Bill Knapp’s as Poststructuralist Paradigm
If you were skeptical about a master’s thesis on daffodil-planting, how about a PhD thesis on old-timers hanging out at the Washtenaw Dairy at 8 am? Chapter heads include “Gathering Because ‘My Wife Wanted Me Out Of The House:’ Public Discussion As A By-Product Of Social Interaction.” (via DiaWebLog.)
A Slim’s Table for white guys.
posted by Sam on April 20th, 2004 at 3:45 pm eIf you read further into that article you’d find interesting statistics:
“Nestled securely in the No. 8 spot on a list topped by Austin, Colorado Springs and San Diego, Ann Arbor is a good spot for dating, according to Sperling’s Best Cities, because it ranks high in dining out and scores in the 98th percentile for percentage of singles.”
98% of the people may be single, but what percentage of Ann Arbor is women?? It seems to me that there are 10 women for every 3 men in A2. Of those 3 men, 1 is gay and 1 is in a committed relationship.
posted by Mels on April 20th, 2004 at 4:51 pm eAnyone agree?
Oh, yeah, I forgot I actually linked to this exact same article before, except that time it was for the dating item. Did anyone notice that the author of that list is none other than…Bert Sperling?
posted by ann arbor is overrated on April 20th, 2004 at 4:55 pm eIf Ann Arbor is in the 98th percentile for percentage of singles, they must be counting college students.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on April 20th, 2004 at 6:34 pm eIf Ann Arbor is in the 98th percentile for percentage of singles, they must be counting college students.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on April 20th, 2004 at 6:34 pm eSpeaking of PhD theses, sort of, and harkening back to our LEO/tenure discussion of a week or so ago, here’s an interesting article in The Chronicle: http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i28/28a00101.htm
If two tenured professors can get sacked mid-semester with no due process, then we may as well let them dismantle the tenure system.
Alex
posted by Alex on April 20th, 2004 at 6:36 pm eAlex,
Thanks for the article link. I saw that the article was about a month old–is there any update on the 2 professors and what there status is? I can’t believe they’re trying to fire them.
posted by Zigs on April 20th, 2004 at 6:50 pm eUm, 98th percentile does not mean that 98% of people are single. It means that… oh, forget it. Wallow in your ignorance.
posted by 99th percentile on April 20th, 2004 at 8:35 pm eUm, 99th, I’m perfectly aware of what 98th percentile means. I still say that if Ann Arbor has a higher percentage of singles than 97% of the other communities in the sample, they’re not using the statistics right.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on April 21st, 2004 at 12:18 am eLarry, I think 99th’s comment was directed at the post before yours that read, “98% of the people may be single, but what percentage of Ann Arbor is women?? “
posted by Murph on April 21st, 2004 at 1:05 am eI heard on public radio (I think that locally produced show on Michigan Public Radio) where this woman Katherine Cramer was talking about her experiences hanging around Washtenaw Dairy and her book, which is really about the dynamics of poilitical discussion among “real people” in small groups. I know the titles of chapters might sound kinda goofy, but Cramer had some interesting insights, at least as far as I could tell from the radio interview. She’s a professor someplace in Wisconsin now…
posted by Steven D. Krause on April 21st, 2004 at 7:04 am eMels isn’t just a stats retard, she’s a neurotic cliche. Thirty-five years old with a biological clock that sounds ominously like the tell tale heart, she can’t figure out why all the men are either committed or gay–and those who aren’t are terrified of her! But all she wants are “some guy friends who aren’t afraid of the M-word (eek! Run for your lives!) who would like to have a family at some point in their lives.” Who’s afraid of the “M” word? YOU can’t even say it! And you don’t want “some guy friends”, you want a husband. And you don’t want to have a family at “some point”. You want it right-the-fuck NOW! I take it back about sending you back to church; you need a shrink. But if you really want help, here’s the short, gloves-off version of what the shrink will tell you:
A person who is transparently desperate is neither sympathetic nor attractive. No man is going to marry you to help you out of your jam; if he marries you he will do it because his life is better with you than without you. As long as you ooze anxiety, his life will not be better, it will be stressful and he will flee. If you continue to paint yourself as a victim, this will keep happening.
