It must be fun to mock the unemployed on the basis of their fashion sense. Certainly, it's an original angle. I've never before noticed the thick black glasses or leather sachels of an academic at MLA, and I've certainly never before read a satirical caricature of academic fashion.

Maybe, though, rather than make fun of the people struggling to find work, we might better spend our time and energy fighting for full-time positions for academics.

I know. I have no sense of humor.

I think this is great - a creative interpretation of the job market situation these days. Sometimes it's nice to read something other than a serious article on these matters. I think the candidate mentioning the difference between what it took to get tenure years ago and what's expected at a job interview is right on. And it is true that many advisors just dont' get it - only a couple weeks ago, an established professor at my R1 university was telling students not to despair if they don't have publications, because one can still get hired without them. In theory perhaps he is right. In reality, the bulk of us had better get our rears off the couch and publish quality articles in first-rate journals.

I just think one's better safe than sorry with these matters. I was appalled that he was still saying this in the current economic crisis!

I've actually started dressing in sweatsuits when I give conference papers because I'm so tired of looking around (at least in my department) and seeing so many of the grad. students wearing practically the same thing. I figure it's better I disappoint first and perhaps impress with my paper than walk into the room looking like just another pretentious little gasbag. But no way do I have the fortitude to pull that off at the MLA...

This is just to say that yes, we're resorting to gimmicks. Thankfully I'm still hiding under a pile of draft dissertation chapters.

The quote that begins this satire is not, itself, satire. I have often read such stuff in articles and books that pass themselves off as current 'scholarship.' I used to think that it was written by people who couldn't write but later discovered that this is a learned discourse that aspirants to the English departments must master.

I have subjected paragraphs of it to the kind of analysis practiced during thirty years of teaching rhetoric and composition at Queensborough Community College and have demonstrated to my satisfaction that such 'writing' can be reduced to a clear if often banal 'appercu' or can be deleted as being self-contradictory or incomprehensible jargon.

I am not terribly sorry that the practitioners of such pompus drivel cannot find jobs perpetrating such pseudo-sophisticated, pseudo-scientific jargon in colleges and universities.

Observation seems to indicate that this kind of criticism is already on the way out. The continued joblessness of its youngest practitioners can only speed the happy death.

Let all those who believe that literature trumps criticism and that there is indeed a text in the classroom find a watering-hole close to MLA headquarters and drink to the demise of Crtical Theory (Ha!)and to the restoration of all those Euro-phallocentric-hegemonic dead-white-males (and females) who used to form the core of our diciplne. They were and are far more than the infected products of sexism, racism, homophobia, imperialism, etc. If they were only that, why bother reading them at all?

There is some truth in what Gina Barreca posts here. The job market in English is abysmal. Job seekers must show impressive publications to get interviews, sometimes more than most tenured professors have produced.

The profession might look at itself critically to examine WHY literature matters and HOW it matters. Maybe it's time to return to the methods of the New Critics, but with the new additions to the canon.

Are we turning out too many Ph.D's in English? Are we being fair to these students, knowing that many of them will never obtain a tenure track position and will be doomed to a life of perpetual adjuncthood? The faculties of the graduate programs in English may need to retrench.

Before, we were a profession in crisis mode. Now, the tone has changed. We are a profession in despair.

(matthew)arnoldas,

You can always find at least one to revel in the struggles of English departments because they deserve it, because of (gasp!) Critical Theory. It's true that lots of people abuse theory, and abuse literary texts in the process. But it's not my view that theory is what's wrong, or what was ever wrong, with English departments. In fact, the rise of theory arguably strengthened English departments, both in terms of the sometimes-no-so-friendly rivalries it pitched between 'theory people' and 'the old schoolers,' and because of the substantive work it did/does to remind us that just as everything written by someone not from Africa or South America isn't 'hegemonic,' not everything traditionally part of the English canon is necessarily inherently 'great,' 'for all time,' or purely autonomous. These were important things, despite some of the negative externalities (the likes of what is parodied in the tag-line of this article).

The problems with the English job market don't actually have much of anything at all to do with the kind of scholarship literary scholars are producing, but more with the nature of that scholarship, which will never be as translatable as cancer research. Even theoretical physicists can claim that for all of the postmodern-sounding nonsese that they produce, it might well lead to the discovery of a new dimension or clock that keeps time accurately for trillions of years or new kind of computer. As I've said before, lit. scholars need to be better ambassadors for what we do: better grantwriters, better politicians. At the sime time, higher education administrators have to be convinced of the value of the English department. Not an easy task.

As an aside, it surprises me how behind most people's notions of literary scholarship are (suppose that speaks to above). Maybe it's just my subfield/s, but the trend has already gone back toward the historicist and textual--only now we have theory to frame these things, rather than doing it the other way around. Most people who criticize lit. scholarship just don't know what they're talking about; and that's our fault, too.

From #5 above: "Are we being fair to these students, knowing that many of them will never obtain a tenure track position and will be doomed to a life of perpetual adjuncthood?"

Nobody is "doomed" to such a life. It's a choice from among a finite number of options, rather like most choices. Most of the folks I've met who hold English Ph.D.s are old enough to vote, drive cars, and even log on to the internet without assistance. Is it possible to acquire a Ph.D. without having some idea of what the employment probabilities are? Does anyone think society is somehow defective or negligent if it fails to provide a tenure-track position for each new Ph.D.? If so, where? Doing what? Making more Ph.D.s?

