On the competition for NIH challenge grant money that is available as part of the stimulus package, Amanda Schaffer writes:
"To a young applicant, these look a bit like de facto earmarks, drawn up with particular scientists in mind. (Many have combed the topic lists to see where their work might fit in. This has involved a lot of all-nighters and an 'almost comedic reshaping of what people do,' said the New Jersey biologist.) As a result, the competition has started to look something like America's Got Talent—if Bob Dylan, Beyoncé, and Bono were allowed to compete."
Bono, of course, is not actually American. Which I guess would make the possibility of him performing on America's Got Talent even more unfair.
By the way, where's the federal stimulus money for ethnomusicology? Someone has to keep pointing out slips like this one.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
I'm Slipping Under
Some preliminary google searching hasn't turned up too many promising hits. So I ask you, dear readers, is it true that there hasn't yet been a really good "toxic assets" joke that references Britney Spears's song "Toxic"? (Don't even pretend like you're not thinking the riff to that tune now.)
Sunday, April 26, 2009
A Bad Day Fishing Beats a Good Day Working
Stanley Fish gave a talk at Penn last week sponsored by the Philomathean Society. It was one of the few events I’ve attended at Penn that seemed to have a relatively even mix of undergrads, grad students, and faculty present. I’ve been reading Fish’s columns for the New York Times for a while now. Love him or hate him, he certainly is quite an interesting writer, and the talk showed him to be an engaging speaker as well.
He seems to have changed his ideas quite drastically over the course of the nearly 30 years since his book Is There a Text in This Class? I don’t know if he has formally renounced that work, but his concern in the title essay of that book with “the authority of interpretive communities” over and against authorial or textual authority (authorial authority—hilarious!) doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the kind of intense formalism (one could say nihilism) that he seems to practice and preach nowadays. The Penn talk was devoted to themes covered in his most recent book Save the World On Your Own Time, which argues that professors should teach their subject and not seek to indoctrinate their students in a particular political ideology. Sounds fine on the surface, right? Because who wants to hear some gasbag professor expounding on how wonderful Obama is or on how the Iraq war was necessary to keep the United States free from terror?
But at the basis of Fish’s arguments is a persistent belief that “academic” or “intellectual” work or thinking is somehow different (read: “above”—though he said that “academic exceptionalism was one of the worst sins committed by academics, it’s hard not to see him as also partaking in this vice) from other kinds of more pedestrian pursuits and shouldn’t be justified or judged based on these more earthly standards. While he acknowledges that the very act of creating a syllabus that includes or doesn’t include white/black/male/female/straight/gay writers (or musicians!) is in fact a political move, he doesn’t believe that this kind of political act is akin to the more banal acts of advocating for a particular candidate or policy.
In his vision of the ideal university, professors do not aim to make their students appreciative of diversity or more engaged citizens or to develop their students’ characters. According to Fish, these are not the things they are trained or paid to do. (Though, here was a logical inconsistency in his work, since he started his talk by—disapprovingly—reading mission statements from universities that in fact do state that they are trying to foster an appreciation of diversity, prepare students to function in democracies, etc. Whether Fish likes it or not, in fact universities do hire professors to do exactly these things, at least according to their mission statements.)
And when asked to justify the work that they do to their state legislatures or funding agencies, scholars (particularly those in the humanities) should not offer any justification for what they do, since none exists outside of the world of the “exhilarating pleasure” they get from the texts they are studying.
Perhaps it is clear by now that I disagree profoundly with Professor Fish. I don’t believe that the admission that “everything is political,” is, as Fish said, “trivial.” The kind of neutral, apolitical reading of a text that Fish argues for is, in fact, a political move itself. As the historian Howard Zinn put it best, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” The world is moving: wars are started or ended, policies are enacted or rejected, people are cured of disease or they die. We can’t pretend that our actions or nonactions—academic or otherwise—have nothing to do with the events around us. If nothing else, our presumed neutrality at least perpetuates the status quo.
