I am kingpin and so can you. Academics are like drug gangs

This piece, "Academe as a Drug Gang", is getting a lot of play … like being republished on Slate. It was posted on Inside Higher Ed by Scott Jaschik and builds on a blog post by Alexandre Afonso, here. It's a basic line of argument you hear pretty often in various forms, that young scholars will endure impossible hours, wretched pay and low odds of success for the potential payoff down the road if you do make it. Certainly the risks and rewards are virtually identical to those of large-scale organized drug dealing.

As the ruthless kingpin of a mighty cartel dealing straight, uncut truth on street corners all around Wisconsin and rapidly expanding beyond, I can only say 'yup, you got me pegged'. It's not all a bowl of cherries, though, even at the top of the food chain. Had a little problem with the distribution network and it looks like we have some entry-level openings to move some product, in fact, new batch with the street name Phonetic Enhancement. But we're offing the whole effin' crew that hit our people, some gang goes by 'Dispersion Theory' or something. Beyond that, I'm running out of things to do with my cash. I mean, how many Caribbean islands am I supposed to own? It's not easy. Like my role model, Scarface, said way back when: I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

Seriously, the commenters on Inside Higher Ed in particular have nailed the key points already: Getting a PhD is about much more than ending up with tenure or any academic job; the pool of brilliant young PhDs (and grad students) is hardly expanding dramatically, etc., etc., etc.

Don't get me wrong … I get the joke and love the snark. But you gotta have some caveats for the uninitiated … some young person out there is reading this stuff and thinking that they should get an MBA instead of a PhD in some social science.

PhD challenge 2011!

For the academic readers of this blog, the website phdchallenge.org should be a well-worn bookmark. Here's the deal:

The idea of the PhD Challenge is to have students perform some task that the average graduate student is too timid to perform. It takes a unique caliber of student to overcome adversity and the ire of their adviser in order to complete this challenge.

Well, maybe YOUR adviser. Here is this year's challenge. The basics:

The goal of this year’s challenge is to get one of the nicknames “Dirty Old Man” or “Crazy Cat Lady” included in the byline for at least one author of a final, camera-ready version of a peer-reviewed academic paper. As an example, an eligible submission could contain the authors John “Dirty Old Man” Smith and/or Jane “Crazy Cat Lady” Smith. The target nickname must appear in the front matter of a paper that is at least three pages long and is published in the proceedings or journal of an English-speaking academic organization. See the contest rules for additional information and conference requirements, or refer to the FAQ for additional examples.

Now sure, you could 'win' this 'challenge'. But them's small potatoes. For this, you could become an academic legend for generations to come. To the doctoral students of Team Verb: We would be sooooo proud. And while we're at it, bonus points for John "Crazy Cat Lady" Smith and/or Jane "Dirty Old Man" Smith.

Image is one of a gazillion of the Simpson's character. Opted against the lolcat 'crazy cat lady starter kit' images.

Caveat Emptor: Buying term papers

Spam aimed at academic blogs have been talked about (like here), and blog spam is just a fact of life. Along the way, it's often noted that email and web scams tend to be easily recognized by bad grammar and spelling. It's kind of hilarious when the you get blog spam/web scams where those problems are directly relevant to the service being pushed.

Blogger is actually remarkably good at preventing much of this stuff reaching this blog, but other services aren't, including one I deal with for a website connected to my work (i.e., not linguistics).  Along with the cheap pharmaceuticals and on-line casinos, I've just deleted from that website a whole set advertising (or claiming to advertise – who knows what level of scam they are plying) services that write research papers for sale.* Look at these two samples (from different messages) and ask yourself whether the stupidest undergrad you've ever met would try to buy from these guys:

This is indisputable that the distinguished buy research paper service would compose the smashing essay writer paper for persons which do not have writing skills. It will be the most simple way for such people, I do guess!

I was doing a bit of research looking at some other custom essay service. and this is the fifth link to the search essay about this topic as relayed by Google… so you are conforming that you are administer a free service for them and amplify their traffic. So if you morally support this then you should take the money but if your opinion has carry at all and you’re against it then you should apparently efface them. But it’s still yours to clinch.

You really want to buy an essay written like that! It is indisputable that I do not know students which do not have smashing writing skills, I do guess.

