'The Great Shame of Our Profession'
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
It is true that supply exceeds demand for PhDs, especially in humanities, and prospective PhDs should be aware of this, but I can't really see any excuse for this behavior by universities. It's bad for the taxpayer, bad for the employee, and bad for the students. Only one it's good for is the administrator, who can pocket a bonus for cutting costs. The government shouldn't stand for this, IMO. I think this would be a good way to frame an argument for a minimum wage in such a way it would appeal to a conservative. "Businesses: you must pay employees enough so they aren't eligible for (most forms of) public assistance."
As the link points out, faculty are complicit too by taking on unsustainable numbers of grad students out of pure self-interest.
Is it better to not pay them at all?
If the problem is that people can't afford their bills, the solution is to help them afford their bills (minimum income, negative income tax, cash welfare, etc.), not to distort labor markets.
We need to make sure that there is modest marginal cost to employment or else people will have limited ability to retrain or otherwise break into new labor markets.
Far better they get a new career and become net sources of tax money rather than net sinks.
At the macro level you have a totally different problem if there's 320 million people and only 90 million jobs, well...
There is no logical reason retraining or breaking into a market naturally requires receipt of food stamps. If there were a healthy demand, pay would be healthy.
Telling people to just find another industry is well and good, but what industry will pay a 55 year old underemployed person full salary and benefits just in case they're a tragically misunderstood diamond in the rough.
And this is a real problem. The employment rate is in the basement. There are structural issues that need addressed.
(I wish I were being sarcastic, but I am sad to say I am not)
[Edit: I don't mean to say you are a right-winger -- I have no idea if you are or not -- simply that you have nailed an excellent point that could be used to support the implementation of UBI: jobs that are socially valuable, but only marginally so].
>According to the most recent MLA jobs report, there were only 361 assistant professor tenure-track job openings in all fields of English literature in 2014-15. The number of Ph.D. recipients in English that year was 1,183. Many rejected candidates return to the job market year after year and compound the surplus.
Now, this begs a much deeper, more heady discussion regarding priorities and values within the US Higher Education system. The question to consider is Does this out-of-whack-ratio mean we have too many English graduates or not enough English jobs? And - while you'd probably knee jerk to the former rather than the latter, I think I could make a compelling case to disagree.
It's not that it's wrong to pursue a lifetime in English or Music, it's just very tough to realize that as a nation, the US has its priorities terribly fucked up and refuses to support even a decent standard of living and healthcare for those who would devote their lives to such pursuits. This should be in bold text on every student loan application in the Liberal Arts, and perhaps others as well. We don't need room after room of high minded PhDs talking Milton, but we do need PhDs to be taxpayers, and there are plenty of immigrants year after year that if English was a priority, it would get funding and infrastructure to support both the Educators and Students. Which, as we can see, isn't the case for now.
I'll agree that military spending is out of control, and that the welfare system in general needs to do better than cut people off past a certain point, but that doesn't mean we should pay for apartments for English majors with the money we're currently spending on bombs.
Is the welfare system the opposite right now with that problematic gap? Make too little and you're on welfare. Get a job, make too much for welfare, and welfare cuts off, leaving this precarious middle area that many can't make, losing their job again, and then falling back into welfare?
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here.
My understanding of the current welfare system is that you get $Y from welfare as long as you make less than $X dollars from a "real" job, but as soon as you make $X dollars at your job, you lose the entire $Y from welfare.
That's a bad system. A better system would keep paying welfare once you make more than $X at your job, it would just start reducing the amount of welfare you receive, e.g. for every $1 you make above $X, your welfare payment reduces by $0.50. This ensures that as you make more money at your real job, you aren't actually suddenly reducing your take home pay.
Basically a negative income tax for those making less than some threshold.
To quote Wikipedia:
At a cost of $56 billion in 2013, the EITC is the third-largest social welfare
program in the United States after Medicaid ($275 billion federal and $127
billion state expenditures) and food stamps ($78 billion).
For example, a married couple with two qualifying children and yearly income
of seven thousand dollars will receive EITC of $2,810 (going up the hill).
At fifteen thousand dollars, this couple will receive EITC of $5,036
(plateau). And at twenty-five and thirty-five thousand dollars, this same
couple with their two children will receive EITC of $4,285 and $2,179,
respectively.
