Why Competing For Tenure Is Like Trying To Become a Drug Lord 168
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Scott Jaschik writes in Inside Higher Education that the academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders and with income distribution within gangs extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities. According to Alexandre Afonso, academic systems rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of 'outsiders' ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. 'What you have is an increasing number of brilliant PhD graduates arriving every year into the market hoping to secure a permanent position as a professor and enjoying freedom and high salaries, a bit like the rank-and-file drug dealer hoping to become a drug lord,' says Afonso. 'To achieve that, they are ready to forgo the income and security that they could have in other areas of employment by accepting insecure working conditions in the hope of securing jobs that are not expanding at the same rate.' The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on adjunct lecturers who rely on food stamps to make ends meet. Afonso adds that he is not trying to discourage everyone from pursuing Ph.D.s but that prospective graduate students need to go in with a full awareness of the job market."
Of course, no mention of the staff (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're staff, you're not even a potential member of the club. It doesn't matter how much of an expert you in are in your field, if you're not faculty, your opinion doesn't matter.
So, Like any Tournament Model (Score:5, Insightful)
Just academia? (Score:5, Insightful)
with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders and with income distribution within gangs extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities.
So academia is just like the rest of the world, then.
subject agnostic? (Score:4, Insightful)
I notice that the article is completely devoid of any subject detail. PhD in what? If you are a STEM graduate (or PhD) and are adept at computers and mathematics, this would be a crisis. The reality is, that academic jobs depend on writing grants to fund the university. Depending on your discipline the university "deserves" more or less, but you will find those promoted pay the "administrators". By more or less I mean, an English professor needs a library, a chemistry professor needs a lab.
Universities are a business, their product is teaching students, and carrying out research, which pays for staff.
Endowments (i.e. donations which are a tax write off for the donor...) pay for endowed chairs.
Faculty is the equivalent "company man"...... The customer may get to complain, but anyone else...
Re:So, Like any Tournament Model (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Overstating their case (Score:5, Insightful)
Though this is because the only people who get tenure-track jobs in the first place are those who've already gotten a PhD., and so by definition have the self-control to resist the urge to kill the back-stabbing bastards who deserve it.
Reminds me of the shooting at SDSU in 1996 -- I knew several grad students who were stunned that a master's student had gunned down his committee. Not that he's shot them (which they could sympathize with), but that he'd done it over a master's degree.
-Esme
Avoid the PhD... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can tell you as someone who has interviewed a lot of engineering candidates, PhD's tend to get a very skeptical eye. Occasionally you find a great one, but usually they are a nightmare of disfunction, and almost never anything in the middle. It is too bad we can't accept more of a skills based compensation model, instead of one that automatically pays a large premium for an extra slip of paper, no matter how much of walking horror show it makes you skill wise.
Re:Long articles are hard to read (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, Like any Tournament Model (Score:5, Insightful)
This is only partially true. At the very least, most people who make it to professor are crazy by then, and just continue in there never-ending fight like ever before.
Additionally, tenured professors will be bullied by the administration if they underperform. That can get very nasty.
Re:So, Like any Tournament Model (Score:5, Insightful)
you did something really good in the past
So, no, not like congress.
The economics of academia (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people don't realize that the tenure-track faculty position is rapidly disappearing at U.S. universities. Tenure is instead becoming a tool to accomplish two goals: (1) recruit superstars, hopefully with the goal of increasing your school's numbers in the USN&WR college rankings, and (2) reshape the demographics of the faculty, e.g. increased female and minority hires.
Otherwise, tenure has outlived its usefulness, at least to university administrators. Go to any major university, and you'll find tenured professors who "retired in place" years ago, and who are worse than useless as researchers or teachers. To them, academic "freedom" translates to "leave me alone, you can't tell me what to do". University administrators have had their fill of those types. It's the old "10% making the other 90% look bad" syndrome, and consequently the other 90% must bear the brunt.
The future of academia is one-year to five-year contracts with non-tenured faculty. If you can bring in research contract money, your academic salary will still be reasonably competitive, at least in engineering and the hard sciences. If your research contracts dry up, your contract won't be renewed, and you'll need to move on. Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.
As to the original article, the drug lord vs. drug seller analogy is largely a side effect of the economics of Ph.D.s in liberal arts and soft sciences. There are only so many university positions available in sociology, history, english literature, etc., and almost zero positions outside of academia to absorb the surplus. So if you truly love Medieval European History, and cannot conceive of doing anything else with your degree, you're going to fight tooth and nail doing academic scut work for slave wages in the hopes of making yourself more competitive for a rare tenure-track opening.
