Old Academe Stanley

William Pannapacker created this meme, and a lot of people are having a lot of fun with it.

Like Pannapacker, I’m not endorsing every single one of these characterizations, but plenty of them are right on the money.

He’s inviting people to create their own. (I will admit that until recently I thought that all those image + ALL CAPS TEXT memes were created by some mysterious meme-machine in Silicon Valley. Didn’t realize you could just input text and create your own.)

Here’s mine!

 

 

Tokyo Walks: Gaiemmae to Hiroo

I’ve lived the bulk of my Tokyo existence on trains, underground, and inside various buildings. Never bought a bike because I’m kind of terrified of accidentally mowing down an old lady on the sidewalk, only take taxis a few times a year, only ride in someone’s car once in a blue moon (very few of my Tokyo friends have cars), and don’t generally walk from point A to point B because the distances just seem too far.

I *do* spend a decent amount of time walking, but all those walks tend to stick close to major stations. So it was a treat recently to take a longer-than-average walk and see parts of Tokyo that you don’t generally see stuck in a train or subway.

The distances between train stations are actually a lot shorter than they seem. Particularly when you’re underground you enter a sort of time warp where you have no idea how far you’ve gone, but then you get above ground, start walking, and in just a few minutes you hit the next station.

My Saturday walk started at the Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art, where French artist JR was having an exhibition.

This is such a cool space, I couldn’t believe I’d never been here before. It’s decidedly “grittier” than a lot of Tokyo’s more famous art galleries. The gift shop–really a massive library of art and design books–was amazing.

And there’s a lovely little underground cafe where you can sit above said bookshop and contemplate the art around you while having a snack and some tea.

The JR exhibit was very well-put together, and small enough that I didn’t feel overwhelmed at the end of it (something that I find happens a lot at larger galleries). As part of his “Inside / Out” project, a photo booth is set up and visitors are invited to take a self-portrait which is then printed out, poster-size. You then paste up the poster somewhere, take a picture of it, and send it to the project website.

Unfortunately in the land of puri-kura obsessions the line to take a picture was about an hour and a half long, so I skipped that part. But they gave me a little card and told me I could come back for free on a weekday if I wanted to.

Leaving the Watari-Um, it was a straight shot down Gaien-Nishi dori all the way to Hiroo, where I had to be in the evening. After I was a decent distance from the station the streets became eerily quiet and un-commercial, full of trees and luxury apartment complexes (I feel like you can always tell Tokyo’s wealthier neighborhoods by the amount of foliage on display). Every other shop seemed to be a wedding shop–either selling wedding dresses or actually performing weddings, and I occasionally had to navigate between small crowds of wedding guests.

There were plenty of tiny restaurants and cafes–not necessarily the kind you’d ever come across if you stuck near the station buildings. People were out walking their dogs on the street or in the nearby Aoyama Cemetery.

Things got momentarily crazy as I passed through Roppongi, but they quieted down again quickly near Hiroo, where I wandered into a little alley and found a vaguely Spanish-y cafe with great tapas.

The whole walk took about half an hour and reminded me that Tokyo really is best experienced outside of trains, convenient as they might be. Maybe next I’ll try walking from Sky Tree to Ueno.

Recent Reads

Between 1) a Golden Week trip to Hawaii that consisted of little more than eating and laying around in beautiful surroundings reading books and 2) the occasional long train ride, I’ve managed to work my way the quite a few novels and non-fiction works recently. Here are a few mini-reviews.

Seraphina, Rachel Hartman (2012). Oh, I adored this. I supposed technically it’s “young adult,” but it’s quite dark, with beautiful writing and very well-drawn characters, including (hooray!) a complicated female lead who’s quite prickly. I guess it’s kind of about dragons, but it’s really not. Just read it, if you have any interest whatsoever in good stories and / or fantasy.

Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World, Shereen el Feki (2013). I came to this book seeking a more in-depth discussion of sexuality in the Arab world, given that what I read in the mainstream media (and even more leftist media) tends to paint a very negative picture of a world full of misogyny and rigid, unchanging attitudes toward any and all sex that takes place outside of marriage (and even the sex that takes place within marriage). And while el Feki’s book is fascinating and well-researched (and written from the unique perspective of a woman who has one foot in both Euro-American and Arab culture), I came away feeling pretty depressed. Things are changing, yes, but very slowly, and in some places not at all.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick (2010). Given the recent leadership change and the very recent “sea of fire” saber-rattling from North Korea, I decided to learn a bit more about my next door neighbor. Demick’s book is a wrenching account of ordinary people’s lives in an extraordinary place, based on extensive interviews (mostly conducted with refugees in South Korea) and her own experiences studying and traveling in the region. If it weren’t so tragic it could just be appreciated as brilliant science fiction. Horrifying but strangely uplifting at the same time.

