whoa, what happened here???

so it seems that the blog died. sad.

this is partially my fault as i went off and: 1) got a job, 2) got married, and 3) bought and sold a house. yes, the spring/summer has been eventful. but things are settling down now. and when you couple that with my resurgent interest in the daily life of a sociologist as brought on by the Gates "incident", it is perhaps time to re-ignite the blog.

so.....if you are an author here and want to remain one, let me know. if you are reader wanting to author, let me know. and if you are a publisher looking to send me a fat contract for my book, also let me know.

thanks.

see y'all at ASA!

Someone is Wrong... In Print!

What do you do if a book contains a (semi-)serious error? In this case, it's not an error of fact, but an error of theory, I guess. The book in question (which I'm not going to name right now) uses a game theory diagram to try to explain a collective action problem. So far, so good. But the diagram doesn't make any sense, and even though it's labeled a prisoner's dilemma, the payoff matrix doesn't follow the format of a PD (in this case, the payoff for cooperating is always higher than or equal to the payoff for defecting)**. So, the game doesn't actually explain anything, and isn't a prisoner's dilemma.

Should I email the authors? Make fun of them on this or another blog? Or just chalk it up to sloppiness and ignore it, since it's not central to the book (which is a history, not a game theory text or anything)? The book is recent (2007 release), if that makes a difference.

*Title is a reference to this xkcd, of course.
**Technical note: The game has R > T > P = S instead of T > R > P > S as it ought.

Prospective Visiting Days!

Who has advice on how to talk to prospective students about your university given you're watching all the funding be soaked back into the institution like a sponge? Can you honestly point to the older students delaying graduation another year? All the low-paying post-doc positions being created to exploit cater to the jobless?

Do people approach this as "If you have nothing good to say..." situation? Or do you squint and highlight the not-so-ugly aspects of going to graduate school school right now?

(Clearly, I'm really glad I'm not the one in charge of my school's recruiting efforts. My personal bitterness can be safely hidden but I am nevertheless curious about how other schools are handling this.)

There is life outside your conference

(apologies to avenue q for the title)

i just got back from the Urban Affairs Association annual meeting. this was my first time going to a major non-sociology conference. i have been to regional soc. conferences before and an Add Health users conference (which was awesome, btw), but never a conference that was totally non-soc.

they did some things that were really neat. they ran 5 concurrent sessions a day for 3 days. however, unlike at ASA where each concurrent session involves probably 20-30 options, UAA had (at most) five. this meant that (gasp!) people actually showed up! i had probably 40-50 people at my session, and i was in the dreaded 8.45am slot. because there were fewer presentations, more people came to each one. also, most (not all, but most) were really good. i also noticed that a lot of folks, especially senior faculty, did not present at all. they just came to hear what other people were doing.

second, they ran thematic tracks by time and not by day. at ASA, various days are set aside for different sections. the result is that if you are interested in social psychology, for example, you have one day in which every time slot has 2+ sessions on social psychology. by 2pm, you are burned out. at UAA, every other concurrent session had one forum on each sub-field - the exception being housing which seemed to have one forum in every session. this played out that you could hit 2-3 sessions in your sub-field each day and have enough down time that you didn't get tired of hearing about it. the end result was, again, better attendance.

perhaps ASA is just way to huge to adopt the UAA model, i don't know. but i do know that after years of presenting papers at ASA to audiences of 5 people, seeing a room full of interested folks was awesome.

A general gripe

Ok, I have a general complaint. I submit an article to a journal and 2 people review it. They suggest R&R. I do extensive revisions including new analysis; the memo outlining changes was 8 pages long! The editor sends my paper to 3 NEW REVIEWERS to evaluate the new version.

sigh.

can you guess what happened? yes, they want different new revisions. i think it would be wicked awesome if there was a standard process for peer review. i don't mean to second-guess the editor here; he/she probably has very good reason for doing this. but i think he/she probably also can understand my frustration.

so i guess i revise...again. sigh.

Why Go to Grad School?

