In the 2008 comedy Smart People, Dennis Quaid plays Lawrence Wetherhold, a down-on-his-luck English professor struggling to find an academic publisher for his latest academic monograph. After Lawrence's precocious daughter sardonically suggests a new title for the work of literary criticism--You Can't Read!--it draws interest from the nonacademic branch of Penguin Group, is reworked by the editors, and becomes poised for commercial success (to Lawrence's dismay).
We have in this scenario a brilliant take on what the public thinks of and wants from an English professor. In his worst moments, Lawrence is uninterested in his students, and looks down upon them. He feels a deep and withering sense of frustration over how his students perform and where their interests seem to lie. He is awkward and tweedy and aloof. His Stanford-bound daughter's suggestion that he call the new monograph You Can't Read! is a perfect jab delivered by an intelligent and successful young student, as it reflects at once the widely held belief that English professors are snobs who lay unconvincing claim to a mystical power to "read," or to magically unlock all the "hidden meanings" and "symbolism" within the text, and the mockery with which this apparent superpower is generally acknowledged. Millions of children who grew up struggling to understand why their English teacher's favored interpretation of Animal Farm was more legitimate than their own have grown into adults who, having been able to graduate from college and hold down a job and figure out a mortgage, remain unconvinced that their high school English essays were or even could be assessed based on much more than whim or subjective, personal preference. Thus, when Quaid, seasoned player of academic characters, portrays Lawrence as a professor whose contempt for his unlettered students is pithily expressed by the barb "You Can't Read," the comedy works because we love watching the elitist English professor get taken down a peg, his hermeneutic powers exposed for what they are: not a sound academic treatise, but a popular book that belongs on the shelf next to Bill O'Reilly and Anne Coulter titles, inflammatory and empty.
The reality, however, is that analytical reading is a skill like any other, requiring, like the mastery of other skills, significant time, effort, practice, and, indeed, talent (I put "analytical" before it because here I'm not talking about merely the ability to understand, for example, that the letters c-a-t form a word that represents a four-legged carnivorous mammal that goes "meow"). And though analytical reading is to an extent a transferable skill, it's no more a feat of wizardry that your English professor is probably better than you at reading literature analytically than it is an act of Zeus that your doctor knows more than you about anatomy. People who teach literature will or at least should have spent years learning it, along with its influences, surrounding social and economic history, language history, literary and narrative theory, and so on, just as your doctor will or at least should have spent years learning biology and chemistry, anatomy, epidemiology, and so on.
Understandably, reading is something we tend to take for granted. You Can't Read! also works wonderfully as a joke title for an English professor's book because of the sheer audacity it would take to sell the public a book called You Can't Read!. Because reading is something most of us begin learning as toddlers, we endow it with a kind of false simplicity, as though the ability to read the back of your cereal box is a sound prerequisite for a literature class. Pragmatically, we figure that so long as we possess the linguistic building blocks, we should introduce children and young adults to literature in academic settings as soon as possible. After all, for reasons few people will bother to articulate, much less articulate convincingly, literature is important, right? Could you imagine what the concerned parents of America would say if we told them little Mikayla or little Trenton wouldn't have the option of taking a literature course this spring at the Cromwell Academy or Lake Oswego High? The same parents who wouldn't dare allow their Mikayla or Trenton to major in English in college, for fear of dismal job prospects, would march straight down the superintendent's throat if we put the kabbash on middle and high school English.
Nevertheless, we should ask the legitimate question sooner than later: should we be teaching literature as early on as we do?
The rest of this essay argues that not only should we seriously consider putting off the teaching of literature in schools before college, but that the teaching of literature prematurely often amounts to a kind of cruelty. That's right. Teaching literature prematurely can be an act of cruelty.
Before you think me hyperbolic, take a few minutes of your day to talk to someone you know about their experience learning literature in school. Asking people about how they learned literature is something of a hobby of mine. For some people, who usually tend to be verbally and rhetorically gifted, or particularly inclined by nature or by socialization toward the literary, English class was a refuge from an otherwise dry and mechanical middle or high school curriculum. For others, their English teacher happened to be that one special, gifted teacher who captivated students and changed their lives for the better. For most, however, the experience of English class falls somewhere on the spectrum of neutral ("I didn't really learn anything") to terrible ("The better the bullshit, the better the grade"). Ask someone what they actually learned in English class, and you won't hear much of substance. Either "English" was construed as English language, and they spent all day diagramming sentences (less likely among younger students, I find), or they learned how to write a five-paragraph essay with a thesis, three "supporting points," and a conclusion about a work of fiction. From this experience students come away with an insufficient and sometimes outright debilitating writing technique, and a frustrating sense of bewilderment about how one perspective on a given piece of literature is any more or less compelling than another. Because the five-paragraph essay emphasizes taking an argumentative stand, then "supporting" one's argument with "evidence," taking "evidence" as loosely as possible to mean any fragment of shit the student can dig up in support of his or her opinion, students rarely learn to read carefully, to identify basic narrative cues, to investigate what other critics have already said about a piece of literature, and why, and to broaden their knowledge of the wider context of the literature they're writing about. In other words, students are given literature and made to critically engage with it, but without any of the basic tools that virtually all literary scholars agree are necessary and fundamental to the practice of engaging critically with a literary text. In fact, students are expressly encouraged to use analytical "methods" that are directly at odds with those of basic, introductory-level literary criticism: rather than making arguments that come from evidence, students are taught to find evidence for their "arguments," "argument" being in this case a more serious-sounding word for "opinion." Rather than investigating the world beyond the piece of literature they're tasked to write about, students are forced to rely on their own largely uninformed and undeveloped sense of literary analysis, usually discouraged from seeking out guidance from the ideas of more experienced and accomplished others. Originality of thought and ideas is considered paramount; in context, a ridiculous notion considering the fact that when we look back on our high-school English essays we discover that, unsurprisingly, we weren't quite as "original" as we thought we were when we were teenagers. Originality in ignorance is hardly something to cultivate or aspire to.