That's why arguments about separating Great Art from Shithead Artists is a constant conversation of "Is it okay..." among adults who care about such things.
If we took half the money we now spend on bombs and spent it on apartments for English majors instead would the result be a better or worse society than we have now?
Just because the money isn't being spent on bad idea "A" doesn't mean bad idea "B" should get funded.
* Keep spending $B/2 on bombs
* Give $B/2 back to the taxpayers instead
* Use the $B/2 to support cultural activities that are not profitable enough to support themselves
> It gets worse. From 2008 to 2014, tenure-track English-department jobs declined 43 percent. This year there are, by my count, only 173 entry-level tenure-track job openings — fewer than half of the opportunities just two years ago. If history is any guide, there will be about nine times as many new Ph.D.s this year as there are jobs. One might think that the years-long plunge in employment would compel doctoral programs to reduce their numbers of candidates, but the opposite is happening. From the Great Recession to 2014, U.S. universities awarded 10 percent more English Ph.D.s. In the humanities as a whole, doctorates are up 12 percent.
> Why? Why are professional humanists so indifferent to these people? Why do our nation’s English departments consistently accept several times as many graduate students as their bespoke job market can sustain? English departments are the only employers demanding the credentials that English doctoral programs produce. So why do we invite young scholars to spend an average of nearly 10 years grading papers, teaching classes, writing dissertations, and training for jobs that don’t actually exist? English departments do this because graduate students are the most important element of the academy’s polarized labor market. They confer departmental prestige. They justify the continuation of tenure lines, and they guarantee a labor surplus that provides the cheap, flexible labor that universities want.
English teachers don't just teach grad students, they teach English majors and just about every other student, as English is a core general education class for graduation in most cases.
This may apply to high school as well.
It should be kept in mind that there are other jobs for PhD besides faculty. (Although I don't know about English; maybe editor, etc?)
I have mostly made my peace with the fact that by going into academia you are trading money for some intangibles, like doing what you enjoy, flexible hours, etc. Anyone who gets a PhD without knowing the risks is...not very smart.
I work in medical research. Trust me, it's not pleasant that total government spending on medical research for a year amounts to the cost of a few dozen bombers. Or that the Iraq War's cost could have funded all our research spending for something like 50 years. But at this point, pointing out how our societal decisions are irrational is like pointing out the sky is blue.
English departments don't normally prepare their graduates teach English as a 2nd language. That's usually done by Applied Linguistics. Applied linguistics also doesn't have the employment problem English programs do. The job market is much better.
You have to wonder how many of those jobs only exist to accomodate the current number of PHD's. The "real" number of job openings could be far lower.
I've taught at a university and felt the pressure to assign higher grades even though I felt I was being fair. The whole concept of aiming to give the same percentage of As, Bs, etc in each group of students is antithetical to the idea of a degree, and is one factor that led to my deciding to never teach again.
Well, that ratio is based on tenure track openings. One wonders how that number changes if you factor in adjunct lecturers somehow. Obviously there's a not a 1:1, but in service departments like that with little research budget, it'd be at least a feasible calculation.
The article also makes the argument that there are only 361 tenure track job openings because universities are temporary workers at beer low pay. That's a strong case for the conclusion of the previous paragraph.
Universities sometimes require or encourage support staff to have higher ed. degrees. Computer tech support positions may require a bachelors degree. Career counseling or academic advising may require a masters. Faculty encourage students to get graduate degrees at the universities they(the faculty member) got their graduate degree from. Politicians and alumni get favors for their families. Universities are practically influence and nepotism laundering machines. Faculty are simply part of the power structure, each trying to improve their position within. Grad school practically selects for individuals who are invested in the institution and will not rock the boat.
That used to be true but not anymore. A lot of the administrative stuff these days are career administrators.
Existence is a prerequisite for all learning/teaching/research, and expansion is implied in these goals too. Unless their stated goal is to further knowledge, but not too much!
I'm skeptical that shady administrators actually don't care about the goals of their organization and have ulterior motives. What seems more likely is that universities are like any other large organization. Most people involved want to do a good job, but only a few are truly passionate about success. Fewer still know exactly what needs to happen for success and are able to rally others to fulfill their vision.
