Current Events: What a World

[ed.  So, Walmart actually sold these items to the woman AFTER she pepper sprayed her way in?]

Ten minutes before the Porter Ranch Walmart opened in Los Angeles, California, a mother of two used a can of pepper spray to attack other shoppers waiting in line for the early, Black Friday door-buster sales according to the Los Angeles Times. The woman was specifically looking to get the $100 discounted price on a Xbox 360 as well as a few Xbox 360 games. With both children in tow, she began spraying other customers as soon as the store employees started pulling packing plastic off the discounted items. Once the doors opened, the woman also used the pepper spray to gain a favorable position over other customers competing for items. A witness at the attack posted on Twitter that customers were screaming about stinging eyes.

Los Angeles firefighters and the LAPD responded to the attack quickly and treated 20 injured customers that suffered from extreme swelling, coughing and redness of the face and eyes. One customer required further treatment at the local hospital. The woman fled the store soon after it opened and the LAPD are accessing Wal-Mart security footage to get a clear picture of the woman as well as video evidence of the attacks. Los Angeles Police Lt. called the attack “customer-versus-customer shopping rage” and mentioned that the LAPD plans to release the photo of the woman to the press shortly. The police are also looking into her method of payment to quickly track down the woman through a credit card or check payment.

by Mike Flacy, Digital Trends via Yahoo |  Continue reading:

You Say You Want a Revolution

[ed.  The man who is probably responsible for more revolutions than anyone else in history.]

Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.

But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal.

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.  (...)

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”

He has been watching events in Cairo unfold on CNN from his modest house in East Boston, which he bought in 1968 for $150 plus back taxes.

It doubles as the headquarters of the Albert Einstein Institution, an organization Mr. Sharp founded in 1983 while running seminars at Harvard and teaching political science at what is now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. It consists of him; his assistant, Jamila Raqib, whose family fled Soviet oppression in Afghanistan when she was 5; a part-time office manager and a Golden Retriever mix named Sally. Their office wall sports a bumper sticker that reads “Gotov Je!” — Serbian for “He is finished!”

In this era of Twitter revolutionaries, the Internet holds little allure for Mr. Sharp. He is not on Facebook and does not venture onto the Einstein Web site. (“I should,” he said apologetically.) If he must send e-mail, he consults a handwritten note Ms. Raqib has taped to the doorjamb near his state-of-the-art Macintosh computer in a study overflowing with books and papers. “To open a blank e-mail,” it reads, “click once on icon that says ‘new’ at top of window.”

Some people suspect Mr. Sharp of being a closet peacenik and a lefty — in the 1950s, he wrote for a publication called “Peace News” and he once worked as personal secretary to A. J. Muste, a noted labor union activist and pacifist — but he insists that he outgrew his own early pacifism and describes himself as “trans-partisan.”

Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt. Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”  (...)
 
“He is generally considered the father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action,” said Stephen Zunes, an expert in that field at the University of San Francisco. “Some of these exaggerated stories of him going around the world and starting revolutions and leading mobs, what a joke. He’s much more into doing the research and the theoretical work than he is in disseminating it.”

by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, NY Times |  Continue reading:
Photo: Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

Tetsuo Aoki
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The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face

Point, click.

The gestures and metaphors of icon-driven computing feel so natural and effortless to us now, it seems strange to recall navigating in the digital world any other way. Until Apple’s debut of the Macintosh in 1984, however, most of our interactions with computers looked more like this:

How did we get from there to here?

iPad photo by Ben Atkin, under Creative Commons license

The Mac wasn’t the first computer to present the user with a virtual desktop of files and folders instead of a command line and a blinking cursor. As every amateur geek historian knows, the core concepts behind the graphical user interface or GUI (including the icons, mouse, and bitmapped graphics) made their debut in 1968 in a presentation by Stanford Research Institute’s Doug Engelbart celebrated as the “mother of all demos.”

