The professor is in The essential guide to turning your Ph.D. into a job

Karen Kelsky, 1964-

Book - 2015

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Subjects
Published
New York : Three Rivers Press [2015]
Language
English
Main Author
Karen Kelsky, 1964- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
x, 438 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 425-432) and index.
ISBN
9780553419429
  • Part I. Dark Times in the Academy
  • 1. The End of an Era
  • 2. Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower
  • 3. The Myths Grad Students Believe
  • Part II. Getting Your Head in the Game
  • 4. The Tenure Track Job Search Process Explained
  • 5. Stop Acting Like a Grad Student!
  • 6. The Attributes of a Competitive Tenure Track Candidate
  • 7. Building a Competitive Record
  • 8. Your Campaign Platform
  • 9. Why They Want to Reject You
  • 10. When to Go on the Market and How Long to Try
  • 11. Where Are the Jobs? Institution Types and Ranks
  • 12. Where and How to Find Reliable Advice
  • 13. Why "Yourself" Is the Last Person You Should Be
  • Part III. The Nuts and Bolts of a Competitive Record
  • 14. Take Control of Your CV
  • 15. Getting Teaching Experience
  • 16. Publish This, Not That
  • 17. Why You Want and Need Grants
  • 18. Cultivating Your References
  • 19. Applying to Conferences
  • 20. HOW to Work the Conference
  • Part IV. Job Documents That Work
  • 21. The Academic Skepticism Principle
  • 22. What's Wrong with Your Cover Letter
  • 23. Tailoring with Dignity
  • 24. Rules of the Academic CV
  • 25. Just Say No to the Weepy Teaching Statement
  • 26. Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness
  • 27. The Research Statement
  • 28. What Is a Diversity Statement, Anyway?
  • 29. The Dissertation Abstract
  • Part V. Techniques of the Academic Interview
  • 30. Academic Job Interview Basics
  • 31. The Key Questions in an Academic Interview
  • 32. The Conference Interview (Including Phone and Skype)
  • 33. The Campus Visit
  • 34. The Job Talk
  • 35. The Teaching Demo
  • 36. How to Talk to the Dean
  • 37. They Said What? Handling Outrageous Questions
  • 38. Waiting, Wondering, Wiki
  • Part VI. Navigating the Job Market Minefield
  • 39. Good Job Candidates Gone Bad
  • 40. Fear of the Inside Candidate
  • 41. Wrangling Recalcitrant References
  • 42. Managing Your Online Presence
  • 43. Evaluating Campus Climate
  • 44. When You Feel Like You Don't Belong
  • 45. What If You're Pregnant?
  • 46. What Not to Wear
  • 47. Covering the Costs
  • Part VII. Negotiating an Offer
  • 48. Don't Be Afraid to Negotiate
  • 49. The Rare and Elusive Partner Hire
  • 50. The Rescinded Offer-Who Is In the Wrong?
  • Part VIII. Grants and Postdocs
  • 51. The Foolproof Grant Template
  • 52. Proving Your Project Is Worthy
  • 53. The Postdoc Application: How It's Different and Why
  • 54. The Good and the Bad of Postdocs
  • Part IX. Some Advice About Advisors
  • 55. Best Advisors, Worst Advisors
  • 56. A Good Advisor Is Not Nice
  • 57. Ph.D. Debt and Ethical Advising
  • Part X. Leaving the Cult
  • 58. It's OK to Quit
  • 59. Let Yourself Dream
  • 60. 100+ Skills That Translate Outside the Academy
  • 61. Collecting Information
  • 62. Applying While Ph.D.
