UPCOMING CARNIVALESQUE

UPCOMING CARNIVALESQUE!!!

Hey all -- the next Carnivalesque is coming up this coming weekend at Cranky Professor Please, send him links at crankyprofessor AT gmail DOT com!

Regarding my faith in the UK education system

Regarding my faith in the UK education system...

"Professor Rick Trainor has been awarded an honorary knighthood (KBE) for services to higher education. The award is honorary due to his American nationality. Commenting on the award, the Chairman of Council of King’s College London, Lord Douro, said, ‘Rick Trainor has been a tireless advocate for King’s and for British universities more generally. In particular, he has helped to develop the alumni programme and raise significant sums for the College, and has helped improve the estate of King’s, not least through the acquisition of the East Wing of Somerset House. He has also helped shape the improved academic profile of the College and done much to further the student experience at King’s. This award is well deserved.’"

Like f*#k.


'nuff said. Feel free to leave furious comments below.

back, kinda sorta

back, kinda sorta

So I've done my last deadlined report for work. I'm burnt out. So today is a me, me, me day! It says something about my life lately that this means I am doing one thing for my department, and otherwise cleaning, doing laundry, handling personal finance because it looks like I've bought a house, and getting ready to start a series of posts on my first year with tenure. And going to Target and buying shoes online.

see you soon!

kalamazoo days 3 and 4

Kalamazoo Days 3 & 4,

Met my SFMS mentee. She's very nice. Hope I gave her good advice. Then off to panels -- Really nice panel where Margaret McCarthy and Karl Heidecker and Justin Lake gave really nice papers. Lots of good questions. Then lunch with friends from Beachy U. Then panels -- two in honor of the legal historian who was the second member of my committee. Since most of my friends from Grad U were there, and also, they were presenting him with his Festschrift, I went to those rather than Steve Muhlberger's De Re Militari lecture. Then off to the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholars' dinner, then to ... the Dance!! Little dancing, some talk, home to bed at a decent hour.

This morning was my panel. It was full of win. First, Sunday morning at 8:30, and at least 20 people were there! Second, the people were all the kind of people who could ask scary questions. Too bad I was not the best moderator ever and let our first speaker go over, but damn, he gave a good paper on formulae. Then one of my blogfriends gave a really interesting paper on things Catalonian, and finally, we heard a very good paper that argued, among other things, that Hincmr's De Ordine was something akin to utopian literature. Then more hanging out with some fab people for brunch at McNalley's, and then home.

I know -- not too detailed.

It was busy and I am tired. More later.

kalamazoo day 2

Kalamazoo Day 2

One of the things I love about Kzoo is the people -- I get to see folks I only see at conferences. One of the things tat gets me is that I'm actually sort of an introvert. And I'm one of those people who doesn't necessarily do well with too many choices. And I want to be friends with lots of people, and am always worried that I don't fit.

So today was a hard day. Blogger meet-up was great, but one of these days I have to remember to socialize more with the people I'll see less, and more with the people who I only see at the meet-up. But it was really great to see folks especially the ones I communicate with less than I'd like, and see far less than I'd like.

Paper panel one was a disaster. I got there ad realized it wasn't really going ot be what I wanted. Then, before the next panel, lunch that went on too long, service- wise. Late to the most. Crowded. Panel. Ever. Poisoning in the 14th C. Awesome

kalamazoo day 1

Kalamazoo Day 1

Today was all about the Carolingian panels. Heard lots of good papers. Especially enjoyed the first two papers, by Christina Pössel and Paul Kershaw. More on that later. For now, I have been hanging with my friends, and have sleep to be getting to. But so far, my Kalamazoo collection includes Rebel Lettriste, Jonathan Jarrett, meg from xoom, ex-tiruncula, Lisa Carnell, and much of the ITM crowd, and some of the totally cool folks I met last year at St. Andrews and Leeds.


more later. Blogger meetup tomorrow!


OH -- I met the Chaucer blogger tonight!!!

Blogger meetup!!

Kalamazoo Meetup

Because I am soooo far behind in reading Other People's Blogs, I missed it. Usual time and place, though -- Friday at 8 am at Mugshots.

Blogger meetup?

Blogger Meetup at Zoo?

Hey all -- have we organized this yet?

Because there needs to be at least one official blogger meetup at the Zoo. I'm happy to organize, if no one else has (although I'm guessing it will be the usual Friday morning at the coffee place?)

LET ME KNOW, MY BLOGPEEPS!


Also, I will blog something of substance soon on my year of isolation.

Carnivalesque!

Carnivalesque!

There is a new Carnivalesque posted at Gill Polack's "Even in a Little Thing". It's got a bunch of things I knew about, and a bunch of things I missed, and it going to be really useful to me in my catching up.




Go and read! I'm too swamped to blog or break, so you should!

Blegging for entries

Blegging for entries

Hi all --

We are looking for entries for the carnivalesque due up in a week or so. We are especially looking for good Ancient posts (anything posted after January 1 is fair game) and would really like more on the closures of Classics departments, cool discoveries, and generally interesting stuff!


this is a great way to get the message out about new blogs and remind people about older ones.

(and obviously, good medieval posts are always welcome!)

