English 600: Introduction to Graduate Study in English > Updates


For Tuesday, December 6 (Week 15):

Reports about potential "Academic Futures." Let's try to keep them brisk and interesting, eh? Aim for 20 minutes or so, plus a few minutes for questions.

If you're looking for data and statistics about the job market, the state of the profession, and so on, remember the MLA and CCCC. But don't forget the U.S. Department of Education, the American Association of University Professors, and other professional organizations (e.g., the NEA, the NCTE, the TYCA [and its journal, and its position papers], etc.). The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) also compiles "key indicators" on The Conditionof Education in the United States; see, for instance, "Characteristics of Postsecondary Faculty" under the "Postsecondary Education" menu.

For Tuesday, November 29 (Week 14):

May we all get some rest and peace of mind over the break.

When we return, in lieu of holding class, I'd like to consult with each of you for twenty minutes or so about your Lit Review-in-progress. (It goes without saying, perhaps, that it should be in a sufficiently developed state that we actually have something to consult about.) Please e-mail me, letting me know whether you'd prefer to meet during our regularly scheduled class time or at some other point during the week--i.e., Tuesday office hours or assorted other times on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. Assuming I've returned your prospectus to you by that point, you should bring it with you, in addition to however much of the lit review you've generated so far. Be ready to talk about what you're incorporating into your review (and why), how you're structuring it, and so on. Which pieces "talk to" which others, and how--around what issues? And how are those issues related to one another and to your overall research project? What models are you imitating? What doubts, if any, are you having? Etc., etc.

I'll be e-mailing each of you individually over the next day or so with contact info and (possibly) some suggested reading for your "Academic Cultures" presentation. You're aiming for a twenty-(ish) minute presentation. What to "present"? The chapter or article I've assigned you, if applicable, along with whatever additional research you've done on your corner of the profession. Has anyone else written personal accounts of what it's like to be a _____ at a ______? Has anyone written scholarly articles about it? A labor-oriented institutional critique? A position paper? Some sort of think-piece for ADE Bulletin or Profession (an annual MLA publication) or NEA Action (a quarterly newsletter) or Inside Higher Ed? Does the MLA or the CCCC or some other professional organization keep statistics on job postings by type of institution, geographical location, level of employment, etc.? Put your research skills to work to flesh out the picture in some interesting way.

Whatever else it includes, your fleshing-out will definitely involve your report of an interview (phone, Skype, or e-mail) with an HSU grad involved in that line of work.

Your questions should probably include the basics: who, what, when, where, how long?  Part-time or full-time, tenure-track or adjunct?  (Etc.) Beyond that: whatever else seems relevant and/or interesting. For instance:

  • How did you get the job?  Deliberately or by accident? What was the interview process like?
  • What does the job involve besides teaching? Any expectations for scholarship or service (e.g., advising, committee work, etc.)?
  • What’s the most rewarding thing about the job?
  • What’s the most heinous thing about the job?
  • How is your performance evaluated?
  • What's the department "culture" like? Department politics? Collegial relations?
  • What about this job did your education at HSU (and/or your MA project research) prepare you for?
    What did it not prepare you for?
  • If you’d known then what you know now, what would you have done differently in grad school?
  • And what advice about preparing for a job search would you give a current grad student?

As with any interview, be prepared to deviate from your script and allow for other questions to develop organically.

For Tuesday, November 15 (Week 13):

Wednesday morning: It's a grim and shameful day in our nation's history, and I don't know what to say; like many of you, no doubt, I'm feeling shattered. But I'll lead with a slogan associated with the early 20th-century labor leader Joe Hill: "Don't Mourn; Organize!" The struggle is never over. All we can do is roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Because I believe in the power of words to animate and inspire, I've been looking this morning for as much inspiration as I can find. New Yorker editor David Remnick's "An American Tragedy" helps, and so does staff writer John Cassidy's early interpretation of statistical data and exit polls. And if those pieces smack too much of the condescension with which we pointy-headed intellectuals and the "liberal media elite" have supposedly dismissed an aggrieved plurality of our fellow citizens, then try this statement by the editorial board of Jacobin, a leftist journal whose name alludes indirectly to the great Trinidadian intellectual, novelist, political theorist, activist, and cultural critic C.L.R. James (and his magisterial study of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins).

