Some parts of the economic crisis might still have to do with overproduction

The academic gloom-and-doom stories are moving north. Fresh off a New York Times story about new PhDs having trouble finding jobs in a year when so many searches are being cancelled, the Globe and Mail reports (a few years too late) that maybe minting all those extra PhDs wasn’t such a great idea after all. As I have said before, I think it’s a patently bad idea to wantonly expand PhD programs in any country without regard to what the students are being trained to do or where they will wind up, but it’s an especially bad idea in a small country like Canada.

There’s much more to say about this, but the only thing I’ll add for now is that given the speed of academic job markets, we are looking at “snapshot reporting” here and the real question is how the market will look over the next few years. Right now, administrators are simply running scared in many places, which inevitably strikes fear into faculty and students.

A Glimpse of the Future of English-Language Higher Education

For obvious reasons, I can’t discuss many details of the admissions process to our graduate programs in Communication Studies in this space (so please don’t ask if you applied and are reading this). However, I must note a change this year which I think may foretell of something bigger to come down the road. Every year, our MA program gets a sizable number of applications from around the world, a sizable subset of which from students who evidently saw our program listed on some website but have no idea what we do, or who DO know what we do but whose educational system is so completely alien to ours that they are ill-prepared to undertake an MA in our program. Many of these students are clearly well-educated in a different system, and I always feel bad turning down the ones who clearly seek what we offer but are not prepared for it.

But this year, something different happened. We are starting to get applications from branches of American universities that have been constructed in the middle east. These are effectively hybrid institutions, designed to give a U.S.-style education, often by American faculty (NYU colleagues tell me there is a very sweet deal on offer to go teach in Abu Dhabi), to middle eastern students. While the emphasis is clearly on sciences, engineering and medicine, some of the humanities are also starting to appear at these schools. Applications from students who have graduated from these schools look more or less like applications from students who graduated from the main campus of the university. Given the lavish funding and resources and funding available to these schools, I can’t help but wonder if among them is the next Stanford or Duke, schools endowed with private money that have, over time, become elite schools in their own right. Clearly, it’s a different model, since it is, for example, still the “NYU brand.” But this strikes me as a very different approach to globalizing higher education, and to preparing students in one’s home country for advanced study abroad. Perhaps as satellite campuses, these schools will never actually compete for reputation with the home campuses. But their students will very likely soon find themselves in western graduate programs to which they previously would not have had access. While new universities in North America seem to be more interested in cheapening higher education (ie, the University of Phoenix), it strikes me that perhaps the next wave of elite English-language universities could be located in the middle east.

Two Position Papers

Instead of blogging on the road, I did some light editing on my book (oh yeah, that) and wrote two position papers for the upcoming conference at the University of Virginia: “Connections: Media Studies and the New Interdisciplinarity.” They’re both pretty fast and loose, though, so they’re perfect for a blog.

As I sometimes say before delivering my talks, “this is work in progress, but please comment upon it as if I fervently believe every word.”

Plenary paper: The Work of Communication Studies (or, It’s Good Work If You Can Get It)
History panel paper: The Times of Communication History

Happy reading!

Two New Blogs on Books + One on Speech

This is overdue, but I am pleased to announce two new blogs on the future of books by friends who are also publishing books on books this summer, Andrew Piper and Ted Striphas.

See:

The Book Report

and

The Late Age of Print

and on a not-totally-unrelated topic:

Money/Speech

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Okay, I’m off to California for two weeks. Tour dates are on sterneworks as always. I might blog, but I might also just do the status update thing on Facebook.

New Configurations of Academic Privilege?

So recently in my travels I encountered a colleague who has ascended to a high level administrative post at his school. We know each other as scholars and are academic friends. He’s the kind of person who I’m happy to see at a conference and with whom I’m happy to share a drink when the opportunity presents itself. Anyway, like lots of places, his school took a massive hit on the endowment. Since they’re private, it hurts even more. He’d ascended to administration hoping to make things better. Now, he’s overseeing some awfully ugly cuts. At one point, he used some euphemistic language that I can’t reconstruct here. I replied, “so you’re going to have to fire professors?” He didn’t visibly cringe but he might as well have as he said something to the effect of “I’d rather you didn’t put it that way. We’re starting with non-renewal of some non-permanent faculty and then we will see.”

We live in scary times. I wonder whether this isn’t going to lead to new kinds of academic shakeups in terms of institutional privilege. Those institutions hit less hard by the current crisis for whatever reason are like investors with extra cash — they can build while everyone else burns. On the flip side, being at a posh private school is apparently no longer insurance that you’ll have good working conditions and job security. According to McGill’s provost, no tenured or tenure track professor in Canada has ever been dismissed for financial distress, so I’m grateful for my own job security, but I worry for the state of the profession and for people in vulnerable positions on either side of the border. And for all the paranoid talk of administrators taking advantage of this opportunity to introduce some new draconian measures, my sense is that they hate it too.

At least I am also running into recent PhDs (like within the last year) who scored some good jobs on the market this year, so all hope is not lost.

Ten Words You Don’t Want to Hear From A Flight Attendant About Her Last Landing At Your Upcoming Destination

“I’d never had a flight where so many people vomited.”

I finally got on a plane Friday morning and was talking with the flight attendant, who was on the Montreal-La Guardia flight that actually landed Thursday before the cancelled the rest. The above quote sums up her description of the turbulence.

My flight was fine and the conference was just great. I confess to not being always thrilled with the music or sound art provided at academic events on sound, but the noise performance by Otomo Yoshihide was one of those amazing, transformative musical experiences that only happen so often in a lifetime. It was waves of feedback coming from two guitars on tables that were treated somehow and run through volume pedals. The best way I can describe in in indy-rock terms is like the end of a Mogwai concert only with much, much more control and saturation. There were so many reflections bouncing around the room that by turning your head you could change the sound. It was a total bodily experience, like a metal show or dub, and had that wonderful dimension of surprise that is so key to all truly transcendent musical experience. The New York Times critic liked it too.

Oh yeah, and the papers were great too. And I got to meet some people I’d only read, including Steven Feld, whose work was very formative for me as a grad student.