Miscellany: a response to comments from the previous thread

There's a lot to respond to in this the previous thread. Too much, in fact, which is why I'm turning my response into a separate post. Here goes:

On Jobs:

You're way off on the numbers and you know why.

But I'm not! According to the MLA's annual forecast on job listings:

In English the fields with the greatest percentage of positions are rhetoric and composition (20.1 percent), British literature (17.9 percent), multiethnic literature (13.7 percent), creative writing (7.0 percent), and American literature (6.1 percent).

So I'm off about the composition numbers, but not about the American literature: I merely did a little further math to account for the jobs I could reasonably apply for, which cut the dismal 6.1 percent into even-more-dismal-because-decimal territory.

[J]ust like I'm not allowed to give up on my chosen profession because the market hasn't been offering me anything but kind and condescending smiles yet this year, you're not allowed to declare yourself a failure because you haven't secured a TT job yet.

I'm not considering myself a failure, though. That is the one thing getting lost in the parallel conversation I'm about to address: what I'm teaching now is neither less complicated nor less rigorous than what I taught previously. I'm no longer of the opinion that people who end up like me should be considered failures.

This sounds more like sour grapes rationalization than a serious argument[.]

Except that, as per above, I'm not bitter.

On Teaching:

I think that one of the imperative points that is being overlooked here is the possibility that critical thinking within a localized context can, with the right guidance, lead to the formation of a skill set that can be put to use in contemporary society.

Wally handled this better than I would have, but to second what he said: when we teach undergraduate courses in "Critical Theory from Aristotle to Žižek," we're not teaching students the tools they need to interpret the world in which they live—we're teaching them how to talk to us. The critical discourse they enter is not the one that is most useful to them as members of the contemporary body politic, but the one most useful to us as literary scholars. I'm not

piss[ing] on the work of your colleagues who find similar success and gratification teaching literature and theory to English majors?

Because I'm not surprised that my colleagues who teach English majors are successful in getting those students to understand the significance and applicability of literary theory. But to rehash the old argument, it's a mistake to conflate literary theory and critical theory, especially when teaching non-majors what might otherwise learn portable skills. To put this in less polemical terms: I'm baffled by the fact that most composition programs teach their largely non-English-major populations how to quote and cite material in MLA format. It's not that I have anything against MLA style per se, only that I think the needs of the students would be better served if they learned how to cite material in accordance with the arcane rules of their future fields. The only reason so many programs teach MLA is because that's all most composition instructors know, so that's what they feel qualified to grade. I'm not running anybody down, then, merely seconding Wally's contention that there's a disconnect between what we hope to accomplish through the classroom and what we do in it.

Peak intellectual jobs are supposed to be what you get a Ph.D. to get. If people are getting Ph.D.s and not the jobs that a Ph.D. is supposed to prepare you for—and Scott's is not simply an individual case of this—then something in society is broken.

I see what you're saying now: the training of people for jobs that never existed is a toxic practice, and anyone who—unlike me—would be unable find satisfaction in the jobs that do exist has been mistreated. You'll get no argument from me on this count.

On Beards:

[Y]ou shaved the beard?

Now that I'm an adult, I don't need facial hair to feel like one. Or I simply like the routine: not shaving became an excuse to feel like a shut-in even when I left the house.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

"I see what you're saying now: the training of people for jobs that never existed is a toxic practice, and anyone who—unlike me—would be unable find satisfaction in the jobs that do exist has been mistreated. You'll get no argument from me on this count. "

"That never existed" needs clarification -- those jobs once did exist, but they were taken away.

You also keep returning to this same trope: previously it was important happiness, now it's you finding satisfaction. Maybe satisfaction isn't really the most important thing. Maybe the waste of a Ph.D.-trained person doing lower-level work is a waste whether they're satisfied or not. Perhaps it's still mistreatment -- to return to one of my original stories -- even if the guy that the Party sent to do farm labor really is much happier tilling the fields. I mean, I wouldn't keep from quitting his biology job to work on a farm if that's what he wanted to do because it made him happy. But that's not what happened.

[P.T. Smith]

Rich, can I just start refering to you as "The Most Bitter Man Alive"? I mean, once you start trying to convince someone that they aren't happy or satisified...

[Wax Banks]

Maybe the waste of a Ph.D.-trained person doing lower-level work is a waste whether they're satisfied or not.

I'm confused, Rich - or maybe just refusing to believe something I find off-putting. Do you really believe you can be scholastically overqualified to teach freshman composition? In your mind, what constitutes the appropriate training for such a teacher?