The analogy falls apart with engineering and computer science, because a good Ph.D. can usually find a relevant job in industry, and quite often at better wages than in academia. Ph.D.s in liberal arts don't have that luxury. For them, it's either academic grunt work, unemployment, or getting a job completely unrelated to your degree.
Re:Avoid the PhD... (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who has worked in industry (where we occasionally considered PhDs) and is now in graduate school looking to get back into the job market soon, this is complete and total BS. You are seeing what you wanted to see. My first time in industry, I bought the "overqualified" line hook line and sinker. In retrospect, it was some sort of organizational bias that lead us to believe that people who could do the job happily for the money we offered could be overqualified. Now, I am leaving with an MS after several years functioning as a PhD student, and I see the same skeptisism applied to me (which undergraduates don't get, despite us competing in the same pay scale).
The fact that you think a PhD is just "an extra slip of paper" shows how out of touch you really are. A PhD can be very grueling, both personally and intellectually. Those who succeed are often elite within their discipline, and despite the laser beam focus, PhDs are often great generalizers in broad realms. I think you are not capable of recognizing talent. You have some other, perverse metric you're using (most likely an organizational bias), and ability to do the job is not it.
In fairness, your organization's disfunction is par for the course. Only exceptional companies really ask root striking questions in job interviews (and many otherwise exceptional companies aren't very good at that either). Most just ask where we want to be in five years, then walk out wondering why they can't find the right person for the job.
Re:Just academia? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the few at the top. It's the wages. Grocery clerks (zero education or experience required) make as much or more than grad students (minimum four years of post secondary, excellent performance through high school and undergrad). A good cashier (few years experience and the ability to count, sort of) likely makes more than a post doc (ten to twenty years post secondary, excellent performance). The manager makes as much as a professor will probably top out at. University administration is sometimes (but not always, and less and less now) promoted academic staff; that's where the money starts.
So in academia you work half your life to make as much as someone who can be trusted not to steal from the cash, and that's pretty much where you're almost certain to top out.
Re: Overstating their case (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a real shame. What sort of "Art Studies" were you in? As a PhD in a hard science, I've found employment outside academia to be fairly plentiful.
The real problem that you bring up is that many higher education institutions don't provide guidance in probability of feeding yourself verses major chosen. This is a real shortcoming in a place that you are investing a HUGE amount of time and money into
Sheldon
Re:Avoid the PhD... (Score:3, Insightful)
My experience as a math PhD student is that about 2/3 of my colleagues are really narrow specialists who view anything outside their narrow specialty as a waste of their time. They probably aren't great fits for industry, especially because the natural result of their attitude is that they have acquired no applicable skills. On the other hand, those who make it through the meat grinder will be great researchers.
The other 1/3 get bored working on narrow, specialized problems; they want to learn lots of stuff and think about all kinds of different things. I think these people are great fits for industry (and will not actually fit in that well at a research university). If you name something, whether it's web programming, fluid dynamics, statistics, or whatever, they've probably dabbled in it to some extent -- and if they haven't, they'll have done something closely related. These people will adapt fairly quickly to any company that hires them. On the other hand, with rare exceptions (Feynman) they probably don't have the talent (and luck) to learn all that stuff and still make a major contribution to their own narrow specialty.
I'd bet that the same distinction exists in other fields, albeit in different proportions.
Re:Just academia? (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't that how a free market works? Groups of people get paid what the entities want to pay, and if they don't like it, they work elsewhere forcing wages to rise, or they just do it anyways and potentially form a union.
If it's so much better to work as a grocery clerk financially, and that's what your measure of 'success' is, then do that. Nobody is entitled to any salary, nor is anyone forced into any career. In fact, if workers for these jobs were more rare, you can bet salary would go up.
Re:So, Like any Tournament Model (Score:5, Insightful)
This is generally done by the same people who use the term "elites" derisively. There's a culture - often promulgated by Libertarians - that people who aren't directly enhancing some corporation's bottom line somewhere don't deserve recognition or respect. The fact is, someone who has made significant contributions to their field deserves some job security.
It's not that these naysayers have a better system for who deserves tenure (or, if they want to eliminate tenure altogether, a tenure-like protection from Administrative whims). They don't want anyone to have such protections, because then scientists who tell inconvenient truths about politics or science ("Hey, did you know Climate Change might be a problem?) can be easily silenced by politically or corporate-backed powers.
Is the tenure system perfect? God, no, but what system involving human pecking order is? But it's pretty good, actually, for the most part! They're a reason the western-style educational system has been rocking it hardcore for hundreds of years now. And the fact is, the attack on professors, tenure, and the scientific elites in general is mostly coming from the corners that are trying to tear down science as an edifice in general.
