Very little growth or change comes from an act of individual will, whether that means an individual act of willing or the acts of will (directed at growth or change, anyway) of an individual.
Well, very little growth or change ever happens, period, right?
But that which there is, tends to come from MY LOVE.
Not that kind of growth, you pervs.
I liked it overall, quite a bit. My quibble with it is that she's conflating the "I have so much love to give that I would be/am an awesome girlfriend" with "I have so much love to give that I'd be able to change this other person through sheer loving them." IMHO, the first is plausible (given a healthy relationship, which, well, yeah, that's a whole other bag of worms, I know), the second, not so much.
(a) "What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome."
(b) "Love must not ask if it is being returned. Instead, it seeks those who need it."
I have so much love to give, which is why I suck at tennis.
My quibble with it is that she's
My quibble with this is that she's a he.
I remember having similar feelings in my long-lost youth. Maybe I was actuallly a girl.
I associate it with a ridiculous excess of sexual/emotional energy.
9: So much love to give, the extra l's spill into other words.
I remember having similar feelings in my long-lost youth. Maybe I was actuallly a girl.
No, it's because women are so emotionally unstable that we are afraid to break up with them, as the disappearance of our love will send them spiraling into despair.
8: I didn't even look at the author's name. My bad. (What, men have thoughts on women? Surely this can't be true.)
the disappearance of our love will send them spiraling into despair rage-fueled berserker violence
Also, isn't Hugo Schwyzer a fairly obvious fraud charlatan enthusiast of the I-used-to-drink/dope-but-now-that-I'm-sober-I-bring-charges-of-sexism-and-racism-to-make-myself-feel/look-superior sort?
When we were in Spain a few years ago, a guy who had a bit of a crush on me (the dreaded you're-the-first-girl-I-could-ever-talk-to-like-this version, which I'd assumed I'd have long since ougrown) told me very solemnly that he could tell there was a giant mother inside of me and that's why I'm so kind and caring. That's all I can think of while reading this.
that he could tell there was a giant mother inside of me
Sounds painful!
I'd guess that some of this is the adolescent megalomania* which, in young men, comes out as the belief that one will triumph/get really rich/show them all/not die while playing Chicken. But looooooooove is the most widely socially acceptable way for girls to have agency.
*probably a misuse of the term.
I have so much love to give I have to wear sweatpants.
I have such big love handles that I find it easier to wear sweatpants.
16: That's why we still laugh about it all the time! I know what he meant, but what he said was better.
6: Yeah, I get all my relationship advice from Nietzsche. Internet advice, too: "If you gaze too deeply into the Mineshaft, the Mineshaft will also gaze into you."
I have so many sweatpants I gave some to Goodwill.
They were positively *soaked* with love.
Yeah, I get all my relationship advice from Nietzsche.
I should think obvious the parallels between the Nietzschster* and the sort of lonely teenaged girl who imagines herself loving wisely, wonderfully, transformingly.
* Been trying to get this to catch on for years.
But both giving and receiving love can actually change people. Parenting is the most commonplace example, but it's certainly possible for interpersonal affection and/or sacrifice between adults to change people. Even a crush can trigger self-realization that would otherwise stay latent, I think.
It's true that this is a staple of pop culture, and that it's romanticized so that people (women especially, I guess, though the bathetic unexamined assumptions besides strong-silent-type fronts are often straight out of harlequin romances) are too fast to confuse crushes with love or whatever. But just as ambition to be the president or a pilot or a doctor can improve lives even when its unrealized, so can love improve them.
Both love and ambition are part of daily life, not some angelic wind from the outside. So I dunno, I don't much like disney, but I definitely still believe in love despite being old enough to know better.
Against 1. and 2. is pretty much every AA meeting ever, unless I'm misreading both of you.
25:" the Nietzschster" -- pronounced ???
But then I always I just refer to him as Fred in conversation, because I'm afraid I'll mispronounce his last name.
behind strong silent-type fronts, not besides, sorry.
Against 1. and 2. is pretty much every AA meeting ever, unless I'm misreading both of you.
I'm happy to grant you all AA meetings ever. What happens in them does not add up to more than very little of the growth and change that there is. So say I.
I just feel like I have this huge amount of passion inside of me. If I could just find someone whom I could really trust, then I could give him (usually, it's a him) everything I have inside of me. I know it sounds corny, but I really believe love can heal all our problems. I feel like I have enough love inside of me to change the world, if I could just find a way to let it out.
I don't recognize this at all as something I ever felt with respect to romantic love. The claim seems to be that this is increasingly common among young women today, and I can't speak to that: it's been 20 years since I was a young woman.
But really, Heebie says this rings true to her as a widespread phenomenon?
27: I think of it as "Neeech-ster," but I have to pronounce "Nietzsche" phonetically in my mind's ear in order to spell it, so you probably shouldn't follow my example.
But really, Heebie says this rings true to her as a widespread phenomenon?
She really does.
So say I.
neb is the nosflovian black sheep.
