At 14:38 6/11/98 -0500, you wrote: >Lou, > May I ask what the point of sending this to us was? I >know that in your heart of hearts you really do consider >all the tenured profs to be a bunch of elitist bums who >should be thrown out into the street. Was that the >message, tenure should be abolished and we should all be >fired because Dr. Newitz has not been able to get a tenure >track position and was found in a foetal position shaking >uncontrollably on the floor of her lover's bedroom? >Somehow I don't think that this quite follows, sorry as I >may feel for Dr. Newitz, which I do. > It certainly is true that there are fewer options for >English Ph.D.s outside academia. But for economics Ph.D.s >we have all kinds of wonderful options, most of them >involving making a whole lot more money than our >academic positions and worthily serving very directly the >masters of the capitalist system, rather than more >indirectly so as even the most radical of us probably are >doing either at least implicitly to some degree. >Barkley Rosser _______________ Well Barkley, obviously you have not suffered in the way she apparently has. Most of what she wrote hit very close to home. One point that she implicitly made, which has gone unnoticed by others is that she is an exceptionally well qualified scholar in the job market. I think it has become a general trend. Most of the best qualified and innovative minds are finding it harder and harder to get an academic job, whereas mideocrities are not having as great difficulties. This has something to do with people who are in control of jobs, and the politics of academic jobs (many of these people feel highly threatened by highly qualified and brillient candidates, and again the old boys and girls network works to keep many like us locked out--the whole academic system has become rotten to the core both on the left and the right). The main problem with her post, as far as I'm concerned, is that she is asking the painters to throw the brush away and start brick laying. That is too much of a sacrifice since so many of us have put so many years of hard work of love and passion in painting. Cheers, ajit sinha
