Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

Descended from Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Distinct from Help, I'm trapped in an ivory tower! Or "what the fuck am i getting myself into with this academia stuff" because about institutional collapse more generally not so much the lived experience of being inside collapsing institutions

Or to quote amateurist, "this seems too broad..."

as a progressive empathetic person, I know I should think these adjuncts etc. are being exploited, but as someone who has spent the last 20 years doing jobs that the "academic class" wouldn't deign to stoop to, I feel like they have a sense of entitlement based on a glowing past, perhaps when they were students, and aren't really looking at how shitty other people have it economically.

prior art

generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

one thing i've been thinking about is that this (the mismatch between phd's generated/jobs available) is generally presented as a humanities problem (and in english / philosophy / history in particular -- or that's what i know most about at least)

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

i do suspect that the "applied" end of STEM certainly is in more of a growth period, and e.g. if you want to make it onto tenure track in computer science that seems not an impossible dream still, but that's really an outlier in terms of growth.

i'd be curious to see a good breakdown between fields/departments that actually takes account of the pure/applied split.

as a progressive empathetic person, I know I should think these adjuncts etc. are being exploited, but as someone who has spent the last 20 years doing jobs that the "academic class" wouldn't deign to stoop to, I feel like they have a sense of entitlement based on a glowing past, perhaps when they were students, and aren't really looking at how shitty other people have it economically.

What sorts of jobs? What is this perception of the 'academic class' based on? When I was a sessional, I did plenty of other jobs as well, as did many of my colleagues. I had actually started growing reasonably comfortable with the gig economy. Still, what would you consider fair and appropriate compensation/conditions?

trailing indicators:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/05/the-three-highest-paid-people-at-or-by-the-university-of-notre-dame-in-fy2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/nyregion/dreams-stall-as-cuny-citys-engine-of-mobility-sputters.html

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

yes you can find articles on the postdoc crisis as well. an old girlfriend of mine is now a research biologist working at a major u and it's apparently impossible to get ahead / stable in the face of all the performance-metric bullshit, funding dances, professional hierarchies

In Florida adjuncts can now be up to 70% of a school's teaching staff. There is no and can be no meaningful oversight of the quality of a liberal arts education in the post-MBAification of higher ed, and accreditation bodies are in practice virtually indifferent to the idea of quality academics and instruction anyway. Some of the issues relating to the quality of instruction aren't even new. Many states have long allowed instructors to teach anywhere from 15 to 23 credit hours per semester, and this workload has historically been approved by staff because picking up extra hours meant being able to eat or buy their kids clothes.

My old school's most recent academic growth plan included changing the school's name for the third time in 10 years, building a basketball stadium when the school had no league to play in, renting out for a season a pro baseball field several miles away, and chartering greyhound buses for the purpose of taking students to said baseball field as spectators. Meanwhile its library has shrunk in every five year period since I left, and the school's new president, coauthor of the the academic growth plan, is said to be even worse than its previous president, who didn't understand, for his entire interminable tenure up to the moment of his deferred retirement, when he was practically on death's bed, that his quixotic goals for the school flew in the face of what was statutorily allowable in the state of Florida.

The other school in the region was built on graft and straight up illegality. They needed surveys and tests and permits to build over wetlands and the school's reaction was fuck you, fine us. Three out of five members of the board who voted on the location the board ultimately chose worked for the company that owned the site and the land around site.

80% of the people getting a liberal arts education deserve free or cheap occupational/vocational training. The US workforce is heavily over-credentialed.

If I were king, I would socialize 80% of the private schools.

accreditation bodies are in practice virtually indifferent to the idea of quality academics

SACSCOC is responsible for accrediting more degree awarding institutions than all the universities in the UK, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain and Australia combined, I believe. idk how they are meant to be able to do it properly.

What is this perception of the 'academic class' based on?

the hundred or so people i know IRL who are university faculty (most adjunct) and what they've mentioned in person or in facebook posts on the subject. Almost all are arts and humanities ppl.

