Curtis Bowman

Peter Conn on Seeking Employment in the Humanities

Peter Conn discusses the ever-decreasing chances of finding a tenure-track job in the humanities.

Thomas H. Benton on Going to Graduate School in the Humanities

One of my former students from my years at the University of Pennsylvania recently directed my attention to this article by Thomas H. Benton. Mr. Benton (who is actually an English professor named William Pannapacker) has this simple advice for anyone who is thinking about going to graduate school in the humanities: just don't go.

My former student says that Prof. Pannapacker's reasoning in support of his advice sounds very much like what I told her when she was considering becoming a graduate student in English. So she wanted to be sure that I read this particular article.

I find myself in complete agreement with Prof. Pannapacker's views. This post on my blog will give you a few of my thoughts on the subject of graduate school. You might also want to read my academic autobiography. I haven't updated it in over three years, but it amply covers my ten-year experience as an adjunct. (Yes, ten years.) My example should serve as a warning to anyone thinking about graduate school in the humanities.

Oh, one last thing. As you read Prof. Pannapacker's article, you'll come across a reference to the infamous Bowen/Sosa report. I say something about this laughable piece of scholarship in this post.

How the University Works

Although I'm no longer a professor, I sometimes blog about the problems confronting academia these days. Consequently, I thought that I should say something about a book that I recently read with great interest: Professor Marc Bousquet's How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.

If you're new to this blog and haven't read any of my autobiographical writings, especially my academic autobiography, you should know that I spent ten years searching in vain for a full-time academic position after I received my Ph.D. in philosophy in 1993. In 2003 I left academia to become an independent scholar.

Given my past experience, I'm intimately acquainted with the sort of marginal academic life that Professor Bousquet describes so well throughout his book. It often comes as a shock to many people, especially newly matriculated students and their financially stressed parents, to learn that an ever greater percentage of faculty members are employed on a part-time basis, which translates into low wages, minimal to non-existent benefits, and a complete lack of job security. At many schools across the country at least half of the faculty are employed on such terms. It doesn't take much imagination to realize that the quality of classroom instruction must inevitably suffer, regardless of how well-meaning and dedicated these part-time instructors happen to be.

To Professor Bousquet's credit, he goes beyond the plight of part-time faculty to investigate the obstacles that many students face in their struggles to get a college education. As tuition costs have increased faster than the general inflation rate, more and more students are forced to take jobs as they make progress towards their degrees. In many cases these are work-study jobs provided by the very institutions at which they are enrolled.

But sometimes they work at businesses that have partnered with schools, neither of which seem much concerned with whether or not these students actually manage to get an education, much less a degree. Without a doubt, the most sobering portion of Professor Bousquet's book is chapter 4, in which he movingly portrays how such a partnership can lead to (and even seems designed to result in) the mistreatment of student workers at the UPS hub in Louisville, Kentucky.

Furthermore, it's just a fact that most work-study jobs don't pay enough to cover all of the costs of a college education, and so more and more students are forced to take on large amounts of debt. Unfortunately, many students in these circumstances never graduate, and so they leave school after fruitlessly accumulating debts that they still have to repay.

The growth of work-study jobs, as is to be expected, has come at the expense of full-time staff members, i.e., secretaries, library workers, and the like. Consequently, an ever greater percentage of staff-related work is performed by students.

All of this should sound familiar. After all, what colleges and universities have been doing for the past twenty-five years and more is to adopt a more corporate attitude towards their costs. Hence it's hardly surprising that they've attempted to introduce as many cost-cutting measures as possible, even though such steps obviously lead to a decline in the quality of the very institutions that cut costs in the above fashion. Such measures are really little more than a form of slow-motion institutional suicide.

But what is most remarkable about these cost-cutting measures imposed on faculty and staff is that they have not made a college education more affordable. Why is this so? In some cases, of course, they may have actually slowed the rate of growth in the cost of an undergraduate education at particular colleges and universities. For example, since state universities receive ever smaller percentages of their operating budgets from state governments, they have to figure out ways to contain cost increases.

Another distressing fact, one that works mightily against these cost-cutting measures, is that the decline in full-time faculty employment and the increase of student employment and indebtedness has been accompanied by a veritable explosion of growth in administrative employment. It's become so bad that some part-time professors make the switch to administration in order to have a full-time job.

Professor Bousquet does not say as much about administrative growth as he could have, and he certainly does not say nearly enough about the concomitant professionalization of higher education administration. The latter is especially important, I think, because of the careerism that inevitably attaches to any kind of professional activity.

