School is out and this blog’s daily hit rate has dropped somewhere around five percent. There went the people who read this because their professor told them they needed to do so. Given that this is the point in the calendar when academics are least likely to think seriously about anything, the Chronicle of Higher Medication certainly chose an inauspicious moment to publish an article on “Scholars Who Blog.” The article in & of itself is predictable enough – it warrants skimming more than a deep read – but it offers some links to critically minded bloggers, as well as interesting statistics on some of the sites it does cover. Of the two sites it points to with scholarly blogrolls, Rhetorica appears to have the most diverse & inclusive list.

 

Two of the academic blogs in particular caught my eye, in part because both are from Penn, one of the “home” teams here in the Philadelphia region & a school that has treated me well since I moved east in 1995. One of these blogs is Critical Mass by Erin O’Conner, a Victorianist (if that’s a word) in the English Department, while the other is anonymously penned under the title The Invisible Adjunct. Both are exceptionally intelligent & well written, and both spend a lot of energy chronicling & analyzing all the ways in which the feudal institution that is Higher Education is destructive to the lives of the people who try to live & work there. Given the degree to which many of this blog’s readers – & poets generally – live in & around the academy, these blogs & some of their recent links are worth considering.

 

Two articles worth reading are “So You Want to Go to Grad School?” by Thomas. H. Benton, which also ran in the Chronicle, and John Sutherland’s, “The Silent Scandal” which appeared in The Guardian (which may just well be the finest newspaper in the English language*). Both articles focus on the same general problem – that graduate schools turn out far more “product” than the market can bear. There are today over 300 creative writing programs in the United States, but you know perfectly well that there will not be 300 jobs waiting for creative writing faculty at December’s MLA meat market. And that would still be just one job per school. A study reported on by the BBC even concludes that “Arts Degrees ‘Reduce Earnings’”:

Graduates in these subjects - including history and English - could expect to make between 2% and 10% less than those who quit education at 18, researchers at Warwick University found.

 

That’s right. A degree in English or the arts is worth less in the U.K. than a raw high school diploma. That’s certainly encouraging. Which is why one blog by John J. Emerson advises readers to “Forget the B.A.”

 

Some other blogs are devoted to tenure track horror stories, such as “My Brooklyn College Tenure Battle” by K.C. Johnson & Bob Uttl’s aptly named “The Worst Years of My Life.” Kevin Walzer is both a new formalist poet as well as a disappointed Ph.D. Only slightly more hopeful is Scott Smallwood’s “The Path to a Ph.D. – and Beyond,” but Smallwood focuses on a top-tier school & virtually every study notes that the difference between the results of the few elite schools and the vast majority is profound. Just to make the point that these issues are not simply the whining of a few malcontents wedded to the culture of victimization, you can find a link to the AAUP’s 2001 study, “Does Collegiality Count?” Which focuses on what may be considered in the tenure decision, although it doesn’t explore fully just how far “collegiality,” which can mean everything from “plays well with others” to brown-nosing to submitting silently to all manner of sexual harassment, might extend. A 1988 article in the Chronicle noted that even then, “Embittered by a Bleak Job Market, Graduate Students Take on the MLA.”  Not with much success, however. Finally, if one makes it all the way to tenure track at an elite institution, Stanley Fish – who certainly should know – advises everyone to “Aim Low.” That’s sort of the ultimate commencement address realpolitik.

 

 

 

 

* Consider The Guardian’s decision to chronicle the lives of those who died during the war on Iraq, focusing in many instances on 8, 10 and 11 year old Iraqi children & not merely the casualties of British citizens. The feature copies The New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief” series which performed the same function for many of the dead in the World Trade Center, but by including “innocent bystanders” who were “being liberated,” adds a political dimension that the Times could not imagine.

 

 

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On a happier blogging note, the story of Salam Pax has taken a few new unusual turns. First, the semi-anonymous gay architecture student in Baghdad survived the war on his country. In fact, MSNBC war correspondent Peter Maas reports that, when he finally set about trying to find Salam Pax, after being urged to do so by his colleagues in the West, Maas didn’t have to look very hard at all. The aforementioned Guardian wasted no time in signing Pax up as a columnist. His first column is here.

 

Also worth checking out is Radio Sawa, the U.S. propaganda radio network in Iraq.