This talk was an interesting counterpoint to another earlier panel sponsored by the Philomathean Society on the future of the humanities within the academy. That panel was organized around the questions:
1. Does the academic analysis of works of literature, philosophy and history
have instrumental value?
2. Should they be funded?
Putting aside the fact that the referent of the second question is unclear (if the pronoun is meant to refer to the analysis, why is it “they” instead of “it?”), the answers given by 2 of the 3 Penn faculty members on the panel addressing this question were rather disappointing. Basically, the answers were “yes” and “yes.” Not terribly surprising stuff. Fish himself offers “no” and “yes” to these questions. This set of answers is perhaps more interesting, though Fish doesn’t offer any reason why a “yes” would follow from the first “no.” But I really wanted to see someone (preferably a well-funded member of the academy) make a strong argument for a “no” to the second question. The devil’s advocate in me says, “Hey, so why should we as a society spend so much money on Stanley Fish so that he can obsess over Milton for nearly 50 years?” I am not one of those people who believe that art and culture will save us. Or, if they will save us, I believe they will be far less effective at doing so than an HIV vaccine, a cure for cancer, or an end to poverty.
I will say, however, that the music department’s own Gary Tomlinson said some very on-point things about what sort of responsibilities the humanities can have. In particularly, he talked about how one of the deconstructive movement’s failures has been its inability to counter the popular portrayal of itself as a painted-in-a-corner fringe practice using an arcane jargon to pore over the minutiae of texts. Instead, Tomlinson argues for a deconstruction that has a sharp ethical edge to it, a deconstruction that is about denaturalizing accepted notions and providing alternative examples of human difference. This, for me, is really the only reason to teach: to be able to encourage critical questioning in one’s students so that, when they are the ones holding the levers of power, they will be able to make more informed decisions about what policies and practices should be followed or discarded. Otherwise, what are they doing in my class when they should be learning more about how to dress wounds or design more efficient transportation systems?
Fish, obviously, disagrees. And so I disagree with him. But he certainly presents his arguments in an interesting manner, and there’s no denying that he is an engaging speaker and writer. It is definitely quite the privilege to be able to think about and discuss such important topics. As someone once said, though, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” As for Fish, I’m not sure he believes there is a “point,” period. Or at least not one that we as academics can get to.
He seems to have changed his ideas quite drastically over the course of the nearly 30 years since his book Is There a Text in This Class? I don’t know if he has formally renounced that work, but his concern in the title essay of that book with “the authority of interpretive communities” over and against authorial or textual authority (authorial authority—hilarious!) doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the kind of intense formalism (one could say nihilism) that he seems to practice and preach nowadays. The Penn talk was devoted to themes covered in his most recent book Save the World On Your Own Time, which argues that professors should teach their subject and not seek to indoctrinate their students in a particular political ideology. Sounds fine on the surface, right? Because who wants to hear some gasbag professor expounding on how wonderful Obama is or on how the Iraq war was necessary to keep the United States free from terror?
But at the basis of Fish’s arguments is a persistent belief that “academic” or “intellectual” work or thinking is somehow different (read: “above”—though he said that “academic exceptionalism was one of the worst sins committed by academics, it’s hard not to see him as also partaking in this vice) from other kinds of more pedestrian pursuits and shouldn’t be justified or judged based on these more earthly standards. While he acknowledges that the very act of creating a syllabus that includes or doesn’t include white/black/male/female/straight/gay writers (or musicians!) is in fact a political move, he doesn’t believe that this kind of political act is akin to the more banal acts of advocating for a particular candidate or policy.
In his vision of the ideal university, professors do not aim to make their students appreciative of diversity or more engaged citizens or to develop their students’ characters. According to Fish, these are not the things they are trained or paid to do. (Though, here was a logical inconsistency in his work, since he started his talk by—disapprovingly—reading mission statements from universities that in fact do state that they are trying to foster an appreciation of diversity, prepare students to function in democracies, etc. Whether Fish likes it or not, in fact universities do hire professors to do exactly these things, at least according to their mission statements.)
And when asked to justify the work that they do to their state legislatures or funding agencies, scholars (particularly those in the humanities) should not offer any justification for what they do, since none exists outside of the world of the “exhilarating pleasure” they get from the texts they are studying.