We'll have a visit next week from Loren Collins of the Academic Career and Advising Center (and the Sociology Master's program), who will tell us about career resources for MAs, with an emphasis on para- and non-academic job searching.

I will let you know when I've put your Annotated Bib in your department mailbox.

For Tuesday, November 8 (Week 12):

Hello, Prospectors. I hope your prospectuses have achieved cruising altitude by now, even if they're not actually ready to land. They're now due on Friday, November 11. I will undertake to return your annotated bibs by Tuesday.

And speaking of Tuesday: we'll have a short class, focused mainly on Calls for Papers. (Bring laptops, tablets, etc.) Your mission is to find one or more Calls for Papers (CFP) that speak to you personally--and to tell the rest of us about them. (A CFP is sometimes also known as an "RFP"--a request for proposals.) Specifics:

Working quickly, and using all the resources at your disposal--web search engines, hard and/or electronic copies of professional journals (PMLA, for instance, used to list about two years' worth of upcoming conferences in its back pages), websites of professional organizations (CCC, Linguistic Society of America, TESOL International), listservs (see below), and/or faculty expertise, find at least one and as many as three calls for conference papers or book/journal submissions from among the following categories:

  • a local, statewide, or regional graduate student forum, conference, or journal, be it English Studies, interdisciplinary, or multi-disciplinary in nature
  • a national discipline-wide (i.e., English Studies or Comp/Rhet studies) conference or journal
  • a conference or journal centering on a subfield related to your current topic of research (or, failing that, to the topic of a current seminar paper)

Be ready to show and tell the rest of us about what you found and how you found it (and whether you plan to respond to one or more of the calls!). Here are a few big clearinghouse CFP sites you may wish to start with:

The listserv clearinghouse links on p. 60 of Moore and Miller are mostly dead, except for:

  • Voice of the Shuttle (Alan Liu, UCSB; navigate to the page for the relevant discipline, then look for the section titled "Listservs & Newsgroups" or "Discussion Lists & Newsgroups")

And here's a conference you should all know about:

For Tuesday, November 1 (Week 11):

First, some questions that you should pose to your faculty interviewee. Make your best effort to secure 15 or 20 minutes with them ASAP, schedules permitting, preferably during their regular office hours. (If, in spite of your assiduous exertions, the stars just do not align, then we can hear news from late-reporting precincts on the 8th.)

  • What, at a minimum, do you need to see from a student before you might be persuaded to supervise their MA project?  Before you would serve as a second reader?
  • What do you look for in a good prospectus?
  • When you serve as an advisor, how does the process run for you, ideally:  how early does it start, how regularly do you like to meet, what sorts of deadlines do you like to set, how much feedback do you provide, and so on?
  • As an advisor, how closely do you like to work with the second reader?  As a second reader, how involved in the process do you like to be, and how early?
  • In your experience, does it typically take one semester or two (or more) to see a project through from start to finish?  What should I be doing in the semester(s) before I begin writing?  The summer before?
  • Have you ever refused to give final approval to a project?  Ever resigned from a committee (or agreed to drop out)?

Rather than deliver a raw, point-by-point transcript of your interview, try to frame and arrange the answers you've collected into some sort of narrative form. After we hear the first two or three reports, subsequent ones may get briefer, focusing primarily on variations on or divergences from established themes, rather than repeating the same information.

Also on tap: tales from the MA Project trenches with Tessa Pitré, Sarah Ben-Zvi, and Dave Longstreth. (NPR Music does a series of video podcasts called the "Tiny Desk Concerts." This may be the Tiny Panel Discussion.)

