{"id":12332,"date":"2013-08-29T09:35:22","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T13:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=12332"},"modified":"2013-08-29T09:35:22","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T13:35:22","slug":"six-signs-you-are-an-academic-careerist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=12332","title":{"rendered":"top ten signs you are an academic careerist"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The<\/em> New Republic,<\/em> Russell Jacoby names Stanley Fish<\/a> as the academic who “raised careerism to a worldview.” “His writings incarnate the cheerful, expedient self-involvement that is part and parcel of contemporary life: everyone is out for himself. Fish has burnished this credo for the professoriate.”<\/p>\n

I do not know if that is fair to Fish, but I do observe plenty of academic careerism. Here are ten signs of it:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You want famous academics to know what you’ve done, but you don’t know or care what laypeople think about the topics you study.<\/li>\n
  2. You can recite the professional achievements and setbacks of colleagues but don’t quite remember their arguments and findings.<\/li>\n
  3. If you could continue to accumulate praise and rewards without learning anything new, you would stop learning.<\/li>\n
  4. If you had a choice between a job where you could do better work and a job that had higher prestige, you would pick the latter.<\/li>\n
  5. You are primarily interested in who<\/em> holds each theory, not whether it is right. And you mainly select topics to study because prominent scholars are currently interested in them.<\/li>\n
  6. You are most impressed by scholarly work that requires especially difficult techniques. You do not consider impact when you assess scholarship.<\/li>\n
  7. You can explain what you know and how you know it, but not why it’s worth knowing.<\/li>\n
  8. For you, a “good” university is one that attracts students and faculty who are already accomplished before they arrive.<\/li>\n
  9. You think that fully successful students are those who become professors in your field.<\/li>\n
  10. Like Fish, you don’t think taxpayers, students, and other laypeople have any right to judge your work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It is a privilege to be paid to read, talk, and write. Many talented young people strive for a chance to join the academy but can’t find jobs. If you hold an academic position and have turned into a careerist, I believe you should quit and get out of the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In The New Republic, Russell Jacoby names Stanley Fish as the academic who “raised careerism to a worldview.” “His writings incarnate the cheerful, expedient self-involvement that is part and parcel of contemporary life: everyone is out for himself. Fish has burnished this credo for the professoriate.” I do not know if that is fair to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12332"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12370,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12332\/revisions\/12370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}