New Kid on the Hallway

Perhaps I protest too much, but I don't miss it

The other day I found myself driving the same route that I took to campus everyday when I was teaching during my first year in this city. I noted that it was my teaching route, because it just happens that I rarely drive that route any more, since we've moved from the apartment we lived in then, and I never need to go to that campus. But it didn't feel like my teaching route. It didn't feel like anything -- it was just a street, like all the other streets in this city. It held no particular meaning. Intellectually, I thought, Oh, yeah, this is how I used to go to school; but emotionally, it didn't mean anything. It felt like something I used to do a very long time ago, that doesn't matter to me at all now.

And this is where it's possible I protest too much, but how I feel about leaving academia has come up with a friend of mine struggling through being denied tenure, who's therefore on the market this year and very very anxious about what will happen if she doesn't find another academic job. In one of our conversations, for some reason it occurred to me to tell her, "I don't miss academia, you know. Not one iota." She's come back to that a few times in subsequent conversations: "You don't miss it, right? You don't miss it at all?"

No. I don't miss it at all.

It's also come up in a listserv I belong to (I know, a listserv -- how quaint, right? How 1990s? Still, it's a good community), where the conversation among people with Ph.D.s leaving academia has turned to the psychological toll of leaving (especially for those people who feel forced out, but even for those who choose of their own volition to do something else). The despair and anguish and self-loathing among those who are un- or underemployed, who are broke, who feel that they have no transferable skills, that having a Ph.D. is hindrance more than an asset, and that they have wasted years and years of their lives, is heartbreaking. But it's all the more striking to me that largely, I have escaped such misery.

(Pause while I knock on wood.)

Yes, it was hard to leave academia. It was very very painful to get terminated at my third-year review, and it was depressing not to generate any interest at all in my job applications the following year. But in hindsight, I think I was much unhappier the first year of working at Former College, than I was to leave academia behind.

Neither of these things -- not being anguished to leave academia, and not missing it now -- are because I have some magical key to happiness and serenity that others lack the enlightenment to discover. On the contrary, there are a lot of material reasons why I have escaped some of the misery and self-blame and doubt. First, leaving academia meant I got to live with NLLDH again, which made me a happier person regardless of what was going on with my career. Second, being married to someone who had (has) a good job tempered a lot of the panic that goes with un- or underemployment. While money (or lack thereof, and the debt that ensues) has definitely been a tension between us, I still have a support system that my non-tenured friend, for instance, who is single, lacks. (That support system has shaped/limited my job choices in other ways, of course, but I'm nonetheless immensely grateful for it.)

Finally, in going to law school I have also chosen a path where the skills I developed in academia have been an asset, which helps me avoid feeling like the time I spent on the Ph.D. was a waste. I'm not going to claim that having a Ph.D. makes me a better student than anyone else, because it doesn't (and my grades reflect this. Though I did find out recently that one of my study partners from last year is ranked #1 in our class, so hey! at least I have the sense to study with smart people!). But having a Ph.D. definitely makes me a better student than I would have been if I'd gone to law school straight out of undergrad, and having work experience -- even in so strange a world as academia -- makes me better able to manage my time and to act like a professional. Employers' reactions to my background have been mixed: some employers clearly like the blank slate of the freshly graduated, law school savants who've never held a full-time job but who are in the top 10% of the class. But others find the Ph.D. intriguing and the fact that I've published stuff before ridiculously impressive.

Mind you, this is not to say that going to law school is the former academic's salvation. I don't think going to law school would help my friend at all, because she went into academia for the teaching, and wants, even if she doesn't get another faculty job, to get work that remains connected to teaching in some way (student affairs, teaching/learning center, that kind of thing). Me, I went into academia for the research and writing, which are hugely important in law school/practice, so it's a much better match. And funnily enough, I find that I'd much rather continue researching and writing on completely new topics, than maintain any non-academic connection with medieval studies. But that's just me, not everyone.

And even for me, law may yet turn out to be a bad choice. So far, I've been rewarded for my past experience more than not, and have succeeded at getting student jobs, which largely consist of volunteering and so hey! why not have a Ph.D. work for you for free for a semester? But who knows how this will translate when I'm looking for something permanent. Especially since large sectors of the legal profession have been thrown into a tailspin by the recent recession, with dire warnings that law will never be the same and that my graduating class will suffer the most. (I feel like the Typhoid Mary of professions: I enter grad school, and it rapidly becomes clear that the Bowen Report's claim that there will be a shortage of professors is utter bunk; I enter law school, and all the law blogs start declaiming the end of the legal profession as we know it. Good times.) I don't even know for sure yet if liking law school means I will like the practice of law.