1. Don't assume these are "brilliant" minds. It takes a certain type of mindset to become a college professor. Do not equate this with brilliance.
2. You're not listing a solution. Ousting the administrators won't solve anything in and of itself. They will be replaced by some other administrators (perhaps of your liking). But what actually is the solution? The realities they have to deal with won't change: Money has to come from somewhere.
3. Some of the author's complaints don't strike me as being a fundamental problem. As an example, it's not obvious why the publishing companies behave the way he would like them to. He's acting as if they have a responsibility towards people like him. Why?
4. Agree with the problem of too many administrators and too many adjuncts and teaching getting the shaft. But don't trust numbers too blindly. As an example, a local university showed their numbers. Since 1980, funding per student from outside (state/federal, etc) dropped a huge amount. Almost all of the tuition increases accounted for it. Overall funding for instruction per student did not drop at all - just the manner in which they obtained it. All the sports stuff was "extra".
5. The latest generation of faculty members - especially in disciplines like engineering - do not share this mindset. It's not at all unusual for me to hear a young engineering faculty member talk about the waste that are the humanities. I suppose primarily it's because the pressure for funding is huge on engineering faculty members, so they are predisposed to viewing everything as a fixed pie, and the less that goes to humanities, the more for them.
6. As several have pointed out, teaching is not something most faculty members today are hired for (especially in STEM). This is a problem from within - not something imposed by administrators.
7. As someone who spent time in academia, faculty members are focused on being individualistic and trying to stand apart from their peers. You cannot expect them to "get together" to oppose these changes. They have trouble getting together for pretty much anything. Don't let multi-author collaborations fools you.
1. I'm trying to be positive :)
2. I should have gone into more detail on that, but the solution I had in mind was not so much a specific policy as a putting-forth of basic principles which they wanted to see administration recentered around.
3. True enough.
4. I know it's more complex than it looks at first glance. Administration increasingly requires compliance with many state and federal regulations which costs money, and likewise sports teams bring in cash from nostalgic alumni, and indirectly subsidize other things.
5. This goes to the heart of what I'm talking about. I find myself wanting to arrange blind dates between members of the engineering, humanities, and economics faculties to figure out ways they could be supporting rather than competing with each other.
6. for sure, and I hope that changes.
7. Clearly I'm leaning too much on a vision of the university as a calling and not enough on its reality as a cut-throat research marketplace.
Thanks again for this in-depth exploration of the issues. I'll keep it in mind on my future reading.
Imagine the following thought experiment: the entire faulty of Harvard goes off and starts a new University (call it Garvard). Now, obviously, the quality of education at this new school is going to be just as good as Harvard. But which school are parents going to want their children to go to: old Harvard, with a newly hired crop of top professors, or Garvard, with the original professors? I suspect that Garvard would get less applicants, and would likely have to charge less.
This market force is why the cost of education is going up quickly while educator salaries are not rising as fast. In higher education right now, branding is more important than product.
"Good" universities benefit from outsized tax-sheltered endowments, which can be spent on anything from rock climbing walls, employee perks and bonuses, restaurants, accommodation to land acquisition. Let's do another experiment, what if Harvard's $36 billion endowment was swapped with that of a less prestigious university in a major city, say Seattle University (SU). With now an almost $2 billion in annual expenditure, SU could hire some great faculty, and invest heavily in R&D. Meanwhile, Harvard would need to rely on huge tuition increases (via student loans), equaling $160k a year per student, as each student currently indirectly receives an additional $100k per year in endowment spending, and minimal financial aid. Maybe some wealthy alumni could try and prop it up, but I think it would take less than a generation for Harvard's prestige to sag, and SU's to soar.
The metaphor is unsalvagable.
Yes, but you can leave non-governmental power structures; the power of the Foot Veto is huge. By your logic, no new companies ever form because existing companies will strip you of your power to form them. Your logic predicts a society a great deal less flexible than the one we actually live in.
The metaphor is unsalvageable.
I suggest to you that it may be worth your time to meditate on this a bit more for your own health, which I mean fully literally. Your worldview quite easily leads to an excessively fatalistic feeling of a lack of control, which is a major factor in depression. Escaping non-governmental power structures may not be easy, but what worth doing in life is? It is well within the domain of possible.