  • 63. Breaking Free: The Path of the Entrepreneur
  • Conclusion. Declaring Independence
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

Kelsky, entrepreneur, blogger, and former academic, reports that the American academy is in crisis. State funding has declined for public colleges and universities; tuition and student debt have increased; costly administrative hirings (of deans, provosts, etc.) are balanced with numerous budget cuts, including fewer educational programs and faculty positions, eliminated course offerings, and closed campuses. Adjuncts, many with PhDs, are hired as temporary teachers with salaries at a fraction of tenure-track faculty. The author aims to empower current or future PhD job seekers to make informed career choices, indicating they will find almost no university opportunities for permanent and secure tenure-line positions commensurate with their advanced training. This book reveals the unspoken norms and expectations of the job market so that graduate students, PhDs, and adjuncts can weigh the risks and chances of success in a tenure-track job search, or they may seek nonacademic options. Kelsky offers wide-ranging, valuable advice and an important perspective for job seekers choosing either of these two career paths.--Whaley, Mary Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Kelsky, a former tenured anthropology professor and department head and current principal of the eponymous "The Professor Is In" blog and career guidance service, delivers straightforward advice to those considering or preparing for a tenure-track faculty position in U.S. colleges and universities. The author pulls no punches in her candid and often irreverent description of the arcane tenure track job search process in an environment of rapidly dwindling opportunities owing to academic budget shortfalls and the resultant proliferation of nontenure track faculty, adjunct instructors, and graduate teaching assistants. Likening the process to a political campaign, Kelsky's detailed five-year plan is replete with advice on building a competitive record, both where and where not to publish, from whom to solicit guidance, cultivating references, writing effective application materials, navigating the job market, negotiating offers, and more. VERDICT Primarily directed to PhD candidates and alumni in the humanities and social sciences, the advice illuminated here will benefit all doctoral students and adjuncts contemplating or pursuing a tenure-track career.-Alan Farber, Univ, of North Carolina, Chapel Hill © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Practical advice for job-seeking graduate students. In 2010, after 15 years as a tenured anthropology professor and department head, Kelsky (Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams, 2001) left academia to found The Professor Is In, a counseling service and blog aimed at helping graduate students mount a job search. Aware of the current competitive job market, with colleges and universities increasingly trying to save money by staffing departments with part-time adjuncts, Kelsky offers smart, frank, and often witty advice to lead applicants through the complicated process of securing a tenure-track position. She has no illusions about her readers' ability to do this on their own. Graduate study is infantilizing, she maintains, a process of hazing that leaves students "insecure, defensive, paranoid, beset by feelings of inadequacy, pretentious, self-involved, communicatively challenged, and fixated on minutiae." Advisers range from moderately helpful to neglectful to downright discouraging. They may not have any idea of the realities of the market into which they are sending students, which Kelsky thinks is "terribly, patently unfair, in that several generations of Ph.D.'s are now victims of an exploitative system that trains them for jobs that no longer exist, and denies that fact." The author covers in detail every aspect of the job search: building a strong record through carefully chosen publications (prestigious peer-review journals are the gold standard, and in the humanities and social sciences, a book contract is crucial); going after grants; presenting at national conferences; honing a CV; writing a succinct, sophisticated cover letter and teaching statement; presenting oneself in an interview and during a campus visit; and negotiating an offer. "Grad students," she writes, "remain in an extended juvenile status long after their peers outside of academia have moved on to fully adult lives." For those studentsand anyone who cares about themthis cogent, illuminating book will be indispensable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

One The End of an Era It's a balmy fall evening in Eugene, Oregon. The air is soft, the setting sun glows, and the leaves shimmer in shades of red, yellow, and orange. A murmur of voices blends with the clink of glasses as a crowd of professors, staff, and graduate students gathers on the spacious deck of a senior faculty member's elegant house. It is a retirement party. A longtime professor is bidding ­good-­bye after ­twenty-­five years at the University of Oregon. The ceremony unfolds as the professor and his colleagues regale the assembled crowd with stories of the students he taught, the programs he built, the family he raised, and the pleasures of his years of sabbatical travel. One of the resident faculty eccentrics (decked out in mauve velvet beret and dashing smoking jacket) laughingly recalls the professor's fierce affection for ­white-­water rafting, and the many, many faculty meetings missed as a result. As they talk, I pause to ponder the event through the eyes of the graduate students in the crowd. It looks beautiful and soothing, a vision of a career and a life lived at a peaceful, gracious pace, filled with teaching and leisure, colleagues and family. I wonder if they know that the life being feted here this evening is already a relic of the past. I suspect they do not. I suspect that they come to this party, and others like it, mingle in the lovely faculty home, drink the wine, eat the food, hear the stories, and believe that this, too, will someday be theirs. Nobody will tell them that they are wrong. The American academy is in crisis. Decades of shrinking funding and shifting administrative priorities have left public universities strapped for cash and unable to sustain their basic educational mission. As state legislatures have slashed funding to their state university systems, what money remains increasingly goes to pay for bloated administrative