No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service

I’ve worked as a foot messenger (back before faxes and email rendered them obsolete)

sorry, read that as foot massager. wasted 15 seconds trying to make the aside make sense. could/should have been working.

and yeah, whut u sed re: committee work.

Thanks for the link. That was very nice of you. Also, do you have a link handy for something you wrote, way back when, on your blog: a piece explaining your in-laws’ incredulity that what you do, reading books and whatnot, is actually your work? I was looking for that post earlier today but couldn’t find it. Of course, I’m inept. So my not being able to find it doesn’t mean much.

Awesome. Thanks. I really love that piece and cite it all the time to prospective graduate students, as I try to explain the complicated nature of what it is that we do and how what we do is perceived by friends and loved ones.

… you’ll soon find that you have many hours of free time every week, and you may not know what to do with yourself.

You’re being unfair, don’t forget Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.

Hyperbole in defense of erudition is no virtue, litotes in defense of fairness is no vice.

I think Dr. Berube’s post left off one very major component of academic work that consumes a lot time. I do not know about other institutions, but where I work we have to write a lot of letters of recommendation for students. I am currently writing one right now.

“one very major component of academic work…where I work we have to write a lot of letters of recommendation for students”

Unless it is hundreds of letters you are spending too much time on them.

I think it is hard to generalize on these matters – I’ve encountered both incredibly lazy and incredibly busy professors. And from a student’s perspective the lazier ones could be just as good as or even better than the busy ones, if they were really gifted and cared about their subject and imparting their knowledge to the students. The good teachers tended to be either young assistant professors who put a lot of time into their classes and could connect well with the students because of the proximity in age or older professors who were so brilliant and well-read (ok, they must have been quite busy at an earlier point in their career doing all that reading) that they could effortlessly turn a bog-standard course into something inspiring and almost magical. The worst seemed to be those who were so busy furthering their careers, that teaching and thinking deeply about the subject matter itself appeared to be almost a negligible duty to them.

I think there’s few things more tiresome than people bitching about how hard they work. Especially academics. Unless you’re a coal miner, shut the fuck up.

Is it really worth sweating all those months getting that manuscript in order– which upon publication will sell only a few hundred copies– just to boost your annual raise a few hundred dollars?

This is the first time I’ve ever heard a conservative academic come out against research and writing in principle. Usually the claim is that professors don’t really do any research but just hang around chatting. Or that the research that they do is all wrong and boring and jargony and obvious.

I have known the stereotypical lazy professors, though. They had seniority and rank and taught the same few classes every year. The ones who really hated them (more than the students and the taxpayers did, but secretly, because the drones ran the place) were the junior and very junior faculty. This may happen more at lower-ranking schools.

Keith missed out another feature of our job that most other jobs lack — control over our time. I suspect I do work 50 hours at least some weeks, but I choose when those 50 hours are, and usually I work less than that.

A friend of mine who became a dean for a while said that being an academic at a research university is among the 2 or 3 best jobs in the world (he compared it, wrongly in my opinion, with being a rock star, which I’ve always regarded as one of the drearier of well paid jobs). His contrast was with being a dean, which doesn’t even get into the top 20.

And it is true that a lot of our job is self-generated. Much of what we (in the humanities) write will not be read. Susan Haack (complaining about philosophy in particular) has a nice comment in one of her essays, that whereas at one time people would spend 10 years writing a really good and important book that just might get read for a long time, now they write a book in 2 years, which has a similar shelf life. And Keith is right that, absent teaching (understood broadly, though) the idea that our jobs are socially productive is laughable.

So, no complaints from me. But its worth seeing the structure of the game. Anyone who is reasonably smart can go to Law School knowing they’ll become a lawyer and earn a good salary (doing a boring job). It is not a high-risk strategy (if you come from a comfortable background). Go to grad school in the humanities and you endure years of low pay, no status at all, with a very uncertain pay-off — the chances that you’ll luck into a job like mine (good salary, good working conditions, considerable status) are not that high, and are very much about luck (much as we would like to think it is merit, it ain’t — I started out with 2-2 job in a research university only because someone else turned the particular job down before it was offered to me — otherwise I’d have had a 3-3 job in a place which would have offered me far fewer early career opportunities). Looking at tenured humanities professors in research universities is like looking at premier league soccer players, and judging the whole profession by them.

Is someone bitching about how hard they work, Keith? If so, you have my permission to go and make them shut the fuck up. Don’t be gentle.

Isn’t bitching about how hard someone else doesn’t work a similar species of shithead? If so, can I mess those dudes up, too? Perhaps I will write a snide comment on a blog about them.

I have known the stereotypical lazy professors, though. They had seniority and rank and taught the same few classes every year.

Well, it depends on the subject matter but in general I don’t see anything wrong with that, as long as the courses taught are really good. If someone is capable of holding a good seminar on, say, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which would entail being able to disentangle the mammoth sentences therein so that his students really understand what is being said there, to put the work into the context of the discussions of the time and to relate it to his later work – I’d say that’s a rare and a good thing and I don’t see why students shouldn’t get the opportunity to participate in such a class every year. The fact that the professor after a few years might be able to teach such a course without too much effort on his part, because he’s become really good at doing it, seems entirely irrelevant if his students are profiting from it.