Yes, this method of teaching literature to school-age children guarantees that at best they will come away from middle or high school English class having learned next to nothing about literature or literary criticism, along with a few bad reading, writing, and analytical habits that will cripple their ability to do even basic literary criticism at the college level, where more bad teaching awaits them anyway. But, as I said, this method of teaching literature also has the capacity to inflict real and serious cruelty upon young people. By depriving students of the basic tools and methods that legitimize literary criticism, and help to differentiate an innovative and plausible reading from a bullshit reading; and by emphasizing the value of their opinions couched as "arguments" and "supported" with cherry-picked quotes and the implication of "symbolism," we set students up for a hard fall. Because at the end of the day, we also assess their essays and in-class comments, either with the same kind of arbitrary, bullshit criteria by which we teach them to build and assess their own readings of literary texts, or by pulling the rug straight out from under them, applying as teachers a more sophisticated but undisclosed and unexplained means of determining whose readings of the text are good and whose are bad. Here is where the cruelty comes in: we build the children up by teaching them the false validity of their own opinions or "original arguments," then we tear them down with an evaluative process that is opaque by definition, too sophisticated to explain to young students who haven't been provided with the tools to understand it. What's worse, the more astute students will indeed see that the Emperor has no clothes. Those students will then have to reckon with painful questions like, knowing that they are being arbitrarily and at times hypocritically evaluated, does the teacher like the students with better grades more than me? Has the teacher taught me a lie? Does the teacher, and some of the other members of my class, have a special, mystical talent for understanding literature that I do not possess? And so on...
From talking to many and reflecting on my own experiences learning literature in school, this type of confusion and, for some of us, sense of betrayal, seems widely experienced. As much is confirmed by the fact that the wider, even educated public, even in adulthood, understands very little about the process of literary criticism, or the value of what skilled, practiced literature teachers and professors actually do. The mismatch between what the practice of literary criticism is and what it is popularly perceived to be can only come, as such information mismatches generally do, from under- or mis-education. We mis-educate every generation of children to believe first that reading is as simple as c-a-t, then that analyzing literature is little more than creatively bolstering your personal opinion, then that the value difference between one "opinion" on literature versus another is nothing more than a function of arbitrary power, the authority to grade it so, whether by an English teacher or professor like Lawrence Wetherhold, or a stuffy New Yorker fiction editor. We take something as powerful as literature, which, for reasons heretofore barely articulated or acknowledged, we all seem to agree is oh so culturally important, and we gut it of its cultural significance by assuring that virtually everyone's experience with it in the classroom is unpleasant and misleading. We confine literature to the realms of personal pleasure or personal distraction, as if its sole value lies in its ability to make us feel good, or to help pass the time of a subway work commute.
For these reasons I would argue that we underestimate the value of both literature and literary criticism. In the process, we sabotage the literary education of our children, sometimes doing them significant intellectual and emotional harm; and we (humanities educators) harm ourselves and our broader cultural relevance. I recommend, therefore, that we consider putting off the formal teaching of literature until post-secondary (college) education, reserving middle and high school English classes for the exclusive teaching of English grammar and writing, sticking with mechanics and using literary texts, along with nonfiction texts from history, science, etc. only as examples. Essays in these classes should be focused not on analysis, but on basic summarization, something that sounds dry and basic, though again even some college students are finding it difficult. Should students develop an interest in studying English in-depth and moving into literary criticism, or the analysis of literature, this is something they will be better prepared to undertake as part of a higher (college) education, where professors will also be better equipped to teach them literary criticism and research methods.
