70%

UPDATE (2/21/2012): Welcome, and thanks for all the retweets! If you’d like to see pieces similar to this one, check out the “Grad Life” category. For a whole archive of great posts on all things adjunct / grad student / academia, click on the postacademic.org link in my blogroll (the blog is sadly discontinued, but a lot of the posts are still very relevant).

Two great pieces came to my attention this week on the subject of adjunct teaching in the university system. First, there’s this wonderful article from current MLA president Michael Bérubé, on the New Faculty Majority (NFM) summit held in Washington, D.C. on January 28.  The summit itself was a long-overdue acknowledgement of the fact that adjunct and contingent faculty now make up a huge chunk of the university teaching force:

“Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities. Many of them are working at or under the poverty line, without health insurance; they have no academic freedom worthy of the name, because they can be fired at will; and, when fired, many remain ineligible for unemployment benefits, because institutions routinely invoke the “reasonable assurance of continued employment” clause in federal unemployment law even for faculty members on yearly contracts who have no reasonable assurance of anything.”

A few other key points from Bérubé’s article:

• The myth that escalating professor salaries are responsible for nationwide tuition increases persists, when in fact tenure-track faculty now make up less than thirty percent of the university teaching force. The remaining 70% of adjunct and contingent faculty can make as little as $20,000 a year without benefits.
• The problem won’t be solved simply by converting all non-tenure-track positions to tenure-track–rather, universities need to work to ensure fair pay, benefits, and basic respect for all faculty. The image of adjunct faculty as “bright, energetic thirty-year-olds who enliven their departments and disciplines, working in the trenches for a few years before getting their first tenure-track job” is misleading, given that many adjuncts are in their forties, fifties, and sixties, and in some cases have been working in the same position for fifteen or twenty years (though they’re forced to re-apply for the job every year).
• Beyond salary and benefits, the summit addressed the need for a major change in attitude, calling on tenure-track faculty to treat adjunct faculty with the respect and dignity they deserve.  At the same time, the general consensus seemed to be that, while respect and recognition are a good place to start, everything needs to be on the table at once–including the more difficult to obtain changes in salary and benefits. The MLA’s recommendation on per-course compensation is truly astonishing because a) it’s such a modest demand, and b) it’s three times what most adjuncts actually make:

“Following a review of best practices in various institutions, the MLA recommends minimum compensation for 2011–12 of $6,800 for a standard 3-credit-hour semester course or $4,530 for a standard 3-credit-hour quarter or trimester course. These recommendations are based on a full-time load of 3 courses per semester (6 per year) or 3 courses per quarter or trimester (9 per year); annual full-time equivalent thus falls in a range of $40,770 to $40,800.”

$40,800. Seriously, that’s all. When you’ve spent seven to nine years getting your PhD and are truly dedicated to your job, is this really an unreasonable salary to demand?

Well, when you’ve been paying your adjuncts $20,000 a year without benefits or job security, then yes, I suppose it is. I just need to do the math on that for a minute. Let’s say the average adjunct makes $2000 per course (not uncommon) and teaches four courses in a semester (what most would consider a very full load). Each course meets three hours a week, and the professor holds two hours’ worth of office hours per week. A semester is 15 weeks. For each course, the students (about 20 of them) hand in two ten-page papers and take two essay-based exams–figure on at least eight hours of grading work per group of exams / papers per class. Then at least another 2 hours per week per class of prep time. When you add it all up, your adjunct is making $17 an hour. With no health insurance or overtime pay, and with no hope of a severance package if their contract is not renewed next semester or next year.

In response to the NFM summit, Josh Boldt has created this great Google Doc which asks anyone in the know to provide basic information about how universities treat their adjunct faculty. One of the goals is to create a “hall of fame” of the best schools to work for, with the hope that faculty treatment might one day become a standard in the accreditation process. As Josh puts it,

“I call attention to this flagrancy because ultimately, it comes down to the students. I have colleagues who go to work every day to teach young minds. To make them better writers, better thinkers, and better people. And then they go home and eat Ramen noodles for dinner, and worry about whether or not they have enough gas in the tank to coast to work the rest of the week. Ramen is no longer cool in your thirties. Trust me.

