Thoughts on the potential CSU Strike

A student recently asked me to answer some questions about a CSU potential strike that may affect all 23 campuses of the California State University system this April. With that student's permission, I'm reposting the exchange here. For facts and analysis, I encourage you to check out the California Faculty Association FAQ. For one faculty member's take on the situation (expanding on a number of posts I've written about the academic market), read on...

What is your opinion on the strike? A strike is a regrettable but sometimes necessary response to unfair working conditions. In this case, CSU administrators have failed to pass along a reasonable portion of increased revenues to repair the damage to faculty pay caused by years of recession. The union has negotiated with the CSU in good faith, and we have certainly tried to avoid a strike. But if this sort of job action is necessary then I stand with my union.

Do you think it's fair to the students? I agree those who state that, "faculty working conditions are student learning conditions." If administrators demean those working conditions by failing to pay workers a wage that allows us to keep up with inflation (in a place known for its extraordinary cost of living) then management is harming students. How, after all, can students succeed if faculty - folks they call to grade assignments, offer mentorship, write recommendation letters, and provide other forms of direct support - can't afford to pay their bills and care for their families? Indeed I would hope that students would feel encouraged to support their faculty, recognizing that we share the same goal: fair and productive working/learning conditions.

How did you feel when you first heard about the strike taking place? When I received the news I understood immediately. Faculty have suffered stagnant wages for years, a fact exacerbated by the growing cost of living in California. We all stepped up to help the CSU weather the economic difficulties wrought by years of shared economic hardship, even accepting a furlough in 2009 to help preserve jobs and help students graduate on time. That furlough meant real pay cuts in a time when many faculty members were struggling to pay their bills. We supported our schools then because we recognized the need to pull together in times of challenge. Now that the economy is growing, albeit more slowly than we'd prefer, the faculty merely ask for some help to keep up with inflation.

Are there any concerns you have because of this? Having joined the union almost immediately upon my employment at SJSU I have always known that a strike could be called. Indeed, I remember participating in an informational picket just a few months after my arrival. It was a strange thing, accepting a job and then soon entering a picket line. While it was nice to join my senior colleagues in singing old protest songs, I inwardly wondered if I was engaged in an activity that might endanger my job. I understood that CSU faculty who pursue authorized job actions are protected from retaliation, but that protection seemed a bit too theoretical to this young professor. Still, I joined my colleagues and was proud to play my part (small as it was). I feel no less determined today. No one wants to strike. But if we must, we will.

Do you think it's important for the faculty to go on strike? Why? A wide range of global, social, economic, and even philosophical trends have contributed to a de-professionalization of education. For many administrators (not all, but enough), faculty members are increasingly viewed as disposable employees - as "human resources" - who should feel lucky to have a job and must be willing to acquiesce in silence to their managers. But we are not widgets. We are professionals, subject matter experts, artists, counselors, coaches, and experts in our fields. We know our students; we serve on the front lines of the struggles to help them enter a tough marketplace and, more importantly, become well-rounded human beings. We became educators because we love to teach, and to learn. So, yes, we accepted a "calling" of sorts. Still, we pay the same sorts of bills as everyone else, and we know our value, even if some administrators don't. We appreciate it when chancellors and board members pay lip service to our central role in educating the next generation of students; we are grateful for their kind words. At the same time we deserve and demand a fair wage. So if there's a strike, I'll join my colleagues - and those students who wish to participate - and do my part.

Update

Infographic by Deric Mendes

Communicating our Values; Valuing our Communication

In his essay "Communication Scholars Need to Communicate," Ernest J. Wilson III, dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, evaluates our field according to the standards of coherency, relevance, and rigor - and awards us a C-. Among his observations, one is particularly salient: "Comparing scholarly citations across fields, communication is a net importer of new, generative ideas; it rarely exports them to other fields." Wilson is correct in this assertion; we can do more to articulate the value of our scholarship and productivity. Yet the author's broader claims that we should seek a "commonly accepted core of methods" is less convincing.

The core of the problem lies in Wilson's inability to define communication in a useful way. In one of his five proposed competencies, he claims (paraphrasing here) that communication researchers study how meanings are communicated, augmenting this circular definition with an appeal to functionalism, stating that we own the "distinctions and relations" between "sender, receiver, message, channel and context." We are also, Wilson writes, respectful of multiple audiences, interested in varied domains, and capable of connecting otherwise distinct disciplines. These are reasonable, if unsurprising claims. Yet his definition of communication as a site of analysis and creativity remains (to use his words) a "black box."

His argument falters, not because Wilson fails to open that black box but rather because he seems determined to box us in. He is correct that students, teachers, theorists, and practitioners (and their many hybrids) should be able to explain what we contribute to the world. We should indeed offer specific and meaningful answers to contemporary questions. But our ability to meet that challenge will not be found by hewing to overly functional or overly broad notions of communication. Rather than chasing down some chimeric definition of "communication," we should be prepared to define what we can do from a communication standpoint. Our answers will be unique, just as unique as every problem we encounter.

I should add that as a demonstration of rhetorical skill Wilson's essay does little service to his argument, at least when evaluating his surfeit of hackneyed phrasing ("communication is a two-way street" and "The field suffers from a kind of academic log-rolling behavior which feeds the reification of silos in the field"), and his excessive tendency to trade repetition for proof. Read it for yourself (wading through the author-bona fides and USC-Annenberg boosterism throughout), and you'll see what I mean. As you do, be wary of Wilson's admittedly pithy but ultimately specious conclusion that, "now is the time for communication to act more like economics."

