A tenured philosopher writes:
I read with interest the piece by Gregory Pence you excerpted on your blog. I think that he may be misinterpreting the data. That is, he takes the dissatisfaction of young scholars as evidence of their sense of entitlement. But it may just be that their expectations were mis- set by their graduate faculty. When I was a grad student at [an Ivy League university] it was obvious that everything short of a job at a research one was, if not an embarrassment, something to be viewed as a temporary step on the way up the ladder. One unnamed but famous philosopher, when I told her of my offer from my current employer, asked me about the teaching load. I told her it was 4-4. She looked at me with pity and said-- I kid you not-- "I'm sorry." This was my only tenure-track offer, which I was ecstatic to get. When, as a grad student I and some others were grousing about the poor adjunct pay at a local state college, another household name who overheard the conversation asked us why we even took a job with such poor wages. Why not simply refuse? He couldn't grasp that we needed to pay the rent and eat, and didn't have a 6 figure salary like he did. I remember staring at him in stunned silence. If you spend several years around folks with quarter million dollar salaries, minimal teaching duties, palatial offices, and brilliant undergrads, you start to think that your first job, if not that grand, ought to be better than teaching 8 courses a year to unprepared slackers at some underfunded State U. in fly-over country.
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