More importantly, I'm taking on a big chunk of debt (though not nearly as big as some do), plus going back to school for three years, which many Ph.D.s either do not want to or cannot do. And then, of course, there's the fact that lots and lots of people would be MISERABLE going into law, so I'm not at all suggesting that because going to law school has worked as a transition for me, it would help everyone. (Brief digression: That's what kind of kills me about some of the naysayers about law school. As the legal profession has suffered recently, there are lots of people on the web saying, DON'T GO TO LAW SCHOOL! JUST DON'T DO IT!, etc. etc. And for some reason a ton of them keep suggesting that people should go to nursing school instead, because there will always be a demand for nurses and you'll make decent money. And I always want to respond: But what on earth makes you think I WANT to be a nurse? What the hell overlap is there between lawyerly skills/interests and nursing ones? What on earth similarity is there between those two professions? I mean, there is, in that both professions require intelligence, analytical skill, and in a lot of cases, the ability to deal with people/clients who have some kind of problem. But I'd suggest that day-to-day experiences of a nurse and a lawyer are pretty different!)

So, no, law school is not THE answer. But it is, for me, AN answer, at least at the moment, and it has had the benefit of removing me completely from my former profession and immersing me in a new one. I really really admire former academics who carve out new and exciting careers for themselves, creating their own niches where their interests and abilities intersect with the non-academic world. But I've never thought I would be able to do that, and am willing to take on the debt to have someone/something else provide the structure of training me into a new career. 

So, no: I don't miss academia at all. It feels long ago and far away, and I'm amazed sometimes to remember that I used to stand up in front of a room full of people every day and try to guide them on a journey through the past. I had to write on the board once last semester, and a really visceral, muscle-based memory hit me: I used to do this all the time. But there's no emotional punch to such a memory -- just a little faded nostalgia, along with a sense of wonder: Really? I did that? Not because I wonder that I could; just why I would do so in the first place.

Ceci n'est pas un comment

I am not taking part in the debate.*

But it's very odd to read discussions about tenure having been part of that system, and having left it.

Honestly, I think one of the biggest reasons why faculty get so wigged out about tenure is the horrific academic employment market. Because tenure means job security, and lack of tenure means (to many of the people involved, it seems, anyway) the increased possibility of getting fired.** And given how fricking impossible it is to get an academic job in the first place, and how hard it is to get to a second one in the second place--especially if, god forbid, you've settled in wherever you got hired, because getting another job will almost certainly mean uprooting and moving somewhere else, which, if you've actually put down roots and created a life for yourself, sucks royally--getting fired takes on a WHOLE DIFFERENT MEANING in academia than in other industries.

I mean, if you're a lawyer, and you get laid off, that sucks royally, too (especially--say it with me--IN THIS ECONOMY). But it is much less likely to mean that you have to uproot your entire household and move halfway across the country if you want to continue in the field for which you trained. You might move from one big firm to another, you might go from a big firm to a smaller firm, you might end up in government work, you might even hang up your own shingle. But the rest of your life will otherwise likely continue much as it always did. (That's a little less likely these days, but still, pretty likely.)

The actual fallout of getting fired as an academic, given the academic market, is largely independent of how you get fired--whether you don't get tenure, you get tenure but your institution declares financial exigency and cuts your department, or you're at an institution that never had tenure to begin with that doesn't renew your contract, the suckiness of getting fired is going to be pretty much a constant.

But the tenure system just means that it's a whole lot less likely that you will be fired.

Given the consequences of getting laid off as an academic, I understand why everyone likes that system so much. But it seems to me that the real problem underlying this element of tenure is not that eliminating tenure means that faculty are more likely to be fired. It's that if faculty are fired, there are so few other things they can (easily) do that involve what they're trained for.

You can also see this, I think, in the kinds of institutions less likely to have tenure. Community colleges are more likely not to offer tenure than four-year colleges and universities. Community colleges also tend to offer more professional/vocational kinds of degrees (e.g. nursing, business, graphic design, journalism). Most of the people who teach such subjects--or perhaps the preferred candidates to teach such subjects--are those who have significant experience in the professional world. Such people don't necessarily care about tenure because they can get jobs in their particular industry (many probably still have those jobs while teaching). For such faculty, getting fired would doubtless still suck, but it would be less likely to cause the same kind of upheaval in their lives as for the average academic at a four-year college or university.

And this, to me, points to the way the academic job market intersects with support for tenure. Which is an economic problem, and a problem facilitated by the proliferation of grad departments to supply TAs so that universities don't have to hire as many professors actually to teach. It's not about academic freedom, it's about supply and demand. And I don't think that ensuring that the few people who do get academic jobs can't get fired from them should have so much to do with the fact that so few people can get such jobs in the first place. Let's face it: would losing your job because your institution doesn't have tenure really be so unthinkable if you knew that, with a reasonable amount of effort, you could get another job doing the same thing in the same town?

