Do I Have a Moral Obligation to Stop Writing Grad School Recommendations?

Hot on the heels of Rebecca Schuman's blistering Slate article on the perils of graduate school, Sarah Kendzior has penned a piece about the exploitation of adjuncts for Al-Jazeera that Cranky Bear would heartily approve of.  These articles have provoked outpourings of bitterness and approval from my friends with experience in the academic world, and for good reason.  They well articulate the feeling of betrayal that many of us have.

Yet today, in the midst of all of this angst, I was talking with a former student over email about his possible grad school plans.  His one option is a terminal master's program at a very prestigious university (the same program at the same university that I graduated from), and he's wondering whether to go or not.  I have tried hard to expose him to the realities of the academic job market, but he is a very passionate and idealistic young man.  Like me once upon a time, he is the type of person willing to sacrifice his youth and quality of life to pursue the scholarly dream.  Unlike my younger self, however, he went straight from college into the work world, and now has a steady, well-paying job in the business world, and gets to live in Austin, Texas, to boot.

I have told him that he should not jettison his current life for a shot at the academic ring unless he really, really wants to do it.  I have told him the odds, but like Han Solo in an asteroid field, it's still full speed ahead.  I don't know what else I can do, apart from refusing to write letters of recommendation, an option that's off the table because I already wrote glowing letters for him.

As much as I tried to dissuade him from applying, I also know in my heart of hearts that he's the by far more suited to being a scholar than any other student I've had.  His knowledge and theoretical understandings are warped by growing up in a repressive, rural Texas environment and attending a third-rate university full of traditionalists, but I know that grad school would easily set him right.  I look at someone like this with his ability and drive, and think that it is an insane profession that would not welcome someone so suited for it.

I then remind myself that it is in fact an insane profession.  For instance, I know multiple people who've published books with reputable presses on important topics who can't get tenure track jobs.  I know many more who are fine scholars and stellar teachers who toil as low-wage contingent faculty, or who are on the tenure track at schools that pay little and offer a pittance, if anything, for research funding.  At the same time, I know complete and utter mediocrities with tenure.  I have seen someone get promoted to full professor, apparently on the strength of his having been a crappy department chair.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that it is these people who keep the academic dream alive.  The youngsters see such mediocrity and think "if they can make it, surely I can too."

It's becoming obvious to me that just telling my former students to reconsider graduate school isn't stopping them.  They don't even listen to the advice I give them on how to play the academic game.  I know other former students at second tier doctoral programs who are worried about their career prospects, but who ignored my advice to jump to more prestigious universities after completing their master's degrees.  These two students are very intelligent and highly capable, and will most likely toil for close to a decade to get a degree from a school whose appearance on their CV will mean an automatic toss into the discard pile come job application time.

I also told them that grad school was not the way to go in the first place, but they obviously didn't listen.  Of course, neither did I at their age.  I heard the horror stories, and thought to myself "I'll make sure that won't happen to me" with all the arrogance and stupidity of youth.  It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the only way I can do my part to preventing the next generation of youth from being sacrificed to the Moloch of graduate school is to refuse to write anyone a letter.  Deep down I know I'm not capable of such an extreme move, but I am beginning to think that this reflects an incurable sentimentality and optimism on my part, not the best interests of my students, or my moral obligations to them.

Margaret Thatcher Embodied the Fundamental Contradiction of Modern Conservatism

Margaret Thatcher's rise to power, and the changes she initiated (some would say inflicted) represented the fearsome power of a revived conservatism.  In all of the obits, condemnations, and hagiographies her death has inspired this week, no one disputes her importance for putting conservative thought into action, no matter what one thinks of those ideas.

However, few seem to be asking questions about the fundamentals of her ideas, which is what I would like to do.  Although Thatcher was a conservative, she and other modern conservatives seem to be at odds with themselves.  To be a conservative means literally to "conserve" past traditions and political practices.  Despite this fact, today's conservatives worship a power that is the greatest destroyer of traditional life ever unleashed: laissez-faire capitalism.

In Thatcher's worldview, there was famously no such thing as society, only individuals and families.  Despite her admonitions that Britons revive "Victorian values," Thatcherism resulted in something quite different.  Her "every person for themselves and let the devil take the hindmost" philosophy hardly jives with anything the Victorians, for all their sins, would have valued.  

Even though Thatcher couched her radical ideas in the language of tradition and Britishness, when push came to shove, her reign shattered tradition and destroyed the organic ligaments of community, the things that conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke had always praised.  In some cases community destruction was quite literal, as in her government's intentional destruction of the coal mining industry, which wrecked the towns dependent on it.  In her worldview, cash-value and the bottom line mattered more than anything else.

Thatcher thus personified the fundamental contradiction at the heart of modern conservatism.  The same people who act most worried about social change and the dissolution of society are the same people worshipping the the very force -unfettered capitalism- most responsible for dissolving traditional bonds. 