Last Night’s Scandal, Loretta Chase. I needed a good beach read, and this was it. It’s got earls and ladies and a crumbling Scottish castle and sex. Lots of sex. Sometimes in rainy graveyards.

The Fault in Our Stars, John Green. I was wary of this one at first, as it seemed to be populated with kids who were just a little too clever and eloquent. But it won me over quickly with its utterly unsentimental portrayal of teenagers with cancer who are nonetheless determined to fall in love and experience all the usual joys and heartaches of adolescence. Again, technially “young adult” but doesn’t really feel that way.

Kindred, Octavia Butler (1979). Not quite finished yet, but damn, this is a rough read. Also unputdownable. I am well aware that I will never, ever come close to knowing what the horrors of slavery were like, but this book brings them closer than just about anything I’ve read before. At one point in the story, after many depictions of almost every kind of brutality imaginable, a character in the 19th century finds a book from the 20th about the history of slavery and scoffs, “Are people still talking about this?” And you understand more clearly than ever exactly WHY.

Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver (2012). Oh dear. I adore Barbara Kingsolver, have devoured almost everything she’s written. Thought The Lacuna was one of the best books in ages. But this one…I got more halfway through it and just never went back. It just felt a little too much like a recycling of a lot of her older work, and while I’ve always loved the imagery she creates, it seemed as though EVERY paragraph in this book ended with a little mini-poem of a sentence. Not my cup of tea.

Among Others, Jo Walton (2012). Okay, sorry, but…this thing beat out Embassytown for the Hugo? Seriously? I wanted to like it, I really did, especially given that it won the Hugo and it’s written by a woman, two things that rarely go together. But it was so bland. I almost feel like it was given an award simply because it was about a girl who loved sci-fi and fantasy and could rattle off book names and authors by the dozen. The story wasn’t compelling. Got to the end and thought, “That’s it?”.

The Giver Quartet, Lois Lowry (1993-2012). I remember teaching The Giver to junior high school students as part of my student teaching experience in college. It’s definitely young adult, but it’s well done, and the subsequent novels (Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son) examine questions that the first novel didn’t really have time for. Sort of My First Dystopian Fiction. Quick reads, and occasionally compelling.

Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson (2012). Amazing world-building and a refreshingly different setting for a sci-fi novel (a fictional Middle Eastern city that vaguely resembles Cairo). At some points it wobbled under its own weight, but it was so rich with place and character that I didn’t really care.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (2012). Classic murder mystery that I read in a day or two, but that still managed to defy expectations and make me think / squirm a bit.

What We’re (Not) Arguing About

“The life of the mind is born of fear,” writes Sarah Kendzior, referring to the fact that William Pannapacker and the small number of academics who have spoken out about the crisis in higher education have almost all felt compelled to use pseudonyms. Whatever side of the debate you may be on, I’m at least grateful that more and more people ARE speaking out, that more adjuncts are unionizing, and that potential and current humanities grad students can now make more informed decisions about their futures.

The numbers don’t lie, and they’re worth repeating. 70% of faculty positions are now held by adjuncts. This means that 70% of current humanities grad students, should they seek university jobs, are likely to end up making less than $25,000 a year, living without health insurance or any job security beyond the end of the current semester, and knowing that they could be fired at a moment’s notice without recourse.

The solutions to the crisis in higher education are still a subject of fierce debate, and I’m happy to see people from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds adding their voices to the conversation. At the same time, I think it’s important to clarify what academics and former academics are and aren’t arguing about.

1. Nobody is saying that ALL grad school is bad.

For the most part, people like Rebecca Schuman, William Pannapacker and Sarah Kendzior are talking about humanities PhD’s, not all graduate degrees as a whole. While law school, medical school, and graduate degrees in the hard sciences surely have their own problems related to academic infrastructure and post-grad school job security, those problems are fairly different from those faced by humanities grad students and adjunct professors.

2. Nobody is claiming that a degree should guarantee you a job.

I don’t think anyone who’s writing about the crisis in higher education thought they were guaranteed  to get a job. But when you spend eight to ten years of your life working toward a degree, I think it’s reasonable to hope for decent odds. Say, fifty people applying for a single job, and not a hundred and fifty. Or a hiring system that’s a little more transparent, where you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars just to get an interview and then wait months to find out whether you got it, and maybe never find out directly.