On another webforum today, I participated in a discussion about what I can most charitably call a “don’t go to grad school” post. The discussion centered, as they usually do, on whether or not it makes sense to go to grad school, given various factors such as:

• The infinitesimal chance of getting a tenure-track job in [esoteric field x]
  
• The financial costs, be they actual cash outlays or opportunity costs, of spending years more in education
  
• The possibility that graduate school might actually be a distraction from learning to live your life like a grownup
  

I’m sure anyone reading this has their own ways of responding to all of those points, which are sometimes valid and sometimes not (depending of what field of study you are in, what your actual costs are, and whether you are in fact a grownup). But I had a different problem with the original blog post. Somewhere towards the middle, the author writes “Don’t tell yourself you need a job that gives your life meaning. Jobs don’t do that; doesn’t that make you feel better?” This is what caused me to respond: what is wrong with at least trying to make a life in which your job gives your life meaning? Why, when the average full-time worker (according to the 2006 General Social Survey) works 46 hours a week, should we not want our jobs to be meaningful? I wrote something to that effect, and another commenter wrote back, wishing that someone would write a blog from the perspective of someone who went to graduate school, finished it, and didn’t find it to be a complete waste of time—even if there are criticisms. So here’s my take:

I went to graduate school, and I finished it. I went to graduate school because I wanted to teach sociology in a tenure-track position at a liberal arts college, and one needs to earn a Ph.D. in order to do this. I viewed graduate school as a sort of professional training all the way through from start to finish, and I think this spared me some of the more existential crises I watched my classmates have. I knew why I was there, I thought strategically about what I needed to do to get to my intended goal, and when faculty told me I shouldn’t be in graduate school because I was taking a spot away from a researcher, I sort of shrugged it off because I was in it for myself and not for them.

All in all, I found graduate school to be a fairly miserable experience. The classes were sometimes great and I had several which were very valuable, though in some others the faculty seemed to demonstrate just as much disdain for pedagogy as they did when teaching undergraduates. TAing was important pre-professional preparation, though after a couple of semesters it became increasingly clear that I knew and cared much more about educating undergraduates than did most of the faculty at my R1 institution—so I started teaching my own classes both at my institution and as an adjunct. Taking comps can really only be described as a glorified hazing process, but whatever—I did learn from them. And I am happy with the dissertation I wrote; I am not even sick of it and am continuing to work on the lines of research I built with it. What I really hated? The environment. The institutions in which we earn Ph.D.s are generally R1 institutions, full of people desperately seeking prestige. That’s fine for them if that’s what they care about, but it is not me. It was hard to spend so many years in an environment where everyone was so focused on exactly which journal was ranked number 1, exactly which job was ranked number 1, exactly which people they should schmooze with at conferences, etc. In the end, graduate school reminded me of middle school for smart people, and going to middle school once was bad enough.

But I survived, and I wouldn’t discourage others from going to graduate school if it was right for them. I would want them to know—as I unfortunately did not—how tight the job market is for academics (when I applied to graduate school I figured the baby boomer professors would be retiring, which is true, but had never heard of an adjunct) and how you don’t end up with much control over where you live and what you teach. If they could look that in the face and still want to go to graduate school, good for them. I figure there are two good reasons for going to graduate school—because it is a necessary or highly valuable credential for the job that will give your life meaning (whether that be teaching, research, or anything else), or because you simply can’t imagine a better way to spend the next 6-10 years of your life than living the life of the mind while eating ramen noodles. Don’t go to graduate school to find yourself or because you don’t know what else to do, but if you have a good reason? It will be worth it.

In the end, I was lucky, but I also worked hard. I started a tenure-track job only a year after I finished my Ph.D. I know I have sunk opportunity costs, but I don’t care. Why? Because this is the job that give my life meaning, and I don’t see why we all shouldn’t have the chance to seek that for ourselves.

Big thinkers with bad thoughts

Man, Wallerstein is being a real Debbie Downer these days...
The Politics of Economic Disaster

Is it wrong of me to be this surprised at how grim his outlook is? Probably. He's been predicting the decline of the US for decades now. But geesh. I think I need a glass of wine now.

Never thought of it like that

so i can think of 3 ways to get research funding:

1. self-funded - use your own money, pots of research money at your school. not competitive, but usually a low cap on how much you can get/spend. best suited to research analyzing existing data or small pilot studies.
   
2. grant-funded - this is the one we typically associate with academia. generally very competitive, especially for large amounts. often government entities issue these grants.
   