* Isn't this cheating? An answer to that question is given the proverbial college try here, the same site the image is from. I wonder if anybody has ever used the products "as intended"?

An old friend returns: Sifting and Winnowing is back

I haven't said much about university matters here at UW lately, but there's a ton going on. Happily, the blog Sifting and Winnowing is back up and running, here. The current posts are about the critical issue of the proposed restructuring of the Graduate School, an important part of our traditional success here in Wisconsin. If you're at UW–Madison, you should read these posts.

Scholarly communication: Listservs, blogs and who knows what all

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Young has a nice piece called:

COLLEGE 2.0
Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance

It's behind a paywall (click here if you have access), so here's the opening paragraph:

Once they were hosts to lively discussions about academic style and substance, but the time of scholarly e-mail lists has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook.

Let's start from the history. Now, I know all you young kids have only heard the stories of such halcyon days of yore, if I may use an expression common back in those times. As an early subscriber to LINGUIST, H-Net networks (for historians) and other lists, I recall it being pretty different. First, there was the issue of whether these were valuable tools or a massive waste of time since only print stuff (books, articles) counts, etc. But there was a heyday of a few years where discussion really bubbled. You could post a query to LINGUIST asking for examples of some linguistic phenomenon and quickly get a set of detailed responses (on or off the list), often from the leading specialists in the world. You could also get flamed publicly by jerks, famous or not, and those flames of course could be dead wrong.

What's happened? Well, as the article goes on to argue, specifically with LINGUIST and H-Net as examples, these folks have developed clearly defined roles in their communities. For H-Net it's the book reviews and LINGUIST is really one-stop shopping for information on languages and linguistics. Young describes LINGUIST as possibly "the largest single academic mailing list out there". Go linguists, go LINGUIST!

What gets me here is the either/or mindset of the title (and the image above) … when we get a new tool, like fMRI, it's kinda dumb to abandon all previous tools for that one. We're doing with scholarly communication what we do with our technical resources: We try to find the places they're most useful for and deploy them there.

Blogs seem better than lists for rambling thoughts and screeds, so in some sense may represent an evolution of flaming. But they are not a replacement for scholarly publishing, surely, although at least one local academic blogger is apparently arguing that line. You gotta use all the tools that make sense. Where does it stop making sense? The line for me falls just before Twitter: Over thousands of years, we've developed easier, quicker ways to record and transmit information. Clay tablets and parchments were pretty slow and expensive, printing on paper quicker and cheaper, and electronic communication even slicker. We can say as much as we need (or want, sadly) and get it out instantly.

But Twitter? From Young's piece again:

"In the last month, i unsubscribed from 4 academic lists," wrote David Silver, a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, abbreviating his comment to stay within Twitter's 140-character limit on all messages. "Thru other means, mostly Twitter, don't feel like i'm missing much."

"I find that I almost hate e-mail now," wrote Kimberly Gibson, an instructional designer at Our Lady of the Lake University. "It feels so slow and outdated. Thus, I'm not really reading my scholarly lists anymore."

Can you really get the info you need from 140-character chunks? That's the equivalent of a whispered comment to your neighbor at a conference talk, not scholarly discussion. Beyond chit-chat, that might make for art or humor, but to abandon lists for this? Are these folks who've also abandoned reading stuff printed on 'paper'? I know I'm missing something here, but not sure what.

Image from here, with interesting and relevant discussion of this issue from a non-academic perspective.

Furloughs, language and politics

State workers in Wisconsin are pretty upset about getting 16 days of furlough over the next two years, including University of Wisconsin employees.

First, to the politics. Of course this is all the rage as a budget cutting measure. Among the major institutions passing out the furloughs are the University of Maryland, Arizona State, Clemson, Utah State, while other states (Illinois, I gather) have simply 'rescinded' big chunks of their universities' budgets. For most people at a university, a furlough is simply a temporary pay cut: We can't or won't actually work less. Some proposed steps, like actually closing offices on the Friday after Thanksgiving, are utterly without consequence — that's a day I work at home anyway, for example.

