Adjuncts, baristas, and bookstore cashiers

Writing for The Atlantic, Elizabeth Segran suggests that the prospects for PhDs in the humanities aren’t as bad as all that. Consider the opening sentences:

There is a widespread belief that humanities PhDs have limited job prospects. The story goes that since tenure-track professorships are increasingly being replaced by contingent faculty, the vast majority of English and history PhDs now roam the earth as poorly-paid adjuncts or, if they leave academia, as baristas and bookstore cashiers.

Notice how by moving to an absurd and unsupportable contention — that the majority of English and history PhDs labor as adjuncts, baristas, and cashiers, Segran manages to move right past what is undeniably the case — that tenure-track positions are disappearing, that a majority of college instructors are now adjuncts, that the percentage is rising, and that many (if not most) adjuncts are poorly paid. At any rate, the news in this piece is that “between a fifth and a quarter of [humanities PhDs] go on to work in well-paying jobs in media, corporate America, non-profits, and government. Humanities PhDs are all around us— and they are not serving coffee.”

What Segran fails to acknowledge is that the very telos of doctoral study in the humanities is a life of teaching and scholarship on the tenure-track. That’s what grad school is supposed to be for. And while it may be the case that PhDs are hired outside academia for, as one of Segran’s interviewees says, “their process skills: the ability to do excellent research, to write, to make cogent arguments,” it is far from clear that doctoral study is necessary or even practical in developing such skills. Five or seven or ten years in training to learn how to make a cogent argument? No.

If graduate programs are producing more PhDs than will ever be hired for tenure-track positions (given current institutional priorities in American higher education), the prospect of seeking a PhD looks ever more dubious. That some degree-holders have been able to find worthwhile employment outside academia (usually “through their own networks, without the support of their departments,” Segran says) does little to make graduate study in the humanities more appealing. Imagine going to medical school when the odds are slim that you’ll ever practice. Ladies and gentlemen, start your networks.

A website I discovered not long ago, aimed at audiences in the humanities and social sciences: 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School. It is a voice of experience. To quote from reason no. 86: “Of course, you look forward to a career — a career in academe. But graduate school can only offer the hope of an academic career. It’s an extraordinarily costly roll of the dice.”

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3:13 p.m.: To the reader who tweeted that the words “the very telos of doctoral study in the humanities is a life of teaching and scholarship on the tenure-track” sound like “bitter, dusty tweed” and make her “want to vomit”: please, read those words in context and not in the form of someone else’s tweet. The words form not a sentence but part of a sentence. And the sentence expresses a sad truth that Segran doesn’t acknowledge: that doctoral study in the humanities prepares students for a future that many of them will never attain. There’s nothing of tweed (or pipesmoke) in my words: rather, there’s a recognition that “the profession” is for many doctoral students unattainable. None of what I wrote suggests that PhDs should not seek work outside academia. But I think that a doctorate is hardly a necessary preparation for being able to reason and write well.

[I follow The Chicago Manual of Style in typing PhD without periods.]

Butterick’s Practical Typography

“Ty­pog­ra­phy mat­ters be­cause it helps con­serve the most valu­able re­source you have as a writer — read­er at­ten­tion.”

That’s Matthew Butterick writing, from the book-as-website Butterick’s Practical Typography. You may already know Butterick’s name from Typography for Lawyers.

LegalZoom exploits Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death to promote its services

From a LegalZoom e-mail with the subject line “Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Last Will: What We Can Learn”:


[“Change is a part of life. But sometimes, people forget that when it comes to estate planning. Let the late Philip Seymour Hoffman's case serve as a prime example of how important it is to keep your will up-to-date to ensure your wishes can be fulfilled when you pass on.”]

This sales ploy is beyond tasteless. It is in truth obscene: “offensive to moral principles; repugnant” (New Oxford American Dictionary). Shame on LegalZoom for seizing upon Hoffman’s terrible end as a way to market its services.

LegalZoom offers no way to explain the choice to unsubscribe from its e-mails. If you call to give feedback (1-800-773-0888), you’ll be directed to a “Contact us” page. It’s possible to leave a written message there.

[And sending this e-mail on April 1: what were they thinking?]

Pelikan FullForever cartridges

New from Pelikan, FullForever ink cartridges: “Due to a special chemical process, the ink ‘regenerates’ overnight so the fountain pen is constantly ready for use. And remains so.”

My favorite pen is a Pelikan fountain pen. I start any piece of writing of any length with that pen. I can’t wait for this ink to appear in bottled form.

