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Why Competing For Tenure Is Like Trying To Become a Drug Lord
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Scott Jaschik writes in Inside Higher Education that the academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders and with income distribution within gangs extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities. According to Alexandre Afonso, academic systems rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of 'outsiders' ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. 'What you have is an increasing number of brilliant PhD graduates arriving every year into the market hoping to secure a permanent position as a professor and enjoying freedom and high salaries, a bit like the rank-and-file drug dealer hoping to become a drug lord,' says Afonso. 'To achieve that, they are ready to forgo the income and security that they could have in other areas of employment by accepting insecure working conditions in the hope of securing jobs that are not expanding at the same rate.' The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on adjunct lecturers who rely on food stamps to make ends meet. Afonso adds that he is not trying to discourage everyone from pursuing Ph.D.s but that prospective graduate students need to go in with a full awareness of the job market."
If you're staff, you're not even a potential member of the club. It doesn't matter how much of an expert you in are in your field, if you're not faculty, your opinion doesn't matter.
There are many career paths, such as professional sports or marketers. But let's use a really inflammatory example to belittle higher education yet again.
with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders and with income distribution within gangs extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities.
So academia is just like the rest of the world, then.
I'm not really sure this is an apt analogy. Yes, you forgo higher wages while in graduate school, but if you don't make drug lord^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a tenure track position, you can head to industry and make a good wage. I don't think street dealers have this option. Yes, most of us want to go into academia, but having a fallback option with 50-100% higher salary doesn't seem so bad (speaking as a mathematician here--maybe humanities Ph.D.'s really are like drug dealers).
Another thing they downplay in the reward side of academia is the time flexibility. There are absolutely zero vacation days, but for the most part, outside of hours physically spent in the classroom (usually less than 10 a week, less than 40 weeks a year), you get to arrange your schedule. I've known professors who worked from home in the morning and the office in the afternoon, and one who showed up at 4:00 PM and stayed until 12 or 1 (I was always amused when he joined us for a beer "after" work on occasion). To a lot of us, this is a huge perk
Generally speaking, not so many people end up dead in battles for tenure.
No left turn unstoned.
I notice that the article is completely devoid of any subject detail. PhD in what? If you are a STEM graduate (or PhD) and are adept at computers and mathematics, this would be a crisis. The reality is, that academic jobs depend on writing grants to fund the university. Depending on your discipline the university "deserves" more or less, but you will find those promoted pay the "administrators". By more or less I mean, an English professor needs a library, a chemistry professor needs a lab.
Universities are a business, their product is teaching students, and carrying out research, which pays for staff.
Endowments (i.e. donations which are a tax write off for the donor...) pay for endowed chairs.
Faculty is the equivalent "company man"...... The customer may get to complain, but anyone else...
Another one of these posts with multiple links. So what's the principlal TFA?
Education is like drugs. Once they get you hooked, you can't quit. The fuckers. It's more than 20 years since I got my MS and my house is still full of books.
I am facing the dilemma of whether to go (back) to the industry, where I was working before starting my PhD, or continue in academia as a researcher. On one had you have the job security and better salary offered in industry. On the other hand you have the thrill of scientific work and fewer (albeit not 0) corporate psychopaths.
I decided on Friday that I'll go for academia. My health is failing, I think I have 10 to 15 years if I'm lucky, and life is too precious to waste it on doing something I don't like all that much, just because of money.
If you do work your way up, and become a tenured man within the organization, can you send your grad students and postdocs out to do hits on faculty aligned with rival cartels?
Except that the UEA climate department was investigated and no problems with their science were found...
But let's use a really inflammatory example to belittle higher education yet again.
Not really - he is just a little ignorant of the correct academic terminology. For future reference they generally prefer to be called the "Faculty of Pharmacology" rather than the "Drug Lords".
I can tell you as someone who has interviewed a lot of engineering candidates, PhD's tend to get a very skeptical eye. Occasionally you find a great one, but usually they are a nightmare of disfunction, and almost never anything in the middle. It is too bad we can't accept more of a skills based compensation model, instead of one that automatically pays a large premium for an extra slip of paper, no matter how much of walking horror show it makes you skill wise.
Its the real world telling you your an ideal candidate for working at McDonalds
If six sentences is too much for you to read, you should learn to enjoy your ignorance and stop complaining that you don't understand what the adults are talking about.
I do have to say, that was an interesting use of the word "disciplinary" in Jaschik's first sentence.
Grammatically accurate, yes, but I had totally the wrong picture in my mind when he said "disciplinary meetings."
