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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.
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
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
Its the real world telling you your an ideal candidate for working at McDonalds
As someone who has worked in industry (where we occasionally considered PhDs) and is now in graduate school looking to get back into the job market soon, this is complete and total BS. You are seeing what you wanted to see. My first time in industry, I bought the "overqualified" line hook line and sinker. In retrospect, it was some sort of organizational bias that lead us to believe that people who could do the job happily for the money we offered could be overqualified. Now, I am leaving with an MS after several years functioning as a PhD student, and I see the same skeptisism applied to me (which undergraduates don't get, despite us competing in the same pay scale).
The fact that you think a PhD is just "an extra slip of paper" shows how out of touch you really are. A PhD can be very grueling, both personally and intellectually. Those who succeed are often elite within their discipline, and despite the laser beam focus, PhDs are often great generalizers in broad realms. I think you are not capable of recognizing talent. You have some other, perverse metric you're using (most likely an organizational bias), and ability to do the job is not it.
In fairness, your organization's disfunction is par for the course. Only exceptional companies really ask root striking questions in job interviews (and many otherwise exceptional companies aren't very good at that either). Most just ask where we want to be in five years, then walk out wondering why they can't find the right person for the job.
I work in a combination engineering (without PhDs) and science (with PhDs) environment. I'll admit the PhDs are bit high on the Oddness Scale. The engineers, however, have this enormous chip on their shoulder about the qualities of the PhDs. They widely deride the PhDs has not doing anything real or even capable of doing anything real. Some PhDs are like this. In general, though, the PhDs are working on higher level problems, so it isn't any mystery that the engineers find them difficult to relate to. I get the general impression that for engineers, good mathematics is born of a virgin and immediately applicable to their interests. That "other" mathematics is the stuff that's difficult to understand and probably invented by PhDs somewhere in a ivory tower dedicated to the ineffable. Getting engineers to back off their immediate problem and tell us any general lessons about their widgets is nearly impossible, and they take pride in snowing us with trivial detail that makes no difference in the general picture. When we do attempt to generalized, we are immediately hit with "it doesn't solve my immediate problem with all the details filled in." Yeah, well, that's because your problem was generalized into a class of problems and the math we gave you will work for the entire class; now quit bitching and particularize it to your widget.
This is generally done by the same people who use the term "elites" derisively. There's a culture - often promulgated by Libertarians - that people who aren't directly enhancing some corporation's bottom line somewhere don't deserve recognition or respect. The fact is, someone who has made significant contributions to their field deserves some job security.
It's not that these naysayers have a better system for who deserves tenure (or, if they want to eliminate tenure altogether, a tenure-like protection from Administrative whims). They don't want anyone to have such protections, because then scientists who tell inconvenient truths about politics or science ("Hey, did you know Climate Change might be a problem?) can be easily silenced by politically or corporate-backed powers.
Is the tenure system perfect? God, no, but what system involving human pecking order is? But it's pretty good, actually, for the most part! They're a reason the western-style educational system has been rocking it hardcore for hundreds of years now. And the fact is, the attack on professors, tenure, and the scientific elites in general is mostly coming from the corners that are trying to tear down science as an edifice in general.
Because administrators by and large are politically conservative, and depending on department, adjuncts and people on tenure tracks may be engaged in research that goes against the ideological grain of whoever is carrying the purse strings for the campus.
Look, this is really more a problem in disciplines other than computer and natural sciences. I'm a grad student in cultural anthropology, and arguably the entire basis of my field is in questioning those things in everyday life that everyone takes for granted. When studying issues that have political/economic implications -- like, say, researching healthcare access among migrant workers on the southern US border -- it's really easy to fall afoul of campus leadership if your work addresses failings of capitalism, engaged in the long-term effects of poverty on a community. You make too much of a fuss over poor brown people who have been systematically screwed over by "the system," and you risk offending key administrators where you're slaving away hoping that a tenured position opens up. These days, the people in charge of campuses and entire state university systems have little background as actual educators, and are increasingly originating in businesses and bureaucracies. Questioning how society works is not in their best interests. Make too big a deal over things like social inequality, and expect the boot.
Now, when it comes to teaching in classrooms, then more departments open themselves up to criticism than the social sciences and the humanities. If I'm teaching about human evolution in a conservative part of the country (which I have), I can take for granted that a significant percentage of my students are going to object to the course material. As an adjunct, I have no job security whatsoever. Any student can go to the administration and complain that my course offends their delicate sensibilities, and if they happen to find a sympathetic ear with the higher-ups, well, I won't have to worry about having my contract renewed the following semester. After all, there are plenty of other desperate M.A.s and Ph.D.s ready to take over at the podium.
If I have tenure, I have much less to worry about as far as what research I can do, and what I can teach in my classrooms. Just stepping on someone's toes because their ideology is too constrained to accept reality (which, as Mr. Colbert famously pointed out, has a liberal bias) is no longer a significant concern. I can instead be judged solely by my peers, who -- while not perfect -- are more qualified to evaluate me than some nervous bean-counter.
These are a couple of broad examples, but I hope they give you some idea of why academic freedom allotted by tenured positions is crucial to the function of higher education. Part of the reason this has become such a major issue in academia is that university systems are so opaque to most of American society. No one outside the so-called "ivory tower" has a good grasp of how it's structured and ranked, or even how the tenure process works (other than vague references to "publish or perish"). If more people outside of academia were aware of how business interests have been affecting higher education since the '80s, I would hope there would be more public outcry, and more support for faculty and staff.