Keith, have you got a link or other evidence (apart from you own personal anecdotes) that “the majority of academics perversely resent” teaching?

How is one supposed to quantify that objectively, it can only ever be anecdotal evidence. That said, it seems to me that a non-negligible percentage of professors resent teaching or are just not very good at it. This might have to do with the fact that having pedagogical talent is generally not a very important factor in the academic selection process.

I can’t disagree with you, in general, novakant, but to make the assertion that a “majority perversely resent” teaching, without any evidence at all, is, I dunno, meaningless. No doubt some teachers hate teaching, and lots of other people with good jobs are unhappy in them as well. The academic selection process is certainly odd, but, anecdotally, I can say I mostly see teachers who care a lot about teaching, and many who are quite good at it. The bitter pills (like Bauerlien appears to be) just demand a lot of attention.

Keith:

It really does seem to me that you missed Michael’s basic point here. It’s not “We work so hard, pity us, we suffer”. It’s “Bauerlein is both lying about the professorial work ethic and he’s making an incoherent claim about the production of knowledge that flatly contradicts his previous complaints about what he’d like to see in the humanities.” Part of that critical reply to Bauerlein requires describing the actual labor that faculty do: I don’t see how Michael can do otherwise.

There’s nothing more refreshing in the morning than to watch another episode of faculty smackdown and bask in the joy that my guy won!

Bizarrely, some of the service work continues even when you do not, in fact, *have an academic job*. I still write reference letters for former students. I still occasionally read and comment on their work. I still occasionally reply to emails asking me for reading lists.

I suppose strictly speaking I don’t “have” to do it. After all, the students don’t have any leverage over me if I don’t. So therefore I suppose the logic is that it’s “not work.”

It is, however, professionalism.

Even the more common four course load per semester involves a 12 work week, right? Something tells me that the torch-lit mob seeking to rout out what they see as the academic equivalent of welfare mothers aren’t going to be satisfied with 6 additional hours of classroom time.

Thanks for this, not bizarro-MB. I know I always quote this in this context, but here’s Zizek:

“On the rare occasions when, owing to various kinds of social obligations, I cannot avoid meeting my relatives who have nothing to do with Lacanian theory (or with theory in general), sooner or later the conversation always takes the same unpleasant turn: with barely concealed hostility and envy lurking beneath a polite surface, they ask me how much I earn by my writing and publishing abroad, and giving lectures around the world. Surprisingly, whichever answer I give sounds wrong to them: if I admit that I earn what, in their eyes, is a considerable sum of money, they consider it unjust that I earn so much for my empty philosophizing, while they, who are doing ‘real work,’ have to sweat for a much lesser reward; if I tell them a small sum, they assert, with deep satisfaction, that even this is too much–who needs my kind of philosophizing in these times of social crisis? Why should we spend taxpayers’ money on it? The underlying premise of their reasoning is that, to put it bluntly, whatever I earn, I earn too much–why? It is not only that they consider my kind of work useless: what one can discern beneath this official, public reproach is the envy of enjoyment. That is to say, it soon becomes obvious what really bothers them: the notion that I actually enjoy my work. They possess a vague intuition of how I find jouissance in what I do; which is why, in their eyes, money is never a proper equivalent for my work. No wonder, then, that what I earn always oscillates between the two extremes of ‘too little’ and ‘too much’: such an oscillation is an unmistakable sign that we are dealing with jouissance.” (Plague of Fantasies, 53-54)

The problem here is pleasure. Maybe since we like what we do, we’re not sacrificing anything to keep ourselves afloat in the world of work. This screws up the whole distinction between leisure and work, work-hard-to-play-hard, &c., and all the various stoical logics so beloved by conservatives. After all, what do I do when I’m not writing an article, prepping to teach, doing my committee work, and when I’m done running errands? I read; I write (on blogs); I talk about books and movies.

“That’s impossible.” He shrugged. “Okay, then, give me the names, the people heading it.”

“There aren’t any names. Nobody’s heading it.”

He left her standing there, mouth agape, and climbed into a taxi whose driver was from Kyrgyzstan and who told him how much he wished the Americans would come liberate his country and bring Democracy Whiskey Sexy and Cellphones.

Then he went to a dinner party attended by a bunch of liberal intellectuals, and when he told them he was a Bush supporter they spat on him and told him to get the hell out.

Can I call myself a journalist now?

And so far no one has even mentioned the students who want to trade sex for grades, but don’t even bother to consider that you might not want to have sex with them (or as far as that goes, anyone).

Coalminers and construction workers never have this problem. (Or not coalminers anyway. UPS drivers, yes — lots).