So the majority of them are MFA's or MM's (or whatever the official U.S. Music Master's degree is called now) who pursued jobs in higher education partially in order to advance their careers as composers, artists, writers, etc.

one thing i've been thinking about is that this (the mismatch between phd's generated/jobs available) is generally presented as a humanities problem (and in english / philosophy / history in particular -- or that's what i know most about at least)

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

That's true of "some really amazing people," but only some -- in general it would be absurd to the point of offensiveness for Ph.D. students in pure math to compare their situation to that of their fellow students in English. The job situation in math is leagues better and has been for at least twenty years. That might change if universities decide calculus should be taught by machine, or not taught at all, but that hasn't happened yet.

english is another mainstay of service-curriculum needs in most institutions, so…?

It seems inevitable that the admin & sports creep pendulum has to swing back the other way at some point. Or else it's not a pendulum and in that case I don't see how in the world higher education survives in any state resembling my college experience from the late nineties, even.

full disclosure i have not yet read this but ppl i trust are sharing it approvingly on fb:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elephant-seminar-room-phd-saved/

That's true of "some really amazing people," but only some -- in general it would be absurd to the point of offensiveness for Ph.D. students in pure math to compare their situation to that of their fellow students in English. The job situation in math is leagues better and has been for at least twenty years. That might change if universities decide calculus should be taught by machine, or not taught at all, but that hasn't happened yet.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, May 29, 2016 9:47 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think j's point pertains here. there are slots to do undergrad adjuncting in remedial math, but seems to be precious little else. not sure how this is functionally different from introductory english courses. degreewise as a whole, the difference being i think that a math degree better suits you (in terms of how you will be judged) for employment prospects _outside_ of academia than many humanities degrees.

the analogy in that article with the AMA isn't quite right---the AMA restricts the # of MDs each year to help keep wages up, it's rent-seeking. I don't see how an organization could come in now and induce that kind of discipline among Ph.D.-granting departments now.

also ime grad student teaching doesn't add up to a lot of hours / "instructional units", relative to faculty. & sure they do some grading / sections but not *that* much. temp / adjunct teaching is a different story, but cutting a doctoral program wouldn't change radically the kinds of undergrad teaching that regular faculty too. losing the occasion grad course would be a drag, I guess, thoughI only got called up to the big leagues four years ago, & I was happy enough before that. the article *doesn't* mention the loss of institutional prestige in cutting a doctoral program, something admins care about since it can lead to $$$ by donations, both by pumping up occasional alums b/c of the subject area, b/c it contributes to staying within associations like the AAU, or b/c it offers the slim hope of having a faculty member win a big prize.

also ime grad student teaching doesn't add up to a lot of hours / "instructional units", relative to faculty. & sure they do some grading / sections but not *that* much.

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, May 30, 2016 1:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this deeply varies by field. Big intro courses are often taught in ways that are sort of unthinkable without an army of student support. Otoh, I know that often advanced undergrads are given opportunities to TA as well, and so i could imagine institutional shifts towards that as a way to compensate should grad resources be cut.

2 of my math friends who did geo/topo and finished phds in the last year got jack shit. one of them is in nyc trying to get back into banking (which he left to do math), the other spent >a year unemployed and then got a job writing python on another continent :-/

math seems to have a weird job market though. when i asked them about it they didn't apply to that many places and said you needed to have connections so they just applied to places their supervisors told them to. i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with and you can apply to hundreds of depts and interview for dozens. i can see why that doesn't work in math though, where everything's so specialized and it's hard to quickly get a feel for someone's research

xxp i think the faculty themselves can often care a lot about the prestige, too? from their peers, from having students to boss around, etc.

my graduate alma mater scrapped its upper-level writing requirements for u.g. degrees some time ago, end of the 90s i think, and moved to using a writing-intensive designation on courses across disciplines, rather than just requiring something from a range of junior/senior english/rpc courses. my department's offerings would surely change if there weren't grad students around to grade all those papers (in most undergrad courses below the senior level, often the junior level, the faculty grade exactly zero): the curriculum is overloaded with W-designated courses that are meant to lure as many students as possible into taking them for the writing credit.