Put your links in the comments!


Thanks!

SEMA

SEMA

Ok, folks. I've agreed to come up with something for SEMA. I can simply put in a paper, but might as well see if anybody wants to help put together a panel. Me, I think I'll be writing about women and property, but focusing on the deo sacrata. Anyway, the CFP is below. Let me know if you are interested in putting together a panel or submitting a paper!

Call for Papers

“Natural, Unnatural, & Supernatural”



36th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association
Roanoke, VA
November 18-20, 2010

The Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association will take place November 18-20, 2010, at the Hotel Roanoke, located in the southwest corner of Virginia in the picturesque Shenandoah Valley. Because this year’s conference coincides with the 75th anniversary of the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, we have selected “Natural, Unnatural, & Supernatural” as its theme.

We welcome papers and panels dealing with all aspects of the Middle Ages, but we particularly encourage those examining elements of the natural, unnatural, and supernatural in the medieval world. As it does every year, the SEMA annual conference encourages submissions from all branches of medieval studies, including but not limited to history, art, science, philosophy, theology, archaeology, paleography, language, and literatures.

Proposals for entire sessions and for interdisciplinary presentations are strongly encouraged, although individual paper proposals are welcome as well. Offers to serve as session moderators are also welcome.

Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length and sessions should consist of no more than 3 presenters and 1 moderator. If submitting a full session, please indicate the intended format of the session (formal papers, roundtable discussion, panel, and so on) and titles of all individual presentations. All proposals should be approximately 250 words and include all contact information (mailing address as well as email) of the presenter(s) and/or organizer. Proposals must include a note regarding A/V equipment needs. Email submissions are much preferred.

Email proposals by June 1 to:

sema2010 AT scholar.vt.edu

Prof. Matthew Gabriele
Dept. of Religion and Culture
Virginia Tech
342 Lane Hall (0227)
Blacksburg, VA 24061
USA

Please explore the conference website, where you'll find information on plenary speakers, accommodation, local dining, travel & maps, and local attractions.


For questions or more information about the conference please contact:

Matthew Gabriele (Virginia Tech) mgabriele AT vt.edu
Dana-Linn Whiteside (Roanoke College) whiteside AT roanoke.edu

Early Modern carnivalesque

New Early Modern Carnivalesque

Hi all -- this month's Early Modern Carnivalesque is up at The Quack Doctor. Remember, you don't have to be an Early Modernist to like Early Modern history! Two series of Blackadder can't be wrong!

A quick MN note

A quick MN note

Still feeling the disquiet, and thought I should point readers to this article at Inside Higher Ed and a post over at Digital Medievalist.

What I'm finding really interesting is how this is playing out. The internet is a wonderful place. I love it. But I think we often forget about the ramifications of how internet communication works. I fully believe that there would have been no story for IHE to write had the MN folks just said that they had been remiss -- or even hadn't realized that people had issues with their policies -- and agreed to start attributing their sources carefully. But the internet is also a weird place. If you make assertions that might be challenged, you can bet that someone will challenge them on their blog.


Update: I have some more thoughts to add to this, in part due to some things unearthed by a colleague, in part due to my thoughts on what I see as MN's rather inadequate response, which to me says, "Fuck you."

And then there was disquiet

And then there was disquiet

My immediate-ish reaction
I'm still processing the various responses to my last post, and to meg's
first post and follow-up, in which she responds to Medievalist.net's comments. She says a lot of the things I would say, but most of you know that I'm not one to let that stop me entirely. And honestly, I feel that there should be a response from me, because despite a promise from MN to start attributing their work (which seems to have begun on the MN site, if not on the sister sites -- I haven't checked those), I feel a greater disquiet than before.

One of the things that meg pointed out was that, even though she and I wrote very different posts, the responses were identical. And to me, they were fairly predictable. I think that's really the source of the feeling. I was hoping that the response would be something along the lines of Jon Dresner's suggestion in the comments: MN would apologize for not attributing the sources -- or even simply say that they had not realized it was an issue for so many of their readers, and fix the practice. I know! How naive was that? However, I was really not at all surprised when the response was initially one of outrage, followed by defensive statements that I can't help but read as:

• their practices were within the range of professional standards, especially when we consider that we are not talking about professional journalists, or what I like to call the "everybody else does it" defense;
  
  
• they were simply trying to provide a valuable service to us, and had been doing so for a while, aka "and you should be grateful";
  
  
• complaints that they had not been contacted and would certainly have responded positively if they had only known, because oh, dear, no one has ever complained before or, "you never gave us a fair chance so really, you are the unethical bad guys;"
  
  
• assertions that they are in it to make money, because they love all things medieval, but it doesn't pay the bills, or "you are gatekeeping and trying to keep us from our livelihood!"

Here's the thing: These defenses are all about the herring rouge, about distraction and redirecting the focus of the arguments. Meg and I, each in our own ways, and for overlapping, but also different reasons, were complaining about what we saw as a problem in standards and practices. The responses bordered on the ad feminas. Not only am I not buying it, but I think that responding to the specific comments in more detail than meg has really dilutes the importance of the issues at stake here.

