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Yet Another Way Academia Is Like A Cult
Jan. 4th, 2020 02:22 pmI’m currently in a Modern Languages and Literature department, and it’s a mess.
It’s huge, for one thing, and it’s also critically unbalanced, with twelve tenure-track (salaried) people overseeing more than twenty term faculty (who have yearly contracts) and dozens of adjunct instructors (who are paid by the course). (By way of reference, a good departmental balance would be fifteen to twenty tenure-track faculty, five to ten term faculty, and maybe a small handful of adjunct instructors, who would preferably be graduate students in the department.) My department is also super Eurocentric, which is difficult for those of us working outside of European languages and cultures. I don’t want to get into the specifics of this, so let it suffice to say that it’s ridiculous and absurd to apply European standards to non-European contexts and expect everything to run smoothly.
The reason I wanted to be in a Modern Languages department, however, was to get away from the weird conservative bullshit of Asian Studies.
( Read more... )
So on one hand, it’s difficult to be someone who specializes in non-European cultures in a department with a strong focus on Europe. On the other hand, the entire discipline of Asian Studies is still stuck in a bygone decade where the most relevant professional training for teaching “contemporary literature, media, gender, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies” is the ability to read eleventh-century poetry.
It’s huge, for one thing, and it’s also critically unbalanced, with twelve tenure-track (salaried) people overseeing more than twenty term faculty (who have yearly contracts) and dozens of adjunct instructors (who are paid by the course). (By way of reference, a good departmental balance would be fifteen to twenty tenure-track faculty, five to ten term faculty, and maybe a small handful of adjunct instructors, who would preferably be graduate students in the department.) My department is also super Eurocentric, which is difficult for those of us working outside of European languages and cultures. I don’t want to get into the specifics of this, so let it suffice to say that it’s ridiculous and absurd to apply European standards to non-European contexts and expect everything to run smoothly.
The reason I wanted to be in a Modern Languages department, however, was to get away from the weird conservative bullshit of Asian Studies.
( Read more... )
So on one hand, it’s difficult to be someone who specializes in non-European cultures in a department with a strong focus on Europe. On the other hand, the entire discipline of Asian Studies is still stuck in a bygone decade where the most relevant professional training for teaching “contemporary literature, media, gender, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies” is the ability to read eleventh-century poetry.
