I quit my Ph.D. in English at a 3rd (maybe it's 4th) tier University--mainly because I moved away. Had I pursued that career, I was considering community college or a non-tenure track job at a couple of the larger institutions around here that have them. The work load for any of those jobs would have sucked.
A lot of people in my program ended up at what we called "direction schools". Northeast something State. Some of them work their way up from there, but a lot stay there, teaching 3-3 if they're lucky, but usually 4-4, going to regional conferences, publishing in small, unknown journals. Most of them really like teaching and really feel like the helping the community by educating the population.
But an awful lot of people never finish or never get a job if they do. It's a sad state of affairs.
I'm one of those academics who got her Ph.D. from one of these top programs and is now teaching at a school that doesn't even show up in the academic hierarchy. My concern about the phenomenon that you're discussing is that I worry that my letterhead is going to be a handicap when I'm looking for publishers for the book I'm working on. I can't tell that it's been a problem thus far in applying to conferences, trying to get articles published etc.--I mean, who's to say whether rejections are because of my letterhead or because of any other factors?--but that niggling fear stays in the back of my head. Even more, however, I can never shake the feeling that my grad school colleagues who get the top jobs are looking down on me; I know that, if they are, it's their problem and not mine, but that doesn't make it any less unpleasant.
Aren't conference abstracts reviewed blindly? Am I missing something obvious, or is this about a difference in fields?
But in general: the myth of the meritocracy. It's damaging.
Oh, all this hierarchy stuff just drives me crazy. I try to ignore it but unfortunately it's part of the whole system I am working in.
Conference papers, publications, etc. are reviewed with a double-blind only in some fields. In my field, the reviewer is always provided with the names of the authors, whereas the authors are not provided with the names of the reviewers. I feel this always influences the review of the content, or at least the benefit of doubt. (so-and-so got a job at ivy league/regional comprehensive, so she must be a genius/dunderhead).
I was thinking a lot about your "secondly" point today, especially the part about "a very small percentage of the published scholars in a given field wind up acting as the gatekeepers for the profession as a whole". My chair was telling me about XU's tenure policy, and that the deans get external letters by contacting the top 3 or 4 departments and asking them to suggest reviewers for us. I actually find this offensive, especially because dept status is changing, and I know XU isn't noticing. So not only are the same behemoths asked over and over, but they're out-of-date behemoths too.
I feel you on the whole academic-status thing. As a fairly recent hire at a state school with masters but not Ph.D. programs, I sometimes feel like my senior colleagues are inordinately impressed with my first tier education. Obviously (as far as I'm concerned), that education was not so much better than theirs, but the letterhead ...
I have a bit of concern on the market-argument for fewer Ph.D. programs, though. It assumes that everyone who gets a Ph.D. plans to use it to profess, and that becoming a professor is really the only sane or sensible thing to do with a Ph.D. Even in the humanities (hell, even in *philosophy*), that's not the case. That said, it wouldn't kill graduate programs to give their students more accurate projections of their academic job prospects!
Thanks for blogging this--have been meaning to talk about this very issue myself for a while now. I particularly appreciate your acknowledgement that, even though we all know it's b.s., we also all do it b/c we've been trained w/in the system--which is, of course, how the system perpetuates itself....
This post articulates a lot of things that I think myself (and have talked about a little bit, I think).
I wanted to respond quickly to Janet's comment about the market/PhD program issue - personally, I'm pretty cynical, but I tend to think the only reason anyone should enter a PhD program (at least as PhD programs stand) is if they do want to go on to become an academic, defined as a professor. Being a professor is about the only job I know of that you HAVE to have a PhD to do. I could also agree with someone who knows for sure that they DON'T want to profess, who has deep personal reasons for learning more, entering a PhD program, but I think that as they stand, such a person stands a deep risk of getting sucked into the academic (tenure-track) rat race, or of being looked down upon (and not supported) for not wanting to be part of that rat race. My personal feeling is that if you love a subject and want to continue learning, there are LOTS of other ways to do so than entering a PhD program. So I would go along with limiting the enrollment of PhD programs because I don't actually think getting a PhD benefits anyone much unless they actually do want to profess.
This is based on PhD programs as they stand, mind you, not what they could and probably should be. I guess I think it would be easier to restrict enrollments and for those with interest in something to find other ways to learn about it, than it would be to change the structure/attitude of PhD programs so that they would give students more realistic ideas about employment options. Because the people running grad programs are the ones perpetuating/benefiting by the kind of hierarchy that Mel describes here.