[Rich Puchalsky]

I have no idea who P.T. Smith is, so I have no idea whether his ad hom is as stupid as it sounds.

Wax Banks, a Ph. D. is supposed to teach you how to do something I've been summarizing, perhaps incorrectly, as "research". That's why it's supposed to take so long and be so difficult: ideally, you are supposed to think of something that no one has previously thought of, and express that thought within whatever standards of rigor and communicability exist in your field. Do you need to know how do that to teach freshman comp? No. Most freshman comp, in the U.S., is really remedial high school classes, and could be taught by an intelligent person with a college degree. Otherwise they could probably use a Masters'.

[Rich Puchalsky]

And I should add, looking at the above, that it's not a waste if the same person is both doing research and teaching freshman comp. That's how things used to be. But that resulted in "too many" high-status, high-paying jobs, so the job functions were separated.

[JPool]

I'm not considering myself a failure, though

Ah, see, I was confused by your use of the term "failed." Surely you can see that my point still stands. Maybe you don't want to do the lit teaching thin anymore or don't care either way, but it's far too soon to decide that it's never going to happen.

More later, but Rich, you're wrong about the division of academic labor. It's been thus for most of a century. The problem is not that their are fewer academic jobs; there are more of them than ever. The problem is that there are also more of those of us looking for them. There is also currently a crisis around public funding of higher ed, but that's an exacerbating condition rather than the base issue. Where is your narrative coming from?

[wkw]

"I see what you're saying now: the training of people for jobs that never existed is a toxic practice, and anyone who—unlike me—would be unable find satisfaction in the jobs that do exist has been mistreated. You'll get no argument from me on this count."

How strongly do you hold to this? Certainly not everyone who has limped their way through a post-grad degree is owed their job of choice. Nor under-grad, for that matter. Not all those who graduate from acting school get starring roles in films or on Broadway, either. Not everybody who attends basketball summer camps plays in the NBA, etc. To some extent any sort of training is a costly lottery; you buy the ticket, you take the ride. If you don't know your job prospects before you enter grad school, well that's hardly a structural problem.

Academia is a highly competitive world. If one doesn't get the job she expected, it could be because her work just wasn't impressive. Hopefully she, like you, can find meaningful work elsewhere. In any case she's hardly entitled to anything.

[SEK]

Rich:

"That never existed" needs clarification -- those jobs once did exist, but they were taken away.

That's within the purview of the last four or five generations of people going into English, for whom such jobs only existed in theory---in particular, in the theory of the ever-expanding university.

Most freshman comp, in the U.S., is really remedial high school classes, and could be taught by an intelligent person with a college degree.

It's partly remedial when it comes to the writing component, but it's certainly not when it comes to the researching. Once their writing reaches a certain level, we're teaching them how to do academic research, which is ideally something taught by people who have actually done some.

WKW:

If one doesn't get the job she expected, it could be because her work just wasn't impressive.

That suggests that there's some universally-accepted standard of impressiveness, when they're really, and I mean really, isn't. We might not be owed jobs, but we can at least feel entitled to a less schizophrenic market that markets, you know, actual jobs. It's not about getting the job of your choice, then, but of getting any job at all.

[Naadir Jeewa]

JPool has the economics right. The incentives in the system are such that they create graduates with no TT-tracks to enter, and that's before the funding cuts even begun. Everyone in UK biomedicine I know talks about the need to reduce the PhD pool, but there's never any impetus to effect any real change.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"If one doesn't get the job she expected, it could be because her work just wasn't impressive."

There's a point at which a quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. If 1/3 of graduating Ph.D's aren't getting TT jobs, then sure, maybe the least impressive ones just aren't being as impressive. But once it becomes a large majority of them, it's no longer a matter of competition within a functioning system.

These are all the standard excuses that people give to reconcile themselves and others to a dysfunctional system. It's competition, and someone has to lose -- at least I'm still better off than those other people -- I downgraded my job, but I found happiness. That last one, as I've repeatedly written but who knows whether some of you can read, is particularly pernicious because it's often true. Simpler tasks are often more satisfying. If the individual person is happy, great -- again as I wrote at the beginning, for people who can't read, it's always better to be happy than unhappy. But once you start generalizing that, as Scott is doing here, it immediately has to become a devaluing of what came before.

[Sisyphus]

I don't know, Rich, I've certainly been the bitter grad student raging at the broken system and trying to agitate for change, and that bitterness can be horribly toxic within oneself. I can certainly see why "blooming where you're planted" and trying to make the best of things would be better for your soul, and your ulcers.

