> > I won't get a security clearance, will I?
>
>It's been my experience that if you want one and your sponsor whats
>you to have one then you will get one.
>
>Now as to whether or not you want one ... :-)
I'm afraid that one of these days English Departments will begin to
invite the CIA to give workshops on "Intelligence as an Alternative
Career for a Ph.D. in English" on campus -- if they haven't done so
already, that is. (They -- including my department -- have been
giving workshops on "alternative careers" for the last several years,
finally recognizing the reality of the job market _and yet_ without
taking any responsibility for it, much less struggling for
improvement.) When they do, I think some of the grad students will
seriously consider it. It will be tragicomic if the CIA is the place
where devotees to "subversion," "deconstruction," etc. will end up.
:-)
>Anyway, just an alternative to your "I could never make as much as
>my dad" ... you might not like the job that would get you that,
>but then again: do you think he liked making steel?
My dad wanted to be either an actor or a scholar. He was once a bright good-looking young man. I don't think he really liked his job at all -- he took it because it was one of the better-paying working-class jobs then.
I entirely agree that I probably wouldn't like a job that I could get & that allowed me to make more than what my father did. That's the main reason why so many adjuncts try to hang onto academy even though there are better-paying jobs; and so many people enter into Ph.D. programs in the humanities in the first place, knowing that it takes fewer years to get a law degree which gives an incomparably brighter economic prospect than a Ph.D. in English, Foreign Languages, Classics, Philosophy, History, etc.
>If it was fun and good for you, they wouldn't call it work.
I don't think that socialism will necessarily make work "fun and good for you," but I think it can at least give everyone the right to live. The main problem for adjuncts -- as with many American workers -- is the absence of job security, health care, etc. Low wages I can live with, since I'm child-free. Those with dependents, however, can hardly live on what I make, I think (the monthly pay for an adjunct who teaches one course in the Humanities at the OSU is $760, which paradoxically is even lower than that for a TA, though lecturers have more experiences than TAs).
Yoshie