- What they say — “apply to everything, be willing to go anywhere,” — is utterly wrong. You should apply in this order: R1, R2, D1, nothing below that and nothing that is not a university.
- What they say — “R1 institutions are the hardest ones to get tenure at,” is utterly wrong. They are the easiest, because research matters there and there is support for it; research is something you can control and what it does for your vita is permanent.
- What they say — “graduate programs do not prepare you to work at an R1 institution” — if true for you, means your program is poor and/or your professors, irresponsible.
Working at a D2 or less, or at a college, is like “going secondary” since your colleagues will be mostly M.A.s from the area, your students will not be prepared for college, and you will not have research resources, let alone a research atmosphere. If you are going to do this you should do so in an area where you are sure you can put in place the kinds of networks you will really need. In most cases I do recommend leaving the metropolitan area where you went to graduate school, but I really think the “go anywhere” advice only applies to good jobs. It also may have been invented for men with dependent spouses and children, and for them it might apply.
If you are not a person who would consider “going secondary” as a second career choice, your backup plan during the PhD program should not be an academic one and you should really work on forming it.
*
I think, though, that the reason there is so much advice about going anywhere and then on how to do research must mean only one thing: most people went into academia to teach, not to do research, and cannot imagine doing anything else. Since they did not go into this to do research and resisted doing it, apparently, throughout the PhD, they now need advice on how to do it. Since teaching is the only job they can imagine for themselves, it is meet to tell them to go anywhere and take anything.
If this characterization of the standard graduate student is actually a mis-characterization, then the advice given standard graduate students (do not do research, just write; take any job, anywhere) is wrong.
Furthermore: for people who do not do research, but just write, I do bet it is hard to publish! So perhaps if you follow that piece of advice then the next warning, that it is hard to publish, is true.
*
Me, I am saying all of these things because I am tired, so tired of dealing with supercilious and condescending men who also lack professional training; so tired of trying to provide a college education to people who do not want such, but are only here for the football experience and the credential; so tired of yard work and home maintenance in these suburbs that barely have sidewalks — and exhausted from the financial strain.
The danger that I would end up in a situation exactly like that is, of course, why I was told not to be a professor, but I am really glad I went to graduate school. I just do not understand why career advice given graduate students and assistant professors gets more and more destructive the more advanced and accomplished they become. Unless (a) they are very different kind of person than I can imagine being, or (b) the intention is in fact to decimate them.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
They don’t deserve you.
Thank you for saying that as it is what I need to hear today.
On your third bullet point, yes: grad school prepares you for an R1 above all. It is a research degree. Grad school does not prepare you for a SLAC.
The only people fit to work at SLACs are people who went to them and ideally, enjoyed them.
Later: grad school also does not prepare you for teaching the skills normally taught in secondary school.
But, do you think I am right, that most faculty went into this to “teach college” and not to do research? I had not thought of this before but if it is true, it would explain a great deal. Could it be true?
Yes, that is true of many of our students at KU, for example. They want to teach, and research is something in school along the way to that. The dissertation a hurdle to be jumped over.
It is amazing, but it does explain a lot.
I think that is true of a lot of people. Not the ones I went to grad school with, but a lot that I have met since then. It is also true of some people who have no ambition to teach college; they “just want to teach.” I overheard a student saying that, some years ago, when she was not doing well in our secondary-teacher-certification program, and considering moving to the ed school. She didn’t care what, or who, she just wanted to teach. I found that chilling, because it seemed like a sort of power-mongering. It’s one thing if you want to teach X topic or skill, or if teaching is the means to an end (like supporting a research habit); but simply wanting to be the conduit through which knowledge comes—I don’t know, but I didn’t like it.
For the scholar, research is not a hurdle but a pool to swim in.
Power-mongering, yes, that is why I find it so chilling. And I really find that the people who go on about what good teachers they are, are not.
I know people who resent research and only want to teach at research institutions to get a low and interesting teaching load.
But I did not realize the extent to which all of this is a norm.
But the low teaching load is a means to an end, the production of more research. How bizarre. I don’t think it’s really a norm, actually, or not at the Ivies and major flagships. About the bad advice given out, a lot of it (the books) are written by people in the social sciences, especially psychology, who seem to have a very different attitude toward writing than humanities scholars do. They seem happy to run experiments and crunch data, but “writing up” frightens them, and so they invent games to make it easier for them. Then the writing-teachers jump on the bandwagon—because some of the games are good for getting frightened freshmen to write and plan—and then the notion spreads from there. But if you grew up writing, thought of writing as a normal part of life as well as of learning (remember handwritten letters on paper?), then writing is not frightening. Advice for problems one doesn’t have should simply be ignored. I am sorry the psych people suffer, but taking their advice is like taking advice on how to cope with chemo when not only am I not on chemo, I don’t have cancer.
AHA, so that is how it started.
I got writer’s block from trying to do a project I disagreed with but was too browbeaten to say no to — people thought my disagreement with the proposal was “fear of success” but it was just disagreement and also other intellectual interests and priorities.
So I got browbeaten into saying yes, then could not write it, and then got all the bad writing advice thrown at me, and tried it.
This was my career wrecking experience. I am hoping to make some sense of it some day, as in, to at least. My terrorized and guilt ridden childhood appears to have been really disabling, what can I say.
So you know what triggered the whole thing, and if you can restore the psychological state you were in before the disagreeable project came along, then . . . but that, I take it, is what the blog is for. Also you are (I take it) now in an external environment that poses its own problems. I agree that it is worse than useless to treat an external problem as an internal one.
” I agree that it is worse than useless to treat an external problem as an internal one.”
And this may be why I am so miserable with the language teaching situation.
It is an external problem that we have been forced to internalize.
An external problem we have been forced to internalize, I am going to repeat that.
Meanwhile, here is a post on type of institution that Dr. Crazy wrote and I missed. It has to do with a conversation with DEH on need for discussion of this over discussion of what are good locations to live.
http://reassignedtime.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/a-school-is-a-school-is-a-school…-or-is-it-parsing-the-differences-and-similarities-between-institutional-types/