Why was I the only person in the world to have all the current grad students lie to me (and admit to doing it regularly once I got there)?
Is there really any university in the United States for which this doesn't apply? Michigan, California—at the anecdotal level, well, everywhere operates like this. Not to excuse Harvard, but it's universities that have long had a shitty rep with women.
Did you visit Harvard in 1992? I was a Classics undergrad then -- and you're totally right about the department. As Harvard professors, though, they thought undergraduates so far beneath consideration they didn't bother harassing us.
Man, it's a good thing that Google can't do inferences, cause I've never seen blogging go from pseudonomous to quasionomous so quickly!
I loved Michigan, but you do have to tolerate the fact that the sun says bye-bye in November, and other than peeking through for a few minutes here and there, doesn't come back until April. I don't miss that side of Ann Arbor.
Kriston, I think you're over-generalizing from 'there are problems everywhere' to 'all universities are equally bad'. I'm sure there are departments at berkeley that are worse than their peers at harvard, but the overall culture and institutions of the school can be more or less friendly to women. I think top ranked private institutions tend to lag others for a variety of reasons.
I saw these little yellow flowers blooming in the tall grass between the runways,
I knew you'd had some pharmaceutical experiences foreign to, say, me, but Substance D? Don't you think that's a little excessive?
Sometimes the little things (the flowers, not the groping - Yuck!) can mean a lot.
When selecting a job in 78 I remember the plane landing in LAX and I could see the smog (ugly orange haze) as we landed into it. The entire two days there I could almost feel that crap soaking into my lungs.
I'll take cold and snowy over polluted lungs any day.
I think top ranked private institutions tend to lag others for a variety of reasons.
That may well be the case, I don't know. What I meant to convey was that groping is not a good measure of an institution's receptiveness (that's a pun) toward women. Administrative actions taken if and when a student/woman alerts the authorities are the ones for which the university is wholly culpable.
If I were Alameida I'd probably sign off on Harvard, too; but I think her characterization of the institution per se based on her experience is akin to Summers introducting as an argument the way his daughters play with toy trucks.
her characterization of the institution per se based on her experience
That ought to have said, ". . . her characterization of the institution per se based on a single fleeting experience"
Oh, but Alameida's one story isn't the only evidence out there. Tenure rates, for one. The point is, Summers's remarks belong in a *context.*
groping is not a good measure of an institution's receptiveness
Waddaya mean, our department luuuvs the women.
Ah, back in the day at my own version of Euphoria state, on two occasions we got a new Director of Grad studies they'd tell all the continuing students that their aid was on hold, so that there was a bigger pot of money to lure sweet young things with higher GRE scores and more of a lilt toward game theory and on one sad occasions, less of a liberal bias. (Hemlines may or may not have played into this as well, whose to say?). You don't need to imagine what visiting perspective candidates were told about what it was like there.
Not that this has happened yet, but would I be right, if a graduate program accepted me with no funding the first year but with some unspecified opportunity for funding the next year, to say, Fuck that?
Adam, if they don't want to guarantee you funding, especially if you're in the humanities (can't remember), tell them (politely if you must) to fuck off.
I'd heard similar things about the Harvard Classics department. And I think it's extremely important, when deciding where to go, to listen to what the current grad students think. Of course, departments are micro-micro-climates; two students with different advisors can have dramatically different experiences.
But weather is not a good reason for choosing where to go. As a Chicagoan, I'm sure of this.
Adam -
I think "Fuck off" depends on your other options and to the extent that you have an appetite for the sort of agravations caused by graduate studies in the hobbesian state of nature. In my case, perhaps because we did such a good a good job of scaring of other applicants, there was more smoke than fire to this stuff. My aid was always renewed pretty perfuntorily. But I would have been much happier with a three year guarantee, which is what my program switched to in the disertation stage.
More inartful typing - last sentence should have read "which is what my program switched to after I was in the dissetation stage."
Adam, for what it's worth, when I transferred from my masters' to my doctoral program, the Ph.D. institution did not offer me funding in the first year--only vague assurances that "most" grad students got funding "at some point." My masters' institution was offering me funding, but I chose to move b/c the Ph.D. place was a much better program. I did get funding the year afterwards, but for that first year (since my undergrad loans were high enough that I refused to borrow more money for graduate education) a toothbrush was a major purchase that had to be budgeted for. And there were people in my program who had to go several years without funding. It's shitty, and schools ought not to do it. But. Whether you personally should say "fuck you" depends, as benton says, on what your other options are and what you're willing to put up with. You could do like I did: take the non-offer, show up, and bitch about it :)
My own situation probably determined the vehemence of my 'fuck off' for non-funding programs. I applied to graduate school after a year off working in a reasonably promising (but boring) career, and I was carrying a significant amount of undergraduate loans.
For me, it wasn't worth it to take on additional loans to pursue a PhD (and I didn't have any other funding sources). Plus, one of the institutions I applied to rejected me from their PhD program, but invited me for their (non-funded) MA program, which struck me largely as an indirect way of saying that they weren't really interested in my scholarship, but wouldn't mind taking my cash.