Why this is important and what is at stake

There are several reasons:

1. I think that we live in a world where the borders of public and private information, of copyright, fair use, and non-attribution have been gradually eroding for rather too long. I think that these things are important in general, and are especially important in scholarship and journalism. It isn't enough for me that a talking head or newspaper or blogger says something -- News Corp and other organizations have demonstrated that they can call all of the shows on their news channels 'news' and huge numbers of people will give their opinions the same amount of credence that they will give to a report on NPR or the Washington Post. So when I look for news, and when I send people to look for news, I want to be able to verify it.
   
   
2. I teach. I teach history. Some of the most important things that I think the field of history can teach us are to consider our sources, to interrogate them, and to run them through well-informed filters for context and subtext, as well as the more obvious information. In order to do this and do it well, citation and attribution are of paramount importance. As I tell my students, we do not cite merely to avoid charges of plagiarism, but also to enter our own reading and writing into a larger academic or cultural conversation. Knowledge is cumulative, yet the model practiced by MN in not granting attribution prevents us from entering into that conversation.
   
   
3. We, as readers academic or not, need to be able to make up our own minds and use the critical skills that I mentioned above. Omitting references makes it impossible for us to do so. We are forced to trust all statements equally, because we haven't been given all the information. Given that the Googling I and others have done shows that not all of the news items are in fact press releases, and some have been, as Peter says, "inadvertently someone's blog piece or news article they wrote for another publication," I can only say that taking more care, and providing references would have obviated this problem.
   
   
4. Standards are important. They are especially important for those who choose to trade on a particular sort of persona. When MN and its staff trade on their connections to academia, they are obligated to follow those standards. I welcome more fluid boundaries between the professional academic and the enthusiast. Some of my favorite blogs are those that focus on being a public scholar and forging those ties. I think it is disingenuous at best to suggest that a site that promotes its connections by linking to scholarly articles and producing interviews with scholars should then fall back on the much lower standards of some forms of journalism. And again, this is a red herring: as others have pointed out in comments, attribution is also de riguer amongst responsible bloggers, academic or otherwise.

Those are the main issues as I seem them. They all boil down to one simple thing, however: being seen to be open and honest is preferable to leaving the reader wondering if what she is reading is kosher in terms of reliability or legality.


And the disquiet

I said I didn't mind the fact that MN is for-profit. And I don't. But that doesn't mean I'm comfortable with the fact that I see things written by people I know who are publishing as a requirement to their careers, and not for money, being used to give a third party money. A colleague pointed out that many journal publishers would likely be perfectly happy to trade the links for the publicity, and I think that's likely true. This is why I did not bring up before MN's policy of linking to the download sites for journals like Early Medieval Europe. MN stated on the faceook page that this was all done by invitation and with permission, and really, I figure if an online publisher has a problem, it's up to them to issue a DCMA complaint. But I do resent that MN does not seem to think that this is an issue. As before, I do -- without a statement that says that an article is linked to with permission of the copyright holder, I wonder. And, for example, free content does not always mean "you are free to link to this without asking." Sometimes it means, "you don't have to pay for it, but you have to ask the copyright holder if it's ok." Given the responses from MN, I am not confident that this is happening. I would be more confident if there were a statement that permission had been granted, even if it were a general disclaimer clearly visible at the top or bottom of the page. After all, that is not only the scholarly, but also the journalistic standard.


So yes, there has been a positive response by MN in regards to our (and I mean all of those who have commented here and at other venues) concerns. And, while I was writing this, Peter contacted me via email with what seems to be a genuine willingness to try to bring the site to a place where we can feel comfortable sending our students. So despite the fact that I am still disquieted by the fact that I don't really think they get the issues, I'm hoping that this post and further dialogue will help.


I'll keep you posted.



edited for clarity and typos

A Breach of Trust

A Breach of Trust

Over at xoom, meg raises some very good questions about the growing blog news aggregation service that is Medieval News and its larger entity, Medievalists.net. It advertises itself as "is your source for news, articles, videos and resources about the Middle Ages". And it is, sort of. Although I do tend to be annoyed by that last assertion, since there are, in face, many sources for resources that are very good and not-for-profit, e.g., Monastic Matrix and ORB.


Where I am most concerned, though, is that, if you look over the actual news articles for MN, you will see, as meg points out, that the names and original sources have been stripped out. Again, my concern is not so much about copyright per se: if there are legal issues, they are between MN and the people who hold copyright to the news stories. After all, IANAL, nor do I play one for fun or money. Rather, I'm concerned because I have been sending my students to the site to try to get them to see that what we do is interesting and fun. And they have been going to the site and reading it. This is problematic, because my students are taught that using the writing of others without attribution is plagiarism. At SLAC, if they blogged or wrote a paper in the way that MN blogs news, they would face Academic Integrity charges with penalties up to and including possible expulsion. And now they have access to a site run by people who say they are academics, doing exactly what I have been telling them they can't do.

The scraping of names has another practical problem. Even if my students were to cite the MN news posts, even if they were very careful in their own documentation, there is a very good chance that they would miss that the original article came from the BBC Website, or the Grauniad or elsewhere. And that's not fair to them (although it's a teaching moment in waiting).

