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Yet Another Way Academia Is Like A Cult
I’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.
I’ve been doing a fair number of interviews for academic positions during the past few months, and OH MAN has this ever reminded me of how strange and dysfunctional Asian Studies is.
To give an example, I just had a Skype interview with an East Asian Studies department at a private university that’s looking for a person who does “contemporary literature, media, gender, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies.” Basically, they’re looking for precisely and specifically me; it’s as if they copied the first paragraph from my professional webpage and posted it into the job announcement. Just to emphasize the point, they’re looking for someone who does contemporary literature and media.
So of course the majority of the twenty-minute interview was about establishing my credentials in premodern literature. Can I read premodern texts? Do I have experience translating premodern texts? Who did I study premodern texts with? Do I use premodern texts in my research? Do I have experience teaching premodern texts? Could I teach a graduate-level seminar in reading premodern languages? What textbooks would I use?
I can handle myself in an interview, of course, but I had totally forgotten that the culture of Asian Studies is like this. Basically, the committee wanted me to prove that I’ve had the sort of formal graduate training emphasized by conservative departments like the ones at Columbia and Yale. My educational credentials are impeccable, and I do in fact have the skills and experience they were asking about, but this conversation was bizarre.
If I were on this search committee (and I have actually been on several academic search committees), I would see myself as someone with good credentials, a solid track record, and a decent amount of experience who’s serious about the position and applying to it for all the right reasons. In the case of this particular school, I also happen to be geographically proximate – I’m literally right down the street – so it wouldn’t cost them anything to bring me in for a campus interview or relocate me. And I could hit the ground running, which is important for a department that needs to replace someone, as they are.
Nevertheless, I’m probably not going to get a campus interview because I don’t have enough professional experience in premodern literature to qualify for a position in contemporary media.
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.
I’ve been doing a fair number of interviews for academic positions during the past few months, and OH MAN has this ever reminded me of how strange and dysfunctional Asian Studies is.
To give an example, I just had a Skype interview with an East Asian Studies department at a private university that’s looking for a person who does “contemporary literature, media, gender, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies.” Basically, they’re looking for precisely and specifically me; it’s as if they copied the first paragraph from my professional webpage and posted it into the job announcement. Just to emphasize the point, they’re looking for someone who does contemporary literature and media.
So of course the majority of the twenty-minute interview was about establishing my credentials in premodern literature. Can I read premodern texts? Do I have experience translating premodern texts? Who did I study premodern texts with? Do I use premodern texts in my research? Do I have experience teaching premodern texts? Could I teach a graduate-level seminar in reading premodern languages? What textbooks would I use?
I can handle myself in an interview, of course, but I had totally forgotten that the culture of Asian Studies is like this. Basically, the committee wanted me to prove that I’ve had the sort of formal graduate training emphasized by conservative departments like the ones at Columbia and Yale. My educational credentials are impeccable, and I do in fact have the skills and experience they were asking about, but this conversation was bizarre.
If I were on this search committee (and I have actually been on several academic search committees), I would see myself as someone with good credentials, a solid track record, and a decent amount of experience who’s serious about the position and applying to it for all the right reasons. In the case of this particular school, I also happen to be geographically proximate – I’m literally right down the street – so it wouldn’t cost them anything to bring me in for a campus interview or relocate me. And I could hit the ground running, which is important for a department that needs to replace someone, as they are.
Nevertheless, I’m probably not going to get a campus interview because I don’t have enough professional experience in premodern literature to qualify for a position in contemporary media.
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.
no subject
I shouldn't be surprised, but I am stunned, because that's like asking someone whom you want to teach modern sci-fi (Jemisin, Scalzi, Kowal, Gladstone, Chambers, Hurley) what their credentials are for Beowulf, Chaucer, and Spenser.
WHAT THE FUCK.
no subject
It’s like you’re bringing in someone to teach contemporary North American fiction, and then you start asking them about their Latin.
The academic job market is absurd. There are a bunch of people in their sixties and seventies who refuse to retire; and, if they have to hire a new person (which everyone resents on principle, mainly because a job search takes about seven months of work) they want to make sure that the new person is basically a carbon copy of themselves.
I’ve been on a few academic search committees, and I can say from experience that this involves exactly as much racism, sexism, homophobia, ethnocentrisim, ableism, and… ageism? as you’d expect. It’s a mess, and there’s really nothing that junior faculty can do about it.
It’s heartbreaking to try to explain this to grad students on the job market who have just sunk seven to ten years of their life into getting a PhD. It’s like, Yes you are in fact perfect for the position, but you didn’t get a campus interview because the chair of the committee wasn’t friends with your advisor thirty years ago at Princeton, sorry.
The old people are eventually going to have to retire whether they want to or not; but, since they only hire and give tenure to people who have the same mindset as themselves, I don’t foresee this situation changing anytime soon.
I feel like there may have been a brief and shining moment during the hiring boom of the early 2000s when higher education in the United States had the potential to change, but the tenure system doesn’t acknowledge or reward diversity. Instead, the market crash of 2008 resulted in an embrace of neoliberal “productivity” and “accountability” enabled by a transient and disempowered labor force, so even elite institutions with substantial resources have become more conservative during the past fifteen years.
Sorry to unload on you here, I just... yeah.
no subject
I do have a question. How does professor emeritus fit into this scheme? Like, does that free up an actual tenured position for someone?
no subject
It took me some time, but I looked into this! It depends on the university and the person in question; but, to make a generalization, emeritus professors are treated like adjuncts, meaning that they teach classes on a per-course salary. Because they're a source of cheap part-time labor, their existence is often used by universities to justify not creating a tenure line to hire a new person to fill the position they've ostensibly left.
The history behind this is that, during the postwar education boom of the 1970s, there were relatively few grad students and professors on the market, so the prospect of tenure (which wasn't an established system then) was used to entice people to jobs. This actually benefited universities in that the person would only be up for one or possibly two promotions, meaning that their salaries would be fixed even in the face of inflation.
I think there's a stereotype of a superstar emeritus professor whom the university wants to retain for their prestige, but a lot of people can't fully retire because of their economic precarity - and because they've devoted their entire life to the university (as per the demands of the tenure system) and don't have anything else.
It's awful and I hate it, and I'm glad I'm getting out while I'm still relatively young.
no subject
I'm glad you're getting out, though.