But maybe Scott learned, when he went to grad school, that he loved _teaching_, rather than teaching any _specific_ subject? Likewise for the researching --- he is co-writing a book and doing research on rhetoric and pedagogy stuff.

So I don't think so much that he's devaluing whet came before as learning both teaching literature and teaching comp provide him pleasure.

On the other hand, I can count way more than .06% jobs that Scott could have applied to, and then there are the job listings that split lit and comp as well.

Is it better to ruthlessly compete for one of those last jobs, or to Bartleby it and say "I prefer not to?"

I'm always kinda stuck on the third option, because we'll need to eat and get money somehow while collectively advocating for social change. And I ain't joining a commune!

[P.T. Smith]

I have no idea who P.T. Smith is, so I have no idea whether his ad hom is as stupid as it sounds.

What is ad hom about my argument that you are a bitter asshole because you are assailing someone's satisfaction in life?

And besides, pointing out that someone is an ass isn't always ad hom; oftentimes being an asshole is an integral part of a weak argument, only being made to be an ass.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Sisyphus, I'm going to assume that at least some people on this blog can read for rhetoric. Let's look again at what Scott wrote:

"Then I realized something tremendously important: I was happy. I was teaching composition to freshmen and felt strongly gratified doing so. I wasn't teaching students abstruse theories about how literature works or arcane theories about how species evolved—I was teaching them the tools they need to interact with the world with a critical distance."

Look again at the sentence that "tremendously important" and "strongly gratified" ones lead up to. It's a compare-and-contrast. The material in Scott's field is abstruse and arcane, while freshman comp teaches tools people need. That's not devaluing? It's being developed into an argument: teaching literary theory to majors teaches them how to talk to literary scholars, while teaching freshman comp teaches critical life skills.

Let's assume that's all true. So what? When did teaching critical skills of general applicability to life to freshman become a higher academic value than teaching future scholars? It's only more important if what the scholars do really isn't that important. If what they do is abstruse, arcane, disconnected from anything.

And about the happiness thing. Sure, if something bad happens, it's always best to be happy in your new situation. Far better than being bitter. But if it involves denial that something bad happened -- complete with bits about how yes this would be mistreatment of someone else if they, unlike Scott, weren't happy with it -- that just reinforces all the routines of social denial that I see playing out in this thread. The whole narrative around happiness in America is a corrupt narrative that isn't about actual happiness, it's about taking social forces and making them an individual responsibility. Couldn't get a job because your field has no jobs? If you are happy anyways, you're fine! No harm has occurred. If you aren't happy -- well then, you should get happy. Not that Scott has said anything like that, but it's there, isn't it?

[wkw]

"That suggests that there's some universally-accepted standard of impressiveness, when they're really, and I mean really, isn't."

I never said a universally-accepted standard. I should have said the opposite: impressiveness is in the eye of the beholder, which (yes) includes hiring committees. But again... how is this different from any other job? I once heard a hiring manager say that he preferred to hire B students from anonymous state schools rather than A students from Ivy schools. In his experience the B students worked harder and were more teachable. Yes, that's a bias, but are the Ivy kids somehow wronged by this or somehow entitled to a different sort of job market that favors their particular qualities?

"We might not be owed jobs, but we can at least feel entitled to a less schizophrenic market that markets, you know, actual jobs. It's not about getting the job of your choice, then, but of getting any job at all."

Again, if someone doesn't do enough due diligence to know what the job market dynamics were like in her discipline before signing up for 5 or 7 years of grad school, then it's hard for me to have too much sympathy.

Not that it particularly matters, but I'm currently a PhD student, although not in the humanities. I understand that hiring is a difficult and capricious process, and sometimes the breaks just don't go your way. Sometimes nobody will be hiring people who study financial regulatory regimes, as I do. Sometimes seemingly everyone will be. Sometimes people will be hiring Wyndham Lewis scholars, and sometimes they won't be.

But I also understood all that before I signed up for this. "Luck" or "networking" or "being in the right place at the right time" is a part of *every* job market, not just that for humanities professors. Sometimes it's really great to be coming onto the job market with a freshly-minted MBA from the University of Chicago. These days? Not so much. Do hiring committees have biases and histories and peculiarities? Sure, but so does the HR manager at your local Kinko's.

Do you agree? If so, what are you really complaining about? That the academic job market is too similar to other job markets?

[Gas]

I'm just gonna jump in briefly to say that it's fascinating from a linguistic point of view that JPOOL spelled "their" instead of 'there', and then SEK two posts down did the same with "they're".