"i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with and you can apply to hundreds of depts and interview for dozens"

no this exists in math in the states, at the big MAA/AMS joint meeting each January

in my job in cornland we had a doctoral program & I got a grader for my early modern course, sophomore level, but not for my junior/senior courses. I wasn't used to that because in wheatland I did all my own grading, but my colleagues in cornland were...pretty used to having that grading.

faculty definitely care a lot about prestige. I did; I didn't want to stay in wheatland for a bunch of (obv) reasons but one was jumping to a dept with a doctoral program, for the sake of vanity and to teach more advanced material occasionally. but yeah vanity for sure.

here in cheeseland first and second year undergrad courses are split between something like lecture and something like sections, and the person doing the lecture does just a little bit of grading on the final; in the sections you give three exams and if you're teaching those you have to grade them yourself. I taught one of those sections this last term, but the others were either grad students or adjunct-like people.

i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with

some of my housemates from college were discussing this on fb. one is now an econ/applied math professor and the others were bio and pure math people, and the others were envious at the efficiency of the economics faculty job system.

there are slots to do undergrad adjuncting in remedial math, but seems to be precious little else

Just don't think this is really true. To take a good but not top-10 department, University of Illinois, here's their recent job placement info:

http://www.math.illinois.edu/GraduateProgram/doctoral-graduates.html

Lots of these people are going to industry jobs in finance or data science, and lots are going to academic postdocs (which are not adjunct instructorships.) Now you could say maybe the postdoctoral system in math just means these folks are all dumped from the academy three years after Ph.D. instead of right after?

Just googling some of those grads from 2012, who would have been on the TT market this year or last, I see Avsec has a second postdoc at Texas A&M, Butterfield is tenure-track at U Victoria, Choi I can't find, Cummins is TT at West Point, Dixit is TT at IIT-Gandhinagar, Hu is TT at Georgia Southern...

So I just don't think it makes sense to say it's a pipe dream for math Ph.D.s that they're going to get a non-adjunct faculty job; a large proportion still do.

Times Higher Education is launching a new ranking system in September, having decided that the current systems for ranking US schools is 'not fit for purpose'.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/us-college-ranking-launched-by-times-higher-education

Is anyone at NAFSA this week? I'd intended to go this year but it got nixed. Seeing that David Brooks is giving the plenary speech might mean i dodged a bullet.

https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/737541019797848066

with leaders like this the future is bright

dear god

Queens has a good anthropology department, iirc. That doesn't necessarily mean that anyone wants to study it there. It looks like a gloss on market forces at work. Not unrelated:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/tuition-fees-force-students-pick-degrees-salary-prospects

That goes double (or treble) for lucrative international students.

a few theoretical premises / hypotheticals, if i may ~

1. class inequality in the US has been dramatic for some time and continues to slide toward neo-feudalism

2. as in all other prestige professions, those born into privilege are the most "marketable" and thus over-represented in academia

3. to reflect 'the world as it is', why not dispense with the marxist pretenses of our humanities departments altogether, and award college admission and professorships at birth? AP classes and SAT tests would then only be taken by the "smart" comfortable / active / rich kids, to determine where they end up at school (although sooner or later, we might want to consider fine-tuning that, too, to accord with increasing feudalism)

4. the collective sigh of relief among the children of say, the bottom 66%, realizing they're not allowed to take AP classes or SATs like their "smart" comfortable counterparts, could very well release the engines of personal industry, and get this country moving again. first, they might get off their lazy butts and start working earlier. second, instead of taking out student loans upon high school graduation, the bottom two-thirds could take out small business loans. in any event, the money the government would save no longer subsidizing the advanced educations of people not born into comfortable circumstances could then be applied to further tax cuts on the job creators, which can only benefit the less industrious classes who'd be jobhunting at younger and younger ages, a virtuous circle

5. in the short term, this would mean shutting down a ton of schools, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. another drawback would be the shrinking of the NCAA, but perhaps it's time to have basketball and football minor leagues, anyways? the college music scene would likewise shrink, but hey, the obscurer the audience the better!

xxxpost
I wonder how much the econ job market system contributes to their culture of assholishness. They gossip and backstab to rival the cast of Mean Girls: http://www.econjobrumors.com/

But that doesn't mean it's not somehow "efficient"...

What could sociology, anthropology, and history possibly have to do with the analysis of society?

i love EJMR but i think the ass-holishness on display there is just typical conservative message board trolls and doesn't reflect irl. the fact that the polisci and sociology equivalents are just as toxic kinda proves that. all the econ grad students i know are nice people who are disturbed by the stuff written there anonymously by peers

the hundred or so people i know IRL who are university faculty (most adjunct) and what they've mentioned in person or in facebook posts on the subject. Almost all are arts and humanities ppl.