If the current state of the U.S. economy is any measure, our field's problem isn't its failure to count dollars and cents. Our problem is the need to reshape the sense of what counts.

Read the essay: Communication Scholars Need to Communicate

The Sandbox Project - Enhance

Inspired by Darcy Osheim's thesis that examines World of Warcraft from a pedagogical perspective, I'm launching a little experiment in paragraph-level writing that explores the intersection of pedagogy and sandbox style gaming, focusing mainly on console games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and LA Noire. Aside from common interest, my project and Darcy's thesis are unrelated. These 'graphs are written without an outline. Their connections may be tenuous or superfluous. I may never finish.

"Freeze and enhance."

This command, typically ordered up by the lead investigator in some neo-brutalist command center, conveys technological sophistication. Blade Runner was my first encounter with this fantasy of infinite gaze, back in '82. There's Decker with his Esper machine, trying to glean the truth from an old photograph: "Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance. Stop. Move in. Stop…" He commands and the image clicks, left then right. Closer. Left then… Decker's machine somehow manipulates a mirror's reflection to peer around a corner. "Enhance."

Image from The RPF

Halo's Theater option offers up a similar thrill, allowing the player a chance to halt gameplay and fly through the expansive battlespaces of previously saved missions, to click frame by frame through every minute of an encounter, to zoom and enhance - even the boring parts, such as when hero stands lazily in the hanger bay while marines are getting annihilated by aliens nearby ("Ah yeah, that's when I got up for a snack and forgot to pause the game"). Halo's narrative pathways are far too rigid to enact a sandbox experience. Yet in Theater-mode, the player becomes a director: tilting, panning, and advancing through scenes [sometimes racing, sometimes crawling], discovering previously unknown options. "So that's where the sniper was hiding!"

The player-as-director reveals an important dimension to the sandbox concept, one that might offer useful insights for anyone interested in teaching and learning. Instructors often deliver course concepts in dribs and drabs, epitomized by the click of phrases on a slideshow. Knowledge wasn't there; now it is. Better write it down. But what if all the information, all the tools, and all the toys are present in one open space, and the student isn't reliant upon the steady drip-drip of instructor-wit? What if the student can direct her or his learning narrative, or at least feel some sense of control and creativity in the process?

That latter proviso ["some sense" - italicize either word] is, of course, the point. After all we have such a world right now. Someone seeking knowledge could do far worse than to cruise the vast and growing Wikipedia data-sphere. Sure, there's plenty of dreck in those pages: vandalism, provincialism, and goofy editorial nonsense by folks who have more time than expertise. Still Wikipedia is undeniably able to offer up at least a semblance of knowledge, not to mention useful breadcrumbs to genuinely peer-reviewed research. Add YouTube educational videos, a decent local library, and the occasional free public lecture, and the determined student can learn nearly anything without setting foot in a school. Yet while a student may enter a grand and seemingly endless array of ideas [Isn't there something creepily antisocial about the much-hyped "Internet of Things?"], that person needs guidance and encouragement to make sense of it all.

An alarming number of university administrators dream of Intelligent Agents that whisk students from automated prompt to automated prompt. They envision a spreadsheet comprised of one hundred professionals, one thousand technicians, and one million students [clients? customers?]. For many of these folks, the long-form lecture and small group seminar makes no sense; it just costs too much. A few of us, particularly those who bemoan the de-professionalization of our craft, will guard the old barricades for another generation. We will practice the art of first-person learning. Few of our students, though, will replace us at the gate.

Our goal therefore should be to adapt the sandbox to our purposes. To "direct" student learning - dripping knowledge at our pace - is one approach. And sometimes such direction is the best way to teach. I merely hope we can practice a more experimental, more entrepreneurial ethos too, one not easily commodified into the MOOC model. We all have the tools, and goodness knows, there are plenty of people yearning to learn. What we must build is a practical and economical model to craft learning spaces that meet local needs. A hundred or so professionals can design the widgets and interfaces that enable our best creative efforts, But no one can know our students as we do. We can help students become directors of their own lives (and not cells on a spreadsheet), maybe to investigate the knowledge-space as they might fly through a Halo theater. The question that remains is a matter of will.

Will we master the games of our new world, or will we get played?

Bigger Classes, Better Outcomes?

In so many ways, Arizona seems like a test case for a future America governed by corporate values. One example: a proposed 2013 budget continues a trend toward the widgetization of higher education. Anne Ryman writes in the Arizona Republic that, for about $15 billion, Governor Jan Brewer hopes to invest in "technology and capital improvements aimed at improving academic results and decreasing per-student costs for large classes or classes with high failure rates." Cutting costs and reducing failure: Rather than designing better lesson plans, Arizona appears to be designing better factories.

Well, maybe not better factories, but certainly bigger ones. How big? Some of Arizona's "mega classes" enroll 1,200 students. This means more clickers to facilitate anonymous answers, more computers to process learning modules, more projectors to display PowerPoint slides, and more T.A.s to fill the gaps. None of these additions are, themselves, bad things. Indeed, I should emphasize that access to enthusiastic, dedicated teaching associates can be a wonderful part of an undergraduate's education. Yet I'm troubled by a trend that seems to deprofessionalize professors.