Finally, as Janice pointed out in a comment at meg's post, the scraping means that, when doing Google searches for information, because of the way people link to MN, and the way MN posts its news, MN and the posts that link to it come up first -- and I've done a check: often the first 6 or 7 search results all go back to MN, rather than the original source. This means two things: obviously, MN appears to the casual reader to be the original source of the story. This seems to me to be confusing at best. The other thing is that MN makes money from advertising, so that there would appear to be a direct financial advantage to more people going to the MN site, rather than to the original sources. Obviously, I can't say whether or not that is true, or whether it is the intent of the nice people who run the site to mislead people or turn a profit from the uncredited work of others. But these practices make me uncomfortable, and for that reason, I am going to have to suggest to my students that they avoid the site.

This saddens me, because I have met the MN people at the Zoo. They present as colleagues. They present the site as something we should use, and encourage others to use. Unlike the booksellers and publishers, who pretty much stay near the bookroom and the wine hours, they mingle as academics and colleagues rather than as business people. But MN does not feel very collegial to me, because I feel I can't trust it with my students. Perhaps this is a big misunderstanding, and I just can't find the links to the original articles at other sites. But until I can show my students where to go to find what they should be citing, I am going to have to recommend that they stay away from it as much as I recommend they not use Wikipedia.


Update: If your work happens to end up on the web in plagiarized form, here is what you can do


NOTE: Follow up posts here and here

Busman's Holiday

Busman's Holiday

So I'm several states away from home, visiting my Cranky academic sibling, and having a lovely time. And working, even though it's spring break at SLAC. Yeah, I know -- faculty don't get spring break!! Seriously, I don't know anyone who won't be doing some sort of work, even if it's just catching up. In my case, it's been connected to lots of fun, though. I got to stop to break a really long drive by having a late lunch with an esteemed senior medieval legal historian and his wife, which was really pleasant. And then spent a very pleasant evening decompressing with Cranky, who took me to a really good little restaurant where I pretty much spent my honorarium I earned today by guest teaching for him.

The next day, we went along on a field trip to the art museum at Cornell, where we saw lots of cool stuff, and had some pretty fantastic Japanese food for lunch. The trip was organized by Cranky's Asian art historian colleague, who totally rocks and put up with lots of questions from me. Then home and dinner and hanging out. And grading. Don't forget midterm grading.

Yesterday was more hanging out, more grading, a visit to a winery, and wings with a bit more local beer than was necessary. But all in all, mostly just fun -- have I mentioned that Cranky is a great host? He took me on a walking tour where I managed to not take any pictures, so will probaby do that tomorrow morning. But this is a fantastic town with all sorts of amazing houses and OMG a LAKE VIEW to die for!!

Today, I earned my keep, having met some other nice colleagues and enviously toured the building that houses Cranky's department. I think I sort of scared the students, who clearly were not prepared for the intense seminar exercise I'd sent ahead. But it was still enjoyable, and gave Cranky a break, so there you are. Back after class to grade some more, discover I'd totally b0rk3d my Blackboard grade books, so will likely get yelled at next week for submitting S/U grades for one class, and kind of pushed the limits of "on time." Never again will I try to teach four classes in the Spring. It's insane. I have never been so behind before. argh.

So what's up for the rest of my break? Well, there's the marking I haven't finished, for starters. Then proofing my department's pages for next year's catalogue -- as well as writing up some sample matrices of how majors should progress in their degree programs for my department. After that, another set of reports for a new SLAC initiative that I suspect will end up in my department being combined with another as a program. And I think I have a bunch of reading to do. Welcome to spring break!

On Jobs, Tenure, etc., part two

On Jobs, Tenure, etc., part two

Right. I thought I was done with this topic, but I'm not. The Frog Princess has made a couple of comments that I think need addressing, and they probably need a post of their own, so I'm going to bring them up here. The things I really want to address are these: the 'silencing of the debate', the sacrifices vs. rewards argument, the honesty and ethics of the field. And some other stuff (what, you thought I would limit myself?).

Here is her first comment:

I've enjoyed reading this post but as someone who remains firmly on the other side of this debate, I do have a few thoughts.

First of all, I've seen a lot of professors blog about how they refuse to feel guilty for having a job and I have no idea where they're getting the idea that they should feel guilty. As far as I read the debate, the issue is not that individual people should be apologizing for having jobs. The system worked as it should.

And yes, people lose their jobs all the time. But losing your job suggests that you had one to begin with, not that you spent a decade earning qualifications and never got a job that you could then lose.

For what it's worth, I don't think individual professors are to blame necessarily, although again I should stress that not every advisor is as up front about the realities of the job market as the professor side of this debate assumes. But graduate school is incredibly difficult (it's taken a hellish turn for me in the past several months) and I don't think it's too much to ask that there be a decent shot at getting a job. I do know this: should I not get a job, going to graduate school will have been a waste. Yeah, I'll have a PhD and I'll be proud of it, even as I hide it on my cv to get employed elsewhere. But nothing's going to make up for the ways in which my life has not progressed in service of pursuing a certain professional path.

