How many of these real professors were there ever? It seems to me like there were never all that many. Growing up I only knew of one non-medical doctor... the principal of my school. I know lots now.

I couple years ago I dated a woman who was an Adjunct prof at two schools. She was more like a high school teacher. At the time she estimated she made about $100/hr -- the problem was she didn't work all that many hours. She just presented material... she didn't do any original research or anything like that.

I know a lady who's an adjunct at one of the universities in my area. Gets by pretty well, too. How does she do it?

The adjunct professor position is a side gig. She has a regular job.

A guy who grew up in Spain before the Spanish Civil War said that the large banks there would hire a lot of people from each year's high school graduation class...and *not pay them* while holding out the promise of lucrative full-time employment for those who did well. Which was very few.

The American universities are doing the same thing on a much larger scale.

From what I can tell looking in from the outside at my husband's work life in Academia, is if you're not continuously being sorted into the highest track you're not gonna make it.

If you ever take a job as an adjunct your odds of getting a tenure track job are low. Adjunct is a side gig or hobby job. People try to make a living at it, hoping they'll get a real gig out of it, but that rarely happens. Better off being a k-12 teacher.

If you aren't at one of the top universities for undergrad your odds of being in one of the top doctoral programs are low, and then if you aren't in a top doctoral program your odds of getting a top post doc are low and if you don't have a top post doc your odds of tenure track -anywhere- are low.

Even then professors at random lesser-known universities are from the top schools.

It's a constant collection of triages until you get to full professor. And if you are triaged in the wrong direction at any point in time the odds of you getting back on track, while not zero, are low.

It's true even in the STEM fields that full professors don't do much teaching. The bulk of the coursework, especially at the undergraduate level, is being taught by TA's and adjuncts, who don't have any of that wonderful intellectual freedom or job security. Their job is to be lecturers and paper-graders. Around here at least, the STEM Ph. D.s that haven't gone into industry are mostly employed by research organizations that are only loosely associated with the university, and being that they aren't university employees per se, they are not expected to teach.

I slightly dispute the timeline on Benoit Cambron's tweet; it started happening earlier than he realizes. The value of a humanities degree was already in free fall when I entered college in 1980. I think there were three factors there. One was the economic decline of the 1970s, which resulted in a lot of corporate consolidation and elimination of middle-management positions, which since WWII had been a primary destination for humanities majors.

The second was the dumbing-down of humanities education, which was already well under way in the mid-'70s. (There was a stereotype / meme that developed of the "typical" humanities degree holder in a job interview. The interviewer asks "What are your skills?", and the job seeker, with a Wal-Mart smiley-face grin, says, "I like to work with people!" It was an early form of virtue signaling.) The third was the increasing level of specialization in a lot of job descriptions; it was no longer a matter of "just a little training", which was how the humanities people regarded most professional skills.

Wait, Dook? this Dook??

https://nypost.com/2019/03/26/duke-university-pays-112m-to-settle-faked-research-lawsuit/

What's really to be resented is how colleges -- oh, and especially journalism schools -- put on a happy face as they take the massive checks from students enrolling in their programs, never revealing how actually grim the students' job prospects are.

Caveat emptor still applies. Maybe they ought to do research while they're knocking out their first two years of work before settling into a major?

On the other hand, if you can weld competently, you won't starve any time soon. If you're good at it, you'll make bank. And after that, if you want to pursue a BA/MA/PhD, you can pay for it in cash. And if worse comes to worse, you can still weld.

Forgot to add: Props to Childress for the use of the word "symbiont". This is the first time I've ever seen it anywhere other than a UNIVAC mainframe computer manual.

I just remembered... over the years I have worked with several people who had a side gig as adjunct prof.

My high school physics teacher had a doctorate from MIT. He said academia had not really worked out for him and he preferred the lower stress of teaching HS.

Depends on the school. The ones I went to the lectures were given by the professors, the grading done by the TAs. Where my husband is he has to give lecture and proctor exams, and the TAs help with study groups and grading. His main job though isn't teaching, his main job is to do research and get it published. Teaching and administrative work is part of the job, but not the main part.

As for publishing, people my generation (I'm 42) and lower really have to publish a LOT. A lot of the older people didn't have to publish as much to get their jobs, and have less total publications than my generation has, even though they have been professors much longer. The whole, "Get tenure and you don't have to do anything" thing is a myth. Not the least because tenure isn't even full professor. But even if you're full they have ways of making your life miserable if you're not publishing enough.

I kind of want to learn to weld, to make cool sculptures for my garden and home. Is it the sort of thing where it can be learned on the hobby level?

... which is why academic study of literature, arts, and history were the purview of moneyed elites up until WWII.

Also: his wife has a degree in "environmental psychology" and her dissertation was on "the ways in which people constructed for themselves a sense of place, of home, of lineage"....

