Holy Shit! I just got Sue’s username! I guess after our national forests are all gone, they can get valuable timber resources from my fawking HEAD.
Oh, yes. From my experience an attitude looking down on teaching is too often cultivated among some faculty members, which makes it very difficult for other faculty (and graduate students) to take pride in teaching well and take the time learn those skills. I can understand that some people value research over teaching, but it irritates the hell out of me when professors who choose to spend their time on good teaching instead of publishing are looked down on and penalized. I know of two profs voted “teacher of the year” who did not get tenure because they didn’t get enough published. They spent their time grading carefully, planning stimulating lectures, helping students, etc. Just so I’m clear: I’m not against research – it’s a valuable thing – just against the attitude that it’s somehow superior to teaching. (Those who can’t, teach. Right? :mad: ) Different institutions strike a different balance between the two but I think too many PhDs are strutting around at colleges that are not primarily research schools with the wrong (self-deluded?) perception of their exalted role there.
I’m getting my PhD, by the way, but primarily to allow me to get a job teaching college age students, to work with material and students more advanced than the highschool level. (A master’s won’t get you anything these days, in my field.) So now you know where my bias is coming from. Fortunately, I’ve found one of the few departments that really works on preparing grad students to be decent teachers, instead of throwing them in completely stuffed full of knowledge but with no clue how to share it.
(Side peeve: I would love to see speakers at conferences actually be trained in public speaking. Mumbling the words of your paper into a microphone is not good enough. It’s a different skill from writing journal articles. Learn it, dammit!)
rivulus
Oh boy, you should see it from another side. My professors were heavily involved in pedagogy. Their sole motivation in life was to graduate teachers with an MA and a teaching certificate. But they had absolute contempt for the undergrad students who took the courses the MA students were teaching. I often joke that if they could create teachers without having to involve students, they’d do it. But alas, these teachers must have students to practice on, so the students are tolerated, as long as they serve the goals of the program.
I had really good teachers in college, and I think seeking a higher education is a wonderful thing. It was wonderful for me.
But, I think there’s gotta be some common sense here. whiterabbit’s story is the epitome of NON-common sense. A degree is not everything. I am glad that some professions don’t dismiss an otherwise qualified applicant because of a lack of degree, but it just gripes my ass big time that some DO. That’s just insane! I think whiterabbit’s story illustrates this completely.
I went to a very nice art school. I didn’t get a degree (too poor) but I certainly feel I learned a lot, and I had some (famous) and wonderful teachers. I think I had a good experience because most of my teachers were working in the field (I was studying drawing, painting, and illustration.) However, some of the students were a bit lazy, puffed up, and too proud. I wasn’t always too impressed with their efforts, since a lot of them really didn’t show much dedication, or talent. But hey - they were going for their degrees, so they must be superior, right? Bullshit!
I just took this attitude for granted, until I encountered some really phenomenal self-taught artists (or artists who lacked the proper “pedigree”). They were so excited about creating, they brought their sketchbook with them everywhere, immersed themselves in art, just LOVED it. And they were GREAT artists! Why should these kind of artists be considered “inferior” because they have no degree? Well, thankfully, it often doesn’t matter. Many art-related jobs are mainly interested in your portfolio, and don’t care so much about your degree. (Fancy that - actually wanting you to be GOOD at what you do!)
Don’t get me wrong, I know many, many degreed artists who are very able and talented, excited about learning, and benefitted greatly from their education. I certainly feel like my years in college transformed my life. But the bottom line is how GOOD you are. Nothing else matters. So I have come to the point that when someone tells me (sometimes with an air of too much pride) that they have an advanced degree in art, it just means nothing to me. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. Until I see the kind of artwork a person creates, I really have NO idea how good an artist they are. Having a degree is absolutely no guarantee of artistic excellence, none at all.
At a previous job, I had a co-worker who had a Masters in Art. I was very active in my pottery, so we would talk about art sometimes. She didn’t mind repeating to me that she had a MASTERS in Fine Art. But I never heard anything about her recent art projects, or anything. I was active with my pottery (always going to the pottery lab to work on my pots, being in pottery sales, etc.) So it should have been obvious that I was active with it. But when I mentioned that I was in a rather prestigious group show (that was covered by the L.A. Times and many other local papers) she was just astonished. I think maybe part of that was because I didn’t have a degree! What was this? This little non-degreed schlub is in a SHOW?!?!? Well, maybe I’m being unkind, maybe she was merely surprised. But none of my other co-workers seemed quite so astonished, so I have to wonder why she was.
