Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Nicole and Maggie. We have argued before that academia is just a job.
We have marveled at how willingness to do math opens up a world of opportunities.  (Though not necessarily with a math PhD… but if you’re willing to do the same math as say, an engineer, you’re in better shape.  And hey, you can always take actuarial exams or maybe work for the NSA with that math degree.)
So… does the fact that you’ve suffered for 5-7 (or more!) years in a PhD program and gotten your hood and your diploma mean that you are entitled a tenure-track job?  What about your debt?  Your lost opportunity costs?  Are you entitled to compensation for that?
The fact is, there’s an excess supply of PhDs compared to the demand for tenure-track professors in most fields. More...

My theory of how students make sense of professors:  Whatever conception of "God" students bring with them to college gets applied to their male instructors.  Whatever conception of "Mom" they bring with them to college gets applied to their female instructors.  Students are, on the whole, more likely to accept that God will, on occasion, be angry, distant, vengeful, than that Mom will behave in these ways.  A Mom who isn't unfailingly nurturing is a source of dismay. Any characteristics (race, ethnicity, gender ambiguity, relative youth, disability) that complicate students' ability to assimilate male instructors to God and female instructors to Mom is also a source of dismay. More...

By Jonathan Rees. When I was in graduate school, I was both a member and a board member of the oldest graduate student union in the country, the good old TAA. The vast majority of TAA leaders came from three departments: History, English and Sociology. Some of that was an artifact of the size of those departments. My first-year graduate school cohort at Wisconsin had ninety people in it. [Thanks again for that, Bill Bowen.] Yet the flip side of that situation was in some ways more telling: You couldn’t find a scientist in our union if you had put one on the Most Wanted List and offered a $100,000 reward. We always figured it had to do with the quality of their aid packages. Well-paid workers seldom join unions. More...

By Michael Hammond. When I meet people and they find out that I am a history professor, often I hear how much they enjoy a particular history story, or that someone in their family has read a book on a certain World War II general or Civil War battle. Sometimes, I learn how much they enjoy watching the History Channel, which leaves me unsure whether they are thinking of the Hitler documentaries, the backwoods reality shows, or the ridealongs with antique hunters. Curious folks—or those who have college-bound kids—often ask, “what does someone *do* with a history degree, anyway?” That question is a tough one, because as most scholars in the humanities know, there is not one clear answer. While it is a simple enough question, it evokes a dramatic answer on the grand scale. More...

By Alex Golub. This piece is a long guest blog by Marshall Sahlins. In an article titled “China U” published late last year in The Nation, Sahlins took issue with Chinese government’s global educational/political enterprise called “Confucius Institutes” (CI). These institutes teach Chinese language and culture which, together with cultural performances, films, celebrations of Chinese festivals, and the like, portrays China as generous, beautiful, and harmonious. Since the CI program was launched in 2004, some 400 such institutes have been founded in colleges and universities world wide—the US presently has 97—and nearly 600 “Confucius Classrooms” in secondary and primary schools. Sahlins argued that CIs exist “as a virtually autonomous unit within the regular curriculum of the host school”. Indeed, according to the standard agreement signed with host schools, the Confucius Institute Head Office (commonly known as “Hanban”) provides the teachers and textbooks for these courses. More...

By Jessica Collett. Notre Dame loves to make videos. They are currently working on a series about graduate students’ experiences on campus and I had a meeting with the production company today to discuss one of the videos, a segment focused on (grad)student-faculty interaction. As great as the meeting was, I left feeling incredibly discouraged about the state of (grad)student-faculty interaction and wondering what, if anything, can be done to change it.
As many scatterplot readers likely know, some of my research over the past few years has been on grad students. In studying things like impostorism and perceptions of work-life balance, I’ve thought a lot about mentoring and the role that faculty play in graduate students’ experiences, expectations, and aspirations. More...