How Professional Historians and Professional Baseball Players Have Similar Career Prospects

There's a piece at Slate that's making the rounds among my academic friends imploring potential graduate students in the humanities to go running for the hills.  Of course, this is a long-standing genre, but this particular piece, written by a recent grad, speaks to the frustrations of those stuck in the trenches of adjunct labor.

Of all things, it got me thinking about baseball.  Some professions try to limit the number of apprentices they take in, but others, like history and baseball, will give just about anybody a shot.  Those who vie for tenure track positions and a spot in a major league lineup must compete against hundreds of others with the same goal.  Both grad students and minor leaguers are paid low wages but subsist on the dream that they may someday get to make a living out of what gives them the most joy.

The winnowing process in baseball as in academia is brutal.  Only a tiny fraction of amateur baseball players are signed to minor league contracts.  The vast majority of those players end up being career minor leaguers, and many never even make it past rookie ball.  Of those who do make it to the majors, many are gone after a couple of seasons.  In academia potential historians must get accepted to a doctoral program, make it through classes, pass comprehensive exams, research their dissertation and then write the damn thing.  When it's all said and done, most of the students in any particular graduate cohort don't make it to the end.  Those who do graduate must compete in a Thunderdome-esque job market and are most likely to toil in the academic minor leagues as adjunct or "visiting" professors.  Those who do manage to attain tenure-track jobs still must jump through the brutal tenure obstacle course.

Academics will do this at institutions they consider second-rate in towns where they'd rather not live.  Like baseball players, academic historians work where they are assigned by the school that drafts them. Like baseball players, they can jump to another school as a high-priced free agent, but only if they are star material.  If not, they're stuck.

Former minor leaguers and unemployed PhDs finish their failed stab at the dream having spent their young earning years developing skills that have little to no attraction to employers outside of their chosen fields.  No matter what the cheerleaders for the "alternate-academic" path say, there is very little demand for an expert in nineteenth century German social history outside of a university.

Look, we all can't be baseball players, rock stars, or CEOs of major corporations.  The problem is, we pretend that becoming a tenure-track professor at a desirable university isn't just as unlikely as getting to start in the major leagues.  If young people still want to take the chances I took, I'm fine with that, I just want them to know the real story when they make that fateful decision.

Our Current Political Divide May Actually Be a Regional Divide

During the last seven years of my life I have lived in four different states in different parts of the country, and that experience has revealed to me the stark regional differences that exist in this country.  The conventional wisdom about important issues is wildly different here in New Jersey as compared to Texas, the state I just left.  We can see such differences in the recent pushes in states like Arkansas and North Dakota to severely restrict access to abortion when no such movement exists outside of the South or West.  A better example might be the map (displayed above) showing where people were most likely to change their Facebook profile pictures in solidarity with same sex marriage activists two weeks ago during arguments in front of the Supreme Court.  The South and Great Plains are noticeably white on this map, and out of step with the rest of the country.  If you look at the map of the 2012 election below, you will see a great deal of correlation.

Shifts in regional power can make a huge difference in national politics.  As historian Bruce Schulman has argued, the rise of conservatism in the 1970s was driven and reflected by the economic and population growth of the Sun Belt.  Unfortunately for conservatives, Sun Belt states like Colorado and California have become more liberal, and Florida has gone for Democrats in the last two presidential elections.  The South and interior West alone cannot give Republicans the votes they need to win.

The regional disparities in voting and on key issues also might help explain the virulence and polarizing nature of political debate in America. The hard-core, true believer House Republicans hail from districts where people who disagree with their ideas are few.  These same ideas are political poison in other parts of the country.   Many states in the conservative regions have taken a combative attitude towards the federal government by refusing to take part in the Affordable Care Act and passing nullification resolutions.  Because of the ideological uniformity of many of these states, politicians there are free to be as kooky and extreme as they want to be.

There is a world of difference between Connecticut, which recently passed sweeping new restrictions on gun ownership, and states like Montana, where the legislature wants to nullify any new federal gun laws.  I really don't think this divide can be breached; fanatics never compromise.  Because our system was designed to diffuse power, it makes it easy for one chunk of the country to band together and jam up the legislative gears.  Mechanisms like the filibuster, for instance, give minority factions an effective veto.

This is not the first time in our nation's history that regionalism has fed political conflict.  (There was that whole Civil War thing, you know.)  For decades the Solid South banded together in Washington to prevent any moves towards racial equality.  Supporters of segregation filibustered and nullified to their heart's content, successfully blocking progress for quite a long time.  If we are to make any progress regarding gun control, reproductive rights, marriage equality, and a whole host of other issues, this regional conflict must be resolved.  Hopefully it will be settled with less difficulty than in the 1860s.