A related post
Five pens

How to disable Chrome Notifications

The Chrome Notifications bell showed up in my menu bar this morning. And also this morning, OS X Daily explains how to disable Chrome Notifications. According to OS X Daily, this feature gets enabled at random. No thanks to Google for enabling without a user’s permission. But many thanks to OS X Daily for explaining how to get rid of Notifications — doing so is hardly intuitive.

[chrome://flags? Really?]

At the Library of Congress

[“Men and women looking up books through the card catalogue at the Congressional Library.” Photograph by Bernard Hoffman. Washington, D.C., 1941. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Sara, have you been time-traveling again?

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Library of Congress (1946) (A short film)

Oxford Vampire comma revisited

Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, talking to the Columbia University student publication Bwog:

“I’d seen there was this Facebook group at Columbia called Students for the Preservation of the Oxford Comma, and that was the first time I’d heard of an Oxford comma. And that appealed to me in a lot of ways, because it has Oxford in it, and I like anything Oxford: Oxford button-downs, Oxford University, all that stuff. But then the fact that it’s a comma, the combination of something like really regal and at the same time, absurd. I remember sitting at my parents’ piano, and that was the first thing that came to my mind: ‘Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?’”

The article’s writer lumps the Oxford or serial comma with “useless punctuation marks.” But as Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage points out, “virtually all writing authorities” outside of journalism recommend using the Oxford comma. Take that, journalism.

Here is Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma.” And here is a discussion of punctuation with VW and Stephen Colbert. The comma talk kicks in at 2:42.

Related posts
How to punctuate a sentence (Includes the Oxford comma)
How to punctuate more sentences

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Fonts and ink and $ Casting doubt on the Garamond v. Times New Roman story.

Baseball and handwriting

The New York Times reports on baseball players’ illegible autographs. With a beautiful account of Harmon Killebrew explaining the importance of good penmanship to Torii Hunter:

“Think about this: 150 years from now, you’re dead and gone, and kids are playing in a field,” Hunter recalled Killebrew saying. “A kid hits a home run, hits the ball in the weeds — far. They’re looking for the ball, they find it, and it says, ‘T, line, dot dot, H.’ They don’t know who it is. They’re like, ‘Oh, we found another ball to play with,’ because they can’t read it.

“But just rewind that. A kid hits a ball, hits it in the weeds, they’re looking for it, they pick it up and they can read it. It says, ‘T-o-r-i-i H-u-n-t-e-r.’ And they’re like, ‘Wow.’ So they go and look it up and they see this guy was a pretty good player, and they put it on the mantel and cherish it.”

Killebrew said, “You didn’t play this long for somebody to destroy your name,” Hunter recalled.

Related reading
Celebrity-handwriting crisis
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

[Harmon Killibrew: I remember him from baseball cards.]

Fonts and ink and $

The buzz over a fourteen-year-old’s discovery that Garamond uses less ink than Times New Roman doesn’t surprise me. It’s a good story. But Suvir Mirchandani is hardly breaking new ground. In March 2009, designers Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth found Garamond to be an ink-thrifty font, thrifter than Courier, Brush Script, Times New Roman, Helvetica, Comic Sans, Cooper Black, and Impact. Also from 2009: Ecofont, which comes in a free version. There is nothing new under the sun, at least not in the recognition that some fonts use less ink than others.

[Granted, Robinson and Wrigglesworth’s novel methodology couldn’t produce numbers.]

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7:38 p.m.: Daughter Number Three pointed me to Thomas Phinney’s analysis, which casts doubt on Mirchandani’s method and conclusions:

Garamond lowercase is about 14% smaller than Times lowercase (while its caps are only about 4% smaller). So it is no surprise that it uses less ink at the same point size. . . .

This is why most scientific studies comparing typefaces first compensate by resizing the fonts to eliminate differences in the lowercase height (called x-​​height by us font geeks). This study failed to do that. . . .

It should be obvious by now: you could just as easily save ink by setting the same font at a smaller point size.

Phinney (unlike CNN) includes a highly visible link to Mirchandani’s work. And, yes, the samples of Times New Roman and Garamond in the study are markedly different in size.

In photographs of Robinson and Wrigglesworth’s experiment, the Garamond and Times New Roman samples appear (to my untrained eye) to be the same or nearly the same in size. So perhaps Garamond does save ink?

Even if Suvir Mirchandani’s work is flawed, I salute its spirit of inquiry. Why should the world run on Times New Roman anyway?

Thanks, DN3.