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Friday, December 09, 2005
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LINDA DOES ACADEMIA More wonderful stuff from Linda Hirshman (for background, see UD) in the paper of record (now that they’ve published UD), Inside Higher Education. She takes her well-grounded claim that many of our most highly and expensively trained professional women are dropping out of the workforce and runs it not through corporations (as she did before) but through the university. First, the bad news: [R]esearch on gender reflects that the arena for discrimination is greater where there is not a clear monetary measure of productivity. So the world of the research university is a perfect playground for subjective opinion, including ideas about women’s proper roles, conscious or not, and the powerful lure of autobiography in each hiring committee member’s inaccessible subconscious. You need only recall Ivan Tribble’s description of the way he evaluates job candidates to know she’s right about subjective opinion at universities. But there’s good news too: …Women may not be as eager to leave academic jobs as their well educated sisters were to quit journalism, law and publishing. There are two reasons for this. One, the hours are better. While the business magazine Fast Company reports that a 60 to 75 hour work week is typical for business leaders, ladder rank faculty with children in the University of California study (according to their own self-reporting) worked 53 to 56 hours a week. All true. One arena for yielding that UD has written about before involves that book Hirshman mentions -- the one only the author reads. The tyranny of the tenure manuscript in particular must be overthrown at those universities that still mindlessly impose it. Significant articles and chapters already form the basis for tenure decisions in many departments, but the humanities haven’t yet liberated themselves. Similarly, UD has argued, along with others, that the Associate/Full distinction should be taken much less seriously by faculty and administrators -- in fact “Full” should probably be dropped altogether. This would remove another pointlessly Hobbesian element from the academic ladder. Hirshman ends her IHE essay by noting that many of the women bloggers who responded to her initial article with a furious fuck you turned out to be academics who had opted out of the work world. She asks any such who may again be preparing to hit the F on their keyboard to restrain themselves. That’s good advice. There are many ways of being an ugly American, and it’s curious, but sometimes those Americans most at pains to avoid that stereotype, and its characteristic provinciality, sense of entitlement, and bluster, themselves fall into it. |