An important caveat before closing: despite that I would eliminate for the most part the teaching of literature from middle and high school curricula (saving perhaps advanced placement literature options), I am in no way suggesting that literature should not be part of the lives of children and young people. On the contrary, children should be encouraged by both parents and teachers to read, and read avidly. There is an important difference between introducing literature to children for the sake of reading it, enjoying it, and learning from it, and introducing literature in the classroom as an object of analysis. While I do believe the latter would be premature for students in middle and high school, the former--enjoyment and engagement with literature--should be as widespread a practice as possible. And I am willing to wager my own career that if children are able to enjoy literature outside of the classroom between learning to read and enrolling in college, plenty will be interested in the English major.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Monday, April 16, 2012
Obligatory Academic Job Market Rant
Every PhD student on the market in an oversupplied field must at some point sit down and scrawl a whiny rant about the conventions of academic hiring. Every PhD student, no exceptions.
But first, the disclaimer. This hiring year has been a tough one for a lot of people, which is why PMB is glad he only got in halfway. Before I go on, it's important to explain that I will be OK. Technically I don't even possess in my furry paws that little piece of paper that says I'm Dr. Bear. But so far I've been fortunate to have interviews and concrete prospects both within and outside of academia. I mention this because the animus that follows is directed at a system, and not its relative sparsity of opportunities.
In fact, even (if not especially) among academics, the working assumption is that late-stage graduate students and people on the job market in the humanities and some oversupplied sciences and social sciences are unhappy because they find that it's extremely difficult to get a job in academia, while they've thought all along, as graduate students, that doing a PhD and doing it right would land them an academic job. Call this a thesis on graduate school as suspension of disbelief: you're just complaining because, despite that we told you it wouldn't be easy, you thought it would be easy. As a consequence, people on the job market are said to complain about lack of opportunity, as though they weren't informed of this likelihood before enrolling in a PhD program with the aim of finding academic employment afterwards.
At the risk of disappointing you, however, this isn't that kind of rant.
Obviously being on the job market during a recession in the general economy, to say nothing of the market for humanities professors, is difficult and often frustrating; but as far as this bear is concerned, that's just life. Inexcusable, however, is the way the academic hiring process in the humanities is frequently conducted.
The first point, then, is that an academic job application takes a lot of time and effort. Specifically, it takes more time and effort than applications for just about every other job. I know this because I have worked other, non-academic jobs, interviewed for a dozen more, and applied for ten times more than that. If you're looking for a chance that an academic hiring committee will give you the opportunity to send them more of your stuff just to make it to the second half of the first round of the application process, you're not sending in a resume and a one-page cover letter. Academic hiring committees in the humanities typically want, up-front, a 2-page cover letter tailored specifically to their department and their university, a CV, a 1-2 page dissertation precis, a 1-2 page statement of teaching philosophy, your graduate school transcripts, a portfolio of student evaluations of your teaching, 3 letters of recommendation, and a 25-30 page writing sample. Sometimes, in addition or interchangeably, they'll ask for a 1-2 page statement of current and future research, a 1-2 page statement of teaching interest, a 1-2 page statement of your commitment to diversity or to the religious ideals of the university (if applicable), a sample syllabus, a new syllabus designed specifically for a course they would want you to teach if hired, and a collection of one-paragraph course descriptions for courses you would design and teach if hired. Naturally, once you laboriously draft versions of each of these documents, you can cut and paste and recycle them for different jobs; but ultimately every single academic job you apply to is different, has different needs and priorities, and demands, if you want a chance at being interviewed, much less hired, that you tailor all of your materials specifically to them and their needs.
Compiling and tailoring these documents takes quite a lot of effort; and for a decent chance at an interview, if you're any good, you likely have to send out around 100 such applications. The odds are miserable; count on being one of 200-700 PhD-holding applicants for a single job.
Imagine for a moment, then, being a professor in a PhD-granting graduate program. Maybe you're supervising 5 students at a time, such that more or less every given year you have approximately 5 students whose doctoral dissertations you've supervised who will require, without exception, a letter of reference or recommendation from you. In fact, observing the numbers above, they will each likely require about 100 letters of recommendation from you, each year. Conservatively you're then writing 500 letters of recommendation between the months of September and May every single year (yes, we have dossier services now; so instead of the professor writing 500 letters, they write 5, which are each then sent out by a dossier service administrator, un-tailored, 100 times a year). What happens to those letters, you might ask?
Hold that question for a moment; let's do some more math. A hiring committee in the humanities, as I said, can expect between 200-700 applications for one job. Let's be conservative and call it 300 applications. Each of those 300 applications requires 3 letters of recommendation. That means 900 letters of recommendation go to a single hiring committee, which is also reading cover letters, CVs, teaching statements, research statements, writing samples, etc. etc. etc. for whichever applicants it takes enough interest in. So of the 900 recommendation letters that a hiring committee receives for a single job, in addition to the other supporting application materials required of each of those 300 applicants for that single job, how many of those 900 recommendation letters, painstakingly written by busy professors all over the world, do you think the hiring committee will actually have time to read? Consider, now, how many such letters are distributed to hiring committees throughout the duration of a single job candidate's year on the job market: for each candidate 3 letters per job, 100 jobs per year; for each job, 300 candidates. Quick, what does this add up to?