And I actually am sorry to have to beat you over the head about this, but you came here looking for guidance and I’m the only one with any sense. Plus, I used to be lonely too, and it’s better not to be lonely. So toughen up, kid, and get back out there! And stay away from Engineers, and impoverished grad students.
posted by torONTo on April 21st, 2004 at 10:40 am eMy heart bleeds at the thought of torONTo being lonely. Thank god that’s all in the past, right?
As for an update on the situation with the two profs in Southern Mississippi, I can’t find an update anywhere! How odd.
posted by Alex on April 21st, 2004 at 11:17 am eThanks for bleeding for me! That’s sooooooo romantic (swoon). Who ever said that getting blood from a Sociologist is like getting jiz from an Economist? How wrong that wrongie-wrong person was!
And, alas, you hit the nail on the dead. I’m so lonesome I could cry.
So did you and Nick ever become fuck buddies, or what? I’ll bet you just swapped pictures and then dropped the subject.
posted by torONTo on April 21st, 2004 at 11:45 am eI love Hank Williams. And how did you know I was a sociologist?
posted by Alex on April 21st, 2004 at 12:40 pm eYou kind of have this website thingamajig and on 10/17/03 you wrote “I eat, breathe, and sleep sociology.” So I sort of guessed. Plus Ilya told me.
By the way, you need to update.
Jimmie Rodgers is pretty cool too. I like a man who can yodel.
posted by torONTo on April 21st, 2004 at 12:49 pm eOh right, forgot about that… I’m flattered that you cared enough to cybersnoop.
posted by Alex on April 21st, 2004 at 1:07 pm eAlex, That was one bizarre story. Among other things, it escapes me why anyone would lie and say they’d been on the faculty of the University of Kentucky.
Although I stand to benefit a great deal from the tenure system, I think it *should* be dismantled — it’s hopelessly screwed up. The reason it exists, putatively, is to protect academia from politics. But the only reason anyone ever gets fired is for political reasons.
posted by Anna on April 21st, 2004 at 1:11 pm eThis is just that kind of friendly place, I guess.
posted by torONTo on April 21st, 2004 at 1:11 pm etorONTo: And here you are, continuing to hide your light under a barrel. Why don’t you tell us your story? Maybe it’ll help you feel less lonely. Am I channeling Jon (albeit less eloquently/verbosely) or what?
Anna: I guess one would lie about being on the faculty of the University of Kentucky because that’s still more prestigious than being faculty at a community college. Or something. I’m curious though, why do you want tenure dismantled? It seems like natural scientists and medical faculty tend to be in favor of getting rid of it, whereas social scientists and humanities people seem to want to keep it.
posted by Alex on April 21st, 2004 at 1:20 pm eTo 99th et al,
posted by Mels on April 21st, 2004 at 1:26 pm eIt’s people like you who make A2 so shitty. Thanks for demonstrating my point.
Alex: It’s fair to say that I have one foot in social science (the other in natural science). As for the sociological difference in general: Tenure doesn’t generally truly exist at med schools because most people are on “soft money”, meaning that they have to cobble together their own salaries out of grants and/or clinical work. If you can’t cover your salary, you’re out of luck and out of work. In a position like that, I probably wouldn’t see the use of tenure, either.
As for others with “regular” tenure-track appointments who still think tenure should be dismantled, I think people have varied objections. There are the common-sense ones centering around concerns about people becoming less productive or even downright incompetent with impunity. We all know this happens sometimes. There’s also the problem of the person who becomes crazy/insufferable, etc. and is impossible to get rid of. In the past we had someone who just got crazier and crazier, and we finally had to ban him from entering our building, but it was ridiculous how difficult it was, given his level of craziness.
There’s also the not-so-small matter of the tenure clock coinciding almost completely with a woman’s prime reproductive years. The pre-tenure workload and reproduction are pretty mutually exclusive these days. Yes, there are people who manage it, but the majority of women either end up in soft-money or dead-end jobs, or take a big risk and have kids late (or, have them before getting their first jobs).