Oh: you'll find the prospectus assignment sheet online, on the front page of the class website. Here are some links to sample prospectuses/proposals I found with a cursory Google search. (Do keep in mind, obviously, that none of these are written to my specs. Studying them will give you some sense of how people typically handle various elements common to prospectuses everywhere, though.)

Finally, a journal-review postscript: I heard and saw plenty of evidence that you'd done some deep digging into your chosen journals, searching multiple locations for basic information and/or snooping into the backgrounds, publication records, and institutional affiliations of editors and editorial board members. (In one or two instances, the journal itself very helpfully provided much of that material for you.) I wanted to remind you, though, not to forget about the MLA Directory of Periodicals, which is generally an excellent source of info about the character, the longevity, and even (implicitly) the stature of a given journal--and plenty else, besides.

For Tuesday, October 25 (Week 10):

Huh. Well, whatever "preparatory remarks" I referred to in my e-mail to you earlier this week somehow got lost in the ether--probably because I was editing this web page in two different locations, forgot to "sync" at some point, and then overwrote the most recent version with an older one. (Don't you hate it when that happens?) Anyway: you'll be handing in your Annotated Bibs, of course. And then I've got several other things on the agenda--a dog from every town, as my mother used to say.

First: Looking forward to looking forward: Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Prospectus (with apologies to Wallace Stevens). The prospectus is a widely recognized genre, even if it doesn't have a universally agreed-upon format. Still, no matter whom you talk to, their idea of a prospectus is likely to include some combination or permutation of certain core components. If you want to show some grad-student initiative and do a little advance scoutwork (is that a redundancy?), be my guest. Otherwise, I'll have a little work for you to do in class. (As always: bring laptops & tablets.)

Next: I want to give you a preview of an upcoming assignment so that you can start thinking about it now. I'm going to ask you do another faculty interview, for informational purposes only. And the specific information you'll be looking for? Their views on the MA project process. I will assign you to a specific interviewee and provide you with some questions, but you'll need to schedule 20-30 minutes for the interview, which should take place before our Tuesday, November 1 class.

Finally: If, with a little more advance notice this time, you'd like to have that "How's Your Head?" talk I began half-heartedly--depressingly?--at the end of our last meeting, then we can do that, too. It needn't involve tearful outpourings or whiny rants or petty gripes, though it could. It could also be a "How Are You Coping and/or Bearing Up?" talk--about time constraints, elevated performance expectations, and any or all of the other "multiple stresses of graduate school" that you read about in Moore & Miller many weeks ago. (It was abstract then; now you're really livin' it.)

For Tuesday, October 18 (Week 9):

Midterm Break! Work diligently and confidently on your annotated bibliographies. (You can download the spec sheet from the front page of the course website. I'll even put on my Research Consultant hat and you could come talk to me if you feel like you need a little coaching or encouragement.)

If we were meeting this week, I would ask for Annotated Bib Research Narrative Status Reports. So I'm gonna use this bully blog-pulpit to repeat the take-away portion of my short spiel on Altick, Harner, and the art of the annotated bib: to generate a working bibliography (i.e., your ongoing, humongo collection of potentially relevant books, articles, dissertations, websites, etc. from which everything else will be drawn), you need to design and execute a comprehensive search strategy to determine what-all is out there, à la Harner 18ff.  That search should probably begin with a look at the relevant (to you) sections of Harner's online MLA Literary Research Guide, then move on to include all potentially useful catalogs (HSU, WorldCat) and databases (including dissertation databases), using a variety of relevant search terms in each instance.  (Keep a detailed record of your searches and their results.) It should also include Google Scholar, "curated" resources like the Year’s Work in English Studies and The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, and any other specialized bibliographies or useful resources pertinent to your topic that you happen to find in the reference section.  Don't forget items you've already read or located and know will be central to your study, items that were recommended to you by faculty, items you discovered on other people’s Works Cited lists, items you found when you were searching for a book on Amazon, etc., etc.

At some point, put the working bibliography on pause and go through its items one by one to determine whether they go or stay. And choose five to ten along the way to annotate. Simple, right?