There are in fact actual, useful, satisfying, worthwhile jobs out there in the "real world." Let's not pretend that it's a clear-cut choice between salvation or damnation, between (to use what seems to this democrat a truly repulsive elitist term) a first-tier tenure-track position or teaching freshman comp to myriads of ignorant teenagers at--gasp--a community college. Let's also not pretend that the former is obviously "superior" in any objective, non-self-centered way to the latter.

It is really very easy to claim theoretical snobbery, but Rome is burning while a thousand theory fed Neros are fiddling, coddled in their tenured positions, blind to reality.

And regarding adjuncthood, it is a miserable existence, but #7 is quite right that there are other options available to graduate students and that choosing to pursue a Ph.D is their own fault.

Might producing too many Ph.D's in English for demand be the fault of the English graduate programs, whose only reason for existence is to support these same Neros?

Questions:

Just because people who stay in school to get a certain degree with which to try to enter a given field do it of their own free will, does that obviate the need for, or justification of, reform in that field? (A while back, when medical interns were working 36 hours at a time with no sleep, one could have made the case that interns knew what they were in for and if they didn't like working 36 hours straight with no sleep as interns, they should never have gone to medical school of their own free will in the first place.)

If colleges can teach, say, undergraduate English classes, more cheaply with underpaid adjuncts, should graduate departments in English simply acede to that situation and quit trying to prepare--or prepare all but a tiny few--full-time, tenure-track faculty?

Unless English departments start teaching freshmen how to write a coherent expository paragraph in some regional variety of standard English about something besides themselves and their own feelings, which had better be politically correct, about politicized novels, then I don't much care what these English departments do and the least amount of money wasted on them, the better.

[PA]: Chiding Dr. Foster, chiding Dr. Foster...

Expossitery essays given jffoster's speling and anthroligwistic oppinness and hateness on rules, how can English departments with money in the least waisted on them say anyway fer shore what's a coherent expository paragraph and be made sure of that they teach their students to write one? If anybody undersstands this one and goes ahead and ansers the question anyhow, so is this one of those paragraphs?

jffoster assumes the only thing an English department is for is teaching freshman writing. It's a bad assumption, but even going along with it prompts questions about whether other university departments perform their one or two directly practical functions as well. Why fund biology and chemistry departments when they can't produce more than handful of students each year whose lab skills approach anything in the vicinity of passable? Why fund mathematics departments if they're not teaching accounting? Why fund religion departments if they're not producing priests and rabbis? Why fund anything in higher education that isn't directly concerned with slating someone into a specific career?

These questions are getting warmer in terms of what really ails English departments. The assumption is that English more useless than other fields of academic study. I'm not sure if that's a good assumption.

My apologies -- I should have made it clear that my comment in (9) largely pertained to freshman English composition. I don't assume that that's English departments' only task but it's easily seen why Suomynona (12) concluded that. But freshman composition is where most of the adjuncts appear to be, and I don't think that adjuncts are responsible for English departments' aparently fairly widespread near abandonment of teachintg detached disinterested expository writing. While I agree that the trend to primarily contingent faculty is not good for higher education or the country, I don't think fixing that would go very far toward fixing a major problem I see with English departments and freshman composition.

Morning Goxewu, nice to have been on the same side in an earlier thread. We might be closer to it here than you realize.

I have no objection to teaching a standard dialect of English or any other language that has a standard dialect (most do not). English has several regional standards -- I don't contend that schools and colleges are wrong to pick one and allow some flexibility for students whose regional standard may be a little different. And all dialects of all languages have "rules". And if spelling were the only problem the products of freshman English had, I'ld be delighted.

jffoster,

Apologies for my hasty conclusion. I largely agree that having adjuncts (which I think we all know, as you already mentioned, but as I feel obligated to mention too, is not a good way of handling academic labor for a whole bunch of reasons) is not directly the main problem with English departments either. I do think, though, that the tendency to fund 'composition' kinds of departments and resources over traditional literature departments and resources does contribute to the problem with writing/composition instruction that you discuss; and I do think this is related to increased reliance on contingent labor. This will take some 'splainin,' I suppose:

This is not meant at all as an attach on comp/rhet faculty and departments, as I teach in/work with them both as a grad. student. But unfortunately it is often the case that students find occasion to 'write about their feelings' in courses for which the main objective is *writing*. When you provide a slightly different objective, say, learning literature, and you put a bit of space between the student and the project of writing, you have an environment in which you can both teach writing and not encourage but require 'detatched disinterested expository writing.' True, comp courses use literary texts quite frequently as writing prompts; but 1) the texts are often deliberately chosen to appeal as much as possible to the students' intersts (not necessarily a good thing for teaching writing, as I've said), and 2) because it's not literature or 'doing literature' that they're ostensibly learning, they confuse, almost reflexively, creative writing with other types of academic writing.

And so it is, as jffoster writes, mostly adjunct faculty teaching comp; but I wonder if those faculty, most of whom probably have literature and not comp/rhet PhDs, might actually be able to teach 'comp' better while teaching literature. Literature departments typically outsource the undesirable comp courses to contingent faculty, yet they could be hiring full-time instructors instead to teach couple more proper lit. courses. I know, I'm not holding my breath either.

But it seems to me the best way for English departments to find thier way out of the woods is to keep doing what they do best, and then try harder--for real this time--to spread out again, turn comp/rhet into full time lit., and back off of this notion of teaching writing as some kind of necessary evil, rather than THE fundamental skill of not just the lit. profession, but, quite obviously and justifiably, a whole bunch of other professions as well.

Terrific piece of writing and Dr. Renner has made a fan of me.

so it actually is pride and prejudice and zombies at the mla? I thought that was just a book...