3. foundation-funded - here's the one i find really interesting. some foundations issue open RFPs, but most do not. if you got a bright idea, send it in. if they like it, they'll call. most foundations have a niche area. these grants are often awarded based on networking and establishing long-term professional relationships with the program managers.
   

so how is your research funded? are some projects better suited to one funding source? some sociologists obviously never have to even deal with the funding issue, such as folks working for a funding agency, those in teaching-only jobs, or some private sector researchers. but if you are in a position where you need to secure funding, where do you look first and how do you start?

the apology

by now much has been written about the Post cartoon depicting a chip who had been shot by a police officer. the big question seems to be whether it is a racist cartoon (although some have argued that a cartoon can't be racist any more than a table can be racist and we should ask whether the cartoonist/editor/publisher is racism).

what i find so very interesting is the apology:

"Wednesday's Page Six cartoon - caricaturing Monday's police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut - has created considerable controversy. It shows two police officers standing over the chimp's body: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period. But it has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism. This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback. To them, no apology is due. Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon - even as the opportunists seek to make it something else."

I have always been facinated by these so-called public apologies. I think there is something that distinguishes them from "accounts" (Terri L. Orbuch; Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 23, 1997) in general. One commonality is that they almost always seem to hinge on the idea "if you were offended, we apologize". This very effectively still offers an account and thus (at least superficially) repairs the social breech. And yet it places the responsibility for the breech on the one who was offended or harmed by suggesting that it was not the action that caused the breech but the reaction of the one who was hurt.

In other words, the Post cartoon offended you if you decided to take offense, not because it was inherently offensive. Akin to the "if you feelings were hurt by my joke, sorry" like that I often get in classes when someone says something insensitive.

why??

so i got my issue of Footnotes today (feb. 18). and here is what i find...

in the "funding" section, there are 5 opportunities listed with proposal submission due dates of: feb. 13, march 6, feb. 2, feb. 1, and no date listed. yup, 3/5 of the funding opportunities closed before the newsletter even reached me.

moving on to "competitions", we have three listed with due dates of: jan 15, march 31, and feb. 1. so here 2/3 of the opportunities listed closed before i ever saw them.

what's up with that? could these sections of the newsletter be made more useful? what's going wrong here??

Early adopters and late bloomers

a recent op-ed piece on slate claimed that facebook membership has become so ubiquitous that everyone should sign up for the site (read the full article HERE). the author writes, "...it's time to drop the attitude: There is no longer any good reason to avoid facebook. The site has crossed a threshold—it is now so widely trafficked that it's fast becoming a routine aide to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant."

the author first disputes several reasons people give for not wanting to join facebook (takes time, lack of privacy, potential for awkward encounters). he then goes on to describe several ways in which facebook helps him do his job or have better social interactions. he also claims that facebook deepens his social connections with others, something he says "social scientists" (sociologists?) call "ambient awareness". he finally concludes by offering an anecdote about a female entrepreneur who was not on facebook until she realized how vital it was as a tool to expand her business.

now without spending too much time critiquing an op-ed piece, the thing i find really interesting is that the author is actually making two totally different points:

1. facebook will benefit you (more social capital), and
2. facebook won't hurt you

on the first point, he may have a valid claim. however, recall that social capital is more than just knowing people. it is having social relationships that are potential exchange relationships. if i know you but you have nothing of value to exchange with me, than i gain zero social capital from our relationship. so in that sense, it is debatable (but an interesting potential study) whether facebook actually generates social capital.

the second point i find fascinating because the author makes three general points on the subject of how facebook can't hurt you. he says there are two big reasons people give for not joining facebook (ways it could hurt you):

1. lack of privacy - the world will know intimate details of your life
2. lack of time - time needed for other activities will be spend on facebook

whats interesting about this is that is implies that the mediated interface (facebook) dictates how users must interact with the interface. simply put, if you join facebook you MUST offer intimate details of your life to others and you MUST allocate a burdensome amount of time to the interface.

many (many!) years ago, when i was on my high school speech team, i did this event where you were given a famous quote and thirty minutes to prepare a 3-minute speech based on the quote (makes me sad now that we don't have any reality speech team shows on tv...). i once got a quote that was something along the lines of "man believes he is riding the train of progress westward, but perhaps it is the train riding the man".

In Sickness and In Health...

Since approximately Saturday, I've been feeling rather ill. Not so sick that I needed to go to the doctor, or couldn't get out of bed, but sick enough that reading feminist theory or memorizing econometric models was beyond me. Monday morning I managed to stumble to class and present the article I was assigned, in spite of how terrible I felt. I came home afterwards and slept for 4 hours and woke up with a low fever, feeling even worse. By last night, I finally started to feel well enough to get some work done... and immediately started feeling guilty for not having done enough work in the past week. Today I'm going to have to either not have enough time to study for a statistics midterm tomorrow, or not have enough time to read all the materials for class today (300p on practice-based theories of gender). And that's assuming I don't start feeling exhausted by the middle of the day, like I did yesterday.

