People are talking about a recent article in The Economist on why obtaining a Ph.D. is supposedly “a waste of time.” The author—who confesses that she “slogged through a largely pointless Ph.D. in theoretical ecology” more than a decade ago—makes the usual argument that universities are overproducing Ph.D.’s (though some would counter that the problem isn’t too many Ph.D.’s but rather too few tenure-track jobs) and chastises universities for using doctoral students as “cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour.”

She also points out that the interests of doctoral students, for many of whom the pursuit of a Ph.D. is a labor of love, conflict with those of their professors: “Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records. Academics pick bright undergraduate students and groom them as potential graduate students. It isn’t in their…

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Bad news, ladies: your recommendation letters could be sinking your faculty job and/or your promotion chances. According to a new study published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Psychology, letters that describe candidates in “communal” or cooperative terms—e.g., “agreeable,” “helpful,” “nurturing,”—are less highly regarded by search committees (hat tip: The Juggle) than are active terms. And, of course, the cooperative terms are most often used to describe female candidates, while active terms—like “confident,” “aggressive,” and “independent”—which are more highly regarded by search committees, are typically reserved for male candidates, the researchers at Rice University and the University of Houston found in their examination of 624 recommendation letters for 194 applicants for eight university faculty jobs.

As Paula Szuchman, a Juggle contributor,…

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