No one with dreams of climbing the administrative ladder will approach his or her job with a conservative attitude. That is, no one can hope to move to a more prestigious, higher-paying administrative job simply by preserving the status quo. This is one of the main reasons for the seemingly endless but almost always useless agendas for change, the maniacal spending on new technology, and the like. Professor Bousquet, borrowing a phrase from David Brodsky, speaks of the "nomadic managerial hordes" (pp. 179-180), and so he is clearly aware of the problem I've just mentioned. But more could have been said about this topic.

One inevitable consequence of this careerism is that administrators will naturally move to reduce all possible resistance to their plans to change to their institutions. This provides them with another incentive to reduce the ranks of tenured faculty to a bare minimum. After all, part-time faculty who are afraid of losing their jobs will keep their mouths shut. No one can blame them for doing so, either. Once again, Professor Bousquet is aware of this issue, but he could have said more about it.

Given that I generally go in terror of English professors bearing theory -- read this review and this review for a few of my reasons -- I am happy to report that Professor Bousquet usually has his theory under control. Usually, but not always. For example, his discussion of the "informationalization" of the university (pp. 60ff.) does not strike me as being very helpful. To say that academic labor is delivered as if it were information, i.e., called up and dismissed as quickly as if it were a piece of information, seems to say no more than what we usually say about what it is to be employed on a part-time basis. Overall, however, Professor Bousquet's analyses tend to be lucid and to the point.

One final observation. In three places (pp. 14-18, 186-187, 200-206) Professor Bousquet discusses William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa's Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences: A Study of Factors Affecting Demand and Supply, 1987 to 2012 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). I had never heard of this book, and so I went to the library and checked it out. As Professor Bousquet points out, the Bowen/Sosa study was wildly optimistic in its prediction that the demand for new Ph.D.s would exceed the supply. We know, of course, that things turned out quite differently.

The Bowen/Sosa study is a grimly hilarious exercise in pseudo-scientific social science, filled with charts and figures purporting to demonstrate a thesis that never even came close to being the truth. I can only say that such talk was commonplace before the Bowen/Sosa study appeared in 1989. I can remember my father (who was a history professor at the University of North Texas for thirty-two years) telling me similar things in the mid-1980s (and I heard the same prediction in my first class as a graduate philosophy student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1986).

My father was part of a generation of academics who were then on the cusp of retirement. No one I knew at the time seriously thought that those in charge of higher education would reduce the number of full-time faculty so drastically. My father and his colleagues (who were hardly naive) never fully realized the extent to which those in charge no longer cared about the traditional mission of higher education and thus had other ends in mind. After all, wishful thinking can take many forms. Therefore, we ought not to be too hard on Bowen and Sosa for writing such a ridiculous book. They were simply expressing the conventional wisdom of the time. Fortunately, we have Professor Bousquet's clear-eyed book to help us to understand our current predicament.

Alan Finder on the Decline of the Tenure Track

Alan Finder of The New York Times recently wrote an article about the decline of tenure track postions at American colleges and universities. This is hardly a new story, of course, since the decline has been going on for at least the past fifteen years. I guess that the point behind the article is that the situation has reached a new low point.

I have to admit that I found the article rather disappointing. Finder says nothing about the rampant growth of administration. Trust me, there's been no comparable decline in that particular type of university employment. This is why the typical administrative excuse of "tight budgets" always rings hollow. I knew academics who permanently gave up teaching to became administrators in order to have a decent job. But I never knew anyone who left the ranks of adminstration to become a professor in order to secure a better position.

Reflections on the Past Year - #3

I've gotten into the habit of posting an autobiographical entry to mark the anniversary of my return to Texas. This year is no exception.

For those of you who don't already know, I flew back to Texas on June 21, 2003. If you aren't familiar with the story, then you can look at my academic autobiography. It will explain why I left Philadelphia after seventeen years and returned to Denton. My earlier autobiographical posts tell the story as well.

The previous two anniversary posts concentrated on my academic writing and my efforts to get settled back in Texas. The latter mostly consisted of my dealing with the house that I inherited from my parents. Fortunately, the work on the house was completed well over a year ago. Consequently, this time around I won't need to write about the many renovations that took up so much of my time in the past.

Towards the end of 2005 the Fichte chapter that I described in last year's post, i.e., the introductory piece on Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, appeared in volume 3 of Central Works of Philosophy. The series is edited by John Shand and published by Acumen Publishing.