* Been trying to get this to catch on for years.
A cluster of six consonants* is going to be a tough sell. Have you tried "the big Nietsch"?
*I'm counting the last "e" as a part of a vocalic r. On the other hand tz + sch is really just an affricate so let's say five.
The Neech-man. The Neech-enator.
31: I feel safe in following your example in pronouncing " the Nietzschster" since you may very well be the only person ever to say it.
On the other hand, I may stick with Fred since people usually assume I'm referring to Fred Flintstone which can lead to hilarious misunderstandings.
The claim seems to be that this is increasingly common among young women today, and I can't speak to that: it's been 20 years since I was a young woman.
Again, the OP quotes a middled-aged man who has a savior complex w/r/t young women.
After reading two posts in quick succession, I have to say I am all around impressed by this Schwyzer guy.
29. Then I guess I don't understand either "change" or "will" the way they're being used here. An example of unwilled change?
37: But the OP is all about getting over saviour complexes.
neb is the nosflovian black sheep.
So there!
Do all philosophers have an S in them?
Again, the OP quotes a middled-aged man who has a savior complex w/r/t young women.
I'd never heard of him before the Jezebel post that showed up in my facebook feed yesterday. What's the background that discredits him?
Prematurely posted! 41 should obviously have been by an opinionated nosflow's mom.
"Am I allowed to say that I refuse to take anything Hugo says seriously?"
30, 37: I've seen it a fair bit, though I have no idea about the claim "wide-spread." I can see some of my younger self in it, which is kind of embarrassing to admit.
(It appears that heebie and I responded in the same way to the piece...maybe the rest of y'all aren't narcissistic enough?)
Very little growth or change comes from an act of individual will, whether that means an individual act of willing or the acts of will (directed at growth or change, anyway) of an individual.
Yeah, this is right, and was a bit of a hole in the linked post.
I currently work with the theory that individual change comes from a change in context. One person cannot save herself by an act of will. One person cannot save another by an act of will. Two people together can come a little closer to saving each other, but generally improvement comes from whole social networks.
This is all very abstract, I know, but I think at least Ben understands.
Philosophers are full of "S".
LB: "But you'd develop a habit of incredibly careful overexplanation if you were, like, from Mars, as he appears to be. Again, he just seems so totally weird to me that I don't read him as annoying, just bizarre."
BitchPhD: "Well, probably, yes. I dunno, I get a really strong more-feminist-than-thou vibe off him. I'm suspicious of his motivations. Maybe I'm just being sexist, but I don't trust men who spend *that* much energy Very Seriously Explaining why Feminism Matters, and who seem incapable of even a single, teeny weenie cock joke."
My theory is that individual change only ever comes from sufficiently clever, individualized strategies that make it easy for that person to change.
51: But there's no big incident in his past that discredits him? Because in the brief browsing I did, he seemed overly earnest, but not pathological.
Hmm. From the thread apo linked to, I learn that
1. Schwyzer is really really Christian
2. He had himself circumsized as an adult.
3. Bitch, Ph.D. refuses to take him seriously.
I'd say (1) is neutral, (2) counts against him, and (3) counts for him.
Somewhat relatedly, Ira Glass's interview with Joss Whedon makes it really clear that Whedon also has a rescuing young women complex, and this accounts for the presence of so many Watchers and Handlers in his shows.
I should be working.
35: ....making some copies, willing to power. Übermensch-o-rama.
On the other hand, I may stick with Fred since people usually assume I'm referring to Fred Flintstone which can lead to hilarious misunderstandings.
Be careful with the habit of referring to notable people by nicknames no one else uses, or you'll turn into Paul Erdos, or even more terrifying, Gregg Easterbrook.
56: No worries, Ned. Once again I was fibbing in a failed attempt to amuse.
I remember reading about 6 months worth of H. Schwyzer's blog once, and thinking "This guy seemed like such a refreshing voice at first, and now, all I can think of is what it would be like to have a conversation with him, because he seems like he would definitely look you directly in the eyes while talking extremely earnestly for ten straight minutes". I don't know what it is about him. It's like J.H. Kunstler. You wrote THAT much about this topic? And then you wrote EVEN MORE about the exact same thing, without realizing it's the same thing? And you turned that into a habit? Your opinions are admirable, and I think you'd be ideal as a panelist on the Bill Maher show.
It's like J.H. Kunstler.
I stopped reading him because he always seemed disappointed that I wasn't dead yet.
46: I've seen it a fair bit, though I have no idea about the claim "wide-spread." I can see some of my younger self in it
Okay; and I've heard quite a bit about that mother-madonna-princess narrative having a serious hold on many girls and young women. I have no idea why it didn't take hold in me. I had dolls as a kid, but there wasn't much of the pretend-babies and pretend-marriage thing. There also wasn't much of a notion that you could fix the world by loving it -- I keep thinking of the classic Miss America personal statements in which the ladies state, wide-eyed, that yes, they lurve the world and aspire to adore all its members to death.