Perhaps it is clear by now that I disagree profoundly with Professor Fish. I don’t believe that the admission that “everything is political,” is, as Fish said, “trivial.” The kind of neutral, apolitical reading of a text that Fish argues for is, in fact, a political move itself. As the historian Howard Zinn put it best, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” The world is moving: wars are started or ended, policies are enacted or rejected, people are cured of disease or they die. We can’t pretend that our actions or nonactions—academic or otherwise—have nothing to do with the events around us. If nothing else, our presumed neutrality at least perpetuates the status quo.
This talk was an interesting counterpoint to another earlier panel sponsored by the Philomathean Society on the future of the humanities within the academy. That panel was organized around the questions:
1. Does the academic analysis of works of literature, philosophy and history
have instrumental value?
2. Should they be funded?
Putting aside the fact that the referent of the second question is unclear (if the pronoun is meant to refer to the analysis, why is it “they” instead of “it?”), the answers given by 2 of the 3 Penn faculty members on the panel addressing this question were rather disappointing. Basically, the answers were “yes” and “yes.” Not terribly surprising stuff. Fish himself offers “no” and “yes” to these questions. This set of answers is perhaps more interesting, though Fish doesn’t offer any reason why a “yes” would follow from the first “no.” But I really wanted to see someone (preferably a well-funded member of the academy) make a strong argument for a “no” to the second question. The devil’s advocate in me says, “Hey, so why should we as a society spend so much money on Stanley Fish so that he can obsess over Milton for nearly 50 years?” I am not one of those people who believe that art and culture will save us. Or, if they will save us, I believe they will be far less effective at doing so than an HIV vaccine, a cure for cancer, or an end to poverty.
I will say, however, that the music department’s own Gary Tomlinson said some very on-point things about what sort of responsibilities the humanities can have. In particularly, he talked about how one of the deconstructive movement’s failures has been its inability to counter the popular portrayal of itself as a painted-in-a-corner fringe practice using an arcane jargon to pore over the minutiae of texts. Instead, Tomlinson argues for a deconstruction that has a sharp ethical edge to it, a deconstruction that is about denaturalizing accepted notions and providing alternative examples of human difference. This, for me, is really the only reason to teach: to be able to encourage critical questioning in one’s students so that, when they are the ones holding the levers of power, they will be able to make more informed decisions about what policies and practices should be followed or discarded. Otherwise, what are they doing in my class when they should be learning more about how to dress wounds or design more efficient transportation systems?
Fish, obviously, disagrees. And so I disagree with him. But he certainly presents his arguments in an interesting manner, and there’s no denying that he is an engaging speaker and writer. It is definitely quite the privilege to be able to think about and discuss such important topics. As someone once said, though, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” As for Fish, I’m not sure he believes there is a “point,” period. Or at least not one that we as academics can get to.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Shadows in the Field
A letter to the folks over at amusicology.
Thanks for this post about a very important topic. You’ve managed to remain a lot more sanguine about this whole thing than I’ve generally been able to. So, if you’re not “lamenting anything particular about this state of affairs,” then I would be happy to!
What you’re talking about, generally speaking, is the “casualization” of academic labor, the fact that more and more teaching is being done not by TT faculty with benefits and job security but by grad students, recent Ph.D. graduates, and others, for very little money/benefits/job/security/university support, etc. As a grad student who has taught my own high enrollment classes over the last few years (and who will likely be trying to cobble together adjunct work in the future), I would say that there is, indeed, something lamentable about this. The problem isn’t that as grad students or non-TT faculty that we are better or worse teachers than TT faculty, but that we aren’t really treated like real employees by our university (and compensated and supported accordingly).