Ding! A big fucking waste of everyone's time.
I don't like to rant without making constructive suggestions, so here's one: if you're on a hiring committee likely to get hundreds of applicants for one job, and you know, as a reasonable person, that there's no way in hell you'll get through 600-1200 letters of recommendation, let alone all the other materials you ask for up-front but don't read until you've already narrowed down the candidate pool, DON'T ASK FOR SO MUCH CRAP UP-FRONT! We both know that if you could read all those documents in the time you spend doing hiring work, you wouldn't be a university professor; you'd be getting prodded in a lab somewhere deep in the bowels of CIA headquarters under suspicion that YOU'RE A FUCKING CYBORG.
My humble suggestion is that you only ask for a cover letter and CV up-front; then when you cut your applicant pool down to 20 or so, ask for other documents; and don't ask for letters of recommendation until you're looking at 6-10 candidates you're considering for interviews. Save us all the time.
It's also time academic hiring committees learned a thing or two about rejection.
As an applicant, I can state with confidence that there are two kinds of hiring committee e-mails that I consider my favorites: my first favorite is an e-mail that tells me something positive, like I'm being invited to submit more work for the next round of the process, or I'm being offered an interview, or you'd like to hire me; my second favorite is an e-mail that says something to the effect of 'we have reviewed all materials and regret to inform you that of the 566 applications we received for this single job, yours was not chosen.'
You might think it's odd that I like receiving rejection e-mails; but I assure you, and I'm not being sarcastic in the slightest, I love getting short, to-the-point, informative rejection e-mails. They bring important closure, so I'm not sitting around wondering what's going on, hoping for the opportunity, but dreading the rejection. They ease the irrational disappointment that comes with rejection by informing me that the problem is not that I suck or am hopeless, but that I simply was not the lottery winner who drew the offer out of 500-odd highly qualified (and I believe it) applicants for that single assistant professorship. Finally, they indicate that the institution that rejected me has the capacity to treat its applicants with basic human and professional dignity. I don't ask for a 'nice' rejection letter if an employer doesn't want to hire me; just A REJECTION LETTER, full stop.
The following, however, are unacceptable ways to indicate to an applicant that s/he has not be selected for the job:
1) Posted on the HR website: 'If you have not heard from us by March, assume your application has not been successful.' This is one of the most disrespectful and cowardly ways of bringing a hiring process to a close...or not. Technically, my assumption that I was not hired cannot be affirmed until the hiring body tells me so.
2) One year after date of application: 'Thank you for your interest in XXX. After reviewing the applications...blah blah blah... However, we would be grateful if you would fill out and return the attached applicant demographic information survey, which helps HR...blah blah blah.' We (royal) would be grateful if you got back to us in a timely manner about our application status; and we recommend you take your HR survey, rip it up into little pieces, and eat it.
3) 'We regret to inform you that your application was not successful. Also, nobody loves you.' Actually, I've never gotten that one; but it's not implausible.
The point here is that we should all consider it part of a hiring committee's professional-ethical duty to treat applicants with a baseline of respect and professionalism, and to inform unsuccessful applicants of their status in a timely manner. The excuses we put up with from hiring committees are simply unacceptable. Despite what people think, hiring isn't a science, especially when professors do it. It shouldn't take more than 6 weeks to conduct a hiring process, from the application deadline to the offer to the rejection notices. No applicant should be wondering what's going on with a prospective job for months after the application deadline, and no employer should ever accept an application from anyone without responding to that person with a result. Even if a hire is drawn out because a preferred candidate has other options and needs time to make a decision, or scheduling difficulty pushes back the interviews, a hiring committee should be able to contact within 4-6 weeks at the very least a shortlist of people who are not selected for interview but are in the running pending the preferred candidates' decisions, along with the rest of the applicant pool who are no longer being considered for the position. There is no excuse for anything else.
The final segment of my rant concerns a much larger, deeper, more convoluted phenomenon than these other aspects of the academic hiring process. Put succinctly: there is a waning market for scholars.
Years ago, when this bear entered graduate school, I knew that job prospects were dismal, the competition was stiff, and it would take time to land the right academic gig. Countless articles in countless media outlets feature the lamentations of humanities people wringing hands over the dismal job prospects and the poor, naive little graduate students who think they're signing up for 'a life of the mind' when if fact they're signing up for unemployment benefits. I have addressed that ridiculousness elsewhere and don't mean to dwell on it here. But there is one sense in which I do feel that we in the humanities, and in higher education in general, are letting ourselves down.