“All I’m asking for is a very modest salary to do a job that I love, and for which there is a clear demand or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

Amen to that. Spread the word and check out the Google doc.

You’ve Got Me Pinned

24 hours in and I’m already addicted as hell.

I joined Pinterest before I really knew what it was, and it only took a few minutes for the format to suck me in. Thus far in the digital age I’ve avoided iPhones and all their apps, Farmville, Words With Friends, Twitter, and plenty of other time-wasting online activities. Sure, I check Facebook several times a day, but I rarely spend more than a few minutes actively engaging with the site. But with Pinterest, I think I finally get it. I see how people could spend half their lives online.

What is it, exactly? Well, it’s virtual scrapbooking. With a community that somehow manages to feel small, even when it’s huge (Pinterest crossed the 10 million user mark faster than any standalone site in history, a fact that has plenty of people paying attention). Basically, it allows you to display stuff you like in categories called “pinboards”. Other people can like your stuff, or re-pin it. You can comment on each other’s stuff.

This might all sound incredibly mundane and fluffy, but Pinterest appeals to a very primal desire (for me, at least): to share things you like. I could talk for hours about books, food, movies, or even buildings that I love. And I could listen rapt for hours while someone else talked about what they loved. Pinterest lets me do both of those things with a huge group of people.

Admittedly, most online traffic represents fluffy pursuits–gaming, posting photos of food and cats, arguing over who could beat Han Solo in a fight. But for some reason arguing about sports or movies is just “online activity,” whereas sharing stuff and talking about it–especially when that stuff includes clothes, weddings, and food–is “girly” (which for plenty of people equals “dumb”). Among the boards that I’ve looked at so far, about 1% of material is related to weddings, but you wouldn’t guess that from this chart.  This article represented Pinterest’s growth with a fucking hairdryer. Apparently when 80% of your traffic is female, you’re a) full of white dress-obsessed airheads, b) an endless source of snark for more “serious” internet users, and c) unable to be taken seriously as an online force.

The snarkers can snark all they want, but as Jezebel points out, “Pinterest drives more traffic than YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace.” And it doesn’t take a genius to see that the site isn’t just an innocuous indie effort at community–every pin equals money for Pinterest and the product manufacturers whose products are getting pinned and re-pinned. Like Facebook, Pinterest’s users generate free advertising just by sharing what they like.

But I like Pinterest so, so much more. I know it’s a marketing gimmick, and I know that by using it I’m basically just turning myself into a free billboard. But I am in love. Hopelessly. The concept is beautiful in its simplicity, as Jezebel goes on to say: “(Pinterest) seems to have identified what women want from the internet by simply allowing women to identify what they want. Period.” The online universe can snicker about Pinterest’s girly-ness all it wants, but it’d be foolish to ignore it.

Life After Grad School: Investing Your Money

I seem to read a lot these days that, for my generation, a lot of the traditional “markers” of adulthood are missing. Or they show up much later in life. Things like marriage, children, purchasing a new car, buying a house or an apartment instead of renting–these things simply aren’t inevitable for a lot of thirty- and even forty-somethings. Which might explain why, when I asked myself, “How should I start to plan for retirement?”, I had no clue where to begin.

For my mother’s generation, I think the answer was fairly simple: your husband will take care of it. Which was all right for some but didn’t work out so well for the ones who got divorced and then suddenly found themselves scrambling to get a handle on their finances. I’ll admit that until very recently, I really couldn’t comprehend the idea of saving for retirement. It was so far away (at least I hoped it was), and I was living hand to mouth, like most humanities grad students. I could barely put away a hundred dollars a month to pay my phone and Internet bills, much less sink a few hundred dollars into an investment account every month. Someday. But not now.

Well, someday’s kind of here, because I’m actually earning money now, and while there aren’t any guarantees, it looks like I might be on track to make a steady income for a while. Unfortunately my basic Internet searches on financial planning just served to confuse me more–even the “financial planning for dummies”-type websites threw around terms and figures that I didn’t understand. So after a brief “I’m a walking Lady Who Knows Nothing About Money stereotype” moment of depression I got in touch with a financial planning company and asked them what my options might be.