No, there are no guarantees. But the odds should be a lot better.

3. People are giving “don’t go / go” advice based on their experiences and their areas of expertise. They’re not making anyone’s grad school decisions for them.

Advice is just advice, and people can take it or leave it. No one (to my knowledge) is barricading the doors of grad school admissions offices or refusing to write letters of recommendation. If someone is really determined to get a PhD in literature, I doubt that a single article or blog post (or even five or ten) is going to change their mind. My nutshell advice is “just don’t go,” but when I sit down and talk with potential grad students (and I’ve talked to a dozen or so over the past few years), I lay out a lot of pros and cons, ask them questions, and let them ask me lots of questions. And I encourage them to seek out lots of advice and opinions, and then make their own decision about grad school.

4. No one is assuming that potential humanities grad students are blind to the realities of the job market. But it IS safe to assume that they don’t always have access to all the information they need.

Prospective humanities grad students aren’t encouraged to ask questions about things like job placement and what to do if they can’t find an academic job. And even if they do ask questions, the people they ask may give vague or misleading answers.

When I got into grad school, the very act of *getting in* and getting funded seemed like such a huge accomplishment that I barely thought about things like jobs. That was ages away, at least six years down the road! Sure, I’d done some research and looked at the numbers, but the realities of academic job-hunting seemed so distant. All I could think about was the exciting new life I was going to lead, the papers I would publish, the new discoveries I would make.

I was naïve, and I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t alone. And few of the professors I talked to gave me any indication that I had anything to worry about when it came to jobs. Sure, I should have pressed them more on that issue, but I was new and wide-eyed and didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with anyone.

In the past, most potential grad students got a pretty limited perspective on grad school—a very rosy one. Nowadays there are still plenty of people who will paint that rosy picture for them, but other voices have been added to the mix. As long as everyone is speaking to the truth of their own experiences and assessments, I don’t see a problem.

5. People aren’t advising against humanities grad school just because they’re angry / bitter / jealous.

A lot of people are angry, I’ll give you that. But when you read WHAT they are angry ABOUT, I don’t get the feeling that they’re jealous, or that they hate academia as a whole. Most of them have a deep love for the idea of “the life of the mind” and are angry because opportunities to participate in it have been steadily shrinking for years. They don’t begrudge those who DO get tenure-track jobs, but they’re angry that those jobs are available to fewer and fewer people. While Rebecca Schuman’s piece in Slate was more of a rant (and again, I think it was a justified one), the majority of writing in the “don’t go to grad school” camp tends to be a sobering collection of numbers and experiences. People are angry, but the anger has a rational basis.

6. (Almost) no one is saying that getting a PhD in the humanities isn’t intellectually or spiritually rewarding.

It can be very rewarding. Some of the “don’t go to grad school” writing has been critical of grad school itself and the kind of learning that takes place there. But most of it has focused on the structural problems within academia, not the question of whether getting a PhD is intellectually and spiritually rewarding.

My own grad school experience was very rewarding, and like Katie Roiphe, I’d like to believe that I use plenty of the skills I gained in my everyday life and in my current job. But even if a literature PhD is rewarding, it is wrong to present it as a viable path to a full-time professorship, and to encourage the idea that any job other than full-time and tenure-track makes a new PhD a failure.

If you want to get a PhD in literature primarily for the intellectual and spiritual rewards it offers, great. But you should have access to hard data and honest assessments of what your post-grad school career prospects are.

To sum up: provided that everyone is speaking to the truth of their own experiences and providing honest data, more information is a good thing. Everyone can still make their own decisions about whether or not to go to grad school. They can read go / don’t go articles, they can read the Chronicle of Higher Education, they can look at the job and placement numbers, they can consult with current grad students and professors. Even though my own advice is not to go, I’m fine with people pursuing a literature PhD as long as they are making a very informed decision.

Just Don’t Go: Article Round-Up

Not surprisingly, Rebecca Schuman’s “PhDon’t” Slate piece has generated plenty of impassioned agreement and disagreement in the blogosphere and beyond. Some of the responses made me nod my head even more vigorously, some of them made me scratch my head, and some of them just made me want to scream YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT in a very loud voice. Rather than comment extensively on any of the responses, I’ll just take this opportunity to provide a round-up of some of the articles I’ve seen.