My particular worries aside, it strikes me that we lead incredibly precarious existences as graduate students (and faculty?). When your job and your life are almost coterminous, spill-over isn't even the right metaphor to describe the interactions. Occasionally work can serve as a refuge, as when I buried myself in math problems in undergrad to avoid thinking about a friend's suicide. More often, a disruption in one can throw everything off in the other. Being successful in academia seems to require an intense amount of discipline - not (just) in the sense of using time well, but in the sense of keeping your focus in a broad sense on school and work at all times (or at least, being able to focus at will). Maybe it gets easier as you move along, and more of the work that seems impossible to do without complete focus becomes routinized. I hope so. I wonder to what extent those people who manage to make it through PhD programs in a 'normal' amount of time (5-8 years, say) are just those lucky enough to have no major life events in that period. So far, I've been pretty lucky. But if a cold can nearly incapacitate me for 4 days...

short video

normally i do not post videos because: 1) i am too lazy to watch videos, and 2) i assume you are too lazy to watch videos. however, this one really caught my eye and not just because it is a cause i support. the so-called "contact hypothesis" is that people will become more tolerant and less prejudiced as a result of simply being in contact with others who are different. this video is especially neat because it presents gay and lesbian couples in places and poses that we are used to seeing opposite-sex couples in. the images are all very traditional in the presentation of romantic love, the importance of family, and valuing 2-parent homes for children. this twist is, of course, they are all same-sex couples. i think this would be a really great video to use in classes, not to engage the issue but to discuss juxtaposition of the traditional and the non-traditional and how the equal marriage rights movement is changing how they frame the issues.


"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

plus, i cried watching this video.

grade inflation - what does an A mean?

grade inflation is one of those topics that always seems to pop up from time to time in academia. the official word on grading at my university is basically:

A=student has an exceptional understanding of everything
B=student exceeds expectations
C=student has met expectations
D=student is not quite there but shows potential
F=nope

can you imagine the hysteria i would encounter if i gave every student who simply met my expectations a C? i get panic-filled emails when i hand out B+ grades! i tend to grade more along the lines of:

A=met expectations for the assignment
B=work had minor omissions, lacked elaboration
C= got something just plain wrong
D=got more than one thing wrong, but at least half of the work was correct
F=more than half wrong, incomplete, or called me profane names in the assignment

so i guess the question is, do we start with a C (average) and then give higher grades to students who do more than we require? or do we start with A's and give lower grades to students who do less than we require?

either way, what i find to be the unfortunate side-effect of all this is that students and increasingly even departments want a very explicit grading matrix so that anyone who had the matrix would be able to do the grading and arrive at the proper grade for a given assignment. this is virtually impossible to do for essay assignments, so instructors tend to give more multiple-choice and short-answer questions.

Walking the walk

In the last post on this blog, Alone but Dissertating spoke about studying risk and poverty and worrying about her own risk of future poverty.

Kim responded "i actually made a deliberate effort to NEVER study marriage. divorce, or fertility after i became a single mother with three kids. it just hits too close to home."

That made me laugh, because I study all those things she talks about- marriage, divorce, fertility, and I'm writing my dissertation on cohabitation (one chapter specifically on pre-marital cohabitation and risk of divorce following marriage), all while cohabiting, engaged, and getting married in just a little over 3 months.

Kim made the decision not to study things that were too close to home, but I stated studying them way before they were close to home, and my research has subsequently affected many aspects of my life.

For instance, one of the focuses of my research is the intersection of work and family, and how work patterns may influence subsequent divorce rates. The topic of my masters thesis grew out of my interest in gender inequality in academia, and the problems associated with balancing a family with an academic life (aka the 'two body problem').

As a result of that research, I made a conscious decision to avoid dating men who were enrolled in graduate school, or had a graduate degree and a high flying career (like lawyers, medical students, etc). I read all about it first, and I knew that if I wanted my career to come first in my relationship, I should stick to people who weren't as career-focused as I was. As a result I am marrying a man who has no specific career goals, works part time and who would love nothing more than to sit at home writing all day. He will easily follow my career as a professor, and wants to be a stay at home dad once we have kids. Some people have been judgmental of him for not working full time, but I know that this is the result of ingrained gender roles and the male-breadwinner model, in which men's worth is judged by their work roles.

