Dear peer reviewers, journal and book editors, conference organizers, and everyone else with tenure-stream jobs in academia: Unless you work part-time at a liquor store and also live partly on welfare (while also having a Ph.D., etc.), you are not my “peers.”
I’m finding it difficult to continue giving up hundreds of hours of academic work for no pay. So, the book chapter and journal article coming out later this year will be my last work for free. If I write any more books or other major projects, then self-publishing and/or GoFundMe will probably be involved.
Should I do a lot of work over the next two weeks revising a substantial article that has provisionally been accepted for an academic journal? It pays nothing, and I am not in an academic position, where this type of work would be expected to be done. The revisions would probably take at least twenty hours to complete.
I already have a different-but-related, unpaid book chapter coming out later this year in a somewhat less academic context. Both items are about aspects of music and parody in “The Simpsons.”
I wonder if there are useful statistics about how the “five times as many PhDs as spaces for them” (not to mention that it’s annually, not cumulatively) pans out re class origins and other factors. I’m a white male, okay, but I’m also from a rural, blue-collar, working-class context in which I was the first person to do a university degree, let alone an MA, PhD (UCLA, 2003), IT certificate, and MLIS (2018). Most of my relatives have been farmers, truck drivers, shop workers, homemakers, and so on.
I still feel like I don’t fit into academia, despite having taught dozens of innovative university courses (from 1999 to 2008, many as a part-time adjunct), publishing three well-reviewed books (from 2011 to 2016), contributing academic book chapters and journal articles, and presenting numerous conference papers. There are almost no post-docs in my field of musicology (or in my more specific areas of cultural studies, popular music, and film & television music), and most people at conferences have assumed I’ve been in a tenure-track position somewhere. However, in reality, I’ve also worked part-time in the performing arts (semi-professional choral singing), arts admin, and writing/editing, and temporarily full- or part-time (or volunteering) in web development and library work. I’ve also gone through bankruptcy and have frequently scraped by on welfare.
I’m in Canada, so at least I have free health coverage and ways to get free or affordable pharmacare. I’m now working as a part-time customer service representative for a government-run liquor corporation. I often feel like I should have started at something like this job in my late-teens or early-twenties, instead of having wasted several decades attempting to land successfully in academia.
People who keep trying to reassure others that they’ll get academic jobs are lying. It’s also too late for me to sort out an alternative-academic career path. At 53 (so, also dealing with the unspoken realities of ageism), I’m now giving up on “the dream.” Getting off of welfare and getting up to a working class income a little above the poverty line is the best I can hope for.Reply ↓
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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!
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.
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.