I know that people are going to bring up academic freedom in response to this, the corporatization of the university and so on, which I haven't addressed here. I'm just not convinced that academic work is so very very different from every other kind of professional industry out there that it requires the protection of tenure. I'm not convinced that having a tenure system really prevents abusive employment practices. Honestly, I'm not convinced the tenure system does much besides reward people for subordinating every element of their life to their work.*** And I'm also not convinced that discussions of tenure and the need for tenure can be separated from the terrible economics of the academic job market, even though they're really not the same thing at all. 

*I don't really want to link; if you read around the academic blogosphere, or the corners I frequent at least, you probably know what I'm talking about. If you don't, you probably don't, but you might consider that a good thing.... 

**I'm still not convinced that abandoning tenure would actually lead to everyone getting fired all the time, but eh, I can't exactly prove that.

***This is NOT meant as any kind of insult to the many of my dear, dear friends who are tenured or on the tenure-track and accomplishing great things. I just think you'd have all done those things without tenure.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

That's what it feels like when you miss one class to write a paper for another. (It feels a little more ironic when the same professor teaches both.)

This whole writing-a-paper-in-law-school thing has been extremely enlightening. And when I say paper here, I mean an actual academic paper, on a topic I pick and filled with my own ideas about the subject, rather than something like what gets assigned in Legal Writing (a memo or a brief, where you're handed the issue and what you come up with is the best way to spin the legal authority you dredge up on your subject, not any "new" insights on the matter. I mean, writing memos and briefs is creative, and it definitely requires analysis and insight and so on, but if all the case law out there says that 40-year-old married women with cats do not constitute a suspect class for hiring purposes, you're going to have a reeeeeeeeeeeeeallly hard time trying to argue that they should be, and will probably have to exercise your creativity in coming up with a different angle from which to advocate for your client. There are more constrictions; your exercise your creativity in trying to figure out how to deal with them. Whereas in an academic legal paper, you're free to write all about how bogus the case law is and why such women really SHOULD be a suspect class. I mean, you'd sound like an idiot making THAT particular argument, but you have more freedom to do so than you would in a brief).

See, I figured that I would be all over the academic paper thing. I mean, it's what I've done for the last umpteen years of my life, right? I know how to handle academic papers!

But I forgot that I also studied my previous subject for those umpteen years. I've mentioned here before how established skills deteriorate when you have to apply them to a new context (kind of like how college students might end up doing really well in Intro to Comp but when they have to write for a new class in a new field, they forget how to do things they'd been doing just fine in the familiar context). Struggling with this seminar paper, I'm brought right back to my early days in grad school, writing final papers for seminars when I was still taking classes in my Ph.D. program. There's a familiar panicky feeling of wanting to sit down and write, knowing you have a paper to do, but simply not having enough stuff in your head yet to come up with something substantial. And while the solution is simply to read stuff, learn more, put more stuff in your head so that you can start making connections and seeing what's going on, that panicky feeling makes it hard to focus on the material you really need to address. I look at the stack of cases and law review articles I could/should be reading for this paper, think, "I can't POSSIBLY get through all that," and waste a lot of time worrying when I should just be reading and thinking and then, only then, writing.

It's all part of learning new stuff, I realize that. I just really expected that I wouldn't have these problems any more. I completely forgot how much medieval stuff I managed to get in my head, and how much that facilitated churning out pages when need be. I've kind of mentally treated this seminar paper like a conference paper, which is off for two reasons: first, it's longer than a conference paper, and second, I just don't have the knowledge to dash it off the way I was able to do with conference papers, by the time I left academia.

On the bright side, though, one of the things that was also panicking me about this paper was feeling like I needed to have years of primary research under my belt before I could say anything useful about anything. It finally dawned on me: this paper isn't intended to be the masterful culmination of hugely sustained research into primary sources. It's a thought exercise. I need material about which to think (and seem to have managed to formulate a topic that requires more than some, of course), but the point is NOT to accumulate information, not in the way that it sometimes is in historical research. The point is to think of something and to communicate it. It was funny to realize how much historical argument is accomplished by accretion: by piling piece of evidence upon piece of evidence. You really don't do that in the same way in legal writing. Tis rather odd for me. 

Okay. Back to the paper I'm missing class to work on.

Eating one's words: another observation on the change from prof to student

So, you know how profs hate hate HATE it when a student says, "I couldn't write your paper/study for your test/go to your class because I was doing my work for my other class?" Because it's all disrespectful in 1) implying that your class is much less important than their other class, and 2) assuming that you'll agree that yes, your class is less important the their other class, and it's really okay that they didn't do the work for you, because after all, they were doing something IMPORTANT?

I've reached that point in the semester where, overwhelmed by all the stuff I stupidly thought I could handle getting done, I find myself REALLY wanting to tell profs, "I can't get the work done for your class because I have to do to the work for X!"

I mean, I'd never actually say that (seeing that I know how well it goes over), and if I ever had to say something related to the whole issue, I'd couch it as, "I wasn't able to do the work for your class because I overcommitted myself and didn't manage my time and this week." But that's really just a nicer way of saying that, at least right now, yes, I think X is more important.

