Thank you for reading that mess, and thank you for this response. What you've written makes perfect sense.
Congratulations on escaping academia!
I think that's the appropriate response. If not, my apologies.
No but really, I have friends on Facebook who quit academia, and it's as if they've found religion or something. They're all like, I NEVER KNEW I COULD BE SO HAPPY, and their intense euphoria almost makes me feel that it's worth getting into academia just to be able to leave. Again, my apologies if I'm totally off the mark here.
I'd be interested to hear more about "a MASSIVE shift in values, expectations, attitudes, and assumptions moving through the undergrads." My own (admittedly limited) impression of people in that age cohort is that they've become more politically polarized, although I suppose one could say the same of the broader population in general. I also hear my adjunct and assistant professor friends complaining about undergraduate "entitlement." Part of me wonders if we're just getting old, but I also remember belonging to a student culture in which instructors were legitimately feared, even if they were adjuncts or grad students (not that we had any idea what that meant).
I also wanted to say...
Best of all: you can officially study the activities of the digital riff raff and write peer reviewed academic papers about them BUT GOD FORBID YOU ACTUALLY ARE ONE OF THEM.
...I get the feeling that, like all things, this is more than a little gendered. People writing about male-dominated online spaces (such as 4chan and competitive gaming) seem to be respected and given lucrative publishing contracts, while "acafans" writing about female-dominated online spaces (primarily fanfiction) are marginalized and have to publish in essay collections put out by second- and third-tier academic presses.
I could be wrong, and in fact I hope I am wrong, but from what I've seen of it academia seems ridiculously sexist.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2016-01-21 12:50 am (UTC)Congratulations on escaping academia!
I think that's the appropriate response. If not, my apologies.
No but really, I have friends on Facebook who quit academia, and it's as if they've found religion or something. They're all like, I NEVER KNEW I COULD BE SO HAPPY, and their intense euphoria almost makes me feel that it's worth getting into academia just to be able to leave. Again, my apologies if I'm totally off the mark here.
I'd be interested to hear more about "a MASSIVE shift in values, expectations, attitudes, and assumptions moving through the undergrads." My own (admittedly limited) impression of people in that age cohort is that they've become more politically polarized, although I suppose one could say the same of the broader population in general. I also hear my adjunct and assistant professor friends complaining about undergraduate "entitlement." Part of me wonders if we're just getting old, but I also remember belonging to a student culture in which instructors were legitimately feared, even if they were adjuncts or grad students (not that we had any idea what that meant).
I also wanted to say...
Best of all: you can officially study the activities of the digital riff raff and write peer reviewed academic papers about them BUT GOD FORBID YOU ACTUALLY ARE ONE OF THEM.
...I get the feeling that, like all things, this is more than a little gendered. People writing about male-dominated online spaces (such as 4chan and competitive gaming) seem to be respected and given lucrative publishing contracts, while "acafans" writing about female-dominated online spaces (primarily fanfiction) are marginalized and have to publish in essay collections put out by second- and third-tier academic presses.
I could be wrong, and in fact I hope I am wrong, but from what I've seen of it academia seems ridiculously sexist.
Edited because I don't know how to English.