Arizona's large-classroom model represents a future in which student learning is facilitated less by individual professors and more through artificial measures and "outcomes." Fewer students will experience the kind of one-on-one consultation, tutelage, and apprenticeship that inspires wisdom and character. This is not to say that every student faces a future of large lecture halls. Indeed, I'm certain that wealthy lawmakers, administrators, and consultants will keep writing paychecks to expensive private schools, ensuring that their children enjoy direct access to professors.

Public colleges and universities, though, risk becoming widget factories, especially as the design and implementation of Next-Big-Thing "learning systems" becomes increasingly big business.

So, should we fight this future? Should we cry out for a nostalgically romantic model of cloistered education in which every classroom resembles a scene out of Dead Poets Society? Oh, God, I hope not. [As one Simpsons episode reminds us, that film "ruined a generation of teachers."] Neither the large lecture class nor the small seminar are ideally suited in every case. Many subjects benefit from hybrid approaches that leverage intelligent-agent software, small group interaction, and a mix of personalized and mediated instruction. Heck, sometimes the large lecture can work pretty well. We may yet learn something from Arizona.

Even so, I fear the future of higher education when professors are transformed into content delivery specialists, when we are so plugged into each new learning management fad dreamed up by multimillion dollar consultants that we become stripped of our intellectual autonomy - and our role as bulwark against administrative arrogance. And no matter how many pupils get crammed into a lecture hall, each student remains a singular self striving to learn. Education, no matter how convoluted an operation we concoct out of this business, is ultimately a personal encounter. Without a professor, that encounter might as well take place at the DMV.

For too long, colleges and universities have been encouraged to learn from corporations, to cut the fat and secure the bottom line. In Arizona that means increasingly large classrooms and ever more pressure to cut the number of tenured faculty. It's a future spreading across the nation. But as we consider the disconnect between corporate and non-corporate America - in terms of outcomes, yes, but also in terms of ethics and values - we must ask ourselves: Is this the future we want?

Learn more: Bigger Arizona college class sizes a growing trend: http://bit.ly/ITNjB0

A Potential Academic Future

W. Joseph King and Michael Nanfito have written a fascinating future-history of the 21st century academy, epitomized by their vision wandering rōnin: peripatetic academics who use social networking tools and post-institutional "guilds" to connect with students priced out of a dying higher education system. Two representative quotes:

"Success in the flat-world economy [requires] training to think, communicate, strategize, and lead. It also [depends] on a mastery of the collective knowledge of humanity, an understanding of diverse cultures, and a desire to enter into the diaspora of global commerce." 

"The rōnin [are] free to pursue their work unfettered by tenure and promotion policies or antiquated accreditation boards. Rather than sinking into self-indulgent solitary research, as some had predicted, they [flourish] in dynamic collaborations with similarly motivated colleagues."

Does this stuff sound too high-minded and impractical? Don't worry. King and Nanfito offer plenty of specifics. You may disagree with their vision, but you can't ignore the sense that these folks may be onto something.


A Potential Academic Future: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/02/09/essay-imagines-future-academe

Continuing Slide in the Academic Market

Here are some highlights from the 2011 American Association of University Professors Faculty Salary Report. While this news has been out for several weeks now, I've only now been able check it out. No matter the delay, this report about today's academic market makes an important contribution to a growing array of evidence that questions the ongoing viability of the professorate.

The bad news:

• For the second year, faculty salary increased marginally but failed to keep up with inflation. [The AAUP adds some important context to this point]:

"Such a disproportionate increase in compensation for a single individual is an indication of misplaced institutional priorities—especially when faculty members and other higher education employees have been faced with involuntary unpaid furloughs, hiring and salary freezes, and cuts to benefits."

• Increases in presidential pay continue to far outstrip increases in faculty pay (especially at private schools).

• Contingent faculty - those not on a tenure track - and graduate student employees total 75 percent of all instructional staff. Less than one in four faculty are on the tenure/tenure track.

What's more, these trends show no signs of abating. If you're thinking about getting into academic life - especially if you're hunting for a tenure-track job - you should read this report.

• Press Release

• Full Report

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

Academic Market Update

Another article about long-term trends in academic hiring, this one marshaling a bevy of pertinent and devastating research findings about the state of the market for humanities Ph.Ds.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Conn lays out the facts and offers recommendations, but his conclusions cannot dispel the grim truth:

The obvious conclusions, though many senior faculty members in the humanities seem reluctant to admit it, are these: As a profession, we are enrolling too many Ph.D. students, we have been doing so for decades, we spend far too long in guiding them to their degrees, and we then consign them to a dysfunctional job market.

Read the entire piece: We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities

Last Call at All-You-Can-Eat Academy

It's a strange thing to live in California and read that folks in the north and south of our state have experienced fairly potent earthquakes these past days. Here in Scotts Valley, the memories of Loma Prieta are fresh [check out a freaky YouTube video from the event]. Yet neither Jenny nor I felt as much as a tremor during this week's jolts. Even so, the quakes illustrate something to me, a sign of secure things slipping away.

Consider then my especially odd position as a college professor. My job is to help students find their footing in a complex world of challenges and opportunities. By helping them engage in the energetic push and pull of college life, I help enable their journeys beyond the gates, ultimately hoping to watch them set their paths toward some meaningful future. The problem is that the future may be much harsher than anything they've been promised. For both undergraduate and graduate students - heck, for all of us - tectonic plates are churning.