When I say there is a waning market for scholars, I mean specifically that most job opportunities are simply requests for cheap teaching labor. Departments and universities are preying upon the vulnerability of people on the academic job market desperate for a gig that lets them stay 'in academia,'; so they'll offer 20-something thousand dollars a year to have a newly-minted PhD from Columbia teaching 4 sections of first-year composition, the same work a first-year, tenure-track professor would do, but for half the salary. Further, they'll call these glorified adjunct teaching jobs 'postdocs' or 'fellowships' in order to inflate expectations, and, I half-think, to make highly accomplished young academics who are overqualified for such positions feel better about applying for and accepting them, so they can call themselves a 'postdoctoral fellow' rather than an 'adjunct instructor.'
Don't get me wrong; I love teaching, including writing and composition, and believe it to be the most important thing an academic does. But teaching is hard work, requires long hours of preparation, entails high levels of responsibility, and, ultimately, demands in a sane world a salary above the poverty line.
The kind of exploitation I see in the academic job market today makes me question whether those in my profession retain vertebrate status.
But first, the disclaimer. This hiring year has been a tough one for a lot of people, which is why PMB is glad he only got in halfway. Before I go on, it's important to explain that I will be OK. Technically I don't even possess in my furry paws that little piece of paper that says I'm Dr. Bear. But so far I've been fortunate to have interviews and concrete prospects both within and outside of academia. I mention this because the animus that follows is directed at a system, and not its relative sparsity of opportunities.
In fact, even (if not especially) among academics, the working assumption is that late-stage graduate students and people on the job market in the humanities and some oversupplied sciences and social sciences are unhappy because they find that it's extremely difficult to get a job in academia, while they've thought all along, as graduate students, that doing a PhD and doing it right would land them an academic job. Call this a thesis on graduate school as suspension of disbelief: you're just complaining because, despite that we told you it wouldn't be easy, you thought it would be easy. As a consequence, people on the job market are said to complain about lack of opportunity, as though they weren't informed of this likelihood before enrolling in a PhD program with the aim of finding academic employment afterwards.
At the risk of disappointing you, however, this isn't that kind of rant.
Obviously being on the job market during a recession in the general economy, to say nothing of the market for humanities professors, is difficult and often frustrating; but as far as this bear is concerned, that's just life. Inexcusable, however, is the way the academic hiring process in the humanities is frequently conducted.
The first point, then, is that an academic job application takes a lot of time and effort. Specifically, it takes more time and effort than applications for just about every other job. I know this because I have worked other, non-academic jobs, interviewed for a dozen more, and applied for ten times more than that. If you're looking for a chance that an academic hiring committee will give you the opportunity to send them more of your stuff just to make it to the second half of the first round of the application process, you're not sending in a resume and a one-page cover letter. Academic hiring committees in the humanities typically want, up-front, a 2-page cover letter tailored specifically to their department and their university, a CV, a 1-2 page dissertation precis, a 1-2 page statement of teaching philosophy, your graduate school transcripts, a portfolio of student evaluations of your teaching, 3 letters of recommendation, and a 25-30 page writing sample. Sometimes, in addition or interchangeably, they'll ask for a 1-2 page statement of current and future research, a 1-2 page statement of teaching interest, a 1-2 page statement of your commitment to diversity or to the religious ideals of the university (if applicable), a sample syllabus, a new syllabus designed specifically for a course they would want you to teach if hired, and a collection of one-paragraph course descriptions for courses you would design and teach if hired. Naturally, once you laboriously draft versions of each of these documents, you can cut and paste and recycle them for different jobs; but ultimately every single academic job you apply to is different, has different needs and priorities, and demands, if you want a chance at being interviewed, much less hired, that you tailor all of your materials specifically to them and their needs.
Compiling and tailoring these documents takes quite a lot of effort; and for a decent chance at an interview, if you're any good, you likely have to send out around 100 such applications. The odds are miserable; count on being one of 200-700 PhD-holding applicants for a single job.
Imagine for a moment, then, being a professor in a PhD-granting graduate program. Maybe you're supervising 5 students at a time, such that more or less every given year you have approximately 5 students whose doctoral dissertations you've supervised who will require, without exception, a letter of reference or recommendation from you. In fact, observing the numbers above, they will each likely require about 100 letters of recommendation from you, each year. Conservatively you're then writing 500 letters of recommendation between the months of September and May every single year (yes, we have dossier services now; so instead of the professor writing 500 letters, they write 5, which are each then sent out by a dossier service administrator, un-tailored, 100 times a year). What happens to those letters, you might ask?
Hold that question for a moment; let's do some more math. A hiring committee in the humanities, as I said, can expect between 200-700 applications for one job. Let's be conservative and call it 300 applications. Each of those 300 applications requires 3 letters of recommendation. That means 900 letters of recommendation go to a single hiring committee, which is also reading cover letters, CVs, teaching statements, research statements, writing samples, etc. etc. etc. for whichever applicants it takes enough interest in. So of the 900 recommendation letters that a hiring committee receives for a single job, in addition to the other supporting application materials required of each of those 300 applicants for that single job, how many of those 900 recommendation letters, painstakingly written by busy professors all over the world, do you think the hiring committee will actually have time to read? Consider, now, how many such letters are distributed to hiring committees throughout the duration of a single job candidate's year on the job market: for each candidate 3 letters per job, 100 jobs per year; for each job, 300 candidates. Quick, what does this add up to?