I have to confess that I caused to the volume to appear later than the publisher had planned. Because I was so overwhelmed by work and the house, and because I had hurt a tendon in my right hand in the summer of 2004, I fell behind on my chapter. Both editor and publisher were patient, and so by early 2005 I had managed to complete my contribution. It turned out fairly well, I think. It's a good place to begin to understand Fichte's philosophy, if I do say so myself.

Another overdue project appeared in 2005. Many years ago Paul Guyer, Fred Rauscher, and I began work on what would eventually be published as volume 13 of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation. This time, though, I was way ahead of everyone else! My collaborators were the ones who had to catch up, because I had finished my translations in 1999.

Things were in a bit of a lull in the summer of 2005. The Fichte chapter was done, and I decided to take some time off to work in the yard. (Oh, how I miss Philadelphia! Everything green belongs to the city!) I also decided to delay resuming work on the translations that I've been preparing for a volume on Fichte and the atheism dispute that Yolanda Estes and I started years ago. It seemed to me that I should instead begin to make good on some plans that had been on hold for a while.

If you look at my CV, you'll see that the philosophy of art is one of my academic interests. For several years I'd been thinking about taking music lessons. There are any number of ways in which a technical knowledge of music could fit into my future writing and translation projects. For example, I might begin to write about Theodor Adorno's views on music. The thought is hardly far-fetched. As I write this post, I'm in the middle of writing a proposal for a book on Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book that Adorno co-wrote with Max Horkheimer in the early 1940s. In the future I could easily branch out into Adorno's aesthetics of music. I've also given some thought to re-translating some of Richard Wagner's prose writings. Doing so would require some technical knowledge of music.

Besides any possible academic use that I might have for a technical knowledge of music, I thought that I should just do something entirely new to me. My current situation as an independent scholar — once again, see my academic autobiography and my autobiographical posts for the full story — gives me the opportunity to do things that I've never done before. So I started taking piano lessons at the end of August 2005. I'm no musical genius, but I've been making progress.

That same August I started going to a gun range in Dallas to do some shooting. I've always been interested in military history, but I've never really known much about guns. I inherited several from my father when he died in 2002. I kept them, of course, although I didn't know much about how to use them. When I moved back to Texas in 2003, I started to do some on-line research to determine whether any of them were of any value. I figured that they wouldn't be worth much, and my research confirmed my suspicions.

As I looked into the matter, however, I thought that I should learn about them. A little carnage to go with my culture, you might say. It would be something else entirely new to me. So I signed up for a class, learned the basics, and started going to the range once or twice a month. I'll have more to say about this in future posts.

Towards the end of 2005 I resumed work on the Fichte translations. They're my main academic project for the next year or so. I hope to have my portion completed by this time next year, but, unfortunately, it will probably take longer than that.

In late 2005 horror film maven Steven Schneider contacted me again, this time about contributing an entry or two to a European horror film guide that he is editing for the British Film Institue. I chose to write an entry on Häxan, a thoroughly odd, but fascinating, Danish silent film from 1922. I wrote a 500-word entry by the end of March 2006. The book hasn't appeared yet. More on it when it appears.

A few weeks ago I noticed that Thoemmes Continuum had published a paperback edition of my three-volume Winckelmann set, which originally appeared in hardback in 2001. I say "noticed" because no one at the press had contacted me. I stumbled across the new edition while I was looking up some information on-line. Not being notified was a bit annoying, as you can easily imagine, but I'm glad that the set is available in paperback. I corresponded with the press, and I was quickly sent my complimentary copies of the paperback edition.

As I mentioned above, I'm working on a proposal for a commentary on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. I've been at it for a while, but only now have I really been able to do the serious writing. I'll soon have a draft, which I'll send to an editor who has expressed an interest in the project. If I get a contract after the usual review process, then I'll have two book projects, this one and the Fichte translations, to keep me busy.

So I seem to have come to terms with being an independent scholar who is no longer pursuing a career as a professor. At least for now I'm content to remain in Texas. I don't really see any compelling reason to attempt to return to academia. Besides, that whole guns thing would probably cause me problems at some schools, I reckon.

"How long should I search for an academic position?"

In an earlier post — "Should I go to graduate school?" — I related some of my experiences as both a graduate student and an adjunct professor to the issue of going to graduate school. At the end of that post I said that in looking back on it all I could think of only one major mistake that I had made during the decade when I searched in vain for a full-time, tenure-track position: I should have imposed a time-limit on myself and then left academia for some other type of career. But, instead, I hung on for ten years and then left academia to become an independent scholar a year after my parents died.