Thinking on this, I remember attending a professional conference a few years back and participating in a panel designed to help students get the most out of graduate school. The gathering was organized to share inside tips and practical realities that don't appear in the brochures, and the audience was packed with smart young folks eager to join the fast track. Most of these students were contemplating bright futures as professors of communication studies.

It's an article of faith that students planning to join the ranks of the tenured and tenure-track professoriate attend conferences like these, meeting would-be mentors and other assorted luminaries in hopes that wisdom and maybe a little networking-mojo might rub off on their own job-searches. They are told that conference attendance is part of the long but stimulating path toward a job as a communication professor (or some other related job in the humanities). It's not easy, but the path leads somewhere worth going.

And since several of the panel participants were current or former leaders in the field - we're talking Association presidents and the like - the atmosphere in the room dripped with enthusiasm and potential. We'd come to talk about the future.

So we commenced to offering our comments, sharing a semi-guided conversation that tacked between predictable bromides and occasionally unscripted words of useful advice. We all seemed fairly well in sync, even me: a relatively Young Turk as compared to the seasoned pros who were the panel's real draw.

I felt confident enough in my role at the panel that when one student asked about academic job prospects after grad school, I responded promptly - not with pleasure but with a directness that seemed appropriate, given the nature of the news. I said something like this:

Grad school can be a wonderful experience, but you need to know one fact: The opportunities to land a tenure-track job are poor, and those chances are growing worse. Many universities are cutting tenure lines, replacing them with an accordion-style workplace composed of an adjunct pool that expands and contracts with the economy.

What's worse, master's and doctoral programs are producing more students than jobs, and many folks who complete their degrees will never get tenured employment in the academy. There may be "jobs" - one here, one there - and adjunct instructors can cobble them together sufficiently to pay the bills. But no one should blindly go into this market with the illusion that a graduate degree guarantees anything.

This is not to dampen your hopes or mock your efforts. Jobs are out there, and folks continue to earn tenure and enjoy a decent middle-class life at many colleges and universities. I did; so can you. But it's not easy, and it's going to get harder.

College administrators, often pushed by boards of trustees and similarly politicized groups, may indeed be using changes in the economy to dismantle the tenure system to create a more presumably compliant workforce, a cadre of interchangeable workers whose academic rights and responsibilities become replaced with the Keep-Your-Head-Down survival instincts demanded by the most dismal types of corporate regime.

So, work hard in graduate school - get teaching experience, network at conferences, and publish - and you may yet land your dream job. But plan for alternatives too. The academic market is changing under our feet. The old reliable foundations are going away, and no one can promise you a future of lifetime employment...

In many ways, I was differentiating between two types of Academic Future. One is an All You Can Eat buffet: Just show up, wait your turn, and eat your fill. The other is a Thanksgiving Feast where every year someone removes another chair from the table. The former Future is a vision of plenty. The latter Future is a vision of scarcity.

Certainly, my memory does not serve to reproduce my remarks exactly as I delivered them, but I recall precisely how several of my fellow panelists followed up on my dour description of the menu of options faced by graduate students today.

They eviscerated me.

Luminary after luminary took their turn assuring the students that I did not speak for them or for the field. "Jobs are available," they said. "The trends are precisely the reverse of what you just heard. Universities are growing all over the country, and veteran professors are retiring at a rapid rate. There may never be a better time to get a job!" [Again, these aren't actual quotes, just paraphrases from an admittedly faulty memory]

Thereafter I observed a palpable change in the atmosphere. The students who attended the panel in search of wisdom and assurance seemed much happier after hearing that my remarks were so clearly wrong. The experts in the room, long-tenured professors looking back on decades of experience and promising the Big Picture, had managed to set the world back on its foundations. The conversation went on, sparkling with promise and pleasantries. Tips were offered, stories were shared, futures were solidified.

I tried to stay in the game, joining the dialogue when I felt I had something useful to say. I had no intention of being a spoiler, and truthfully I felt embarrassed at being called out so publicly. I'd read the same articles in Chronicle of Higher Education as the other panelists; I'd seen the same towering piles of applications for each treasured hiring opportunity; I'd observed the expanding pool of hardworking adjunct instructors chasing after the same teaching opportunities, with increasingly low pay (particularly when counting for inflation) and shrinking benefits. And I imagined that a significant economic downturn would merely exacerbate the problem. Things seemed bad for too many people, and they could easily get worse.

Looking back about four years ago at that conference, I had no idea just how bad things would get.

Anyway, the meeting ended and I offered my best effort at collegiality, saying goodbye to my fellow panelists. I remember feeling that I'd somehow angered one or two of them, that I'd done something worse than say the wrong thing. I shook a couple of hands, but I couldn't wait to escape those dismissive looks. The luminaries were off to the next panel or the next party or the next escapade (surely together, I mused) and I departed the room alone. I felt like a fool. It was time to slink off, find a nearby dive, and disappear.

A couple blocks away I stood in line to find a seat at a greasy spoon-type diner, still nursing my guilt and embarrassment. I thought I'd told the truth, balancing it with some assurance but also a necessary degree of reality. "I did," I said, "and so can you. But it's not easy, and it's going to get harder." Those words coursed through my ears. I felt that I'd been honest, but that I'd hardly let slip some sort of secret. Doesn't everyone know just how tough the job market is getting?