Oh, my, you’ve ripped open a scab on my psyche with this thread. As a programmer, I’ve worked with quite a few PhD statisticians in the pharmaceutical industry and they tend to be either very nice, well-adjusted people or raging sociopaths with very little going for them other than their credentials. My college professors fell somewhere in the middle for the most part, with the exception of my faculty advisor who was biased against male students and consistently gave them lower grades than the female students. (I finally figured this out in my third year on campus; I thought that she was just challenging me to do better, dope that I am.)
The a-hole brigade resents the fact that the credential which places them at the apex of the academic pecking order doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to the man in the street. I’ve also noticed that many of them seem to single out medical doctors to crap on, joking that they’re just glorified auto mechanics fixing up broken-down human bodies while the truly gifted scions of academia are building up the edifice of human knowledge. These PhDs (especially those who are offended if not addressed as Doctor, in contravention to long-held standards of etiquette which hold that only medical doctors are entitled use their title socially) envy the well-deserved prestige of the people who work to protect and preserve life.
So for fuck’s sake, if you’re going to be arrogant, be arrogant about something that fucking impresses people at least. Your advanced training in a narrow academic discipline doesn’t make you Isaac fucking Newton.
Just wondering if I qualify as an “academic” by the defenition of the OP. Hmm, I do have a PhD., but my full-time job is as an elementary school teacher. I do teach classes for the local university during the summer and one night per week during the regular school year. I have never published anything, nor would I care to take the time to do so.
[mini-rant]
A very vocal, significant minority of the faculty at the University takes the particular label one’s position has very, very seriously. A colleague in the English department once took me aside and advised me, in a very condescending manner, that I am not to have the students call me “Professor” (which I don’t) so long as I am still classified as an instructor (He was a FULL professor. There are about 16 ranks of professor, plus department head, dean, president, chancellor, emperor, etc., it’s like some mutant cross of the military with European nobility). He also informed me that I should have my students call me Dr. Six rather than Mr. Six, because it devalues the PhD.'s in the department when I don’t insist that students show me the proper respect. My response was, “I don’t work for you.”
[/mini-rant]
There are those who care more about petty politics and their own little world than about teaching, and there are teachers whose primary purpose in their classes is to show off how smart they are, but there are also some wonderful people who genuinely care greatly about educating people. Where I happen to work, the talented, dedicated teachers seem to be a minority, and the vicious pricks seem to a minority, with the vast majority somewhere in the middle.
Mundane competence seldom makes a big impression. People at the extremes do, which is why we tend to remember the great teachers and the incompetent ones the most.
And IMHO, anyone who insists on being called doctor in social situations, PhD. or M.D., has an ego problem.
YosemiteBabe, you’ve touched a nerve here. ( Now, if you’d just be so kind as to touch it again in a rhytmic and romantic way, why I’ll be right as rain 
)
I went to Art School too. Within a year, I was begging my parents to let me quit, because my chosen field is a craft, not an art. One only can learn it by exposure in the real world, not by sitting in a classroom. By the end of Freshman year, I had more production experience than my Production Class teacher had- and I thought that was awful.
While not academic snobs, my parents came from the generation where having at LEAST a Bachelor’s Degree was an essential. Mom used to say, " Just you wait, a day will come when someone will hire you over someone else JUST because you have the degree !!!". Thanks Mom. It’s been 16 years since I graduated, and not a single day’s pay has resulted from that degree. Suck it up and admit you were wrong.
Art school, as Yosemite so astutely pointed out, is not immune to snobbery. It just comes in different forms. Art Critics must be the lowest form of humanity. Frustrated near-creative types, destined to live out a life of bitterness and anger directed at others.
That lady with her MFA can lick my love pump, as they say. Taking that diploma and lining a birdcage with it would be an excellent use of the materials at hand. Otherwise??? SHOW US YOUR STUFF, MFA BITCH ! 
If she can’t throw a pot, then why the FUCK is she downtalking you?
And, mazel tov on the show. I’ve always been afraid to show my stuff publicly. I think it’s cause I do it for mental health as well as creative reasons, and don’t wanna cross the line into thinking I MUST generate pieces because I have a show coming up. Besides, who wants to go to a show and see an 11 foot tall rasperry alabaster penis? :rolleyes:
Cartooniverse
OH boy, I could tell you about art school too. I had one professor in the first painting class I ever took, he told me I could work outside of class as long as I put in the hours. So I did. I put in more hours than anyone in the class. I came to the final class to find the studio empty, except for the professor sitting on a folding metal chair in the middle of the room. I asked him what was going on. He said it was critique week, it was announced last week in class and everyone had to get a critique to get their final grade. I asked him if there were any critique spots left. He said that THIS VERY moment was the last open critique slot. I said, ok, I have all my work here, let’s go! He said I had to sign up last week, so he refused to give me a critique, and I’d be receiving an F. What an asshole! I had enough of that crap and dropped out.