One of my former Haverford students wrote to me after he read that post, asking what might be a reasonable time period for searching for a job before deciding to move on to something else. Everyone's answer to that question is, of course, subject to innumerable qualifications. Consequently, if you're looking for a position, or intend at some point in the future to do so, your particular circumstances will play the most important role in how long you decide to conduct your search. But nonetheless I believe that something worthwhile can be said about this issue.

My own experiences should once again prove instructive. If you look at my academic autobiography, you'll see that I express some amazement that as time passed and I improved as a scholar and a teacher, it became no more likely that I would find a job. In fact, it became harder. Additional qualifications, i.e., teaching experience and publications, didn't help at all.

I started looking for a position in the fall of 1992. I was expecting to finish my degree in the spring of 1993, and so I had to think about finding a job for the fall of 1993 when I would no longer be a student. Since this is what most people do, it means that most people first go on the market without having finished their dissertation. I was no different in this respect.

I sent out my applications and was interviewed by four schools at the December meeting of eastern division of the American Philosophical Association. (My academic autobiography explains the application and interview process.) Two of the four schools brought me to campus in early 1993, but as you already know, I didn't receive any job offers. I then finished my dissertation and graduated in May 1993. Then began my years as an adjunct.

Well, I couldn't have known it at the time, but my first year on the market — when, remember, I hadn't yet received my degree, had only a small amount of teaching experience, and hadn't yet published anything — was the best one I was to have in a decade of searching. Never again did half of my APA convention interviews result in on-campus interviews. I've talked with other people about this, and many of them have told me that they too experienced the same thing. Most of them, fortunately, went on to find a job. The point, though, is that their first year was the one in which they caught the serious attention of the largest number of schools.

In short, if you don't get a job your first time on the market, your chances for getting one begin immediately to decrease. Schools begin to assume that something is wrong with you, that you aren't serious about academia, and so forth. Whatever the reasons may be, it just seems to be a fact that your prospects diminish dramatically if you don't have a position by the time that you receive your Ph.D. They don't disappear completely, they just decrease.

This is why I now think that I should have given up my job search after three years. I managed in early 1995 to get an on-campus interview for a tenure-track position. I didn't make another on-campus visit for a tenure-track job until the spring of 1999. By that time I had a more diverse teaching and publication record than many of the people who were interviewing me, and I was obviously going to do even more in the future. I can't imagine that those accomplishments made for better prospects of success. I had stayed too long, and so my efforts weren't going to be rewarded.

"Should I go to graduate school?"

In 1999 I created a set of pages on my homepage that dealt with the sad state of affairs in academia. The pages — collectively entitled "Biting the Hand that (Barely) Feeds Me" — were meant to do several things at once. They offered advice to my students, attempted to inform people about what was happening in academia, vented some of my frustrations, and the like. I maintained the pages for two years and then removed them from my website. I didn't have the time to keep them current, and so I took them down.

After a few years passed, I restored my academic autobiography to my site. I had originally intended that page as nothing more than an introduction to the other "biting" pages. I figured that there ought to be some way for readers to orient themselves to my situation before they proceeded to read my advice and mull over my somewhat jaundiced observations. Much to my surprise, my autobiography turned out to be the most popular of my pages. I received a lot of email about it. Therefore, I eventually decided that I should put the page online again and update it on a regular basis. I've been gratified by the positive feedback that the page still generates.

But I never did anything with the other "biting" pages until today. There didn't seem to be any pressing reason to put them online again. I've changed my mind, and here's why I've once again made available the page containing my advice about going to graduate school.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with an intelligent young woman who had contacted me through my blog. She told me that she had been thinking about going to graduate school, but also that she hadn't been able to get very helpful advice from her professors. I met her at a coffee shop and told her what I could about going to graduate school. When I mentioned that I had once had a page on my website dedicated to this question, she said that she would like to see it, and that she had friends who would also like to see it.

Well, I'm happy to help when I can. I've posted the original page and appended a brief update. Although I last updated the old page in March 2001, I don't see any reason to make any major changes to it. I still believe what I believed five years ago. Nothing has changed in academia to make me change my mind. Things are as bad as they've ever been.

In the update you'll read a few bits of advice that you won't find in the original page. When you read the original page, please keep in mind that it was first composed in 1999 and last updated in 2001. I was still in academia at that time, dividing my teaching between the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College. The update reflects my current opinions, and so to a certain extent they are the product of the past two and a half years, during which time I've been an independent scholar without any academic affiliation.

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The Original Page — From 1999/2001

"Should I go to graduate school?"

