the petulant professor?

Music: Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001)

Referencing recent discussions here of the entitled student, Dave sent me a link to a recent editorial in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled, "How to be Happy in Academe," an oxymoronic title for many. In the essay Gregory Pence argues that the current, emerging professoriate have their expectations for employment set too high. He concludes to be "happy" as an academic,

You need a tenure-track job, and then you need to work hard at the three things we are expected to do: teach students who want to learn, publish about things you care about, and be a good academic citizen through service to your institution and field. That's the deal.

To reach that conclusion, Pence draws on his own experience as an overloaded adjunct who eventually got lucky with a position in Birmingham, Alabama as a bioethicist.

In general, I think Pence's caution to the new professoriate should be well-taken. No matter what your field, students should not expect to land a research one job right out of the gate; you have to publish and teach your way there. I have also heard matriculating students say that they will not take a job in such-and-so a place or (my personal favorite) "at Anything State" because their personal worth is more weighty than such places can carry. I either laugh or get mad, depending who says such a thing, and then try to correct perceptions: we are fortunate to have jobs at all, and as Pence says, this dire economy will only help to underscore that fortune.

I don't go so far as to say you shouldn't expect a job, however. Pence's field is philosophy, a notoriously difficult field to get a job in. I was lucky when my undergraduate advisor in philosophy repeatedly told me not to pursue graduate study because there are no jobs in it. Or rather, my advisor did the ethical thing by discouraging me from becoming a philosopher. And this gets at my beef with Pence's closing remarks, "that's the deal." A "deal" refers to a contract, and a contract refers to an agreement made between two parties. Who are these parties, and what are the conditions of the deal? Answering this question helps to uncover what Pence overlooks.

While I agree that graduate students on the market should not expect a top-of-the-line job, they should expect a job because a graduate program admitted them on that tacit promise. Placement success should always be the barometer of a program, and if that program is not placing, admissions should decrease. I recognize I am woefully ignorant of college administration---and frankly, I hope I stay that way for my life---but there is a quid pro quo here that everyone knows: in exchange for being underpaid and overworked, a graduate program trains a student to take a job. The assumption of a job resulting from "the deal" is built into the apprentice model and the academic degree system.

The problem Pence overlooks is that the tacit dimension of this contracting has remained in place while the terms of the deal have changed. My philosophy advisor pointed this out and, thus, I didn't go that route---I didn't want a raw deal. I think many graduate programs are offering raw and rigged deals, contracting with students to teach the bulk of their courses with the knowledge many of them will not get jobs. Of course, this represents the coporitization of the academy and the logic of the wage, but stretched toward barter: "yes, dear graduate student, you will be underpaid for your labor while you are here, but you will be paid tenfold upon completion of your degree with a job!" If there are no jobs, then the deal is unquestionably dirty.

In Communication Studies, we are fortunate to have jobs as the field continues to expand. There was, apparently, a contraction in the 1990s, but I'm sensing lots of growth in recent years, and this is in part because we continue to teach skill-based courses to meet the everyday needs of the average (working class) student. In other words, unlike philosophy or literary studies or similar fields marked with the connotation of "elite," the previously inferior field of "Speech" is now thriving because of its attention to students (and the shift of the university to a consumer model). If, however, professorships start to decline, it seems my colleagues and I are ethically compelled to stop admitting as many graduate students.

So, Pence is right and wrong. He is right that sometimes expectations for that first job are way too high; we all "pay our dues," so to speak, and that's working hard wherever you begin. He is wrong, however, to assume what is true of his field is true of others. How ironic is it that the discipline most explicitly concerned with ethics doesn't do right by its graduate students?