In some ways, I'd rather take a small pay cut than lose more faculty and staff, but there are massive problems with applying this to everyone at the university. A tremendous amount of the core work at UW-Madison is done by academic staff, from instructional people to very high level administrators. If you furlough them across the board, though, you need to consider their funding:

That is, core state funding (GPR) is less than a quarter of their pay, while most of it comes from grants and gifts. Politically, the deal is that many want "everybody to share the pain" but it's pretty stupid for non-state-paid people to share it. Why not then have the captains of industry be furloughed and take that money? Of course the federal grant funds that are paying about a quarter of academic staff funds cannot be hijacked here. This might be a good time to remind our elected leaders that less than 20% of our budget comes from the state. In fact, the latest word from the UW-System says (emphasis added):

Facing a combination of budget cuts, employee furloughs, and canceled pay plans, the UW System will contribute at least $211 million in GPR savings to help close the State’s budget gap – equal to 9.2% of taxpayer support for the public university. The UW System will be required to contribute an additional $34.6 million in revenues from other sources to address the growing State funding shortfall.

This is not good. The Department of Corrections, it's being said, may furlough employees and then pay overtime to cover the shifts. Brilliant.

Second, to language. Furlough is one of the surprisingly large number of Dutch loanwords in English, from verlof. The semantic development is an interesting one, though. It was and is widely used as a specifically military term for 'leave', so a positive thing. Judging from OED Online, it was extended to any kind of leave from work long ago. Merriam-Webster gives the verb with one meaning of 'to lay off from work', but without any chronological information. It's got that old euphemistic feeling to it — though hardly as bad as 'enhanced interrogation' for 'torture'. Any idea how old that meaning is?

UW budget news

Well, Mr. V is back on language topics, so I can toss in the latest on the budget situation in Wisconsin: UW has started a website, here, for updates. There's nothing new there that I can tell, but as a colleague said, this puts it all together in one place. More importantly, this is a place to check for news. Biddy Martin has pretty clearly been working to improve the flow of information and this looks like a part of that effort.

State worker morale fatally wounded, and the Madison Initiative passes

Language? Yeah, I guess we used to do language around here, back before the University furloughed all those who aren't lucky enough to be retired like I am.

For non-UW readers, we heard yesterday that state workers can expect to be furloughed for 8 working days per year for the next two years. Of course faculty won't start canceling classes or anything, so it's just a temporary pay cut. It doesn't seem like it'll save that much money with a ca. 7 billion dollar deficit (on a ca. 20 billion budget!), so that as a still-active colleague quipped yesterday, the most likely concrete effect will be to kill all morale among all state workers. Oh, and they revoked the promised 2% pay increase too!

But everybody with a wisc.edu account has been flooded today with announcements that the Madison Initiative passed the Board of Regents (and see here for a local news take). The lone dissent was a student member of the Board, who …

wondered if the initiative was nothing more than a short-term fix for long-term funding problems that are dogging higher education.

Well, yeah. It's not going to fix the real problems and everybody knows that. This shows something pretty remarkable though: After years of a really ineffective chancellor, we have somebody in that office now with the brains and energy to make something happen. Biddy Martin is still probably figuring out the layout of Bascom Hall and she's made a real impact on things. That gives us some hope that we'll win some coming battles.

In the meantime, I'm ready for a beer.

Tuition and need-based aid

The Stranded Preposition made, as SP is wont to do, a very nice point about yesterday's post, specifically the graphic ...

One question, any chance of showing the same graphic with the cost of tuition next to the financial aid?

Well, I've just dumped the numbers into Excel — yesterday's on need-based aid plus tuition from here. I adjusted the scale (total aid in 1,000s but tuition in full numbers). There are four relevant tuition rates, undergrad and grad and resident and non-resident.

Click on image to see a view that you can make sense of. And if you prefer the numbers:

Basically, we're a little lower than anybody but Iowa for in-state undergrad, in the middle of the pack for in-state grad, and fourth highest in out-of-state grad, but ridiculously behind in aid. The cost of non-resident grad tuition is a huge problem, for reasons that have to wait for another post.

I'm in a hurry right now and haven't had time to ponder these, but hope this might promote a little discussion. I really want to understand this issue and all of us involved in higher education need to.