I guess I just don’t see why our field should be different than other fields — why should academics have 100% job security not tied to performance? And the up-or-out nature of tenure is a lot of unnecessary pressure, I think. I guess I want it because I want to stop moving around and settle in someplace, but I don’t see it as a birthright and if no one had it, I’d be perfectly fine with that idea.
posted by Anna on April 21st, 2004 at 2:33 pm eAlex, thanks for your offer to let me “share”, but honestly I’d rather share my colon with a tapeworm. It’s not that I don’t find you all delightful, it’s just that I think this is all mere fun and games for most of you. Unlike me, you folks don’t hate Ann Arbor more than you love life. You don’t fantasize about mushroom clouds rising over M-14. You don’t root for the funnel cloud every time the tornado siren wails. And last August, when the power went out, you didn’t get down on your knees and pray to Jesus that this might finally be it. You see, you hate Ann Arbor, but like yourselves and each other. I hate Ann Arbor, but I hate you too. I also hate myself as often as not, but never as much as I hate you guys. You people suck the warm, caramel colored, shit tootsie rolls from a dead dog’s ass.
I’d “share” more, but I can’t reveal too much because I think Jon is friends with my mom and I don’t want her finding out what sort of language I use.
posted by torONTo on April 21st, 2004 at 4:24 pm eThe article reminds me disturbingly of a job I used to have at Bell & Howell, proofreading and inspecting microfilm / microfiche copies of doctoral dissertations.
98% of them were jaw-droppingly stupid, like this one was. There’s some shockingly brazen bullshit being passed off as valuable academic topics, and getting a pass from the committee. My two favorites were the marketing major whose Ph.D thesis was on the effectiveness of various types of slogans on signs in a national park in getting people to clean up after their dogs, and the Master’s thesis for psychiatry from the one who wanted to talk about “past life regression therapy.”
Any discipline that has “science” in its name is not a science (library science, political science, etc.). Anything that contains the words “semiotics,” “discourse,” “textual,” “deconstructing,” or the phrases “ways of knowing” or “informed by our experience” is in all likelihood bullshit, but if your mommy and daddy are rich enough and connected enough, you can get a cushy job producing bullshit for a living.
At least 90% of the material I saw (almost everything in drama, art, English lit, “Womyn’s Studies,” philosophy, political science, sociology, semiotics, “ecological studies,” etc.) was impenetrable moronic gibberish that looked like something produced by a perl script (such as this one, the Postmodernism Generator):
The Postmodernism Generator
You know that the net information content of the material is zero when you can put it through the Shannonizer:
the Shannonizer
…and it comes out exactly the same. Mathematics, or scientific, or technical material put into the Shannonizer comes out as meaningless gibberish. Literary criticism put into the Shannonizer comes out all but indistinguishable from what it was when it went in–which means it had no information content in the first place.
Imagine having to skim over thousands of pages of *that* every day, the net semantic content of which was null. I knew I wasn’t *supposed* to read this stuff, but when you have to inspect four thousand pages a night, looking for duplicates, damaged scans, emulsion bubbles, or off-center scans, you have to read the stuff or you’ll go out of your mind, so what did they want for eleven bucks an hour?
What kept me from losing my mind at that job was that in engineering and the sciences there’s a great deal of fascinating and very clever work being done these days, some of which has the potential to change the world.
posted by Mr. Mindboggled on April 21st, 2004 at 5:19 pm etorONTo sucks. Both the city and the man/woman.
posted by Engineer Guy on April 21st, 2004 at 8:03 pm eYeah, I’m sorry for making A2 so shitty. I’ll go back to letting you be an uneducated estrogen bomb. Hope this works out for you.
Idiot.
posted by 99th on April 21st, 2004 at 11:14 pm etorONTo just fears rejection. I’m determined to turn the other cheek and love him twice as much as he hates me. Not bad for a non-Christian right?
big XOXO at ya, t
posted by Alex on April 22nd, 2004 at 5:21 pm eI’m beginning to feel a distinct sense of unease….