So the majority of them are MFA's or MM's (or whatever the official U.S. Music Master's degree is called now) who pursued jobs in higher education partially in order to advance their careers as composers, artists, writers, etc.

I dunno, the music sessionals I've known have generally either taught a tonne of courses or done other jobs as well (mostly music lessons or some kind of performance/conducting gig but I know people who have done manual labour). I did quite a bit of temping for a while until I was in a place where I could do well enough with other teaching work. I don't necessarily think there should be a really easy ride to tenure and a six-figure salary or anything but I think the labour situation could fairly be described as exploitative in a number of places. The fact that other people are also facing exploitative conditions does not change this.

i'm not quite sure how to work it so that 'area studies' get to be saved but lately i've been feelin the crazy idea that academics should start pushing back hard against usefulness in schools, anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

i guess this would solve nothing tho, since aside from STEM-related fields needed to get the engineers out the door it would mean universities' revenue streams would vanish

I worry that we'd end up with a lot of musicologists who can't play.

The jump in the number of students between 1980 and now, and particularly over the last ten years, has been extraordinary and I'd guess mostly driven by people who were the first in their families to go to college or the children of first generation immigrants. Usefulness isn't just built into the political agenda, it's in the agenda of millions of families where the risk of fronting up college fees needs to be tied to demonstrable increases in conventional employment prospects. Obviously there are questions over how demonstrable those prospects remain but I can't really see much of a way back from here. Business / marketing / finance are also absolutely crucial to the international student demographic, who'll be increasingly important in the the U.S. in the future.

actually i was partly thinking of uselessness as a proxy for (the freedom for) rigorousness and student motivation (perhaps again in the freedom from certain occluding motivations). in my adjuncting adventures i've kicked around to a pretty representative range of the levels of institution in my region, had traditionally/untraditionally good/bad students at all of them, but it seems like the most poisonous combination, pedagogically, has been the ones who are only at college because they (economically) have to be, pursuing a practical major (in that mid range of the ones housed in universities, never traditionally in vocational schools) which has no real or even speculative need for anything like scientific/systematic knowledge, and are fundamentally incurious. it seems as if the traditional disciplines, trying to play the administrative numbers games, just cannot win with those students, thus just cannot win with the administrators.

this is a serious question, but, like, what do marketing majors even study

Every marketing course I've ever seen has been a combination of business fundamentals (intro to business statistics, management theory, finance, business ethics, etc), psych modules and more specific content (retail marketing, digital marketing, etc). As an undergraduate course it does often look like it has been cobbled together but there is also a fairly serious academic discipline behind it that gets fleshed out more at post-grad level and does cross over with the more traditional ideas of applied social science research.

There clearly needs to be viable, respected alternative routes for people who fundamentally don't want to be at university but feel they have no other options though. Whether that is vocational study, apprenticeships or something else, I don't know. Germany is an interesting example of a country that is arguably more 'over credentialed' than even the U.S. but still retains a strong alternative path for less academic students.

it's mean the way vocational schools and the like are under-emphasized in secondary schools. kids who aren't great at school are made to feel like society has no use for them.

even though i agree about incurious marketing students i feel like explicitly railing against 'usefulness' backfires in practice

I dunno, the music sessionals I've known have generally either taught a tonne of courses or done other jobs as well (mostly music lessons or some kind of performance/conducting gig

uh, those are all perfectly respectable. Those aren't at all the types of "wouldn't stoop to x" jobs.

It's a supply and demand problem, as has been mentioned by others in the past dozen posts. Should "we" create more economic opportunities for all the MFAs etc or should there just be less of them? And what hasn't been discussed is education for education's sake. If someone wants a Master's in Music Composition or an MFA in visual art, because it will make them a more emotionally/intellectually fulfilled person, then why shouldn't they? Why should they have to reproduce the means of production by becoming a professor or a professional artist or musician?

This is definitely tied to socioeconomic class, but, this pressure to have a career in what you studied in college feels more pronounced now than when I was in college.

given the cost of college in america, degrees are either 'investments' or luxury goods and if you get a job in your field then you avoid feeling like you bought a luxury good.