--or, from the rest of the articles, maybe not so inaccurate as all that--
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Most people don't realize that the tenure-track faculty position is rapidly disappearing at U.S. universities. Tenure is instead becoming a tool to accomplish two goals: (1) recruit superstars, hopefully with the goal of increasing your school's numbers in the USN&WR college rankings, and (2) reshape the demographics of the faculty, e.g. increased female and minority hires.
Otherwise, tenure has outlived its usefulness, at least to university administrators. Go to any major university, and you'll find tenured professors who "retired in place" years ago, and who are worse than useless as researchers or teachers. To them, academic "freedom" translates to "leave me alone, you can't tell me what to do". University administrators have had their fill of those types. It's the old "10% making the other 90% look bad" syndrome, and consequently the other 90% must bear the brunt.
The future of academia is one-year to five-year contracts with non-tenured faculty. If you can bring in research contract money, your academic salary will still be reasonably competitive, at least in engineering and the hard sciences. If your research contracts dry up, your contract won't be renewed, and you'll need to move on. Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.
As to the original article, the drug lord vs. drug seller analogy is largely a side effect of the economics of Ph.D.s in liberal arts and soft sciences. There are only so many university positions available in sociology, history, english literature, etc., and almost zero positions outside of academia to absorb the surplus. So if you truly love Medieval European History, and cannot conceive of doing anything else with your degree, you're going to fight tooth and nail doing academic scut work for slave wages in the hopes of making yourself more competitive for a rare tenure-track opening.
The analogy falls apart with engineering and computer science, because a good Ph.D. can usually find a relevant job in industry, and quite often at better wages than in academia. Ph.D.s in liberal arts don't have that luxury. For them, it's either academic grunt work, unemployment, or getting a job completely unrelated to your degree.
TFA is right...it's not "belittling higher education" you moron...bullies "belittle" their victim...TFA is a valid criticism...**ACADEMIA** is the one who bullies!
Academia suffers from
1) Bad Management from people who are not accountable by rule (tenure professors)
2) Artificial Scarcity motivated by politics
Academia is **all about the money**....just like being a gangster!!! C.R.E.A.M.=Cash Rules Everything Around Me
"gotta get the NSF grant, gotta get tenure, gotta get the project approved..."
Academia is competitive, but in ways that have nothing to do with science and only waste energy.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Most PhDs, like my daughter, teach because they LOVE academic life. Also it's probably the only life they know. And like drug dealers, if enough die off you can move up.
Well obviously "your" not an ideal candidate for novelist.
.... Dr. Walter White, Dean of the College of Chemistry.
Have gnu, will travel.
Blaming all these societal/academic issues on tenure is incorrect. The tenure system has its problems, but it also yields large advantages to academic work. Most importantly, it puts a few professors above the fray of very short-term, ignorant, simplistic-metrics-driven management decisions. There's a lot of important long-term progress to be made in fields of study that doesn't always fit into the "publish-or-perish" and "maximize each year's grant money" models; placing quality over quantity is a possibility protected by the tenure system.
Given that tenure positions are becoming rarer, with far more professorships being ephemeral and low-paid (especially for teaching positions), the tenure system can hardly be blamed for the educational outcomes from universities. If anything, if tenure was a problem, then things should have gotten much better over the past few years alongside the erosion of the tenure system.
Blaming any part of the external job market situation on tenure is downright ignorant. Graduates aren't working at McDonalds because of decisions made by some tenured professor; the job market is set by decisions from a super-wealthy oligarch class far from the ivory tower.
Wow, that sounds exactly like how the rich operate.
A large number of very competent and qualified scientists get pushed out of the system long before they ever get to compete for tenure. The system is arranged such that there is not much room for full faculty, hence the odds of reaching one of those positions is remote for any grad student. That is part of why many grad students end up going to industry after completing their PhD.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You should read this article in the current Thought & Action magazine -- http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/TA2013Rosenthal_Schnee.pdf
Summary: For the first time in 40 years, the City University of New York (CUNY) has started up a new community college, dedicated to novel teaching techniques. As part of that, they've refused to hire or grant any tenured faculty at all, not implemented departments or department chairs, not given faculty a vote in committees or any faculty senate structure, etc. The article writer is a long-time professor of math at another CUNY school, who was so excited by the prospect of trying new teaching techniques that he jumped ship anyway, despite concerns from colleagues. End of the story is that administration took away all their initial promises and there was nothing the faculty could do about it (for example: promise of 40% concentration on math studies, and one-on-one contact time between students and faculty, replaced by peer tutoring). This formerly excited professor is one of several who have now left the new community college and gone back to their old jobs.
Who will care more about the integrity of the academic discipline: Faculty or administrators? The former are the people who have some direct personal contact with students, and have some likelihood of defending their interests as people. The latter are just PHB's looking to increase the bottom line. Shifting power from the former to the latter is one sign that we're not really serious or respectful towards real learning in this country.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Isn't that how a free market works?