What will the neighbors think?
posted by torONTo on April 22nd, 2004 at 6:12 pm eI’m strictly Modern Lovers only
posted by Alex on April 22nd, 2004 at 6:25 pm eAlex and Anna, as an alternative to the tenure bullshit, many people in applied sciences get around it by going the route of thinktanks or other contract research firms. In many ways it’s not a bad strategy - spend ten years or so focusing on your research without pressure to produce a tenure case, and then once you’ve become reasonably senior at the thinktank, make the lateral move over into academia and a full professorship. Very popular move among RAND folks (who generally get adjuncts at UCLA pretty easily and teach as much as they want). Though you have to really like writing grants.
posted by Nick on April 22nd, 2004 at 11:36 pm eThat’s great for you guys, but how does that help the many of us not in the applied sciences?
posted by Alex on April 23rd, 2004 at 6:31 am eNick, In my experience, there’s no place you can work in science without writing lots of grants. What’s really eye-opening is being on an NIH grant review panel. Shiver. Alex: Rand hires social psych people and sociologists, as does the the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (and others). And if you want to ditch altogether, McKinsey and BCG actively recruit Michigan Ph.D.s. I was interviewing with the former when I got my current job.
posted by Anna on April 23rd, 2004 at 9:24 am eWoah. Stay away from consulting. It’s just a pimping operation.
Off-topic, but Michigan boys aren’t very pretty. That makes me sad.
posted by snickerdoodle on April 23rd, 2004 at 5:06 pm eYeah, the problem with the McKinsey/Bain/BCG line of work is that it’s sort of unidirectional - if you get sick of it (which most people seem to, the hours suck, the travel prevents you from having a life, and the work is mindless) you don’t exactly have a great deal of scholarly work to propel a move into academia or contract research. And yes, psychologists and sociologists are abundant at places like RAND, RTI, Urban, Abt, Brookings, etc.
posted by Nick on April 23rd, 2004 at 9:38 pm eIt’s only a certain kind of sociologist that is abundant at those places. Demographers? Check. Criminologists? In spades. Health and Aging? You betcha! Strat and poverty? Can always use some of those. Org Theory? By the dozen. Specialists in early modern state formation? Once every fourth year at Russell Sage. Social movement theorists? You must be looking for the FBI. Ethnographers? “We don’t do anthro here.”
Whatever. So many hellish things lay between me and the job market that I can hardly bring myself to care about that right now. But I suffer no illusions that I will ever find a home at Brookings.
posted by Alex on April 23rd, 2004 at 11:25 pm eHonestly, grad school is about as good as it gets.
posted by Anna on April 24th, 2004 at 8:54 am eSo what you’re really saying is that I should just end it all now?
posted by Alex on April 24th, 2004 at 12:15 pm eOnly if you think there are hellish things between you and the job market. The hellish things don’t really kick in until after the job market
posted by Anna on April 24th, 2004 at 12:30 pm eAnna, if grad school is as good as it gets, I’m starting my MBA tomorrow.
And Alex - try to look at this as a marketing question. The chances that any of us will find the post-grad-school job suited to our training is small - so, if you have to find a job that won’t reflect your training in any way, what can you talk your way into?
The above might reflect all the time I’ve spent consulting.
posted by Nick on April 24th, 2004 at 11:27 pm eIf I wanted to look at things as “marketing questions” I would have never come to grad school!
posted by Alex on April 25th, 2004 at 11:42 am eNick, it is, and I’m right behind you.
posted by Anna on April 26th, 2004 at 10:01 am eNot something to remind us during exams, Anna. I don’t think I’m very disillusioned about the career I’m training for, but that may be because I genuinely like the activity of doing research and have been generally fortunate enough to work for/with terrific people doing it. But I completely agree with your thoughts on tenure - I would add that it often seems pretty decoupled from merit, which is my problem with it - it seems to be either impossible to obtain or too easy, depending on what dept. at what univ. you’re at. Academia itself is a crapshoot - if you’re lucky enough to find your way into a supportive department with good people who care about scholarship and good work, it can be really wonderful - but a politicized, gossippy dept can be living hell because problems like that are exacerbated by the resource constraints schools usually face. Something I got to see 1st-hand - years ago my father chose to leave a full professorship and not use his Ivy League PhD anymore, training out of his field to do Master’s level work in the private sector because he hated academia so much. He’s never regretted the decision.
posted by Nick on April 26th, 2004 at 11:15 am e