Wednesday Reading
This article on the "last professors" and the coming "death of tenure" vis a vis the adjunct situation in the humanities from Inside Higher Ed is worth a look. The comments are interesting for the most part as well--only one bizarre comparison of higher education to global warming and one random invocation of the Spectre Of Horowitz (GASP!) among the lot thus far.
Of course, the day is young.
The article resonated with me because I saw the writing on the wall back in '98 or so when I declined to pursue the Ph.D. I mean, why would I want to incur more debt and waste more years of my earning potential, merely to enter a ridiculously competitive job market where, even if I did secure a tenure-track position, I would spend the first decade merely trying to catch up financially? And that wasn't even considering tossing a family into the mix.
Incidentally, a fair number of my friends who went to law school came to this same conclusion, too late.
Since I've been hanging more on the science side of a research university lately, I've been able to see firsthand how badly the humanities are hurt by their inability to tap into the big grant dollars. I can't see a solution for them, though. And the financial realities of state-supported and land grant universities are also driving the adjunct train. The sciences can compensate with research money--the humanities can't.
And I don't think that state legislatures are going to stop and say, "Wait! We need to give a bunch of english professors eternal job security! Let's fund higher salaries!" It's more likely that they'll point to the Ward Churchills and the tenured former members of the Weather Underground in humanities departments--fairly or not--and say something like, "Why do these losers get a free ride?"
Interestingly (to me, probably not to you), I went on to get my PhD (Computer Science) and I have very mixed feelings about it (the time I spent getting it was the early days of the DotCom boom - it was my professor's project that Marc Andreesen blew off to work on Netscape). But even then, when I thought about being a professor, my plan was
1) Go in to industry and get rich enough to semi-retire.
2) Take up an adjunct position to do teaching, because being semi-retired tenure would be of no concern.
That's actually what my wife did, and so she gets a University affiliation, gets to teach, and can simply laugh at all the departmental politics. I'm not sure how viable this is for non-technical majors, though.
I do laugh at the problem, although it's mean, because of how the liberal arts community has eaten its golden goose. It's wonderfully meta, though, how liberal arts academia failed to consider the real world effects of its ignoring real world effects.
AOG -
I did sort of a cost/benefit analysis on this stuff way back in '98 or so and decided against the Ph.D. Really, why would I want to waste more time, go into debt (the stipend I got in grad school was a whopping eight grand a year; even doubling it wouldn't have been a living wage, especially when you figured in relocation, etc), and possibly end up with the same salary 4 years later that I could make at a temp job somewhere in the RTP?
In my fantasy world wherein I write the Great American Novel and sell the movie rights, I would work at the university as a guest lecturer. It would cover food and gas money, and give me stimulating classroom discussion, while exempting me from the snakepit of departmental politics.
It's sad, really--it seems the only folks who can afford to work in humanities departments anymore are either independently wealthy, or have a high-earning spouse in the private sector.
The last couple of years in college (in which I had purposely pursued a pre-law course), I was planning to go on to law school after a year or two in the "real" world. I had heard from my adviser and from some friends who had gone to law school that taking time off between undergraduate and law school was a positive for many schools. But then school burnout mixed with hearing the tales of woe from those same lawyerly friends made it seem less appealing. That, and I was making really good money programming crappy websites sealed the deal.
Sometimes I wish I had taken the chance on law, but, to be honest, most of those times are when I'm pissed at the 500th customer who lied to us about what they did to a server.
Like Skippy, I was aiming at law school...until I was advised that law school costs lots of money, while grad school pays you money (in my case, 12K, which was almost exactly what my husband was making with his journalism degree). So now, 20 years and a humanities Ph.D. later, I'm making a little more than twice that...but I get University affiliation, the joy of teaching cute undergrads, and -- what was that other benefit AOG mentioned? -- oh, yeah: a few laughs creditable to departmental politics. If only I'd gotten rich enough to semi-retire first!
But, but, but, all those humanities types get to live the "life of the mind". Wouldn't that have been worth it?