The company asked me some VERY personal questions that I wasn’t quite sure how to answer (How serious is your current relationship? Do you plan to have children within the next five years? Do you plan to marry? How much longer will you remain in Japan, and if you do leave, where will you go?). One thing about retirement planning–you’ll have to take stock of a lot of things, maybe before you’re really ready.

After doing a basic evaluation of my income and future plans, the company sent me a thick packet via registered mail–glossy booklets detailing financial plans that looked designed for people with lots and lots of money. People who, judging by the brochures, wore suits every day and had boats. I took a few days to think it over and then told them I would keep looking.

A U.S.-based financial adviser that my mother hooked me up with recommended a Roth IRA, one of those terms that I’d heard thrown around for years but had never fully understood. IRA stands for “Individual Retirement Account,” and basically it means that you deposit a certain amount of money every month into a special account until you retire. As long as you don’t withdraw the money, it’s not taxable. And IRA funds can be invested in all manner of mutual funds that will accrue interest and make your money “grow” instead of just sitting in a bank.

This is where it gets confusing, because I have no clue what kinds of funds or stocks I would want to invest in–I just want to plop my money somewhere and hope that it grows modestly until I’m around 70. And I don’t know the logistics of opening a Roth IRA when you’re living overseas and making your money in yen instead of dollars. Luckily my local bank seems ready and willing to explain everything for me, so I’ll let them give me some advice when I’m back in the States in May.

A few things I’ve learned from this (so far very brief) experience with trying to invest my money:

1. It’s never too early. The bank was pretty surprised when I asked about IRA’s–apparently most people start investing much later in life. Which might be all right if you’re making a six-figure salary or close to it, but if you’re like me and will probably never move out of a certain salary bracket (barring divine intervention or writing The Book of the Century), you need to start EARLY. Because it takes a long, long time to save up enough money even to live modestly after you retire. So even if it’s less than a hundred dollars a month…or less than fifty dollars a month…start putting money away as soon as possible.

2. Be realistic. Don’t sign up for an investment plan that demands a very high monthly contribution. You might think that you can realistically put away $300 a month, but the general advice is to take whatever you THINK you can save and cut it in half.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions. Not just to a financial adviser–to yourself. Thinking seriously about money forces you to think seriously about a lot of other things–your marital / single status and what it means, your plans to have (or not have) kids, where you want to live, how long you plan to be at your current job, etc. Too many people wait too long to confront these questions, and sometimes by then they’re in a financial mess and it’s too late.

4. Explore a lot of options. Don’t let yourself be pressured–by family, a financial planning company, or anyone else–into a retirement plan that doesn’t feel right. In the end if it’s all too much you can just start by opening an extra savings account.

I guess planning for retirement is just one of many stages of becoming a grown-up. Which might explain why I now have the urge to run outside and hula hoop.

Done?

A friend wrote to me recently and said, “So your dissertation is basically done, right?” My immediate instinct was to respond with, “Haha, no way, not even close,” because that’s how I’ve responded to people who’ve asked me about my dissertation for the past two years. But then I realized that I sent off a 177-page draft to my committee two weeks ago. And I’m about to buy a plane ticket to California in May. Where I will, ostensibly, defend my dissertation.

So yeah…it’s kind of done.

But I keep wanting to say that it isn’t. Because it can’t be done. Nothing that’s defined your life for so long can ever actually END. Because when it ends…then what?

I may actually have plenty more work ahead of me–still waiting for those inevitable emails full of requested changes from my committee members. But there are four chapters. And an intro, and a conclusion, and a bibliography. Looking back all I can think is…how the hell did I get here?

It’s remarkable to think that every dissertation, every volume uploaded to ProQuest and skimmed over by researchers like me, must have a similar story. Each one must have been a chronicle of failures, struggles, false starts and re-starts, arguments, long periods of writer’s block, and eventual completion followed by a strange feeling of “what now?” I’m tempted to start some sort of NPR-like project in which I seek out the authors of random dissertations and ask them to tell their stories, sort of like Miranda July’s It Chooses You.