I responded:

Frog Princess -- here's the things that, for me at least (and I expect some of the other people who have commented similarly) are problematic in your statement:

• Those of us who have jobs have also gone through grad school. It is incredibly difficult, and has been hellish for many of the people I know. I had all sorts of health problems in grad school that ended about 4 months after I finished. All stress-related. I joke sometimes that Prozac finished my diss. I also lived with very minimal possessions, hand-me-down furniture, seldom going anywhere nice, never had a real vacation for years. Even now, I live in a small apartment because I'm only just at a point where I might qualify for a mortgage. Yes. It's difficult in what we have to do to get the degree and the sacrifices many of us make to get the degree.
  
  
  
• You can think grad school will have been a waste. Fine. But it's a choice, and in life there are tradeoffs. I would most likely have got a job sooner and at a better institution had I not chosen to get married and raise a child. That choice, and that marriage, totally derailed my academic work for a long time. And I don't have that marriage anymore. Ironically, I probably would have met someone else who I love very much much earlier had I put grad school first, and we might even be together now. Or maybe not. At any rate, I have an ex-husband who is a dear friend, a child I love very much, a bunch of in-laws I adore, and my share of the post-divorce debts is almost paid off. We make choices and live with them. You can spend your life bemoaning where you might have been without grad school, but you have no idea where you'd be now. None of us do. And even getting the job doesn't mean we don't look at people who are "ahead" of us and wonder what life would be like. Hell, my little sister had a baby a month after graduating high school, never went to college, and makes $30k more a year than I do -- and theoretically can retire on a full pension in about 5 years, at 49 years old. She made some shitty choices and ended up "ahead" of lots of us.
  
  
• yes, you need to have a job to lose it. But grad school is a job. And there are no guarantees in any training that there will be jobs. Nor is there any guarantee that, had you trained for something else, that you wouldn't be changing careers. I can very much understand feeling that you deserve a decent shot, and I don't know what your subject is, but honestly, I think "decent shot" is pretty nebulous. I know many people who would not ever have applied for some of the jobs I've taken, because they had heavier teaching loads than they wanted or because they weren't FT or T-T. But those 'lesser' jobs gave me the experience I needed to get the job I have. It's still a crap market, but it's a crappier market for people whose idea of what sort of job fits them is limited to certain sorts of institutions. Either way, this goes back to the feelings of entitlement I mentioned in my post. Grad school is already a fantastic luxury compared to what non-academics go through.
  
  
• About the apology thing: I think some of us are refusing to apologize because of the underlying message that I see in many of the posts about this -- that we somehow just don't understand, or that somehow, we were more fortunate than we know. That's probably true for some people. But it's a lot less true than we are given credit for, I think.

And her rejoinder:

I don't disagree with what you've said, really. I just think there are legitimate reasons to question what's going on and I don't like the attempts at silencing that are going on. In my opinion, silencing the debate only perpetuates the aspects of academia that are grossly unfair. Just because everybody's been through it doesn't make it right. And I think the extraordinary sacrifices academia demands people make with little reward isn't right. There's a "trial by fire" mentality (and I don't think you're making this claim but it's out there) that I think is nonsense.

And I guess I wasn't clear: I don't think anybody should be apologizing for getting a job. At all. Your getting a job hasn't taken a job away from me, it's a totally separate issue. And while I don't think I've seen any calls for the professoriate to apologize in this debate, I do notice this among graduate student colleagues where bitterness increases when a person gets a job that other people feel didn't deserve one. That's ludicrous. My concern is the larger structures in place that have created a situation in which there are significantly more students than available jobs.

All I want is for the field as a whole to be honest about what it demands of people and what little it may give. But hey, I guess I should be suffering in silence for the comfort of the field as a whole.

And yes, I'm living with the choice I made; that doesn't mean it was the right decision, nor does it mean that the field is acting in an ethical way.

The silencing of the debate
I honestly don't think this is going on. No one is saying that the system hasn't got tremendous flaws. But I think that what we are seeing in many cases is a conflation of an academic system that is flawed in many ways with a graduate school experience that is not systemically flawed. Yes, many people are totally unprepared or unable to handle the stresses of grad school. But lots of people make it through with relatively little stress -- or at least no more stress than one finds in any other job. Many people even enjoy grad school. Some departments can suck, but others, like mine, were amazingly supportive. I was still stressed out, so much that I was sometimes ill, but I'm not going to put that on the system. I knew what was expected of me, pretty much, from the first day. I was stressed because I was not as good at it or as organized about it as I wanted to be. Obviously, this may not be true for everybody, but that's my point. Unless one is in one of the relatively few completely screwed up programs, people's mileage will vary when it comes to handling the demands of grad school. One of the demands of my program was that I pass three language exams in two years. Any medievalist coming in knew that upon acceptance. I wasn't worried about it, because I know that I can do languages. Others actually dropped or changed fields, because they hit a wall. So in the case of grad school being amazingly stressful or ridiculously difficult, all I can say is it isn't really debatable. Only we can judge whether or not it's going to be too stressful or too difficult for us.

