Optimism; or, False Hope

Wow. This article from Inside Higher Ed just enraged me. Apparently, the bright hopes glimmering through the darkness of the current job market for academics lie in the author's pride in her graduate students. That's a lovely sentiment, but it's not particularly helpful, especially as the article seems to betray a large measure of naivete about what the situation really looks like for a large majority of academic jobseeksers (both those trying to find tenure-track positions as well as those who are searching beyond the ivory tower). It's easy for a tenured professor to make these sorts of overly optimistic comments that reveal no real reason for hope besides the idea that some unsuccessful jobseekers are able to be magnanimous in their attitudes toward classmates and colleagues who do manage to get jobs. Being impressed by others' generosity of spirit doesn't strike me as a real reason to celebrate. How about making significant changes in higher education, such as preparing graduate students for jobs outside of academia and addressing the adjunctification of the corporate university, instead of just spreading false hopes and good cheer in the face of utter bitterness and despair? I'm with Barbara Ehrenreich on this one.

Reforming Humanities Graduate Education/Humanities Careers

These are two recent articles published in The Chronicle of Higher Education that discuss a wide range of issues dealing with graduate education in the humanities as well as job prospects and how we train (or rather, don't train) humanities graduate students for careers outside of academia.


"Forum: The Need for Reform in Graduate Humanities Education"
Interesting how you can tell the administrators (platitudes) from those who have a real investment in change (statistics, stories from the trenches).

Peter Conn, "We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities"
This article summarizes a lot of the issues related to the adjunctification of higher education in the U.S., such as the corporatization of the university, the popularity of for-profit educational organizations like the University of Phoenix, the resistance of full-time faculty to retirement (especially given the current economic market), the over-admission of graduate students to humanities programs, the attrition rate of those same programs, etc. Conn offers some reasonable proposals for reform that might help alleviate the atrocities of the job market, including responses to potential counterarguments.