The revolutionary ideas in Engelbart’s demo were further developed at Xerox PARC, where a 24-year-old Steve Jobs took a legendary tour in 1979 that convinced him that the GUI represented the democratic future of computing. (“I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life,” he said later. “Within ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday.”) He promptly licensed the GUI technology he saw at work in a non-commercial product called the Xerox Alto for a modest amount of Apple stock, and the rest is Silicon Valley history. (...)

The challenge of designing a personal computer that “the rest of us” would not only buy, but fall crazy in love with, however, required input from the kind of people who might some day be convinced to try using a Mac. Fittingly, one of the team’s most auspicious early hires was a young artist herself: Susan Kare.

After taking painting lessons as a young girl and graduating from New York University with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Kare moved to the Bay Area, where she took a curatorial job at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. But she quickly felt like she was on the wrong side of the creative equation. “I’d go talk to artists in their studios for exhibitions,” she recalls, “but I really wanted to be working in my studio.”

Eventually Kare earned a commission from an Arkansas museum to sculpt a razorback hog out of steel. That was the project she was tackling in her garage in Palo Alto when she got a call from a high-school friend named Andy Hertzfeld, who was the lead software architect for the Macintosh operating system, offering her a job.

by Steve Silberman, PLosBlogs |  Continue reading:

Ernst-Ludwig-Kirchner. Nudes in a meadow. 1929. Oil on canvas.
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Competion in an Unregulated Market

How the Plummeting Price of Cocaine Fueled the Nationwide Drop in Violent Crime.

Starting in the mid-1990s, major American cities began a radical transformation. Years of high violent crime rates, thefts, robberies, and inner-city decay suddenly started to turn around. Crime rates didn't just hold steady, they began falling faster than they went up. This trend appeared in practically every post-industrial American city, simultaneously.

"The drop of crime in the 1990s affected all geographic areas and demographic groups," Steven D. Levitt wrote in his landmark paper on the subject, Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s, and elucidated further in the best-selling book Freakonomics. "It was so unanticipated that it was widely dismissed as temporary or illusory long after it had begun.” He went on to tie the drop to the legalization of abortion 20 years earlier, dismissing police tactics as a cause because they failed to explain the universality and unexpectedness of the change. Alfred Blumstein's The Crime Drop in America pinned the cause of crime solely on the crack epidemic but gave the credit for its disappearance to those self-same policing strategies.

Plenty of other theories have been offered to account for the double-digit decrease in violence, from the advent of "broken windows" policies, three strikes laws, changing demographics, gun control laws, and the increasing prevalence of cellphones to an upturn in the economy and cultural shifts in American society. Some of these theories have been disproven outright while others require a healthy dose of assumption to turn correlation into causation. But much less attention has been paid to another likely culprit: the collapse of the U.S. cocaine market.
•       •       •       •       •
Cocaine was the driving force behind the majority of drug-related violence throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. It was the main target of the federal War on Drugs and was the highest profit drug trade overall. In 1988, the American cocaine market was valued at almost $140 billion dollars, over 2 percent of U.S. GDP. The violence that surrounded its distribution and sale pushed the murder rate to its highest point in America's history (between 8-10 per 100,000 residents from 1981-1991), turned economically impoverished cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Trenton and Gary, Indiana, into international murder capitals, and made America the most violent industrialized nation in the world.

Then in 1994, the crime rate dropped off a cliff. The number of homicides would plummet drastically, dropping almost 50 percent in less than ten years. The same would go for every garden variety of violent crime on down to petty theft. The same year as the sharp decline in crime, cocaine prices hit an all-time low. According to the DEA's System to Retrieve Information on Drug Evidence (STRIDE) data, the price per gram of cocaine bottomed out in 1994 at around $147 (calculated in 2003 dollars), the lowest it had been since statistics became available.