The real question is why so many bright minds want to go into this to begin with.
"oh we'd like to pay you decently and hire enough workers, we really would, but the market simply can't bear it, we don't have the funds, I'm so sorry. We're on the same side here, really, it's just the practicalities of the situation. You wouldn't understand, it's business, and you're an expert in Art/English/Engineering/Chemistry which I totally respect, but you just wouldn't get it so just trust me. I'm one of you. Oh, and by the way your faculty parking lot is being redistricted into stadium parking, and since you aren't an administrator you'll have to purchase a special faculty pass (half off!) that isn't valid on game day. You can take the bus on game day, you like that kind of stuff, you're a liberal, right?"
I think nearly unconditional tenure is kind of untenable. There is so much dead weight in any academic department and it's so easy to see. Ask any grad student which professors don't do research or take students and teach like absolute trash. There are always plenty. Usually old, taking up the few slots available for bright young PhDs.
But we could also make more slots. There's nothing wrong with being a teaching professor, lots of people love it and they love it so much it doesn't need to pay well, just decently, and how about tenure-ish-track teaching only instead of shunting teachers off into second class citizens who can be fired if some students drop their class the day before? There's plenty of room to expand if that was the goal. But it isn't. Cuts are made where they can be made. It isn't really a market, quality of education isn't really the measured output of paying tuition so the market will NEVER select for what we think of as 'good', but the institutions are being run as if they are operating in a market instead of a public service, which is THE central neoliberal fallacy whose implementation has been as disastrous in education as it has been in any public service which is not a real market (eg healthcare)
What's interesting is that this ultimate power is used exceedingly seldom, and very rarely indeed for non-symbolic purposes. There's an active Congregation process involving the compulsory retirement age, but for more-or-less everything else Congregation simply defers to the administration.
So I'm not sure that we can point to the power structures as the reason top-down management is such a thing. It happens because we're happy to let it.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
Also everybody knows that if the university administrators actually got replaced by sensible rational people then the English department might not exist any more anyway so they're all living on borrowed time.
Finally, looking at the political situation in much of the developed world, you wouldn't be surprised by the fact that the study of the humanities (and social sciences) has declined; perhaps we need to invest more in it.
Conservatives didn't politicize the academy alone. Studies[0] have shown left-wing professors will openly admit to discriminating against conservative peers and students. From the abstract I quote:
"In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate."
Other studies[1] have confirmed that there is an incredible lack of political diversity in certain university departments and that it's likely caused by outright discrimination.
"This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking. (4)"
Given that these university departments are overtly discriminating based on political affiliation, is it any surprise to see funding for these university departments being politicized? Sorry, if you're discriminating based on political affiliation, you're not doing science, you're doing activism.
[0]: http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf
[1]: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-...
Also, have you considered that academics don't select for liberalism, but liberals select for academia? In my field (Biology) it seems like it'd be almost impossible to find a well-qualified faculty candidate who is an average US conservative without applying some truly outrageous "affirmative action" for conservatives. Difficult to see how that sort of thing would do anything but dilute the quality of a department's faculty.
Honestly it's funny, because usually conservatives seem to reject the concepts of relativism: have you considered that there are certain truths in these fields that simply contradict the conservative worldview? If that is true, wouldn't departments be throwing these truths aside in a quest to be basically be "politically correct"?
Absolutely not.
>In my field (Biology) it seems like it'd be almost impossible to find a well-qualified faculty candidate who is an average US conservative without applying some truly outrageous "affirmative action" for conservatives.
Have you considered that your view of an "average" US conservative is incredibly biased by the media you consume and the environment you operate in? And that your incorrect stereotype might be the reason you seem comfortable making arguments against observed discrimination that you would immediately reject if they were applied to other groups?
In the current environment you operate in, would you even know if one of your peers is conservative? Is it safe for them to be "out" about their political beliefs?
> Also, have you considered that academics don't select for liberalism, but liberals select for academia?