And it's funny how when you're feeling totally stressed and overwhelmed, it seems totally natural to tell your profs that. I'm not a slacker! I'm working hard! I'm just working hard on other stuff, not yours! And it's overwhelming and I'm swamped and tell me it's going to be okay!! It's funny how intensely self-centered being swamped and overwhelmed makes you feel, where it seems completely natural that you could say something like this to a professor and actually expect them to comfort/reassure you.

Of course, profs get swamped and overwhelmed, all the time. But there is something about being at the (greater) mercy of others (who grade you), and struggling through something for the first time, where you're still learning how to do everything you're being asked to do, that creates a feeling of helplessness and self-absorption -- the kind that makes you think that telling your prof that you didn't do their work because you had other work you had to do first is really a reasonable thing to do.

I'm not planning on saying such a thing to any of my profs, but I feel a kinship with past students who've said such things to me, and a drop of guilt about my lack of charity with them.

Random comments on the 1L year: I shouldn't even blog this for fear of jinxing it

So, when I was making plans for going to law school, I read a lot of how-to-succeed-in-law-school guides (a sucker for a good self-help book, I am), as well as a lot of law school blogs and online forums.

Something that a LOT of these sources emphasized was how hard law school could be on your marriage/relationship.

There was a lot of warning that non-law school people can't understand what you're going through in law school, and that you had to prepare your partner for the stress you'd be under and how much time law school would demand, and that you would have to remember to give time to your relationship so it wouldn't founder. There were also a lot of comments on how many couples break up when one of them goes to law school.

Sometime in April, I turned to NLLDH and asked, "Have you found that me being in law school has put a strain on our relationship?"

And he just laughed and laughed and laughed.

Because actually, no, we haven't found me being in law school to be a particular strain on our relationship. (Caveat: I realize I've only finished one year, so this may change, although I should add that most of the comments about the strain of law school that I've seen talked specifically about the first year.)

But honestly, I don't think this is because law school isn't hard. It's because in comparison to the strain that getting Ph.D.s and working in academia place on a relationship, law school is NOTHING.

When I look back at my life since NLLDH and I first got together (in 1993!), here are all the ways that earning Ph.D.s and being academics put pressure on our relationship:

• After completing his doctoral exams (in the minimum time allowed by our grad program) and immediately turning around and teaching his first independent course, a summer (and therefore compressed/intensive) course, NLLDH, who has issues with perfectionism and was dead exhausted, had a kind of a mini-breakdown just before we moved in together.
• Throughout grad school, he struggled with excruciating writer's block.
• Throughout grad school, I struggled with an excruciating fear of my advisor/her feedback.
• When he used up what was the standard level of grad student funding in our department, he decided to move back to his parents' house to finish his dissertation. (Since he was a foreign student in the US on an educational visa, there were limits on what kind of employment he could take.) We broke up based on the theory that we would be living in two different countries.
  
  • (That didn't actually happen, because we moved his stuff to his parents' house, then moved me into a new apartment, and he moved into my new apartment to catsit for the 6-8 weeks I was in Europe doing dissertation research. By the time I got back, he'd got a non-departmental TAship that he managed to keep for the next two years, so he never moved to his parents' house and we just kind of pretended we'd never broken up. Still, it was a strain.)
• When he finished his degree, he got a job about 5 states away. I was writing my dissertation. Should I go with him? Should I not go with him? I was going with him. No, wait, I wasn't. Okay then. He moved away, and we broke up (again on the basis of being in two different places) for 2 years. If he had not had to move for this job, we would not have broken up.
• We ultimately got back together, and got engaged while living across the country from each other. We got married 7 months later where I was working as a full-time adjunct, and the day after, he had to fly back to his job. (Honeymoon? what honeymoon?)
• I got a job at Rural Utopia. He came with me, had nothing to do for the first semester (in the middle of nowhere where we didn't know anyone yet), and spent a lot of time drinking.
• Ultimately, NLLDH got full-time teaching at Rural Utopia, which was great, and more than a lot of academic couples get. However, although we saw each other in meetings and what not, and ate lunch together on campus, we also had workloads/schedules such that he'd get up and leave the house before I woke up in the morning, we wouldn't see each other till dinner, and then he'd go to bed about 8 pm and I'd stay up and work for 3-4 more hours. (Yes, we did get summers "off," so there was that.)
• NLLDH decided that staying in his position at Rural Utopia (not tenure-track, not permanent - renewed year-to-year, so not secure, no support for research) was not something he could do long-term, other academic options didn't pan out, and he decided to go back to school to retrain for a new field. I also got a new job at Former College, in a big city, based partly on the idea that it would be easier for NLLDH to find a satisfying job in that rural area. Which meant that we left Rural Utopia, I moved to Former College City, he moved to Second Grad School City, and because he never did find a job in Former College City, we lived mostly apart for the three years I worked at Former College.
• During which time I suffered from depression, ran up a bunch of debt (partly the impact of maintaining two households and paying for travel, partly me being a depressed dink), and was relieved as much as distressed when Former College booted my ass.