Something was wrong. If anything, cocaine prices should have been skyrocketing. One of the DEA's stated objectives for the War on Drugs was to make drugs more expensive and therefore harder to access for the individual user. To get there, the DEA pursued a number of strategies: large drug busts, heavier penalties on importers and producers, and limiting access to the materials used in drug production. Even while many of those tactics produced big successes, cocaine prices still went down, not up, and crime plummeted right alongside.

by Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones, The Atlantic |  Continue reading:

The Cloud Appreciation Society

I first learned about cloud lovers in a police report concerning a man who received a blowjob from a young woman and went mad. The man—let's call him Carl (police reports have the names of suspects and victims redacted)—was in his 40s, and the woman, let's call her Lisa, was almost 18. The two first met in the fall of 2003 at a local TV station that was holding a contest to find the best video footage of Northwest clouds.

According to the report, which was lost when I cleaned my messy desk in 2005 (I'm recalling all of this from an imperfect memory), Carl, who was married and well-to-do, fell in love with Lisa, whose family was not so well-off, upon seeing her for the first time. He had a videocassette in his hand; she had a videocassette in her hand. He showed his tape to the station's weatherman (sun, sky, clouds). She showed hers (clouds, sky, sun). During the contest, his eyes could not escape her beauty. After the contest, the impression she made on his mind intensified. That bewitching coin in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Zahir," comes to mind. If a person sees this coin only once, the memory of its image begins to more and more dominate his/her thoughts and dreams. Soon the coin becomes the mind's sole reality. Lisa's face was Carl's Zahir.  (...)

"We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them. We think that they are Nature's poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them. We pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking' wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day." This is the opening of the Cloud Appreciation Society's manifesto. The organization emerged unexpectedly in 2004 (the year before I lost the remarkable police report) from a lecture delivered by Gavin Pretor-Pinney at a literary festival in Cornwall, England, entitled "The Inaugural Lecture of the Cloud Appreciation Society."

"Lots of people showed up for the talk," explains Pretor-Pinney in an e-mail, "and came up to me afterward to ask how they could join my society. So I put up a website and issued anyone who wanted to join with a badge and a certificate with their name on it... The membership just spread in the viral way that things can on the internet. We now have more than 27,500 members in 94 countries around the world." (Pretor-Pinney also published a book, The Cloud Collector's Handbook, that, when closed, fits snugly in your pocket and, when open, provides information for identifying and scoring clouds.)

The Cloud Appreciation Society website (www.cloudappreciationsociety.org) has several features, the best of which is a gallery of cloud photographs by members and nonmembers, professionals and amateurs, the young and old. Indeed, if Lisa and Carl are still lovers of clouds (she by now is in her late 20s and he in his late 40s), they are probably familiar with the pictures on this website. Some clouds are caught at dusk, others at dawn, others in the dead middle of the day. Some are reflected by a glassy sea, others cling to the tops of green trees, others rise over the glittering ice of Antarctica. One photo captures a god-mad cloud that threatens to smite some rural road in a god-fearing country. Another shows dusky clouds that are massively stacked in the sky above Singapore's port. One stunning photo, which was taken by Nick Lippert (a resident of Tumwater, Washington) at 7:40 a.m. on October 28, 2011, transports us to the place we expect to see when it is time to pay for sins: a hellish Mount Rainier casting a demon shadow on a soaring continent of blood-red clouds. (...)

The Cloud Appreciation Society's website also has poems ("Cloud Verse"), love letters to clouds, and short essays. Much of it is bad, and much of it is wonderfully bizarre. For example, one essay, "The Advantages of Watching the Cloud Channel," which was composed by one Andrea de Majewski, a Seattleite who currently lives in the Big Apple, loftily compares watching clouds to watching TV. In a million years of dreaming and thinking, I would never have seen this connection, never found this invisible thread that links the sky to the TV screen.

"The cloud channel has several advantages over regular TV," writes Majewski. "First off, you don't have to choose between rabbit ears or taking out a mortgage to fund a dish or cable package or whatever. It's free, and whether it's on or not is completely beyond your control. Here in Seattle, it's broadcast more often than many places. Move here if you want to watch a lot. If it's not on, you must do other things. The laundry, grocery shop, whatever. But if it's on, you can postpone chores and lie down and watch it.