The honesty and ethics of the field

Again, this is where I see a conflation of arguments that is very unhelpful. One of the things I've mentioned, and that others have also noted, is that many of the people complaining about the system is that, "nobody told me that I might not have a job at the end." And at pretty much every blog where there has been this conversation (and I'm talking now about over the last several years, not just this iteration), working academics have pointed out that professional organizations and grad schools have often pointed out that the retirements that were supposed to hit beginning in the 1970s and 1980s have never materialized. Now, I think that there is some variation over fields, and even in History, in some sub-fields. And perhaps medievalists are a bit more in tune? after all, we have to prove our relevance all the time in order to preserve lines. But when I think of the numbers of Americanists in my grad program compared to Europeanists, and all the modernists compared to the medievalists, it seemed pretty clear that there were more people than there would be jobs. So that's the first part. I'm not denying that some faculty mislead their students about their prospects, although I think it has more to do with wishful thinking than trying to con the students. After all, undergraduate faculty often see in the students they send to grad school mirrors of their own success, and thesis advisors often measure their real success in how many successful students they produce. But on this point, I am loath to accept that the system is any more at fault than are the students who fail to perform due diligence.

I began to address the second part of the honesty question above, in terms of the emotional, stress, and work/life costs of grad school. Again, I think part of this really is about knowing yourself, rather than there being a systemic problem. Culturally, we aren't that good at that level of introspection and actually behaving like grown-ups rather than superannuated adolescents. Grad school is a big decision, one akin to marriage and, like marriage, lots of people do it right out of college. And like marriage and having children, we have ideas of what it will be like that often omit real consideration of how very damned hard these things are. The difference is, I suppose, that marriage and family confer expectations of sucking it up and being adults, while grad school can, and often does, infantalize students. By doing so, we tend to think of it as training, as something we do while postponing our lives, when really, it's much more akin to a job or at least on-the-job training. So here again, I am not sure there is a systemic dishonesty perpetrated by academia, nor do I think it's all down to grad students being unrealistic or irresponsible. But I do think there is a clash of expectations that can lead to people feeling let down.

HOWEVER, and this is a big however, and one of the crucial points in the debate: there are ethical problems. But those problems are not down to letting in more students than there will be jobs. The main problem is that the system is replacing full-time faculty with contingent faculty, and not providing the sort of long-term prospects that it should. This is a problem on many levels, and not simply for employment. Another problem is that fields and departments are being cut, and budgets cut, so that all faculty are being asked to do more with less, even while requirements for tenure and promotion for those who *do* get T-T jobs are raised. Another problem that I see is that some programs do offer PhDs in fields that they really can't support properly. Part of this is departmental politics, part is administration, and sometimes there is even external influence. In my opinion, departments shouldn't offer a PhD in a subfield unless it really has the library and faculty to support that subfield. But the reality is that being able to direct graduate work, especially at the expense of undergraduate teaching, is a carrot. And again, students with good undergrad advisors will know not to apply to grad schools that don't really specialize in their chosen fields. And again, no one should accept a place unless it comes with guaranteed money. So overall, I think that the greatest systemic ethical problems are in the reduction of T-T jobs and the replacement with (usually unbenefited) contingent faculty and accepting students that universities aren't going to fund.

sacrifices vs. rewards

Again, this is a subjective argument. As I said in my previous post, it's a choice. The Frog Princess implies that the choice is one where people who are not given the whole picture, and says that she will regret her choice if she doesn't get a job. In short, this is a variation on the "nobody told me" argument. And for me, it really doesn't work. It doesn't work because for many people, whether or not they get a job, the sacrifices of grad school are worth it. There was a point in my life where I genuinely thought that my academic career was over before I'd even had a chance to put my degree to work. I had a good job making more than I make now, and I was unsure if I'd finish before my clock ran out. At that point, I realized that I could have one regret about grad school or two: I could regret that I'd fucked things up, but still finish and have the PhD, or I could regret having written three chapters and never finished. I could regret having let my personal life get in the way of my work, rather than learning to integrate the two. Or I could deal with what I had chosen. But that's me. I'm a 'shit happens, and you make your choices and take your chances' kind of person. What I do, the choices I make, and the things that happen to me over which I have little or no control are all things that contribute to the person I am.

Here's the thing: I regret all sorts of things about my life. I regret some of the choices I've made, especially when I know that having made a particular choice probably kept me from being in the right place at the right time for something else. Goodness knows I can look at my life now and think of the crappy things about it. I hate that I'm single. I hate that my most recent relationship died in small part to the demands of two academic schedules and the costs of traveling across the Atlantic and the fact that I will never get a job in the country where my ex-bf lives and will retire. I hate that I don't own the house and am years behind on saving for retirement. If I'm disabled and can't teach till for at least another 25 years, I'm screwed, although at least I qualify for full social security. I hate that I live so damned far away from my family -- but at least I knew when I started grad school that chances of employment near them were minimal at best. BUT, when I think of all the things I do love about my life, and people I might not have met if I'd done things differently, I wouldn't change it for some nebulous alternative reality. Any one of those different decisions could also have led me to being hit by a bus and crippled.