Or maybe I’ll just do all those things I’ve been wanting to do but have felt guilty about indulging in, things like

1. Reading for pleasure. I already do a lot of that, but even my pleasure reading usually has some Meaning to it. No more. I’m going to seek out the most pointless novels I can find and read them without a moment of thought for their socio-cultural significance. If such a thing is even possible anymore.

2. Being with people. I miss having a social life. Looking forward to being out with friends again on a regular basis.

3. Drawing. I’m not a great artist, but I love drawing. Maybe I’ll even take a drawing class.

4. Exercising. Shit, I need to do a lot more of that.

I’ll admit that I’m kind of frightened of the day that I’ll turn in the last of the paperwork and send this dissertation off to that great digital library in the sky (where in the next few years it will probably be found and read by a few random undergrads, or maybe a grad student or two who’ll just skim the bibliography). I like identifying as a “researcher.” I like my current job too, but “web content writer” just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

In the meantime, I still open up the dissertation file almost every night and tweak the bibliography or one of the chapters. Which is going to become a bit sad if I’m still doing it after it’s been officially submitted.

Some Thoughts on Privilege and “Overreacting”

Maybe it was John Derbyshire’s comment in the National Review that sexual harassment isn’t real. Maybe it’s all of the permanently jobbed, mostly wealthy individuals who keep telling the Occupy Wall Street crowd to “quit whining and get a job.” Maybe it was Richard Dawkins’ incredibly misguided response to elevatorgate.  Or maybe it’s just the endless echo of “You’re overreacting” that seems to accompany so many observations about racial / gender / age / class discrimination in the popular media.

Whatever the reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about privilege lately, and about what people really mean when they accuse someone of overreacting.

I can already feel hackles rising when I say the word “privilege,” because somewhere along the way, privilege became the realm of white dudes and white dudes alone. Any time you talk about privilege, it seems, one of the first reactions is to accuse the speaker of white dude-bashing.

But privilege, of course, is not limited to white dudes. Let’s look at what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say about it:

privilege, n. A right, advantage, or immunity granted to or enjoyed by an individual, corporation of individuals, etc., beyond the usual rights or advantages of others; spec. (a) an exemption from a normal duty, liability, etc.; (b) enjoyment of some benefit (as wealth, education, standard of living, etc.) above the average or that deemed usual or necessary for a particular group

It’s that second definition, the “exemption from a normal duty / liability” one, that interests me most. Because that can apply to lots and lots of people.

Where privilege seems to come into play most commonly these days is in situations like this, which I’ll try to illustrate in a mathematical way.

1. Person A, a member of X group, describes how Y situation made him / her uncomfortable or offended.

2. Person B, who is not a member of X group and has never been in Y situation, dismisses person A’s response as “overreacting,” “not having a sense of humor,” or “being too sensitive.”

Let’s apply that formula to a few different situations.

A black man says that being followed around by a security guard in a shopping mall was offensive to him. A white woman says he’s blowing the whole incident out of proportion.

A woman says she was uncomfortable when a workplace superior invited her to his apartment for a drink. A male coworker rolls his eyes and says she’s overreacting.

A man says it’s difficult to live on $20,000 a year. A woman / man (the gender really doesn’t matter here) who has never made less than $100,000 a year tells the man to quit whining.

I’d like to propose a radically simple mathematical solution to this problem: If a member of X group expresses frustration / discomfort / anger over an issue specifically related to X group, and YOU ARE NOT A MEMBER OF X GROUP, please don’t accuse that person of overreacting, being too sensitive, or not having a sense of humor. You might have reason to doubt their position. You might be offended by their assessment of the situation. But as a person who has never and will likely never experience the kind of marginalization / discrimination they are describing, you are still viewing their situation from a place of privilege, and you should not assess it as an insider or an expert. Disagree all you want, but don’t dismiss.

I’ve got plenty of privilege of my own. As a white woman living in Tokyo, the police leave me alone. Not so many of my male foreign friends, especially my non-white male friends, who report getting stopped by the police on a regular basis for no reason at all. Am I going to accuse them of whining? Fuck no.