"It's very relaxing. One reason for this is that there are no ads. Not even the things on public television that are just like ads except shorter and more boring. No one tries to sell you anything at all on the cloud channel." The impression one gets from the Cloud Appreciation Society's website is that cloud collectors are very dreamy people, utopians to the core, and extremely sensitive to the transience of life.

by Charles Mudede, The Stranger |  Continue reading:
Photo: OeilDeNuit

Askers and Guessers

The advice of etiquette experts on dealing with unwanted invitations, or overly demanding requests for favours, has always been the same: just say no. That may have been a useless mantra in the war on drugs, but in the war on relatives who want to stay for a fortnight, or colleagues trying to get you to do their work, the manners guru Emily Post's formulation – "I'm afraid that won't be possible" – remains the gold standard. Excuses merely invite negotiation. The comic retort has its place (Peter Cook: "Oh dear, I find I'm watching television that night"), and I'm fond of the tautological non-explanation ("I can't, because I'm unable to"). But these are variations on a theme: the best way to say no is to say no. Then shut up.  (...)

There are certainly profound issues here, of self-esteem, guilt etcetera. But it's also worth considering whether part of the problem doesn't originate in a simple misunderstanding between two types of people: Askers and Guessers.

This terminology comes from a brilliant web posting by Andrea Donderi that's achieved minor cult status online. We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept."

Neither's "wrong", but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won't think it's rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline. If you're a Guesser, you'll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it's a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they're diehard Askers.

by Oliver Burkeman, Guardian |  Continue reading:
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Monique
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Flower truck by colorstalker on Flickr.
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'Guilt is My Subject. I've Taken Research to an Extreme Degree'

Nicholas Evans is a celebrated storyteller, and the story he tells me is a cracker. A man and his wife go to stay with her brother and sister-in-law, a titled couple who live on a beautiful estate in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. On a balmy August evening, the man goes out and picks some mushrooms. He brings them back, fries them up in some butter, sprinkles parsley over them, and the family enjoy a relaxing evening meal.

The following morning all four awake feeling not quite right. By lunchtime they are seriously ill. They consult a book in the kitchen – a guide to wild mushrooms – and leaf through until they find a photograph. Anxiously they scan the text, and see the chilling words: deadly poisonous.

The local GP is called urgently. The four are rushed into the local Highland hospital in Elgin. Ambulances race them down to the renal unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. On the journey the man begins to convulse, his body shuddering and shaking uncontrollably. He fears he is about to die.

The poison ravages their bodies, the violent vomiting of blood and bile remorseless as one by one all four go into kidney failure. Only the thought of his youngest son, just six years old, keeps the man clinging to life. To his horror, he realises that each couple's will grants the other couple custody of their children, in the event of the parents' death. All their children may soon be orphaned. Fearing the worst, he calls his solicitor from his sick bed and has a new will couriered up to Scotland, as the four fight for their lives.

They survive. But the man, his wife and her brother are left without functioning kidneys, and must endure five hours of dialysis every other day to keep them alive. All three need kidney donors. The search for suitable matches goes on for three years – until his grownup daughter eventually persuades him to accept one of her own, and saves his life. But his wife and brother-in-law remain on the transplant list, still sick and still waiting, leaving the family in a toxic tangle of illness, guilt and recrimination.

It is a classic Evans tale – intense family drama set in a cinematic backdrop of epic landscape – and would almost certainly be a bestseller. The author's 1995 debut novel, The Horse Whisperer, sold 15m copies, and his four subsequent books have sold many millions more. Unfortunately, however, this isn't a new plot dreamt up by Evans, but a horribly true story.

by Decca Aitkenhead, Guardian |  Continue reading: 
Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Bruce McLean
Grass on Grass. 2009
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What Would Gabby Do?

After the shooting, Gabby Giffords needed help to be herself—and her astronaut husband led the team.