I don't mean to mock all of that as though those who ascribe to it are unforgivably idiotic; I just really thought we'd gotten rid of a bit of it. Teh feminism, you know.
I recognize from my own adolescence some of what this guy is describing, but only the first part, the have-so-much-love-to-give, need-to-find-the-right-person, must-pour-out-my-soul part. It seems easy enough to attribute that to the combination of high emotions and general loneliness. But I think he's missing something in the leap from that to thinking that the power of my love will solve all of my problems, my potential boyfriend's problems, and the problems of the world in general. It's not just that that latter part wasn't part of my own adolescent experience. I think there's something being left out, even if I can't put my finger on it.
notion that you could fix the world by loving it -- I keep thinking of the classic Miss America personal statements
Would it resonate better if you thought of classic Beatles songs instead?
51: But there's no big incident in his past that discredits him? Because in the brief browsing I did, he seemed overly earnest, but not pathological.
Well, that depends. He's on his third or fourth wife, can't be bothered to check which; he's had serious substance abuse problems in the past; he's been committed at least once; he had some sort of affair with a student, early in his teaching career. But he's very upfront about admitting all of this. Basically, he's a classic narcissist, but his story is that he found Jesus, sobered up, and has been using his powers for good for the last 10 or 15 or whatever years. By all accounts he's an extremely effective community college women's studies/history professor, youth group mentor, etc. That said, he's pretty obviously the sort of person that can very easily rub folks at The Mineshaft the wrong way. Heh, heh.
63: Very interesting!
Makes his most recent blog posting more interesting:
http://hugoschwyzer.net/2010/11/15/a-few-good-men-new-research-on-problems-with-male-allies/
I've mentioned here previously that my father has only one arm. Growing up there was this bin in the front closest full of right-hand gloves the old man had acquired over the years (he has use only for the left-hand ones, you see). I always liked to think that one day he'd meet a man with no left hand who would have a comparable bin of gloves and they could exchange collections.
The preceding is a true story, and I share it because I think a lot in my life can be explained by the fact that, as a child, my family always had so much glove to give.
One of the best [benefits of longterm relationships] is that they tend to destroy any illusion one has about one's own unique power to heal or change another person.
One's own unique power to heal or change another person: relatively small.
One's own unique power to completely fuck-up the psyche another person: considerably greater.
One's own unique power to completely fuck-up the psyche another person: considerably greater
I doubt that most people's power to fuck-up another psyche is particularly "unique".
65: First, groan.
Second, I went to school with a guy with no left arm, but I don't know if he kept his glover. When we went to my high school reunion, my son saw the hook and asked if he was a pirate.
I don't know if he kept his glover
I cannot be kept.
62: Would it resonate better if you thought of classic Beatles songs instead?
I'm not sure which classic Beatles songs I should be thinking of.
I had 2/3 of a comment written about hippie love and how that's different, but I ditched it.
And now that comment will never be the same.
(Which is a better and more age appropriate earworm than how I started the day: Vengaboys We Like to Party).
65: Even if we never found the right glover, it was all worth it just so you could make that pun, son.
Makes his most recent blog posting more interesting:
Yeah, I think the first comment on that post gets at something quite real that Schwyzer downplays--the possibility that there's a non-accidental correlation between self-identified male feminist identification & a tendency towards boundary violations. Off the top of my head, two plausible causal pathways: 1, a common cause (an abusive father, say) predisposes the guy both to be extra-aware of The Patriarchy and to have impulse control / general violence issues. 2, an awareness of an independent predisposition towards anti-feminist behavior/sentiment leads a self-aware & reflective guy towards feminist self-identification, without necessarily eradicating the original predisposition.
(I suspect that H.S. himself is an example of this sort of thing--and I don't mean that in a negative way, simply as a folk-psychologistic explanation.)
Thanks to this thread, I have "I Will Survive" lodged in my hippocampus. Demographics notwithstanding, this does not please me.
I have two other friends with one-armed parents, but I don't know which arms.
And no, I'm with parsimon, I certainly never felt like that as a teenager, and would have looked at anyone who expressed anything similar in, well, probably something approaching horror.
71: Yeah, well, they didn't say "I feel as though I'm so filled with love, if only I could get it out there, I could change the world." Did they?
We! We all together! Not just me all by myself. For one thing.
75: Also the conscious hypocrite -- guy decides that pretending to be feminist is good way to get laid.
And the unconscious hypocrite -- guy is genuinely appalled by other guy's abusive behavior, but is somehow unable to see it in himself.
67: The power itself may not be unique, but people can be quite creative in finding new ways of exercising it.
78: Could you find out, asilon? This could be a magic transformational moment.
I recognize from my own adolescence some of what this guy is describing, but only the first part, the have-so-much-love-to-give, need-to-find-the-right-person, must-pour-out-my-soul part.
