Archive for the ‘labor’ tag
Where the tenure track jobs are. …
Some news related to Mike’s earlier post Hard Times, Come Again No More. … According to the Chronicle of Higher Education article For Some, Hard Times Make Hiring Easier:
some institutions are going against the grain of the poor economy and appointing new professors. This decision has given those campuses an edge, yielding top-quality candidates who might not have been within reach in a more-competitive job market. — by Robin Wilson, from the issue dated March 13, 2009.
Of course, the competition is high at these colleges and universities. As such,
“This is an opportunity to find the very best people,” says Michael J. Chajes, dean of the University of Delaware’s College of Engineering — which had more than 500 applications each for two of its eight faculty job openings. — by Robin Wilson, For Some, Hard Times Make Hiring Easier, Chronicle of Higher Education, from the issue dated March 13, 2009.
Want to know the campus hiring the most? Take a moment to guess before you look. Read the rest of this entry »
Hard Times, Come Again No More
Last week, the NY Times published a depressing story about the state of tenure-track jobs. This gives you feel for the article:
Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.
Marc Bousquet, however, calls the whole thing a sham. The problem isn’t the economy, he argues, because this has been the trend for the past forty years. Bousquet’s position: Read the rest of this entry »
Are PhDs a Waste Product?
How the University Works
This week, I began reading Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. Bousquet is an academic labor activist, and blogs at both the Chronicle’s Brainstorm and at his own site. (A side note: Bousquet is now a prof at Santa Clara, but he first received tenure at the University of Louisville, my alma mater, at the same time I was a student there. He and I did not cross paths, as far as I can remember, but I witnessed firsthand many of the same things he saw, including UofL’s deal with UPS (PDF) to employ students at UPS’s graveyard shift in exchange for financial aid.)
Bousquet views the current academic economy as systemically corrupt. Here’s his description of graduate education:
Under casualization [of academic labor], it makes very little sense to view the graduate student as potentially a “product” for a “market” in tenure-track jobs. For many graduate employees, the receipt of a Ph.D. signifies the end, and not the beginning, of a long teaching career. Most graduate students are already laboring at the only academic job they’ll ever have – hence, the importance for organized graduate student labor of inscribing the designation “graduate employee” in law and discourse.
From the standpoint of the organized graduate employee, the situation is clear. Increasingly, the holders of a doctoral degree are not so the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its by-products, insofar as that labor system exists primarily to recruit, train, supervise, and legitimate the employment of nondegreed students and contingent faculty. (21)
Do you agree with Bousquet’s assessment? Is the difficulty in finding employment for Ph.D. recipients due to a flooded job market (the standard explanation) or due to an academic system that prefers cheaper, usually non-degreed contingent faculty to degreed tenure-track faculty?
