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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
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...
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.
Though this is because the only people who get tenure-track jobs in the first place are those who've already gotten a PhD., and so by definition have the self-control to resist the urge to kill the back-stabbing bastards who deserve it.
Reminds me of the shooting at SDSU in 1996 -- I knew several grad students who were stunned that a master's student had gunned down his committee. Not that he's shot them (which they could sympathize with), but that he'd done it over a master's degree.
-Esme
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
Jimmy 'the dean' approves of your ruthlessness; but wishes to inquire as to whether you are bringing in enough 'grant money' to carry your weight.
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.
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.
That is very true. Advisor reputation flows out through his grad students. I'm known as one of "Mark's" students and that comes with significant baggage, both good and bad. In general his student have been very successful and when in certain circles that flowed back to him. Both in reputation and grant money. The grant money comes from people who know him or were his students and are working in the field and control research dollars that can flow to colleges.
It's a cool world, not without problems and inefficiencies, but it would be hard to create a better one that would be stable long-term.
Sheldon
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.
superwiz was referring to the adjunct professors on food stamps mentioned in the summary, no need to get personal. (Clicking the link, the woman on food stamps is a medieval-history Ph.D, heh)
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
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
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.
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.