The Madison Initiative

I've been sweating what to make of the Madison Initiative for a long time, and not making much progress. This is, in the briefest and most simplistic of terms, the chancellor's proposal to up tuition significantly on those from better-off families and put the money toward need-based financial aid and increasing access to high-demand courses. It's hard to oppose those two things, but it's not without real problems. My strong sense is that any barriers to higher education for talented people are bad and having to jump through the hoops of getting financial aid is a barrier.

One local blogger at The Education Optimist has tackled this with gusto and if you care about the issue, I urge you to read her posts. Media coverage has been until very recently entirely one-sided and I'm glad to have this side of the issue articulated so clearly by Sara Goldrick-Rab, but it doesn't really resolve things for me.* She's provided evidence for the core concern I noted above, but the current situation with regard to need-based financial aid is unspeakably bad — a disgrace to this university, as the graphic shows. Faculty and staff are contributing now to a big campaign for need-based aid but even a real success there won't be more than a drop in the bucket.

The only real answer, it seems clear, is massive increases in public support for higher education. In a sense, this initiative might be one shot at keeping the place from collapsing until we can address the fundamental issues. And we have to do that.

*I should mention that I'm in close agreement with her on any number of other issues, like this, and have now started reading that blog regularly.

Graduate education: Worth more than many people know

Why, Mark C. Taylor, Chairman of Religion at Columbia, why? Didn't we offer you a free subscription to Mr. Verb?* You clearly haven't been reading our stuff.

Yet you go and publish this piece in the NYT as a guest editorial, called boldly:

"End the University as We Know It"

…and starting with this unfortunate bit:

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost … .

Unlike Detroit, grad education is not being subsidized to hell and back. Grad education is being starved as university budgets have been slashed time and again.

Yet we're producing the best product out there: Most Americans, let alone people outside the US, won't buy a Pontiac (oh, what? Oops, make that Ford), but the whole world will kill for the chance to get a higher degree from a major American institution.

And from reading your piece, I don't doubt that you're preparing your students to do nothing more than write obscure stuff that nobody will read. But that's hardly the state of the art, at least not here in Wisconsin. And the putative lack of demand might exist in religion, but don't confuse a few areas with the whole university.

But I do kinda like the idea of getting rid of traditional departments, and replacing them with units called Earth, Wind and Fire, or whatever it was. Oh, wait, here it is:

zones of inquiry … [like] Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Linguistics would go under everything but Water, I think, so it doesn't help us. Mind is a natural home, but better than Information? Presumably we have a big role in Language too. Seriously, this has some promise.

* OK, so maybe we didn't. But it's a blog, and it's completely free.

Image from here.

Two depressing notes on academe

If you're not a member of the AAUP, you probably haven't yet seen the full annual report on the "economic status of the profession", this year appropriately called "On the brink". If so, it's worth a look and available here. The good news, I suppose, is that it sees us as on the brink and not a step beyond it. If the policies and stimulus money from Washington start us on the path to overcoming the miseries of recent years, this report will mark the nadir. Let's hope so.

Depressing for a whole different reason is this Wall Street Journal piece, "So you wan to be a professor?". Let me just know one absurdity in the piece: There's an apparent assumption in the piece that grad enrollments should be dropping because PhDs in areas like English can't expect tenure-track jobs. Certainly tenure-track positions are tough to come by. But when are people going to stop thinking that the only value of getting a PhD, even in English literature, is to become a professor?

Sigh.

Image from here.

Not everybody's looking forward to the beginning of the school year …

Just check out CrankyLitProf if you want to confirm that some people have a bleaker attitude than you do. Or at least write blogs from that narrative voice, or whatever lit profs call that kind of thing. I wouldn't know. I particularly enjoyed, in some sick way, "In which my ulcer begins to churn out acid."

More generally, I hadn't realized how developed the whole 'cranky prof' meme has gotten to be, like here.

Makes me feel like Mr. Happy by comparison. Man, am I looking forward to the start of a new academic year!

The Chronicle: "An End to Foreign Languages, an End to the Liberal Arts"

Behind a pay wall, the Chronicle of Higher Education has an article now by Will Corrall and Daphne Patai. Here's the opening:

Is foreign-language teaching at the college level simply a numbers game? Put another way, should administrators follow the feet of students as they make their wishes known by the courses they choose? Sure, if universities conceive of themselves as trade schools preparing their students for employment. If that is really the aim, administrators could and perhaps will cut history courses, art, English, creative writing, music, philosophy, and much else.

