Are you a professor or a grad student or a college student? Any thoughts on the crisis in humanities higher education? I am terribly uninformed on this subject.

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

Answers

Ya wanna know about the job market in academe? Then hie thyself over to my previous place of employment: http://chronicle.com and take a stroll around the articles in the Jobs section.

While Ms. Savoy article lady may be a whiner, it is true that getting a job in academe is a bitch and requires a lot more work than your average job search in the IT field for example.

All I have to do when I want a new job is "post availability" on dice.com and open my umbrella against the flood.

If you are a young wannabe professor, you have at least a years' worth fo steady unpaid work ahead of you to even get a foot in the door, unless you're brilliant and have published a million papers and taught a dozen intro classes blah blah blah blah.

Basically, when I started my graduat degree in history, I was told outright to consider alternative career choices than being a professor because chances were slim to none.

That was fine with me, because I didn't really want to be a prof. I wanted to teach high school, and simply was interested in studying history for the sake of studying history.

But the academic job market is in fact, quite brutal.

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

Yeah, I know it's pretty bad out there. I just didn't buy her premise that she was an "evangelical" instructor who had been driven out by academic meanies, because she didn't give me any reason to believe it.

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

The divide between the multi-culti, PC, PoMo crowd and the Old Skoolers is HUGE. My college was overrun with the MCPCPM people and it's taken time to learn that a) I am not the White Devil and b) Toni Morrison really is full of hooey.

Check out _Bright Shining Years_ for a good, balanced and * interesting* look at what the university is and what it may become.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

um.. maybe this is a can of worms, but why exactly is Toni Morrison hooey? Are we talking about _Sula_, _Beloved_, _Paradise_, _Jazz_, essays, fiction, what?

And as far as the whole "PC" thing goes.. I think it's not such a big deal to consider what it is your words mean and how they affect people. It doesn't mean having no sense of humor, it just means having some sense. Especially for people whose job is thinking about things, it would be pretty damn slack to not think about words, wouldn't it? Most of what people mean by "pc, pomo, multiculti" has to do with actually recognising that in the real world (and in real world classrooms) you find a variety of people with a variety of backgrounds. It's a lot more productive to recognize that, and use that potential for more learning.

I know that in academia (especially ivory-tower style universities taht are mainly ful of very sheltered people) you do actually find instances of "PC"-meaning narrow-minded humorless fear of controversy. But in schools with populations that reflect the world outside (mixes of classes and races, just for some examples), it's actually just good sense to think about how you define "the american experience" for example. In an ivory tower it may seem theoretical nit-picking, but most other places it's pretty damn practical.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

First, a bit of context. I was an English major in college (Earlham, fwiw - if you've ever seen "PCU", THAT was exactly what it was like). I loved it, I really did. When I took literary theory, I decided that - even though I didn't really grasp all the intricacies - that PoMo, deconstruction, post-colonial marxist critique was where it was at. The truth was out, we were gonna fight the Man by revealing his subtext, etc. Then, I graduated. And got a job. And lived in the real world and lost my ivory tower blindness.

I've read _Beloved_ five or six times - at least twice for classes in college. The first time, I was - good, bowed, PC white liberal that I was - stunned, blown away, humbled, reduced to tears. It was all so tragic and terrible! For another one of my classes - I think it was Senior Seminar on African-American Lit - we read a short essay-type book by Morrison which dealt, solely, with the tropes of "black" and "white" in literature. It was by the time I reached her deconstruction of the white whale in Moby Dick that I began to poke through the mists. Everything white, in Morrison's world, is about power, oppression, an overwhelming anti-diversity beast which seeks to silence the voices of people of color.

This is, of course, all bullshit.

In the dedication of _Beloved_, it says "60 million and more". Per Stanley Crouch's blistering, right-on essay re: Beloved in his book _Notes of a Hanging Judge_ (out of print, but you should be able to find it at the library), 60 million is 6 million (the Holocaust) times 10 and thus Morrison is trying to point out that African Americans have suffered MUCH more than anyone else and are thus more deserving of apology, repayment and - let's not forget - revenge. (The number 60 million is also absurd, but that's an argument for another time.)

Morrison is angry, first and foremost, and for me, that taints everything she writes. Her goals are to thrust guilt upon the newly- PC sensitized white liberal population. It is dishonest and self- defeating. She gets the thumbs down from me. Her kingdom is built on shakey ground.

(Argh, they've totally redone the site and it's now a mess, but: at jollyroger.com there is, somewhere, an essay by someone who had a class with Morrison at Princeton. jollyroger.com is, in itself, often hard to deal with, but in terms of offering alternative perspectives, it's great.)

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

I have a BA in history with a minor in museum studies. When I graduated in 1997, I thought I could find a small historic site or museum and find a job that way. No such luck...even the really small sites want people to at least have an MA. Well there are not that many schools with programs in museum studies. Soooo, I went to work. Ive an admin asst for 2 years and I hate it. I want to go back to school but cant b/c it costs too much! Why arent BA's worth anything anymore? I mean you pay $30,000.00 (or more) to be taught a trade and the powers that be decide that the training you recieve during your undergrad study is good enough. Then you have to pay anothe $50,000 to get an MA just to get an entry level position. Boy, now I have really depressed myself. I think some Prozac would be good now.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

I'm getting a doctorate in Political Science. The academic job market in social sciences isn't great, but thanks to the baby boomlet, it's getting a lot better. My program has 100% academic placement (that's part of the reason I chose it), though not all of those positions are tenure track. This year, while I'm not on the market, there are a lot of tenure track jobs, all my friends are getting interviews, and our advisors are ecstatic.