I think you’re absolutely right when you say that we need to manage expectations when we get to grad school and not think that we’re going to get TT jobs at research universities as soon as we graduate. I hope that things like the musicology jobs wiki (which you guys have been great about drawing attention to) lead to a more honest discussion among prospective grad students, current grad students, and current faculty about the state of the job market. I would love to see aggregated statistics about how many people are entering musicology/ethno/theory/comp Ph.D. programs every year, what percentage graduate with degrees, and what percentage land TT jobs within 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years. My sense is that there are just far more people graduating every year than the number of TT jobs available. At a recent SEM, Philip Bohlman talked in his presidential speech about how great it was that there were more student members at the conference than faculty. For him, this was a cause for celebration, evidence that ethnomusicology was growing and assured of a bright future with so many young scholars interested in the field. But looked at another way, it means that (at least for that one weekend in Columbus, but possibly generally as well) there are more people in the field who will want jobs in a few years (when they presumably graduate) than currently have jobs. So unless every faculty member retires or the number of faculty lines in ethno increases dramatically, there’s going to be some serious un(der)employment.
I generally agree with most of your suggestions for how to manage this “shadow residency” period that will no doubt result from this serious un(der)employment, except for “ABDs should have the opportunity to teach independently.” Teaching experience in grad school will certainly make teaching as an adjunct in the future easier. (It will probably also make one more marketable on the job market generally speaking, as well. At least, I hope so.) But I also think that the increasing number of grad student teachers is part of the very problem we’re addressing, and that we should advocate for fewer courses to be taught by non-TT faculty, so that universities will have to hire more TT faculty to teach classes.
I also think that if we as grad students need to do a better job managing expectations, our departments need to do a better job managing outcomes. This situation where there are far more students with degrees than TT jobs is a situation that our departments have, in some sense, created (or allowed administrations to create for them, depending on to whom you would like to ascribe agency). Are there fields other than the academy that allow so many people to go through their rigourous professional training programs when the prospects for stable employment are so bleak? Our departments need to advocate for more faculty lines to be created and, frankly, to limit the flow of new students entering the Ph.D. pipeline. And as students, we need to do a better job of advocating for ourselves and not simply accept the fact that many of us will, despite having credentials, be only marginally employed for years at a time. That could include many things, including supporting unionization efforts, advocating within our own institutions and administrative structures for more TT jobs, or encouraging undergraduates to attend only institutions where the teaching is done by trained professionals, who are compensated like trained professionals. Whichever path we want to take, though, I think we need to find some way to get the supply of scholars more in line with the demand, unless we all want to be living in a “shadow residency” for the rest of our professional lives.
Thanks for this post about a very important topic. You’ve managed to remain a lot more sanguine about this whole thing than I’ve generally been able to. So, if you’re not “lamenting anything particular about this state of affairs,” then I would be happy to!
What you’re talking about, generally speaking, is the “casualization” of academic labor, the fact that more and more teaching is being done not by TT faculty with benefits and job security but by grad students, recent Ph.D. graduates, and others, for very little money/benefits/job/security/university support, etc. As a grad student who has taught my own high enrollment classes over the last few years (and who will likely be trying to cobble together adjunct work in the future), I would say that there is, indeed, something lamentable about this. The problem isn’t that as grad students or non-TT faculty that we are better or worse teachers than TT faculty, but that we aren’t really treated like real employees by our university (and compensated and supported accordingly).
I think you’re absolutely right when you say that we need to manage expectations when we get to grad school and not think that we’re going to get TT jobs at research universities as soon as we graduate. I hope that things like the musicology jobs wiki (which you guys have been great about drawing attention to) lead to a more honest discussion among prospective grad students, current grad students, and current faculty about the state of the job market. I would love to see aggregated statistics about how many people are entering musicology/ethno/theory/comp Ph.D. programs every year, what percentage graduate with degrees, and what percentage land TT jobs within 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years. My sense is that there are just far more people graduating every year than the number of TT jobs available. At a recent SEM, Philip Bohlman talked in his presidential speech about how great it was that there were more student members at the conference than faculty. For him, this was a cause for celebration, evidence that ethnomusicology was growing and assured of a bright future with so many young scholars interested in the field. But looked at another way, it means that (at least for that one weekend in Columbus, but possibly generally as well) there are more people in the field who will want jobs in a few years (when they presumably graduate) than currently have jobs. So unless every faculty member retires or the number of faculty lines in ethno increases dramatically, there’s going to be some serious un(der)employment.
