2010 Holiday Newsletter

Click the image to read our holiday newsletter, or simply download it here! 

I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday season. See you in 2011...

Inception Tiny Town

Yes, I'm actually on blog-hiatus, but I couldn't resist sharing this Coca-Cola mashup of a Christmas tiny town and my favorite movie of 2010, Inception.

Academic Market Update

The Economist looks at today's glut of doctoral students as a sign of decay in higher education. Some especially pertinent quotations:

"Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings… The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes."

"Since [1970] America’s annual output of PhDs has doubled, to 64,000."

"The production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book [Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids - and What We Can Do About It], Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships."

"In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of [enrollment]. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%."

"PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree."

"Workers with “surplus schooling”—more education than a job requires—are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs."

"The organisations that pay for research have realised that many PhDs find it tough to transfer their skills into the job market. Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience."

Learn More: The Economist: The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

Read More: Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have summarized some of their newest book's findings for The Chronicle of Higher Education in Are Colleges Worth the Price of Admission?

Read More: Robin Wilson offers sobering numbers of the shrinking tenure system in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Education. Here's the key number: "Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The [U.S. Education Department report, Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2009], is expected to show that that proportion fell below 30 percent in 2009. [ed. note: the percentage held at 30 percent exactly] If you add graduate teaching assistants to the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere quarter of all instructors."

Read More: Last Call at All-You-Can-Eat Academy

Andy Looks Back on 2010

As I finished up a final day of grading and exams, I think this is a swell time to wrap up my blogging for 2010. Time permitting, I will try to upload our family holiday letter before Christmas, but otherwise I plan to spend the next couple weeks trying to recover from a busy, exciting, sometimes overwhelming year.

Some highlights:

• Responding to absurdity

• Writing about suicide

• Speaking on convergence

• Cruising along CA-395

• Celebrating our 22nd

• Dispatching from desolation

• Remembering Rota

• Gawking in Europe

• Sweltering in Asia

• Returning to teaching

• Plunging to earth

• Carving an alien

• Living in Cityville

I plan to return to Woodland Shoppers Paradise soon after New Year's Day. Until then, I hope you and yours enjoy all the delights of the season!

Fun with GDocs Presentations

These days I'm playing around a new presentation app (Prezi - thanks to Justin Lloyd for his recommendation) so I am especially delighted to see this creative use of a seemingly boring tool.

Difficulty seeing the video? Point your browser here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt9F7tKcZcU

Doing Domains

Yesterday I took at stab at answering a colleague's seemingly innocuous question: what is a domain?

This topic arose as we were discussing potential ways to organize our graduate courses. As you might imagine, the topic is both banal and fraught. Initially one would imagine that, really, there's not much at stake in the name and write-up of a college course. But when faculty members get involved, every jot and tittle risk becoming a Big Deal.

Part of the problem, as I see it, lies in the political terminology of paradigms. Defining one approach (rhetoric, critical studies, whatever) as a paradigm creates a power relationship with other approaches that may be called (mere) methods or traditions. One is centralized; the other risks being marginalized. In response, I proposed that we seek a less loaded term. My vote: domains.

A domain is a top-level taxonomic order of related ideas, approaches, methods, paradigms, communities, schools of thought, and traditions; an organizing category that is widely recognizable to an educated (but not necessarily a specialized) audience.

To illustrate, Carl Woese proposed three domains of life: archaea, bacteria, and eukarya. One may need to be a biologist to understand (or simply pronounce) "archaea." Yet anyone knows that a staph infection is different than a starfish; these things interact with each other, but each belongs in a different domain.

Domains are regularly broken into sub-domains, but adding a new domain is rare.

Indeed, while any attempt to define a domain is inherently persuasive its terrain should be viewed as settled by even the most partisan observer. Put another way, one does not create a domain; one recognizes its existence. Put still another way, one might recognize a domain of a particular universe by asking whether it could serve as a section (composed of several chapters) to an introductory textbook.

Anyway, I started my response in this manner before exploring how we might organize the "universe" of Communication Studies into domains: the kinds of decisions we'd make as educators rather than as partisans. It's a reasonable enough idea, I think. Still, I expect that domains will fare no better than paradigms.

It's hard to name without pain.

Andy Gets Pummeled

I thought I'd share a video produced by an outfit called Pummelvision. Once you authorize them to peak at a photo collection (Facebook, Flickr, or Tumbler) these folks produce an experience that's akin to watching your life flash before your eyes (at least according to Adam Dachis, writing for Lifehacker).

Since I have relatively few images in Facebook, my video was short. Moreover, the audio lops off awkwardly at the end. Still, the overall effect is... pretty cool.

Difficulty seeing the video? Point your browser here: http://youtu.be/d9rzXEpF34U