Students who are thinking about pursuing an academic career ask me this question all the time. This is hardly surprising: I attended graduate school, received my Ph.D., and began an academic career, all within recent memory. As a result, I should know something about what it's like to attend graduate school nowadays. From my point of view, it's fairly easy to decide who is or isn't cut out for graduate school. Success in a graduate program is as much a matter of character as intelligence, and it's generally not too hard to see who possesses both qualities. Such judgments aren't infallible, of course, but they're more or less dependable.

But this really isn't the sense in which the question is intended. Most students are confident of their abilities (some, alas, are too confident), and thus they don't need me to reassure them. Instead, what they want to know is what they can expect once they've finished graduate school and have begun looking for an academic job. Most people who decide to get a Ph.D. initially do so with an eye towards an academic career, and so they naturally want to know what the job situation is. Unfortunately, the current situation is a such a disaster that it beggars belief.

Believe it or not, roughly half of all professors in this country are now employed on a part-time basis. An academic employed in this fashion is typically known as an adjunct professor or, more simply, an adjunct. I can't cite any statistical surveys to prove that the percentage of adjuncts is so high (although such data no doubt exist somewhere), but a figure of fifty per cent squares with what I have observed on my own and with what I have read in newspapers and magazines. Most people outside of academia have no idea that the percentage is so high. This is truly odd. Universities, of course, have good reasons for failing to publicize such figures, but one would think that the mass media would pick up the story and aggressively report it. Imagine how the media would howl if they learned that half of all doctors and lawyers were employed on a part-time basis.

For example, I taught part-time at La Salle University, a Catholic school in north Philadelphia, for two and a half years, and during the Fall 1995 semester, which was the last time I taught there, the adjunct faculty in the philosophy department outnumbered the full-time faculty. (If I remember correctly, at that time there were eight part-time members and seven full-time ones.) My colleagues across the country tell me similar stories. At some schools the percentage of adjuncts actually exceeds fifty per cent.

This is a scandal. Given how much students pay to go to a college or university, they deserve to be taught by full-time faculty receiving the salary, benefits, and institutional support that make it possible for them to do their jobs properly. Increasingly, however, this isn't happening, and so students are being cheated.

But universities aren't letting on that this is the case. Can you imagine what the recruitment brochures would look like? If they were honest, they would sound something like this:

Here you'll be taught by some of the finest professors in the country, although it was decided that it would be more economically efficient to exploit half of them as cheap labor. But don't worry! Academia is a genteel profession in which everyone works for a higher good, so trivial things such as money and hope for the future don't matter, especially to those who actually do the teaching and research that together constitute the primary mission of the university.

My point, overwrought as it is, is clear, I hope. Parents would not be happy. Students would not be happy. Alumni would not be happy. The happiness of a large portion of the faculty apparently doesn't matter. So the scandal is simply not mentioned. Decorum demands as much.

Since the use of part-time faculty is widespread (and maybe even accelerating), the odds are good that upon leaving graduate school freshly minted professors will be employed as part-time labor, perhaps after accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in debt. As adjuncts, they will probably have to teach too many classes at two or more schools, and they'll almost certainly receive no benefits, little or no computer support, and no research assistance whatsoever. If they have absolutely no luck at all, they might not even get an office in which to hold office hours. Furthermore, they'll have to go on the job market every year, which itself costs a lot of money, and compete with hundreds of other people in the same degrading circumstances.

I can attest to all of this from personal experience. I have been looking for a full-time job since the end of 1992. Since then I have sent out approximately five hundred and fifty applications, had twenty-two interviews, and made seven on-campus visits — all without ever receiving a single job offer of any sort. I'm not an idiot; in fact, I'm very good at what I do. I don't think that it's immodest of me to say so. Yet I can't find a job. It's very frustrating.

The Penn philosophy department does for me what it can with its limited budget: I make a decent amount of money; I have a nice office; and I have gotten some money to help pay my way to three conferences. But I receive no benefits and no computer support outside of the usual e-mail account. The computer equipment in my office belongs to me. I bought it all with my own money. Despite the terms of my employment, I very much enjoy teaching here, but I have no future at this institution. That's why I have to go on the job market every year. (I've also been teaching at Bryn Mawr College recently to earn more money. By the way, Bryn Mawr supplies me with a computer.)

If you're thinking about going to graduate school, it's naive to think that this can't happen to you. (If you've already gone and find yourself in my situation, then you have my sympathy.) Because this can happen to anyone (although I admit that my case is something of an exceptional one because of the length of time that it has lasted), this fact should give pause to anyone considering graduate school. Why spend five to ten years in a graduate program just to wind up badly employed at the end of it all, especially when there were always other alternatives?