This isn't a free market. Unless you're arguing that money being taken from citizens at gunpoint (taxation) and forcibly distributed to "public" universities, who can then use said dollars to advance their own agenda at the expense of everyone else, is a "free market." But it isn't.
captcha: layoff
Wait, wasn't there a thread just yesterday that we had a STEM shortage?
But today it's an over-abundance?
Nearly every undergrad degree remains largely static over time; having old timers repeating the same thing is just fine as long as they don't get too bad at it. Bringing in adjunct is often covered by some false premise that they are up to date and out in the "real world" but that is not all that useful for most material-- some courses and probably more at higher levels like the graduate level. The real reason is they don't want to pay for a full timer. A big cost for full time employment is health benefits-- if you can decouple that from employment then you'll see a big shift in the actual motivation behind many of these policies.
There is always a small % who give simpletons some example to cite. Entrenched management, employees (relatives,) politicians does encourage abuse of their power - but this is education- there is not much money or power involved compared to those others. Sometimes solving a problem is more trouble than it is worse-- Perfect can be the enemy of good. Take the UK postal service-- 2% failure rate on delivery times or something like that-- and they spent billions trying to be perfect and made everything worse; now they've sold off and gutted the royal mail (the inventors of mail) and it will not get better than it was before they tried to perfect it. Often, the best attack is to use the enemy and their supporter's own nature against themselves... This is often done when destroying democratic/public organizations -- the terrorists sure beat the USA with the tactic.. the Americans win battles but they've lost the war (or if you are optimistic, they are still losing the war.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Yes academia is like drug related jobs, but so is everything, i don't believe this article brings any insight into anything.
Fortunately, it wasn't like that 15 years ago. It seems the universities expanded just to take on as many people as possible, and employers have absolutely no way of telling whether that person is a good deal or not.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The fact that a few professors (the chosen few that run each department, choose the curriculum and set the tone for everyone that serves beneath them) have tenure does not change anything about what I have said. If anything all it does is concentrate power in the hands of fewer and fewer people ensuring that they have even greater sway over everything.
I have seen professorships that are low paid, with PhD's that work for less than what they could make in fast food when you factor in the number of hours. This is common in academia from my conversations with people in other institutions when I worked in the environment.
The fact that you have a large number of overly qualified people chasing far too many paying positions only enforces my point about the disconnect between the real world and academia. The problem has been created by a system in which there fields in which there are effectively no jobs due to over-saturation of the market. The result is that if you want to have any chance of having your degree actually be used in your professional career you must work at one of these jobs and compete where you can easily have 100 like qualified people in identical situations per job. If those kinds of numbers were being used at a vocational school the Federal Government would shut the program down for being unsuitable. It's a pyramid much like a multi-level marketing scheme, only your working with students, teaching positions and the very rare tenured position at the top.
There is nothing ignorant about my post, I saw students at my University realize with horror the uselessness of some their degrees for years. I watched academics fight for positions and saw everything that I described to you from a position as an administrator. I also have sheer statistics in terms of millions of workers that are underemployed, out of work or working in a field that does not match their degree. You can easily Google the statistics, the number in the millions.
Tenured professors at the top are not the reason there are too few academic positions. They are not pushing for that --- saying "oh noes, keep the department tiny and never add new positions". Unlike in the private sector, the top professors are not an immense drain on the resources of the institution: compensation ratios between top positions and median/lower workers are not hundreds to one. Those tenured professors are probably making more like a 5:1 wage ratio compared to less-than-fast-food-wages gradstudents at the bottom (and 10:1 would be exceptional). Removing them from the system doesn't free up vast resources for increased pay and positions at lower levels (unlike in private industry, where the tiny percentage at the top walks off with the vast majority of the money, personally pocketing billions of dollars stolen from the wages and jobs of workers).
Limitations on good positions for educated people are not imposed from "within" by tenured department chairs. They come from "without," in terms of the total amount of funding available to universities, to be used to hire folks and run research groups. When government research funding is flatlined (or declining in real dollars), in order to save a microscopic fraction of the percent off the budget so the ultra-wealthy will not have to pay more taxes, then there is no way to expand employment opportunities for highly qualified individuals. Similarly, the unavailability of jobs outside the academic sector to take advantage of well-educated individuals, cannot be blamed on what a handful of professors is doing; this is a systematic result of our immensely unequal society, focused on serving the desires of a tiny wealthy elite while generating mass poverty and unemployment for everyone else.
Okay, I'm going to try and explain it to you step by step because you are talking about things that are completely unrelated. I never said anything about the pay that tenured professors make, nor did I talk about the drain that the professors make on the resources of the institution.
