Higher ed is hot, hot, hot right now. Here are some of stories that have been getting some buzz:
The PhD Now Comes With Food Stamps – Been there. (Thanks, Anjali.)
Ken Auletta's "Get Rich U" was excellent. I need to read it again.
The Chronicle fires one of their bloggers. Guess which one.
Apt. 11d 
“Guess which one.”
The one with the black husband and (presumably) black kids?
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Riley has a book coming out this week entitled “The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For.”
It looks like her husband is a big deal with the WSJ, which certainly can’t hurt.
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I should have known there was a book to sell.
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Actually, I do consider it irresponsible to get a Ph.D. in medieval history and expect to earn a living with it. I don’t like the way unemployed folks who have privileged backgrounds are seen as more deserving/ with more sympathy than the folks who DIDN’T get all the educational breaks. Why is anyone surprised that a guy getting a Ph.D. in film studies is not earning enough money to feed his kids?
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The one with the black husband and (presumably) black kids?
Some of her best friends are black too.
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MH: Yup. It seemed so heavy-handed and such an “underhand pitch” to stir up some page views and readers. I wasn’t so clairvoyant to see ahead to the book deal though.
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My sympathy for individuals with PhDs in disciplines like medieval history is somewhat limited – if you aren’t making a living at something and nothing’s going to change, to hell with prestige – get out. You won’t be the first to discover that following your dream leads you down a path that isn’t economically viable.
But at the same time, who DO we want teaching in our universities? Don’t we want students, whatever their major, taking some history, English, philosophy, art? Who should be teaching these things? How do we want to select and reward the teaching staff?
Academia needs a complete overhaul to eliminate needless administration and ensure that instructors are paid a living wage and held accountable for good teaching practices. Until we sort that out as a society, anyone without a rich spouse or trust fund who is getting a PhD in the humanities is – and I say this with great compassion – bonkers.
FWIW, my college student’s instructors (at a large state school – fine arts department) have been absolutely fantastic – he says he’s learning so much more than he did at his excellent high school, which is the reverse of my own college experience. And yet, my mediocre professors were mostly tenured, while his are all adjuncts.
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Reading the article reminded me of the article about Walmart employees being counseled to sign up for state aid (I think the article was about health care). In this case, as that one, we have underpaid employees who are being told to avail them selves of services in order to make ends meet (though, I’m guessing, the community college doesn’t actually formally offer this counseling to their adjuncts).
Walmart was trying to foist off some of the costs of their employees onto the state. For community colleges, I guess the foisting is from one pot of tax-payer supported funds to another (though potentially, different sets of taxpaers). Kind of like the disability services in schools — paid by the school district? or medicaid? or by private insurers?.
The bottom line seems to be that we have growing classes of employment (walmart, service jobs, adjuncting) that can’t sustain a family (food, shelter, health care). And, we have safety nets with lots of holes that are supposed to deal with those in distress, but are being used by both employees and employers to sustain the economic system.
It’s a breakdown.
I’m toying with the idea that it fits into the general scheme where compromises between diametrically opposing forces results in a system that’s inherently illogical and prone to the worst of both forces. “Conservatives” want a system with no safety nets (would fewer people major in medieval studies and find potentially more remunerative employment, undermining the need for the safety net). Liberals want a system where more people (everyone?) are paid wages sufficient to cover basic necessities but want safety nets when they’re not. So, we end up with safety nets that are gamed by employers (something neither group wants).
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I’m growing tired of this formula–
1.) Write extremely inflammatory article which bashes either mothers, women, the poor, or people of color.
2.) Release book.
(Incidentally, Laura, did you see this article, too…
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/04/grad_school_admissions_grad_cafe_exposes_gen_y_s_job_search_angst_.single.html)
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Here’s Historiann’s take on the mishigas of Riley and her inflammatory comments.
http://www.historiann.com/2012/05/09/why-blogging-still-sucks-part-ii-a-shande/
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“Some of her best friends are black too.”
Undoubtedly. But isn’t having a black husband and (probably) black kids pretty far to go to create a racial alibi? Riley probably lives a much more racially integrated life than 90% of the people who got her fired.
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I believe that last month we learned that the racist John Derbyshire had an Asian wife. Also, I keep hearing that Obama is “anti-America,” despite the general belief that his wife was born here. (Unless I didn’t read closely enough, and Michelle is Kenyan also.)
I’m not sure where people got the idea that a relative can give you can get some sort of Shield of Racial Invulnerability when you’ve done an otherwise racist thing.
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I don’t think the Derbyshire thing makes your point since he is more specific in his racism.
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I think her firing was necessary because she held up specific works as being pointless. You can say that a certain field is junk* and you may get away with it. But, by bring up specific dissertations and then not reading those, she was on ground that just couldn’t be defended.
*I hope not too often in the Chronicle, but in general.
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“I believe that last month we learned that the racist John Derbyshire had an Asian wife.”
I think there’s probably a causal relationship there. 1st-generation Chinese women are notoriously un-PC, and it’s very natural for that to rub off on husbands. Likewise, my least PC friend locally is Hispanic. PC is primarily an upper middle class white person’s competitive sport and it actually stands to reason that a person with a non-white spouse would be rather less PC than a white person of the same general class, background and social position.
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Being African-American, being married to an African-American, or having many friends who are African-American is not a defense against racist diatribe. The diatribe gets judged on its own, and the fact that “many of your good friends are black” is not a defense against it.
Being racist is a behavior, not a characteristic.
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“Being racist is a behavior, not a characteristic.”
That needs to be a bumper sticker, bj.
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I am a teacher, currently struggling with end-of-semester student excuses and evasions. Riley deserves no sympathy: she didn’t do the reading….
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I want bj’s bumper sticker. And I agree with that medievalists w/o jobs maybe ought to find another line of work. The Walmart issue is a harder nut to crack.
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