Ding! A big fucking waste of everyone's time.
I don't like to rant without making constructive suggestions, so here's one: if you're on a hiring committee likely to get hundreds of applicants for one job, and you know, as a reasonable person, that there's no way in hell you'll get through 600-1200 letters of recommendation, let alone all the other materials you ask for up-front but don't read until you've already narrowed down the candidate pool, DON'T ASK FOR SO MUCH CRAP UP-FRONT! We both know that if you could read all those documents in the time you spend doing hiring work, you wouldn't be a university professor; you'd be getting prodded in a lab somewhere deep in the bowels of CIA headquarters under suspicion that YOU'RE A FUCKING CYBORG.
My humble suggestion is that you only ask for a cover letter and CV up-front; then when you cut your applicant pool down to 20 or so, ask for other documents; and don't ask for letters of recommendation until you're looking at 6-10 candidates you're considering for interviews. Save us all the time.
It's also time academic hiring committees learned a thing or two about rejection.
As an applicant, I can state with confidence that there are two kinds of hiring committee e-mails that I consider my favorites: my first favorite is an e-mail that tells me something positive, like I'm being invited to submit more work for the next round of the process, or I'm being offered an interview, or you'd like to hire me; my second favorite is an e-mail that says something to the effect of 'we have reviewed all materials and regret to inform you that of the 566 applications we received for this single job, yours was not chosen.'
You might think it's odd that I like receiving rejection e-mails; but I assure you, and I'm not being sarcastic in the slightest, I love getting short, to-the-point, informative rejection e-mails. They bring important closure, so I'm not sitting around wondering what's going on, hoping for the opportunity, but dreading the rejection. They ease the irrational disappointment that comes with rejection by informing me that the problem is not that I suck or am hopeless, but that I simply was not the lottery winner who drew the offer out of 500-odd highly qualified (and I believe it) applicants for that single assistant professorship. Finally, they indicate that the institution that rejected me has the capacity to treat its applicants with basic human and professional dignity. I don't ask for a 'nice' rejection letter if an employer doesn't want to hire me; just A REJECTION LETTER, full stop.
The following, however, are unacceptable ways to indicate to an applicant that s/he has not be selected for the job:
1) Posted on the HR website: 'If you have not heard from us by March, assume your application has not been successful.' This is one of the most disrespectful and cowardly ways of bringing a hiring process to a close...or not. Technically, my assumption that I was not hired cannot be affirmed until the hiring body tells me so.
2) One year after date of application: 'Thank you for your interest in XXX. After reviewing the applications...blah blah blah... However, we would be grateful if you would fill out and return the attached applicant demographic information survey, which helps HR...blah blah blah.' We (royal) would be grateful if you got back to us in a timely manner about our application status; and we recommend you take your HR survey, rip it up into little pieces, and eat it.
3) 'We regret to inform you that your application was not successful. Also, nobody loves you.' Actually, I've never gotten that one; but it's not implausible.
The point here is that we should all consider it part of a hiring committee's professional-ethical duty to treat applicants with a baseline of respect and professionalism, and to inform unsuccessful applicants of their status in a timely manner. The excuses we put up with from hiring committees are simply unacceptable. Despite what people think, hiring isn't a science, especially when professors do it. It shouldn't take more than 6 weeks to conduct a hiring process, from the application deadline to the offer to the rejection notices. No applicant should be wondering what's going on with a prospective job for months after the application deadline, and no employer should ever accept an application from anyone without responding to that person with a result. Even if a hire is drawn out because a preferred candidate has other options and needs time to make a decision, or scheduling difficulty pushes back the interviews, a hiring committee should be able to contact within 4-6 weeks at the very least a shortlist of people who are not selected for interview but are in the running pending the preferred candidates' decisions, along with the rest of the applicant pool who are no longer being considered for the position. There is no excuse for anything else.
The final segment of my rant concerns a much larger, deeper, more convoluted phenomenon than these other aspects of the academic hiring process. Put succinctly: there is a waning market for scholars.
Years ago, when this bear entered graduate school, I knew that job prospects were dismal, the competition was stiff, and it would take time to land the right academic gig. Countless articles in countless media outlets feature the lamentations of humanities people wringing hands over the dismal job prospects and the poor, naive little graduate students who think they're signing up for 'a life of the mind' when if fact they're signing up for unemployment benefits. I have addressed that ridiculousness elsewhere and don't mean to dwell on it here. But there is one sense in which I do feel that we in the humanities, and in higher education in general, are letting ourselves down.