Which would leave what, precisely? Business, computer science, engineering, the hard sciences, and maybe a smattering of world culture to help hard-nosed employees of the future avoid making gaffes on their international jaunts. The business model is the larger context for understanding the recent closure of the German department at the private University of Southern California and the proposal to end German at the public Humboldt State University.

This all sounds familiar so far, but it turns into a plea for returning to teaching the literary canon:

We used to study great writers; now we study identity-based texts chosen solely because of their ethnic, racial, or other identity.

Really? I know a fair number of literature people, including in language departments, and I don't know if I've ever heard any of this. I guess there are individuals who solely choose the authors they work on based on identity, but Shakespeare and Proust and Brecht don't seem like they're gone from offerings. Or is Wisconsin just behind the curve?

I fear this part may be truer:

We can hardly recall the last time we met a colleague in a language-and-literature department who actually believed it made a difference for students to read fiction, poetry, and drama.

Now THAT will kill your program and I do see this attitude regularly. I talk regularly to a lot of historians, linguists and literature people, to give three examples. The historians and linguists I know love what they do and it takes nothing to get them yakking away excitedly about some project they're doing or something they've just taught or run across somewhere. Almost all of the lit people stand out for precisely that lack of engagement. Reading only the authors included in some national canon surely contributed to that lethargy and returning to it won't solve the problem.

The MLA report (see here) provides a much smarter and more viable path to turning around the decline of language study.

UW news: all minor

The big announcement on the new UW-Madison chancellor should be coming down soon, maybe today, but in the meantime, here's other UW news:

• The scariest of the chancellor finalists, Tim Mulcahy, has withdrawn.
• The CapTimes has a story on UW brain drain, focusing on superstar Law prof Alta Charo (hey, she's been on CNN roughly a zillion times), who turned down a 45K raise at Berkeley to stay here.
• The proposal is floating again for 'differential tuition', namely for big school-specific increases in the School of Engineering.
• There's another political blog, Fearless Sifting, covering UW. Looks like a promising start, although many readers of this blog will disagree with the views found there. The poll for who should be the next chancellor was there yesterday but gone now. (Blank was leading and Sandefur had almost no votes, fwiw.) Check it out.
  

Bringing the Two Cultures together

Oh boy, Science Times Tuesday. I admit, I like it best when they don't have linguistics stuff, given how often they don't get that stuff right, but I always look forward to it, even with occasional disappointments.

This morning, Natalie Angier has a piece called "Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science." Here's a key quote:

a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems.

Really? Do tell. Wait, this idea sounds familiar.

First, a note on the history of ideas. The NYT piece draws on C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" riff. He was both a physicist and a novelist, so had a foot in both worlds in some sense, as he notes at the beginning. But don't assume he was always so lovey-dovey with lit guys — the book isn't a kumbaya moment. His chapter "Intellectuals as Natural Luddites" is aimed in no small part at literary scholars. And a lot is aimed at the disconnect between academia and the real world, like the wealth and power produced by the industrial revolution.

Where were we? Oh yeah, how this sounds familiar. I've got it: Linguistics does this. I know a whole set of linguists who move freely between reading texts in dead languages and working in the phonetics lab. Most linguists have some good part of the math/logic/stat background the article portrays as desirable, are comfortable with discussions of ethnography and such since we do so much fieldwork, and we count as 'humanities' at lots of major institutions.

Another reason linguistics really should be at the center of the world.

Simpsons academics

A tailgating party just turned into a riot over this insult on the Simpsons, yelled by football fans at fans from a rival school:

Your tenure track is highly politicized.

Whoa. Do they understand EVERYthing?

A little context on department closings

There's been quite a bit of buzz on email about the closing of USC's German Department, described in the last post. It's worth stressing how broad the trend here is — covering at least all arts and humanities and circling the globe. This post from Evolving Thoughts on "The decline of the humanities" says much the same thing I hear from language department colleagues in the U.S., but it comes from a philosopher in Australia.