So I'm not buying the sacrifices vs. rewards argument. It's personal. It depends on one's own value system. Perhaps it's also generational, I don't know. Maybe Gen X and Gen Y people have expectations that I and others my age don't and that's part of the problem. I'm genuinely troubled that so many people feel that they have been victims of some sort of bait-and-switch, but as the Frog Princess herself says, she may have made the wrong decision. And I think that is at the heart of the discussion. We are dealing with personal regrets about entering into a system, and those regrets tend to demonize everything about the system -- and frankly, it often comes across as an unwillingness to own your own shit (I'm not directing this at anyone in particular, especially not Frog Princess). And I think this derails productive discussions about what is really wrong with the system, and the things that we all need to work to fix, either as professionals, or as the 'paying customers' who send their children off to expensive colleges and universities to be taught by contingent faculty and under-trained and overworked grad assistants, or as the taxpayers who can't be bothered to complain about the way their taxes are or are not spent. I'm not even going to go into people who don't want to pay taxes -- unless there are huge infusions of money into higher ed, either from private donations or via public spending, this is all a moot conversation. Even cutting a hell of a lot of administrative deadwood won't fix things (although in some places it might be a moral victory!). We've got to a point where I'm not sure most places could afford to increase FT benefited positions without upping class caps, teaching loads, or letting facilities fall apart. Those are the systemic problems we have to deal with -- but I'm fairly sure that our warnings, just as the ones about the job market that some of us paid attention to more than 20 years ago and yet seem to have gone unheard by so many people, will fall on deaf ears.

On Jobs, and Tenure, and Other things

On Jobs, and Tenure, and Other Things

I haven't posted this before, because so much has been happening that I wanted to roll into it, including every new post on the job market and the Amy Bishop story and how people have decided to use the violent behaviour of a woman who clearly seems to have come unhinged to critique the tenure system. Honestly, though, every time I started to write, something new has happened. Plus, honestly, there has been a lot happening in my department and at SLAC that have been taking up a lot of time, not least the work that has to be done when you want to re-vamp a program, plus keeping up with the tracking of assessment figures, writing rubrics, cajoling colleagues into agreeing that, if they are teaching the same course, the course should be at least minimally consistent, checking to make sure that the information for the department in the university catalogue is correct. Oh, and now some other report that has to be done that I suspect will lead to my department being lumped into a larger program. In the meantime, I'm teaching 4 courses and am just a little busy. So please, bear in mind that I'm writing on a Friday night when my choice this or marking essays :-) Or, as a furry person on the arm of sofa would tell you, I could be playing with cats.


So I'm just going to post what I've got. I think I've mentioned it here before, but I'm in the post-tenure slump. So I have all sorts of mixed feelings when I read posts and comments castigating those of us who have jobs for not warning the people who don't about how they weren't properly warned about the job market, or how much they resent the years spent in grad school. So I will now say this one thing: I began graduate school over 20 years ago. I went thinking all sorts of things, and not knowing how lucky I was that I had four, probably five years of guaranteed funding. But then, no one in my family had ever gone to grad school; only two had had more than two years of college. I wouldn't have gone, had I not had funding. And even then, I was not ever told, either at Beachy U, where I saw friends who were grad students on the market, and or at Grad U, that we would all have jobs. It was, however, implied that if we were as good as we should be, we would have them. Still, it was never a guaranteed thing, and it was always clear that in order to have a proper chance at the brass ring, we needed to get through and finish and present and publish.

Flash forward 13 years -- or nine years ago, more or less. When I first started to participate in the online community of scholars, the conversations centered on the job market, more or less. And honestly, there was so very much information out there about and by people who were barely making it as adjuncts, worried and frustrated by how much of their lives had been given to grad school and living in a sort of semi-adult status, that one could easily have thought that there was not any good point in going to grad school at all. That was then, long enough ago that, if the people now complaining had looked, or known to look, if they had talked to other students in their programs, they should have had inklings of the risks of going to grad school and expecting a job.

So from where I sit, I do have a hard time with the "but nobody told me" argument. This is for two reasons: one is that, honestly, I cannot imagine anyone paying to go to grad school, except in countries where bursaries or fellowships are incredibly rare (and tuition relatively low in any case); the other is that, if you are a person who didn't pay, then you got the luxury of going to grad school. I mean, yes, it's in many ways packed with all sorts of hazing rituals of its own, but really -- the ability to go and study and research and get paid for it? And even ABD historians get some mad job skills out of it that they can apply to other fields. And that leads me to another thing that sort of stumps me: people lose their jobs and suffer unemployment all the time. I have been the casualty of corporate downsizing and the dotcom bust. X has been laid off, and retrained and learned new computer skills several times. My father suffered an on-the-job injury in his thirties that meant not doing what he loved, and having to re-train and find new kinds of work.

These things happen to people all the damned time. So tell me, my academic friends, why shouldn't it happen to you? Oh, because you are smart and privileged, and somehow that has given you a big ball of entitlement that has ended up dragging you down, rather than giving you strength. And that's a shame. It's always worth something. The sacrifice, and the experiences? They count.

