outside/inside
A friend and mentor of mine once chastened me, several years ago, on the issue at hand here, in relation to Old English University. 'There is no inside', she said, 'at an institution that predates you and will outlast you. You've been preceded by a large number of incomparably great minds over 800 years, and will be followed by a greater number still. OEU doesn't know you exist. If you're striving to find the inside, to "be accepted" by those you've somehow constructed as constituting the inside, you're missing something more fundamental about the nature of the institution'.
The anecdote, admittedly, is perhaps truer of the institution than academia as a whole. But I wanted to include it because I want to simplify the question started on Dr Crazy's here slightly before I return to the richness of my friend's injunction. The report on MLA's 2004 Survey of Hiring Departments (found here) caught my eye the other day, as I listlessly poked at the MLA Job List and its non-availability. This paragraph nearly sent me off the nearest bridge (and bless NY, there are many): 'When candidates were hired as tenure-track assistant professors by four-year departments in the JIL group, 18.1% already held tenure-track positions at other institutions. Of this 18.1%, 11.1% received their PhD degrees in the year 2000 or earlier and 5.8% in 2001, 2002, or 2003. Another 33.1% of those hired to tenure-track assistant professor positions by four-year departments in the JIL group held full-time temporary positions, 8.2% held part-time positions, 3.9% held postdoctoral fellowships, and 34.4% were categorized as still in graduate school. There were 1.3% hired who had been employed outside of academia, and 1.0% who were not employed.'
Depending upon how I categorize myself, I fall into the 2.3% of those employed 'outside' academia or unemployed (which, if you accept the almost implicit definition of employment in the report, are interchangeable, or merely reflects those of us not looking to publicise what we're doing to pay the bills). The numbers fall to 2.0% for English departments. The percentages shocked me, but on reflection I think the language of the inside/outside I used in the comment to Dr Crazy's post was inflected by the Report.
I very much don't want this to devolve into a 'what is academia' discussion, but to rework the hackneyed and unnecessarily insulting phrase, 'There are those who teach, and those who don't'. Also, I don't want to run up against the Ivory Tower(tm) issue: I'm a firm believer in, or at least part-time aspirant to, the idea that academia is an Ivory Tower only if you let it be. Crazy's point about the nuances of academia - the name-tag cruising and elitism rife between, and even within, institutions, subdivides the inside/outside question endlessly. But if one is publishing in the Best Journals and presenting at the Best Conferences, it's distinctly possible that name recognition and quality of work trump institutional affiliation. Which is the longer and harder road to acceptance into the coterie of the Known and the Elite to which some aspire. The flip side, of course, is endemic to the profession, and I'm under no illusions on that front. Smoking, the great leveller...
The lack of an inside to Old English University was a blessing, inasmuch as I was never under the only marginally illusory illusion that there is an inside for those coming from Fancy Research and Top Notch U. Moreover, it's a self-propagating inside that nonetheless sheds the majority of its constituents to RCU et al before readmitting a small percentage of them to the larger cross-institutional coterie. (I'm fond of the word, though as a concept it has been rather au courant and much over-used/abused in my field recently.) But Crazy's 'bait-and-switch' reaction is, I think, completely understandable - at many levels, from those who are employed in, or near, their fields of study, to those teaching at institutions with radically different academic cachet than those at which they studied, to the emphatic impact of geographic and demographic relocation accompanying the First Job.
I don't know the reality of teaching at RCU. And thus, to some degree, I don't know the extent of my illusions and misconceptions of the radically varying 'inside' of academia. Personally, in the 2.0%, I've worked and work very hard to ensure that First Job does not appear as a panacea on the not-so-distant horizon - the disappointments Crazy describes regarding her engagement with her students are only part of the whole. But I still want 'in', if only to have the opportunity to get paid for something vaguely resembling what I've spent an alarming proportion of my adult life working on. Even knowing how fickle 'in' is, how nuanced, even how much it represents a fundamental misconception of what I, we, are trying to do, trying to participate in, to create.
The anecdote, admittedly, is perhaps truer of the institution than academia as a whole. But I wanted to include it because I want to simplify the question started on Dr Crazy's here slightly before I return to the richness of my friend's injunction. The report on MLA's 2004 Survey of Hiring Departments (found here) caught my eye the other day, as I listlessly poked at the MLA Job List and its non-availability. This paragraph nearly sent me off the nearest bridge (and bless NY, there are many): 'When candidates were hired as tenure-track assistant professors by four-year departments in the JIL group, 18.1% already held tenure-track positions at other institutions. Of this 18.1%, 11.1% received their PhD degrees in the year 2000 or earlier and 5.8% in 2001, 2002, or 2003. Another 33.1% of those hired to tenure-track assistant professor positions by four-year departments in the JIL group held full-time temporary positions, 8.2% held part-time positions, 3.9% held postdoctoral fellowships, and 34.4% were categorized as still in graduate school. There were 1.3% hired who had been employed outside of academia, and 1.0% who were not employed.'
Depending upon how I categorize myself, I fall into the 2.3% of those employed 'outside' academia or unemployed (which, if you accept the almost implicit definition of employment in the report, are interchangeable, or merely reflects those of us not looking to publicise what we're doing to pay the bills). The numbers fall to 2.0% for English departments. The percentages shocked me, but on reflection I think the language of the inside/outside I used in the comment to Dr Crazy's post was inflected by the Report.
I very much don't want this to devolve into a 'what is academia' discussion, but to rework the hackneyed and unnecessarily insulting phrase, 'There are those who teach, and those who don't'. Also, I don't want to run up against the Ivory Tower(tm) issue: I'm a firm believer in, or at least part-time aspirant to, the idea that academia is an Ivory Tower only if you let it be. Crazy's point about the nuances of academia - the name-tag cruising and elitism rife between, and even within, institutions, subdivides the inside/outside question endlessly. But if one is publishing in the Best Journals and presenting at the Best Conferences, it's distinctly possible that name recognition and quality of work trump institutional affiliation. Which is the longer and harder road to acceptance into the coterie of the Known and the Elite to which some aspire. The flip side, of course, is endemic to the profession, and I'm under no illusions on that front. Smoking, the great leveller...
The lack of an inside to Old English University was a blessing, inasmuch as I was never under the only marginally illusory illusion that there is an inside for those coming from Fancy Research and Top Notch U. Moreover, it's a self-propagating inside that nonetheless sheds the majority of its constituents to RCU et al before readmitting a small percentage of them to the larger cross-institutional coterie. (I'm fond of the word, though as a concept it has been rather au courant and much over-used/abused in my field recently.) But Crazy's 'bait-and-switch' reaction is, I think, completely understandable - at many levels, from those who are employed in, or near, their fields of study, to those teaching at institutions with radically different academic cachet than those at which they studied, to the emphatic impact of geographic and demographic relocation accompanying the First Job.
I don't know the reality of teaching at RCU. And thus, to some degree, I don't know the extent of my illusions and misconceptions of the radically varying 'inside' of academia. Personally, in the 2.0%, I've worked and work very hard to ensure that First Job does not appear as a panacea on the not-so-distant horizon - the disappointments Crazy describes regarding her engagement with her students are only part of the whole. But I still want 'in', if only to have the opportunity to get paid for something vaguely resembling what I've spent an alarming proportion of my adult life working on. Even knowing how fickle 'in' is, how nuanced, even how much it represents a fundamental misconception of what I, we, are trying to do, trying to participate in, to create.
posted by itinerarium at 6:54 PM
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