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Tuesday, December 02, 2008
The stigma of sessional work
Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman on 12/02/08 at 10:50 PM
Given how lovely the market is this year, I wonder how faculty who earned tenure in the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s will respond to up-and-coming scholars who slummed as adjuncts or lecturers during the Great Recession of the December 2007 and Counting. Will they convince themselves they marketed their wares when the state of the nation was equally bleak?
Jonathan Culler of Boston prepares to return home after successfully landing a job at MLA 1974.Or will they admit that the prospects for the current crop of newly-minted doctorates are sufficiently dim that the ban on hiring anyone who deigned to take a position because he liked food and needed shelter should be lifted?
I’ll give you three guesses.
A lot of people are telling me I should go to graduate school, but the career prospects are so dire that I fail to see the point. These people mostly did their grad work in prior decades, so I’m not sure they actually have a grasp on the situation at all.
Instructional and vocation training seems to be seeing the most activity as people retool their skill set in the hope of a career change. Their does seem to be a disconnect between classroom and the job situation outside. Advanced degrees aren’t getting the jobs, it’s licenses and designation. Great time to be a nurse or paralegal, not so good for an advanced degree in poetry or Irish mythology with an emphasis on folksongs!
Or will they admit that the prospects for the current crop of newly-minted doctorates are sufficiently dim that the ban on hiring anyone who deigned to take a position because he liked food and needed shelter should be lifted?
-Never! They will stick to the usual social Darwinist arguments of academic survival of the fittest and hire the newest PhD out of the blocks…
the time has never been better to go into the business of refinishing hardwood floors, or plumbing. Rich people will always need services no matter what the economy is like and even poor people need to call the plumber.
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