He doesn't mention what his degree is in, but he now a partner at "an ethnography-­based consulting firm"

Which means they are postmodern parasites who have probably not contributed much to Aht and Culchuh. Like similar psych/sociology majors who get jobs as "Human Resource" parasite/enforcers. Whose degress would be worthless absent our bloated gubmit sector and its mandates.

Why am I less sympathetic after reading the fine print?

I kind of want to learn to weld, to make cool sculptures for my garden and home. Is it the sort of thing where it can be learned on the hobby level?

Google: learn to weld as a hobby, turns up a bunch of hits including something called Arc Academy. You'll need the equipment, tho, but perhaps there's a shared work space near you that you can rent the space & tools to use.

Do note, if you end up arc welding do not scrimp on the safety glasses. Your eyes will thank you.

Don't worry about the professoriate... Enough of them have lived the dream that an even larger number of essentially worthless administrators have hitched their hineys to education's star wagon, evacuating whatever merit the system might once have held for human intellectual progress.

I'm a simple guy who grew up on a college campus. I have some energy about this.

NicoleK, you can rent welding equipment in most decently sized cities. Prices do vary a lot depending on local demand and supply. And demand tends to be very seasonal in a sense. Some years no one is interested and others you can't keep the stuff on your shelf.

I'll echo what IRA said about the glasses. Do not cheap out on them. Other than that for what it sounds like you are interested in doing it isn't that difficult to learn.

As for the topic above, I don't have much pity for Childress. It's simple supply and demand. Why was a degree worth so much more for boomers? There simply weren't that many of them. Now there are far more and the value has fallen to match. It Childress's case it sounds just like the video game industry or Hollywood for what it's worth. He really wanted to be a professor. So do a whole lot of other people. Far too much supply means people aren't worth squat. And they get treated like squat because of it. For comparison look at the oil industry and off shore drillers. Guy with only a high school education can make $90k easily. Going overseas and you can make $150k really easily too. Why such a difference? There are fairly few people who want to do that kind of work. If they pay less they can't get enough people to get the job done. Simple supply and demand.

Why was a degree worth so much more for boomers? There simply weren't that many [people with advanced degrees]. Now there are far more and the value has fallen to match. ~ Ben at March 28, 2019 9:57 AM

The student deferment for the draft during the Vietnam War caused a lot of Baby Boomers to seek post-baccalaureate educations. From that, we got a flood of lawyers and professors.

What was once a pursuit of pure knowledge became a way of dodging the draft without actually dodging it.

Guy Doesn't Get the Job He Wants and Clearly Thinks He Deserves. Film at 11.

Why am I less sympathetic after reading the fine print?

Ah.

He should have applied to be a Title IX coordinator, or *checks notes* gone to work at the SPLC. I suspect that supply of such PhDs exceed the demand for tenure-track positions, and so he would have not only hold a PhD, he'd have to be in the top echelon of said holders. To paraphrase the John Wick trailer, he'd need published papers, lots of published papers.

But fake papers get published often enough to make me ask how hard is it to get published?

You have to be a bit sympathetic to see how self-destructively obsessed he was about getting the academic gold ring. Nothing else mattered. That's too bad.

Honestly Richard I'm just too tired to be sympathetic anymore. I've seen too many people gladly throw themselves into meat grinders like that. You can't talk most of them out of it so you just accept that it is their choice and the consequences are their choice as well.

"Is it the sort of thing where it can be learned on the hobby level?"

Certainly. As others have said above, the best way to get started is probably through a community college course, or an artists' collective, or by renting equipment and watching some videos. I don't know what things cost where you are, but in the U.S., decent small MIG welders start at around $700, and figure on another $75 or so for safety equipment. (MIG is an electric-arc method; you don't have to mess with oxygen or flammable gases.)

"Forgot to add: Props to Childress for the use of the word "symbiont". This is the first time I've ever seen it anywhere other than a UNIVAC mainframe computer manual."

See ST:TNG\Jadzia Dax, or musician Celldweller's tune of the same name.

Symbiont: parasite with benefits!

"You have to be a bit sympathetic to see how self-destructively obsessed he was about getting the academic gold ring."

Not when I read that he chose a made up bullshit major - that's a signal that he lacked the intellectual chops for a more established, useful field of study. Don't want to do hard science, math, statistics, or be exposed to reality that makes you butt-hurt? We'll create a new major with none of that!

One of the problems with art these days is that it'e no longer about the artist offering society something of transcendent value, it's now about society praising and paying he artist for working out his/her personal catharsis. The same thing has happened to academia.

Nicole, if you want to get your feet wet, you can get a wire feed welder worthy of a beginning hobbyist at Harbor Freight for under $150, and a MIG welder for under $200 (with the monthly 20% coupons they give out to anyone who ponies up an email address.) Get the warranty for an extra ten bucks and when it dies in a year (about half of them do if used much) they'll replace it free (and offer the same $10 warranty on the replacement one.) When you get to the point that it no longer serves your needs, take an adult education course from your city or school district before upgrading to a better one. You'll learn enough to make the bigger investment wisely.