What I talked about was the disproportionate level of power that is seated in the hands of tenured professors. Tenured professors have an attitude of entitlement that they do not have to answer to anyone, most especially the world outside of academia. Tenured professors then create an ivory tower that is disconnected from the real world because they do not need to have any connection to it.
The result is that degree programs often do not have any connection to the outside world and programs are created that do not serve the public or private sector and therefore do not serve their students. In parts of Europe the problem is so bad that many companies won't touch a graduate without two years of unpaid free labor just to show that they have gained some actual real world knowledge.
In other fields departments do nothing but churn out students for degrees that have little or no prospects for a job as certain fields simply have far fewer positions than degrees are granted for each year. The net result is that those students are forced by a job market that does not have enough jobs for their field to become the proverbial PhD at a fast food job while they compete for a too few positions with all of their previous classmates.
Words like best practices, ITIL, industry, government, the private world are answered with "that's not how we do things around here" - and it doesn't matter what the subject is. I have seen this attitude up close and personal with tenured professors routinely doing things that would get them fired in any other setting that didn't have anything to do with free speech.
All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the ultra-wealthy (whom I do not care for and am not defending) or the business world and everything to do with the Ivory Tower and it's disconnect from the real world.
The fact that employers are expecting unpaid free labor is not because employees are coming out of the "ivory tower" with any less practical educations than they always have. It's because employers, faced with more employees than they need (a situation they soundly encourage) are able to get away with pitting the potential labor pool against each other to accept ludicrously low wages, while skipping the job-specific training that employers would have provided in the past. There were no "good old days" when PhD's stepped out the door ready from day one to do exactly what employers needed --- instead, employers would make a long-term investment in an employee to mentor and train them in real world specifics; building expertise over several years at the start of a life-long career (not a 12 month temporary gig).
As I have pointed out above, the tenure system has already been steadily in decline for several decades. Schools have fewer tenured positions; and they do not have a monopoly on course content. Indeed, tenured researchers often have the least to do with teaching, which is planned by administrators and foisted off on low-paid adjuncts. If the power of tenured professors within institutions was a negative factor on the quality of instruction, then the quality of instruction should have been steadily rising over the past few decades as the position of tenured professors has become marginalized (their "disproportionate level of power" is in decline). The fact that the correlation goes the opposite way empirically counters your entire argument --- in the "good old days" when academia seemed more "connected" to the world, tenured professors were an unchallengeable cornerstone of academic institutions.
If academia has become any more distant from the private sector, it is because the private sector has itself moved away from all norms of human decency and career professionalism. Educated workers are treated as expendable, temporary labor to be shredded up and spit out, not lifetime-career professionals deserving respect. Companies have become ever bigger and more management-heavy, replacing leadership by people who understood engineering/science/whatever-the-company-was-doing with cookie-cutter empty suit MBAs. If you want to talk about "concentrated power" problems, the "concentrated power" problem is that of multimillionaire management class with an iron grip over industry, who are more than happy to shit all over the lives and careers of mere PhDs.
...what you're saying is that the tenure (I get a great salary, can never be fired unless I practically murder a kid, and have a giant professional union handling all my negotiations) bullshit is like winning the lottery, and you're unhappy that buying a bigger, more expensive ticket isn't an "automatic" win?
Wow, I think I'm tearing up here.
-Styopa
Many "environmental" hoi polloi are so innumerate and scientifically illiterate that they don't understand what the verb "investigate" means. Dream/scam on.
The main "duty" of most non-tenured professors is to produce research. If you do that best by working regular 9am-5pm hours or by only coming in in the middle of the night, nobody's going to care much. Aside from that, you need to attend occasional meetings and turn your grades in at the end of the semester. Once you have tenure, the obligation to produce continuous research is lessened a bit, and most of the schedule on which you "fulfill your duties" is really up to you.
From my perspective in the trenches, the reduction is not as big as most people might think for CS and the sciences. If you worked like crazy while building your credentials, either for tenure or to a senior position in a non-tenure research track, you can't really slack off too much. You still need to bring in the cash to cover your team, grad student tuitions, and your own salary, which are now more expensive too. This means just as much research effort and proposal writing. This is exacerbated when research funding is cut at a large scale (sequestration). The reduction really comes from i) having established robust lab practices, methods, and management skills and ii) improved proposal writing skills combined with a track record. Junior faculty expend a lot of time finding and developing the right models, processes, and skills.
Another problem is that you spend your early career developing and reinforcing workaholic habits. It is very hard to step away from work, even for a regular weekend. Unlike most high intensity jobs, the flexible time is great for scheduling around family so they actually see you. You can insulate them from the worst of it.
LOL no took my 4 years longer to do my English O level - Dyslexia's a bitch.
I was channeling Jethro or Ducky from NCIS