For Tuesday, October 11 (Week 8):

Back in Theater Arts for good, I think. In case you hadn't noticed: we've now left the syllabus calendar pretty far behind. We'll (probably) do that database eval/review exercise we didn't get to last week--it would be useful to have a critical mass of laptops to huddle 'round--and then I'll introduce the Annotated Bib assignment. Could be a short class. You could prepare the relevant reading (Altick & Harner, from Week 7 of the online reader), if you like; my introductory remarks may include a few words about them. Looking ahead: I've definitively decided to cancel class on October 18th. (Marcos will have to demand a refund.)

Here are a few links to things that I showed, commented on, or alluded to last night. If there are things from Kyle's portion of the presentation you've tried unsuccessfully to track down, let me know. If we change our mind about building a DH project ourselves, then perhaps it could take the form of a curated collection of readings and resources about DH--a sort of expanded and annotated "LibGuide" done for the benefit of (and/or with input from) Marissa Mourer and/or Janelle Adsit. You know: journals, anthologies, foundational and/or influential essays, latest debates, best practices, best tools, exemplary or forward-thinking sites, etc. Just thinkin' out loud.

For Tuesday, October 4 (Week 7):

Keeping you on your toes: we'll begin—and possibly end (depending upon how comfortable we get)—the evening back in Library 205, the Co-Lab, where librarian Kyle Morgan will tell us about "Digital Humanities," partly as a "thing" (or, if you like, the Next Big Thing, which is how it has been hyped for the past decade or so), but also as a thing that may very well change how you conceive, execute, and disseminate research at the graduate level and beyond. I don't really think of DH as a research "method," or even as a loose aggregation of methods, which is one reason I didn't assign Griffin's chapter on DH to anyone. (The other reason: it's hopelessly outdated.) But certainly digital technologies have already changed how we carry out many different kinds of traditional research. If I decide to assign any reading by way of introduction to Kyle's presentation, I'll let you know.

We'll also hear brief reports about the journals you reviewed as part of the assignment you'll be handing in, and we'll move on to database reviews, probably as an in-class workshop exercise. I'll have your Research Proposal/Feasibility Studies (with feedback) in your department mailboxes by Friday afternoon. And you'll hear from me about your chapter presentations over the weekend. Feel free to drop in and see me with any concerns about how things are going for you in Engl 600 or in the program generally. Or drop in and see me about nothing at all; a plain old social call is always welcome!

For Tuesday, September 27 (Week 6):

Great to hear about the early--or, in or some cases, intermediate--stages of your research last night. I'm looking forward to spending time with the write-ups. If, as you continue thinking about next steps, you want to review those bullet points I was projecting last night, then you can find them here.

So, just to clarify: this coming week we'll return to our Harley-Davidson-enhanced classroom for reports of your research about, uh, various methods of research. (More detailed guidelines below.) Your journal reviews, meanwhile, will be due the following week, October 4th--not September 27th as per the syllabus. I'm still pondering the calendar for the weeks following.

One print source I mention in the Journal Review guidelines but didn't mention in class is Magazines for Libraries, a serial found in the Reference Section (REF Z6941 .M23).

Some other websites I blew by quickly:

Maia has recently passed along several links reminding us that we don't only have to content ourselves with mourning the death of Aaron Swartz (see last week's update) or wringing our hands about the corporatization of the public university and the commoditization of public-funded research. We specialize in rhetoric, after all; we can make arguments and raise alarms. E.g.:

And we can fight for Open Access databases and Creative Commons licensing. (When we're not busy prepping presentations, writing papers, and studying for degrees, that is.)