(The list above is necessarily incomplete, since it's from my perspective, and NLLDH might very well add to/subtract from it.)

Now, I don't mean to suggest that academia was the cause of ALL BAD THINGS EVER that NLLDH and I have gone through in our relationship. Because it definitely wasn't - he and I brought plenty of our own issues to the party. Many couples might well have made very different decisions about these matters than we did, in ways that might have reduced stress levels. Moreover, I'm not someone who sits around bemoaning what happened in the past, because it's what has made us who we are, both as individuals and as a couple. I don't regret any of the things we've done or haven't done because of our choices to pursue Ph.D.s, try out academic jobs, and change careers. So this isn't meant to say that ACADEMIA RUINED MY LIFE, DAMMIT. And finally, I realize that lots of careers, never mind life itself, put stress on relationships, so I don't at all mean to say that only academics have to deal with relationship angst.

Nor is law school entirely stress-free. The exam period kind of sucks, because it really does expand to suck up ALL. YOUR. TIME. I told NLLDH at the beginning of it that I was probably not going to be able to cook, clean, or be very much fun while exams were ongoing (his response? "You do EXACTLY what you have to do to do well on your exams, and screw the rest of it till they're over." So that wasn't so bad, although we're both sick to death of frozen pizza). I did feel somewhat disconnected from him throughout the process, because I was immersed in the Dormant Commerce Clause and zoning amendments and inchoate crimes and personal jurisdiction and so on, and so my brain was just in a completely different place; I was so consumed by exams that when he said something about something else, I occasionally felt like, "How can he expect me to think about that??"

But I would submit that in comparison with the strain that academia placed on our relationship, me going to law school is NOTHING.

(But last caveat: we don't have kids, so that has made both the academic careers and the current careers less stressful.)

Hey wow

So, I wrote this one article, and it's fairly decent, and it got placed in a really good essay collection, so it's actually been cited in a number of places.

And that was pretty cool, and all, but in my latest vanity-Google I found something even cooler:

Someone's assigned it for a class.

I'm verklempt.

In a bad economy, job prospects suck everywhere

That said, I think I bring a warped perspective to discussions about the employment prospects in law.

(Disclaimer: I don't know much about the legal job market yet, not compared to the academic job market, so my comments here are just gut reactions, not reasoned arguments.)

Big law firms are bleeding as hard as many other industries, and last Thursday has been dubbed "Black Thursday" because over 700 lawyers at big firms were laid off; 400 more lost their jobs the next day. And while I don't want to work at a big law firm (or possibly any law firm), I still have to pay attention, because when these lawyers can't find jobs at other firms, they'll turn to the government and public interest jobs I have my eye on. Plus, government and public interest positions aren't exactly handed out like candy in times of economic crisis.

Nonetheless, it's very weird for me to see someone on a law board I read talk about law prospects prior to the current disaster and criticize them as bad even before our economy went to hell.

This article talks about a reported employment rate among 2007 law grads of 92%.

Now, this is troublesome because schools are notorious for reporting ANY employment as employment - so if a law grad is working at Starbucks, hey! they're employed! Moreover, these percentages are based on students' self-reporting, and presumably those who are un- or under-employed are less likely to respond than those happily set with legal employment.

Nonetheless, the idea was floated at this other board that a 92% employment rate wasn't very good, and that, well, it made me laugh. Or cry. When you consider that most people I've seen now concede that maybe 50% of humanities Ph.D.s will get a tenure-track job (and I'd argue that number should probably be lower), 92% sounds like PERFECTION. 80% would sound like perfection. And 70% would sound pretty decent. I mean, maybe there really is 42% worth of wiggle room/exaggeration in the reporting of law grads' employment. But I'd be a little surprised if it were THAT high.

The other major issue with legal employment is an extreme bi-modality (is that a word?) of salaries. Associates - meaning new law grads - at the biggest of BigLaw firms do earn $160K+. (I'll pause while my academic compadres recover from that one.) Of course, firms offer a wide range of salaries, and only a very small number of people will reach such heights. Nonetheless, the article linked above states that the median salary for law grads working at firms is $108K.

The thing is, there are salaries clustered at the top of the scale, and salaries clustered at the bottom of the scale, but very little in the middle. And the same article warns that 38% of law grads are earning $55K or less.

And all I can think is, I would be willing to bet you that there are a LOT of assistant professors throughout this country who still start at less than $55K. (We won't even get into adjuncts, who are, after all, employed in the field for which they trained, and who would therefore be considered successfully employed by legal standards.)