Otm

what's wrong with luxury goods?

and "cost" is relative.

nothing's wrong with them, but unlike buying a sportscar a lot of people only find that their degrees were luxury goods after they made the purchase

yeah, it's as if they told everyone that a sports car was the ticket to a well paying job and a comfortable lifestyle and then when you got home they were just lol now you can pay this off for the next 20 years except w/ the sports car you resell it but no one will buy yr diploma even from a fancy college

anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

Coming back to this for a moment, i do think it's at least plausible that a substantial cohort of students might, in the future, decide that a traditional academic university environment isn't the best place to learn business skills. Given the option of studying a degree-level course at a mid-to-low level college / university with little to no 'brand recognition' or studying a vocationally-orientated degree course with a theoretical path to direct employment at IBM College or the Chevron School of Management, i think a lot of people would probably lean towards the latter.

Sumsung does this reasonably successfully in Germany, Canada and the UK, typically at a lower level and in partnership with traditional colleges, but it has the potential to take a much larger segment of the market. One FTSE 100 company in the UK has launched its own stand-alone degrees rubber stamped by a trad university and aims, in the future, to have degree-awarding powers of its own.

This inevitably means the "corporatisation of higher education" and has been resisted on those grounds, and also poses a potential revenue threat to traditional universities, but it could lead to refocusing of attention.

so.. i understand now. i really wasn't trying to be cruel to or denigrate anyone. i know both you and table are good at your jobs and impact students' lives for the better all the time. that applies to all of the teachers here.

i should have phrased what i said differently. part of it is that it feels like a loony thing to say. it was way too general, too pointed. i'm no fan of the horrible environments of abuse that can be found in many religious organizations. i've seen it first hand. i made the post because i keep seeing quotes from the new pope and really agreeing with them.

idk. it just feels like capitalism has turned higher ed into a nightmare. i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with some kind of religious group doing education instead. i get that 95% of them are horribly reactionary in unjustifiable ways, but there have got to be some out there that are a little more enlightened, no? seeing all the garbage in higher ed - and yes having some firsthand experience with it having worked in an academic library - i am left wondering if it's really a worse option to be in a religious organization for education purposes, if the organization has it right, or right enough, for the most part. maybe that's more a fantasy in my head and doesn't actually exist.

anyway, i see how what i was posted was actually pointed, since this thread is largely about teachers supporting each other, and i'm sorry. i do still think ya'll could stand to ease up on the judgment. ok i'm probably going to take an ilx break today. genuinely hope you guys have a good day.

pal of mine wrote this piece. don’t agree with all of it but the general framing is, i think, right on:

https://defector.com/humanists-have-done-nothing-wrong

I enjoyed that! Also enjoyed this today:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/opinion/higher-ed-dostoevsky-attention.html

I've tried to do this in my short teaching career, it can be hard to summon enthusiasm but I know it has worked. The studio/classroom needs to be a place for wonderment imo.

(not exactly a shitbin article but oh well)

Interesting article, thanks!

Loved your friend's article, tabes. Of course, it left me wondering if I'm a Primary Source Person or a Secondary Source Person. Probably a bit of both.

Also LOL @

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede, in one of my undergrad classes; the student of mine who disclosed that he loved The House of Mirth because “something similar happened to me recently” (????); or the guy who collects swords as a way into understanding the medieval period are examples of this type.

(the piece dan posted looks interesting too, but I ain't wading through the NYT permissions and whatnot to get at it)

Ah shit I got it as a gift article, missed that it didn't carry over to my post

Here's an archive version: https://archive.ph/KXIYN

i am 90% a primary source person— i have bought books because they were owned by certain departed poets, and they have an “aura.”

i honestly just find most theory and critical work incredibly boring, tho i know that’s a me problem and not a problem with the work itself

As a designer-educator, I consider myself a primary source person. I appreciate viewing and talking about the work of others, but I much prefer making my own work. In grad school there was a faculty member who would deride the faculty who studied but did not make work as "designologists" which was pretty funny.

i honestly just find most theory and critical work incredibly boring, tho i know that’s a me problem and not a problem with the work itself

no, a lot of it really is the work itself imo

apolgies in advance, i'm in a mood

idk a lot if not most of theory and academic writing is just extremely poor, meandering, un-serious, jargon-filled, and often pointless beyond the specific career goals of the author in question (no shade, really, get that tenure). and sometimes that writing is, in the case of "theory" English dept people, a direct attack on humanism rather than exemplary of the best that humanism has to offer. and besides academia is just a career like any other and is not, in my opinion, some place that needs to be idealized or held up as a beacon or a fortress against the barbarism of conservative cultural warriors

and i'm not even some weird Allan Bloom type, i just finished reading Anti-Oedipus for chrissakes, but let's be serious here

also the characterization of people (artists) who prefer to engage directly with primary sources as a bunch of horny undergrads and LARPers is ???

but maybe i am missing the point somehow

(xps)
Thanks Dan. Will check it out.