Many years later, my mom was bugging me to finish my degree. The one thing that made me decide to re-enroll was that a woman artist I admired was now teaching at my old school. I’d followed her career for years, and now was my opportunity to study with her. My first class drawing class with her was a disaster. For years, I’d had a postcard from one of her exhibitions, with one of my favorite sayings about drawing on it, “a drawing is a continuous record of millions of tiny decisions by the artist.” In a class discussion about the philosophy of drawing, I quoted her own words back to her, and she denied she had ever made such a statement! From that moment forward, she hated me. I accidentally made things worse when she showed a slide lecture about an exhibit and I mentioned that not only had I attended the show, I was friends with the artist. I guess those years I spent in LA as a struggling artist and hanging around with professional artists was not acceptable to academic artists. Shortly after my disastrous experience with this woman, I discovered she got a grant so she could spend more time painting and be relieved of teaching responsibilities for a period of 2 years. Well why the FUCK did she want to be an art teacher if she just wanted to paint? She was making a good living as a painter, I guess she just wanted to annoy the fuck out of poor students as a hobby.
All three are desirable in life.
To have knowledge alone - especially without goodness or ability - is not desirable.
But the lack of knowledge is not desirable either.
Some academics are lacking in goodness or ability, they are bad, incompetent people. But this is also true in other areas, that there are people lacking in one or more of these three dimensions.
how exactly are grad students “tax-money sucking?”
Grad students are often paid by the university (research/teaching assistance), so unless it’s a public university, the money is not even remotely related to taxes. Just curious; I don’t see where the “waste of taxpayer money” is.
This is what I’m talking about. You’ll bust your ass to be a good instructor because you have a genuine interest in teaching. I bet some of your students will appreciate it, but you’ll probably be living in a cheap apartment in the bad side of town for a long time,unless you have family money. I wish you a lot of luck and hope you do well. If you ever get tired of the BS, you’d probably do well in industry- you seem to have your head all the way out of your ass.
And Cartooniverse, I guess I wonder if I’m the only one who’s curious? It cant be just me- **Besides, who wants to go to a show and see an 11 foot tall rasperry alabaster penis? **While I’m not inclined normally towards interest in such things, 11 foot tall? I’m curious just for curiosity’s sake…
b
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Billy Rubin *
**
Yeah. Curiosity’s sake. That’s what they ALL say, JUST before we affix the gag to their mouths…MU HAHAHAHA.
Okay, sorry. It was a half-wiseassed remark. I do sculpt, and I do work in raspberry alabaster. Uh, the rest was just for fun. 
Cartooniverse
If you don’t need college for your chosen career, I say go anyway. Spend four years having fun and learning about other fields.
Man, I just don’t have any of these experiences in my field.
I am a graduate student. I am also a medical student. I work in a cutthroat world of “publish or perish” and “living grant to grant.” We work on topics which range from those directly applicable to human disease (modeling Parkinson disease in the fruitfly and the mouse to further understand the human condition) to those not so directly applicable but still immensely interesting (development of the fruitfly eye and leg). For our field, a PhD is absolutely necessary. We work with complex systems and are constantly looking to do the best science. Planning and carrying out an experiment can only be learned through a PhD program. Granted, bright Masters degree holders and those with an undergraduate degree can run a project, but for anyone but a PhD (with extensive postdoctoral training) to run a lab is quite ludicrous. It is the same way with most basic science fields.
Many of the professors with whom I work closely are world reknown in their respective fields. All of them insist that graduate students call them by their first names. Some of them are cocky, some of them are rude, but I don’t think that you would find more PhDs like that than people of the general populace. Most are more than willing to talk your head off about their particular interests. Most enjoy having a drink with their graduate students and postdocs. It is quite a friendly environment because we depend on peer collaboration in order to move our science faster.
In many fields, people who pursue a PhD do so because they want to “avoid the real world.” It is simply not the case in the sciences. The “real world” of sciences takes place inside of academic centers, not in industry. Academic centers consistently lead the wavefront of scientific advancement. Don’t paint all graduate students and PhDs with the same broad brush.
Fun would hardly be the word for an 11 foot alabaster penis. If you WERE into that sort of thing, I’ll bet it’d be the E-ticket ride. Gag or no gag.(sic)
Do you have a site where we might see your work? penises or not, alabaster is pretty cool, I’d love to see it.
b.
Cartoon, ChasE, yes, yes, you know what I am talking about! I have a million of these stories, I’m sure you do too!