Some Sunday nights, Giffords looked at her schedule and complained, “I can’t do it all. It’s too much,” to which her staff’s response was, “But you tell them all ‘yes,’ and then we’re stuck.” The weekend of the shooting, though, she’d noticed a hole in her schedule. Her staff set up a Congress on Your Corner event, an impromptu chance for constituents to meet their representative. Jared Loughner, an unmedicated schizophrenic, was one of the people who took notice.

Sometime after 11 a.m. Houston time, Carusone called Kelly at his home, where he was lecturing a daughter about her texting habits. Carusone said she had a terrible message to deliver. “I don’t know how to tell you this, except to tell you,” Carusone began. “Gabby’s been shot.”

Kelly hung up and then stared at his phone—he thought he could have been dreaming. He phoned Carusone back. “Did you just call me? What did you say?”

Soon, Kelly was on a plane provided by his friend Tilman Fertitta, owner of several nationwide chain restaurants and one of the richest people in Texas.

To Giffords’s friends, the pair couldn’t have been more different. Giffords was a kind of Tucson aristocrat, cultured and well-to-do and with access to select circles—one grade-school friend ran against her for Congress, and a high-school buddy helped manage her campaign. (“She had multimillionaires she could’ve married,” her father boasted.) Kelly grew up a blue-collar kid in West Orange, New Jersey, the son of two cops. And there were other dissonances, too. Giffords was attractive and vivacious, constantly making new friends, while Kelly, bald, short, and wide, seemed pleasant and supportive but distant. On his occasional campaign visits, he stood patiently in the background as Giffords held forth. Her friends could see that he was smitten. “She had it all. Beautiful, smart, hardworking, balanced, fun to be with, and she laughed at my jokes,” he once said. It was touching, though these same friends found his jokes a bit old-fashioned: “Have you guys ever packed a suitcase for your wife for a trip?” began one joke. “It’s perhaps the riskiest thing I’ve ever done.”

But their differences were part of their chemistry. “Secretly I think she wanted a macho guy,” said a friend. Around the office she called him “my sexy astronaut.” When they were dating, he’d told Giffords to look in the sky at a certain time, according to Tom Zoellner’s forthcoming book, A Safeway in Arizona. He flew an A-10 Thunderbolt II jet over Tucson and dipped his wing.

by Steve Fishman, New York |  Continue reading: 
Paintings by Nick Lepard 

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Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood

The day before Thanksgiving 2004, Pat Dollard, a Hollywood agent who represented Steven Soderbergh, sent an e-mail to just about everyone he knew containing one word: “Later.” Friends worried it was a suicide note. Dollard, 42, had spent nearly 20 years in the film business. On a good day he seemed little different than any other successful operator, a sort of hipper version of Entourage’s Ari Gold. But often in his turbulent career, bad days outnumbered the good. Once a rising star at William Morris, he was fired in the mid-90s for chronic absenteeism brought on by drinking and drug abuse. He attended 12-step meetings and bounced back, playing a critical role in getting Soderbergh’s Traffic made. Propaganda Films tapped him to head its management division, and in 2002 he produced Auto Focus, the Paul Schrader–directed biopic about the murder of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane—a film in which Dollard has a cameo in drag. Dollard co-founded Relativity, a firm which would assist the Marvel Entertainment Group in its half-billion-dollar production deal and went on to produce, after Dollard’s exit, Talladega Nights. But by 2004, Dollard was bingeing again. His fourth wife left him, and his third wife was suing for sole custody of their daughter. News that his daughter would be spending Thanksgiving at the home of Robert Evans—for whom his ex-wife worked as a development executive—sent Dollard into a morbid depression. Late one night he phoned a friend and suggested that everyone might be better off if he were dead. Then he sent his good-bye e-mail.