It’s kind of breathtaking–although not surprising, I suppose–just how badly you’ve missed Bauerlein’s point, Michael. The problem, I think, is that you’re just too close to the issue, and too personally invested, to see what he’s getting at. Perhaps I can help by presenting it from a greater remove…

“Damn sellouts”, says the talented-but-obscure jazz musician. “Instead of spending hours on end practicing, listening, jamming, living the music, they plunk out a bunch of mind-numbingly simple tunes, take the catchiest of them and hire a bunch of studio musicians to turn it into three minutes of ear candy, and make ten million dollars. And the worst of it is that instead of taking all that money and using it to create real music, they just invest it in their next ‘project’, which is inevitably every bit as empty and commercial as the previous one. What a colossal waste of effort!”

“What’s his problem?”, retorts the tunesmith. “First he complains that I’m not dedicated enough to my music, then he complains that I’m too dedicated to it. Well, let me tell you, I work as hard on my music as he does–probably even harder. It may look like a lot of fun and games, but there are personnel to be hired, tours to be managed, interminable lawyer meetings, creative meetings, financial meetings, advertising meetings–heck, I could produce ten times as many pop albums if it weren’t for all these damn meetings. Just thinking of all that missed airplay gets me so depressed I sometimes wonder why I even do it all. Then I hear one of my songs on the radio, and I feel much better.”

Does that help at all?

So Bauerlein is resentful he isn’t more famous? (He’s the “talented but obscure” one, right?) Now, the “tunesmith” is successful because he makes music people like. So likewise, humanities professors, despite all their committee work, are successful because .. . Wait, the bees are on the what now?

I think Karl is right that the issue in part is that academics are understood to find their work (however much there is of it) personally satisfying, and that they make essentially autonomous decisions in many academic workplaces about what they devote their time to and in what measure. Bauerlein, it seems to me, is increasingly drifting towards a view that this is the unforgiveable sin, that in the new service economy of the 21st Century it is not enough to work long hours. Virtuous labor also has to involve a loss of autonomy and a loss of pleasure, that any professional work which is not unpleasant and lacking in autonomy is intolerably elitist because those are not conditions that most white-collar workers enjoy.

Okay, I guess analogies are too tricky for this crowd…

It’s not a contradiction to say that on the one hand, academics in the humanities have cushy lives because they’re well paid to teach a small courseload and produce a bit of pointless crap they call “research”–and on the other hand, that they inexplicably choose to spend their copious free time churning out much more pointless crap than they need to. Nor does it matter that much of this extra work involves manning the bureaucracy generated by the pointless crap industry, rather than directly generating the pointless crap itself.

Of course, one could argue–and I gather that Michael does, routinely, and at length–that humanities scholarship isn’t pointless crap. But that argument isn’t well served by bogus claims of inconsistency in one’s opponents.

52: On the basis of having met one of each in the last six months I’d say the ratio was no more than 1.5x. But Michael isn’t spending his two or three weeks on top historians – there aren’t fifteen of those cases coming up every year. He’s doing it for mid- and entry-level grunts, the third-year associates of history.

Actually, Dan Simon kind of clarifies the central disagreement here — if the humanities are a giant Pointless Crap machine, it is pretty silly of humanities profs to toil any more of their days away at it than is minimally necessary (I’m not sure what minimum necessity would be, presumably producing just enough Pointless Crap to keep the Pointless Crap machine making that nice humming noise to which everyone has grown accustomed).

But if the humanities are NOT a giant Pointless Crap machine — if they produce some inevitable quantities of Pointless Crap (as does any human enterprise, after all) but mostly produce Pointy Virtues, then it matters that some people do put in the effort to keep the whole thing humming along in all its particulars: research, service, teaching.

As a young faculty member at an institution that is very good about supporting the first and also about not overloading us with the second, I can tell you the third (a mere 2/2 load) is just about killing me. I don’t pretend it’s because it’s harder than coal-mining; it’s just hard in the way any complex, high-stakes task at which one is not very adept nor experienced is hard. But I don’t think “oh thank god I don’t have to concern myself with the nonsense of committee work”. I think, “hooray it’s getting done mostly without my help for now”.

So I’m in engineering, but

The conference papers that have to be written, the scholarly articles they want to complete, the book projects that hang over them . . . these are not required.

is ridiculous. You don’t get tenure or keep your job if you’re not writing for the greater glory of the university etc etc. Furthermore, in the sciences and engineering you’re expected to lure in big fat juicy grants, which require articles, conference papers, and the proposal itself… it’s a funny definition of required that’s being used here.

People I know in the humanities may have fewer grants to go after and the tenure requirements are more draconian. Who is he trying to kid?

If you have an OCPD-type personality, you will generate your 50-60 (or 80) hour workweek automatically, especially in a field like Classics or Ancient History with a great mass of publication and with a Germanic tradition of exhaustive citation and of hostile reviewers. Maybe some academic disciplines are naturally more laid-back, or focus more on arguing ideas than on piling up citations.

The danger is that you will burn out from not being able to see the forest for the trees. I washed out of academic interviews because I was asked to describe the forest. I also suspect that I was no fun.

