Personal life? Sorry.
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.
March 30th, 2005 at 10:34 am
When I was growing up, we used to call this “academic incest” (when talking about institutions that hire mostly their own). My own father, having gone all the way from B.S. through Ph.D. at the institution where he was then hired as a professor is a classic example. Some places are notorious for practicing this. A few try to avoid too much of this and you can see their point (but usually they only make this statement after having satisfied themselves that they’ll still have room for all their favoured sons).
I’ve never heard of any programme trying to place a geographic block around their own location and not hiring from that region — that’s strange!
March 30th, 2005 at 1:42 pm
I agree that hiring only your own is not good, and also that there are issues if you start working at the place where you were a student. But refusing to hire your own?
As usual with the Chronicle, it was the tone I objected to, a holier-than-thouness.
March 30th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
Ah, yes, another missive from ChronicleLand, where all who struggle deserve it because they are mediocre and not fully committed, and glories rain down on the lucky, allowing them to believe that this is normal, and thus nothing should or can ever be done to fix things, all because the system worked for the author and his or her idiosycratic circumstance.
Thank you for the excellent rant! :)
March 31st, 2005 at 12:46 am
To play a tiny bit of devil’s advocate, although there is an element of his tone that’s troubling, I kind of think the point of the column is well taken. (I do think that job ads explicitly saying “no locals” is weird, and haven’t seen that, but whatever.) I think what he describes DOES discriminate against people who don’t deserve it - there was a lot of suspicion in my grad program about people who’d done their undergrads there - well, not so much if they made it into the program, but they were very very reluctant to let in people who’d done their degrees there, b/c they didn’t want it to look like they’d just take “anybody.” Some folks were doubtless disadvantaged by this, no question. But I guess the question I have is whether the column should be taken as saying “this is how it is, and there’s nothing wrong with it,” or “this is how it is, and you should be aware of it when you get into this.” I do think that geographic mobility is one of the biggest components of getting the elusive TT job - it doesn’t guarantee one, but limiting your geographic options is going to increase your difficulty in getting a job. Now, I don’t think the profession SHOULD expect people to sacrifice family (local) interests for career, but since it does, if you want to succeed, it’s worth knowing that, and that’s how I read him.
His comments about local folks not finishing are kind of obnoxious…but while teaching, I have run into students who want to go to a particular grad program because it’s nearby, and that’s what they think matters, rather than because it’s best suited to what they want to study. Usually if it’s a good program they just don’t get in, but sometimes they want to go to crappy programs just b/c they’re there and they don’t have any idea how academic hierarchies work (you can get a good education just about anywhere, yes, I know, but if you want to go into academia you are best going somewhere that academia respects). Nearby may trump quality because of economics or family interests or whatever, but if a good student is stuck with a crappy school because of locality, that’s not going to help them in the long run. Or if a good student goes somewhere that doesn’t really support their interests - there isn’t REALLY someone in their field, but the program wanted warm bodies - so the student doesn’t get useful support and stops because of that - well, that’s not such a great situation either.
I’m not advocating for discriminating against local candidates the way that he does (and in fact Rural Utopia was very directly connected to my grad program and continues to hire a lot of folks out of that program because we “got” RU students and we were good hires for their institution), and there are probably better ways that he could put this, but I do think he points to some realities of the market as it stands, and that pointing them out doesn’t have to require the author to propose solutions about how to change it. (though I do totally agree with your point that his arguments about local students reveal how thoroughly he believes that academia is incompatible with an actual life.)
(Sorry to ramble so badly!)
March 31st, 2005 at 1:42 pm
NK, I agree that mobility is crucial in getting a TT job; I disagree that this is either a good thing or a necessary one.
The article hit me as “this is how it is and how it must be” not ” . . . and you should know this before you decide”.
And, look: students going into particular grad programs because they’re nearby probably need to be told why this is bad, and what academia is like: the fact that their profs didn’t do that is the fault of the professors, not the students.
You can only say “I’m just pointing things out, it’s not up to ME to propose changes or comment that this is perhaps not perfect (though the author seems to think this is Just Fine)” so many times before you sound like an idiot; frankly, after the first few times it’s been pointed out, you come across like an ass just saying This Is How It Is. (Obviously saying these things to students is different from writing them in an article.)
My objection was to the idea that it’s good and ideal to want to move around a lot, to the idea that these are clearly the best students. I disagree *vehemently* that the best academics are those with no ties to anything but academia.
And I like rambling; no worries.
April 1st, 2005 at 6:42 am
I definitely agree with you, that it’s not good and ideal that everyone has to move or that those who are willing/able to are clearly the best students. As for having no ties to anything but academia - well, I think it *can* make you a good academic in the sense that you may achieve a lot in your job; but it’s DEFINITELY not going to make you the best PERSON.
You’re also right about “how often can you point this out” - one of my problems with Chronicleland is that so often these columns come across as, “Look, I’m going to identify a problem that everyone already knows about and talk about it as if I’m the first to discover it!” So while I took the column as just (intending to) point out a reality, taken as part of the First Person corpus as a whole, yeah, I can agree that its impact is to advocate for something that the author just thinks he’s describing. If that makes any sense!
April 1st, 2005 at 9:01 am
I think that if your life is nothing but academia, in general you’re not going to be a good academic. You might produce more, but I think the production is hollow when there’s nothing else backing this up, no life there. (I mean this over long time periods; everyone has shorter times when things happen.) And since I still like to imagine that academics also ought to be sharing their work with people, teaching and all that . . .
You’re being more generous to the author than I am. I don’t think the intent was just to point out a reality: really, how many senior undergrads or early grad students read the Chronicle? Anyone else already knows. So he couldn’t've been explaining this, or pointing this out to people. So he must have been advocating for it, and agreeing with it — including the parts he said which aren’t common knowledge, like “local people are bad”.