This is NOT to say that there are therefore no problems with the legal job market. In some respects, it shares the same problems as academia: There are very very few of the jobs for which the degree ostensibly prepares you, which grad schools use to lure you in (in law, the money-making Big Law jobs; in academia, tenure-track jobs), and if you don't get one of those jobs, you're stuck chasing crumbs. (And, I'd argue, that once you get one of the holy grail jobs, you may well find out it's not all it's cracked up to be...but that's another issue.)

The comparison only goes so far, of course. The first big difference is that while I think the BigLaw jobs are what draw a lot of people to law school (I will go to BigLaw and wield power and make lots and lots of money!), there is a much wider range of good, accepted options other than BigLaw for lawyers, compared to options other than tenure-track jobs for academics. I don't actually think that if you don't do BigLaw, you're chasing crumbs, though I think that attitude exists (not where I am - in fact, I don't think my own school actually pushes the BigLaw track very much at all - there's a much greater emphasis on government and public interest work (though this may just be my own bias showing). But I hear this may be the case at some schools).

And the second big difference (or it should be a big difference) is debt. I sincerely hope that most people going through a Ph.D. program in the humanities are being paid to do so (even though I recognize that this won't always keep you out of debt; grad stipends don't go far, especially after you've been living on them for seven years or so already...). I sincerely hope that many people get out of their Ph.D. programs with minimal debt.

This is not the case for most people going to law school. With some private law schools breaking the $40K/year tuition barrier, law school is EXPENSIVE, and many people come out with crazy debt.

So the bi-modal salary distribution is a big problem for law students because if you come out of law school owing $150K in student loans, taking a $35K/year job to start may not be an option. If you choose to take out exorbitant loans to go to law school banking on the chance of getting one of the $160K jobs, being unable to find a job that you can afford to take can make the legal market look like one great big scam - kind of like coming out of academia and being unable to get anything more than a couple of sections of Western Civ at $1500 a throw.

But it's still hard for me to see the legal job market as quite so exploitative and awful as the academic market. This is probably due to a lot of personal factors rather than any wonderfulness on the part of the legal profession: I just wouldn't have paid $40K/year tuition, I'm going to a state school specifically to keep my tuition and loans down, I have a supportive husband who can pay our living expenses which further reduces my loan burden, and I don't want to work in a big firm anyway. And I haven't yet been kicked around by the legal job market - it may yet happen, but it hasn't yet.

It still doesn't sound as bad as academia.

Why community colleges are not a solution for the academic job "market"

This post is inspired by the discussion going on at Dr. Crazy's (in response to this post by Sybil Vane at Bitch Ph.D., which is a response to this column in the Chronicle by Thomas Hart Benton), about advising students who want to go to grad school in the humanities. Vane and Benton ring changes on the theme of "Just say no!", while Dr. Crazy suggests that doing so perpetuates serious class inequities in academia.

I'm not actually addressing here the question of what one should say to students who think they want to go to grad school (I've weighed in at both of the above posts, if you're REALLY dying to read my comments), but responding to something that got raised in the comments to Dr. Crazy's post. I found myself leaving yet another multi-paragraph comment there, then told myself, Self, if you just post this on your blog instead, you will stop hijacking people's comments, and you will get a blog post out of it, too! So:

Good Enough Woman left a comment on Dr. Crazy's post saying, basically, why has no one mentioned community college teaching in this thread? That is, in all the discussion of the crisis of humanities Ph.D.s not being able to get jobs, why not consider teaching at a community college?

Now, I mention Good Enough Woman by name to cite her correctly, but not at all to single her out or criticize her for asking this question - because this is a question I see raised quite regularly in job market discussions. But finally, after seeing it any number of times, I think I can articulate some of my problems with the question, legitimate though it is. To me, the suggestion that humanities Ph.D.s would have more career options if they'd just put aside their prejudices and work at a community college doesn't really wash. (Again, apologies to Good Enough Woman for putting words in her mouth.)

The obvious reason for this is that many Ph.D.s don't want to work at community colleges. Which is admittedly true, for good or bad reasons. But let's examine the reasons why people who have earned doctorates don't want to work at community colleges.

First, I'd contend that many humanities Ph.D.s get taught that working at a community college is just as much a failure as leaving academia altogether (not that either of those things actually are failures, just that there is a zeitgeist in academia that holds that they are). I mean, I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the majority of humanities professors who staff Ph.D.-granting departments have never attended or taught a community college (I know this overlooks many people who have, especially in more recent generations, and I don't want to erase their experiences, but I suspect that in the humanities, they're still  a minority).