There is at least one compelling reason to go to graduate school: simply put, it can be a wonderful experience. I'm not given to excessive rhetorical displays, but I will say that I genuinely enjoyed graduate school, and that my life would have been impoverished without it. I would look back with regret if I had not studied philosophy. There are a few things that I regret having done, but getting a Ph.D. in philosophy isn't one of them.

So if you find that you cannot imagine your life without having graduate school figure in it in some significant way, even if you don't want a career in academia, then I think that you should go to graduate school. While this isn't the only good reason for pursuing a Ph.D., it seems to me to be the most compelling one. But if you do go, make sure that you do so with both eyes open. Otherwise, you might regret it.

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Update — February 17, 2006

Here are some additional thoughts.

If you decide to go to graduate school, I strongly advise you not to enter a program that doesn't offer you financial support from the very beginning. Some programs admit students without offering them either a tuition waiver or a stipend. In such cases they usually say that it's always possible in a year or two to get such support, but even then it isn't guaranteed.

Face the following fact: some of the newly admitted students are being offered such support. So if it isn't being offered to you from the beginning, it's almost certainly because the department doesn't think that you're as good as the others who have been admitted with financial support. Why go into such a situation voluntarily?

My advice is to keep applying until a department agrees to fund you from the very beginning of your time in graduate school. Don't think that you have to enroll in a program just because you happen to have been accepted. If you don't have funding from the beginning, you'll have to borrow a lot of money (unless, of course, you or your parents are wealthy enough to pick up the tab). That's not a good idea, as far as I'm concerned.

So if you apply one year and don't get any offers of support, apply again next year. Wait until you get an offer that makes it worth your while to go to graduate school. Graduate school is stressful enough as it is. Having to worry about your financial situation will only make things worse.

If you go to graduate school with the intention of becoming a professor afterwards, you have to keep in mind the possibility that you will fail to find a long-term position. This is what happened to me, as my academic autobiography attests. I still have no regrets about having gone to graduate school. As I reflect on what happened to me, I can really only think of one significant mistake that I made. When I first ran into trouble finding a job, I should have set a time limit for my job search. I should have said to myself that after some number of years, I would just pack it in and turn to some other career. Instead, I stayed in the profession — rather tenuously, of course — for ten years. Well, that was too long. I should have left it earlier than I did.

When I finally left academia, I did so when I could become an independent scholar who had no need of either part-time or full-time employment. As my academic autobiography and my autobiographical blog posts point out, the untimely death of my parents left me in good financial shape.

It's unlikely that many people contemplating the prospect of going to graduate school will ever wind up in my current situation. So it's hardly something that can figure into your plans. That being the case, I recommend a self-imposed time limit for searching for a job. If you don't find one after a certain number of years, then move on to something else. Academia has its charms, but it's a deeply troubled profession, and nothing is happening right now that will greatly improve it. Not being a part of it isn't the end of the world.

More: Go to this post for what I have to say about imposing a time limit on your job search.

Reflections on the Past Year - #2

Today is the second anniversary of my return to Texas. A year ago I posted an entry — "Reflections on the Past Year - #1" — that told the story of my first year back in my hometown of Denton. I thought that I would make such a post an annual event, and so here you have the second entry — "Reflections on the Past Year - #2".

As is the case with my online autobiographical writings, I'll mostly stick to topics that relate to my academic work in some fashion or other. My personal life typically enters into the story only insofar as it somehow impinges on my scholarly efforts. It's not that I'm shy about writing about my personal life, but I figure that the other people who would necessarily have to be mentioned might not want to turn up in the bits of autobiography that I post every once in a while. Hence my decision not to say very much about my personal life.

Last year's post mentioned that in the the previous year I had resolved to remain an independent scholar, and thus not to make any attempt to return to academia. The same is true of the past year. As I continued to settle into life as an independent scholar, I felt less and less of a desire to go back into the classroom. Ideally, I would like to return to teaching, but I don't see how I could possibly do so on terms that I would deem favorable. Consequently, I haven't set foot in the classroom since I finished teaching at Haverford College in the spring of 2003. I'm reconciled to the likelihood that I'll never teach again.

The work on my house has continued off and on during the past year, but on a much reduced scale. There wasn't much left to do once the extensive renovations of mid-2003 and early 2004 were completed. But in September 2004 the central air system was replaced with more efficient modern equipment. I immediately noticed a drop in my electricity bill, which was nice, especially given that I have to endure the Texas summer. That was easier for me to do twenty years ago, I might add.