I’ve also never been poor in my life. Sure, like a lot of grad students I refer to being broke or strapped for cash, but I have never lived in fear of eviction, never had to live in my car, never had to forgo medical treatment because I couldn’t afford it, never had to use food stamps. So when someone who IS using food stamps says that it’s really hard to live on them, I’m going to acknowledge that I don’t know shit about what it’s like to be in their shoes. I’m certainly not going to dismiss their complaints as overreacting.

Because really, what we mean when we say “You’re overreacting” is “Your feelings don’t matter” and “I understand this situation better than you do.” We’re negating the person’s experience, diminishing the person,  and dismissing their problem as trivial.

To sum up, then: maybe we should all think about our own privilege. In particular, think about whether you’re speaking from a place of privilege before you dismiss someone’s anger or discomfort. Really, just think before you say “You’re overreacting,” “You just don’t have a sense of humor,” and “You’re too sensitive”. It’s very, very hard to say those things and not sound like a dick.

Hiatus

Going on a break, everybody–it’s getting to that time when I can no longer ignore looming dissertation deadlines, and if I want to finish this puppy in time for a May defense I have to hunker down a bit. I’ll probably still stop in here occasionally, but expect fewer posts through mid-January, when I hope to have sent off a draft. Stay warm!

Anne McCaffrey, 1926-2011

I wanted to be Menolly. Or at least I longed for a few pet fire lizards to call my own.

Menolly was braver than I ever felt as a teenager–after being told “no” time and time again, she kept going anyway.

In the case of Killashandra Ree, I just wanted her job. Who wouldn’t want to make a fortune singing to rocks on a hostile planet? Re-reading Crystal Singer recently, I was surprised to discover that Killashandra was a lot less likeable than I remembered–she kept whining about how everyone was invading her privacy and seemed to have a very, very high opinion of her talents. But she was nobody’s sidekick, she never needed rescuing, and she flew spaceships in mach storms. And when she had casual sex it was no big deal.

I only ever read three of Anne McCaffrey’s books–Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Crystal Singer–but they were enough to impact my life and reading habits for years to come. Like a lot of other confused teenage girls, I found solace in the struggles of McCaffrey’s mostly female protagonists. They might be battling monsters on distant planets, but they were fully-fleshed human beings, and they felt like kindred spirits.

“Harper, your song has a sorrowful sound,
Though the tune was written as gay.
Your voice is sad and your hands are slow
And your eye meeting mine turns away.”
–Dragonsong

 

I’m Confused

Image courtesy AP / The Enterprise, Wayne Tilcock

I’ve run the gamut of emotions in response to the UC Davis pepper-spraying incident. I went from shock to rage to despair and have now settled into a state of bafflement.

Seriously, I’m really fucking confused.

What in the world do institutions like UC Davis gain from pepper-spraying students? When has violence toward peaceful protesters ever done anything but galvanize a movement? Were the chancellors and the police officers really thinking, “This’ll show them–if we pepper-spray these kids they’ll all go home and think twice about ever protesting again”?

For fuck’s sake. Protesting is what college students do. It’s as much a part of the U.S. college experience as freshman composition. Who in their right mind calls in police in riot gear to a university protest?

During my four years at the University of Texas at Austin (1996-2000), there seemed to be a protest every other day. People demonstrated in the name of labor inequality, a lack of rights for the LGBT community, meat eating, affirmative action (for and against), protecting the Edwards Aquifer, and against a Barnes & Noble replacing the local bookstore. Some protests were small, but some were huge.

I never once saw police react violently at these protests, even the ones that lasted for days and involved tents. There was a police presence, but they mostly just stood by and watched. They actually seemed to be there primarily to protect the protesters from anyone who might, you know, try to deprive them of their right to exercise free speech.

There is, of course, a historical precedent for violent reactions to peaceful protests. In the last few days the UC Davis incident has reminded many of Kent State and the violent responses to civil rights protesters in the 1960s. But for a while there, at least, it seemed that exercising one’s right to free speech was actually safe again.

At the university where I’m currently enrolled (in California), I’ve also witnessed plenty of protesting. One protest involved the school’s use of sweatshop labor to produce its official clothing. Students camped out in front of the president’s office. At one point they were told that if they didn’t disperse, they would be suspended. Their parents were also called (a gross violation of privacy). One parent reportedly told her daughter, “Stay right where you are.”