The problem that the woman who wrote in Savoy has, as far as I can tell, is that she wasn't willing to listen to what people were telling her. You can't get on the tenure track if you're not willing to go to another city, just like you can't become a partner at McKinsey if you're not willing to spend a lot of time on the plane. And you're not going to get on the tenure track if you're not publishing. A university doesn't want published academics just for status, incidentally. Almost without exception, my professors all become dramatically more animated in classes when they talk about their research, and they design new classes because they want to pass on what they've learned in their research. But even beyond that, university departments are ranked in large part based on the contributions of their faculty to advancement of the discipline. That means if the university wants smart students, the faculty has to publish. There are also good reasons to make sure your faculty doesn't get too wrapped up in the traditions of a particular area; this was a mistake a lot of universities made in the 1960s, when schools were desperately hiring their own PhDs just to keep up with demand, and those departments descended into a weird sort of groupthink.

If you have geographic constraints, and you want to get on the tenure track, you should publish like crazy, and maybe you'll get lucky. If you don't like writing, then you should look for a small teaching college somewhere that doesn't care much about your publications. If you don't like writing and you're not willing to move, you probably should be teaching high school. I suppose that sounds harsh, but I knew what I was getting into when I decided to get my doctorate.

When my husband and I first started dating, I told him that I wanted to be an academic, and that would mean that I would have to move for my career. Lucky for me, he's from an academic family, and he was willing, and even luckier for me, his job is portable. But I know that if he hadn't been willing to move, either my career or our relationship would have had to go. Life is full of choices.

So I'm very fortunate, but I've listened to what I've been told. I presented six conference papers in the last year, I expect to publish two of those papers this year (my co-author and I are doing last revisions after getting really positive feedback), and I have good teaching reviews because I spend a lot of time with my classes. I think I'll get a tenure track job sometime in the next five years. But I'd be insane if I didn't think that this would require us to move at least twice. I'd also be crazy to think it was going to happen if I didn't keep pumping out papers.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

My brother just earned his doctors degree in business & is teaching on the east coast. He is looking to return to the midwest where his family is. He has a pretty good deal -- teaches 2 days a week & earns over 80k. He also does consulting work & teaches CPA exam prep courses. He did not have trouble getting a job & is, in fact, currently receiving requests to interview. I think it really depends what field you are in.

As to the Toni Morrison discussion, I liked one of her books. A little off-track, I used to love Maya Angelou until I read a continuation of "I Know Why thr Caged Bird Sings" a couple of years ago. She is definitely anti-white. I get really tired of the "white devil" syndrome....

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

I have to continue to disagree with you about Toni Morrison, Gabby. I was unable to connect to jollyroger.com, but I assume this is the Crouch article to which you referred. I've never been all that impressed by Crouch and this piece doesn't change my mind; it certainly doesn't strike me as either "blistering" or "right on." But I'll let everyone reach their own conclusions.

And I think this has to be said -- if you, as a white person, are reading a book set before the civil war and coming away from it feeling like you've been assaulted for being a "white devil," I'd say that has more to do with your own issues than anything in the book. And it sounds like those issues are pretty fucking ugly.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

Context context context.

At my college, in my department, books by people of color were read and interpreted - by both professor and newly initiated PC students - as "whites are bad, we have much for atone for."

Reading a text like _Beloved_ *outside the PC white-guilt academic enviroment* is an entirely other experience and enabled me to see it for what it is: a book with an agenda, an agenda relevent only inside the aforementioned academic environment. Toni Morrison, in short, has a bone to pick with America and has targeted her prose - weepy, overly-dramatic, shocking - at the soft, shameful heart of bleeding heart liberal intelligentsia, of any color (as her "60 million and more" dedication aims to say - "African Americans have it worse than everyone - the Holocaust was *nothing* compared to the Middle Passage").

Outside that environment, her book fails at its goal. Toni Morrison wants revenge, she wants pity, she wants bloody accolades for the *suffering of others*! It's offensive, it's nasty.

Whether you hold Crouch's critique in esteem is not an issue - as you've repeatedly stated yourself as a fan of Morrison, I doubt there could be any critique by anyone of scholarly merit (ah, if only Henry Louis Gates would turn his eye toward her!) that would convince you otherwise. Its accessibility, its New Critical approach, its common sense conclusions, its contextual assessment impressed me greatly. I presented it merely as context and source for my reply to the other poster, who wondered why Morrison was disparaged. Crouch certainly manages to raise issues that, in our heady Post-Colonial wonderment, are very often shunned or ignored.

