Yet another darling Chronicle article, this one saying that if you’re a local candidate who has any reasons (say, family) to stay local, you’re screwed, and you should just give up now.
For some readers, my observations may seem bleak and foreboding. I sympathize with the Ph.D. who cannot relocate because her mother has Alzheimer’s. I feel for the person whose spouse is locked into a location for career reasons. I realize that some who had hoped to find a teaching job near the place they consider home may feel cheated.
If you absolutely cannot relocate, and many people are in such a situation, then you need to reconsider your professional plans. I know several people who did just that and stumbled into rewarding careers that allowed them to remain where they needed to be.
One final observation, the twin realities of a completed Ph.D. and an ability to relocate are, in some ways, related. While I have no statistical evidence to support this, I have noticed anecdotally that “local” students in Ph.D. programs are among the least likely to complete the dissertation. Perhaps those students are more encumbered with responsibilities that obstruct degree completion, or when they learn of the narrowness of job opportunities they lose the “carrot” at the end of the degree.
We’re such a wonderful school! We have no one local, so we can talk about all sorts of different programs, except, you know, the nearby ones, and our own program (his school does not seem to have a grad program in his dept), because faculty know what it is to experience school just by teaching there. And we can understand the issues of local students by magic. (There were a number of faculty who were unimpressed by people at my undergrad school who were from Montreal because they were from Montreal — I’ll leave this one alone, other than to say that if you’re disdaining people who don’t move around when you’ve been at a school for 20+ years, you’re a hypocritical ass.)
Plus, you know, if you’re local then you’ll have family obligations or whatever, and we’ll “feel” for you, but you’re not going to have no life but academia, so sorry. Look, you suck as students, not finishing the PhDs even though you know that (a) they’re a disservice in a lot of the job market and (b) you can’t get an academic job locally with them.
I’m afraid that sometimes we academicians are so used to trafficking in pristine ideas that we forget about the harshness of the real world. And in the real world of academe, you need to be mobile.
. . . because we’re unable to do anything to work on changing the system: it’s like this because of divine fiat, and there is no way academia could ever work otherwise.