My research focus on gender inequality and work/family has led to an interesting relationship dynamic. I am hyper-conscious of the division of labor within my family, and about the possibilities of gender inequality. Me and my fiance have specifically worked out an arrangement whereas since he works part time and I work many more hours a week than he does, he is responsible for the vast majority of routine housework- the stuff women usually do, such as cooking dinner, doing the dishes, cleaning the litterbox- these are all his responsibilities. If I wasn't so conscious of who was doing what when he first moved in, I have no idea what our division of labor would look like right now. Probably not like it does now.

My last big argument with my fiance was about gender socialization- around Superbowl time he was talking about how if we have a son he will watch football with him, but if we had a daughter then he would watch whatever she wanted to watch. I immediately jumped all over his assumptions that a) women are less likely than men to want to watch football, and that this difference isn't caused by precisely what he is talking about- the assumption of fathers that their daughters won't want to watch football, and so they are differentially encouraged to watch it b) he thinks he can know anything about the tastes of our not-yet-born children based purely on their gender.

I suspect other couples don't have arguments quite like that.

My firm gender-equity ideals that were brought about by my research have also led me to make assumptions about the way I should live, which I have recently begun to question. Since first studying gender inequality, I have maintained a firm position that I would never change my name upon marriage. However, now that it gets closer to the date, I think in my specific circumstances it might be a good idea (my specific circumstances being that my parents have disowned me for being engaged to someone not Jewish, and as a result I don't feel much desire to keep their family name). On the other hand, I've published under my name, and I feel as if I would be looked down upon within the feminist community for changing my name upon marriage. As of now I'm not changing my name, but I may eventually change it, or change it and continue to use my parent's name on my publications (but why should they get any credit at all for the accomplishments I have made despite them?)

Sociology is also a great comfort to me when dealing with problems with my family; I've read a great deal of literature on group inclusion and maintaining group boundaries, on religion, and the academic literature on GLBT people being disowned from their families of origin has been particularly comforting (I highly recommend Kath Weston's book "Families we choose", an ethnography of gay communities in the 1980s San Fransisco, for anyone going through a similar situation). Trying to understand my parents choice to disown me as being a result of their group identity and religious norms has comforted me since I can now view their actions as being a result of structural influences, and not a result of me in particular being a bad daughter.

Meanwhile I've decided to try to get pregnant next year becuase of all of what I know about fecundity, and women working in academia. I've become convinced that if I start an assistant professorship without a child, I would end up pushing off having children until after tenure (at around age 35 I predict), and at that point it may be biologically too late to have the 2-3 children I eventually want to have.

It seems then that sociology has a huge influence on my entire life, and the way I live it. I probably wouldn't even have had the courage to leave the insular religious lifestyle I grew up in, if I wasn't exposed to sociological ideas in college, and that has been the largest change in my life over the past decade.

But it goes both ways- I became interested in studying cohabitation and divorce because I was about to start cohabiting when I was working on my dissertation proposal. Now I'm thinking of doing some research on the frequency at which people talk to their parents and the degree to which their marriages are homogamous (testing some theories found in Rosenfeld's "Age of independence"). My 'real' life gives me ideas for research all the time. :)

Better to know?

With apologies, I start with a downer of a story - we have friends whose young child is battling cancer. She is doing quite well and the prognosis finally looks good. I bring this up as one of her parents is a doctor, who ironically has done research on cancer. I sometimes wonder if this makes it easier or worse to deal with what is obviously and unequivocally an unholy nightmare.

Actually, I wonder this each time I hear of a "professional" who is experiencing the subject of his or her profession in a personal way. The doctor who is dying from an unpleasant illness. The veterinarian who is treating her dying childhood cat. The obstetrician who has a very premature baby. The statistician receiving the long odds on her breast cancer. I've had friends in each of these positions in recent years. They all share a knowledge most regular folks do not have in these situations - they know all the odds, they know the likely outcomes, good and bad. The experience seems to vary for each one - some find comfort knowing how things will play out, others do not.

On nowhere near as grave a level, I still feel a similar sinking feeling as our family income has been looking less secure in recent months. Having just completed a chapter on risk in society, I've been steeping myself in works like Hacker's Great Risk Shift. The detailed explanations about families who do everything right and still sink into poverty upon a job loss have combined with the knowledge that the economic situation is spiraling even further out of control in the past few months and shows no signs of stopping (only a grad student could be this obsessed with current events!) to make me feel like an expert on the problems that may very well be coming.

