Academic economics

How did I miss this Times opinion piece on tenure?

Author Christopher Shea describes the tempest in academia / higher ed's teapot over the economics of universities and colleges. In particular, whether or not tenure ought to be abolished, and the mission of academia / higher ed be rethought. This is in response to recent publications such as Mark C Taylor's new book, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities, and his opinion pieces in the Times. Shea concludes his piece:

Here we have the frightening subtext of all the recent hand-wringing about higher education: the widening inequality among institutions of various types and the prospects of the students who attend them. While the financial crisis has demoted Ivy League institutions from super-rich to merely rich, public universities are being gutted. It is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality. And that — not whether some professors can afford to wear Marc Jacobs — is the real scandal.

From where I perch in higher education - a PhD who in fact is immersed in undergraduate education, teaching 4 / 3 (with no TAs) at a public college that is not a research center (and whose research career depends upon the amount of time I manage to steal, essentially, from myself...) and who cannot afford to wear Marc Jacobs - I do not think that private versus public is the only important division, and I do not see the division of haves and have-nots as news. Frankly, is it not for this reason that so many Americans today do pursue post-secondary education? B/c having a college degree might mean the difference having or not having a job. Not to mention why the competition for admission to institutions like Williams and Columbia (or faculty positions there, for that matter) is as stiff as it is?

What is broken needs to be fixed. I just worry that the fixes proposed for academia / higher education will make institutions like the one where I teach as broken as everything else seems to be? Is the new normal "broken"?

I am not tied to the tenure system - I can imagine reasons to abolish it - but in the current stream of rants, I seem to see a lot of suggestions to decrease the autonomy and security with work in academia / higher education.

When it comes to work, is the new normal "sucks"?

Having everyone participate equally in unfair conditions is not the same as banishing inequalities. It seems to me that we all need to feel that we put our energies and efforts to meaningful use in our work, and that we are as necessary to the work being accomplished as the work is for our ability to meet our own needs and wants.

That this is not true for too many people is what sucks and what is broken.

The two-body problem

So, to put what I am about to say in context, let me give you a glimpse of the e-mail that StraightMan sent to me this morning:

And here’s an article that describes your life depressingly well:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/10/AR2010071002610.html?hpid=artslot

Also, the AAA meetings in 2011 are in Montreal, November 16-20.

I love you! Thanks for cleaning out Bubbie’s potty this morning. All drop offs went well.

I think the above illustrates what the modern dual academic marriage is about - love, certainly. (The reference to Montreal even suggests romance?!) Obviously also communication, which indicates mutual appreciation ("Thanks for cleaning...") and shared responsibility ("All drop offs went well"). The juxtaposition of information about interests both professional (the AAA meetings) and personal (love, potty, drop offs) in an e-mail of approximately five lines suggests a need for efficiency.

Which leads me to my response to the article that indeed describes my life depressingly well: It might be just that I am coming off my Stieg Larsson bender, but I feel like Lisbeth Salander hacked into my life and fed its contents to a journalist.

For women intent on becoming both scholars and mothers, the timing of the tenure track could not be worse. The average female doctorate is awarded at 34, an age when many college-educated women are starting families. Tenure, a defining moment in a professor's career, is decided roughly seven years later, just as the parenting window is closing.

Researchers from Barnard College in New York interviewed 21 women, all striving to be supermoms at the most demanding time in their careers. Many of the women portrayed their work and family lives in irreconcilable conflict. One mother described working in "survival mode," just doing "the things that I can to not be kicked out." Another said she was no longer being invited to career-building speaking gigs. A third faced the hard truth that she was "never going to be one of those superstars."

Professors have few set hours and can largely come and go as they please. But the scholarly demands of the job -- writing papers, applying for grants, pursuing research -- are unending. Working mothers who devote day and evening hours to parenting duties end up repaying the time at night and on weekends, feeling somewhat like perpetual graduate students.

"You tend to carve out your time for research between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., when the kids are asleep," said Tracy Fitzsimmons, 43, a political scientist who is president of Shenandoah University in Virginia -- and mother of three.

"You could choose to meet the bus when your child gets off," she said, "but it means you'll pay for it at midnight that night."

A few corrections: I was 36 (not 34). The parenting window does not close at age 41 (or ever) - in fact, for some women, that is exactly when it opens. Because my kids have an early bedtime, "my" time is between 8pm and 12midnight, but during the teaching year, it still tends to be swallowed by tasks related to teaching. So, my time for research is in the summer. Which might be a reason why I tend to be a little irritated when people ask me whether or not I am teaching summer courses: Never.

