l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 2/21/2012
It is fascinating to see people accusing others of things that they
themselves are doing, especially when their own sins are worse.
Academics love to say that businesses are not paying enough to people who
work for them. But where in business are there people who are paid
absolutely nothing for strenuous work that involves risks to their health?
In academia, that situation is common. It is called college football. How
often have you watched a big-time college football game without seeing
someone limping off the field or being carried off the field?
College athletes are not to be paid because this is an "amateur" sport. But
football coaches are not only paid, they are often paid higher salaries than
the presidents of their own universities. Some make over a million dollars
a year.
Academics also like to accuse businesses of consumer fraud. There is indeed
fraud in business, as in every other aspect of human life -- including
academia.
When my academic career began, half a century ago, I read up on the academic
market and discovered that there was a chronic over-supply of people
trained to be historians. There were not nearly enough academic posts
available for people who had spent years acquiring Ph.D.s in history, and
the few openings that there were for new Ph.D.s paid the kind of salaries
you could get for doing work requiring a lot less education.
My own pay as a beginning instructor in economics was not high but it was
certainly higher than that for beginning historians.
Now, 50 years later, there is a long feature article in the February 17th
issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education on the chronic over-supply of
historians. Worse yet, leading university history departments are resisting
demands that they keep track of what happens to their students after they
get their Ph.D.s -- and inform prospective Ph.D.s of what the market is like.
If any business operated this way, selling customers something that was very
costly in time and money, and which the sellers knew in advance was almost
certain to disappoint their expectations, academics would be bursting with
indignation -- and demanding full disclosure to the customers, if not
criminal prosecutions.
But The Chronicle of Higher Education reports "faculty resistance" to
collecting and publishing information on what happens to a university's
history Ph.D.s after they leave the ivy-covered walls with high hopes and
low prospects.
At a number of big-name universities -- Northwestern, Brown and the
University of North Carolina's flagship campus at Chapel Hill -- at least
one-fourth of their 2010 history Ph.D.s are either unemployed or their fate
is unknown.
At Brown University, for example, 38 percent of their 2010 Ph.D.s are in
that category, compared to only 25 percent who have tenure-track
appointments.
For people not familiar with academia, a tenure-track appointment does not
mean that the appointee has tenure, but only that the job is one where a
tenure decision will have to be made at some point under the "up or out
system." At leading universities, far more are put out than move up.
There are also faculty appointments that are strictly for the time being --
lecturers, adjunct professors or visiting professors. Half the 2010 Ph.D.s
from Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania have these kinds of
appointments, which essentially lead nowhere. They are sometimes called "
gypsy faculty."
Finally, there are Ph.D.s who are on postdoctoral fellowships, often at the
expense of the taxpayers. They are paid to continue on campus, essentially
as students, after getting their doctorates. More than one-fourth of the
2010 Ph.D.s from Rutgers, Johns Hopkins and Harvard are in this category.
At least these universities release such statistics. A history professor at
Rutgers University who has studied such things says: "If you look at some of
the numbers published on department Web sites, they range from dishonest to
incompetent."
But apparently many academics are too busy pursuing moral crusades in
society at large to look into such things on their own ivy-covered campuses.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of The
Housing Boom and Bust. |
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