I've considered it, but the evidence suggests that discrimination is a better explanation of the facts. Haidt notes that historically most university departments were not the political monocultures they are now. Haidt also responds directly to your criticisms about qualifications and personal preference. I quote:
On intelligence:
"[Are conservatives simply less intelligent than liberals, and less able to obtain PhDs and faculty positions?] The evidence does not support this view… [published studies are mixed. Part of the complexity is that…] Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008). [Libertarians are the political group with the highest IQ, yet they are underrepresented in the social sciences other than economics]"
On self-selection:
"Self-selection clearly plays a role. But it would be ironic if an epistemic community resonated to empirical arguments that appear to exonerate the community of prejudice—when that same community roundly rejects those same arguments when invoked by other institutions to explain the under-representation of women or ethnic minorities (e.g., in STEM disciplines or other elite professions). [Note: we agree that self-selection is a big part of the explanation. If there were no discrimination and no hostile climate, the field would still lean left, as it used to. But it would still have some diversity, and would work much better.]"
Given that there's ample evidence of explicit evidence of discrimination against conservatives in academia, that is a straightforward explanation for the disparity we observe.
I'd highly recommend reading the three papers I've linked in this thread for an overview of this issue which goes deeper than the "conservatives don't want to be in academia and even if they did, they'd be too stupid to contribute anyways" idea.
>have you considered that there are certain truths in these fields that simply contradict the conservative worldview?
Have you considered that every ideological system has its own blindspots, and that the mechanisms of peer-review breakdown in an ideological mono-culture? Consider that some of the social scientific concepts facing the toughest scrutiny in the ongoing replication crisis are concepts beloved by a certain ideological group, like implicit bias and stereotype threat[0]? And that ideological blindspots can negatively affect the search for scientific truth, both by embedding values in the research that's conducted and by the absence of research in other directions? That these ideological blindspots might even exist in your own field of biology?
[0]: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/02/23/are-most-published-so...
Err, I was just speaking in terms of public polling information- gallup is the "media" I'm consuming here. The median US Republican (good proxy for conservatism) does not believe in evolution or climate change- extremely difficult to find a serious faculty candidate who fits that profile, just for starters. Do you not agree with that?
You misinterpreted my second point- I am not trying to argue that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives (the data you share would have been what I suspected, though) - rather I was trying to explain that if we require a faculty candidate to have views similar to the median US conservatives, we'd likely be passing up on many, many highly more qualified candidates if it's simply a numbers game.
>Given that there's ample evidence of explicit evidence of discrimination against conservatives in academia
This is possible in the social sciences, where one's work can explicitly belie one's political worldview- but how does it explain the trends in the life and hard sciences? Faculty in fields like Biology and Physics are also overwhelmingly liberal, but departments generally know nothing about the political views of faculty candidates. Honestly, the only people who can be discriminated against here would be those who are very vocal of their political views on public internet profiles, and even then honestly nobody is stalking your Twitter when evaluating you for a faculty position. I think that this evidence directly contradicts the possibility that discrimination is primarily responsible for the political imbalance of academia.
> And that ideological blindspots can negatively affect the search for scientific truth, both by embedding values in the research that's conducted and by the absence of research in other directions? That these ideological blindspots might even exist in your own field of biology?
Of course- this is all serious stuff to think about and I often do. The other thing to think about is: how do we achieve that while also keeping cranks and denialists out of power positions in institutions of learning? It seems like those in the field are usually the best at distinguishing crankery from genuine ideological difference- if we don't trust them, who do we trust?
I get that you personally see the difference between what you're proposing and affirmative action for climate denialists, creationists, and anti-vaxxers. I do too. I'm okay with Scott Alexander and Peter Thiel faculty. I'm okay with Milton Friedman. The problem is I think that this line of ideological affirmative action would lead to professors Ken Ham, Jenny McCarthy, Glenn Beck, and Milo Yiannopoulos. There are many people in the US who talk the same way about academia, but are talking about this kind of change. If you can propose measures to introduce the reasonable kind of change you seek that is robust against the insane, anti-intellectual, scientific-existential threat kind of change a large number of other conservatives are seeking, I'd be tentatively on board.
>Faculty in fields like Biology and Physics are also overwhelmingly liberal, but departments generally know nothing about the political views of faculty candidates.
One of interesting thing to keep in mind, is that while it's true that biology and physics professors also lean liberal, the ratios are inline with what the ratios have historically been in academia as a whole. They are closer to 3:1 or 4:1. Fields like sociology or social psychology are closer to something like 20:1. A college student taking a sociology class is more likely to be taught by a Marxist than a Republican[0]!