• Here’s Schuman’s original piece in slate. She also wrote this blog post in response to some of the more common negative feedback that her piece received.
• Sarah Kendzior echoed many of Schuman’s points in this piece for Al-Jazeera. The comparison of grad school to cults was particularly chilling for me.
• For a bit of reference, here’s Thomas H. Benton / William Pannapacker’s famous “Just Don’t Go” piece from 2009. He wrote another piece for Slate in 2011 with suggestions for “fixing” humanities grad school.
• And just for the hell of it, here are a couple of pieces I’ve written on the fact that 70% of university positions are now held by adjuncts, and the MLA jobs data for 2007-2010.
• The Paraphernalian wrote this piece in 2011 about her decision to leave academia, and also this response after the original piece generated a lot of mixed feedback.
• Katie Roiphe wrote this piece for Slate on why a literature PhD is not a waste of time.
• Tressiemc wrote this very thoughtful and eye-opening piece about the realities of being black and seeking a job inside / outside of academia.
• For another bit of reference, Jonathan Senchyne wrote this piece back in 2011 in response to Pannapacker and the “just don’t go” mentality.

I’d like to try and break down some of the arguments for and against humanities grad school that pop up repeatedly in a lot of these pieces, but for now I’ll just let the writing speak for itself. Please feel free to link to other posts or articles that I’ve missed.

“Just Don’t Go,” Part…I’ve Lost Count

A large number of “don’t go to grad school” articles and essays have been written by tenured professors, and while I tend to agree with a lot of their points, there’s a bit of a credibility problem. When the person telling you that there are no tenure-track jobs available is someone who HAS a tenure-track job, you’d be forgiven for having doubts.

Rebecca Schuman, a visiting assistant professor of German at Ohio State, agrees. Her recent Slate article, PhDon’t, is one of the first I’ve seen in a while that’s written by someone in the trenches. Not surprisingly, the bitterness is palpable.

The key points (though you really should read the whole thing, and take a look at the accompanying and very appropriate image):

• The image that most people have of a post-PhD job–reading books, summers off, job security–is a complete myth.
• After four years of job hunting, Schuman has come to the conclusion that the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct.
• The odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you–around 150 people apply for any tenure-track job.
• There is intellectual reward in the exploration of scholarly problems, but it is next to impossible to get paid a living wage doing it.
• The reasons for the decline in humanities jobs aren’t 100% clear, but it’s clear that things aren’t likely to change in the next 5 to 10 years, if ever.

The article is refreshing in its (justified) anger and frustration, and also in the author’s ability to admit that some of her dissertation analysis was “batshit crazy” (in a field where a fair amount of batshit crazy passes for meaningful work). It covers ground that’s been covered before, but this time around the speaker is someone who never made it into the tenure track, not someone who’s advising from a position of relative comfort and security, and that provides a nice change of perspective.

Interestingly, in the almost-year since I completed my PhD, several of my friends and colleagues in the humanities have gotten tenure-track jobs. But I was fairly certain that these people would get jobs. They had the right combination: brilliant minds, provocative and marketable dissertations, drive, persistent and well-connected advisers, and a willingness to sacrifice a lot (read: move just about anywhere) for a good job. I would never dismiss their successes as luck, because they weren’t.

But they are a tiny percent of the PhD population, the (if Schuman’s estimate is accurate) 6%. For every one of them, there are probably more than a hundred who are jobless or adjuncting for something close to minimum wage.

There’s only one section of Schuman’s article that I disagreed with:

“So you won’t get a tenure-track job. Why should that stop you? You can cradle your new knowledge close, and just go do something else. Great—are you ready to withstand the open scorn of everyone you know? During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)”

Yeah, that didn’t happen to me. But maybe that was because I quit while I was ahead and didn’t spend years being beaten down by academic rejection. I also never saw my “academic self” as my whole identity, and I’ve always had friends and circles outside of academia. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that everyone–advisers, academic colleagues, friends, family–was wholeheartedly supportive of my decision not to pursue an academic job. Tenured professors have a reputation for having their heads in the sand when it comes to the humanities job market, but plenty of the professors I talked to seemed to think that opting out of an academic job search was a wise move.

I make that point primarily for those who ARE in grad school–if you do drop out, if you do end up not seeking or not getting an academic job, it doesn’t have to destroy you. You can maintain a multi-faceted life and group of friends. And if your academic friends “scorn” you for not getting or seeking an academic job, then they’re hardly the kind of friends you want.

That said, however, if you haven’t yet made the decision to pursue a humanities grad degree, I’m still very much in Schuman’s camp. PhDon’t.

Curious and Teachable

I still remember the one email I sent to Roger Ebert in college that got a response.