Was I wrong?

As I choked on that question, three or four people, each wearing the overly precise stare of a grad student job hunter, walked by me and then stopped. I couldn't recognize anyone, but I somehow knew they'd attended the panel. My mind swam with frustration. A rising young professor, I made an ass of myself in front of my senior peers, and now these grad students were here to watch me wallow alone in my own shame.

Then one guy looked me squarely and said this: "Thanks for saying it. No one else would."

I can't say that I felt much better at that comment. But I felt a little better. And that was enough.

Remembering that conference and that moment afterward, I find myself re-reading Thomas H. Benton's January 30, 2009 Chronicle article, Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go. In his piece, Benton lays out a nuanced critique of the delusional structure of today's grad-to-market machine - an argument I wish I could have articulated as effectively some years back. I can't agree with every element of Benton's essay, but this fellow (even writing under a pen-name) undeniably drops some powerful truth-bombs. Examples:

"The reality is that less than half of all doctorate holders - after nearly a decade of preparation, on average - will ever find tenure-track positions."

"Most undergraduates ... seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect - a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete - and, as a result, they don't make any fallback plans until it is too late."

"[H]umanities Ph.D.'s, without relevant experience or technical skills, generally compete at a moderate disadvantage against undergraduates, and at a serious disadvantage against people with professional degrees."

"Even if the long-awaited wave of retirements finally arrives, many of those tenure lines will not be retained, particularly not now, in the context of yet another recession."

"The minority of candidates who get tenure-track positions might as well be considered the winners of a lottery."

I think about essays such as Benton's - and my own experiences trying to share a similar vision - and I realize just how strange it seems for both of us, each enjoying the benefits of tenure, to convey the bad news. I've heard critics who dismiss these warnings as little more than self-satisfied bits of economic tourism. We may be seen as "slumming," visiting the realities of the academically disenfranchised, boo-hooing a bit about their tough lot, but still fiercely maintaining our grip upon personal safety while doing pitifully little to challenge the forces that perpetuate the problem. Indeed, we are part of that problem.

I appreciate those rebukes, and I admit that it's much easier to be a truth-teller when safely secured in my own little bubble of tenure and promotion.

Still, writing these words is more than an empty exercise in back-handed self-congratulation ("My, my... I got this gig somehow despite it all"). In fact, I've never put much stock in the so-called security of my line of work. And I fully expect that my life will change substantially in ways I do not plan or prefer. Like an earthquake, it could happen a decade from now or in the next moment. Should such a shattering event rock my foundations, I'd like to think that I'm not so locked into this life that it'd be impossible to live some other way, in much more humble circumstances if necessary.

Perhaps that's a perspective that comes from being married to a Mormon. To members of her faith, prayer alone is not the key to salvation. Keeping a year's supply of food storage is also part of the deal, just in case. God helps those who help themselves, she is taught. She's right.

All of us - those of us currently fat and safe, and those already feeling the rumbles of collapsing girders - are wise to recognize the tenuous nature of our situations, to contemplate the profound changes marching across the world. An unsustainable culture of always-on, always-improving, always-expanding humanity is confronting a shrinking age of limitation and retreat. Things are changing fast. Maybe not entirely for ill, but certainly in directions we cannot fully anticipate.

Of course, possibilities remain that we may somehow prolong the metastasization of the society we seek to join and perpetuate, as evidenced by our "All-You-Can-Eat Academy." And I hope that Doomsters such as Benton and myself are proven wrong in thinking that the tablecloth is being ripped under the plates, that the Boomsters are correct in forecasting an ever-growing table for all those willing to wait in line ("All you have to do is work hard - but don't worry. It's not that hard").

I'd love to be wrong.

But it seems to me that one day we'll look back on these years and ask ourselves, "How long did we think the endless buffet could last?"

Read More: Katz, S.N. (1996, October 6). What has happened to the Professoriate? Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(7), B8-B11.

Update 1: Conn, P. (2010, April 4). We need to acknowledge the realities of employment in the humanities. The Chronicle Review.

Update 2: Sadly dead-on video: So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities

Update 3: The Economist: The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time - for some pertinent quotations, check out my blogpost, Academic Market Update.

Waffle House: 10 of 10

The following is from a ten-part serialized essay on Waffle House, initially written in December 2008. A sort of mashup between scholarly musings and personal reflection, this piece may satisfy no one in particular. But I'm happy to share it nonetheless (presuming you don't edit or repackage this piece without my permission). Also, a reminder: these words do not reflect the opinions of Waffle House, San José State University, or any other entity.

I lied a bit, too...

Most importantly, I lied about where I wrote this piece. I did not write this essay in Waffle House; I wrote it at home. Yes, I did drive to Phoenix; yes, through the snow of the Mojave Desert; yes, barely avoiding a robbery late at night; and yes, the sound of Patsy Cline's "Crazy" transformed an early morning hour into something meaningful, at least to me. These things happened, but I wrote all of these words at home.