When I say there is a waning market for scholars, I mean specifically that most job opportunities are simply requests for cheap teaching labor. Departments and universities are preying upon the vulnerability of people on the academic job market desperate for a gig that lets them stay 'in academia,'; so they'll offer 20-something thousand dollars a year to have a newly-minted PhD from Columbia teaching 4 sections of first-year composition, the same work a first-year, tenure-track professor would do, but for half the salary. Further, they'll call these glorified adjunct teaching jobs 'postdocs' or 'fellowships' in order to inflate expectations, and, I half-think, to make highly accomplished young academics who are overqualified for such positions feel better about applying for and accepting them, so they can call themselves a 'postdoctoral fellow' rather than an 'adjunct instructor.'
Don't get me wrong; I love teaching, including writing and composition, and believe it to be the most important thing an academic does. But teaching is hard work, requires long hours of preparation, entails high levels of responsibility, and, ultimately, demands in a sane world a salary above the poverty line.
The kind of exploitation I see in the academic job market today makes me question whether those in my profession retain vertebrate status.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Trayvon Martin and Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Myself and Alan Dershowitz, at least, have laid out arguments that, given the facts of the case, Dominique Strauss-Kahn could and perhaps should have been taken to trial after a Sofitel maid accused him of sexually assaulting her. Notably these arguments do not amount to a condemnation of DSK, but instead suggest that the prosecution would have had both a viable retort to those who questioned the maid's credibility and a viable prosecution strategy had they taken the case to court. Underlying these arguments is the important recognition that the American justice system is an adversarial system aimed not at getting convictions or securing defenses, but at getting as close as possible to the truth in the process of one side trying to get a conviction and the other trying to secure a defense. Within this system it is the duty of the prosecutor to weigh all prosecution strategies at his or her disposal before deciding whether to prosecute; but in the case of DSK, it seems, the prosecution bowed out, abandoning legally sound prosecution strategies as the media storm 'tried' DSK and the maid in the court of public opinion, miraculously finding the former more credible than the latter.
The case of George Zimmerman, now formally accused of killing Trayvon Martin, has been reminiscent of the DSK case for one reason in particular: the comparable laxity with which the justice system approached a very serious accusation, and the apparent reasons for such laxity.
As an aside, it shouldn't take a dead kid for us to realize that the 'Stand Your Ground' law in Florida is a bad law. The overbreadth of a law that allows someone to use lethal force against someone when there is a reasonable belief of a threat is plainly unacceptable to a reasonable person. It essentially reads like a vigilante measure, which enables just anyone packing a firearm to be capital judge and jury in the heat of even a mild confrontation, the consequences of which are literally life and death. Do we really want a law that extends above and beyond a pre-existing rubric for differentiating between self-defense and murder or manslaughter, and educates citizens to feel justified in using lethal force when they feel threatened? Against people who are wholly unarmed? I submit that the answer is resoundingly no.
The 'Stand Your Ground' law was used by the Sanford police department to justify not even arresting Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin dead; so for the longest time we had the admitted shooting of an unarmed teenage boy handled without even an arrest, let alone a prosecution. The decision to prosecute need not come immediately; but the longer the police go without making an arrest, and the longer the prosecutor goes without making the charge in a case for which the facts justify at least an arrest (given the reasonable suspicion that this shooting was a crime), the more we justifiably begin to wonder what else is going on here.
I don't like counterfactuals of the sort that the seemingly lagging prosecutors in both the DSK and Zimmerman cases have spawned: 'if DSK were a black bus driver and Nafissatou Diallo were a white woman he would have been prosecuted'; 'if Trayvon Martin were white and Zimmerman black, Zimmerman would have been arrested and charged immediately.' It may well be that there is some truth to these counterfactuals; but what interests me more is what actually happened. Both the DSK case and the Zimmerman case are, I think, exceptional in the degree to which prosecutors in both cases appeared extra-circumspect, the prosecutor in the DSK case having (in)famously decided not to go forward with the prosecution at all. Perhaps race/nationality/gender/class were significant factors in the decision not to prosecute DSK, or in the decision not even to arrest Zimmerman and charge him with a crime until yesterday; but in both cases what is bizarre is the extent to which external or prejudicial factors in whatever form were allowed to deter the justice system from using the trial, given enough evidence, as a means of determining what really happened.
The case of George Zimmerman, now formally accused of killing Trayvon Martin, has been reminiscent of the DSK case for one reason in particular: the comparable laxity with which the justice system approached a very serious accusation, and the apparent reasons for such laxity.
As an aside, it shouldn't take a dead kid for us to realize that the 'Stand Your Ground' law in Florida is a bad law. The overbreadth of a law that allows someone to use lethal force against someone when there is a reasonable belief of a threat is plainly unacceptable to a reasonable person. It essentially reads like a vigilante measure, which enables just anyone packing a firearm to be capital judge and jury in the heat of even a mild confrontation, the consequences of which are literally life and death. Do we really want a law that extends above and beyond a pre-existing rubric for differentiating between self-defense and murder or manslaughter, and educates citizens to feel justified in using lethal force when they feel threatened? Against people who are wholly unarmed? I submit that the answer is resoundingly no.
