Still, I loved research, and I would make this a career. I hated bureaucracy and funding and paper-writing formalities.

So I took a compromise, I went as a postdoc to a R1 institution, just to see. Being a postdoc, you have a lighter workload than being an assistant professor, and while there’s not much money, there’s enough to have an alright life with a bit more freedom.

But after about 6 months of looking at it up close, I’ve decided I’m not going to pursue it further.

Universities were great before the Internet. With Internet, there’s no more point. Indeed, there are great scholars at universities, but it’s correlation, not causation.

I just saw your presentation at AOIR- really great presentation. If you reconsider, you might want to take a look at this position at Teachers College, Columbia University: http://www.tc.edu/dean/pdf/ccte.pdf. Only graduate students and in NYC.

Cheers,
Anthony

On the tangent, I’m interested in this tension about teaching unengaged students. I wonder if students don’t break down neatly into “engaged” and “unengaged”. I suspect there’s a big middle of “students who would and want to be engaged” but are worn down by years of sit-there-and-listen, hoop-jump-ing and cram-and-regurgitate. Some of the brightest minds are the ones that check out under that kind of regimen. There’s something slightly radical about trying to bring students out of their defensive armour, whoever you figure is to blame for it being there. Exhausting, but radical.

Could you elaborate a bit? Or rant about IRB in another entry? I ask because while my experience with IRB has been incredibly frustrating because of their lack of competence and understanding of social science research, I don’t see a particular barrier against having “true” ethnographic research approved through IRB as opposed to anything else.

Thanks for sharing your thought process around these hard decisions. It is actually very comforting.

I, too, left acedamia, and I’ve been gone since ’99. The one thing I really miss is the ability to just go to someone’s office and just talk about some new idea that’s on my mind (and have the reverse happen as well). I still have the inclination to teach, and I find myself doing it on a daily basis, just not in the classroom. Maybe someday if I get up the gumption, I’ll see what I could do at a local liberal arts college, maybe teach at night, just to scratch that itch.

However, while I’m not big on babysitting either, I am more than willing to help students find a way to find their own way. But I wholeheartedly agree that the dominant model of higher ed is particularly lame in that regard.