Yes, this is what I was trying to articulate. To parsimon's 60, I was never the type to fantasize about a wedding or even play with dolls (no, weirdo child Parenthetical used to go out back and build semi-accurate models of prehistoric houses with twigs and shit), but you know, that sort of thought still appealed to me as well.
Also, I agree with the rest of 61 - it was what I was trying to get at in 5, only much better stated.
It is also entirely possible that the guy is really insightful in print and a mobile disaster area in person when dealing with precisely the same issues that he writes about. This might even be likely.
Blume's 61 seems right to me. I also don't think this:
I recognize from my own adolescence some of what this guy is describing, but only the first part, the have-so-much-love-to-give, need-to-find-the-right-person, must-pour-out-my-soul part.
is particularly gendered, as 100 million overly earnest, overly confessional young guys will attest to.
weirdo child Parenthetical used to go out back and build semi-accurate models of prehistoric houses with twigs and shit
This is awesome, for reasons including but not limited to that the use of "shit" is ambiguous.
84: 'the guy' meaning H.S. himself? I kind of doubt it, simply because he's such a visible web-presence that if he were still the wreck he used to be, it would be very obvious. Every once in awhile he gets a new surge of press attention for being the hottest prof on 'ratemyprofessor' or whatever, f'ristance.
"You can't chage things, we're all stuck in our ways."
the have-so-much-love-to-give, need-to-find-the-right-person, must-pour-out-my-soul part.
Is this more common in women than in men? It seems basically human to me, at least for those who aren't caught up in some kind of role-play. I still would be unlikely to put it in terms of "have to much love to give," but otherwise, the needing to find the right person and the wanting to share one's self fully seems kind of normal regardless of gender.
The overblownness of the language (must-pour-out-my-soul) seems like the way one thinks when one is fairly young, but once you calm down, they're pretty normal sentiments.
The linked post is bothering me, because it seems to be lumping together something terribly ordinary with something kind of screwy.
"I have so much love to give": eh, I wouldn't have put it that way even as a teenager, because I've always been kind of self-deprecatingly sour, but someone who hasn't had a satisfying romantic relationship thinking about how good it would be to have someone to be affectionate and loving to and with... that's pretty boringly ordinary and sane, and carping about it as something that's wrong with teenage girls seems off.
"Love can heal all of our problems" and "I have enough love inside of me to change the world", on the other hand, sound loony if 'love' is taken in the sort of romantic context that the rest of the paragraph seems to be about. (Religious people talking about the transformative power of Love, WH Auden "We must love one another or die," on the other hand, while that's not my language, I'm not going to call it loony. But it doesn't seem to be the topic of discussion).
I guess I think the first is non-genderedly ordinary and not unhealthy, and I don't get the second at all, much less be familiar with it as a common way to think. Is it really?
And I think I'm thinking along the same lines as Blume, Halford, and parsimon here.
89 / 85.last: But what the OP was talking about was a particularly nurturing sort of sharing-of-self. And I think that's quite gendered. The stereotypical young dude pouring out his soul while playing Counting Crows CDs is, stereotypically, talking about himself and his soulfulness, not being a helpmeet.
And, yes, there's also the stereotypical guy-with-a-savior-complex, but I really think we ought not overlook the massive amount of gender training that goes into conditioning girls to be agreeable and helpful and nice.
This topic reminds me somewhat of a conversation with a professor at a college where I used to work. She was triumphing in a young woman in her class who wrote, on an assignment, something like, "There is absolutely nothing in this world that I cannot do! I can achieve everything! I am like an eagle that flies as high as the sun and I will destroy anything that threatens to get in my path! Who can hurt a Goddess like me? NO ONE EVER WILL." Etc. Prof was reading aloud, at length, in this vein, and I got visibly nervous. I had no idea how to respond without expressing some concern about the sanity of anyone who would say these things. But to the professor, this was a sign of healthy, natural, happy self-esteem and confidence.
There's this self-help discourse marketed especially to young women all about how you are BEAUTIFUL and PERFECT and YOU HAVE SO MUCH LOVE TO GIVE and blah blah blah and I think it's supposed to keep you from getting involved with men who might hold you back? I guess? Don't let anyone ever tell you that you might have flaws!
I dunno. Maybe it works. But why does everyone have to be beautiful? Or perfect? Isn't it possible that not everyone has infinite amounts of everything for everyone else's judgment? I don't think someone is wrong if they think I'm ugly or weird or whatever; I don't demand that everyone alive has a taste precisely for me.
That isn't to say, of course, that one should raise young women to think they're ugly; I'm just not sure that the expectation that you can make everything work out perfectly with every situation and relationship in your life by being the perfect everything is a very healthy one. You will fail at some stuff, and sometimes it will be your fault. Not everyone will think you're pretty enough or nice enough. There are other things worth living for than everyone else's constant satisfaction with you.