Re:So, Like any Tournament Model (Score:5, Insightful)
Because administrators by and large are politically conservative, and depending on department, adjuncts and people on tenure tracks may be engaged in research that goes against the ideological grain of whoever is carrying the purse strings for the campus.
Look, this is really more a problem in disciplines other than computer and natural sciences. I'm a grad student in cultural anthropology, and arguably the entire basis of my field is in questioning those things in everyday life that everyone takes for granted. When studying issues that have political/economic implications -- like, say, researching healthcare access among migrant workers on the southern US border -- it's really easy to fall afoul of campus leadership if your work addresses failings of capitalism, engaged in the long-term effects of poverty on a community. You make too much of a fuss over poor brown people who have been systematically screwed over by "the system," and you risk offending key administrators where you're slaving away hoping that a tenured position opens up. These days, the people in charge of campuses and entire state university systems have little background as actual educators, and are increasingly originating in businesses and bureaucracies. Questioning how society works is not in their best interests. Make too big a deal over things like social inequality, and expect the boot.
Now, when it comes to teaching in classrooms, then more departments open themselves up to criticism than the social sciences and the humanities. If I'm teaching about human evolution in a conservative part of the country (which I have), I can take for granted that a significant percentage of my students are going to object to the course material. As an adjunct, I have no job security whatsoever. Any student can go to the administration and complain that my course offends their delicate sensibilities, and if they happen to find a sympathetic ear with the higher-ups, well, I won't have to worry about having my contract renewed the following semester. After all, there are plenty of other desperate M.A.s and Ph.D.s ready to take over at the podium.
If I have tenure, I have much less to worry about as far as what research I can do, and what I can teach in my classrooms. Just stepping on someone's toes because their ideology is too constrained to accept reality (which, as Mr. Colbert famously pointed out, has a liberal bias) is no longer a significant concern. I can instead be judged solely by my peers, who -- while not perfect -- are more qualified to evaluate me than some nervous bean-counter.
These are a couple of broad examples, but I hope they give you some idea of why academic freedom allotted by tenured positions is crucial to the function of higher education. Part of the reason this has become such a major issue in academia is that university systems are so opaque to most of American society. No one outside the so-called "ivory tower" has a good grasp of how it's structured and ranked, or even how the tenure process works (other than vague references to "publish or perish"). If more people outside of academia were aware of how business interests have been affecting higher education since the '80s, I would hope there would be more public outcry, and more support for faculty and staff.
Re:So, Like any Tournament Model (Score:2, Insightful)
If they were delivering on grants, then, by definition, they wouldn't be underperforming professors.
Re:Of course, no mention of the staff (Score:3, Insightful)
No, but if the ship's engineer tells them it'll take 7 days to get there with 3 fuel stops, he doesn't get told to make it happen in 2 days with no fuel stops. Well, at least not in the world of reality.
Re:Tenure is destructive to higher education (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that employers are expecting unpaid free labor is not because employees are coming out of the "ivory tower" with any less practical educations than they always have. It's because employers, faced with more employees than they need (a situation they soundly encourage) are able to get away with pitting the potential labor pool against each other to accept ludicrously low wages, while skipping the job-specific training that employers would have provided in the past. There were no "good old days" when PhD's stepped out the door ready from day one to do exactly what employers needed --- instead, employers would make a long-term investment in an employee to mentor and train them in real world specifics; building expertise over several years at the start of a life-long career (not a 12 month temporary gig).
As I have pointed out above, the tenure system has already been steadily in decline for several decades. Schools have fewer tenured positions; and they do not have a monopoly on course content. Indeed, tenured researchers often have the least to do with teaching, which is planned by administrators and foisted off on low-paid adjuncts. If the power of tenured professors within institutions was a negative factor on the quality of instruction, then the quality of instruction should have been steadily rising over the past few decades as the position of tenured professors has become marginalized (their "disproportionate level of power" is in decline). The fact that the correlation goes the opposite way empirically counters your entire argument --- in the "good old days" when academia seemed more "connected" to the world, tenured professors were an unchallengeable cornerstone of academic institutions.
If academia has become any more distant from the private sector, it is because the private sector has itself moved away from all norms of human decency and career professionalism. Educated workers are treated as expendable, temporary labor to be shredded up and spit out, not lifetime-career professionals deserving respect. Companies have become ever bigger and more management-heavy, replacing leadership by people who understood engineering/science/whatever-the-company-was-doing with cookie-cutter empty suit MBAs. If you want to talk about "concentrated power" problems, the "concentrated power" problem is that of multimillionaire management class with an iron grip over industry, who are more than happy to shit all over the lives and careers of mere PhDs.