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 … [Read more...] about Where the tenure track jobs are. …
labor
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 … [Read more...] about Hard Times, Come Again No More
Are PhDs a Waste Product?
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 … [Read more...] about Are PhDs a Waste Product?