There are no academic jobs and getting a Ph.D. will make you into a horrible person: A jeremiad. Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired?
Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing this path. Well, what if I told you that by “five hours” I mean “80 hours,” and by “summers off” I mean “two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning”? What if you’ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you’ll mostly be using made-up words like “deterritorialization” and “Othering”—because, as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out recently, the “dusty seminar rooms” of academia have the chief aim of theorizing every great book to death? And I can’t even tell you what kind of ass you have to kiss these days to get tenure—largely because, like most professors, I’m not on the tenure track, so I don’t know. California Council for the Humanities. CFGE_report.pdf (application/pdf-Objekt)
Bob Samuels: Rethinking the Future of Graduate Student Education. The recent Commission on the Future of Graduate Education report, "The Path Forward: The Future of Graduate Education in the United States," represents a perfect example of why you should not ask a bunch of business people and university presidents to plan the future of higher education.
While the overall message of the report is that that the federal government needs to pour billions of dollars into graduate programs to make America more competitive in the new global knowledge economy, this extensive study ignores most of the basic problems dominating graduate education in the United States. The report begins with an interesting analysis of the current state of the global economy: Survey on Doctoral Education and Career Preparation home page. The #alt-ac Track: 'Alternative Academic' Appointment.
[This is a guest post by Dr.
Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library. It's Your Duty to Be Miserable! - Advice. By William Pannapacker Every fall, during convocation, as we professors parade in our academic regalia, I am reminded of the march of the penitents in Bergman's film The Seventh Seal.
Is Stanford Too Close to Silicon Valley? Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever.
Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the “Stanford duck syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley.
Faculty Senate to hear report on reimagining undergraduate education. L.A.
Cicero A key recommendation is that Stanford guarantee that freshmen are exposed to a variety of instructional and learning styles so they experience new ways of learning that are a departure from their days in high school. Stanford University today released The Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford University, a comprehensive examination of teaching and learning that makes 55 recommendations to prepare students to face the challenges and opportunities of an ever-changing world. Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES) - Members. Skip to Content <form action=" id="cse-search-box"><div class="searchbox"><input type="hidden" name="cx" value="003265255082301896483:sq5n7qoyfh8" /><input type="hidden" name="ie" value="UTF-8" /><input type="text" name="q" id="search_string_web" /><button type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" class="search_button" >Search</button></div></form> Home The Report.
Who Needs the Humanities at 'Start-Up U'? - November/December 2012. Stanford says everyone does, and wants to convince the world.
Freshman Saya Jenks comes from nearby Menlo Park, but she admits to having initially misjudged Stanford when weighing college choices. She had the Farm pegged as an imperfect place for someone with her interests, which start with theater. When two friends who were a year ahead of her in high school picked the University for its humanities programs, her main reaction was skepticism. “I thought it was such an engineering school,” Jenks says. International Relations, National Security, and Global Competitiveness. Debating the Value of College in America.
My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university.
Re-envisioning the PhD: Home. New Era for Ph.D. Education By Russell Berman (Inside Higher ED) Not all doctorate recipients will become faculty members, but all future faculty will come out of graduate programs.
Rethinking the humanities Ph.D. The warning last year from Russell Berman, who at the time was president of the Modern Language Association, was apocalyptic: If doctoral programs in the humanities do not reduce the time taken to graduate, they will become unaffordable and face extinction. Now, Berman has taken his ideas home. At Stanford University, where he is a professor of comparative literature and directs the German studies program, he and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford -- a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren't just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years -- roughly half the current time for many humanities students.
The Multi-Track Ph.D. - Do Your Job Better. By Leonard Cassuto The crisis in humanities graduate education is coming to an end. But don't take out the party hats yet, because the situation in the trenches hasn't improved much. Academic jobs are still few and far between, and graduate education remains on shaky ground both institutionally and socially. Intellectual Entrepreneurs. The Future of the Humanities: A Think Tank. Don't make an economic case for the liberal arts. The liberal arts and sciences have no economic value. Let me repeat that: none, nada. Public Sphere Forum. Lisa Anderson, American University, Cairo Stephen Walt’s observations about the “growing gap between university-based scholars and both the policy world and the public sphere” echo, as he points out, many such laments in recent years, and much virtuous self-criticism in the academy. Political scientists (and area studies specialists) have been quick to castigate themselves about the irrelevance of their work and to worry about the growth of a competitive “alternate-universe” policy world of think tanks that seem not to share our high standards but nonetheless to enjoy the high regard among the public we think is rightfully ours.
Indeed, I have written some of these complaints myself.[1] We political scientists seem to be unusually voluble in sharing our pain at being spurned by policymakers whose heads have been turned by far less deserving pundits and bloggers. It is hard not to notice that this hand-wringing is becoming a feature of modern life.