Yep, that’s me. Good old GSU… I think at times that at least some of the profs underestimate their students–like I said, I find many of them smart, just they lack the skills they should have gotten due to being in a crappy school district in the more rural areas of the state. Profs tend to want to find the easist work for the survey classes, because they know they are dealing with a cross section of ability; but often I’ve discovered that many of them actually rise to the occasion when given more challenging work… They sort of resent it when you talk down to them and treat them like children. It’s kind of a fine line.
I didn’t think otherwise. But GSU can afford a football team, new buildings, and major remodels (they are talking about revamping Kell, which I don’t know how that will be possible, given the age of the building and what is supposedly in the walls regarding health/environmental risks), but they can’t give profs a raise in over 5 years, and they can’t give graduate students a raise in over 10 years, while our fees have been continually leaping upwards–it’s over a grand and that doesn’t include the mandatory insurance. They have money–they just don’t want to spend it on the humanities. They have conflicting goals, they want us a major research university, but they don’t want to sink money into academics. part of creating an attractive program is having an attractive package for graduate students, and at least in the humanities, they just don’t have that. It’s better in the sciences, but that’s because they get funding from places other than the university (grants and the like). My field needs money for research travel and traveling to conferences to present our work–the more we are out there, the higher the profile is for the university. I’ve been lucky to work with some incredibly talented and smart people who are fellow grad students–the university would do well to invest in them, and make sure they get placed in good jobs, yet they just aren’t willing to put in the money to do so, at least as I see it.
As for tenure? Well, it’s tenure that makes the university professor a middle class job. What I think you mean is that middle class jobs are going away more broadly. Is that something we want as a society? What replaces those jobs? Is the middle class just becoming obsolete? If so, what does that mean? The university system in california actually has two tracks for jobs–traditional tenure, with a focus on research and the teaching track, which has it’s own tenure like system, but has a strong focus on teaching evals and the like. I kind of like that. Not all people in humanity programs want to end up doing research later on, but are interested in teaching, just not K-12. I’d also like to see more MA/PhD programs in the humanities that gear people for non-academic jobs. Public history is getting pretty popular, so sink more time into teaching how to do public history… or think about gearing people for various kinds of public service jobs–being a state historian, for example or even becoming something like a corporate historian…
I think this more complex than that–it can be democratic, but access to computers, books, and the like was until recently pretty costly. I think the field has gotten more accessible and democratic, but not entirely. My husband still notices a serious lack of diversity in his field (which is admittedly, anecdotal a small slice of the profession, but he’s been at it for quite a while). It still tends to skew middle class, relatively white (though I think south and east Asians are represented pretty well, from what he says), and male. Plus, we’ve all been discussing recently how sexist “geek” culture is and this is certainly related to that.
Can you clarify what you mean by “rent-seeking”? I think I know what you mean here, but want to be sure before I address that point…
I think that’s a key point–humanities are less about right answers and more about talking about different answers and how you get there. I feel like I’ve done my job if they come out of my class with more, but better crafted questions than answers. I’m not sure you can effectively do that in a MOOC? It might be a more effective structure for classes that have definitive answers, but even there, I think you have shades of grey that might get lost in a MOOC structure.
From your mouth to the FSM’s ears!