To me, the job market is tight enough that taking out loans is too much of a risk given the expected payoff. But as BitchPhD said, a lot will depend on your situation. If I hadn't been accepted with funding, I wasn't going. Plenty of other things that I could do with my life.
Unless you're already a big shot in your field, the only thing Harvard seems to actually offer anybody is the ability to put "Harvard" on their vitae.
I can't even comprehend why anyone would bother with their completely bizarre treatment of junior faculty. And then there's the institutional sexism on top of all that.
blech.
Adam, I was in that situation, sort of. (I don't think they offered any vague promises, and I had been accepted with funding to a school I preferred.) Don't take it. You can apply again in another year, and it's not worth going into megadebt just so you can get dropped into the humanities job market later.
"There we were, enjoying some Thai food and shit, and one girl just leaned me over and said...."
With respect, I'm somewhat baffled by the reasoning expressed in this post, I'm afraid. I'm perfectly prepared to believe Harvard has a bad historical record with a significant number of female grad students and profs -- it's not a topic I believe myself to possess remotely definitive information on, but I certainly know of no reason to argue with the premise -- but why I'm (or any reader is) supposed to agree that this is a reasonable conclusion that has been demonstrated as based upon the combination of an anecdotal sample of one, and the forwarding of the post into the point that "In the end, it was something very trivial that decided me" and that that seems to have been weather and flowers is what leaves me baffled as what we're supposed to learn about Harvard's treatment of women from this.
It seems to be a post that posits a proposition, and supports it solely by, following the posit, the anecdotal quote of a single, unnamed, person, and a digression into weather.
I mean, you didn't even say what the opinion of the other two women grad students were, not that that would prove the proposition much more conclusively.
I am unfamiliar with this logic, although if the entire posit was dropped in favor of a personal anecdote, it could have made perfect sense; if one can't blog anecdotes on one's blog, then where? But how did we get from point A (demonstrating that women are treated badly at Harvard) to point B (this post establishes this - ???), via what's in-between? How did we get to point B at all? And if we didn't get there, why does it seem to be the ostensible point of the post, rather than just "I'll tell you about my own experience of what a single stranger told me?" (Okay, that doesn't leave much of a post without more colorful, or amusing, or interesting, detail, but we've probably all been there; certainly I have.)
I'm doubtless just being dense, though; that happens.
Point B: the "well-disposed grd students" ALL "happened to be male." They invited three "less gruntled grad students" who happend to be all women, and who "were all leaving the program."
That's not just one anecdote about flowers. It is, admittedly, not a controlled double-blind study, but it is very sugggestive. The fact that one student actually told a prospective enrolee not to attend her graduate institution is also pretty suggestive: anyone who's been to these greet prospective students/faculty things knows that there's enormous social and instituional pressure, not to mention self-interest and the desire to be polite, that tends to make everyone speak only of the good things. For someone to break all those codes and say, "don't come here," something has to be seriously wrong--or else that one person has to be seriously fucked up. What Alameida describes of the setup--the grouser has been expressly invited by *happy* students to give a balanced view of the program--seriously suggests the former, not the latter.
"Point B: the 'well-disposed grd students' ALL "happened to be male." They invited three 'less gruntled grad students' who happend to be all women, and who 'were all leaving the program.'"
A point not unworth mentioning, but why were the other two women leaving? Because of institutional sexism? I have no trouble whatsoever believing that -- I'm certainly reasonably aware of the history of sexism in general, in America, and in educational institutions, and, as I tried to indicate, I have no reason whatever to argue that Harvard still doesn't have serious problems, and I make no such argument, nor anything remotely close, whatsoever.
But there's simply no information whatever cited in this post about why the two other women were leaving. Sexism? Sure, that's perfectly plausible. But so is the possibility that this vast sample of two people -- and so far as we know, all three women were complete strangers to Alamedia, and thus she has no reason whatever to take any of them as remotely reliable, anyway, unless it's a premise that, generally speaking, most given grad students in a random sample are all unbiased, sensible, and reliable informants on any given random subject -- and I don't particularly buy that -- were leaving because they found a program or professor -- or the weather! -- more congenial elsewhere, and that's all.
I repeat: I'm not at all inclined to argue with the premise, or to suggest that the conclusion is wrong. I'm just saying that quoting a single comment from a single stranger, and citing the otherwise motivation-unknown acts of two other complete strangers, does not an argument make.
"...anyone who's been to these greet prospective students/faculty things...."
Which I've not, so thank you for emphasizing this point, and I also thank FL. I am, shockhorror, a college dropout. Which is why I don't otherwise weigh in on this topic, or academic topics in general (although I'm unshy on substance where I delude myself I have some grasp). (I have worked on a number of campuses, for a number of departments, including Yale and MIT (and the Universities of Washington and Colorado, as well as the New School, NYU, and....), and had sweeties who are professors, so I'm not exactly a complete alien to the academic milieu, to be sure.)
Anyway, I'll drop this point now, I expect; I've been overly cranky about various posts all day, so I'm clearly in an overly picky mood.
I know the Onion isn't funny anymore, but the STATshot in this week's issue is pretty good.
Marty looked at him for a moment more then darted behind the shield play blackjack Professor Brown waited a few minutes before starting to answer some of .