You decide, but Prof. Karzarian is certainly giving John Protevi a run for the money! I reprint this amusing display in whole below the fold, since, as several who sent it to me observed, it may not last:
While we're talking about rankings...
We're talking about rankings this week. (Do we talk about anything else, any more?) While we're doing so, I'd like to encourage everyone to read and meditate on this extraordinary post by Kate Bowles, which takes off from the heartbreaking story of Professor Stefan Grimm, "a senior UK academic who has died after being put on performance management for the insufficiency of his research. He was 51."
The piece is a meditation on the professional culture and the emotional world, all too familiar, that almost inevitably surrounds not just a death like this but also any number of other real abuses which we have become all too capable of overlooking, if only by virtue of their excessive familiarity. It bears, heavily, on rankings, and the uses to which they are put. But it also calls us out for the way in which we participate in, and facilitate the whole process. As a tease, I'll simply leave folks with these two paragraphs.
Some days they will also drive each other for you. They will whisper about each other, and turn a blind eye to each other, and not quite find the time to act on their own secret critical thinking about any of it. They will also surreptitiously maintain each other through care and coping practices and shrugs in the corridor and exchanged glances and raised eyebrows in meetings and Friday drinks that become chronic, secretive drinking problems so that they can get some rest without writing emails in their heads at 3am.
In fact, if you get the scarcity, intermittency and celebratory settings for occasional reward just right, then the toxic alchemy of hope and shame will diminish their capacity for solidarity, and they will keep the whole thing going for you, in the name of commitment, professional standards, the value of scholarship, academic freedom, the public good of educational equity.
Posted by Ed Kazarian on 01 December 2014 at 19:26 in "Austerity"? You mean class war, don't you?, Adjunct faculty and hyper-exploitation, Ed Kazarian, Improving the philosophy profession | Permalink
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Ed - with all due respect, what this is is an unfortunate tragedy that could happen in any other job and that was precipitated, if at all, by the kind of short-sighted administrative CEO management mindset which concentrates on quantifiable measures that PGR is one tool how to combat since it precisely does not measure such things which cause us all headaches when we come up for tenure and such things. Not PGR. Ranking per se is not an evil.
That's novel. PGR doesn't measure anything so concrete as scholarly production (or at least, we can't tell whether it does that), so it's free from potential for misuse attending to rankings that do.
Not at all sure how that follows, but have fun with it.
It's not a tool used by administration for evaluating and pressuring faculty into anything. And it cannot really be used that way since it simply more publications, or more grants, do not increase your reputation (and might even lower it). It's a not tool for administrators to exert pressure on faculty. It can be used by faculty to argue their case against administration. This is actually quite simple. It's also not a matter of simple logical inference - you need a bit of experience too.
I'd ask you for some kind of support for any of these claims, but that last bit where you suggest that my not seeing it is simply a matter of me not having any experience pretty much gives the game away here.
You've had your say, but I'm done letting you troll now. Bye.
Ed,
It seems to me that you've completely misread the last sentence of plo's post. plo was not claiming anything about *your* experience. Rather, plo was making a claim (I take it) about the role experience *in general* should play in practical deliberation with the PGR in all the relevant settings (both when dealing with administration, and when one either is or is mentoring a prospective graduate student).
It is not entirely obvious to me why plo's view is so objectionable or controversial, as your replies to him/her indicate, Ed.
Must your readers agree wholeheartedly with all the viewpoints enunciated here to be treated decently?
Ahh, and now parsers brigade arrives, right on cue, to accuse me of some sort of egregious misinterpretation.
(In case you folks haven't figured it out yet, I'm enjoying this. It's almost making me nostalgic for the days before we started moderating.)
And of course, I'm now a vicious censor *because I'm publishing all of these replies rather than leaving them unpublished.*
(And yes, most of the time, except when you catch me in just the right mood, every single one of these comments—derailing the discussion, or at least totally failing to address the substance of the post or advance any sort of discussion, critical or otherwise, of the points being made in it by introducing compelling, substantive considerations—would have been ignored without notice. Have fun, I'll probably get tired of this soon.)
You're acting incredibly childish in response to what was (in my case at least) merely an attempt to charitably interpret a sincere comment, and I expect that you'll soon realize this and delete the thread in order to save face.
(No, I don't expect you to post this. But I thought I should let you know anyway. Consider it a favor.)
Also: calling names ("parsers brigade", etc.) rather than, say, explaining why you aren't in fact guilty of a misinterpretation is still a fallacy, even if you commit it in an online forum.
Plo's argument was not that the gourmet report is free from potential for misuse. It was that whatever its flaws the gourmet may be useful in counteracting administrative pressuring of faculty based on more "objective" grounds like publications, grants, and all that. Plo was bringing up experience because you said I'm not sure how that follows. I think she was saying that it follows only given certain certain facts about the way administrators think I guess, and that that's something you can only learn through the relevant experience. I don't personally agree with Plo, but it hardly seems off-topic or trolly.
You're right, I'm a bad, bad man. This is all deeply, profoundly embarrassing for me. As soon as I've left this heartfelt mea culpa up for awhile, I'm going to delete the post because it's so obvious to everyone (and to me now) that I have been horribly uncharitable in not seeing the brilliance of shopworn, off topic, unsupported assertions by a bunch of anonymous commenters about the PGR that bear at best a tangential relationship to the point of this post, namely the effects of rankings within an academic labor system about which all of you seem deeply invested in avoiding any substantive discussion.
Derailing is a pretty standard tactic in such instances. It's not hard to recognize; and of course, the best way to keep it going is to turn the entire thread into a meta-discussion about how unfair the person accusing the derailers of derailing is being. All of this is predictable as clockwork.
And yes, take this as an object lesson in why we've gone to fairly strict moderation here. Don't like it? Cry me a river.
Meanwhile, there's a really good blog post linked above about the academic labor system, the personal and communal effects of our investment in hierarchical ranking systems, etc., and the ways in which we, by virtue of our own investments in being special, excellent, the very best, etc., tend to enable some of the forms of exploitation and abuse that are endemic to the academic workplace now. If folks want to discuss that, by all means. Otherwise, consider the comments closed. I've had more than enough of this little trip down memory lane.
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