Just now I'm sitting in bed with my cat curled up on my lap, she who detests the cold and finds me more than suitable as a means to escaping the winter that creeps through our poorly weather-stripped doors. Outside, I can hear the sounds of children playing on the streets of our cul-de-sac as the sky darkens at dusk. I write this is an enclave called Scotts Valley, a one-hour bus ride from the halls where I work. I live in a community composed of people who are pretty much like me, middle class strivers seeking a safe investment and quiet streets. I write this as the cat groans and sighs in the pleasure of our darkening room, she and I warm and comfortable.

I tried to write this essay entirely on site, in "the field" as the silverbacks (and wannabe silverbacks among us) might say, but I never could get beyond hastily typed notes. I remember typing them and reviewing them again and again. Is that what I heard? Is that what I said? But I quickly forsook any effort to writing "the truth" of my experiences while I was there. Sipping a cup of coffee, typing out notes on my laptop, I was usually surrounded by folks who reasonably assumed me to be a journalist or an author come to make them famous. Consequently, my fellow patrons paid more attention to me that they would have otherwise. The act of writing in Waffle House undoubtedly skewed what I saw. I mean, really: other than college students cramming for exams or banging out a course paper, who comes to write in a Waffle House? And I stopped looking like a college student a long time ago. So I came home, guiltily, carrying a computer filled with digital scribbles and predictable photos.

I thought briefly about writing at my neighborhood Starbucks, a phrase just about as meaningless as one's "Neighborhood Applebees" (where I'm not sure that they serve anything that can technically be called "food," certainly not "apples," any more than they serve "neighborliness"). Sure, there was plenty of noise, a Waffle House hallmark, and Starbucks possesses the same sort of enclavic sensibility, perhaps even more so with its "black card," a clever device to transform Starbucks into something more akin to an airport terminal's private lounge. But one can hardly confuse Starbucks with Waffle House; the theoretical similarities and stylistic differences are just too distracting. It's better to come home as one would come to Waffle House, to a place where they call you "hon."

My home in Scotts Valley culminates a personal and professional search for enclave that brought me westward from Florida to California. It's a place where garage doors are larger than the porches, where we celebrate our community through holiday performances but generally leave each other alone (with some notable exceptions). It is a sign of the times in our age of anxiety. It is perfect for me. I fled a childhood filled with fear for the safest port in the storm, a hitch with the Navy. I then bounded into the cloistered confines of college years, learning to please those who judged me, selecting my battles with precision.

I made mistakes, so many mistakes, especially when admitting my weaknesses to friends better labeled acquaintances, and I found myself behind the closed door of my own tenured office space. I discovered the unhappy truth of so many academic lives: We who enter the Ivory Tower, searching for a fortress for ideas and a mote of separation from the dreaded "real world," generally manage to bring our own fears with us, locking them tight within our interiors.

Home, therefore, is the final freedom, the ultimate closed door. I have found shelter after all these years as the storms rage outside. I am safe in my protected intellectual space, a world in which I can drive hundreds of miles to sit in a cheap fast food diner and expect people to say, "Well, that makes sense." I admit this only from the safety of job security and the confidence that no one would every really publish an essay like this. I shuffle paragraphs, rehash quotations, double check song titles, and abandon any pretense at depth. Moments break and congeal, transformed into a story, an auto-ethnography of fragmentary shards read at highway speeds. Only in this way do I try to explain the bittersweet domesticity of Waffle House, my home away from --

Well, you know.

(Photographs by Andrew Wood)

Thanks to Tyrone Adams for inspiring this essay. While the book we envisioned did not (as yet) come to pass, I am grateful for your seductively written call to write something heartfelt about Waffle House. Anything that works in my essay owes much to your recommendation to tackle this topic. All errors that remain, of course, are my own.

Read More

1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10

Waffle House: 4 of 10

The following is from a ten-part serialized essay on Waffle House, initially written in December 2008. A sort of mashup between scholarly musings and personal reflection, this piece may satisfy no one in particular. But I'm happy to share it nonetheless (presuming you don't edit or repackage this piece without my permission). Also, a reminder: these words do not reflect the opinions of Waffle House, San José State University, or any other entity.

"What will you write about?" I haven't a clue....

I think this conundrum reflects a larger conversation about finding meaning in places rather than people. It's as if I am sitting in a corner watching the streaming crowd of laughing, chatting friends, a cohort I can never quite know. The crowd congeals into a mass of barely remembered names, halfhearted conversations, jokes that never did seem that funny to me. But behind them lies a structure, something I try to see and maybe understand, even as, all too often, insight flashes by too quickly to recognize.

For the past few years I've written about something called omnitopia, an effort, I suppose, to understand. In bits and pieces, confident drives and dogleg detours, and a few hairpin turns, I've carved out some space within this portmanteau of the Latin "all" and the Greek "place." It's an idea that, truthfully, came to fruition from the velvet command of a dean to start publishing more peer reviewed articles if I had any plans to gain tenure. I can still see the wide eyes of a trusted confidant to whom I shared the news. "She wrote that?" At once, some notes from grad school days needed to find order and purpose, and pretty damn quick.

After a few iterations, I came to define omnitopia (my definition; there are others) as a structural and perceptual enclave whose apparently distinct locales convey inhabitants to a singular place. From this perspective, omnitopia refers to the experience that parallels exiting a computer terminal to visit cyberspace or entering an airport terminal to visit the global domain of movement, commerce, and discipline that marks contemporary air travel. Omnitopia is a matrix of undifferentiated, un-striated experiences that has no "capital," no "home," through it has an exemplar, which is Las Vegas. It has no ideology, but it has a motto: "Wherever you go, there you are."

