More and more, they all sound like David Horowitz, who is the king of pathetic whiners who’s desperate to join our club (and yet strangely, not desperate enough to earn the minimum required degrees.) They simultaneously diss us and yet crave our approval. All they have to do is lose their comfy incomes and dedicate themselves to earning a Ph.D. over the next 5-10 years. Yet they all think they should jump the line because they published some crap warmed-over book based on secondary sources? Um, yeah–when you go to grad school Jon, maybe you’ll learn why that’s not all that impressive.

“The whole idea that only PhDs can get tenure at even the least prestigious university may be time-honored, but it makes no sense. It’s the work, not the sheepskin, that should count.”

This is already happening.

In grad school (which I subsequently quit in disgust), several recent hires for TT, long-term VAP, and extended (read: guaranteed) adjunct positions were “professionals” with spurious master’s degrees in often unrelated fields.

These people were often rabid anti-intellectuals who quickly eroded standards because, well, they had so few of their own. But they had been hired to teach the “professional” courses in the departments I worked for, so they were considered experts in their fields. They just had little sense of academic discipline or course management.

Aren’t those last 2 supposed to be hallmarks of a college education? Or am I hopelessly out of fashion? I think Historiann’s onto something with the jealousy angle. Add it to the lowering of standards, rampant corruption, and EduCracy-run-amok and we can see how things are unravelling.

Lawrence is on target when he hails Andrei’s narrative. It is superb scholarship, thrilling story-telling and another example of why those academics (you know who you are) who like to belittle journalists trying their hand at writing history should chill. I’m not saying this is a problem among TPM readers, but it’s a frequent complaint in the faculty clubs. These folks need to judge the work, not the credentials (or lack of them) of the author. The whole idea that only PhDs can get tenure at even the least prestigious university may be time-honored, but it makes no sense. It’s the work, not the sheepskin, that should count. Even crazier is that if Andrei wanted to go teach history at a public high school, even one desperate for teachers, he would be turned down for lacking a teaching certificate. (Some states have alternative certification). I know this sounds like a tangent, but I had to get it off my chest.

Interesting, huh? (Many historians panned Alter’s 2006 FDR book as adding nothing new to the scholarship).

Journalists do sometimes (though certainly not as often as they could, perhaps due to the prevailing ideological climate) take the “heroic outsider” storyline. The coverage of a certain former advisor’s rise to the presidency of a certain high-profile northeastern university was largely quite positive, and the predictable misogynist, anti-pc criticism was (appropriately) a very minor theme in the coverage in the MSM (though it predictably flowered in the right-wing blogosphere). But that’s in part perhaps because it’s a heroic individual story–an easy sell–rather than a complex institutional or disciplinary one.

Let’s face it: universities have been around for a long time, a lot longer than newspapers, and it’s likely that they’ll be around for a few more centuries or millennia. Of course, they have the advantage of being non-profits, which gives them more flexibility than newspapers that are for-profit companies. But that’s the tradeoff we made 15-20 years ago, right JJO? We deferred money and accepted less of it in the end for greater job security in the long run. People who were livin’ large and enjoying the dot-com bubble and the home mortgage bubble while we were eating Ramen noodles–well, they made their own choices as well.

This is certainly intellectually lazy, and there are better and worse ways of doing this kind of story (i.e. more fair & accurate versus simplistic, distorted, & one-sided, which is clearly where Cohen’s story falls), but from my experience, this impulse explains a lot more about journalism than personal animosities or specific ideological commitments, though it often ends up having a conservative/reactionary effect.