An Appreciation of Roger Ebert

I grew up in an isolated town where the only movie theaters were a three-plex at the mall, and a twin cinema downtown.  The proprietors of these establishments typically played it safe with the movies they brought in, only showing the most middle of the road Hollywood fare.  Despite this impediment I started on my cinephile journey in high school.  Much of this has to be credited to a fantastic local video store that stocked just about everything.  However, I would not known what to look for if not for Roger Ebert.

As a teenager, I watched Siskel & Ebert every week.  At first they really intimidated me, because they could be brutally critical with stuff they didn't like, and they heaped praise on movies I'd never heard of, and which didn't come within 100 miles of being exhibited in my hometown.  I slowly began to realize that I had spent my life watching movies uncritically, without reflection, and had wasted much of my time on garbage.  They mentioned worthier films like Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver, and I sought them out.  After that and a dose of Stanley Kubrick, I never looked back.

Once I took off for college in a city with a thriving art house cinema, I finally got to enjoy independent and foreign movies on the big screen.  Watching quality films became one of my most cherished hobbies, and Ebert was my guide.  With the advent of the internet, I especially benefited from his Great Movies series, which gave me ideas and pointers on where to look in the video store.  After college I landed in Chicago (and later Champaign-Urbana), and I made sure to buy a copy of the Sun-Times every Friday to read his reviews, which guided me to all kinds of films I never would have seen otherwise.  His passionate opinions and nimble prose drew me in week after week and never failed to give me insight.  With his passing we have lost a true giant, one who will not be replaced in our current, fragmentary cultural landscape.

Track of the Week: Mott the Hoople, "The Ballad of Mott the Hoople"

Over the years I've developed a special love for British bands with a sizable following in the home isles that didn't make a splash over here in the states: Suede, The Small Faces, The Move, and now Mott the Hoople. I first got into Mott a few years ago after a record store clerk back in Illinois pushed their All the Young Dudes album on me. In the ensuing years I've picked up more albums on vinyl, and enjoyed rockers like "Roll Away the Stone" and "All the Way from Memphis."  Their killer cover of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" speaks of the magic they could work with a good riff.

It's one of their ballads, however, that has really sunk its hooks into me. Around the time I started teaching high school after my escape from academia, I dusted off their Mott album, and for the first time really listened to the wistful track "The Ballad of Mott the Hoople (26th March 1972, Zurich)."  It's a heart-wrenching account of what it's like when you've realized that the dream you've chased for so long and for so hard isn't going to come true. The whole premise is rather meta: before taking the stage at yet another show, lead singer Ian Hunter opines in his distinctive rasp about never having quite made it. (The Allmusic site describes the band as "one of the great also-rans in the history of rock & roll.") One of the most cutting lines of the whole song is "rock and roll's a loser's game," and it's really stuck with me. When I hear the song, I tend to substitute "academia" for "rock and roll," and think about my own also-ran status.

Like rock and roll, academia attracts true believers willing to endure poverty and all manner of indignities for the opportunity to be on the stage, whether it be at Madison Square Garden or an Ivy League lecture hall. The sheer numbers mean the odds are slim, and the number of failures is rather steep. For every tenured professor there are ten adjuncts and grad school dropouts; for every Bad Company there is a Mott the Hoople and several other bands too obscure to even get a record deal. And yet Bad Company covered one of Mott's songs ("Ready for Love") without even approaching the quality of the original. There's the rub, of course: many also-rans are a whole helluva lot better than a good number of their more successful peers. I know plenty of academic Mott the Hooples who have a lot more to offer the world than the professorial Bad Companys and Foreigners that I've had the misfortune to meet and even work with. (Like those bands' music they tend to be overblown and devoid of taste, but inexplicably popular.)

The problem with big dreams is that they come with big disappointments. The most cutting line in "The Ballad of Mott the Hoople" for me is "Oh I wish I never wanted then/ What I want now twice as much." I too have felt the regret that I was ever so stupid and silly to chase such a preposterous, impossible dream. Or to let that dream dominate my life and steal my youth. My undergraduate professors warned me, and told me how long the odds were, but I refused to listen.  How dare they presume to tear down my dream?

Our society tends to romanticize the pursuit of dreams and the following of one's bliss, but it's taken me a great deal of time and meditation to overcome my bitterness with the loser's game that I used to play. I've recovered, and I'm happier than I've ever been, but my years of having dreams are over and done. Perhaps that's for the best.

[Note: I wrote a version of this back in the autumn of 2011, and I pretty much feel the same way still.]

What If...I Were Commissioner of Baseball?