Most of us study subjects that are interesting to us (or were, at some point, before we spent years beating the enthusiasm out of ourselves by using them for our dissertations). I wonder, has anyone else had this strange turn where suddenly the professional becomes very personal? I could imagine any number of us are at risk of knowing too much at some point, in any number of subfields. And if you have experienced this, is it better to know? I'm still undecided.

Carmen

I have an office of my own. My very own. This never happened when I was in grad school. Okay, I correct that. I wrote my dissertation in bed so I sort of had an office of my own, if by "office", you mean "bed". But now I have an office.

And right across the hall is a wonderful professor whom I admire and respect. With a habit of playing music from "Carmen" very loudly all afternoon.

How 'bout them apples?

The book prospectus

I am writing my first book prospectus which I hope to have complete in time for the Urban Affairs Association annual meeting next month. And when I say "I hope to", I mean "my mentor will be very grumpy if I do not".

The book prospectus is very hard for me to write because I am not creative and therefore tend to rely on examples to get the correct form and tone. Whenever I write an article, I look up other articles that are on the same topic, ask the same types of questions, or use the same methods. I then try and write mine using a similar format. I would have been a great technical writer.

But there isn't a JSTOR or SSCI for book prospectuses (prospecti? prospectum?). I do the best I can with google, but I get very little. Have any of you written one? Do you have any advice? Do I lean more towards a lit review style (here is what i will say and here is how it will add to what this other guy said), or towards the "significance" section of an article (here is why everything else ever written is lacking and how i will fill that great chasm).

I can't even think about how to go about finding someone to publish my book. This whole process is rather scary!

RFC: Wooing Admits

So, it's admissions season once again and this year I've volunteered to be on a little grad student committee in charge of thinking up the best ways to woo our already admitted students. We're planning a few events - a walking tour of the city, if it isn't miserable out, a dinner, maybe a small cocktail party or something - but I was curious if any of y'all had suggestions for good ways to recruit students.

For example... What did you like or dislike about your recruitment visits? Was it most important to get enough time meeting with potential future advisors, or would you have liked more time spent with older graduate students? Did you visit classes in session? Would you liked to have? Did you stay with students or in a hotel, and would you have preferred the other? Etc.

Thanks ahead of time for any thoughts!

We're Not Eco-Friendly

So all the traveling for conferences, research, etc, means graduate students are just...not eco-friendly. We fly far more than average in order to do our work and I was thinking today that this is probably something we want to start correcting given current technological advances.

What ways can we cut down on air travel in an effort to both reduce cost and reduce sociology's carbon footprint?

shallow words?

it would seem, according to a recent article at the Chronicle, that new PhDs value "family friendly" jobs. the article makes these points:

1. PhDs want to work in "family friendly" environments
2. They don't perceive R1 institutions as offering that
3. they're right

but here's the thing...what do we mean when we say "family friendly"? the article implies that a "family friendly" job is one in which the employee is not expected to devote all their time to the job. it really comes down to a time question. if 60+ hour work weeks are required to be successful, then the job is not "family friendly". why? because this type of lifestyle is not conducive to having satisfying relationships with partners and children.

but the thing is, we're not really talking about hours worked here. no one is keeping track of how many hours you work. its all about production. if professor A with a partner and kid can produce as much in 40 hours as single professor B produces in 60 hours, we don't have a problem. the problem springs up when professor A only publishes 2 articles and professor B publishes 3.

and lets just be frank here, that is not ever going to change. just as the assembly line worker is paid by the part, we're all evaluated based on our bottom-line number of published articles per year. to claim that "teaching jobs" are more "family friendly" is really to argue that such jobs require less productivity (notice the heavy use of quotation marks - i don't buy it).

thing is, scholarly productivity is ALWAYS going to be the standard by which we are judged. and unlike jobs where your task is to complete an objective, we work in a field where the objective is to get the most easter eggs faster than the other kids. and when you do "family friendly" things like refuse to work on weekends, you will "produce" less. the only way i see to make academia "family friendly" is to adopt a universal standard for tenure that is achievable by someone with talent who works reasonable hours. but frankly, i don't see that happening. when it comes down to me and my single, 65-hour-a-week-working colleague, competing for the same job...yea, s/he got it. because i may be "productive:, but s/he is "more productive" (man, i love using quotations today!).

and to be difficult, perhaps i should also argue the alternative. me and my single uber-productive colleague both faced the same choices. i elected to dedicate a good chunk of my time to my partner and three kids and two step-kids. my colleague passed on those options and instead gave him/herself entirely to work. in the end, we both probably saw what we got coming to us. i don't know...but i do know that the saturdays i spend not working are fine by me.

but as for the “new thinking and a new model to attract and retain the next generation in academia.”...hahahaha!!!!!!!! good luck.

