Job Types

    When I look around at the state of higher education in the U.S. nowadays, it makes me feel lucky to have squeaked through the system when I did. My former graduate advisor, Professor Spangler, feels the same way. He’s looking at it from an educator’s perspective, me from a student’s – but we’ve arrived at the same place: We got off the island just before the volcano erupted. The volcano being the neo-liberal politicization of everything that’s now going down on university campuses.

    It’s been a quarter century since I got my degree. Professor Spangler retired last year. He was one of the last guys on the island.

    He’s Professor Emeritus Spangler now, and we still talk. I jokingly asked him where they placed his emeritus statue and/or bust, and he replied, “That’s all done virtually now.” After a pause he added, rather poignantly, “Funny how I had to retire in order to get tenure.”  

    That should give you a hint as to what kind of guy Spangler is. Tenure is permanent, on-lock job security for a professor, but it’s only doled out as a reward for playing the game according to the rules. There’s no real equivalent to it outside academia. For instance, there’s no way you can earn guaranteed employment at General Motors or Amazon or Acme Inc., even if you do every little thing you’re told, each and every day. Sure, I guess you could say that many working people will never get canned unless they really, really fuck up. But that’s not the same thing as a guaranteed ride. Anyway, Spangler played by his own rules rather than by the university’s, so he never got his tenure. That’s just how it works. What was his most outrageous act of nonconformity, you ask? He spent too much time teaching, and too little time publishing journal papers and soliciting corporate grants.
 
    I bet the university brass only looked upon Spangler rather one-dimensionally, though. I bet they missed his biggest trick. Through their myopic lens, they probably just saw him as someone who wasn’t meeting their “annual sales targets,” and that was the sum total of their frustration. They probably didn’t realize that Spangler was exposing a bunch of us students to his free thinkin’ ways.
 
    Here’s a little sample: While I was working on my graduate thesis, Professor Spangler had me diligently track all my working hours. While I was in the thick of it, this struck me as ridiculously tedious. Every time we had our weekly progress meeting, without fail, he’d start off by asking how many hours I’d put in on my project so far – and those hours had to be divided up into hours devoted to theoretical work, experimental work, and writing. And on it went for the entire two years and change that I worked on my graduate degree. Detailed hours reporting. Every week. It wasn’t until the very end, after my thesis was printed, bound, and defended, and I was all set to graduate, that Professor Spangler let me in on why he was so interested in tracking my hours. It had to do with computers.
 
    You see, I was a part of the first cohort of students using PCs with new-fangled programs like Excel and Word to sort through my experimental data and handle my “word processing” tasks. And Professor Spangler was dead curious to see if computers were actually saving students any time compared to doing a thesis the old fashioned way – with graphing paper and typewriters and wooden spears and such. To make the comparison, he dug out his notes from when he had done his thesis many years before.  Here’s what we found: The total hours that each of us spent on our thesis?  Nearly identical. The percentage of that time consumed by writing? Nearly identical.

    Since computers ought to beat the pants off typewriters when it comes to churning out pages per minute, we had to stop and think. How was it possible for the tortoise and the hare be crossing the finish line at the same time?
 
    Spangler put it like this: “Computers only have the potential to save us time because they make editing a breeze. But they’ll never end up reducing the 40-hour work week because that same ease-of-editing is an invitation to fiddle.”
 
    I still think about that statement today, a quarter of a century later. I think Spangler saw the whole computer thing clearly and nailed it, right at the very start of the wave. If you’re a university, you just can’t tenure a guy who thinks like that.
 
    When I was going up, I never entertained the idea that I wouldn’t go to college. Going to college was just the thing to do. And once I was in college, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine saddling up for graduate school. But if I was growing up these days, I honestly don’t know what I’d be thinking. Universities seem to have been taken over by the thought police, so I’m not super confident that there’s good stuff to be learned there anymore. Although, I suppose the stuff you do learn can still prepare you for jobs of a certain type.
 
    What will I tell my son about all this? Should I encourage him to regard college as an attractive life path? I could tell him that college didn’t do me any harm, but also acknowledge that that was way back when. Ouch. That sure ain’t selling it. Should I jazz that up a bit, put some sprinkles on top? I had some good times in college. I could share some funny stories. I could tell him about the time we scared the hell out of my friend, Bruce, with a goat mask. I could tell him about the time my roommate, Bart, accidentally flooded our apartment by trying to force-flush all the coagulated grease out of his Fry Daddy.
 
    Here’s the thing: I’d feel a lot better saying good things about college if I knew for sure that there were still a couple of Spanglers on the island. But since there are no guarantees on that, I’ll just give it to my son straight. That’s been the pattern thus far in the experiment that is his young life. He’s getting way more truth in his diet than I ever got growing up, and it looks to me like he’s growing healthy bones and teeth.
 
– O.M. Kelsey