It was a desperate plea for information about Mononoke hime, the Miyazaki film that was getting rave reviews at film festivals but still didn’t seem to have a U.S. distributor. “Slowly working its way into national release,” he wrote.

It meant something, that an internationally famous film critic and TV star would take the time to write back to a simple fan query that would have been answered by newspapers and magazines a few weeks later. It was as if he understood the longing to see a really good film and wanted to reassure me that yes, soon, it’ll be here.

I started reading Ebert’s reviews in the mid 1990s. They gave me my first inkling that films were about much more than film, that a good conversation or debate about a movie was often a thinly veiled conversation about life’s biggest questions. From a fairly young age I sought out people who wanted to move beyond “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it,” who saw films as much more than an escape or a way to kill time on a date.

Those people were hard to find. But Roger Ebert was always there, saying things that resonated with my experience of the films he reviewed, drawing conclusions that had been on the edge of my perception but that I hadn’t been able to put into words. The conversation never felt one-sided, even if he was the one doing all the writing.

Reading the hundreds of tributes that have poured out over the past few hours, this sentiment comes up again and again: we all felt like we KNEW Roger Ebert, that he was one of us, that we could have sat down with him and talked movies in a coffee shop. And, thanks to his blog and his willingness to engage directly with fans, we felt like we were already doing that.

Roger Ebert could make poetry out of seemingly mundane things like dinner at a Steak ‘n Shake or the many uses for a rice cooker (I’m with you on the rice cookers, Roger). Many of his deep thoughts were connected in some way to film, but after he lost the power of speech and turned more and more to his blog, the voice that emerged had meaningful things to say about everything from gun control to Catholicism to global warming to his gloriously romantic relationship with his wife Chaz.

Something happened to Ebert’s writing after 2006, a transformation that has been commented on extensively. I noticed, for one thing, that he seemed to be giving out a lot more four-star reviews, often for movies that I thought he might have panned ten years before. I didn’t trust his opinion as blindly as I once had (positive reviews for The Happening and The Golden Compass? Seriously?). But the razor-sharpness of his negative reviews was still intact—Sex and the City 2 was one of my favorites, along with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Even his negative reviews didn’t feel mean-spirited, though. When he hated a movie he hated it because it could have been something much better, or because it was lazy, or because it was an insult to the intelligence of movie viewers, an intelligence he never doubted. One of my favorite stories is of the actor Rob Schneider, whose dreadful Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo inspired the title of Roger Ebert’s book, Your Movie Sucks. While Ebert was ill, Schneider sent him flowers with a card signed “Your Least Favorite Movie Star.” Commenting on the incident, Ebert said:

“Sometimes when I write a negative review, people will say, ‘I’ll bet you can’t wait to hammer his next film.’ Not true. I would far rather praise the next film to show that I maintained an open mind…(The flowers) were a reminder, if I needed one, that although Rob Schneider might (in my opinion) have made a bad movie, he is not a bad man, and no doubt tried to make a wonderful movie, and hopes to again. I hope so, too. “

Reading even his most negative reviews, you really got the feeling that this was true—that he desperately wanted these actors, directors, and writers to do better, and would congratulate them if they did.

When I think of Ebert’s writing, the single adjective that I remember most is awe. He was in awe of so many things, and he made you feel in awe of them too. And he had a profound sense of empathy, and a rational, calm way of writing about death and mortality that revealed a deep and abiding love for life.

Ebert is endlessly quotable, and collections of his best reviews and musings on life and film are swarming the web right now. For me, there’s this section from a piece about his relationship with his wife Chaz:

“This woman never lost her love, and when it was necessary she forced me to want to live. She was always there believing I could do it, and her love was like a wind forcing me back from the grave.”

Or this, from his “Great Movies” review of Dark City: “This is not only a beautiful film but a generous one, which supplies rich depth and imagination and many more details than are really necessary to tell the story…Many other great films give you the same feeling — that their makers were carried far beyond the actual requirements of their work into the passion of creating something wonderful.”

Or this one: “What I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: curious and teachable.”

It actually hurts to think of future movies that Roger Ebert won’t review, future events of worldwide significance that he won’t comment on. It was almost ritualistic for me to watch movies first on my own, then seek out his reviews and nod my head or have a heated mental argument when we disagreed. Reading his reviews was, in a way, like experiencing the joy of a good film all over again. Reading his blog was just a joy.

Thanks for giving sharing a regular dose of awe, Roger. I’m doing my best to remain curious and teachable.