A bit of pointless crap they call “research”—and on the other hand, that they inexplicably choose to spend their copious free time churning out much more pointless crap than they need to.

Definitely this provides a solid foundation for a thoughtful discussion of the topic.

So, dan, are you saying Bauerlein wants the “professional man of leisure” (or, to put it German, “Privatgelehrte”) back? Trust-fund babies as our researchers? Then he’s even more of a moron than I thought he is.

Next he’s going to claim that no beauty can be created without really rich people as patrons, and that all good music is made by hungry, syphilitic artists…

And finally, he’s going to fall prey to his German name and is going to rant about “Germanic culture” vs. inferior “Anglo-Saxon civilization.”

“Haul on the Bauerlein!” we sang that melody,

Like all tough sailors do when they’re far away at sea.

Actually, someguy, many of us social scientists have a pretty good line in obscurity too. What Bauerlein and his fans want is not just obscurity but abjection.

You’ve done such a wonderful job of skewering Mark Bauerlein’s ill-considered argument in this post. Certainly that should count as “service to the discipline”? Or at least be worth a drink or two at the pub, should you ever venture up towards my neck of the woods.

Dan Simon (in general): I just don’t see even an implicit argument for amateurism in the blog post to which Berube is responding. Not at all. Are you reading that somewhere else? Can you give more specifics? If you’re outlining your own sympathetic reading, that’s fine, but in that case I’m not sure it’s fair to tell Berube (and others) that they’re missing the point.

As I read it, Bauerlein’s post was just a fragment: he raised a question and left it open to debate, without moving on to make recommendations. It is a pretty bizarre question, but the guy has an obvious antisocial streak— which is itself mildly fascinating, in that it’s a common characteristic of literary-studies types (especially men), and yet he seems to be trying very hard to convince everyone that given the choice between writing crap for Horowitz and writing about literature, he’d take the former every time. I mean, I’m convinced, which is why it’s taken a considerable effort to give a shit about him for the duration of this comment. I was pretty much with John Emerson @ 20.

Anyway, I suspect Dsquared has missed an important point: when MB says that “In the past two years, some of these cases have required me to read two medium-sized books and a couple dozen essays; that takes me about two or three weeks of “spare” time”,. the important word is “spare”.
I don’t think (though please correct me) that he means he drops everything else and does nothing but wade through essays and books all day for two or three weeks. That would be insane. The case-related reading happens in “spare” time – ie evenings, weekends etc when he would otherwise be pursuing whatever hideous and unspeakable activities normally occupy his free time.

That brings the time burden down a good deal, to something closer to the man-hours that a top hiring decision takes at an investment bank.

Which are impressive. Anecdotally, some banks hiring fairly low-level personnel (not talking about division heads here) will go through nine interview rounds. That’s nine interviews of at least an hour each, involving anything from two to six interviewers. Multiply that up, add in time for internal discussions after each interview, background checks, references and so on, and the bank could be spending more than one full-time man-week per candidate for these positions. I doubt that two or three weeks’ spare-time reading by one professor, however Dangerous, equates to that.

Trudging off to work on summer morning, i noticed my neighbor, a superintendent of schools, working in the garden. I made a comment to the effect that “Boy, you guys have it easy”. He smiled, put down his trowel, and said (i remember these exact words) “Yeah. It’s a racket.”

Why, again, was Mary Douglas an “utter waste of space?” I stopped reading after that, so if you pointed out where Mary Douglas rose to the level of “utter waste of space” I missed it. I’ve rather enjoyed her work, may not agree with it all, but enjoyed it none-the-less. I also recognized her scholarship and hardly find the claim that she was as “utter waste of space” useful. But if you have evidence that she was an “utter waste of space”…

Indeed.

Michael, you keep coming back to that phrase, “comes alive in archives”–and indeed, I believe that’s the source of your confusion. You seem to think that what Bauerlein means by this phrase is simply, “humanities scholarship”–you know, like other humanities scholars do. What I’ve been trying to explain to you is that Bauerlein sees what his friend does as fundamentally different from conventional humanities scholarship, in much the same way that jazz improvisation is different from hit song composition. It’s driven by passion, rather than desire to please an audience; guided by inspiration, rather than methodology; and has as its end goal a personal ideal state (“erudition”) rather than a product (a publication).

Again, you’re entitled to argue that this distinction is unimportant, or that it reflects badly on Bauerlein’s favored model of research, rather than your own. But to ignore it is, well, to miss Bauerlein’s point completely.

Certainly the majority of academics I’ve known (excepting the faculty at my alma mater, but it’s very much an exception) have resented teaching. All my friends who are/were academics resented teaching, but then they were all in the sciences. I suppose the humanities might be better, but I’m not sure why I would suppose that. Finally, when almost all undergraduate classes in US universities are taught by grad students, I’m not exactly clear on why I should be expected to assume that my own anecdotal experience of what academics prefer should be extraordinary. Are most clamoring for more teaching loads but rebuffed by administrators? Really?