It's come to this.

So, my department has officially sent word that economic crisis has put all conference travel funding on hiatus.

Of course. A given on top of all the other things that have been cut.

So if you want to have any form of professional development, be ready to pay for it out of your pocket. "That's what your stipend is for, isn't it?!"

Yeah, you know, I was getting sick of that whole eating thing anyway. Spending two month's worth of food budget on air travel to Chicago for a two-day paper presentation seems like such a better way to go.

Or better yet, I'm single! Maybe I should be "investing" my stipend into plastic surgery and a new wardrobe so I can marry a guy willing to support my research.

I mean, seriously, I am nothing if not devoted to my research.

Why Do Universities Have Endowments?

So, last term I attended a lecture by Burton Weisbrod, an economics professor who has focused on universities for a long and distinguished career. One of the questions he discussed was shockingly simple and yet I had never really considered: Why do universities have endowments?

Most non-profit organizations do not have such funds. Most businesses don't either. Sure, a business might retain some earning to finance expansion, but generally most revenue will either be spent or disbursed as dividends (citation needed).

So why do universities have endowments? Well, it might make sense as a big rainy-day fund to smooth consumption. Consumption smoothing is why, according to economists, most individuals save. Tomorrow I might not have a job, and no matter what in a few decades I'll retired, and I want to be able to live well then, so I live a bit less well now. Makes sense enough. So we can imagine an endowment as being like a big rainy-day fund.

Except... Universities don't seem to treat their endowments as rainy-day funds. For example, say there was a major economic crisis that caused the Dow to drop 30 or 40% and numerous other assets to lose their prices. Donors, having lost much of their wealth as well, are more reluctant to give, jobs are scarce and more tenuous so students have less money, no one is lending, etc. If endowments were rainy day funds, wouldn't now be the hurricane, so to speak? Instead of frantically cutting programs and selling off their art museums, shouldn't those universities that can afford to actually spend their endowments down right now? Perhaps I have not been looking in the right places, but has anyone heard of a university doing this? Actually spending down the endowment, and not just spending the interest on scholarships, etc.? Has this even been considered at your university?

If universities don't spend their endowments now, when would they ever? And if never, why have them at all?

Shutting the Gates to the Ivory Tower

Ph.D. applications have increased by 16 percent at Northwestern, 7 percent at Michigan, 8 percent at Dartmouth, and 12 percent at Johns Hopkins. Overall applications for graduate study—most of which are for Ph.D.s—are up by 15 percent at Duke, 9 percent at Dartmouth, 5 percent at Stanford, 9 percent at Yale, and 9.5 percent at Princeton, according to deans at those universities.

These increases are dramatically higher than the 3 percent average annual increase in graduate school applications over the last decade, noted in a 2007 report by the Council of Graduate Schools.

And these numbers are likely to mushroom next year.

Craaaaazy.

age ain't nuthin' but a number

i am not one to get sentimental or even reflective around my birthday. it is what it is, and bemoaning one's age seems about as logical as being concerned that trees grow taller. this year i had a birthday party, really just an excuse to play board games with friends and bake a Portal Cake. mine had coconut instead of nuts on the outside. but as we were playing games, i realized that (as a consequence of starting grad school at age 30, no doubt) i could drive a car before some of my friends were out of diapers. i graduated from college before they started high school.

and if we'd know each other then, we obvio would not have been friends. but now, it is a non-issue. i wonder at what point in one's life does age become "just a number"?

when you're in high school and college and such, your social network is pretty age-homogeneous. some adults i know still have very homogeneous networks, while others do not. when we talk about social network homophily, we tend to think about the "big three" - race, class, and gender. but what about age? does it matter? does having a social network that is, on average, younger than you have an impact on you?

i can say that, at least according to my preliminary findings, living in an age-homogeneous neighborhood doesn't seem to have an effect on your sense of collective efficacy or "neighboring behaviors".