I bought a new sofa and made arrangements for re-upholstering three chairs and a couch. (That takes more time than the previous sentence lets on. Picking out fabric is almost as agonizing as choosing paint colors or wallpaper patterns.) Everything was delivered by the beginning of November 2004. Decorating the walls became the next priority. I put up a lot of pictures, bought a tapestry for the den, and did the many other things that accompany re-decorating an entire house. Fortunately, none of these tasks was especially time-consuming, and so my scholarly work wasn't disturbed very much. Recently, I've been restoring some old pieces of furniture. It's time-consuming, but the results are worthwhile.

During the summer of 2004 I began writing a chapter on Fichte's Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. (My Fichte entry for The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy will bring you up to speed on this particular book by Fichte.) I had to compress a complex and obscure work into a chapter of only 10,000 words. The writing went very slowly, partly because it's the nature of such a task to move at a glacial pace, partly because I injured a tendon in my right hand, probably from working in the yard. The injury made it difficult for me to sit in front of the computer and type for any length of time. Even today, as I write this post, my hand still bothers me. It's gotten much better, of course, but I'm surprised that a tendon takes so long to heal.

I finished the draft of the chapter by the middle of December 2004. It was sent out to readers for comments, and I also asked several friends to read it as well. I gathered up all of the comments and made the appropriate revisions by the end of March 2005. The chapter is now in production at the press, and it will soon appear in volume three of Central Works of Philosophy, edited by John Shand for Acumen Publishing.

While I was grappling with the Fichte chapter, Paul Guyer, Fred Rauscher and I finally completed our volume of the Cambridge Kant Edition. Ten years ago we began to translate a selection of Kant's posthumously published notes and fragments, which is why our book is entitled Notes and Fragments. I had translated my assigned portion of the material by the middle of 1999, but the project stalled for several years. Eventually, however, the translations were completed, and by the fall of 2004 the volume was in page proofs. We read the proofs, sent the corrections to the press, and the book was published about two months ago. It was quite a relief to bring that project to an end.

In early 2005 I spent a lot of time re-organizing my library. What I want to study and write about in the next few years has become clearer to me, and so I had to acquire quite a few books, which demanded in turn that I sell some of the old ones in order to make room on my shelves. Anyone interested in academic books can tell you that they're best acquired deliberately and slowly. There are so many secondary works that look good at first glance but turn out not to be especially helpful that one has to be cautious when shopping for them. Consequently, I did a lot of research into what I really needed to own before I ordered anything.

I'm already under contract (in collaboration with Yolanda Estes) for a volume of translations and commentary relating to Fichte and the atheism dispute of 1798-1800. My library was already adequate for that project. But since I've definitely decided to write a book on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, I had to make the appropriate adjustments to my books. If you look at my academic autobiography, you'll see the ups and downs of this project, which has been on my mind for quite a while. Fortunately, I'm now in a position to devote myself to writing that book. I'm currently working on the proposal to send to an editor who has expressed an interest in the project.

I'm also toying with the idea of writing a book on horror film, but it will be a while before I have a more concrete plan. The theme of the book will certainly be that of an essay that I published about two years ago, an essay in which I discussed what I call the Heideggerian uncanny. (My essay is in a book entitled Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror.) For the moment, though, I'm simply watching horror films in an effort to choose the right ones to discuss in the book that I hope to write. At least that's what I tell myself while I'm watching movies instead of working on philosophy. It's good to be able to rationalize one's less than exalted inclinations, isn't it?

I'll close this post on a more personal note. I've been back in Texas for two years, but not, as many readers already know, because it was where I most wanted to live. After my parents died — the necessary details can be found in my academic autobiography — I didn't really have much choice but to leave Philadelphia and return to my hometown. Nonetheless, I've often thought that I made a mistake by coming back. For many months I wasn't sure that I could stay here and do the work that I would like to do. But I've learned that I can in fact stay here and work as an independent scholar. After all, I've managed to complete or begin several projects. Consequently, as long as I stick to my resolution not to return to academia, I suspect that I'll remain in Texas.

Jonathan Chait on Why Most Academics Aren't Republicans

Not only does Jonathan Chait understand economics and fiscal policy, he even understands academia, as his latest column shows. Many in the media, conservative or not, never demonstrate much of a grasp of what really goes on in academia. Therefore, it's refreshing to read the following from Chait:

A few weeks ago, a pair of studies found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias.

Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?

No, Mr. Chait, you aren't the only one who wonders about this! I've long been of the same opinion.

In fact, it's one motive behind the unwavering conservative hostility to academia. There are lots of foolish views in academia, especially, alas, in the humanities, and thus some of what comes out of it isn't really worthy of serious attention. But Republicans want to eliminate every source of opposition to their views. Because academia hasn't surrendered to them, they constantly criticize it, often unfairly.