In this "place," one must emphasize the necessary relationship between structure and perception. Just because you're waiting at an airport gate doesn't mean that you're in omnitopia, particularly if you're waiting for a loved one to pass through this door of this gate. The structure of nodes that perpetuate mobility from place to place, typically a conflation of consumer and corporate environments, from airport to interstate to food court to atrium hotel to convention center, requires a perception of flow, a sense of seamlessness, to render omnitopia visible.

In this enclave, one finds a set of distinct places that render even exteriors part of a barricaded interior, crafting a synecdoche of the world, individual places -- this tiki restaurant with glowing blowfish and nautical netting, that "New York" themed casino sitting next to "Paris" in the Nevada desert -- which all blur into the same continuum, one safely detached from the real world outside. Omnitopia is not a place but a desire, sometimes conscious and sometimes just below the surface, to be safe.

Naturally I wonder if Waffle House, with its interchangeable architecture, its mass-produced signage, its utter dependability, reflects a node of omnitopia. Or perhaps does it represent something more meaningful?

Part 5 of 10 appears tomorrow.

Read More

1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10

Waffle House: 3 of 10

The following is from a ten-part serialized essay on Waffle House, initially written in December 2008. A sort of mashup between scholarly musings and personal reflection, this piece may satisfy no one in particular. But I'm happy to share it nonetheless (presuming you don't edit or repackage this piece without my permission). Also, a reminder: these words do not reflect the opinions of Waffle House, San José State University, or any other entity.

We were on our own, without a place to stay...

We passed our time in a string of motels offering the neon flash of domesticity and detachment, and I solidified my interest in the ways in which people carve intentional spaces out from impersonal wildernesses, natural or humanmade. I never thought in such theoretical terms, of course; life was far more practical in those days. But so much of what moves me now began back then.

I remember those mom and pop motels along the highway possessing the exotic thrill of near-distance, just far enough away from what I'd previously considered home but not too far that I couldn’t find a ride to elementary school. During those evenings, I imagined other kids sitting in their dining rooms and eating dinner while I ventured out on my own to the diner attached to our motel, free to get whatever I could fetch for a couple of bucks. It was exhilaration leavened by the dull ache of apprehension. I could close the door to our tiny room, lock it even, but I still heard the cars race by outside, and I still saw the light of the sign through the closed curtains. Finally when my mom scrounged up enough money to get us an apartment, making sacrifices I cannot imagine to name, I remember being enclosed in our car by the gathered stuff of our lives, fitted tightly within laundry baskets of clothes, a few toys, and some books. I was safe but always moving.

Maybe that's what I meant about the feeling of safety that flowed from entering a Waffle House my first time on the road. I joined the Navy to get the hell away from home. I figured that staying too long pretty much anywhere was fraught with risk. Even a house, which other children crayoned as a sort of permanent mother's embrace when I was in elementary school, seemed ephemeral, untrustworthy, perpetually ready to collapse. But the Navy promised a short commitment and long distance. I did my years and cleared my head a bit. But my time ran out. At 22 I was married and renting. I was lucky to find someone who loves me, but those early years were rough.

We had a daughter, and I was working my way through school, handling my reserve obligation as just one more plate to keep spinning. Life at home was tense, often bitter, and the walls closed in on our tiny family as bills piled up and time ran short. Hitting the road, heading away, was my safety valve. And Waffle House offered the perfect form of temporary domesticity, a house without a key, a house without a father, a house that didn't need me. I could visit and enjoy comforts of home, share first names or not, and cut into a grid drenched with sweetness. I could order it all on a ticket. Waffle House was a poetry of safety in its ritual and speed, an exemplar of automobility -- a perfect site for auto-ethnography.

Heading South to Phoenix

So I'm sitting in a Waffle House on 59th Avenue west of downtown Phoenix. It's morning, and I'm sliding a dollar into the jukebox. I've traveled more than 20 years from those bad old days in Florida, passed through gauntlets of dissertation and job search and tenure, all to enjoy the pleasure of sitting in a Waffle House a day's drive from home, here to write an essay for no pleasure other than its creation. Back on campus, my promotion dossier is winding its way through the university bureaucracy. I know what the outcome will be, but I've been living in a state of functional panic for months anyway. Years, really.

Around me, the economy sputters and dies; things fall apart. Around the world, kids throw rocks and teenagers launch rockets, and I'm worried about my little office with its door that closes tight. I've gathered one mortgage and then a few more. My spouse and I have invested in a series of properties around the country just in time to watch the real estate market dive off a cliff. But now I'm far from that place and those anonymous cul-de-sacs, even though I've managed to carry a few bricks with me, loaded in the back seat of my Saturn (American made, but not really, safely nationalistic, but practical too), my own little intellectual fortress. "I'm going to Waffle House to write an essay," I say, and my colleagues ask, "What will you write about?"

I haven't a clue.

Part 4 of 10 appears tomorrow.

(Photograph by Andrew Wood)

Read More

1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10

Waffle House: 1 of 10

The following is from a ten-part serialized essay on Waffle House, initially written in December 2008. A sort of mashup between scholarly musings and personal reflection, this piece may satisfy no one in particular. But I'm happy to share it nonetheless (presuming you don't edit or repackage this piece without my permission). Also, a reminder: these words do not reflect the opinions of Waffle House, San José State University, or any other entity.