And, yes, I understand that the context here is responding to a critic that ought to be responded to. I’m certainly no fan of Horowitz or his fellow travelers. Even so, you spend a lot of time defending the claim that you work very hard. If that’s not the part that you are primarily interested in, why is that the majority of your post?

RE #89:

In my experience, the increased teaching load placed on the shoulders of graduate students has resulted in a generation of young scholars who prefer teaching to research. I saw that with my own peers in graduate school in the 1990s, and I see it in the graduate students I’m currently teaching and advising. These are people who identify first as teachers, not as researchers–they want to be in the classroom, and they want the promotion structure to acknowledge that work even at R-1 institutions (which pay official lip service to pedagogy even while they silently ignore it). I can therefore state with some confidence that, at least in English studies, the lower ranks of the faculty are quite happy to teach.

I spend my work week in the drudgery of teaching, grading, committee meetings, advising, and so forth. But, man, I live for the weekends, when my buds & I head out to the garage and just rock out, man, with some Faerie Queen or the variorum Yeats — maybe toss back some suds & do a Foucault jam, you know?

We’re thinking of maybe playing out, doing some conference gigs, but that’s like, you know, not what it’s all about. It’s about the scholarship, man.

Peace out.

”This is not anywhere close to the truth.”

Really? What is it then? Half? Let’s exempt community colleges.

Well here in the engineering college of a Big 12 university, none of the undergraduate courses are routinely taught by graduate students. (There is the occasional exception when a prof. is on sabbatical, etc.) But in general, no engineering course is taught by grad. students. Yes, some gen ed. courses are taught by graduate students, but nowhere near half, much less “almost all”.

“well, I don’t know any humanists, but I bet they resent teaching just like my scientist friends do.”

I did not say that. Who’s arguing in bad faith? I said that my friends have mostly been in the sciences but I didn’t say that accounted for all the academics I’ve known. I’ve known many academics that complain about their teaching loads, both in the sciences and humanities. Do you really think that having studied Ptolemy (at a liberal arts college) I’d not have known any humanists?

Although my personal experience doesn’t really reflect this, I’ll go along with a generalization that humanities faculty are probably happier to teach than are scientists. But the fundamental dynamic isn’t that different—you describe it above. Humanists have their own research to do; it determines their careers far more strongly than does teaching.

As for graduate students not existing at most liberal arts colleges and comprehensive universities…that’s simply not true. I have no idea why you are asserting this. The majority of liberal arts colleges have graduate schools and pretty much all universities do. Or are you speaking of non-US schools? I’m not. Really, how can I take seriously someone who claims that most schools of higher education in the US don’t have graduate students?

Yes, the smaller and private liberal arts colleges use few or no grad students to teach. But liberal arts colleges account for a tiny portion of the entire population of undergraduate higher education in the US. The majority is accounted for by state schools, with a few large private schools in the mix. All of those use grad students for teaching.

Also, I’m including in “grad student taught” classes those which are lectured by the grad students, even if they are otherwise under the direction of a faculty member.

Exempting “general ed” classes is disingenuous.

“I don’t know what the actual numbers are but there are a lot of places that don’t give degrees above master level.”

And…?

I encourage you to find us better data, Keith, but five minutes of googling produced this
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/append/c2/at02-03.pdf
which shows total 2001 enrollment in 4-year institutions (the first eight columns) of about 8.9 million, of which only 4.3 million (the first four columns) even have graduate students available who might do any teaching.

I leave it to you to track down the percentage of courses or undergrads *at the grad-degree granting institutions* that are taught by graduate students. A little looking around, and my own experience at several places, suggests it is usually under ten percent. But hey, surprise us with data.

Good concept. The laid-back Fonzarelli character from Happy Days, thirty years later, tenured, staring aimlessly out the window and his acolyte brings him news about the despicable Professor Liverwurst, who is also claiming to be laid-back. The Fonz calls for his computer. Liverwurst is not really laid back, its just that since he said the kind of work Fonz and his people do is shit, nobody likes him any more, so they don’t give him anything to do. Storm-clouds gather. Very nice, good tension. But it does downhill: the writing is really shoddy so the laugh lines don’t work; Fonz is made to fly into a rage more than once when people don’t get his jokes, which doesn’t fit his character; and the plot doesn’t really go anywhere either, so it turns into a free-for-all where none of the characters is really fleshed out. Also it could be a lot shorter.

“Apparently reading comprehension and basic logic are not required for a degree in Ptolemy Studies. Pulling numbers out of your ass, however, is a key prerequisite.”

Oh, come on. I feel like I’m reading comments at Yahoo! or somewhere similar. “Reading comprehension and basic logic”? God, anyone who complains about someone not understanding “basic logic” on a web message board (outside the context of, say, logic) is, in my book, immediately identifiable as the same type of wanker who likes to call people “pseudo-intellectuals”.

As for reading comprehension, the only error in reading comprehension I’m seeing is Michael’s where he concludes that “my friends in the sciences” is equivalent to “academics I’ve known”.