All too often conservatives simply dismiss views that disagree with theirs. I've blogged about this in my posts on The New Criterion. And, just to mention the obvious, the Bush administration is hardly an advertisement for intellectual openness and curiosity. None of this endears Republicans to academics.

But, of course, continues Chait, that's not how conservatives see it:

Conservatives have a ready answer. The only reason faculties lean so far to the left is that deans, administrators and entire university cultures systematically discriminate against conservatives.

They don't, however, have much evidence to back this up. Mostly, they assume that the leftward tilt is prima facie evidence of anti-conservative discrimination. (Yet, when liberals hold up minority underrepresentation at some institutions as proof of discrimination, conservatives are justifiably skeptical.)

A very good point, Mr. Chait. Consequently, in accordance with their own skeptical standards, conservatives have to come up with a more convincing explanation of the dearth of academic conservatives.

As for the leftist trends in the humanities — many of which I deplore, I should mention in passing — Chait points out that there's more at work in all of this than academic trendiness:

. . . the rise of fashionable left-wing scholarship can be blamed for only a tiny part of the GOP's problem. The studies showing that academics prefer Democrats to Republicans also show that this preference holds in hard sciences as well as social sciences. Are we to believe that higher education has fallen prey to trendy multiculturalist engineering, or that physics departments everywhere suppress conservative quantum theorists?

The main causes of the partisan disparity on campus have little to do with anything so nefarious as discrimination. First, Republicans don't particularly want to be professors. To go into academia — a highly competitive field that does not offer great riches — you have to believe that living the life of the mind is more valuable than making a Wall Street salary. On most issues that offer a choice between having more money in your pocket and having something else — a cleaner environment, universal health insurance, etc. — conservatives tend to prefer the money and liberals tend to prefer the something else. It's not so surprising that the same thinking would extend to career choices.

Second, professors don't particularly want to be Republicans. In recent years, and especially under George W. Bush, Republicans have cultivated anti-intellectualism. Remember how Bush in 2000 ridiculed Al Gore for using all them big numbers?

That's not just a campaign ploy. It's how Republicans govern these days. Last summer, my colleague Frank Foer wrote a cover story in the New Republic detailing the way the Bush administration had disdained the advice of experts. And not liberal experts, either. These were Republican-appointed wonks whose know-how on topics such as global warming, the national debt and occupying Iraq were systematically ignored. Bush prefers to follow his gut.

In the world of academia, that's about the nastiest thing you can say about somebody. Bush's supporters consider it a compliment. "Republicans, from Reagan to Bush, admire leaders who are straight-talking men of faith. The Republican leader doesn't have to be book smart," wrote conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks a week before the election. "Democrats, on the other hand, are more apt to emphasize . . . being knowledgeable and thoughtful. They value leaders who see complexities, who possess the virtues of the well-educated."

Is anyone really surprised that the majority of academics long ago turned against a party that adopted divisive cultural warfare as the cornerstone of its election strategy? A political party that is proudly hostile to intelligence — and unwilling to be held accountable for the consequences of this attitude — won't draw the support of many people who have devoted their lives to trying to think things through in a serious and sustained way.

No Right to Unionize

Well, I can't say that this bit of news comes as a shock, given that Republicans are now in control:

The fast-growing movement to unionize graduate students at the nation's private universities suffered a crushing setback yesterday when the National Labor Relations Board reversed itself and ruled that students who worked as research and teaching assistants did not have the right to unionize.

In a case involving Brown University, the labor board ruled 3 to 2 that graduate teaching and research assistants were essentially students, not workers, and thus should not have the right to unionize to negotiate over wages, benefits and other conditions of employment.

The Republican-controlled board reversed a four-year-old decision involving New York University, a private institution, in which the board, then controlled by Democrats, concluded that graduate teaching and research assistants should be able to unionize because their increased responsibilities had essentially turned them into workers.

It's when I read such things that I wonder about most people's commitment to democracy. The right to organize for the purposes of collective bargaining shouldn't turn on technicalities. It should turn primarily on the free will of those who decide that they would like to bargain collectively with their employers.

When I worked as a teaching assistant or an instructor while I was a graduate student, I routinely spent more time on class preparation, grading, and office hours than I spent on my own research and writing. I had to buy my own health insurance. The most I ever earned while I was in graduate school was $10,000, and that was in my final year — which was the 1992-1993 academic year — when I had a dissertation fellowship that required no teaching on my part.