Other links:

  • Institutional Review Board (IRB). Note paragraph 2, which emphasizes that if your research "includes humans or data on humans in any way," it will need IRB approval. That's a pretty broad mandate. If IRB requirements and procedures aren't clear from the website and you'd like me to arrange a visit to our class by a member of the board, let me know.
  • Library Skillshop Calendar. If you learn better by hearing things from a human (rather than following an online guide), then know that there's a Zotero workshop at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, October 4th--and another devoted to Mendeley (a somewhat more specialized citation-management program) at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, September 22d.
  • A resource I should have mentioned before now: the GradHacker blog at Inside Higher Ed. It's geared toward Ph. D students, but I'm sure y'all are welcome, too. (Pre-2014 posts are at GradHacker.org.)
  • Finally: like Lakoff & Johnson's ideas about metaphor but don't enjoy their turgid prose? (Get used to it: felicitous style, sadly, is not a hallmark of academic writing.) Try Roger Brown's Words and Things. Or a recent popularization of Lakoff & Johnson, James Geary's I Is An Other.

For Tuesday, September 20 (Week 5):

So now that you've heard some things about sources for advanced research in English, you're ready to embark upon the project whose spec sheet I laid on you today. Also on tap: brief oral versions of the work you'll be handing in.  Nothing riding on this, especially, and you'll be talking among friends. But we'll be doing this sort of thing periodically so that you can work on your ability to talk succinctly, articulately, and intelligently (but casually) about your work. The more you're able to "frame" your project in such a way as to make it intelligible to other people, the better you'll get at writing abstracts (for instance)—and the more proficient you'll become at shaping nebulous thoughts into clear aims and arguments.

In addition to the English-Studies-friendly databases you saw today, remember the other resources I mentioned, which may be helpful in preparing your feasibility study:

In two weeks' time, you'll be reporting on a research method that you will have, er, researched--primarily via a chapter from Gabriele Griffin. (I know: two balls in the air at once. You're all copping your best grad-student can-do attitudes, right?) I'll put your assigned chapters in your mailboxes so that you can get readin', but you should undertake to do at least a little bit of supplemental research on the topic, as well. Some further guidelines:

You're aiming for a presentation of no more than 20 minutes in length. 15 might be better. And you can think “book report” (“chapter report”?).  There’s certainly room for you to get critical, even beyond the questions I’ll ask you to address below.  But for the most part, the purpose of your presentation is informative.  And so, to the extent that you’re researching a research method so that we don’t have to, you’re mainly aiming to find an effective, efficient, compelling way of conveying information.

At a minimum, make sure your presentation gives an overview of your chapter, followed by a slightly more detailed summary of its contents, employing whatever principle(s) of selection and level(s) of detail seem necessary or appropriate to do it justice. If you've done additional research that supplements, complements, or corrects your chapter, tell us about that, too. It would be useful to give us a sense of your perspective on the chapter—your judgments, your take-away, your conclusions. And if the following types of questions (the list is not exhaustive) aren’t answered by the chapter itself, then try to work some answers into the "take-away" portion of your presentation:

  • How good of a “feel” does your chapter give you of what it would it mean to use X as a research method?  Your supplemental research? In what contexts and/or on what kinds of projects (or even specific projects) could you imagine using this research method?  (In other words, for what sorts of endeavors does this research method seem best suited?)
  • What are the biggest challenges—practical, philosophical, meta-cognitive—to using this research method, as you see it?  What are the advantages?
  • Assuming you have the time and opportunity: is there anyone on our faculty who might flesh out what you've learned with firsthand testimony about their own experience using this research method?
  • And are there examples of this method in action—articles you’ve been assigned in other courses, say—that employ it, that are clearly a product of it, or that benefit from it?  If so, could you conveniently cite (or even display) one or more of them?  (Anything else you could bring to the table or the computer screen—additional research, hearsay, conversation—by way of illustration, amplification or enhancement?)
  • What questions are you left with?  What do you feel you would still have to understand better before undertaking research using this method yourself?

Finally: just how much does information want to be free?

 

For Tuesday, September 13 (Week 4):

Thanks for running that marathon tonight. You went the distance fully engaged, and you had some smart questions, to boot.