I generally agree with most of your suggestions for how to manage this “shadow residency” period that will no doubt result from this serious un(der)employment, except for “ABDs should have the opportunity to teach independently.” Teaching experience in grad school will certainly make teaching as an adjunct in the future easier. (It will probably also make one more marketable on the job market generally speaking, as well. At least, I hope so.) But I also think that the increasing number of grad student teachers is part of the very problem we’re addressing, and that we should advocate for fewer courses to be taught by non-TT faculty, so that universities will have to hire more TT faculty to teach classes.
I also think that if we as grad students need to do a better job managing expectations, our departments need to do a better job managing outcomes. This situation where there are far more students with degrees than TT jobs is a situation that our departments have, in some sense, created (or allowed administrations to create for them, depending on to whom you would like to ascribe agency). Are there fields other than the academy that allow so many people to go through their rigourous professional training programs when the prospects for stable employment are so bleak? Our departments need to advocate for more faculty lines to be created and, frankly, to limit the flow of new students entering the Ph.D. pipeline. And as students, we need to do a better job of advocating for ourselves and not simply accept the fact that many of us will, despite having credentials, be only marginally employed for years at a time. That could include many things, including supporting unionization efforts, advocating within our own institutions and administrative structures for more TT jobs, or encouraging undergraduates to attend only institutions where the teaching is done by trained professionals, who are compensated like trained professionals. Whichever path we want to take, though, I think we need to find some way to get the supply of scholars more in line with the demand, unless we all want to be living in a “shadow residency” for the rest of our professional lives.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Don't Tell Philip Bohlman
There's a whole website devoted to the 54th Annual Eurovision song contest on the New York Times. Eurovision, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is a huge celebration of national identity, nationalism, and pop music. It's like "American Idol" avant la lettre. A few of us here are pretty amused that a certain ethnomusicologist at the University of Chicago seems to be moderately obsessed with Eurovision, writing about it here, here, and in one of his columns in the SEM newsletter. At least, those are the places we've tracked down thus far. There could be more out there.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Stay Classy, San Diego
I finally got the schedule for the conference that I'm giving a paper at in May. Nice to see that a couple of other Penn folks are on the program. And how awesome is it to go to a conference that pretty much exactly covers the types of things you are interested in studying? No offense to other conferences, but it's nice not to have to really strrrrrrrrrrrrrrretch to make a paper or a panel relevant to your own concerns. So it should be a fun couple of days. Anyone got good restaurant recommendations for San Diego?
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Tidbits of the Day
So I love this, I think this is great. Shawn Fanning, the former Northeastern University student who founded Napster, you know how his parents met? They met because his mother attended a concert of an Aerosmith cover band that his father was playing in! What a brilliant link between the old way of copying (with musicians) and the new way of copying (with ones and zeroes). That's so going in my dissertation. Right next to the anecdote about Vladimir Putin being rumoured to have attended a private performance by the ABBA tribute band Bjorn Again, which Putin himself denies.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Yarrrrr!
Isn't it amazing how there has been all this talk in the media the last week or so about, you know, real pirates as opposed to, say, people who download music illegally? I swear, I think the primary referent for "piracy" now in journalistic discourse is no longer the swapping of digital media files. How long before it switches back? Certainly, there's enough time for a good (?) pirate joke . . .
What's a pirate's favorite baseball team?
The Carrrrrrrrrrdinals!
Alternate Answer: The Pirates!
Alternate Answer: The Twins!
What's a pirate's favorite baseball team?
The Carrrrrrrrrrdinals!
Alternate Answer: The Pirates!
Alternate Answer: The Twins!
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Come to Philadelphia For The . . .
Sorry, haven't had a lot of time to post. But I do have one exciting piece of news. Catharine and I are moving back to Philadelphia for a couple of months. Which means, among other things, that I can attend the 2nd annual Roots Picnic. The Roots, TV on the Radio, Antibalas, Public Enemy. I'm so there.
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