On not shooting yourself (or your colleagues) in the foot...

"Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities."

That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

Bad Advice

The following question and answer comes from this interview with Julian Young (Kenan Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest):

What advice would you give to young graduate students and aspiring university professors?

Don’t. Not in the current job-market. Not unless you are extremely good and can get into a top graduate school. They still have reasonable employment records. But if you can’t get into a top school, forget it.

As I hail from a non-"top school" (and cannot think of myself as "extremely good" though I think I'm at least ok), I have to take issue with this. I don't have any particularly profound counter-advice (or a particularly inspiring story). So, I'll just have to witness to the fact that it's possible to land (what I think is) a fine job in academia even if you don't measure up to Young's criteria. (Maybe Rusty Jones--though I don't know his background story--is an even better example, since it's not every day that Harvard hires a Ph.D. from Oklahoma.)

What Young says is probably true (Rusty Jones being the exception to the rule) if anything other than a "research" job would not make you happy. But as a baseline standard, that strikes me as a bit like refusing to drive anything other than a Bentley. And that's hooey. (So is driving around in your Hyundai and bitching about how you really deserve to be driving a Bentley.)

(I hope that if anyone at Arkansas reads this they understand that I don't mean to imply anything negative about the department there. I learned how to learn in that program, and learned from people that I trust immensely.)