Next week we meet in Library 205. Bring your laptops, notebooks, tablets. Marissa Mourer will be helping to (re-?)introduce you to print and electronic resources for advanced research in English Studies.

Give Griffin's Introduction to Research Methods in English Studies (Course Reader, Week 4) the once-over when you can; it's meant to serve as background to an assignment I may introduce as early as next week.

If you want to go old-school: Linguist-L | WPA-L

For Tuesday, September 6 (Week 3):

So: read chapters 1, 2, and 6 in McComiskey (on Linguistics & Discourse Analysis, Rhetoric and Composition, and English Ed, respectively) and prep some smart, probing, and/or provocative questions for our guests, Suzanne Scott, Lisa Tremain, and Nikola Hobbel. The general idea is that they will discuss a) Now vs. Then--"Then" being a decade or so ago, when the assigned chapters were written, and b) how the local picture in their field stacks up against the discipline-wide picture painted by Ellen Barton, Janice Lauer, or Scott Yagelski's representations. But I'm also giving our guests an open hand, and you're free to pose any other relevant question you can think of, too.

Oh--and Happy Labor Day! If you're feeling like you don't have enough work to do already, then see the articles by Jacqueline Rhodes & Jonathan Alexander and Jean Ferguson Carr in the online reader (Week 3). They can stand as supplements and/or correctives to Janice Lauer's chapter on Composition Studies. (I've only dipped my toes in Carr's piece, but I think it may well be a "must-read.")

Finally, some feedback on those interviews I had you do:

I gave you very little idea as to what would constitute successful completion of this strange little assignment, and in a way, that was part of the point: to see what you’d do, left to your own devices, on your own initiative, with minimal direction.

Obviously you faced questions of appropriate tone, style, and presentation--questions which were obviated, to some extent, by the very casual procedure we wound up adopting for the oral reports.  (Don't worry: you'll have plenty more opportunities to experiment with honing your “grad student” voice.)  

As for structure: I think a safe assumption for an assignment like this is that while it’s somewhat journalistic in nature, nevertheless a report is usually less interesting if it consists only of unfiltered “reportage” (or, in this case, a raw transcript of the interview). It's likely to be more interesting if you give it a frame, a structure, and a point of view of your own. 

Think of it this way. This type of reporting involves two skills you use all the time in academic writing: summary and paraphrase.  And summaries and paraphrases can be more or less artful.  But relating a conversation is also like incorporating a quotation into your own prose.  You want it to be both accurate and judicious, obviously, but you also want the quote to fit seamlessly into the surrounding sentence structure.  More important: you want the quote to serve your purposes.  It’s not enough just to plop it down on its own and imagine that it will speak for itself; you’ve got to “sandwich” it: set it up, contextualize it, interpret it.  You use the quote as part of the connective tissue holding together the ideas you mean to convey.

Still: given my minimal guidelines, I wouldn’t fault anyone for taking a minimalist approach. If you related, in a more or less “blow by blow” fashion, what you asked and how your interlocutor replied…well…that’s okay; you delivered what was requested.  If I were grading it--and I'm not (this was mainly an informational exercise)--then as long as your prose was reasonably solid in terms of style & mechanics, I would probably give it something in the “B” range.  (Remember Moore & Miller saying how in grad school, we’re more likely to expect “flawless” prose from you?  Noticeable surface errors and/or issues with style or diction might take it down to a low or middling B…)

If you gave more thought to selecting, arranging, and “spinning” the information you gathered; if your report was a kind of story, with a structure and a theme and an introduction and a point of view, then impressed with your initiative, I'd probably go higher.

Never mind imaginary grades, though. From what I heard and read, I'd say these were valuable chats--and that's the main thing!

For Tuesday, August 30 (Week 2): Historicizing English

What--a 65-page overview of the history of English Studies and two additional assigned readings aren't enough to keep you busy? You had to check in to see if there was more? You are so diligent!

(Seriously, though: you guys seem like a great cohort. I like you, and I'm looking forward to working with you.)

