Tenure or Titanic?
Oh this is just perfect. I was looking over the news again this evening when a little tidbit article caught my eye. One of those fluffy bits on the Jobs page of The Boston Globe. It's called "6 Myths About Work". I clicked and skimmed it, then laughed out loud when I got to this one, myth number 5:
Going to grad school open doors.
Grad school generally makes you less employable, not more.
For example, people who get a graduate degree in the humanities would have had a better chance of surviving the Titanic than getting a tenured teaching job.
2 comments:
It's an interesting blurb. It sounds mostly like the kind of bullshit spouted by people whose view of the world is irrepressibly narcissistic. (i.e. I've never encountered prejudice in my own life, so it must not exist anymore!)
I'm surprised you didn't have something to say about the claim that the glass ceiling doesn't exist. It seems like your kind of fodder. And the logic that "if no one is climbing to the top, the glass ceiling isn't keeping anyone down." is just ridiculous. Somebody has to be at the top (Communism just doesn't work, people), and there are still plenty of people willing to climb the metaphorical ladder. They just spend their time doing that instead of with the author apparently.
I found it sexist and narrowminded, not so much reeking of narcissism but of privilege, the sort I see in most "professionals" who are from 5 to 15 years older than me (something about the disco kids - what an obnoxious age group. I think I'd take babyboomer idealism over the disco-brats' shameless, ego driven glam-cynnicism and hyper-privileged sense of entitlement).
I'm going out of a limb here and guessing the average reader of the globe (and of the globe's job pages) is not someone who is (a) a feminist (b) an academic (c) making less than $50K/year (d) working shifts jobs. The paper has a decidedly conservative slant (although good god it's better than the herald, which is just this side of a neo-con tabloid).
However, I still did get a chuckle out of the Titanic statistic.
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