ranks, and the expensive dorms and recreational facilities that can be used to attract students and justify skyrocketing tuition dollars. A few facts and figures tell the story. States spent 28 percent less per student on higher education in 2013 than they did in 2008. Eleven states have cut funding by more than ­one-­third per student, and two ­states--­Arizona and New ­Hampshire--­have cut their higher education spending per student in half. Graph 1, from a 2014 report by the Center on Policy and Budget Priorities, illustrates. To compensate for declining state funding, public colleges and universities across the country have drastically raised tuition. Tuition growth has outpaced inflation for the past thirty years. Annual ­inflation-­adjusted tuition at ­four-­year public colleges grew by $1,850, or 27 percent, between 2008 and 2014, with states such as Arizona and California increasing tuition at ­four-­year schools more than 70 percent. Graph 2 from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities demonstrates. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 1975, a University of Minnesota undergraduate could cover tuition by working six hours a week ­year-­round at a ­minimum-­wage job. Today, a student would have to work ­thirty-­two hours a ­week--­close to ­full-­time--­to cover the cost. The result of these hikes to tuition is escalating student debt. The Institute for College Access and Success reported that 71 percent of the class of 2012 had debt at graduation, and the average debt of $29,400 was up 25 percent compared to 2008 figures.3 Currently student debt in America totals approximately $1 trillion, and default rates on these loans have climbed for six straight years. Astoundingly, in the midst of this crisis, universities have chosen to vastly increase hires at the highest end of the pay ­scale--­university administrators such as deans, provosts, and the like. According to the U.S. Department of Education, between 2001 and 2011, the number of administrators hired by colleges and universities increased 50 percent faster than the number of instructors. Between 2008 and 2012, university spending on administrator salaries increased 61 percent, while spending on students increased only 39 percent. The University of Minnesota system added more than one thousand administrators between 2001 and 2012, for an increase of 37 percent, two times the growth of both teaching staff and student body. To balance the loss of funding combined with the added salary burden of new administrative positions, colleges and universities have slashed educational programs, cut faculty positions, eliminated course offerings, closed campuses, shut down computer labs, and reduced library services. Arizona's university system, for example, cut more than 2,100 positions between 2008 and 2013, and merged, consolidated, or eliminated 182 colleges, schools, programs, and departments, while closing eight extension campuses entirely. During the same period the University of California laid off 4,200 staff and eliminated or left unfilled another 9,500 positions; instituted a ­system-­wide furlough program, reducing salaries 4 to 10 percent; consolidated or eliminated more than 180 programs; and cut funding for campus administrative and academic departments by as much as 35 percent. With fewer faculty and more students, who is teaching the classes? Temporary, contingent faculty known as adjuncts. Adjuncts have replaced traditional tenure track professors as the majority of instructional staff on campuses: in 2013 approximately 75 percent of university faculty were contingent and only 25 percent permanent tenure line. Forty years ago, these proportions were exactly the reverse. Between 1975 and 2011, the number of ­full-­time tenured or tenure track positions increased just 23 percent, to about 310,000, but ­part-­time appointments rose almost 300 percent to 762,000, according to the 2012-13 annual report of the American Association of University Professors. Graph 3 from the AAUP shows the shift. Adjuncts, who are also sometimes called instructors, lecturers, teaching professors, teaching postdocs, or visiting assistant professors, often have Ph.D.'s and scholarly records equivalent to those on the tenure track, and teach the same classes. However, they are paid a fraction of the salary. Where a tenure line faculty member in 2014 could expect to earn an average salary (encompassing all ranks) of close to $102,000 at doctoral institutions, and $75,317 at liberal arts colleges, an adjunct was likely to be paid a mere $1,800 to $2,700 per course for a maximum annual salary of around $23,000 per year. When the hours of required work are factored in, adjuncts' hourly ­take-­home pay of about $9 is less than that earned by a typical Walmart worker. ­Seventy-­nine percent of adjuncts do not receive health insurance at work, and 86 percent do not receive retirement benefits. Adjuncts at institutions of every rank often qualify for welfare and food stamps. The number of people with advanced degrees receiving public assistance more than doubled between 2007 and 2010, from 111,458 to 272,684. Washington Post writer Coleman McCarthy wrote of the "hordes of adjuncts" who "slog like migrant workers from campus to campus." "Teaching four fall and four spring courses at $2,700 each," he continued, "generates an annual salary of $21,600, below the national poverty line for a family of four." As the Los Angeles Times recently observed, "The lives of many adjunct professors are ones of Dickensian misery." Added to this financial struggle is the escalating student debt borne by those with advanced degrees. Graduate student debt is the fastest growing type of student debt, and graduate students now owe an average of $57,600. One in four graduate students owes almost $100,000. Adjuncts also lack access to the basic resources and tools of university teaching, such as an office, a phone line, a library card, or even photocopying privileges. They are typically told of their teaching assignment just days or weeks before the first day of class, and must scramble to prepare. When adjuncts arrive on campus, 94 percent receive no campus or department orientation. Despite their qualifications, skills, and dedication, adjuncts cannot manage, with their impoverished resources and precarious employment status, to provide a quality of student experience equivalent to that provided by professors with job security and full access to university resources. As tenure track faculty member turned adjunct Alice Umber (a pseudonym) wrote in her