It is eerie to see words that have fallen from my mouth in this article. "Survival mode" is practically a running joke between StraightMan and me. I confess that I have just enough arrogance to speak such lamentations about finally facing the fact that I will never be the kind of superstar that I really think I might have been. In fact, I think I might have blogged about this not so long ago :)

StraightMan warned me ahead of time that I would find myself in high dudgeon when I reached this bit:

Working fathers, in theory, ought to suffer the same setbacks as mothers in their quest for tenure. But research shows that parenthood has an opposite, positive effect on men's abilities "to move ahead in academic careers," said John Curtis, director of research and public policy at AAUP. Fathers bear fewer parenting burdens than mothers, and faculty fathers who do sacrifice work for parenting tend to be admired and rewarded, while the mother who makes the same choice is "seen as neglecting her job," Curtis said.

This is when the notion of the working "parent" really annoys me. Because it erases the still significant differences rooted in gender. For example, I imagine that the partners of married faculty mothers are likely also to be working. In fact, a number of female academics are married to male academics. Married faculty fathers are likely also to benefit from their careers being a priority for their wives, esp. when they are not academics or not working outside the home (or both). Plus, the wives themselves are engaged in unacknowledged effort.

The least, then, that any faculty mother or father can do is to send your spouse an e-mail to say thanks again for helping with the poop.

P.S. StraightMan, I love you, too.

My tenure kitchen

Hard to believe: I just finished my 4th year of teaching at what on this blog I will call East Central State University College. I agree it is ridiculous that all of these words can be strung together to form the name of an institution.

So, I am supposed to start thinking about putting together my tenure file.

Allow me to preface what I am about to say about tenure: I am not sure how I feel about tenure in general b/c I get that there are arguments for it pro and con, and this is now how they do it in the UK, and so on. For example, in terms of so-called job security, the idea of a 5-year contract, with possibility of renewal, sounds reasonable to me, too. However, tenure means "more" than job security. So, as far as that goes, I want tenure, too, as a sign of a positive appraisal resulting from the process of peer review.

Here is what I am about to say about tenure: I wish that there were more "perspective" on tenure. One of StraightMan's friends from graduate school remarked that tenure is proof of ability to self-exploit. Funny how many tenured and tenure-track professors do not find this, well, hilarious, as StraightMan and I do, sitting at our adjacent desks, preparing classes, then glancing and muttering at each other, "Self-exploiter."

What happened to irony: The kind that is so not what our high school English teachers meant, but that having come of age during Reagan and Bush I apparently cultivated. Or what happened to humility and the ability to see, like Straight Man, that "promotion in an institution like West Central Pennsylvania University was a little bit like being proclaimed the winner of a shit-eating contest. Certainly such success did not reflect greater worth on the open academic market. To move to a better college, we'd have to give up something - tenure or rank or salary, or some combination of the three" (27).

In other words, I do not want to make too small or too big a deal about tenure.

It might be b/c I am turning 40 this year, therefore feeling a bit more reflective than usual even, but this bit from Richard Russo also makes sense to me: "I sometimes tell myself that I might have found another book in me if I'd been in a different, more demanding environment, one with better students, a shared sense of artistic urgency, the proper reverence for the life of the mind. But then I remember Occam's Razor, which strongly suggests that I am a one-book author. Had I been more, I'd be more" (27). Which I quote not to be self-pitying or self-deprecating but b/c I think stating things so unpityingly and undeprecatingly, in fact, helps me to keep trying in any case. I think that it is necessary to recognize that research universities do not just hire researchers, but that they produce them. Similarly, teaching colleges produce teachers. Tenure, then, is academia / higher ed's brand of quality control. It ensures that the research universities produce researchers and the teaching colleges produce teachers, to more or less their specification.

BTW, I find Occam's Razor, how shall I say, a bit ethnocentric. Whose version of simple? What is so simple about your version or mine in the first place?

Which brings me to my intended topic: I hope I get tenure. When I do, I want a kitchen!

At first, I had been browsing magazines and books and Web sites like The Not-So-Big House, but I kept finding ideas and inspiration for not-so-small kitchens. Why does everyone think they need an island?

Then I stumbled upon Apartment Therapy and their Small, Cool Kitchens Contest.

I esp. like the kitchen with the old file cabinets in the International division.

Whatever my tenure kitchen looks like, it will not have an island.