Echoing Cattedrale's response to tabes that frustration with theory/criticism isn't always a you-problem. Truth be told, I am probably more Primary-leaning than Secondary, but I'm teaching The Searchers this Fall, and I am more excited about assigning Jonathan Lethem's great essay on the film than I am about the film itself.

sorry i swear i am not coming here to shit on academics, a lot of my friends are academics and i value their work a lot, and i'm sure (actually i know) we have some good eggs here itt.

also want to add: it's not even that i don't think people should be doing the difficult, weird, granular, idiosyncratic research/investigations out at the edges of human thought. i actually think that kind of thing is cool. but i think expecting universities to have humanities depts that are grounded, rigorous, promoting clear thinking and clear writing -- that's not some kind of fascist dog whistle imo. nobody should really be emulating judith butler. only judith butler can really pull off judith butler. and i just think we'd be better off generally if students were more forcefully compelled to be educated about the actual technical and historical aspects of literature rather than being given a lazy and impersonal toolkit to play language games with

Final statement sounds a lot like a critical theory tbrr

i actually agree with you, Cattedrale— i think that as someone who likes to think that i write some far-out work (a poet friend once said my work evidences Eliot’s idea that “some sensibilities are simply capable of devouring any kind of experience”), i feel some kinship and empathy with theorists. the borders of human thought are indeed what many of them are investigating, it’s just that many of them are not great writers. in this way it’s like any other field of inquiry.

the problem is that right-fash attacks against easy and visible targets like Butler and liberal universities are just proxies for attacks on inquiry in general, actual freedom of thought, and also non-white people. i’m no defender of the university, for what it’s worth, but i think my pal makes some points that can’t be easily dismissed.

a little garbled, oh well

The loudest critics of bad academic writing aren't the fash but the libs. One of the myths I had to quash when I started grad school, based on the number of good to great writer-critics I read growing up, is that people got master's degrees because they were good writers able to explain theory. Now I protect them because, angel, down we go together.

idk a lot if not most of theory and academic writing is just extremely poor, meandering, un-serious, jargon-filled, and often pointless

I was actually having a similar conversation with a friend last night about philosophy and theory. As an undergrad I struggled to understand a lot of it and mostly gave up tbh. It definitely pushed me away from academia. Even if I wasn’t dumb and it was just bad writing, I didn’t fit in that world. My friend got his undergraduate degree in that area and struggled less than me, but he also said it was mostly not very good writing qua writing.

I'm absolutely the wrong person to ask for an unbiased opinion on the quality of academic writing on political, social or literary theory. Whenever I encounter it my mind rebels and refuses to make the attempt to disentangle the thickets of jargon and subordinate clauses. It could be the brilliant and profound thoughts f a steely and penetrating intellect for all I will ever know. It cannot touch me, move me. or elucidate the world for me.

It's not meant to! It's by and for fellow academics.

thank you i was about to clumsily make that point

i don't expect academic work in any field to be immediately transparent to me, a layperson

Good article, dan. It was nice to read something optimistic about the state of humanities education for once!

I recently enjoyed a read through Helen Sword's book Stylish Academic Writing, aimed at both the sciences and the humanities. (There is, she makes clear, plenty of very good good and very bad writing in both.) It's really great, and makes a strong case for loosening up and enjoying the writing process... giving yourself permission to be a little more conversational, or make judicious use of devices that are pleasing in general nonfiction writing. It's made me feel a little more confident as I write and revise my manuscript - a reminder that I can trust my writerly instincts and imagine a generally literate audience as opposed to the imaginary dissertation committee living rent-free in my head.