97: When I was growing up, I think mostly in junior high, my parents told me over and over again "we know you can do anything you make up your mind to do." They would tell me this particularly when I got middling grades, and yet somehow didn't notice (until I told them, in my twenties, with the awkward, disproportionate, unfair anger that sometimes happens when you suddenly get pissed off enough to mention something that has bugged you forever) that this statement had never come off to me as anything but 1) an expression of disappointment, and 2) a thing I could never live up to and would never enjoy trying to live up to. This part I can't explain well, but what it actually inspired was sort of fond, dreamy feelings about failure and incompleteness/sucpicion of thoroughness and perfection.
Nutureshock suggests that the problem described in 98 is pretty widespread amongst UMC kids of today.
98: I suspect the overwhelming majority of the commentariat here has had exactly that same interaction. I know I certainly have.
96 to 95. I think some ToS stuff got zapped.
98: I am you. Same conversation with parents. On the job market now, begging them to stop responding to every conversation about it with, "Well, you're just the best, and they'll see that and everyone will want to hire you!!!" Thanx folx but there are about 40 jobs in the whole world for someone who does what I do, and about 400 people applying for them. It is acceptable if I don't get one this year. I don't deserve death if I'm not The Best.
97: The general project of promiting self esteem, particularly in At Risk Youth, which has been going on since the 70s in the US, has been bizarre and mostly hurtful. It has been hard on kids who stops and thinks about what grown ups say to them, and even harder on those who just accept it.
87: I was thinking of the past odd behavior of the sort that Apo mentioned. I shouldn't judge, but hey, its the internet.
100: It's even worse than it appears. You may be the best, but with search committees being snowed under by so many applications there's no way they'll discover that. When a committee is confronted by hundreds of applications they winnow the pile down to manageable proportions by quite arbitrary actions.
Back on topic, the worst song in the oeuvre.
105: Yeah, I got one rejection less than a day after sending the letter. I figure I'll send out a ton of applications and hopefully one or two of them will actually be read by someone. I'm just grateful that about half the applications require only a CV and letter on the first pass. Yes, I'd rather them see some of my work, but arranging 10-page, 15-page, 20-page, 30-page, and 40-page writing samples for every application is gruesome.
It was also fun to see the postdoc apps requiring the applicant to send a substantial check along with the application. For the privilege of having everything you've worked toward for eight years tossed in the trash, please send us forty bucks! OK!
When I was on the job market (science rather than humanities, but still academic) I was sending out in the neighborhood of 60-70 applications per round and I needed about 5 separate versions of my application package.
I can understand SLACs wanting different things than big research institutions. But among universities of basically the same type, how hard would it be to agree on a standard length for the research plan?
All y'all should go teach at Deep Springs.
109: I will happily apply. If I can get a stable job for more than one semester, I have to take it, but six months in the desert would do me good.
There aren't any full-time positions this year, but pitch 'em a semester on your diss and see what they say.
If we get a chance in Jan I'll introduce you to the professor I took some 60 weeks of courses from back in the day. We also went to the MLA and interviewed faculty together. The ones who understood that the students were actually making the hiring decisions and therefore made eye contact with us in the interview tended to be the ones we second-interviewed. One of them was this guy, who ended up a first runner-up (long before the article).
Now I want to donate a kidney to a stranger, and find five dollars.
Heh. From the article: "Writer tells about Kravisnky's difficulty finding an academic position. By 1994, he decided to go back to real estate. Within a year, he had assets of six million dollars and debts of four million. He began in property management and then shifted to commercial real estate."
The interview was Christmas '92. We could have changed millionaire kidney-donating history!
Why is making eye contact a positive attribute?
112: Excellent! I'll be at MLALA, probably with nothing to do but lament my lack of interviews. I'll get them materials in the next few days.
114: I think he means as opposed to ignoring the student members of the fac mem committee. It's a huge mistake, and one I've seen a surprising number of candidates commit. If the faculty want students there, it's probably because students have serious input. Ask them what they're working on.
115: Let me know what you pitch them. The college is doing a presentation in L.A. in a few weeks and I will gingerly recommend you, hopefully engaging their interest without tripping their "fucking alumni" meters. (The professor mentioned in 112 is no longer teaching there, he's just cool and will be in town from Oberlin for the same reason.)
116: Yes, this.
114: More broadly, see here.
odd behavior of the sort that Apo mentioned
I think that was x. trapnel.
116: maybe the key is to look them in the eye and tell them that you have enough love to change the world.
They're 19-y-o men, they might be looking for something like that.
I think that year we went with the professor who did much the same, substituting "French Nietzscheans" for "love".
... by quite arbitrary actions. Or by non-arbitrary credit scores.
Having a lot of French Nietzscheans inside you sounds about as bad as containing a giant mother.
100 Thanx folx but there are about 40 jobs in the whole world for someone who does what I do, and about 400 people applying for them.
How specialized is the job description? I was shocked to learn that 500 people applied for one of the jobs I applied for, because I feel like I should personally know a substantial fraction of everyone who would qualify for a job in theoretical particle physics and is at the appropriate stage in their career to be applying for an ass't prof job. And I wouldn't have guessed there were more than 50 or so.
the Nietzschster" -- pronounced ???