Anyway, yes: I can confirm that we'll read McComiskey's Introduction, as well as Chapter 5 of his edited anthology. Mary Ann Creadon will be appearing in the role of Local Representative of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies (I'll serve as her understudy), and she will take your questions--and possibly have a few remarks of her own. She may or may not have reviewed the chapter in question recently, but regardless, the onus is on you to frame your questions in such a way that she needn't have. (E.g., "In the course of arguing x, Elias asserts y; do you find anything problematic about that?" Or: "McComiskey charged the contributors of his volume with the mission of doing x; do you think Elias's proposal to do y is a satisfactory response?" Etc.)

McComiskey's bibliography is fairly thorough, and for those of you who really want to delve more deeply into the dirty disciplinary laundry, I would especially recommend the titles by Ohmann and Scholes that made it onto his "Works Cited" list, as well as two other books, one by Chris Baldick and another by Gauri Viswanathan, that didn't. Ask me for details, or show some of that grad-student initiative everyone's talking about and track them down on your own.

As your Yours Truly: I will assay the role of Native Informant of Literary Study and Literary Criticism. And yes: I've decided that our touchstone text will be Terry Eagleton's justly famous, much-anthologized, wise-cracking, name-dropping, 36-page historical survey of the ideology of literary study, which you can find here:

Terry Eagleton, "The Rise of English." Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 17-53.

I'd like to add to that the last few pages of his "Conclusion: Political Criticism." (Right before the excerpt begins, Eagleton has concluded that what we should be studying in English is not just literature, but a whole range of "discursive practices" or "signifying practices" or even "culture"--whatever one finally calls it "it not of first importance.")

In other news: if you haven't already had your fill of doom-and-gloom, here are a couple more sources. (You'll soon discover that there's no end of hand-wringing in academe!):

  • First, a piece from the ultra-hip journal Jacobin by Lennard Davis and Walter Benn Michaels on why faculty at the University of Illinois-Chicago mounted a two-day strike in February 2014. It had to do, in part, with what they saw as the ugly future to which their composition faculty were being consigned:

    So what exactly does it mean to insist on the importance of the first year experience and then pay the people most responsible for that experience a wage that virtually requires them to work a second job? What does it mean to claim you want to reward the best and the hardest working when you not only won’t promote them, but you won’t even provide a position they could in theory be promoted to?

  • And then there's something William Deresciewicz referred to: "Thomas Benton's" now-famous (notorious?) series of columns for the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The centerpiece was a rant entitled "The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'". Benton's pieces inspired a storm of comments, consternation, and rejoinders, both on the Chron's site and across the blogosphere. One--not a counterpoint, exactly, but what one commenter calls a "sane response" to Benton's "fevered columns"--is James Mulholland's "Neither a Trap Nor a Lie." Here's a taste:

    There are many ways to pursue intellectualism in and out of academe. I think of the life of the mind as the union of intellectual labor and professional success that, at its best, allows academics to explore ideas and still be supported financially...I do not intend to diminish the emotional and economic severity of the job market, of graduate-student debt, of adjunct teaching...or the host of other forces that conspire to destroy academic lives. Instead, I want to suggest that we should not discount the possibility that our students desire to live a life that involves academic ideals and intellectual study, despite all of the impediments.

Moore & Miller admonish you to always keep thinking about extra-academic job options--what Brian Croxall, in his "Open Letter to New Graduate Students," refers to as "alt-ac" (para-academic or quasi-academic) job options. "Alt-ac" is a hashtag originally associated with Bethany Nowviskie of the University of Virginia, and I'll invite you to pursue the trail I followed to learn more about the topic:

Finally, some (more) links. Just FYI. 'Cause that's what I do.

More on professionalizing in grad school and beyond:

An essential reference source (find others on the course "General Reference" page):

Grad-student survival strategy:

And some smart, public-intellectual-type, leisure reading designed to help you waste many, many hours that you really don't have available to waste:

  • Michael Bérubé's defunct blog (at least he's no longer adding new content!)

 
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