So you have snobbery. But beyond snobbery, this also means that Ph.D.-granting humanities departments are staffed mostly with people who probably don't know squat about what community colleges need in their faculty or how to help students learn these things. I'd even say that most Ph.D. programs probably don't do much of anything to prepare people for teaching in CCs, because what the Ph.D. programs value - research, research, and more research - is not usually what CCs need. So you can teach a seminar on seventeenth-century Italian graveyards? Gee. That's nice. Which is not meant to suggest that no one who teaches at a community college ever teaches specialized topics in their areas of research, but come on - what community colleges in the aggregate need from their humanities faculty is the ability to teach (depending on your field) composition, US Survey, Western Civ, Intro to Poli Sci, and the like. These are not the primary interests of most Ph.D.-granting departments. (WIth the exception of composition, if your Ph.D. is actually in composition/rhetoric, I suppose! And even then, doing scholarship in composition is not the same as teaching remedial and intro comp to first-year students.)

So when people say, Why don't people with humanities Ph.D.s teach at community colleges?, they underestimate the degree to which the training in Ph.D. programs is not designed to and in practice does not prepare students to be candidates for community college jobs.

Anecdotally, many of the people I know with doctorates who have applied to community college jobs have had absolutely no luck. These weren't people who were deigning to apply to community colleges and believed the colleges would be lucky to get them; these people would have considered themselves very lucky to get the jobs for which they were applying. But they had no previous experience with community colleges. And they got nowhere. I have seen this happen any number of times, to bright, lovely people who are dedicated teachers and would be extremely effective community college professors.

Conversely, everyone I know who has ended up getting a full-time community college job has had previous experience teaching part-time at a community college, often the very college at which they end up employed full-time. Sometimes they got this experience while writing their dissertations; others were able to swing teaching only one or maybe two classes a semester for a few semesters until something permanent became available. But they had to have that previous experience. And if they weren't able to get it during grad school - if they didn't know to consider it until they went on the market - not everyone can afford to live off the pay from one to two community college classes in a semester (even if you do something else like temp or waitress on the side).

I think my point here is that like any other relatively specialized place, community colleges want to hire people who have familiarity and experience with their missions and unique circumstances. But partly because of snobbery and partly because of inability, most Ph.D. programs in the humanities do not position you to get this experience. If you've gone to a fancy SLAC and R1 Ph.D. school, you don't have the right experience from your own education. And since your fancy SLAC and Ph.D. programs probably didn't promote community colleges as a viable and desirable career option, they don't help you improve your position.

Finally, I am not trying to get anyone to weep salt tears for the graduates of elite schools because boo hoo, they didn't get to go to/work at community colleges! I mean, that's just silly. I also recognize that I'm generalizing hugely here, and that what I describe does not match every individual's experience (I'd say it characterizes the culture of academia overall, but you're welcome to dispute me on that, too).

I guess all I'm really trying to say (at way too great length) is that when Ph.D.-granting institutions notoriously train students to reproduce themselves, to be eminent scholars in R1 institutions (or at a pinch, fancy SLACs), no one should be surprised that community colleges aren't a good solution for humanities Ph.D.s who don't win the lottery of the tenure-track job. It's not because humanities Ph.D.s are snobs who have internalized academia's snooty privileging of research and prestigious names, who don't want to teach introductory courses, who think that students at community colleges are of lower caliber - or, at least, it's not only that.

It's that Ph.D. programs, left to their own devices, produce graduates who are just plain old poorly qualified to teach at community colleges. No matter how much they want to.

(I'd also argue that you could probably substitute "high school" for "community college" in the post above and it would hold true. I suspect this is less the case with the elite private high schools - of which there is not a superbountiful supply. Public schools offer the additional obstacle of certification: a friend of mine who teaches at a community college would very much like to get certified to teach high school. But in her state, to get her certification, she is required to take the very course in U.S. history that she now teaches. She didn't major in history as an undergrad, so never took the U.S. survey. One doctorate later, she has now taught U.S. History umpteen times. She would still have to complete the course for credit to teach high school.)

Please forgive incoherence/rambling - it has been a looooong week and I'm pretty seriously sleep-deprived...

A moment of selfishness

A friend of mine just found out zie was denied tenure. I'm not going to go into why, mostly because it's not my story, but partly because I think the knee-jerk reaction to such a decision is to try to figure out why it happened, which too easily turns into trying to figure out what the person in question did "wrong." Which, to me, is kind of like trying to figure out why a given person doesn't succeed on the academic job market - it turns too easily into a kind of "blame the victim" game, which mostly serves to help other people feel like they have control over the process -- that if they do everything "right," unlike those poor unsuccessful folk, they will suceed/get the job/get tenure. That in fact, the system is rational.

(This isn't to say that there aren't ever very good reasons for someone to fail on the job market/at getting tenure. But I'm more and more convinced that success at either of those is 95% context and 5% qualifications.)

But anyway, my point is that I have, on one level, a very selfish reaction to this: it brings back all the stupid feelings of losing my own job at Former College.

Which pretty much sucks rocks.