(Please don't tell me that the intellectual underpinnings of marxism are more correct than that of conservatism. I'll have an aneurysm.)
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessi...
The "median" person doesn't become a professor. I think you're confusing object level Republican issues with conservatism. One doesn't have to agree with the Republican party on every issue to be considered a "conservative." One thing that opened my eyes to this issue was reading Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind." Conservatism and liberalism are ways of looking at the world which involve valuing different moral principles.
From a book review[0] on the book:
"He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity...
These moral systems aren’t ignorant or backward. Haidt argues that they’re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we’re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn’t, we reject it. People accept God, authority and karma because these ideas suit their moral taste buds. Haidt points to research showing that people punish cheaters, accept many hierarchies and don’t support equal distribution of benefits when contributions are unequal.
You don’t have to go abroad to see these ideas. You can find them in the Republican Party. Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet."
These values are inherited culturally and some evidence[1] suggests there may be a genetic component too.
So, to clarify, I'm not necessarily asking that professors be hired with wrong object-level beliefs. But I do want to make sure that we're not discriminating against people who view the world through different moral structures, and who may view certain issues more clearly than those of us who are inclined to be on the left.
Have you ever considered that the reason for the intellectual bankruptcy (I note your mention of Glenn Beck et al) in the right in America today is because conservative minded people have been pushed out of academia (and the media, and entertainment...)? I can't emphasize this point enough, but the evidence is that there is overt and explicit discrimination against conservatives in academia. People with conservative beliefs are 100% correct to distrust these institutions, and our society, our democracy, and our political discourse as a whole is poorer for it.
> It seems like those in the field are usually the best at distinguishing crankery from genuine ideological difference- if we don't trust them, who do we trust?
One might also argue "we should trust tech interviewers to determine who's a good fit for tech and who's an imposter. And if that discriminates against people of color or women, that's just because they're worst."
My answer to that would be "humans are irrational, and we have to recognize the possibility of bias and therefore we need to think long and hard about how to ensure that everybody is getting a fair shot." The bare minimum we could do is make it absolutely clear that openly and explicitly discriminating against people (our fellow citizens!) based on their political beliefs is incredibly harmful and morally wrong.
[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous...
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/
(btw: Scott Alexander identifies as a liberal and votes for the Democratic Party)
Also, politicizing a scientific-existential threat is not unique to the right: http://www.vox.com/2016/10/18/13012394/i-732-carbon-tax-wash...
I would also be remiss to mention that Republican intellectuals just put forward a carbon tax proposal last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/opinion/a-conservative-ca...
I'm talking about conservative politicians - external actors, not internal.
Also, I'd love to see some cites about the issue you raise from reliable sources. I'm sure it happens to a degree - it happens everywhere - but there is so much static on the issue from partisan conservatives, who follow the program of delegitimizing everyone who disagrees with their ideological program (e.g., the "media", climate scientists, Obama, Clinton, etc.) that they can't be trusted on anything.
Yes, I'm claiming (and evidence supports) that internal actors politicized these disciplines. Do some research into these fields. All of them were politicized in a remarkably short amount of time. Conservatives are just responding by denying public funding to self-identified partisan political activists.
> Also, I'd love to see some cites about the issue you raise from reliable sources.
I gave you cites from reliable sources. The second link I sent you is a review article of all of the research done into this subject. I'd highly recommend checking out some of the citations in that paper, they're very illuminating.
Another good one to check out is this paper[0] from Stanford which measured the implicit bias association test applied to political groups. In all of their studies (I believe they recreated 3) they found that implicit bias is as much as 50% stronger for political identity than it is for racial identity.
From that paper: "Compared with the most salient social divide in American society—race—partisanship elicits more extreme evaluations and behavioral responses to ingroups and outgroups. This remarkable patterns applies to both explicit and implicit measures of group affect and holds even when the tests of ingroup favoritism are unobtrusive and completely nonpolitical, and partisans are incentivized to treat copartisans no differently from opposing partisans."
[0] https://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2015/iyengar-ajps-group-po...