I pronounce it "Nie-chester."
I just had a new heap of job-application-related stress dumped on me last night, but it's the sort of thing where if I complain I'd sound like alameida with her orgasms.
Let's just pretend like I phrased that better.
It already does! It's the game you can't win.
I'd sound like alameida with her orgasms.
Hott.
Let's just pretend I closed that tag, and wasn't pwned.
Anyhow, Essear, just because you haven't found the job of your dreams doesn't mean you need to give up physics and become a transsexual prostitute. I want you to know this.
124: I mean my century, my country, my discipline, around the world, there are probably 40 total jobs. I'm applying for about 30, and that includes Asst Prof and postdocs. How many are applying?
That's another problem. Because there are a lot of plum jobs this year, my competition for them is not just all this year's PhD grads, and all those from the recent few years who didn't get jobs, but also all the current Asst Profs in my field who aren't happy at their current TT jobs or locations. And there are probably quite a few more who are applying to jobs in my field because there aren't as many in their own adjacent fields.
So yeah, as jim says, when there are 500 applications, you're lucky if they don't throw yours out by accident, and then there are sorting mechanisms like, let's only look at people whose CVs name at least two major publications. What started off as a job that seemed appropriate for a fresh PhD is now a job for seasoned pros.
At least transexual prostitutes are free to choose what city they live in, right?
132: Yeah, that sounds difficult. But wouldn't most of the ones in adjacent fields just be thrown out right away, for not doing the sort of work the job is looking for? I get the impression that's what will happen to 400+ of the 500 people applying for the job I heard about.
The ones who understood that the students were actually making the hiring decisions and therefore made eye contact with us in the interview tended to be the ones we second-interviewed.
I'm sure you were a great interviewer and all, but stories I've heard from a colleague who interviewed there last year suggest that 19-year-old boys may not be the most skilled interviewers.
Though it might also have helped if they'd had more than a crappy speaker phone and had articulated their questions clearly and in the general direction of the phone's receiver. Interviewers became exasperated with my colleague's requests that they repeat questions and seemed to think that he simply didn't understand English very well. (He's German.) This was after the student interviewers had postponed his interview on two different days because they hadn't yet gotten around to eating lunch.
124: Having been on the other side of the job search process, I'd bet that a substantial portion of those 500 applications are from folks who don't even remotely have a realistic chance at the job (for example, people with no publications but a long list of "in preparation").
There's a Polish lit prof by the name of Nycz who has written on Nietzsche giving rise to the inevitable 'Nycz nic o Nietzschem wie' with (nic means nothing, Nietzschem is pronounced like the word nothing, so the phrase either means Nycz doesn't know anything about anything or Nycz doesn't know anything about Nietzsche) Repeat the phrase five times and bills will fall from the sky.
I get the impression that's what will happen to 400+ of the 500 people applying for the job I heard about.
And if it is a plum job not by academic standards, but rather by sounds-good-to-outsiders standards, some of those applications will be off the charts loony. For the last faculty opening in my department, we got an application from someone who had finished a master's degree seven or eight years ago (not a PhD!), and since then had started a pizza delivery company in a large city in northern Germany.
I pronounce it "Nie-chester."
The English pronounce it "Nister".
At least transexual prostitutes are free to choose what city they live in, right?
I think the most enterprising try to live near Lapo Elkann.
136: for example, people with no publications but a long list of "in preparation"
Cue the sad music from Peanuts. I have a couple of things listed, but they're not major publications; I've been busy writing a publishable book of 45-page chapters, not 25-page standalone articles.
There's always seppuku!
141: I'm pretty sure that your discipline has different norms about publication than mine. I gather that books are the gold standard in English, while in science they generally don't mean sh*t.
There's always seppuku!
The photographs of Yukio Mishima's severed head suggest that seppuku is pretty unpleasant.
I thought Mishima was always already unpleasant.
143: The photographs of Yukio Mishima's attached head suggest that he was never a "big smiles" kind of guy.
145, 146: I've seen one or two filmed interviews in which he seems surprisingly personable and smiley, given his rep. That doesn't come across at all in the Paul Schrader movie.
135 -- It's amazing there isn't more academic search related violence.
I've lost $5 -- anyone seen it?
Thank you, Blume. 135 fits nicely into my declension narrative. Back in my day, we always ate lunch on time.
Is there anyone else who has this song persistently going through their head because of the post title?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H71YMS0DjOQ
As earwurms go ... pretty damned classy.
I will always treasure Peter Ackroyd's review of Mishima: "This is not writing, this is Barbara Cartland - and at least Barbara Cartland has the courage not to commit suicide over it".
dsquared, if you have read Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and you didn't like it, then that'll prove that the world doesn't make any goddamn sense.
A world in which Yukio Mishima was still alive would necessarily be a world in which Barbara Cartland, with a few heavily-armed followers, had stormed the barracks of the Household Cavalry and attempted to lead the Blues and Royals in mutiny, only to commit suicide after failing to do so.