Anyway, as it happens, working through Ptolemy’s Almagest does require both reading comprehension and, yes, basic logic in the form of geometric proofs and such. Just for the record.

would it be rude of this particular grad student to point out that he

a) greatly enjoys teaching

b) is apparently really pretty fucking good at teaching (as measured by student performance on block finals versus those taught by senior fancy-pants faculty)

c) just got a job (hey, at Penn State! Hi Michael!) based pretty much entirely on his teaching

d) has many grad student teaching colleagues, all of them really quite fine teachers, with whom he enjoys discussing matters relating to teaching.

e) wonders why the existence of his kind is being used as an ideological club by some wanker on the internets.

Seriously, Mr. Ellis, would it be unprofessional of me to request that you fuck off?

It is remarkable how many people substitute their fantasies about what happens in American colleges and universities for what actually happens. Some of these people, like Mark Bauerlein, actually work in higher ed & their statements are clearly pathological; others are just random people on the internet, some of whom apparently went to college, who make absurd assertions without any data other than vague anecdotes based on their own experience. And who then claim, like some of my freshmen, that their work was eaten by the dog computer.

“And who then claim, like some of my freshmen, that their work was eaten by the dog computer.”

That does deserve a “fuck you”. But I’ll retract it as soon as you see my comment appear that’s dated at “March 8th, 2008 at 2:39 am” and apologize.

“Why would you make an uninformed assertion without first looking at the data? That seems like rather sloppy scholarship.”

“Rather sloppy scholarship?” Really? Well, this is looking a lot like a Yahoo! comment section after all, isn’t it? I made an assertion based upon my own experience. People do that, you know, and it is not incumbent upon every commenter here to Google before they make every assertion. Adopting your haughty tone as if this were the norm is a nice example of bad-faith Internet argument. You write: “But then, that is what I would have done”. Really? Are you sure you want to claim that you research every assertion you make on the web? Considering that you use a pseudonym, that’s an assertion about yourself that’s quite hard for anyone to check, isn’t it?

For a good-faith example, note my admission that I was wrong. For another example of bad-faith, note people who assume that I’m lying when I say a comment is awaiting moderation.

Mr. Ellis: I don’t think I’ll have any need to apologize. As a long-time teacher, I’m entitled to be skeptical of the sort of claims you’re making? It is curious, though, the way your posts keep showing up, except for the crucial one. Perhaps the dog computer did eat your post, which in any case, you now say does not support your original assertion. Your claim that posts to an internet discussion do not require the rigorous standards of an academic paper is certainly true; nevertheless, basic veracity might be expected, no? And this forum happens to be frequented by academics, who tend to get upset when even the most basic standards of argumentation are ignored. Indeed, it is you who are behaving as if you were posting to a Yahoo political forum. Do you know the derivation of the word “yahoo,” by the way? Because you are behaving like one.

Dear Keith M. Ellis,

So then it was a matter of rather sloppy scholarship on your part. Really. Pity that you did not devote enough time to researching your claims before you made them. But then, research actually can take time. Interesting that.

And yes, it appears you were wrong. Now what have you learned from that?

very few graduate students are going to approach you and ask you to direct their dissertations on how It’s All a Load of Nonsense Anyway.

Tangential to the argument, maybe, but I think these dissertations and students actually make up a good-sized chunk of middle-of-the-road academia. I know about half of my grad school cohort were writing exactly that diss, and chose professors with precisely that interest. Never underestimate mediocrity and its projected resentments.

“But I also believe Mr. Ellis is wasting his time arguing with those of you who do not understand hard data and rational logistical thought.”

Really. At this point, I’m the only person who’s provided any data at all and I’ve admitted that one of my claims was wrong—though the opposite counter-claim was equally exaggerated and I’ve continued to contest that. Meanwhile, there’s this sort of comment by you, full of snark, as well as those like Mr. Duemer who really is quite sure that I’m making up my “dog ate my homework” excuse. One wonders if he’ll reassert that claim, even now.

Who is arguing in bad-faith? It’s not me.

“you are apparently unaware that the term ‘liberal arts college’ generally means an institution dedicated to undergrad ed.”

Really? So you think I’m going to have trouble finding “liberal arts colleges” that offer graduate degrees? Should I take on that exercise, or should you? Oh, hell, I have to or I’ll be accused of something. Here goes:

The first Google result for “Liberal Arts Colleges” produces the US News list, which is as good a place to start as any. It doesn’t look good for you, though, as the article begins with “The nation’s 266 liberal arts colleges emphasize undergraduate education and award at least 50 percent of their degrees in the arts and sciences”. Do I need to link to a dictionary definitions of “exclusively” and “emphasize” to achieve the “scholarship” required by some?