But nonetheless, yes, the target audience remains a fundamentally small world of highly educated experts in a select number of subfields. While they might be pleasantly surprised to be touched and moved, that's not the reason they will (hopefully) read the book. And given my timeline, the of my skills as a writer/thinker, and the sheer density of the archival work I'm putting into this, it just wouldn't be realistic to imagine it becoming the kind of powerfully synthetic nonfiction prose that weaves a gloriously engaging tapestry and *also* grabs hold of a more general or literary audience. My boldest hope is that non-specialists who just find the subject matter interesting would pick it up, and find that it met their interest while being baseline readable, maybe even modestly engaging from time to time.

I liked Helen Sword's book, but it wasn't especially helpful for me in practice.

I have found it very difficult to get clear, insightful, academic prose accepted/published. My dissertation ran up to ~100k words, excluding appendices and front/back matter. Of those, 25k were pro forma, 25k matter-of-factly detailed research process/protocols/results, and 25k necessarily addressed the concerns and interests mandated by my readers/editors. This left me with just a small space for inquiry, analysis, and postulating, sprinkled in odd sections throughout the manuscript. These parts - the 'thinking' parts that came out of years of research - were themselves constrained by the necessity that I express myself in the vocabulary and previous scholarship in my sub-field, and by the need to define terms so that an uncharitable reader wouldn't be able to kneecap my findings.

Much of the ugliness of my prose is a result of defensiveness against conservative institutional biases, and the whims of the established editorial/review committees.

Speaking of writing and the academy — at our annual dept meeting today I learned that certain well regarded institutions in the American south have decided to thumb their noses at the entire accreditation process. It feels like a civil war!

https://archive.is/SYkJZ

NYT:

A Texas University Becomes a Petri Dish for a Conservative Overhaul
Texas Tech is using A.I. to cut left-leaning content in its curriculum. Some say the effort to ferret out forbidden topics is a dystopian academic nightmare.

...

Texas Tech is using A.I. to ferret out books and other materials that touch on topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. Professors describe the effort as a dystopian academic nightmare, in which ideologues are wielding technology to sideline subject-matter experts.

That is not how the Texas Tech system’s leader, Brandon Creighton, sees things.

Mr. Creighton, a former state lawmaker who has been heading the five-university system since November, is the force behind the effort. He has said there was “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” at universities.

His course-review plan, he said, “will produce the best curriculum in America. I also believe it will be a national model when we’re finished.”

Mr. Creighton is tackling two of higher education’s most pressing problems, at least in the eyes of its Republican critics and others who argue universities need to be reformed. Academia needs to rebuild lost public trust as campuses have moved left and to make itself more relevant in the era of artificial intelligence, they say.

on the bright side, once we feed Judith Butler into the AI they'll be much easier to read

while I'm here: https://www.ms.now/news/frame-up-whistleblower-says-probes-into-antisemitism-at-colleges-were-ploys-to-harass-and-strip-millions

soda, I hear all that. I've also struggle with an internalized sense of the need to "defend," which is baked by name into the PhD process even if none of my advisors ever once told me "write like you want to produce something so utterly airtight that no one could ever object." In this regard I've also appreciated William Germano's /From Dissertation to Book/ for helping me reorient, a little, out of that headspace and towards being, as he puts it, "a professional writer."

Of course, I'm focusing here on the battle inside my own head, which doesn't account for an actual potential struggle with actual real-world committees, boards, readers, etc.!

@LL: how disheartening!
@rob: Judith Butler-bot is one of the least imaginable use-cases for LLM (and I'm a fan)
@doctor casino: glad to know i'm not the only one

Yeah Florida and Texas are leading the way on creating their own accreditation, I expect lots of red states will follow. It has the potential to fracture the whole idea of “American higher education,” into a bunch of competing camps.

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/26/texas-am-accreditation/

That’s such a horror show that I couldn’t have imagined it bc I won’t allow myself to go to those dark places. Absolutely awful nightmarish working conditions also!! 🤮

Related to capitulation and devaluation...

Several people in my department have begin using AI to 'automate' drafts/outlines of the parts of their MSes they find boring to write (abstracts, introductions, overviews of existing research, reportings on findings prior to analysis). After reading the AI draft, they fiddle with the prose to match their own style, and to detection as users of AI. But I have noticed they do not alter the underlying conclusions/structure, and their writing has suffered. I do not feel this is ethical. However, it allow my friends heaps more time to tinker with the philosophical parts of their 'scripts while I'm toiling away in the MLA-mines writing meticulously-cited lit reviews by hand, barely scrawling out a conclusion before hitting 'send.' They think I'm smug and old-fashioned and stressed-out. I think they're cheating.

