Saturday, February 23, 2013

Weekly Address: Congress Must Act Now to Stop the Sequester. By Barack Obama.

Weekly Address: Congress Must Act Now to Stop the Sequester. By Barack Obama. Video. WhiteHouse.gov, February 23, 2013. Video at YouTube.


Marco Rubio’s State of the Union Response.

Full Text and Video of Marco Rubio’s State of the Union Response. The Daily Beast, February 13, 2013. Video on YouTube.

Deluded Republican Reformers. By Michael Tomasky.

Deluded Republican Reformers. By Michael Tomasky. The Daily Beast, February 23, 2013.

Karl Rove Won’t Stand Up to the Tea Party. Who Will? By David Frum. The Daily Beast, February 8, 2013.

Can the Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence? By Robert Draper. New York Times Magazine, February 17, 2013. Also find it here.

Ph.D. Problems: Wannabe Professors Need Not Apply. By Walter Russell Mead.

PhD Problems: Wannabe Professors Need Not Apply. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, February 23, 2013.

What’s the Use of a PhD? By Megan McArdle. The Daily Beast, February 21, 2013.

The Humanities, Unraveled. By Michael Bérubé. The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2013. Also find it here.

Mead:

PhD students are in serious trouble, and not only because the job market for professors is shrinking more every day. Over at the Daily Beast Megan McArdle offers some penetrating insights about the attempt of PhD programs to prepare their students for jobs outside academia (called “alt-ac” jobs, alternative to academic):
Unfortunately, in many cases a PhD sends a negative rather than a positive signal. Some employers are suspicious of people they figure will be a smartypants pain in the ass with no real skills (I’m not endorsing this view, just reporting it). But a bigger problem is that employers know why people get a PhD in Comp Lit or Religious Studies: so they can be a professor. If you go on the job market with that degree, they know that it’s almost certainly because you failed to get a job as a professor.
Now, most potential employers don’t know about the state of the academic job market: that there were only two jobs even offered in anything close to your specialty last year and one of them went to the son of a famous professor and the other went to the top candidate from Harvard. Many will just think of you as someone who couldn’t cut it in academia.
What makes things worse is that PhD programs train you in a very narrow range of skills really only suited for academia. PhD students are trained to write, but only as professors write, which doesn’t usually translate well into journalism. They’re trained to teach, but usually in the specialized context of large research universities, so the degree wouldn’t really prepare you to teach at the high school level, nor would it give you much of an edge in the brave new world of MOOCs.

People with PhDs will have a very hard time getting jobs outside academia, just as they will have a very hard time getting jobs inside academia. For many PhD students, the long years they spent in the program added up, from a career point of view, to a terrible waste of time. MacArdle writes: “I happen to think it’s the most cruel, abusive labor market in America, doing terrible things to bright and idealistic kids who want to be scholars.”

It’s hard not to see her point. PhD programs keep students poor for as much as ten years, taking their time and their money and leaving them with very few prospects on the other end. There are encouraging signs that reform is coming to higher ed. Let’s just hope, for the sake of suffering PhD students, it comes as fast as possible.

Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past. By Marlene Zuk.

Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past. By Marlene Zuk. The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2013. Also find it here.

Professors on the Production Line, Students on Their Own. By Mark Bauerlein.

Professors on the Production Line, Students on Their Own. By Mark Bauerlein. American Enterprise Institute Working Paper, January 2009. Also find it here.

Executive Summary:

In higher education in the United States, teaching and research in the fields of language and literature are in a desperate condition. Laboring on the age-old axiom “publish-or-perish,” thousands of professors, lecturers, and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays, and reviews. Over the past five decades, their collective productivity has risen from 13,000 to 72,000 publications per year. But the audience for language and literature scholarship has diminished, with unit sales for books now hovering around 300.

At the same time, the relations between teachers and students have declined. While 43 percent of two-year public college students and 29 percent of four-year public college students require remedial coursework, costing $2 billion annually, one national survey reports that 37 percent of first-year arts/humanities students “never” discuss course readings with teachers outside of class, and 41 percent only do so “sometimes.”

These trends are not unrelated. Academic engagement on the part of students is a reflection of how much teachers demand it. But with the research mandate hovering over them, teachers have no incentive to push it. If the system favors publication, not mentoring, hours in the office in conversation with sophomores are counter-productive or even damaging to career and livelihood.

Universities need to reconsider the relative value placed on research and teaching in the evaluation of professors. This paper offers several recommendations, including limiting the amount of material that tenure committees will review and creating a “teacher track” in which doctoral students are trained and rewarded for generalist knowledge and multiple course facility rather than a highly-specialized expertise.


Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research. By Mark Bauerlein. The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2009.

Research As Self-Branding. By Mark Bauerlein. Minding the Campus, July 24, 2007.

Are the Kids All Right? By Christy Hall Robinson. The American, January 27, 2009. Review of The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein.

Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads. By Elizabeth Redden. Inside Higher Ed, March 18, 2009.

Mark Bauerlein asks the “so what”question. By Alex Reid. alex-reid.net, March 2009.

Grad School scrutinized. By David Burt. Yale Daily News, September 21, 2011.

The Humanities, Unraveled. By Michael Bérubé. The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2013. Also find it here.

Graduate Education Is Losing Its Moral Base. By Cary Nelson and Michael Bérubé. The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 23, 1994.

The Tribes That Hire the PhDs. By Daniel B. Klein. Minding the Campus, February 10, 2013.

Superpowers: The American Academic Elite. By Robert Oprisko. The Georgetown Public Policy Review, December 3, 2012.

Academic Superpowers. By Scott Jaschik. Inside Higher Ed, December 5, 2012.

Prestige School Dominate Academic Placement. By James Joyner. Outside the Beltway, December 5, 2012.

How Wars Start. By Robert Kaplan.

How Wars Start. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, February 21, 2013.