Category Archives: employment

Help Me Get Better LinkedIn!

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LinkedIn seems to be mainly useful for people who have had fairly straightforward job experiences within limited industries. It also helps if one has easily highlighted skills, with useful endorsements and recent recommendations by people who know what you’re trying to do.
Numerically to date, my top endorsements are: Music, Singing, Writing, and WordPress, followed by other IT/Computer things (but Software Development?!) and Music things (but Music Theory?!). There’s almost nothing else about my academic work in musicology (just Editing) and absolutely nothing about my work in Library & Information Science.
I’ve added some categories, deleted others, and am trying to get some more recent, relevant people to help me update my skills endorsements and recommendations. I find that very few academics and librarians actually use LinkedIn, but please help me out if you are able to. Thanks!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/durrellbowman/

 

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Nobel Work if You Can Get It

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The whole kerfuffle about the University of Waterloo’s Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, Dr. Donna Strickland, being “only” an Associate Professor is ridiculous. She has tenure at a fairly major Canadian university, can do her work, and has pay equity. Lots of academics don’t attempt to advance to Full Professorship, because the amount of administrivia, committee work, etc. one then gets stuck with is prodigious. The university’s President basically implied that it would be a walk in the park for her to get that, but she still might not want it.

A much more important issue is that 80-82% of Ph.D.s (e.g., in the humanities, in which alternative career paths barely exist) end up outside of full-time, tenure-stream academia. For example, tens of thousands of adjunct instructors do the same work as faculty-member professors for less than half the pay, usually with no benefits or conference travel grants, generally without unionization, sometimes without even having an office (or, say, having to share a photocopier room with dozens of others as an “office,” as I once did), and they also often do the paid part of their work only on a part-time basis. Some of us basically have to give up after years of that kind of abuse. Now THAT is an actual problem.

Ontario’s Court Challenges

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toronto-shooting-20180723

It’s pretty clear that Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s months-old Conservative government is going to lose court cases repeatedly. It recently lost against Tesla Motors re leaving the company’s sales out of the gradual phase-out of electric-car rebates, the cessation of which was a bad enough idea already. This morning, it lost against the City of Toronto re attempting to drastically reduce the number of municipal election wards, given that campaigning was already under way and that rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be affected in various ways.

The right-wing government will probably also lose in the class-action lawsuit currently underway re the basic income pilot it recently cancelled, despite saying during the provincial election campaign that it would let it play out. I expect disability and welfare recipients and their case workers to create further, successful challenges, once the government rolls out its new, “sustainable” approach in November. The changes to come are likely to be devastating for the province’s most vulnerable citizens: those who can’t work and/or can’t find work.

The new, Conservative government is already turning out to be quite useless, which the 60% of us who voted for the other parties’ candidates knew it would be. Fortunately, the fact that it has a majority of seats at Queen’s Park may not even matter, if its attempted legislation keeps getting overturned in court.