All,
I"m a postdoc searching for a faculty position in ecology. I just read
the article below, which recently appeared in the Chronicle of Higher
Education. It paints a grim picture of academia, now and for the
foreseeable future. I'm highly productive, love research and teaching
and feel that academia is where I belong. Yet, I find myself very
disheartened by many aspects of the current academic environment and
this article seems to bear some of my perspectives out. I would really
appreciate if any faculty would comment on this article as it relates to
their experience....though, if this article is correct, they will be far
too busy to read this. :)
Cheers, and article below--
Bruce Robertson
Postdoctoral Fellow
Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center
Current mailing address:
3310 West Main Street #101
Kalamazoo, MI 49006
206-718-9172
[email protected]
Homepage: www.msu.edu/~roberba1/Index.html/
_____________________________________________________
The *Chronicle of Higher Education* includes an article: "The Ivory
Sweatshop: Academe Is No Longer a Convivial Refuge" by Sarah Kiewel.
Here are some excerpts:
[begin excerpts]
With standards for tenure at major research universities rising year by
year, professors say academe has become such a pressure-cooker
environment that faculty jobs barely resemble those of a generation ago.
Gone are the days when academe was considered a convivial refuge from
the corporate world, a place where scholars had ample time to debate
ideas--often during lunch or over drinks after class.
Professors, particularly those at research universities, are simply
working much more and much harder these days.
They are competing for scarcer grant money, turning out more articles
and books, coping with the speedup in communications afforded by better
technology, and traveling the globe to establish the kind of
international reputation that's now necessary to thrive.
"What I'm seeing now is junior faculty really just putting their noses
to the grindstone," says Frank Donoghue, an associate professor of
English at Ohio State University, who earned his Ph.D. in 1986.
"It's had the effect of transforming the culture of the academy into one
that is much more businesslike."
"Assistant professors are producing article after article and research
study after research study," says David D. Perlmutter, who directs the
School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa.
"Then they're looking at the promotion-and-tenure committee and they're
going, Wow, I've actually published more in the last six years than all
of them combined."
<snip>
John B. Conway, chairman of mathematics at George Washington University,
certainly remembers a time when getting through graduate school and
finding a faculty job was much simpler.
He earned his Ph.D. in 1965 after just four years and never completed a
postdoctoral fellowship--a virtual requirement these days for scholars
who want to work at a research university like his.
Mr. Conway secured his first academic job, at Indiana University,
without even applying for a position. His adviser put out some calls to
department chairmen, and the deal was done.
<snip>
Robert G. Bergman, who holds a distinguished professorship in chemistry
at the University of California at Berkeley, agrees that times have changed.
"This job has gotten a thousand percent harder than when I started out,"
says Mr. Bergman, who began teaching in 1967.
It takes a lot more time now, he says, for scholars to keep current with
advances in their discipline.
"When I was starting out, one of the premier journals in my field, the
Journal of the American Chemical Society, came out once a month, and it
was relatively thin," he says.
"Now it comes out once a week, and it's much thicker."
Because of declining state and federal funds, professors also spend more
time trying to raise money for their own research.
In fact, Mr. Bergman recalls a time during the late 1960s when someone
from a federal agency called a chemistry professor at the California
Institute of Technology, where he was teaching, and said, "Please submit
a grant. We want to give you money."
Now, if something like that happened, everyone would think it was a joke.
"We have people submitting a large number of proposals just so one or
two will hit," says Mr. Bergman.
"That means a massive amount more work."
Scholars also routinely spend much more time away from their campuses
now than they ever did in the past, he says.
They travel to present their work at far-flung seminars where they might
meet luminaries who could give their work a nod come tenure time.
"There used to be much more confidence that just in publishing stuff,
your work would be known."
A study of work-life issues conducted by Harvard University's Graduate
School of Education found that Generation X professors value efficiency
over face time.
The study, which consisted of conversations with about a dozen research-
university professors born between 1964 and 1980, found that younger
professors didn't want to become workaholics.
But none of the young scholars who spoke with The Chronicle about
faculty workload seemed to believe that dialing down was an option.
Luis Ponjuan, an assistant professor at the University of Florida,
refers to himself as an "intellectual entrepreneur," even though he
studies higher-education administration, not business.
He doesn't think of his job as affording him time to ponder big ideas
with interesting colleagues and students.
"I identify pockets of opportunity that other people will buy into,
support, and fund --to lessen the state's responsibility," he says of his
research.
<snip>
The more calculated approach is the result of heightened competition, he
says.
