Formation Continue du Supérieur

By L. Maren Wood. Whenever I talk with graduate students about how to prepare for a nonfaculty job search, there is one topic about which they share varying degrees of anxiety: how, and when, to tell their Ph.D. advisers. Students who are determined to exit the academy are usually the least concerned about burning a bridge with their advisers. The most anxious are students who, knowing the odds are stacked against them on the tenure-track lottery, still want to play that game but also want to explore alternate career options. Read more...

By Elizabeth Segran. Every month or so, a disturbing story emerges from the frontlines of the academic job market, contributing to a growing genre of social commentary about the brutality of academe. A few weeks ago, Patrick Iber, a visiting lecturer at Berkeley, wrote yet another such essay, describing how his quest for a tenure-track position had been repeatedly met with failure, even though he is eminently qualified and well-respected for his scholarship. As a result, he has taken one temporary, poorly paid position after another, with no end in sight. Read more...

By Summer McGee. I am writing this essay at 1.7 m.p.h. No, I do not mean "w.p.m." (words per minute). I now measure my daily productivity as an academic in terms of speed, calories, and steps.
As scholars and teachers, we usually calculate our progress in terms of the number of words written in a day, students advised in a semester, or total grant dollars raised in a year. All of those are important metrics on the tenure track. But I have seen my productivity, perspective, and health improve from being on an entirely different track—the never-ending one that runs right beneath my desk. Read more...

By Jeffrey J. Williams. One of my colleagues went to Woodstock and another lived in Haight-Ashbury in 1969. While they’ve cut their hair since, they’re obviously baby boomers, and they sometimes tell me stories about protesting the Vietnam War, smuggling dope, and seeing Bob Dylan in concert. The strange thing is that I’m supposedly a baby boomer, since I was born in December 1958, but their stories recount a distant world. I only vaguely remember Vietnam on the news, have no memory of JFK, and find Bob Dylan grating. The events that made an impression on me were the Watergate hearings, stagflation, and the Carter and Reagan presidencies. Our music was different, too—OK, let’s forget Journey, but in our early 20s, we raised our lighters to some remarkable bands, like U2, the Cure, and, born in my year, Prince and Madonna. Read more...

By Eric Best and Joel Best. Problems with for-profit colleges are receiving a great deal of attention in education news, and most of the conversation revolves around increasingly modest federal "gainful employment" rules that judge college programs based on their graduates’ debt levels. The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities is aggressively lobbying lawmakers to further weaken the standards to protect continued federal student-aid payments to member institutions of the trade group. Read more...