The Little Professor

Professing and Editing

1.  At The Clutter Museum, Leslie M-B asks, among other things, "Should the classroom be considered a relatively private space?"  I suppose the answer depends on what "relatively" entails.  In everyday practice, classrooms aren't very private. Many faculty teach with the door left open to the hall, pack up the class on sunny days and teach it outside, or have voices that carry through cheap walls.    Students chat about lectures (and faculty), circulate their instructor's more inane remarks (it would be nice if they circulated the brilliant remarks, but that doesn't happen quite so often...), and, of course, leave complaints on RMP.  Everybody exchanges war stories in open areas.  Some class wikis and blogs are left open to the public; moreover, even when they're locked, somebody can always break out ctrl-C ctrl-V.  And when your classroom has three hundred students in it, the "private" space starts to look rather suspiciously public.  (That's before we get to scandals, publicized grievances, people criticizing reading lists, or whatever.)  At best, physical and virtual classroom environments are remarkably porous, which makes the "private" classroom something of a polite fiction...and yet, I think, when it comes to media with a potentially wide audience, that fiction is worth maintaining.  Personally, I try not to post anything negative that would lead Random Student Reader to say "Hey, I recognize the subject of that anecdote."  (For example: posts about an individual's bad behavior in the classroom, no; posts about confidential disciplinary matters, definitely no;  posts about a swarm of misplaced modifiers, sure.)  There have been moments when I've broken down under the strain--HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY CONFUSE TENNYSON WITH DARWIN?!!--but I definitely find myself biting my tongue...er, keeping my fingers off the keyboard quite a bit. 

I also think that pseudonymous bloggers have to be just as careful as bloggers who publish under their own names, because the moment your Sublime Moment of Venting gets just...specific...enough, your pseudonym is, as they say, toast. 

2.  As part of her call to prepare doctoral candidates for life off the tenure track,  The Tenured Radical suggests that students spend a year or two as fellows in non-teaching positions.  For example, "[u]niversity presses would also be an outstanding place to spend this fellowship year, since becoming a book editor, a writer or a literary agent is a viable (and often more vital) way to perpetuate an intellectual life."  My immediate and totally inarticulate response to that sentence was "eeeerrrummmerrrk."  As I mentioned a few posts down, my first year after finishing my doctorate was spent working for, yes, the University of Chicago Press, where I was an assistant to the editors at Modern Philology.  Now, I enjoyed this job quite a bit, enough so that I would have happily pursued publishing as a career had the job search not panned out.  However:

  1. Very few jobs in publishing actually require a doctorate.
  2. The U of C Press actually employed a fair number of otherwise unemployed Ph.Ds, most of whom were not engaged in anything that had to do with their doctoral training.
  3. My own job required me to file, correspond ("Dear Dr. X, do you plan to cough up that book review in the immediate future?"), file, copy-edit, file, read proof, file, help plan the TOC, file, maintain administrative notes, file, handle random annoyed contributors, file, and so forth.  My doctorate was of use when it came to suggesting book reviewers and, in one case, catching a couple of factual errors in somebody's article.  Otherwise, no.
  4. Did I mention that very few jobs in publishing actually require a doctorate?

In fact, someone who wants to work in commercial publishing probably needs to be pursuing an entirely different educational track altogether.  See, for example, this post.  That being said, a Ph.D. can come in handy at a university press, as Elizabeth Demers points out...but, as she also notes, it's still not an absolutely essential line on the CV.  If I had wanted to continue in publishing, I probably would have needed to undertake additional professional training (e.g., a publishing certificate program). 

However, as Demers also admits, entry-level positions are very entry-level, and they pay proportionally.  My own job paid three thousand dollars less than my previous year's graduate stipend.  Or, to quote an exchange I had with an emeritus faculty member who wandered past my office one day:

PROFESSOR: Does the job pay moderately well?

ME: It pays moderately.