151: That's not "I Will Survive", so no.
A world in which Yukio Mishima was still alive would necessarily be a world in which Barbara Cartland, with a few heavily-armed followers, had stormed the barracks of the Household Cavalry and attempted to lead the Blues and Royals in mutiny, only to commit suicide after failing to do so.
That world sounds pretty cool, actually.
In my own experience, I've found that love and the relative safety and security it has provided me has made it easier for me to work on making change.
But no, you can't really change other people.
For most of my 8 years on the job market, I used the spam approach, where I applied for 150+ jobs, including many that were only marginally in my area. I wasted a lot of time and money and recommend strongly against it.
Part of my problem was that I couldn't actually make up my mind about what kind of job I wanted, or even what my specialty really was. I basically wound up with a job where I wouldn't have to make that decision.
158: I'm trying to do the opposite of the spam approach, but the one job I got an immediate rejection from was for a field that only one chapter of my dissertation addresses, and isn't addressed by any of my many conference talks. So that was a fair rejection, and I won't waste my time getting into that field, despite my teaching experience in it.
The few jobs that I actually feel hopeful about had super-specific ads that may have as well said "Ad for AWB, Asst Prof of AWB Studies." OTOH, that kind of specificity may mean they have holes in those two/three fields that I work in, or that they already have this AWBish unicorn in mind. I will destroy you, OtherMe!
"AWBish unicorn" -- that would be a fascinating-looking animal!
But no, you can't really change other people.
Says you.
I sort of feel bad for not liking Sch/wyzer more, but, what bitchphd said. there's something strange and narcissistic about him. I mean, he's sort of fascinating too, and some of the things he says are totally right on, and then...
What does Dr. Human Caterpillar metamorphoseinto?
160.2: I remember an ad in the Economist for the head of some public health programme, reading more or less "The successful candidate will have a PhD in public health or a related field, and will have at least ten years experience in public health in developing countries, with at least five years in a leadership position. Experience in the prevention of water-borne diseases is also essential. The candidate should also speak and write at least one of the following languages fluently: Pashtu, Dari, Urdu."
I read it and thought "There can't be more than three people in the world who fit that, and one of them has obviously just left the job. Can't they just phone up the other two?"
In my department (and I suspect in my field in general) there always seems to be pressure to write very general ads even when we have a specific specialty in mind. We start out with very specific wording and then some one says "Why limit ourselves? Why not cast a wider net?", and this thinking usually carries the day.
I suspect that I applied for a lot of jobs that I didn't actually have a shot at due to my research area, but I never would have known from the way the ads were written.
My friend has been applying for librarian jobs for two years. Apparently it helped a lot to get the PROTIP that half or more of all job postings are completely inaccurate, and the people who interview you often have no idea what the job posting says, so tailoring your cover letter specifically to the hypothetical job posting will guarantee that you look unsuited for the real job that exists in our objective reality. So, be you! Be you! Be free to be you and me!
165: well, or they had an inside candidate but had to do a nominal public search, so they wrote the description as specifically as possible.
I sort of feel bad for not liking Sch/wyzer more, but, what bitchphd said
I don't actually have strong feelings about him one way or the other, but every time I've read him I get the distinct vibe of the guy who you spend the entire party trying to escape.
168 was...what's the opposite of pwned, when you are scooped by something that says the exact opposite?...by 167
The linked post is bothering me, because it seems to be lumping together something terribly ordinary with something kind of screwy...."I have so much love to give"..[vs].."Love can heal all of our problems"
I don't think either of those are quite the described phenomenon. I think the described phenomenon is a milder version of the "having a baby will give me someone to love" version of teenage pregnancy.
In other words, some girls have been utterly inculcated with the idea that your number one strength is your ability to care and nurture, and you'll be incomplete until you can fulfill this. I can't defend this very well, but I have a belief that it's class-linked and especially Mexican-American.
So to sum up on the job hunting tip, the listing may be much more general than the job's requirements, it may be very specific but list requirements that are not actually required, it may be written the way it because there's an inside candidate, or it may be written the way it is for no clear reason at all, but the one thing you can be sure of is that the reasons the people making the hiring decisions are likely to have for considering or rejecting you will remain completely opaque even if you do get the job, so don't listen to the advice of successful candidates, unsuccessful candidates or people on hiring committees but make sure to get everything right, unless it turns out that doesn't matter.
I sort of feel bad for not liking Sch/wyzer more, but, what bitchphd said
I don't actually have strong feelings about him one way or the other, but every time I've read him I get the distinct vibe of the guy who you spend the entire party trying to escape.
I haven't read him in years, but I was . . . put off by his need to insert himself in every feminist blogfight and then attempt unctuously out empathize and feminist everyone.