I also noticed a certain snobbery between the “commercial” artist students and the “fine art” students. I occasionally got some Fine Art students looking down their noses at me, because I was studying Illustration. And also, apparently it was terribly tacky that I (gasp!) knew how to draw realistically. And I actually DID work that was realistic. How crass.
I also encountered teachers who actually discouraged their students from drawing, even though the students expressed an interest. I remember one class, a student was drawing out-of-proportion drawings. (The head too big, the legs too short.) It looked like typical beginner student stuff. The guy had talent, but he had poor drawing skills. I once asked him (being the brash chick I am) if that was what he intended. No, it wasn’t, he WANTED to draw in proportion, but the teacher had told him he was “just fine”, she didn’t want him to change. Well, he was very upset to discover that he was not drawing realistically or in proportion, so he went to ask her about it. She had to take some time to smooth him over, and to re-brainwash him. SHE thought his out-of-proportion drawing was “primitive” and “fresh” and it didn’t really matter to her that HE wanted to draw more realistically. She was basically subverting his goals, to learn how to draw better. And he is paying a lot of money for a class, for this? What a rip-off. And I know it happens a lot in art schools.
Another small story that always sticks in my mind happened a few years ago. I took a Life Drawing class at night. (I’m a Live Drawing veteran, it’s one of my favorite types of classes.) A lot of students, a lot of different age groups, a lot of different skill levels. One lady really did not stand out at all, I figured this was her first Life Drawing class - she needed a lot of improvement. (I can tell you already see where this is going… 
) Well, one night the teacher wasn’t there for class. That’s fine, we can just draw the model and do our thing. This one particular (mediocre) student piped up, and informed us that the teacher had left *her * “in charge” of the class tonight. Because she had an advanced degree in Art, she was qualified to be “in charge”. She rattled on about her degree in art. I was just dumbfounded. Not that she ever taught anyone anything that night, we just did our own thing. But I thought it was just ludicrous that she really felt entitled to be “in charge” of people who were obviously FAR better and more advanced at Life Drawing than she was! Well, it was just beyond me.
I’ll let the E Ticket comment ride Sorry, but I’ve never put anything up on a web site. If I could find a way to HAVE a web site, I’d consider it.
** Yosemite**, you and me cupcake. I hung with the Fine Arts majors because the Film Majors ALL wanted to be Steven Spielberg. ( No offense to Steve, but it’s not an attainable goal for 99.983 % of the populus). A few of us wanted to be cinematographers, editors and animators, and most of that group are actually doing as they dreamt. Realistic dreams, realistic goals.
As you said here,
What a pathetic show of inadequacy. IF the teacher really HAD left that person in charge, they would have been well advised to just say, " Ms. XYZ asked me to note any questions or issues, and we all get to do what we wish tonight". Pompous ass that she was, she got a taste of power and ran with it. The world of art has no place in it for such folderol.
I went to the School of Visual Arts, in NYC. It so happens I grew up 4 BLOCKS from the Tyler School of Art in Philly. I basically lived there for years, being indulged by the college students while I was in Jr High and HS. It was heavenly… Let’s lay the cards out, I’m so curious- Yosemite, where did you and Chas E. go?
Cartooniverse
Cartoon, I went to Otis in L.A. It’s really a great school, or at least it was when I went. I had some fantastic teachers.
I also took plenty of “fun” classes at good ol’ Glendale Community College (in. L.A. area) off and on for YEARS. The Ceramics dept. was great (still is) and it produced some really remarkable potters. I was in the aforementioned group show because of my Glendale College friends and contacts. (I suppose I shouldn’t mention Glendale College with pride, because sniff it is just a Community College. :rolleyes: ) But since it produced at least one potter that got on the COVER of Ceramics Monthly (Ceramics Monthly is the magazine for potters) and since C.M actually did a glowing article about G.C.C., I think it is obvious it was an exceptional place. And I’m extremely proud to have spent so much time there.
As a PhD student in the physical sciences, I must echo the sentiment in edwino’s fine post.
PhD pretension is quite rare (but sadly not unheard-of) at my school. I’m on a first-name basis with all faculty members with whom I interact regularly.
The MD community’s hang-up on always getting addressed by “Doctor” in all settings is rather comical to me, and I don’t think it reflects upon them very well. I believe I’ve read that the chancre mechanics “stole” the title from academia in the first place, which makes it all the more funny/grating when members of that community insist that only MD’s should be deserving of that form of address.
brad_d wrote:
Standard etiquette holds that only holders of medical degrees may use the title “Doctor” socially, so don’t blame the sawbones, blame society. Referring to physicians as “chancre mechanics” doesn’t reflect on you very well.
Physicist[sup]1[/sup], observe thyself.
[sup]1. Or whatever.