Heterodox Academy's stated mission is to advocate for more conservatives in academia. They also have no independent claim on credibility that I know of. That's not what I mean by a reliable source; it's the kind of source I avoid (of any political stripe).
> Conservatives are just responding by denying public funding to self-identified partisan political activists.
Can you give examples? I've seen them attack climate scientists and tenure for everyone.
Heterodox Academy advocates for ideological heterogeneity in departments, which in the context of the academy as it exists today means conservatives. It was created by Jonathan Haidt[0] who is not and has never been a conservative. Considering the results of the study, it would be impossible for any significant number of conservative social psychology professors to be a part of the organization (there are no significant numbers of conservative social psychology professors).
If you choose not to read the studies that I've cited, that's your own partisan anti-intellectualism and it's a perfect example of how partisanship (even left-wing partisanship) prevents the search for truth.
I'm happy to discuss issues, whether or not we agree, but personal attacks aren't welcome here on HN. They create a few problems: 1) They are unpleasant for the recipient; 2) they don't inform other users or otherwise add value to the discussion; and 3) they derail discussion and spread like cancer - one personal attack breeds several more.
No real harm done, but let's stick to comments that are worth everyone's time to read. That's why I asked about different cites; I wanted to learn something.
>The truth is that teaching is a diminishing priority in universities. Years of AAUP reports indicate that budgets for instruction are proportionally shrinking. Universities now devote less than one-third of their expenditures to instruction. Meanwhile, administrative positions have increased at more than 10 times the rate of tenured faculty positions. Sports and amenities are much more fun.
The author alludes to sports and nice dorm rooms as the place where the money goes, but is that true? Do they really take up all of the slack that was once the use for instruction? That can't be right. There has to be a lot more corruption than that these days.
Still, if the University really has become High School 2.0, then this makes sense in a way. But the real question we then have to ask is what happens then to the MA/S? Is that then the new BA/S? I have been told so by many hiring managers that it is the case. Follow the logic here, that then means the PhD is the new MA/S. Perhaps these students are smarter than the author lets on.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athleti... http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/runnin...
It can be generational (parents pay for kids education) or time (a person buys something at 20 that they will pay off at 45).
I also think that the prestige of a degree combined with less and less real world application of that degree has something to do it with.
I think that the market value for certain degrees is falling below the market price for said degrees and what you are hearing is people complaining loudly.
I think if there really was a serious market for pure academics and high value, quality degrees someone would be tapping that market already. There is plenty of expertise, plenty of study in the subject and plenty of players would would be ready to provide that service.
I think far, far too many people look at college as a four year luxury party with a side of academics rather than the other way around. People going to college today seem like the most privileged demanding consumers.
The new source of costs in colleges which eclipses academics today is services that didn't exist 20 years ago. It's gone way beyond merely housing and a few health services.
Colleges are giving students what they want and what they want is scoreboards not lower student-to-professor ratios or cutting edge research. People have always wanted more cake and circus. College is just as consumer driven in this culture as anything else.
Most versions of this discussion lament the fact that students come into graduate programs with little idea of what the academic job market is like. One could respond - and many do - that it's a "free market," no one is forcing them to choose this profession over any other. However, this rational-actor reasoning can only be expected to work if effective channels were set up to inform students before they've sunk in too much time, and cost (both in terms of money and lost opportunities). Do such channels exist? While I agree that the responsibility largely lies with faculty, there are few incentives in the system for them to lower the number of PhDs. And any system that depends on the uprightness, or clarity of vision of individuals (even liberal humanities professors) is bound to be leaky at best.
While this essay puts some numbers to the problem - approximately 1 job for every 4 PhDs per year, for example - I think this is one domain where more data and analysis could serve as a wake-up call. Those 1 in 4 odds, I'm sure, are far from evenly distributed. They are heavily skewed towards a handful of elite institutions. Go to school elsewhere and the odds stack up much higher. Consider the applicants who graduated in previous years but have remained in the market and the odds are even more daunting, and made worse during job shortfalls like that after the '08 downturn.
If informing graduate students of the magnitude of the challenge they are taking on is the best approach to the problem, then the profession needs to do better than trust this to individuals and institutions who have no incentive to scare away a large portion of their students. Does a dataset exist that makes this information accessible? I'd expect some resistance from departments to share detailed information, but the MLA should have enough information from their member surveys. When grad students send in their first $23 check to the MLA, perhaps they should receive a dossier with employment data for the last 10 years and a few choice graphs to scare the living daylights out of them!