Now, let’s look at the top ten “liberal arts colleges”:

01. Williams College (MA) — Offers Graduate Degrees
02. Amherst College (MA) — Offers Graduate Degrees
03. Swarthmore College(PA) — Offers Graduate Degrees
04. Wellesley College(MA) — No Graduate Degrees
05. Carleton College(MN) — No Graduate Degrees
05. Middlebury College(VT) — Offers Graduate Degrees
07. Pomona College(CA) — No Graduate Degrees
07. Bowdoin College(ME) — No Graduate Degrees
09. Davidson College(NC) — No Graduate Degrees
10. Haverford College(PA) — No Graduate Degrees
11. Claremont McKenna College(CA) — No Graduate Degrees
11. Wesleyan University(CT) — Offers Graduate Degrees
11. Grinnell College(IA) — No Graduate Degrees
11. Vassar College(NY) — Offers Graduate Degrees
15. Harvey Mudd College(CA) — No Graduate Degrees
15. Washington and Lee University(VA) — Offers Graduate Degrees
17. Smith College(MA) — Offers Graduate Degrees
17. Hamilton College(NY) — No Graduate Degrees
17. Colgate University(NY) — Offers Graduate Degrees
20. United States Naval Academy(MD) — No Graduate Degrees

So far, that’s 40%. Not looking too good for the claim that liberal arts schools are schools which don’t offer graduate degrees. I happen to have been aware of that as my alma mater, a top-tier liberal arts college, also offers graduate degrees.

“If we’re including courses with TAs—that is with any grad student contact, you’re switching definitions.”

…which was your response to my quote:

“University of Michigan: one-quarter of classes are taught by grad students or partly”

That’s implicitly switching definitions to your preferred extreme, isn’t it?

“Who made that claim? You’re the one who is slowly climbing down from ‘almost all.’”

I already completely climbed down from “almost all”, and did so quite explicitly. But Berube made that claim when he wrote:

“Not to slight the Just Making Shit Up Club, in which people say that graduate students do all (or maybe just half) of the undergraduate teaching in the United States—even though they don’t even exist at most liberal arts colleges and comprehensive universities…”

…which implicitly asserts a counter-claim of significantly less than half and, given his claim that most schools don’t even offer graduate degrees, is obviously understood as being “very few”.

“You can’t be that dumb. It’s a chart of different teaching loads. Teaching loads vary by more than a factor of two.”

It’s a chart of average teaching loads for all schools, comparing four-year to two-year. If average teaching loads for two-year instructors who teach at least one undergraduate class are quite a bit higher than the average teaching loads for four-year instructors who teach at least one undergraduate class, what does that imply? By your own assertion, you’re a smart guy and I’m dumb, so I feel sure you can figure this out. By the way, I qualified that conclusion with “that’s a guesstimate, we can’t know from only this data”.

All this bad-faith, insults, and whatnot thrown my way because I had the temerity to assert that graduate students do a large portion of the teaching of undergraduate students in the US, something that everyone already knows is true. Was I wrong in claiming that it was “almost all”? Yes, I was. I admitted that, I’m admitting it again. But Berube has made, at least implicitly, just as an extreme counter-claim and others here are making fun of me for not knowing that liberal arts college don’t offer graduate degrees, even thought they do, at least in this universe. Not to mention that liberal arts colleges account for only a very small portion of all four-year undergraduate enrollment and it’s really beside the point. People have claimed that “comprehensive universities”, also, don’t offer graduate degrees. Which isn’t true, either. And they pointed to a chart which is completely useless for answering this question, even if liberal arts schools and comprehensive universities didn’t offer graduate degrees.

Berube equated “most people I’ve known” with “friends of mine, most of whom were in the sciences”, either very bad-faith or just sloppy reasoning. Then his most recent post is an exercise in snark that was both completely uncalled for and entirely unproductive.

I’d have thought that CT was better than this. But I guess it proves that given someone taking an unpopular position, along with implicit administrative sanction for and example of tossing off snarky bullshit, CT will descend into a ugly little pile-on filled with more rhetorical nastiness than good-faith argument.

At any rate, this is wrestling with pigs territory. I’ve made my case clear and answered increasingly piddling complaints with data and argument. I’m done. If it makes anyone feel better about themselves to lob off a parting shot, feel free. It’s cheaper than therapy, I suppose.

At this point, I’m the only person who’s provided any data at all

Hmm. That’s actually a lie.

Sorry, Keith, but I’m with Mike on this one. If academics are the secular clerics of the postmodern state, then grad school is necessarily the novitiate of the postmodern monastery. Someone’s got to muck out the stables, and the Abbot’s usually otherwise engaged in lively debates with his clerical subordinates concerning the merits of Faith versus Good Works, and Grace, and all that other Good Shit.

You know, for all the snark and such, I really am an extraordinarily patient person. I just need a few hours off between vexations to recharge my patience batteries. And so, having been vexed by the Inside Higher Ed quality of Mr. Ellis’s comments in this thread (you know the IHE comment style – “I’m Very ANGRY about SOMETHING in higher education that I completely don’t understand but am willing to write about at great length on the Internets! I defeat you with Logic! Win! ! 1 ! 1 !”), I’ve taken a deep breath and returned to explain something about why scientists and humanists at major research universities might have different attitudes toward teaching.

