U. of Washington Extension Lecturers Vote to Unionize

When I worked for the government, the 80/20 rule was formulated as “You sped 20% of your time solving the first 80% of the problem, and 80% of your time solving the other 20% of the problem. I wonder some days about the serenity of being a “B” student.

That interpretation sounds more accurate to me.

Are you suggesting that academics and others following the 80/20 rule as described above are universally functioning at only 80%?

It brings to mind the counsel given to new grad student freshman composition instructors–that their responsibilities to their teaching duties were important but that their responsibilities to themselves as students comes first. Despite the guilt that some (not all) need to conquer in this scenario, this little “get out jail free” card proves to be a real lifesaver.

I always assumed that pass was temporary. Are we saying it’s not?

Certainly, if we look at this advice to grad students from an advisor who says he has a good placement record, which is probably pretty good vice given how the profession seems to be functioning, the emphasis is on rapidly jumping through hoops:

http://chronicle.com/article/What-I-Tell-My-Graduate/126615/

This brings to mind the counsel given to applicants to graduate journalism programs, that their application packages should include published “clips.” This gets them though a hoop, demonstrating a certain level of commitment because they sustained the activity and survived the rejection such activity entails, but ultimately admissions and funding decisions do pay attention to quality irregardless of the publication status of the work.

Are we saying that does not pertain beyond the admissions gate? It doesn’t pertain in journalism, I suppose. If you can’t bust a move in print constantly, you really are toast. But most journalism is pretty ephemeral, we don’t really expect most of it to hold up over time.

I expect a work in history, OTOH, to hold up for a longer period of time. (It also takes a little bit longer than that to produce it). I don’t expect to have to troll through mounds of garbage to get to a few nuggets of durable knowledge, although that does seem to currently be the case in academic knowledge production.

I also remember a time in women’s and gender studies when producing the wrong thing at the wrong time could get a person near slandered out of the discipline. A whole mountain of scorn fell on Carol Gilligan for “In a Different Voice,” which proposed men and women reason differently about moral issues. “Difference feminism,” it seems, had gone out of fashion. Just off the top of my head, but there’s a lot of this stuff and not just in gender studies.

If we really expect PhD students to produce like that throughout their degree, then maybe there should be a hiatus between the MA and PhD, in which they can better orient themselves lest they end their careers by publicly sticking their foot in their mouths.

By the way, I’m not really criticizing the advice-giver, here. It would be nice if more graduate faculty advisors gave more than the 80% that can be accomplished in 20% of their time to which they became accustomed as grad student teachers with temporary get out of jail free cards.

Forgive me if I’m repeating a joke that’s right here on some CHE thread:

In tech endeavors, the saying is: “We’ve solved 80 percent of the problem, which leaves only the remaining 80 percent to solved.”