Boy, this is rambling! Anyway, Janet, this isn't intended to sound at all hostile towards you and I know that there are lots of people who don't agree with me on this point (I have friends who espouse a pov more like yours and we've debated this before). Just thought I'd throw this out there.
Oh yeah, wanted to add that while most journals I know do double-blind reviewing (although the reviewers can reveal their names if they want), I don't think any conference that I have ever submitted to does. When I was on the planning committee for my subfield's Big Snooty conference we were basically told, for instance, to favor senior scholars in our selections. Now, that didn't rule out senior scholars who were from lower tier schools who'd become known in their field, but Mel's point about the amount of publishing carried out by people with 4/4 (or 5/5!) loads is an important one here. And if you're at a school with no money to send you to conferences, too, that will limit how well you're know.
I am occasionally heartened by how many people I see who aren't at Top Ivies or Big Ten schools who are extremely well-regarded in their fields (and tend, like ianqui, to see some of those people at the Very Top Schools as out-of-date/boring). But their level of production is still usually less, and I don't know how their being well-regarded makes up for the greater amount of work they probably have to put in to publish their stuff, compared to people at Top Schools who have a lot more assistance.
Hmmm, can you tell that I don't want to do real work?? Will be quiet now...
Hi Mel, some fine critical thinking here: Coning (thinking) Index 80%
More detail: www.oracep.com
85%] I've been thinking about academic hierarchies lately, and my deeply ambivalent relationship to them: not so much the hierarchy of rank within a particular institution, but the list of schools we all carry around in our heads, tailored to our specific discipline or field. We all know, or think we know, which are the best schools, which are the second best. When confronted with any school name, even the less-familiar ones, I generally have an intuitive sense of where it falls in that list. And mostly, it's an easy guessing game: there's lots of agreement about which are the top ten or fifteen schools in a given field. And after that, the second tier is easy to fill in. Past second tier, and nobody really cares, except for the people in those institutions. And the people who might be hiring them, or reviewing their tenure files, or selecting papers for a conference.
76%] I've been selecting papers for a conference panel recently, and even though my conscious mind knows it's a very flawed way of making judgments, I still recognize that the internalized hierarchy plays a role in how I read a proposal. Even though I'm trying to only read for the content, I also know that a session with some well-published, if not well-known scholars will more likely be approved for the conference, and more likely to draw some attendees. And unfortunately, the degree to which you're published usually reflects either the length of time you've been in the profession (i.e., you don't expect the same from grad students as from assistant profs) or your institutional location. People who are teaching 4-4 or 5-5 don't have time to publish, nor are they usually required to.
90%] There are several things I find so pernicious about all of this. First is that in today's market (which in English has been this way for at least 15 years), the 3rd- and 4th-tier places are frequently staffed by people from top-ranking PhD programs. Like my institution, for instance: we are a research U, and we offer PhD and MA degrees. But we are not nationally known, at least in my field. We serve a regional student population, and we do that quite well. But we are definitely down in the 3rd or 4th tier, depending how you're counting. My colleagues include people with degrees from Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, UCLA, etc etc. So judging someone by their letterhead doesn't necessarily tell you anything about their individual caliber. (of course, neither does their PhD-granting institution -- but it usually tells you something about their training, if not their brains).
61%] Secondly, there's this weird inflation of institutional self-importance. For instance, for my tenure review, I was told to list external reviewers "who would have good letterhead" -- by which my chair meant Ivies. Because to the College-level committee (not even humanities faculty, mostly) the letterhead meant more than anything else. I didn't actually have any Ivy reviewers, but I had people at tier1 and tier 2 schools in my field. What this means, multiplied by all the other tens of people trying to get tenure, is that a very small percentage of the published scholars in a given field wind up acting as the gatekeepers for the profession as a whole. (Plus it overloads them with work: MS reviews, P&T reviews, etc.)
100%] Thirdly: the ethics of this profession are crap. Realistically, half of the PhD programs ought to shut their doors -- there's no point in churning out so many PhDs (a particular problem in English) when there aren't enough jobs. If people like me are working at places like this, and feeling damn grateful to do so -- where are the people from 3rd, 4th, or 5th tier places going to go?
100%] Fourth and Most Pernicious: the myth of meritocracy. The myth that it's really just about your ideas and your arguments. Because at the end of the day, academics are making judgments all the time not about content, but about status.
50%] Who knew I was so bilious today? this post actually relates to a much larger post that's been brewing in the back of my mind for a while, but I haven't been ready to write it yet.
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