"There's a finite number of faculty positions, a finite number of
grants, and a finite number of journals."
Scholars like Mr. Ponjuan who have been on the job for only a few years
have already noticed an upward creep in standards since they were hired.
"There's been a major escalation in terms of what CV's look like for
people being considered for a position," says Greta R. Krippner. By the
time she finished her doctorate in sociology,
in 2003, she had completed four publications, none of them in the
field's two flagship journals: the American Journal of Sociology and the
American Sociological Review.
Her work was good enough, though, to get her a starting job at the
University of California at Los Angeles.
Since then she has moved to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,
where she is up for tenure next year.
"Now it's kind of normal that you see a graduate student with a paper in
one of those top journals," she says.
"Just last year, we looked at someone who already had a book out, plus a
handful of articles."
In fact, that job candidate--who hadn't even finished his Ph.D.--had
already completed what at Michigan would now be a very respectable
tenure file, says Ms. Krippner.
Indeed, the tight job market has given top universities the luxury of
choosing candidates who have already demonstrated an ability to attract
grants and churn out papers.
Particularly in the sciences, universities invest so much in start-up
packages for young scholars that no department any longer wants to take
a chance on an untested hire.
"Departments can afford to hire people who already have what they need
to do to pass at least their third-year review," says Diana B. Carlin, a
professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas who was
dean of the graduate school until 2007.
That third-year review has also become a much more formal evaluation
process than it was 10 to 20 years ago.
Jennifer Ng, who just earned tenure in the School of Education at
Kansas, says one of her older colleagues told her that his own third-
year review had consisted of the department chairman's pulling him aside
and saying, "You're looking good."
Ms. Ng, on the other hand, had to document her work in a package that
resembled a miniature tenure file.
Young professors are reluctant to complain publicly about how much
harder they may be working than their senior colleagues did when they
were starting out.
But professors who are in midcareer hear the comments.
"My younger colleagues feel they don't have the same opportunity as
previous generations to sit and really think and let ideas germinate,"
says Gregory M. Colon Semenza, an associate professor of English at the
University of Connecticut.
"What used to be a truly enjoyable intellectual process has become a
very professionalized model of efficiency."
Meanwhile, experienced scholars say their own workload has increased as
well.
The pace doesn't necessarily slow down anymore once a scholar gains tenure.
Young professors are typically protected from committee assignments and
departmental duties while they are on the tenure track, but then those
burdens get dumped on them, too.
"People are freaked out about the amount of work they have--there's just
no time," says William A. Pannapacker, an associate professor of English
at Hope College.
"Once you're tenured, suddenly you're given way more administrative
responsibility really fast, and you have no training for it, and you
have no idea what you're doing."
<snip>
Nora Berrah, a distinguished professor of physics at Western Michigan
University, has worked in academe since 1987. She still devotes most of
her waking hours to her research, and spends about half of her time
traveling to national laboratories, where she collaborates on projects.
Back in her office at Western Michigan, she usually keeps the door closed.
"Sometimes I avoid my colleagues in the hallway," she says, "because I'm
afraid it's going to take awhile to say, 'Hello, how are you doing?'"
Campus social life does seem to be a casualty of the work speedup in
higher education.
A couple of decades ago, it wasn't unusual for faculty members to have
lunch together during the workweek and attend parties in one another's
homes on the weekends.
<snip>
Mr. Menand, who is now an English professor at Harvard University, has
been back to Princeton several times in the last few years, and notes
that things have changed. For one, "half the faculty live in New York."
And even in a college town like Cambridge, he says, the culture has changed.
"You make a lunch date two weeks in advance, but you just don't all
gather at noon and head off."
Many research universities have cut teaching loads to help their faculty
members make time for increased demands in research and publishing.
<snip>
Mr. Bergman says the breakdown of social relationships among professors
is more important than people might think.
"You're less willing to get into conflict with people if they are part
of your social circle as well as your professional circle."
And Mr. Menand says faculty work looks a lot less attractive to
prospective academics than it used to.
"I think the demands have come to be experienced as all-consuming,
24/7," he says.
"That's bad because of the quality of life and because it discourages
other people from getting into academe."
He adds: "You don't want smart college students taking one look at what
we have to do to keep our jobs and saying, That's not how I want to
spend my life."
[end excerpts]
The article is online at:
<http://bit.ly/8XKENPope>
Ken Pope
THE THERAPIST AS A PERSON:
<http://kspope.com/therapistas/index.php>
"Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what
the world needs is people who have come alive."
-- Howard Thurman (1900-1981)
