing who you are is pretty substantial.

I'd agree with that. I didn't come from an academic family -- far from it, I was the first in my family to go to university. But I liked academic work and then went through the ritual initiation of grad school and the hazing of the job search. I've been at the heart of the academy (the cold dead heart, I'm tempted to say), and then more at its periphery. There is definitely a threat to identity to no longer be recognized as an academic.

It helps to be Stoic or Buddhist about it all, and to focus on actual accomplishments and real relationships rather than ephemeral notions of identity which are basically to do with status.

It is worth noting that a lot of people who are certainly full academics have an imposter syndrome or have a lingering sense that they never quite made it because they didn't achieve their dreams (Ivy League job, Nobel Prize, or whatever).

Academic identity seems pretty fragile.

[polly_mer]

In either case, abandoning your identity is not a matter of economic logic. The fear of not knowing who you are is pretty substantial.

Sure, and yet the fact remains that clinging to a comfortable identity that isn't putting food on the table etc. as regularly as one needs means one has chosen a comfortable fiction that comes with a less-than-comfortable life.  Insisting that the world should change so your comfortable fiction comes with a comfortable life means failing at critical thinking.  That's not stupidity in the sense of lacking cognitive power; that's failing to weigh the evidence in such a way as to come to a reasonable conclusion.

Again, I think of the distinctions out in the world between, say, the Syrian refugees who may have left with just the clothes on their backs to go towards something better and the employed people living in tent cities in parts of California.  The coal miners who have turned to hunting/trapping/barter to remain in their communities are making a different, and much more logically justifiable, choice in my mind than the people who are putting huge efforts into bringing the CUNY adjunct wages not quite up to the poverty line.  A supportive community can make up for a lot of economic buying power.

However, the folks who are already in the city where the other jobs exist so they wouldn't have to move and would be supported as they explore other perfectly good middle-class identities that involve being surrounded by communities of educated people baffle me.  I am also angry as I complete yet another week of being smacked in the face with the realities here of:

* having large fractions of students in November turning down as uncompetitive $25/hour summer internships for undergrads who will have completed their first-year of college in May

* having multiple people turn down six-figure salaries for recent college graduates as being uncompetitive, even when done as spot offers in October for people who will graduate in May

* being unable to fill full-time, benefitted positions that don't even require a college degree, but do require good organizational and logistical skills including being able to run multiple calendars

* running so short-handed all the time that we have to figure out how to free up even more time to recruit people who are open to going to school on our dime so they can fill some of these positions in a few years.

And yet, CUNY adjuncts are working very hard to mobilize a strike to bring their wages up to poverty level in NYC.  I have a lot of sympathy and respect for people who are risking their lives to get somewhere better.  I understand choosing to convert to the good enough barter/hunting/gardening economy instead of living a weird, displaced life.  I understand valuing daily tasks enough that one would make the trade-off to have a better daily experience than more money once the money is good enough.

However, I am out of sympathy for the adjuncts in large metropolitan areas where the disconnect between the message (we're teaching really valuable skills for life as well as job, which is why everyone in college must take these general education courses) and lived reality is so glaringly huge that it must be able to be seen from outer space.

[marshwiggle]

In either case, abandoning your identity is not a matter of economic logic. The fear of not knowing who you are is pretty substantial.

Sure, and yet the fact remains that clinging to a comfortable identity that isn't putting food on the table etc. as regularly as one needs means one has chosen a comfortable fiction that comes with a less-than-comfortable life.  Insisting that the world should change so your comfortable fiction comes with a comfortable life means failing at critical thinking.  That's not stupidity in the sense of lacking cognitive power; that's failing to weigh the evidence in such a way as to come to a reasonable conclusion.

This reminds me of a young man I know who barely scraped through university because his real dream was of being a musician. The band got more of his time than school. His parents paid for his education, and after graduation, he hasn't had steady jobs due to time spent touring, etc. His parents still subsidize his apartment.

For how long should they pay in order that he can pursue his "dream"? Whose fault is it that
"the dream" doesn't pay the rent? Is it because of governement underfunding of the arts?

Who owes him his dream?

[Hibush]

In either case, abandoning your identity is not a matter of economic logic. The fear of not knowing who you are is pretty substantial.

Sure, and yet the fact remains that clinging to a comfortable identity that isn't putting food on the table etc. as regularly as one needs means one has chosen a comfortable fiction that comes with a less-than-comfortable life.  Insisting that the world should change so your comfortable fiction comes with a comfortable life means failing at critical thinking.  That's not stupidity in the sense of lacking cognitive power; that's failing to weigh the evidence in such a way as to come to a reasonable conclusion.

...

However, I am out of sympathy for the adjuncts in large metropolitan areas where the disconnect between the message (we're teaching really valuable skills for life as well as job, which is why everyone in college must take these general education courses) and lived reality is so glaringly huge that it must be able to be seen from outer space.

To restate one of your points, you would be grateful to be able to hire several of these dunderheads at many times their current pay if they would only think to apply to your non-ac offerings.

On the second point, you do wonder when you see the invisible hand of the market whacking someone upside the head all the time, and they don't move. Friedman would be having a cow! In many ways, I'm not particularly sympathetic either because much of the exploitation in academe is driven by simple supply-demand market forces. Perhaps the right word is empathy. That is, to understand that there are intangible things someone would need to change in order to even see other opportunities as applying to them.