Morrison wants our guilt, our apology. Myself, I want the same from her.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

Speaking of context, although I also have an English major, I was never assigned any Morrison in school. Except for two American Lit classes in which the professor made an effort to showcase works by lesser-known gay and lesbian authors from the twentieth century, I pretty much studied the canon and nothing but. I think the only African American authors I studied in college were James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and they got precious little space.

Thus, I read Beloved on my own, without anyone telling me what to feel about it. I didn't feel guilty and I didn't feel like I was being manipulated. I guess I'm just dumb that way.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

"Morrison wants our guilt, our apology."

Hmmm. Who gets to be "our"? Who is the assumed reader here?

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

It sounds, instead, as though you had a radically different English department and experience - one which I envy. (I could only stand hearing the phrase "gynocriticism" once before I laughed. "Well, my uterus really though the author was saying. . . ")

I gave my copy of _Beloved_ to my mother with well wishes - she loves the book and rereads it every year. While she reads it from the perspective of a mother, I read it with an eye as to how it contributes to literature(s). I always come away agreeing with my main man, Edward Said's, take on the situation (from the Salon article): "If you turn the classroom into a kind of substitute for political action," he told me, "then you're corrupting the whole system." Toni Morrison comes off like a woman who'd be far happier writing rants against the system but for some reason, she chose the novel.

In lieu of _Beloved_, I sat down tonight with my favorite African American woman writer, Audre Lorde and her essay collection, _Sister, Outsider_. I wanted to understand why, while both women cover similar ground, it was Lorde who managed to capture both my attention and respect. It boils down to this: while Morrison is more than content to always write about Black people via comparisons with white people, in order to show differences and thus detail the oppressions, Lorde has the confidence to write about Black people via comparisons with each other. She writes about the struggle of black women against each other - not about black women against white women. She contextualizes and therefore adds depth and meaning to challenging subjects. Lorde embraces the diffrerences between people of color (whereas Morrison is noticeably deficient in acknowledging the struggles of others) amongst themselves and with white people and finds commonality and therefore strength and hope.

I think this basic struggle - the victim brigade vs. the coalition brigade - is what lies at the heart of the Cannon/MultiCultiPoMo fight in the university. The MCPM people are too busy identifying the walking wounded everywhere - the coalition people are like, right, but we've still got bleeders! Let's start the healing already.

That is, in short, why we study the Western Canon in the first place: to understand where we came from (politically, culturally, historically) and where we might be going. We are so different, yet we share a form of government, of society and social agreements, of notions of freedoms - it is these things which unite us, which give us strength, which give us a commonality to relate to one another with.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 1999

See, that's interesting. because although I like some of Lorde's writing, most of it leaves me cold. Doesn't do much for me. But I like a lot of authors that you may think of as overdone. I think there's more of a stylistic issue here perhaps. I mean, Morrison also fits well into a list including Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Pauline Melville. And these may be authors that strike some as being overdramatic or weepy or something, or as having an agenda. But their writing inspires me, makes me laugh. i think there's less playfulness in Morrisson, actually she has less of a sense of humor than I would like, and maybe this is what strikes you as so angry. And I have mixed feelings about Morrisson in person, but I think her writing goes beyond a lot of the personal agendas peopel project on her. Morrison doesn't make me feel bad at all, actually. I don't feel the same agenda you do in her work. I've read her in classes and out, and I find her to often be provocative, but not in a bad way.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 1999

Okay, I can see how in some stretch of the imagination your "comparing black people to white people" argument might apply to Beloved, and possibly to The Bluest Eye (which I have never, alas, been able to finish). But how on earth does it apply to Sula? (Which, by the way, I think is her best work, and which I am now remembering I did read in college, so I stand corrected about not studying any Morrison at university.) How does it apply to Song of Solomon? I actually don't buy the argument as applied to Beloved, either, but at least in that case I can see what you're getting at.

The one serious criticism that I would make of Beloved -- and it may be what you're getting at, I suppose -- is the same one that John Gardner made of The Grapes of Wrath. He said that if Steinbeck had humanized the ranchers in that book, made them something other than faceless evil, given them a story, he would have written the great American novel and everyone else could quit trying. Instead, he wound up with political melodrama.

I still love Grapes of Wrath; I still love Beloved. But I can see Gardner's point as a valid literary criticism, although I don't think it warrants the kind of accusations you've directed at Morrison. I certainly have never felt that I needed an apology from either Steinbeck or Morrison because they wrote angry books.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 1999

Well, color me befuddled. I can't stand pomo-style literary criticism. I took a bunch of graduate courses in feminist theory and walked away appalled (for the most part). (My training is as a mathematician and computer scientist... you can imagine how well I fit into these courses..) Every time I tried to criticize an argument (not even the conclusion of the argument, necessarily, just the logical structure of the argument itself) ... you should have seen the looks I got. I gave up.. The feminist theorists have no room for women in science, and many of the sciences still have little to no room for women. What's a girl to do? But that's another rant...

But anyway.. I'm befuddled because I (like some others) read _Beloved_ on my own (not for a class), and quite enjoyed it. (If "enjoyed" is the right word.) I really think it depends on context. And I also don't have a problem with people who are angry. There's plenty that I'm angry about. *shrug*

LIM

-- Anonymous, November 23, 1999