I also know of a senior researcher who recently ran 100+ pieces of qual data (in the form of a specially vulnerable population's written perceptions of an intervention) through ClaudeAI and said 'tell me if there are patterns related to X, Y, or Z.' They did the same with a set of post-intervention surveys, telling the bot to 'run descriptive and inferential stats on this Excel file and tell me if there's anything of note.' This researcher did not redact names from either data set, and they further rationalized letting the AI correlate the unencoded outcomes as part of their private brainstorming process. While the staff member prepared to publish, they manually replaced the participants' real names with pseudonyms after they had fed the entire study through the machine. A good (junior) friend of mine raised this to the IRB as a violation of human subject protocols. The geriatric IRB saw no problem with this practice, and praised the senior researcher for their ingenuity.

After reading the AI draft, they fiddle with the prose to match their own style, and to avoid detection as users of AI.

god that is just terrible, soda

well, this thread is living up to its name. :-(

xxp that’s enraging

fuck that

I didn’t even read the whole thing bc I didn’t need to. That is unethical and imo despicable.

Honestly I’m appalled.

I can’t stop thinking about this! The arrogance of outsourcing the “boring” parts of the work galls me the most.

I don't know for sure, but given how much of my institution's research ethics requirements have to do with storing data on secure hard drives, I would assume that be a very clear and serious breach

I like this primary/secondary framework for thinking about humanities. Don't we all start as primary-source driven, then perhaps get caught up in the synthesis afforded by deep intertextuality, etc? Anyways, I wasn't drawn in theory as much as some of my late-80s friends in their bachelors programs, but I found it a delight to learn how to use the tools of jargon to uncover the specificity that gave them value.

Like 80% of my BA/BFA peers, I was drawn into tech at the turn of the century, and given the animosity for humanities that was just getting going in that era, I was was amazed at how well semiotics and deconstruction prepared me for sysadmin abstractions and shell coding. Perl Monks were just like all the other monastic diggers.

Eventually, I ended up more in the S than the T end of STEM. And once again, I found the training in tearing apart a text incredibly valuable to reading scientific lit, allowing me to stay afloat professionally (though barely at times) without landing any further academic credentials. I've also noticed the feedback loop of working in coding making me a better musician, and the rudiments of music theory making me a better coder. Generalist training is awesome.

Several people in my department have begin using AI to 'automate' drafts/outlines of the parts of their MSes they find boring to write (abstracts, introductions, overviews of existing research, reportings on findings prior to analysis). After reading the AI draft, they fiddle with the prose to match their own style, and to detection as users of AI. But I have noticed they do not alter the underlying conclusions/structure, and their writing has suffered.

I'm beginning to see AI policies that seem to throw their hands in the air and accept that it's being used at every stage of research, and just ask that people declare their usage. This is especially the case with student assessment, but also with some journals. Quite how to approach assessing something that has declared, perfectly legitimately in terms of the guidelines, that AI was used to generate a draft outline, or to 'consult' on the core ideas, I don't know. And for literature reviews, in the tiny niches that academics tend to find themselves in I think the smoothing out and depersonalisation that comes from the LLMs having billions of sources diminishes a bit. If you ask for a literature review on small feature x of obscure figure y's work, chances are that despite the randomisation it will end up mining one or two sources, and then you've just plagiarised someone else's (potentially idiosyncratic) literature review without even knowing it.

They think I'm smug and old-fashioned and stressed-out. I think they're cheating.

― doc (soda), Tuesday, August 18, 2026 9:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

you're right and they are wrong

I know that some universities have specific licences with specific AI models so (in theory....) they can only give data to that model and it's not supposed to be stored/ kept for training the model etc. there are institutional AI policies that deal with this. did this guy at least do that in a situation somewhat like I'm describing, or is there no such policy? (or does no-one care either way)?

obviously the whole thing is utterly depressing regardless; just wondering what the employer policy is.

sorry that was xp to soda

Yes, it's not necessarily wrong to use PHI with an AI model as long as there's a BAA agreement in place. But if there's no agreement and they're just putting it in a consumer model, then that's bad.

That Jonathan Lethem Searchers essay cryptosicko mentioned is grebt!