It's baseball's opening day today, and amidst my joy at the return of the boys of summer, I am annoyed at the men who run the game.  Last night's official season opener between the Rangers and Astros was case in point.  The Astros have been moved from the National to the American League, completely against the wishes of the team's fan base, so that interleague games can be scheduled every day of the season.  I've never heard a solitary baseball fan demand that interleague play be a daily occurrence, so I am unsure where this idea came from.  It is representative of Bud Selig's tenure as commissioner, which has been full of all kinds of silly gimmicks and hasty decisions.  I know that Bud will be retiring soon, and baseball will have a new commissioner.  He (baseball's hierarchy is unfailingly patriarchal) will likely be the owners' toady and enable, just like Selig and most of his predecessors.  If he is not, he will be strong-armed and fired by the owners, which was Fay Vincent's fate.  That doesn't mean a baseball fan can't dream or have flights fancy.  If your humble author were made commissioner of baseball, this is what he would do:

Organize the two leagues into two divisions and eliminate the wild card
One advantage that baseball has over most other sports in the pennant race.  The excitement of two or more teams trying to win every day down the stretch, or else face elimination, is hard to match.  The last day of the 2011 season, which saw several momentous games on one night, contains the kind of magic you just don't find elsewhere.  Pennant races are good for baseball because they happen just as football season is beginning, and thus keeps the public spotlight on the diamond at a time when the more popular gridiron begins to hold sway.  Unfortunately, the current format, with three divisions, has cut down on the number of close pennant races.  Having teams compete for only two spots in each league will create dramatic moments.

What's more, the current wild card system is immoral.  In sport with 162 games over a grueling season, I find it completely galling that a team incapable of winning its own division can go to the playoffs and ride a hot streak to a title.  One of baseball's advantages over other pro sports is that the regular season really matters, and that mediocre teams can't make the playoffs, as they regularly do in hockey and basketball.

Bring the Astros back the to National League and limit interleague play
The only reason the Astros are in the American League is to expand interleague play, which should actually be limited.  In the early days interleague games had all kinds of excitement attached to them, since they had never happened before.  Now they have gotten beyond mundane.  The Reds and Angels are playing an interleague series tonight, but does that really excite anybody?  One of the advantages that baseball has over other sports is the uniqueness and contrasts between its leagues, which are so much more meaningful than those between the NFC and AFC in the NFL.  I think limited interleague play is fine, especially when it involves intense, intracity or intrastate matchups like Cubs-White Sox.  However, once it waters down the uniqueness of the leagues without adding any real value to the baseball experience, it ought to be limited.

Recommend Buck O' Neil, Bill James, Marvin Miller, and Curt Flood for the Hall of Fame
I know the writers and the Veterans Committee determine these things, but as commish I would implore them to consider these men for the Hall.  O'Neill was one of the greatest managers in the Negro Leagues, as well as a legendary scout and coach in the majors.  After he retired, he became one the game's greatest ambassadors.  If not for segregation of the majors and the racism that remained after desegregation, O'Neill would have managed in the bigs and managed well.  The Hall should do right by him.  Bill James' use of statistical analysis has revolutionized the way the game is interpreted, and so ought to be inducted.  Marvin Miller and Curt Flood were the most important figures in the end of the reserve clause and the battle for players to get rights and just compensation.  The owners may have hated both of them, but they don't get to determine who's in the Hall.

Have an official ceremony at Elysian Fields in Hoboken
The legend of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, is complete and utter poppycock.  Modern baseball was invented by New Yorkers who played their games at Elysian Fields, in Hoboken.  Today it is a busy street corner, with a humble mark that shows the spot where baseball was first played.  As commissioner I would officially give Hoboken its due and repudiate the Cooperstown legend, and not just because I'm a New Jersey guy.  There is a reactionary and pernicious notion that baseball is a rural game and a throwback to a more rustic America, when in fact it was the product of the city and early urbanization.  The ruralification of baseball fits with a general anti-urban bias in this nation's mainstream culture that has pernicious effects on our cities and their dwellers.  It's also just bad to perpetuate lies.

Reform the All-Star game
I wrote about this in-depth last year, so I will just give the highlights: end the player from every team requirement, limit rosters to 27 players, and end the practice of giving the winning league home-field advantage in the World Series.

Revenue sharing
This would really be a long shot.  Of all the major team sports, baseball is the only one without a robust revenue sharing structure when it comes to television money.  This means that wealthy teams can outspend poor ones, which hurts the overall popularity of the sport if fans in several markets decide that there team will never have a chance, and so give up.  Revenue sharing would also help limit runaway salary inflation.

Use YouTube more effectively
Right now MLB tries to shut down any YouTube video with footage from baseball games in it, ostensibly to guide users to mlb.com.  There's just one problem: unless you're looking for highlights of recent games, it sucks.  Baseball has such a wonderful history, and plenty of video footage of it is out there, but fans have almost no access to it at a time when other sports have come to peace with YouTube.  If the sport wants to bring in young fans, keeping them from seeing anything baseball-related on YouTube is a pretty stupid way to go about it.