Blog: What Does Productivity Even Mean to a Classics Administrator?
By Erik Shell | May 31, 2019
From time to time, T.H.M. Gellar-Goad will be checking in with a member of the discipline to see how they conceptualize or define “productivity” in their own work and in the profession. We’ll ask them the same set of five questions and share their responses, plus perhaps a photo or two from their experiences. These Perspectives on Productivity will present views from a diverse cross-section of our field, people from all sorts of backgrounds, working in all sorts of areas, and at all stages in their Classics-related journeys. Today we hear from Erik Shell, the Communications and Services Coordinator at the Society for Classical Studies.
What does "productivity" mean to you as a member of the discipline?
Blog: A Day in the Life of a Classicist
By Ayelet Haimson Lushkov | March 14, 2018
A Day in the Life of a Classicist is a monthly column on the SCS blog written by Prof. Ayelet Haimson Lushkov celebrating the working lives of classicists. If you’d like to share your day, let us know here.
Hellen Cullyer is Executive Director of SCS.
Blog: Being An Independent Scholar in Classics
By Ann Raia | February 1, 2018
Another of our new monthly columns here on the SCS blog explores the contributions of independent scholars within classics. There is a thriving community of classicists outside of the university system who, while often overlooked, are integral to the strength and survival of our field.
“Gallows enthusiasm” on and beyond the academic job market
By T. H. M. Gellar-Goad | April 15, 2014
This month’s column is adapted from a paper I gave at the invitation of the Graduate Student Issues Committee at the CAMWS meeting in Waco earlier this month.
The humanities are a field in crisis because the number of students pursuing liberal-arts degrees has plummeted over the past couple decades. Classics is producing more Ph.D.s than the discipline can support. Online education will be the death of us all.
Sound familiar? Well, most of that’s bull. The decrease in liberal-arts majors was caused by opening non-humanities fields like engineering to women: without formal gender discrimination, as Heidi Tworek explains, women’s humanities-degree rates have adjusted to match men’s, which have remained stable since the 1960s. Online education has indeed opened opportunities to people otherwise lacking access — but isn’t close to usurping in-person teaching, as witnessed by abysmal completion rates of overhyped MOOCs.
Yet our discipline does face grim realities: almost nobody nowadays lands tenure-track positions when first on the market, and many classicists never will. Adjunct faculty outnumber tenure-line faculty nationwide, and tenure-line employment has remained stagnant while the number of Ph.D.s awarded has blossomed. White privilege, class privilege, male privilege, thin privilege, and abled privilege affect academic careers in big and small ways, from hiring to service workloads. It’s not necessarily Sisyphean, though it is definitely a steep uphill path. But it’s worth considering three interrelated ways of achieving a strong, satisfying career: the value of non-tenure-track faculty positions, possibilities for non-faculty employment, and mindful approaches to the academic market.