The 'Stand Your Ground' law was used by the Sanford police department to justify not even arresting Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin dead; so for the longest time we had the admitted shooting of an unarmed teenage boy handled without even an arrest, let alone a prosecution. The decision to prosecute need not come immediately; but the longer the police go without making an arrest, and the longer the prosecutor goes without making the charge in a case for which the facts justify at least an arrest (given the reasonable suspicion that this shooting was a crime), the more we justifiably begin to wonder what else is going on here.
I don't like counterfactuals of the sort that the seemingly lagging prosecutors in both the DSK and Zimmerman cases have spawned: 'if DSK were a black bus driver and Nafissatou Diallo were a white woman he would have been prosecuted'; 'if Trayvon Martin were white and Zimmerman black, Zimmerman would have been arrested and charged immediately.' It may well be that there is some truth to these counterfactuals; but what interests me more is what actually happened. Both the DSK case and the Zimmerman case are, I think, exceptional in the degree to which prosecutors in both cases appeared extra-circumspect, the prosecutor in the DSK case having (in)famously decided not to go forward with the prosecution at all. Perhaps race/nationality/gender/class were significant factors in the decision not to prosecute DSK, or in the decision not even to arrest Zimmerman and charge him with a crime until yesterday; but in both cases what is bizarre is the extent to which external or prejudicial factors in whatever form were allowed to deter the justice system from using the trial, given enough evidence, as a means of determining what really happened.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
'Robots Should Look Like Robots'
For the second time now a student specializing in robotics has expressed to me the sentiment that 'robots should look like robots.' The context of this comment was a discussion of what's being done today with humanoid robots, which can apprehend, speak with, and interact with humans. Most of the computer science/automated reasoning/robotics students I've spoken with over the years are attracted to these fields and enthusiastic about their work in large part because of the amazing things they can program robots to do. The idea that you could program a machine to hold even a basic conversation with a human is for many people exceptionally cool. At the same time, however, this very fascination with how advanced, intuitive, and interactive we can make robots has also proven disquieting. The same students who marvel at how well we can make robots interface with humans would also seem to balk at a robot whose appearance too closely resembles that of a real human. In other words, robots without metal and gears showing, designed instead to look like organic beings while mimicking the behavior and capabilities of organic beings, have a propensity to give people the creeps. The reason for this is, presumably, that without any kind of overt visual confirmation that the being in question is artificial rather than organic, the line between artificial and organic 'life forms' becomes disconcertingly blurry. At present, we humans can handle the shock and awe engendered by increasingly advanced humanoid robots so long as it's easy for us to classify them as unproblematically artificial, just as we tend to classify ourselves as unproblematically organic and human.
What intrigues me about this form of suspension of disbelief is what it suggests about the relationship between human advancement and humanity. On one hand, we're happy to reap the benefits of technological advancement, which are perhaps the fruits of a predictable if not unavoidable trajectory of human progress. On the other, our ability to manipulate the so-called 'natural world' and its materials--including our own organic bodies--poses a threat to our humanity as we know it: though human evolution could certainly involve evolution out of or beyond what we understand today to be the fundamentals of our humanity, such a long transition would demand significant grappling with which aspects of our humanity are most valuable and worth preserving, which we could never preserve even if we wanted to, and which we could never discard even if we wanted to. One theory of human progress is determinative and circular: no matter what we do, we'll unavoidably end up where we end up because of our nature, and the nature of our 'progress.' Another would suggest that human progress will be shaped by the kinds of choices we make, by humans as agents of our own steady change. I suspect there may come a time when humanoid robots that look identical to humans will be commonplace enough that they'll cease to give people the creeps; but the more interesting question is not whether and at what point will robots look more like humans, but whether and at what point will humans become more like robots.
What intrigues me about this form of suspension of disbelief is what it suggests about the relationship between human advancement and humanity. On one hand, we're happy to reap the benefits of technological advancement, which are perhaps the fruits of a predictable if not unavoidable trajectory of human progress. On the other, our ability to manipulate the so-called 'natural world' and its materials--including our own organic bodies--poses a threat to our humanity as we know it: though human evolution could certainly involve evolution out of or beyond what we understand today to be the fundamentals of our humanity, such a long transition would demand significant grappling with which aspects of our humanity are most valuable and worth preserving, which we could never preserve even if we wanted to, and which we could never discard even if we wanted to. One theory of human progress is determinative and circular: no matter what we do, we'll unavoidably end up where we end up because of our nature, and the nature of our 'progress.' Another would suggest that human progress will be shaped by the kinds of choices we make, by humans as agents of our own steady change. I suspect there may come a time when humanoid robots that look identical to humans will be commonplace enough that they'll cease to give people the creeps; but the more interesting question is not whether and at what point will robots look more like humans, but whether and at what point will humans become more like robots.
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