Lisez-le, it is a thoughtful post on Marc Bosquet and How the University Works. And the Bittersweet Girl reminds us not to mislead students on the cost of a graduate education. My addition to that is not to mislead them on the cost of an assistant professorship. Of these three posts, mine is the most sobering.
It is very important to come out of graduate school almost loan free because faculty subsidize their institutions and careers out of their own salaries. Books, conference travel, photocopies, paper, postage, and more, it all costs, and it adds up, and only the very best funded universities cover these costs. They are what make it difficult to also dress appropriately for work or take decent bottles of wine to dinner as you are now expected to do since you are faculty. And no, ACLS grants do not cover everything. Such entities do not fund expenses they feel the institution should cover as a matter of course.
Initially it seems that you will only run in the red this year. Your colleagues, of course, tell you that you are “investing,” and that the reward will be a substantial raise. Even with that, however, it continues, and not because of your lack of fiscal control. The day I discovered how many people in my graduate program had trust funds – and I mean large, permanent ones – was a true eye opener.
You may be in a richer state than I am, and stay in one. But the economy is weakening permanently, and major funding will not be dedicated to higher education. In graduate school you should not be contracting debt. You should be saving for that first MLA, for those first moving expenses, and for further subsidies of your assistant professorship including protection of your mental health by weekend travel to towns with sidewalks, galleries, movie theatres and bookstores. If you end up not needing the money, tant mieux – you’ll have a savings account, which is a form of freedom, because to have a cushion is to have options.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Nice links & commentary. I’ve avoided universities because I grew up hearing about how they really worked … (though I’m pretty sure even that 1970s reality wasn’t as harsh as today). But so many friends from grad school have learned this stuff the hard way. And some accepted it, but some of them would never have gotten involved if they’d known.
And look at that! I’m finally out of Akismet purgatory.
Right. And that’s why my daughter took her PhD to Microsoft and has lived happily ever after.
I mourn over her scholarship, though, which was first rate and I think essential.
But her high salary and benefits have meant she could have a home and family and finance them herself.
don’t forget that after seven years when your ramshackle furniture and accessories were par for the course, you will be entertaining yourself and may be expected to have the necessary accoutrements. Or money for protecting your mental health by paying for therapy (if you can find a good therapist. I know you have had bad experiences). A tip: never use a therapist available to you on campus, especially a small campus.
I declared bankruptcy after my Ph.D. This was before the law had changed and it was easier then, but it is the second best decision I ever made. I felt terrible about it (feelings of guilt that resulted from parental moralizing about paying off debt, etc.) until I learned what you mention here: how many assistant professors tenure track have other kinds of money behind them (wealthy parents, trust funds, etc.). That kind of thing allowed them to make the sort of investments that got them hired and kept them going, where as I used credit cards for it. It was my own fault, no one made me, but the whole thing is still sickmaking.
We don’t so much have those kinds of rituals of faculty parties here. Or we do — but it’s lower key.
I’m noticing in recent years that those faculty parties are going the way of the dinosaurs and I think it is because people realize that many cannot afford to give them and do not have a place in which to do it.
I do still have one colleague who literally kills a fatted calf once a year, but the guests have quietly taken over to bring most of the rest of the meal, most notably the wine. However, when I first became an assistant professor it was *utterly* clear that I had to get the house looking genteel and start entertaining in a genteel manner PDQ.
A friend of mine, slightly younger – she started her Ph.D. around the time I finished mine – has a spectacular degree and worked a lot during graduate school, T.A., adjunct, and an outside job part time during the year and full time in summer, but still had too much debt to be able to take a faculty job … now works in business, makes six figures, lives modestly (albeit in a high rent city) as she pays it off. So, essentially, she’s like Hattie’s daughter, had to give up a *great* research program, but also had to live.
How universities work – it’s definitely worse than in the seventies, just because of the economy. I was in college in the seventies, paying $600 in fees a year, period. In those days universities – or at least the ones we knew of and thought we might work at if we became professors – covered more of one’s business expenses. Thinking about graduate school and professordom nobody expected to get rich, but they didn’t expect the current penury.
The most shockingly true concept of Bosquet’s is the idea of degrees as waste. Undergraduates get degrees that may or may not do them good, but in the meantime they are cheap labor; the same continues in graduate school. So effectively for many, an academic career ends, rather than begins, with the Ph.D.
I could go on and on, obviously. In the 80s when I was in graduate school, there were famously no jobs, so we did more or less expect our academic careers to end with the Ph.D. What we hadn’t seen clearly was the radioactive half-life of academia that lingers on, if you go to one of these underpaid jobs that requires subsidies for continued employment and possible success! And something a friend in graduate school pointed out, that I only fully understood later, was that *we the TA’s* were the actual assistant professors. I of course saw at the time that the university couldn’t function without all the TA’s and RA’s, but it wasn’t until later that I realized we had in fact been doing assistant professor work all that time.
In my situation, if we reduced the size of the two introductory surveys in our department to 30-40 students and assigned them to TT profs with the same course load as our other asst profs, we would have to hire something like 40 additional faculty. We have neither money nor space for this, so we admit grads like crazy to keep this house of cards erect.
Yes – it is *really* hard to figure out what to do, or how to change the situation. I don’t think it’s too bad to admit all these grads, as long as they are qualified enough to do a good degree (whether or not they get an academic job), and as long as you don’t promise that there will be academic work.
We don’t get enough grads so we have instructors and adjuncts, and that is where the problem lies. Many are overworked, and some also aren’t good, most want their jobs but aren’t committed to the field, none are as well trained even for basic teaching as a Ph.D. would be, and there is no incentive for professional development. The LP is sort of right, this is a neglected, but necessary group. We tend to make up for the way we treat them by not requiring a great deal more than high SCH (student credit hour) production. This whole attitude needs revision.
I often find myself thinking in my own survey that a lot of work could be saved if more were done in school. If my overaverage undergrads are an index at all, the state of the schools in this country must be atrocious. But there is a lot of territory that we have to cover painfully with adjuncts and not enough attention that might be surveyed in a strong school setting with a teacher–assuming that teacher were also adequately trained. The problem is that so much basic skills development is left to us as university teachers that we really should abandon our thinking and simply jump into fixing problems. But the university can#t afford to have us do that for some reason. I don’t know what the solution is, either, because I am disturbed by the numbers of faculty teaching in universities who have demonstrably not opened a book in the last twenty years or since they were tenured. I do think that teachers also need to learn regularly.
The state of schools in this state is atrocious and a lot of people come to college with, essentially, only an elementary school education and not a great one, at that. (I’ve noticed that people who have gone to good *Sunday schools* – the ones where they study the Bible in a scholarly way – have reading and analytical skills that outstrip many.)
One more or less has to abandon what one knew about university teaching and jump in and fix problems – but paradoxically to do that in a university setting, you have to be *really* well prepared, not less well prepared, so you can teach at a high level at the same time. That’s where just getting the cheapest possible teachers really doesn’t work (although again, I am quite impressed with most T.A.’s I know). I’d really like to lower the instructor teaching load by and insist on some sort of demonstrable professional development.