At Illinois, where I taught for twelve years, researchers in the sciences usually had teaching loads of 1/1; in the life sciences, it could go as low as one course per year. Scientists were explicitly researchers, and everything depended on their ability to secure grants (private or federal)– their working conditions, their graduate assistants, their chances for tenure and promotion. From the moment they set foot on campus– or, perhaps, from the moment they embark on doctoral work– they are encouraged to see themselves as grant-writing and grant-winning machines, because that’s the only way they’re going to get their research done. So yes, they tend to resent anything that distracts them from that process– and it can be, for some scientists, a year-round process– such as teaching the basics of biochemistry to a bunch of 20-year-olds.

Humanists, by contrast, have no such funding structure and no such expectations. Sure, if we’re lucky enough to teach someplace that awards released time, every once in a while we get a semester off to do research in France and come alive in archives. But we don’t have to spend our days chasing multimillion-dollar grants to keep our labs running and our graduate students employed, and consequently, we don’t see undergraduate teaching as a distraction. Quite the contrary, many of us think it’s the best thing about the job.

Now, it’s true that at a tiny handful of elite research universities (did I stress the “tiny handful” part?), even professors in the humanities can devote themselves primary or exclusively to graduate education. That’s why, in the literature on American academe, people who are familiar only with Harvard or Yale complain about the amount of undergraduate instruction done by graduate students. But having worked now at two large public research universities outside that charmed circle (three, including my four years as a graduate student at Virginia), I can assure all interested parties that nearly all humanists at places like Penn State and Illinois teach undergraduates and do so with enthusiasm. How much enthusiasm, I imagine, depends partly on the undergraduates themselves.

Last but not least: I shouldn’t have said that graduate students don’t exist at liberal arts colleges and comprehensives. I meant that they generally aren’t employed as teachers in such institutions, since we were talking about teaching done by graduate students. My mistake! But I want extra extra bonus points for anticipating Mr. Ellis’s final paragraph @ 124 with my own final paragraph @ 120.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this–and all is mended–
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.

cute

Gotta say, when I first read the Bauerlein excerpts, I wondered when Miriam Burstein was gonna show up to burst the “teaching load” bubble; and fortunately, she did, back at #36. But (with no disrespect intended toward Michael, who’s spent more energy than most disputing this point when Horowitz himself makes it), I think there needs to be more flogging of Bauerlein’s “Maybe in some segments”, which dismisses, like, the vast majority of institutions in four words. We’re not all at Emory or even R1 public schools here; and a seventy-hour work week was not unusual at the “teaching institution” where I went to college. Moreover, much of the “service” work at most schools –and all of it at many– goes not to perpetuating the bureaucratic structure that values research but to perpetuating its educational mission.

P.S. The “love” and “amateurism” argument that Dan Simon sees in Bauerlein has recently been addressed to good effect by Marc Bousquet.

“11. Vassar College(NY)—Offers Graduate Degrees”

Hmm. It’s possible that they’ve beefed up their grad-programs offerings since I was a student there in the mid-late 90s, but at that time “Offers Graduate Degrees” meant that very occasionally someone got a – I think it was chemistry – master’s degree. Afaik most students weren’t aware that there was any sort of graduate program, and had not encountered any graduate students at all, much less ones teaching courses, since those were taught by actual faculty (one partial exception – there was an African Art seminar taught by someone who, iirc, was just about to get his Ph.D. from NYU. Rather good class.)

-Uses the wonder of the intertubes to confirm – well, this undated peterson’s page points out that
“[Graduate] Programs Offered:
Offers chemistry (MA, MS).”

Meanwhile, Wikipedia claims that “All classes are taught by members of the faculty, and there are almost no graduate students and no teachers’ assistants. ”

I don’t know if the other high-ranking liberal arts colleges tend to share this general model or not.

Best tag lossage ever

124:

Keith, Swarthmore does not offer graduate degrees. If you got that from US News, they’re wrong. In any event, wherever you got it, you’re wrong on this point. I don’t think Williams does either, but I’m only absolutely certain about Swarthmore. We confer nothing besides the BA and the BS (for Engineering students). No graduate degrees.

I’ve been thinking about the distinction that Bauerlein seems to be making between research in the humanities and research in the sciences. He seems to think that most humanities research is optional and, in addition, intellectually worthless. Not only that, but it’s not read by anyone. By contrast, he implies the research in the sciences is routinely more valuable – though he doesn’t say anything about who reads it (at least, not that I remember) – I’m thinking of the second passage Michael quote, the one with an aside about summer work.

On that score, the last time I looked at research on how often the typical scholarly article was read, the number was something like 3 to 5 times, and it applied to the sciences as well as the humanities. (Alas, I cannot provide a citation. I will note, however, that this was over two decades ago. I have no idea whether or not things have changed since then.) That’s not exactly an indication of overwhelming intellectual significance for typical science research.

As far as I can tell, most university research is a crap-shoot, regardless of discipline. The problem, however, is that there’s no a priori way to determine the value of a given research project. So we’ve got to fund/tolerate a lot of crap in order to get the good stuff. Sciences and humanities alike.