i will tell them… and i will tell them… the day will come next spring, i guarantee it. it will come and i will tell them…
because i get paid for one thing but my performance and my future employ depends on work done for which i do not get paid; work done which takes away any and all possible free time i might have to supplement the chicken shit you pay me to do work that doesn’t really factor into my future with you. i might not say chicken shit though i might.
there is something fundamentally mendacious and perverse about hiring people for 9 month contracts, telling them to celebrate the flexibility of the profession while continually adding on more and more responsibilities, and then not paying them for the work that is used to evaluate your employee’s performance. indeed, it makes you want to be one of those professors who does the minimum for tenure and then sits around and complains all day.
we’ve got one of those… i’ve named him the revolutionary always looking for a revolution to betray. but, in his defense, he gets paid crap, and that ain’t gonna change, so why do anything but complain.
i don’t want to be one of those professors who sit around and complain.
Do you know anyone who doesn’t think getting tenure is one of the suckiest chores ever?
by greg—Oct 11, 06:45 AM
i don’t have a problem with getting tenure… partly because i would get it rather easily were i to stay here.
i do have problems with the some of the effects of tenure and what is used to assess tenure.
not every article or manuscript written should be published. because of tenure we are drowning in a morass of mediocre monographs. partly because assistant profs hurridly work towards turning their dissertations into books, because a 6 year tenure window assumes that dissertations will become books.
for a university to run properly, teaching, service, and research must be conducted by its professors. and this is fine; except the provost has said on several ocassions, “i don’t care about service and teaching, i only care about publishing.” but, then you don’t get paid over the summer to do the research that they say is what they really hired you to do. (on the other hand the BOR, won’t give substantial raises because university professors are over-paid and living high off the hog… and their real job is to teach and they don’t do enough of it, or do it poorly anyway.)
so, at places like my institution, which pays just under the national mean (despite being in a top-ten city), it feels like your doing a whole bunch of work for free…
by Balthasar Gracián—Oct 11, 07:16 AM
i told them on Tuesday. and i should maybe point out that you don’t get to tell them just once.
getting tenure is remarkably easy…which is probably a glaring symptom of why i will be unemployed (at least here, anyway) in 325 days, 13 hours, and 12 minutes.
i’ll tell you more some other time.
by chris—Oct 11, 09:44 AM
i meant to say
“getting tenure here is remarkably easy.”
i don’t mean to downplay the effort required by other people’s more difficult situations.
by chris—Oct 11, 09:47 AM
I guess I didn’t really mean the process itself—all things considered, it’s relatively straightforward depending on your situation. The suckiness of it seems to me that so much is wrapped up inside it: job security and better pay, obviously, but also commitment to a place where you never expected you’d be. That seems to be particularly the case in the humanities, where “choice” is a joke. The problem is that so much comes wrapped up in the character of a place which may or may not be evident on first blush.
I’d love to know what they said, C. Meanwhile, I’m pretty certain you won’t be unemployed.
by greg—Oct 11, 09:57 AM
well, that’s another thing… at least here, better pay is a mirage. so, you get 5k more. that bump is not commensurate with your supposed experience and work. however, given the way the collegiate market works, you’re only gonna get a real raise if you go on the job market and your institution wants you enough to really give you a raise.
by Jeremy—Oct 11, 10:30 AM