Shelter from the Storm:
An Auto-Ethnography of Fear and Hash Browns

I'm sitting in a Phoenix Waffle House, waiting for the world to end.

I've driven 727 miles one way over a day, alone, to sit here. It turns out that this Waffle House sits in a cluster that is nearest to my home on California's west coast. I figure about eight links to this chain reside in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metroplex. A sprawl of limited access freeways and speed cameras, of rock gardens and ornamental cacti, the Phoenix region presents a dense enclave of order when viewed from above, all that stretching, colonizing geometry, all that wheezing air conditioning surrounded by fearsome desert. Waffle House is known for its order too, for its incantation of commands and precise ballet of motions, but it still feels strange being this far from its Southern roots.

I'm a Southerner too, sort of, also far from my roots. I was born in Florida, raised in the suburbs of Pinellas County, which is a gigantic parking lot when compared to the Everglades further south or the one-stoplight towns north of I-4. In fact, I didn't discover my Southernness, my tendency toward a drawling y'all and my deeply instilled sense of "place," until I left my home state after high school. In a similar way, I never really thought much about Waffle House as a southern institution until I found myself far from home, a faculty member at a California university where many folks have never heard of the chain.

I'm asked, "Is Waffle House like International House of Pancakes?" Yeah, just about as much as Pepsi is interchangeable with Coke. A Southern institution (and IHOP, if you're curious, is a Los Angeles area fabrication) contains a subtle but distinct set of rules about decorum and design, and it most definitely offers sweet tea, a delicacy I'd never recognized as such until I left home. Even in an era of globalization and homogenization, a world whose primary metaphor may be the international shipping container, the South means something distinct to the American imagination. The South remains an enclave, safely and necessarily apart from all that surrounds it.

So here I am, a transplanted Californian sitting in Phoenix after a 15 hour drive -- it should have been 12, but a Siberian blast of snow and ice, even in the Mojave desert, was both extraordinary and thought-provoking: better slow than dead on the road. I've driven a long way to think about Waffle House as a safe space against a surrounding world that seems frightening. Fresh memories of terrorists laying siege in Mumbai, dawning threats of war in the Middle East, and global fears of an economic collapse so vast and intricate, so perfectly total and mindbendingly grand, that serious-minded people are called forth to remind us again and again that, no, we're not drifting toward a Depression (repeatedly enough to panic us into imagining that, yes, we are drifting toward a Depression): these thoughts troubled me enough to seek a redoubt from all that random violence and ominous danger. The world is ending, the time we once knew, and this spot so far from home seems like the appropriate place to wait for what comes next.

I'm here in a Phoenix Waffle House, writing about fear. That is to say that I've chosen to write about how places like Waffle House (how rare and necessary they are these days) serve up enclaves from the outside and the unknown, particularly as they perpetuate the possibility for us to order places and relationships as we would order our meals, a performance of ritual and community that resembles that we would call real, even while it is usefully, therapeutically, unreal. Assuming a perspective that is somehow broader yet simultaneously much more narrow, I have also chosen to write about the way in which some academic writing may benefit from a method of auto-ethnography, a kind of drive-by scholarship that reveals the role of fear that animates so much of academic life, whether on the road to Waffle House or the road to tenure.

While I claim no particular "ownership" of this play on words, I would offer my own interpretation, emphasizing that auto-ethnography ought not be confused with autoethnography, the method of qualitative analysis that calls for a profound and time-consuming encounter between the author and a site or community (generally with the author her/his self providing a primary lens of inquiry). Auto-ethnography demands the fast moving gaze of the long distance driver, a means to catch quick meaning from blurring signs, reading the road as flow rather than stasis. Auto-ethnography requires a peculiar vigilance borne of imminence, a sense of threat that yields the clarity of perpetual now. It is a position that is never fixed, one that milks the risk of staying anywhere too long. Indeed, auto-ethnography is most aptly employed when unpacking the complimentary reality of fear and safety, a desire to be here and not-here at the same time.

In this essay, I will try to tell a useful story about Waffle House from an auto-ethnographic perspective, even as I tell some stories about how I came to write this piece. I will generally tell the truth, though I will lie a little bit, too. After all, whether studying the creation of hash browns or the mashing together of scholarly prose, too much honesty can be a dangerous thing.

Part 2 of 10 appears tomorrow.

(Photograph by Andrew Wood)

Read More

1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10

What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School

Want to be a tenured faculty member at a college or university? Read this first.

Paul Gray and David E. Drew's What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School

Update: Bummer: The article is now behind a pay-wall. OK. Here's another crack at it - from the same authors: Paul Gray and David E. Drew offer rules for finishing up that dissertation and finding a first job. Not the same piece, I imagine. But it looks helpful...

Want to be an Academic?

Getting a tenure track job in this market is tough, and despite today's wave of students pouring through the doors, it's going to get tougher. Boomer-era professors are hanging onto their positions and administrations increasingly prefer to hire lower paid adjuncts over full time (and well benefited) tenure track professors, which is all the more reason for me to appreciate the position that I have.

To illustrate, here's a recent Washington Post article that provides some fairly typical accounts. Ignore the sales pitch for the "placement agency" and read on:

Dreams of Academe? First, a Course in Reality