PageView. Mary Beard is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and classics editor at The Times Literary Supplement. She blogs at A Don’s Life. Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning? A. The first thing I read in the morning is my computer screen (or occasionally, I confess, my email on my iPhone in bed). The first hour of the day is usually spent between the laptop (not just the mail, but ‘servicing’ the blog too) and occasional glimpses at The Guardian, as a reward. Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? A. Q: What books have you recently read? A. For work, I read a whole clutch of new books on Alexander the Great for the NYRB.
Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years? A. Q: Do you read blogs? A. I go to CultureGrrl to see her take on Museum and Gallery gossip; Blogging Pompeii is great for all the Pompeii news; and my daughter’s blog, Researching South Sudan lets me know what she is up to in Africa. A. A. To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees - Advice. By Karen Kelsky Dear faculty members: I sell Ph.D. advising services on the open market. And your Ph.D. students are buying. Why? Because you're not doing your job. Lest you think that by advising, I mean editing research papers and dissertations, let me disabuse you. A former tenured professor at a major research university, I am now running an academic-career consulting business. As my own former Ph.D. advisees would happily tell you, I am not infallible.
When I ask them why they come to me—and not you, their Ph.D. advisers—the answers never vary. Why am I the pinch-hitter for an absentee professoriate? Let me be the first to tell you, your advisees are working hard. Cultivate a letter-writer? To be sure, my clients tell me that advising occurs—endless advising of "the dissertation project. " That is pure intellectual snobbery.
For years now, many professors have used the abysmal job market as an alibi to entirely neglect career advising for their doctoral students. How? With Limited Opportunities to Move, Many Senior Professors Feel Stuck - Faculty. September 11, 2011 Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Audrey Williams June At some point in many professors' careers, they want to move.
They want to upgrade to a more-prestigious university, a bigger salary, and better facilities. But in the wake of the recession, this once tried-and-true method of recasting an academic career now eludes many faculty members. On Hiring. People are talking about a recent article in The Economist on why obtaining a Ph.D. is supposedly “a waste of time.”
The author—who confesses that she “slogged through a largely pointless Ph.D. in theoretical ecology” more than a decade ago—makes the usual argument that universities are overproducing Ph.D.’s (though some would counter that the problem isn’t too many Ph.D.’s but rather too few tenure-track jobs) and chastises universities for using doctoral students as “cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour.” She also points out that the interests of doctoral students, for many of whom the pursuit of a Ph.D. is a labor of love, conflict with those of their professors: “Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records. Academics pick bright undergraduate students and groom them as potential graduate students.
It isn’t in their interests to turn the smart kids away,” the author writes. Read the posts in their entirety and share your thoughts. How Will Colleges Innovate as the Market Is Disrupted? - The Editor's Notebook. On Hiring. One of my favorite academic bloggers is Dean Dad, author of the very wise “Confessions of a Community College Dean.” In a recent post, he argues that the current crisis in academic hiring may have the salutary result of dispelling what I would call the “myth of meritocracy” in the job market.
He argues that the economic problems higher education is facing have created such a mismatch between the size and quality of the applicant pool, and the number of available faculty jobs, that there is no meaningful way to correlate applicants’ quality (however defined) with success on the job market. Surely there are many wonderful candidates who, through no fault of their own, will not get faculty jobs. There are also a lesser number (I hope) of weak candidates who will somehow manage to find academic employment despite their shortcomings. For a long time, I have thought about the way academics internalize that “Great Chain of Prestige.” Return to Top. 5 Years Later, the Growing Divide Worsens in Higher Education - The Editor's Notebook.
PageView. Chris Impey is a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning? A. I read The New York Times and NPR online every morning, either getting up to peruse them over breakfast, or lounging in bed and using my iPhone. Resisting the urge to open the Pandora’s Box of email first thing is very important, although some days, I’ll admit, I fail. More occasionally, I’ll go to the BBC online for a more global perspective.
Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? A. Q: What books have you recently read? I just read Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love. Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years? A. Q: Do you read blogs? A. Q: Do you use Twitter? Like the comedian who drinks from a glass and as it pours down his shirt, says “I must be full,” I felt sated with information when Twitter came along, so there’s only room at the Inn if someone else checks out.
Sketch by Ted Benson. On Hiring. In my first post, I alluded to my own snobbishness about applying for jobs at community colleges when I was first on the job market. And I also wrote about the intrinsic rewards of working at those colleges. But now, let’s get practical. Whether you are a graduate student or a midcareer professional — or both, like me — there are good reasons to consider employment at a two-year college. First, and most obviously, the United States has more such colleges than any other type of postsecondary institution.
More institutions with more students mean more job opportunities. Second, if you’re looking for a faculty position where you can focus on teaching, community colleges are ideal. Third is the issue of salary and benefits. Return to Top. Percolator. If you want to get a job at the very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy, here’s what you do: 1. Go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford. If you’re a business student, attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will work, too, but don’t show up with a diploma from Dartmouth or MIT. No one cares about those places. 2. That’s the upshot of an enlightening/depressing study about the ridiculously narrow-minded people who make hiring decisions at the aforementioned elite companies. The portrait that emerges is of a culture that’s insanely obsessed with pedigree. What’s surprising isn’t that students from elite universities have a leg up; it’s that students from other colleges don’t have a chance, even if those colleges are what the rest of us might consider elite.
There are exceptions, but only if the candidate has some personal connection with the firm. So going to Harvard is a prerequisite. It’s not what you did in college. Conducting the International Job Search - Manage Your Career. By Katrina Gulliver With the faculty job market as tight as it is in the United States, more academics are looking for options beyond their own country. In many fields, especially the humanities, the reality is that you can increase your chances of landing a position if you are willing to consider a long-distance move. And with the academic market in many fields winding down for the year in North America, now is a good time to point out that it is just warming up in other parts of the world.