Sifu presents the situation well. Fortunately, corporations are people now. I recommend setting up a subsidiary or low-end brand of yourself for "mass-market" job applications that require minimal personalization, and maintaining your high-end self for presentation in tailored ways.
the fact that sifu is actually exactly right is making me feel better about not finishing my phd. but sad for job-seekers. you will get a job, insha'allah.
||
OT, completely, and possibly already discussed here, but this is the thread where people seem to be hanging out, so I thought I'd drop it in just because:
http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/
Basic gist: all of your students are lying to you. Entire dissertations? Seriously?
I am reminded of a South Park episode in which Cartman gets hired as a substitute teacher for an inner city math class. Mr. Cartmanez proceeds to teach his students to cheat. "What do you think white people do? They cheat."
||
The Guardian's jobs section used to regularly advertise for positions like "Experienced logistics manager, must speak fluent Korean, £16,000". Another was for a Japanese chef who spoke German. There being no way anyone who combined those characteristics would waste their time working for peanuts, I always wondered what the story was - perhaps the job was promised to someone's kid and they had to advertise for form's sake?
My subfield is quite small, maybe twenty jobs so far this year, which is about twice what it was in last years jackal-infested desert of a market, and that's counting ones that are cross listed (as in "We're either looking for a historian of Africa or of India. We'll figure it out after you all apply."). The closest I've seen to an AWB unicorn is postings that they match the century or sub-region I work on. So you pretty much have to apply to every job/post-doc that doesn't specifically say, "You there, yes you, don't bother to apply." And then throw a few "We're looking for a historian, we think, of some kind" jobs into the application mix for good measure.
Both the job that I've already been rejected from and the post-doc that I got a phone interview for, this year, are in a comparative field that my work can kinda sorta be argued into.
Back to the wine -- it's interesting that Stanley's coblogger talks about wanting his product to be more accessible. Because if it's all selling at its current price, it's as accessible as it's going to get; he can't make it more accessible without making more of it. Which puts me on the same 'keep the price up' bench as everyone else.
180: wrong thread, but I had a similar thought, although in fairness to him, with a lower price it might be accessible to a different market. (A concert might sell out at $300/ticket as easily as it sells out at $30/ticket, but the concertgoers may end up being different people.)
177: It reminded me of this article from a 1995 Harpers. At the upper levels at least, the cheating business hasn't changed.
The few jobs that I actually feel hopeful about had super-specific ads that may have as well said "Ad for AWB, Asst Prof of AWB Studies." OTOH, that kind of specificity may mean they have holes in those two/three fields that I work in, or that they already have this AWBish unicorn in mind. I will destroy you, OtherMe!
So in my field there was [awesome place] that posted a job that was basically "Slave away for [Dr Y] on [Project Z]. You will also be expected to pursue your own research program and may eventually be promoted to a permanent position", where the second sentence seemed clearly disingenuous, and the whole thing was obviously (a) a response to Dr Y threatening to leave for Institution Q, and (b) tailored for one of three or four people already working on Project Z, and (c) timed just after the one qualified woman working on the project gave up in disgust on finding a job. It's like, disingenuous and nepotistic and sexist, all in one!
It's like, disingenuous and nepotistic and sexist, all in one!
Like "Beverly Hills, 90210".
It's like, disingenuous and nepotistic and sexist, all in one!
Academia, conflicts, viciousness, low stakes, Henry Kissinger, etc.
||
Wait a minute! "Chris Hedges" and "Chris Hayes" are two different people!
|>
They had to run an internal search before hiring me full-time at my current job. I wrote the job description, tailoring it as closely as possible to my skills, and I applied as soon as I could after it got posted. Still, the listing was probably up for 24 hours. I hope nobody else saw it and got excited. My bad, Other-Me.
had to run an internal search
Ouch. Did you have anything in you?
tailoring it as closely as possible to my skills to 190.
"Applicant was found to be transporting no illegal substances, but should consider a new iPhone cover."
189: I answered a job ad a few years back where this was clearly the case. It was a very cool (and really well paid) part-time job at a museum affiliated with the place I was already working, so I saw the ad instantly and applied instantly. It was a very specific and none-too-common set of qualifications that matched me freakishly (and, I am guessing, better than the person the ad was intended for). The entire listing was withdrawn the next day, presumably to be resubmitted at a later date when they could hope no one was looking.
lennon settled for "my love will turn you on" and he was like king of the dirty fucking hippies
UPDATE: I got a callback! What should I sing for my second audition?
UPDATE: I got a callback! What should I sing for my second audition?
Clearly, this. All digits firmly crossed.
When they told you about the callback, did they say "You're . . . GOING TO HOLLYWOOD!!!"
203: We're not at that stage yet. The first pass was just for letter and CV, the second for writing sample, recommendations, etc., and the third pass is Hollywood. I already bought my ticket, though, so if I don't have any interviews, we're going to need to drink a LOT.
What should I sing for my second audition?
"I Whip My Hair Back and Forth"?
Which is to say, congrats and good luck.
Modern Romance on a karaoke machine?
Knocks on wood.