(I'll grant you it's worse for my friend, who has gone through the whole tenure track, while I only had to get through half. And if we do want to get into why, I think zie's been treated much worse than I was, although I also think there are some disturbing parallels. Nonetheless, sometimes I just wish I could wipe the slate clean and forget I ever had a career before law school.)

My undergrad alma mater is full of psychotic people

So, the home of the lavender bovine sent me a press release announcing the award of various fellowships the school offers for post-graduate study at Cambridge and Oxford. Here's a sampling of the people who won:

- art history major who studied at Oxford hir junior year.
- Named Scholarship holder.
- has interned at the X College Museum of Art, a major news channel, and a national magazine.
- a member of the varsity track and field team, the varsity cross country team, the varsity tennis team, the concert and chamber choirs, and the -------, an a capella group.

- physics major
- Phi Beta Kappa
- winner of a scholarship for contributions of music.
- a member of the X College Symphony, the [Local] Symphony Orchestra, and the X College Symphonic Winds.
- interned at the Argonne National Laboratory and studied at the U.S. Particle Accelerator School
- is writing an honors thesis on [scary quantum physics topic].
- captain of the fencing team.

- history major
- Phi Beta Kappa
- Named Scholarship holder.
- studied at Oxford hir junior year
- took part in X College program in X studies (residential off-campus program in cool stuff).
- winner of Named Travel Fellowship and spent last summer in food research and interning with a number of premier pastry chefs in France.
- member of the X College Brass Ensemble, Oxford crew team, and the X College Bhangra dance troupe.

- political science major
- co-founder of [Organization], an organization that aims to reclaim childhood for Iraqi refugees in Jordan by organizing sports camps for young girls.
- awarded a Really Cool Grant to fund [Organization].
- op-ed columnist for the X College Newspaper.
- has interned for a national news channel.
- serves as the co-head of an X College tutoring program and is a member of the X College Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. 
- co-author (with Professor --------) of "Cool Article Title Here."
- awarded a [Emeritus Professor's Name] Fellowship to fund a research project about the Olympics and national identity. 
- a member of the X College varsity ski team, captain of the X College cycling team, and a member of the X College varsity crew team.

Now, I realize that college-sponsored press releases are like Lake Woebegon on steroids - everyone is WAY above average. But still. Are these students not insane? How do they accomplish such things??

Well, actually, I take that back - one of the ways they "accomplish" such things is by getting into a school that has the money to hand out named fellowships/scholarships left and right and create opportunities for students. Not that these students haven't done impressive things to get those fellowships/scholarships. But my alma mater has a LOT of money and a LOT of connections. That helps undergrads do things like intern at the Argonne National Laboratory (which may not be all that big a deal, I am not a scientist, but hell, it sounds really prestigious to me).

Nonetheless, these are crazy impressive people. Granted, these scholarship winners are 8 people out of a class of about 500. Still scary, though. I look at these students and think, dang, they're all WAY more impressive than I was when I was there! (Of course, I don't know if today I'd even get IN to my alma mater.)

But I also look at this and see the intense professionalization that has pervaded graduate education trickling down to undergraduates. Sure, these kids are going to Oxford and Cambridge, so are (theoretically) the cream of the crop. But I swear that when I graduated, you didn't have to have saved the world and played a varsity sport while doing so in order to go to grad school. There were students in the sciences (and maybe psychology) who were named authors on articles, but not nearly as many as you see now. It wasn't quite such a necessity to intern at really cool places in order to do something when you graduated (and boy, is that a practice that depends on having money - of your own, or your college's. If you have to work to put yourself through school, you literally can't afford to do unpaid internships at national news channels, no matter how much you want to get into that business).

I forget, sometimes, how unusual and downright bizarre the small, elite (rich!) liberal arts colleges really are - until I encounter people who've never spent any time at one. It really is an attitude you have to experience to understand. They're amazing sites of opportunity - people attend this college (and others like it) precisely because they can set you up with amazing internships, give you the chance to do cool research, and put you at the head of the pack. (Which isn't to say that other kinds of institutions can't do this - of course they can. But you have to be much more willing to take the initiative at a huge research university, and I think there's a lot more specialization; I don't think there's as many students who, say, do lots of cool internships AND play in a musical ensemble AND play a varsity sport, while doing independent research in their major field. Feel free to rebut that assumption in the comments.)

And at the same time, these colleges are incredible bastions of privilege. They would, I know, HATE that characterization, and they do extend opportunities to many students from underprivileged backgrounds (they have so much money, they can afford to do so). And I know that many of their alumni go on to do amazing social justice-y kinds of things. But they also, by virtue of their wealth and connections (and incredibly strong alumni network, which fuels both those things), continue to raise standards for undergraduate success. The more students graduating from these schools rack up the nifty accomplishments, the harder it is for students at schools that don't make such accomplishments possible to distinguish themselves. (It's not impossible, of course. But harder.) And there's something about that that makes me a little uncomfortable. (Though it could just be my inferiority complex talking.)