You will find much variation in the hiring process, even within the English-speaking world. Attend conferences outside your country. But that is no reason to rule out a foreign trip. Cultivate international contacts. Know where to look for positions. Make yourself familiar with the Web sites that advertise jobs, such as Jobs.ac.uk and Campusreview.com.au. Familiarize yourself with the job titles. Learn to use local terms in your cover letter. If you are American, don't use U.S. Do your homework. On Hiring. In Part 1 of this post, I focused on two key things that academic job seekers should do during the summer to improve their chances of finding a position: Keep up with the job listings, and network. Here are four more off-season activities that every prospective candidate should consider: Plan your attack. Summer is the perfect time to re-evaluate your job-search strategy and decide what has worked and what you might want to change during the next round of applications and interviews.
For instance, are you looking at all of the possible jobs that you might be qualified for, at every kind of institution? Are you paying attention to openings all over the country? I’ve been telling people for years, in this space, that they shouldn’t ignore the community college-job market just because they have dreams of being research professors. The same holds true for geography.
Revise your materials. Enhance your CV. There are other activities besides writing and research that can enhance your CV, too. ProfHacker. Earlier this week, Miriam Posner, Stewart Varner, and Brian Croxall wrote “Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics.” They had some terrific recommendations about how to establish an online presence and how to keep that presence active and positive.
Good stuff! Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written before about the networking wonders and creative collaborations that can happen via online forums. We meet people from different disciplines in various parts of the world, and we connect because we share interests and goals. With all the good, though, there are some negative aspects to online presences. Today I want to veer off their post just a bit and write about something that might detract from a positive and professional online presence, a presence that we so meticulously create and maintain, comments made online that publicly disparage students and colleagues.
Take, for example, the case of Dr. A few more cautionary tales: How about you? Return to Top. PageView. The A to Z of Dual-Career Couples - Manage Your Career. By Female Science Professor Much has been written in academe on the topic of dual-career couples, and it remains a major issue for many institutions and people, particularly for women in science, engineering, and math. My point of view on the subject is that of a full professor in the physical sciences at a large research university. I am also writing as a member of a dual-career couple fortunate to have two faculty positions at the same institution. Whenever I write about this topic on my blog, I am quickly reminded by the comments that some people are hostile to the concept of accommodations being made for academic couples.
In the topics below, arranged from A to Z, I have tried to reflect the agony, the ecstasy, and the anger surrounding the issue of dual-career couples in academe. Advantages. Bodies (two of them). Competition. Deans. Economics.. Fields. Gender. Higher Education Recruitment Consortium. Illegal. Job-sharing. Kids. Long distance. Midcareer move (dual-career edition). My Daily Read: Sonja Lyubomirsky - PageView. Faculty Immobility in the New Economy - The Chronicle Review. By Leonard Cassuto When Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. left Duke University for Harvard University's African-American-studies department in 1991, it was his fourth work address in seven years.
I remember a waggish response at the time featured a Top 10 list of reasons for his departure. One: "Why do you think they call him Skip? " Gates's peregrinations were more frequent than we usually saw (even for him: He's stayed at Harvard for 20 years since), but they were broadly typical. That's because senior-faculty movement has dropped along with every other figure in today's employment market. Eminent professors often change jobs—or at least they used to. Let me say at the outset that my goal is not to lament the losses suffered by the more fortunate members of the profession who already have secure jobs.
But we still should ask how the newly limited mobility of star senior faculty—and senior faculty in general—will affect the academic workplace. But the game didn't stop for everyone. The Last of the Tenure Track - The Chronicle Review. By Daniel J. Ennis This year's season of assistant-professor job offers has come and gone. The search committee has entered that awkward clinch with Dr. Top Choice, holder of a newly minted terminal degree. As for unlucky Dr. This may seem like just another year in the rhythm of academic life, but we are reaching the end of a long cycle. The dismal numbers need only a brief review. A conservative projection puts the effective end of tenure within sight—a generation might be enough to finish it off. Therefore, the newly hired Dr. Senior among her colleagues by 2051, she will have outlived most of her peers and retire after 35 years of impressive teaching and research (and, perhaps, five down years here and there). This scenario suggests how disconnected discussions of "the tenure crisis" have become.
And that is why those skirmishes no longer matter, if they ever did. This year's new tenure-track hires, fortunate examples of a vanishing breed, had better make it count. Daniel J. Search. As Science Is Politicized, U.S. Prestige Wanes To the Editor: It’s both an embarrassment and a sad reflection on the state of scientific literacy in the United States that, unlike citizens of virtually all other Western countries, more than ... Helium, Part 2 The bubble-psychology of the consumer who holds fast to the belief that every bet is an investment; the mesmerizing allure of the prestige college that can dazzle parents to overlook the meretricio... A Career Dilemma I recently received the November/December issue of the American Federation of Teachers' publication, On Campus, and opened to the headline: "Community Colleges More Satisfying for Female STEM Facul...
Reputation-Building through Aca-letics Buzz Bissinger's recent Wall Street Journal column, Why College Football Should Be Banned, struck quite a nerve in academe. Talk to the Least Important Person in the Room ’Tis the season for department functions, such as new faculty or graduate student orientations. Instigation capital. Most Colleges Chase Prestige on a Treadmill, Researchers Find - Archives. Colleges Should Cultivate Leaders Within Their Own Ranks - Commentary.