It's not that I don't understand the hell that is the job search, by the way. I do. I went through four years of job applications and interviews that did get me adjunct and visiting positions, but not the T-T job. I was even offered a T-T job I'd applied for, but only after they had changed it to a visiting position so they could hire someone else in a different position. Um ... no. But it hasn't been all that long since I was applying for 20-35 positions a year. Oh -- and that's not a sign that the job market was better, by the way. I just applied for a lot of generalist Community College and SLAC positions as well as the very few in my specialty. And I could legitimately apply for them, because I somehow had the good sense to have made sure that my coursework was broad -- I had fields in Early Modern and Asian History, so I could apply to Ancient/Medieval and to Medieval/Early Modern, plus positions like the one I have now, where I am the only non-Americanist in my department. That sort job-market investment, on top of a 5-5 load and, the last year, a divorce, is damned hard. It's scary and bad and some search committees are hugely incompetent or insensitive. Even some of the ones who are trying to do their best are sometimes just awful. I once had a call at ten o'clock at night about a job, a week after my campus visit. When they told me they were calling to let me know that I didn't get it, I hung up the phone and cried. I mean really, who calls and gives you bad news like that? And yet it was in many ways far more considerate than the letters I've never got -- including the one I never got from a noted university this year, telling me I'd not made the cut, or that the job had been filled. It hurts. You feel horribly rejected, even though part of you knows it may not have been you. I know people who got jobs I applied for, and honestly, I know why they got them, but sometimes I think, "you know, I still think I was a better fit." But then so could others have been.

So why am I writing this now? Because I'm going to say something else that probably will annoy some of you, but that I think sometimes needs saying. This job is not a bed of roses. It is hard work. Read any academic life blog, and you will see evidence that many of us, especially the women, struggle to balance just our academic lives, and gods help us if we try to juggle home, family, and partner (and, as someone just reminded me, Cats!). Many of us, if not most of us, work 40-60 hours a week, just to keep up. Some people are definitely better at it than others. Some of us have heavy loads. Most of the people I know think it's worth the stress, the politics, the heavy service and teaching loads -- because in return we can do the things we love, at least some of the time. I honestly don't want to do anything else. But some of us do burn out, or decide that the costs are too high. And that's fine. They haven't wasted their lives. They've just moved on. We do.

When I was looking for a thesis topic, my Doktorvater told me to pick something I could love and live with for at least twenty years, because the average academic's relationship to her research lasted longer than the average US marriage. And that's true. And in that way, I also understand the grief that some people are feeling, and the resentment that they have expressed toward some of my colleagues. Going through grad school and not getting a job is in some ways like having to decide whether or not to end a relationship. You get to the point where you have to decide whether or not you can put in just one more year, that maybe you can salvage it. And the longer you stay in, the more you have invested, and the harder it is to break up. And when you do, even if it's a good decision, you grieve.

But it doesn't mean that those of us who have the stable (or stable-looking) relationship don't know we're fortunate. And it doesn't mean that it's easy. And some days, it really is so hard, physically and mentally, that it's difficult not to look at things with a somewhat jaded eye. And a little survivor guilt. As I said, I love what I do. I work for an institution I like, and I have a fantastic dean and provost, and some tremendous colleagues. I have some of the nicest students I've met, and working with many of them is incredibly rewarding. I get tons of support, and feel constantly worried that I won't live up to expectations. And I often think that there are any number of other people who could do my job. But you know? I'm not going to apologize for having it, just as, when I hear stories of other people's searches, I am not going to gloat. It is what it is.

Carnivalesque Help Needed!!!!!

Carnivalesque Help Needed!!!!!

Sharon at Early Modern Notes pointed out to me that it's an Ancient/Medieval month, and we don't have hosts lined up.

Would anyone like to volunteer? Anyone want more traffic? Anybody want an excuse to read a bunch of ancient/medieval stuff?

HAAAAALLLLLLLPPPP!!!

that is all.

Post Tenure Blues?

Post-Tenure Blues? Blahs?

One of the few work colleagues I trust with my super-sekrit identity pointed out the other night that I haven't been blogging much. The truth is, I've felt under the gun, even though in November, when I was blogging almost daily, I felt on top of things. There is a difference -- I'm teaching four classes this semester, and the one that was meant to be a doddle has turned out to be rather a lot of work. And so it goes.

There have been other things to keep me from blogging. Sometimes, when I need to blog the most, I really can't. Here's where the pseudonymity thing really helps: when very few people knew the medievalist under the mask, it was just easier to generalize my stories. Now, I worry that people will wonder if I'm talking about Colleague X, or if I'm on search committee Y. And a lot has been going on that I haven't been able to find the distance to write in the way I'd like to write: relatively objectively.

But I have been reading, and thinking, and have a plan. I want to write something on how my blog reading and writing habits have changed over time, especially as some of my blogfriends have become RL friends, and how moving some of the personal stuff to LiveJournal has also changed the way I interact with people via this blog. There may be Facebook commentary, too.

But for now, I want to write something that addresses several posts since last month. The first is the string of posts that began (for my purposes) with Tenured Radical and moved from there, in which there were recriminations, finger-pointing, attempts at sympathy, and some common sense and empathy. Then, most recently, is today's post at Historiann on Kerry Ann Rockquemore's column in IHE on the myth of balance while on the tenure-track. Notorious, PhD's comments on many of those posts have me thnking as well. So tomorrow, that's what I'm talking about.