People were outraged at that level of response. But the idea that those students would have been beaten with batons, or had pepper spray forced down their throats, was pretty much unthinkable. They were college students. Protesting was what they were supposed to do.

What happened? When did students peacefully assembling on college campuses come to be seen as a threat? What is different about these protests?

Plenty of others have responded to that question eloquently. Reasons cited include the militarization of police forces (I particularly like the contrasting images in this article, of an unarmed police officer leading a student away at Columbia, and the UC Davis police, who look like they’ve ready to face down an army). The one thing that I keep coming back to is this: maybe these protests at Berkely and UC Davis, protests over outrageous tuition hikes and a growing income inequality, hit a little too close to home. Maybe the government has read its history and knows that protests which begin in places like Berkeley have a way of striking a chord with the nation. Maybe protests that have nothing to do with the university itself are fine, but when students protest something that actually might make people look a little more closely at how universities are run, they have to be silenced.

And then of course there’s the post-9/11 world, in which every gathering of more than two people in a public space seems to constitute a threat to public safety. In which linking arms is apparently NOT a form of non-violent protest. The behavior of the UC Davis police is inexcusable, but perhaps we should look more closely at the training they received–training which, I imagine, taught them to treat all groups, even college students sitting on the ground, as potential terrorist threats.

I’m still confused. And I don’t mean for my confusion to make light of what is truly a tragic situation that should provoke all kinds of outrage. But at this point my rage is all worn out, and I’m going for baffled.

In the meantime, here’s a video that makes sense. Lots and lots of fucking sense. When I grow grim over images of Penn State students rioting in favor of a man who enabled a child rapist, I look at this video instead. Thank you, UC Davis students and faculty, for bringing a little sanity to an insane world.

Stop SOPA, Protect Net Neutrality

I’ll be back with more posts soon–things have been a little hectic–but before then please read up on SOPA, the very scary might-just-pass bill that could make life really difficult for bloggers and many other small website operators.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that online piracy is a problem and we need to do something about it, but this bill is a mess. You can sign a petition in opposition to it here.

Penn State and the Code of Silence

Sadly, I wasn’t too shocked to learn of how Penn State had egregiously mishandled reports of child sexual abuse.

When it comes to on-campus sexual assaults, universities are very good at sweeping things under the rug. To avoid tarnishing the university brand–and the multi-million dollar endowments that come with it–assault cases tend to be handled internally, and victims are put through a bewildering and often humiliating system which makes other victims reluctant to speak out.

In November 2010, a freshman at St. Mary’s committed suicide nine days after reporting a sexual assault by a Notre Dame football player. In that case, the university had not involved the police and subsequently refused to discuss its handling of the assault. St. Mary’s, for its part, was quick to point out that “no crime occurred on our campus.”

At Drake University in August 2010, a fraternity member sexually assaulted one of his fraternity brothers and was kicked out of the fraternity, but not out of school. These kinds of punishments seem to be the most common–the accused gets kicked out of clubs or suspended from certain activities, but does not get charged with an actual crime or even kicked out of school.

Maintaining the illusion of crime-free, assault-free campuses seems to be priority number one for more than a few universities. Students who do report assaults are sometimes threatened with disciplinary action if they discuss the assaults in public. The system in place for handling assault cases can be baffling and shrouded in secrecy. While cases are under review, accusers may be forced to attend classes with their attackers. Many accusers report pressure from other students to back off, especially if their attackers were popular.

The Center for Public Integrity’s multi-part study on university handling of sexual assault cases paints a fairly grim picture:

“One national study reports that roughly one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. But while the vast majority of students who are sexually assaulted remain silent — just over 95 percent, according to a study funded by the research arm of the U.S. Justice Department — those who come forward can encounter mystifying disciplinary proceedings, secretive school administrations, and off-the-record negotiations.”

If there is one silver lining to the horrific events that took place over the last twenty years at Penn State, it’s that maybe, just maybe, people will finally start to realized the depth and power of the university code of silence surrounding sexual assault.

And how utterly fucked up it is to shelter pedophiles and rapists in the name of protecting a brand.