Chronicle of Higher Education column "I Used to Be a Good Teacher": "I'm not suggesting that adjuncts are poorer teachers than ­tenure-­track professors (except in the fiscal sense), only that the very limited institutional support so many of us receive undermines our teaching; at least it has mine. No matter how dedicated I am to my teaching or how hard I work, I simply can't do for students as an adjunct what I could when I was an integral part of a department and a university." She elaborated on how adjunct teaching falls short, hampered by isolation and exclusion. While adjunct professors usually bring great passion and dedication to their work, the lack of institutional inclusion means that they have little knowledge of, or impact on, the integrated curriculum that is supposed to govern the content and sequence of courses in a major. "I teach in a vacuum," she explained. "While I'm assigned classes and (sometimes) given course outlines or sample syllabi, after that initial exchange of information, I teach my courses in almost total isolation. In my previous job, one of the first things I learned was how the sequence of required courses in the major fit together to create a foundation, continuity, and a ­discipline-­specific education for our majors. That I ever possessed such knowledge now seems like such a luxury to me." In order to survive, adjuncts usually must cobble together a set of courses at several different universities, ­driv­ing frantically across the city or state to assemble a piecemeal income from three or four different campuses. Called "freeway flyers," they have no time or space to conduct the research necessary to keep their courses vibrant and demanding, to meet with students, or to publish the kind of work that is required to get a permanent position and leave behind adjuncting once and for all. Students (and their ­tuition-­paying parents), of course, have no ability to discern the difference between a tenure line and an adjunct professor. To students and parents, they are both "professors." The adjunctification of the university has flourished as an open secret, hollowing out the university education even as the costs of that education have skyrocketed. The cost of adjunctification for undergraduate students may be hidden, but the costs for those earning Ph.D.'s are anything but. Adjunctification has openly decimated the career prospects of new Ph.D.'s, particularly in the traditional humanities and social sciences, where nonacademic uses of advanced degrees are still relatively unusual. Thousands of Ph.D.'s emerge onto the tenure track job market each year, expecting to find permanent and secure tenure line work at a university commensurate with their years of advanced training, only to discover that there is almost no such work to be had. In some corners of a field such as ­En­glish, a single job opening can draw nine hundred to one thousand applications. In less overcrowded fields, the number may be closer to three hundred to five hundred. In all fields, candidates grow increasingly desperate. They stay on the job market for years, eking out a living by adjuncting. They quickly become enmeshed in a ­self-­destructive adjunct ­cycle--­adjuncting to make ends meet while searching for a tenure track job, but unable to research and publish enough to compete for a tenure track job due to the time demands of adjuncting. The tenure track job market in recent years has been likened to a lottery system, a Ponzi scheme, the Hunger Games, and a drug gang. In response to this state of affairs, increasing numbers of adjuncts are organizing in advocacy groups such as New Faculty Majority, Adjunct Action, and Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL). Because agitation for better working conditions can lead to the immediate dismissal of individual adjuncts, they have also begun to unionize. Adjuncts and other contingent faculty have successfully unionized at American University and Georgetown, among other institutions, and have been incorporated into faculty unions at the University of Oregon and a few other places. Progress, however, has been slow, for reasons I'll discuss in chapter 2. In all cases, the universities have fought these efforts. Northeastern University retained one of the country's most aggressive antiunion law firms to fight adjuncts' unionization efforts there. Despite these upheavals, most ranking graduate programs still consider any Ph.D. who ­doesn't land a tenure track job a failure or an aberration. "Doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values," critic and columnist William Pannapacker wrote. "It teaches them that life outside of academe means failure, which explains the large numbers of graduates who labor for decades as adjuncts, just so they can stay on the periphery of academe." Graduate students absorb this value system and judge themselves harshly. Adjuncts and those who can't find tenure track positions suffer not just from debt and poverty, but debilitating feelings of shame and failure. As Robert Oprisko observed, "A substantial and deeply meaningful of your core identity is tied to your profession [and] losing your position represents the death of your identity, the annihilation of your self. Your identity is contingent not on publishing or getting high marks in teaching. . . . It is contingent on being employed, which is beyond your power to control." Many tenured faculty advisors in the departments that produce all of these Ph.D.'s maintain a studied silence on the question of, in Oprisko's words, "being employed." Rare is the advisor or department that acknowledges the employment needs of their Ph.D.'s. or provides ­hands-­on training in the tactical professionalization graduate students need to either compete for scarce positions, or retool themselves for nonacademic work. That is where this book comes in. The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. into a Job reveals the unspoken norms and expectations of the job market so that graduate students, Ph.D.'s, and adjuncts can grasp exactly what is required in the tenure track job search, and accurately weigh both their chances of success and the risks of continuing to try. With this book I hope to empower you, whether you're a current or future Ph.D. job seeker, to understand how the job market works, make informed choices about your career, and protect your financial security and mental health. Excerpted from The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph. D. into a Job by Karen Kelsky All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.