[SEK]

Rich:

Look again at the sentence that "tremendously important" and "strongly gratified" ones lead up to. It's a compare-and-contrast. The material in Scott's field is abstruse and arcane, while freshman comp teaches tools people need. That's not devaluing?

It's differentiating, not devaluing. I was never as gratified teaching literature surveys as I have been teaching composition. A lot of that has to do with the program I'm in---working beneath someone you respect enough to be co-authoring a book with is a joy---but a lot of it has to do with the simple fact that I'm not sure what value there is in training people to be like me. Why? So they can go to grad school too? It killed me that I had these brilliant students who'd make brilliant colleagues, because I didn't want to encourage them to become so.

WKW:

Do you agree? If so, what are you really complaining about? That the academic job market is too similar to other job markets?

I absolutely don't agree, at least not as it pertains to the MLA as a job market. It might seem the same on the surface, but it isn't. If I get a degree in computer science and respond to a job ad for a programmer, they're going to 1) narrow the field down to all the candidates who can perform the tasks that'll be required of them, then 2) evaluate them in terms of office politics, i.e. who they'd think would make the best candidate. The problem with MLA job ads is that they might claim to be looking for a programmer when they really want a janitor, but because they can't in good conscience hire a janitor, they have to pretend to want a programmer; but as long as they're hiring a programmer, they might as well hire the best one out there, only they won't tell anyone what programming languages they want this programmer to know, so the applicants must guess, pay $1,000 to fly and stay at the conference, then walk into the interview only to find out that although the hiring committee couldn't come out and say it, they really only wanted a janitor with expertise in a language they don't know. Sorry!

Gas:

I changed course mid-stream their, so what should've been they're ended up in some other sentence. It happens, even to the best of us.

[JPool]

I just want to put in a brief word for Shane in Utah's point that lit profs don't just teach students cultural capital and how to talk to academics. They also expose students to different perspectives on the world they live in and train them in new methods for analyzing texts/discourses/arguements, both of which they can take with them into whatever career or life-course they pursue. They also help students to, as the teaching goals statements put it, "improve the quality of their verbal and written communication." This doesn't make them better than or even, if it's done right, all that different from something like composition and rhetoric. So let's not pretend that one is zen and the other motorcycle maintainance.

Gas, you're fascinated by the fact that I made a typo in a blog comment? Really? Fascinated?

[SEK]

I'm offended that you think that anything I do is related to either zen and motorcycle maintenance. That said, what are you quoting there? Because that strikes me as a very comp-oriented objective, and while English professors do in fact help English majors in that respect, it's not their (or should I say "they're") primary goal.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"It's differentiating, not devaluing. [...] a lot of it has to do with the simple fact that I'm not sure what value there is in training people to be like me. Why? So they can go to grad school too? It killed me that I had these brilliant students who'd make brilliant colleagues, because I didn't want to encourage them to become so."

Dude, that's devaluing. You even use "value" when you write about it. If you don't want people to end up like you, I don't really know how much stronger a devaluing statement you can make.

You could say that you're criticizing the job market, not the work itself. But really, not. The whole thing is accompanied by a claim that teaching freshman comp teaches them critical skills which are useful to them in life, while teaching majors teaches them mostly how to talk to other people in the field, which is useless if they aren't going to work in the field. That still means that it's useless. Perhaps not intrinsically -- I haven't seen you write anything about how people should just give up doing literary studies -- but literary studies have been consigned to being an activity only useful within a professional context that no longer exists. Like learning how to be an alchemist, say.

I don't think that anyone here really understands what I'm trying to say. Responses have ranged from totally moronic to polite-and-puzzled. But really, I think your rhetoric does what I think it does. It's understandable, and not too bad, but it's just not doing what you seem to think it's doing.

[SEK]

You even use "value" when you write about it.

But saying I'm not sure what value there is in training people to do what I can do isn't the same thing as saying there's no value to what I can do---it's simply an acknowledgment that I'd rather not train people to do something that damn near ensures they'll be broke and unemployed if they follow through with it.

It is odd that, for the most part, the people who are arguing for what you take to be the "devaluing" side are all literary scholars, whereas those who find merit in the practice and value in it as such aren't. That's not to say you're not correct, as y'all have a perspective that we obviously lack, but still, I don't think any of my "us" are devaluing the study of literature to the extent that you think we are.

In other words, it goes without saying that I think I have a skill, that I think I'm an expert, but as a someone who also likes to eat, I can't in good conscience encourage others to acquire it. Not because I don't value it, but because the market evidently doesn't. It'd rather reward those who [insert whatever theory's trendiest at the moment], and there's nothing I can do about that.