The View From Kalamazoo
More on culling the herd
I want to make an additional reply to a specific point in Dorthea Salo’s reply to Not letting the door hit us on the ass on our way out… but it’s a response I don’t want to get lost in the land of Discussion so I’m tossing it all back on the front burner.
She writes “I also think Drout mischaracterizes what the dream *is*. The Ph.D is NOT NOT NOT the terminal goal for (I would argue) 95+% of those who enter Ph.D programs. THE TENURED JOB IS THE TERMINAL GOAL. If that goal is out of reach for a substantial percentage of those who try for and/or achieve Ph.Ds, then Drout and his ilk are doing them a hell of a disservice, wasting a lot of their lives on a lie.”
Certainly this is a good point – there is simply not a tenure-track position for every Ph.D. produced. I don’t think this is necessarily the problem. My ultimate goal is that elusive Good Faculty Position I’ll readily admit. Given my experience there are a variety of non-faculty positions that I might consider and that may be a good match that I simply cannot be considered for without a Ph.D. Positions within university administration that may or may not have teaching responsibilities, at university presses, and with any number of libraries and museums are filled by people with doctorates who may or may not ever had the Great Offer. And these people are happy, active professionals within their fields – I work with great examples. If I just roll over now I can’t ever hope for anything much beyond the clerical morass because I will not be qualified on paper for any position I may be qualified for based on experience without the Ph.D. Community colleges that used to hire M.A.s to teach are now looking for Ph.D.s – the adage that what once required a high school graduate now requires an applicant with a bachelors filters up from there.
Perhaps part of the problem is that when discussing graduate school, when discussing the great professional hereafter, I hear (both from people giving me advice that they think is in my best interest, and scores of online sources of discussion) tenure-tenure-tenure – the response from the adjunct left out of that scheme, the abuses of that system and of graduate-level instructors. I hear very little about good professional opportunities that will utilize the Ph.D. Not everyone is a born teacher – and not everyone is a born administrator. The best I’ve found of one I’ve only in the rareest instances found were also skilled in the other. There is a place for bright, well-educated people who can’t or not otherwise inclined to find themselves in long-term faculty positions.
Yeah, the job market sucks – it sucks all over. It really sucks if you’re only looking at faculty positions in choice schools in attractive areas of the country. There’s more out there. There’s more to being an academic than academia, if you will, and there’s more to academia than the tenure-track position. To cull the herd also means to take some of the best and brightest away from positions at the Getty and other institutions, away from presses and publishing houses interested in academics with skills beyond the classroom, away from administrative positions that, frankly, a whole lot of university folks may want to avoid, anyway.