But Dollard was not planning a suicide, at least not a quick one. Dressed in what he would later describe as his “scumbag hipster agent’s uniform”—Prada boots, jeans, and a black-leather jacket—he boarded a plane for New York, then Kuwait City. From there he hopped a military transport to Baghdad and embedded with U.S. Marines in order to make a “pro-war documentary.” Given the decades of substance abuse, the idea of the chain-smoking, middle-aged Hollywood agent accompanying Marines into battle was sort of like Keith Richards competing in an Ironman Triathlon. But Dollard thrived. “My first time in a combat zone, I felt like I had walked into some bizarre fucking ultra-expensive movie set,” he would later say. “I had this vivid clarity, like when I used to take LSD. I felt joy. I felt like I had a message from God, or whoever, that this is exactly what I should be doing with my life. I belong in war. I am a warrior.”

To those at home it seemed that Dollard had entered dangerous mental territory. Around the New Year in 2005, he e-mailed a photo of himself to friends. In it he is clutching a machine gun, surrounded by Marines. Dressed in combat gear, his hair in a Mohawk and the word “die” shaved into his chest hair, Dollard looks like the mascot of camp Lord of the Flies.

by Evan Wright, Vanity Fair (2007) |  Continue reading:

Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor

In a way it is the greatest compliment a student can give. I ask them what they want to do with their history degree. They get all passionate and earnest and vulnerable as they answer, "I want your job. I am going to be a college professor!" Then they turn their smiling faces towards me, expectantly awaiting my validation and encouragement of their dreams. And I swallow hard, and I tell them....

No, my esteemed student, you are not going to be a history professor. It isn't going to happen. The sooner you accept this the better.

This is not because you are not bright enough. You are plenty bright. In any case, finishing a Ph.D. program is more a matter of persistence than intelligence. The reason you are not going to be a professor is because that job is going away, and yet doctoral programs continue to produce as many new Ph.D.s as ever. It is a simple calculation of odds--you are not going to win the lottery, you are not going to be struck by a meteorite, you are not going to be a professor. All of these things will happen to someone, somewhere, but none of them will happen to you.

First, let's look at the odds. Tenure track jobs are declining. The AHA recently reported that "The number of job openings in history plummeted last year, even as the number of new history PhDs soared. As a result, it appears the discipline is entering one of the most difficult academic job markets for historians in more than 15 years." And the job market was terrible 15 years ago. Very few of the people in history PhD programs right now are going to get teaching jobs--the Economist recently concluded that "doing a PhD is often a waste of time."

Not you.

Ah, but you say, I am special. I am a 4.0 student (except in your class where you gave me that 3.8 and ruined my life). Every teacher since kindergarten has told me how delightfully clever I am. I have interesting ideas and I really really love history. I know how hard it is to become a professor, but I am willing to work hard, so those odds do not apply to me.

Yes they do. The thing about grad school is that everyone else is at least as special as you, and most of them are more so. They all had 4.0 GPAs, they all have gone through life in the same insulating cocoon of praise, they all really, really love history. Hell, some of them shoot rainbows out of their butts and smell like a pine forest after a spring rain--and they mostly aren't going to get jobs either.

I know that some of your other professors are encouraging your dreams of an academic career. It is natural to turn to your professors for advice on becoming a professor, and it natural for them to want to see you succeed. Remember though that we 1) mostly have not been on the job market lately and 2) in any case are atypical Ph.D.s in that we did land tenure track positions. To return to the lottery analogy, it is like asking lottery winners if you should buy a ticket. For our part, there is a lot of professional satisfaction in mentoring some bright young person, encouraging their dreams, writing them letters of recommendation and bragging of their subsequent acceptance into a good doctoral program. Job market? What job market?

Your professors are the last generation of tenure track faculty. Every long-term educational trend points towards the end of the professoriate. States continue to slash funding for higher education. Retiring professors are not replaced, or replaced with part-time faculty. Technology promises to provide education with far fewer teachers--and whether you buy into this vision of the future or not, state legislators and administrators believe. The few faculty that remain will see increased service responsibilities (someone has to oversee those adjuncts!), deteriorating resources and facilities, and stagnant wages. After ten years of grad school you could make as much as the manager of a Hooters! But you won't be that lucky.

by Larry Cebula, Northwest History |  Continue reading:

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Late Night Alumni