Markets depend on some level at consumers who know what they're buying; if all of the consumers are blindfolded, firms will sell them pieces of paper. If a university can attract students by investing in its instructors, it will do so. Currently they can't.
The managerial/administrative class sucks up as much of this wealth as it can for itself and like minded individuals while burning lots of it in conspicuous displays of wealth like football stadiums designed to attract more interest/wealth some of which will stick to their hands.
This waste is probably nowhere more apparent than in areas of study which require so little special equipment and expenditure like literature. The single most valuable resource, a library, is available for free to most, next up is the teachers time which costs only a small fraction of what the student is paying.
When basically students are paying 20x the actual cost of the teachers time for the credentials to participate in the institutions that only exist because of the easily borrowed money in the first place it seems that this is unsustainable nonsense most easily rectified by cutting off the money supply.
In the longer term it will be necessary to implement means by which we can legitimize means to connect teacher to learner without an unnecessary intermediary that takes almost all of the resources.
Providing a way to achieve this wouldn't be terribly hard fixing our entire system which depends on credentials from this dysfunctional industry to legitimize employment isn't but cutting off the money is the first step.
Do you think that grad students don't read articles like this? Do they understand points that author laid out?
If they do as a group stop applying for PHD programs knowing that their job prospects are abysmal? If so, why don't more people either a) cut their losses or b) not pursue a PHD in a wholly oversaturated market?
The exploitation argument works if you have completely illiterate and uninformed workers who work on the promise of advancement or pay that never comes. This doesn't hold water for professionals who literally spend every day working with the people they are trying to become.
The question then begs why do all of these intelligent, well educated people go through such great hardship, knowing full well the level of poverty involved. Every grad student I've ever known has joked about how poor they will be, how little they get paid, how miserable they will be on the other side.
Here's a radical idea; intelligent people are choosing this hard life because they value something in it more than the hardship they are going through to get it.
Now, you may disagree that the hardship is more than what they will get in return. You may also make the point that by definition, most of them won't even have the opportunity to achieve their goals. You may even make the point that colleges don't prioritize academics. I would agree with you on those points, especially the last one.
What's clear though is that they are people making this decision deliberately. College isn't the kind of thing where you just fall into like some academic gulag. At every step of the way, people applied, got loans or secured financing, moved across the country and put in hard work to achieve. All of this to say that somehow they were tricked by the "system" that's against them and is out to exploit them and their labor?
Now people are saying that colleges and society needs to put out a helping hand to all of these poor souls who find themselves in a position after a decade of deliberate decisions. If people put more support for this and made English PHDs more sustainable, I predict that you would see ever more PHDs and even more people trying to get into the field.
The problem lies in the fact that some people will make irrational decisions. Some things cost more (in money) than will give out (in money). Some people will get caught up in their love of books and academia and pursue a degree for the joy of literature but, then complain that a decade or professional reading and writing has yielded a mountain of loans and little else as prospects in the job market. It may even be that well meaning but, nefarious English professors are inspiring students to fall in love with Literature and teaching and speaking and this infatuation is causing a glut in the job market.
I would be more sympathetic if it weren't for the fact that this is a decade long process and you are doing in the very environment you are trying to enter. It'd be one thing if it took a decade to become an astronaut on Mars and we had a professional industry for training astronauts that lied or hid the fact that there aren't astronaut jobs available.
But, people see struggling grad students for four years in undergrad, and spend a decade being a struggling grad student. All the while pressing on. I have no sympathy for smart people making dumb decisions all the while studying books. The loud suffering of people who have made bad decisions is an important vital thing to listen to.
Allow people to keep making these decisions. Post this article and send it to every current and prospective grad student. Let them know that the road to a PHD is paved in suffering and misery (as if they don't already know).
Watch how few of them actually change their minds and alter their course. They are adults and are making decisions for their own lives inside dynamic systems that will work against their favor. I don't want to impose artificial limitations on the freedoms of a system because so many people make irrational (by my perspective) decisions for their own lives knowing full and well the consequences.