In my last post on leaving academia, I raised the issue of music having no centralized jobs listing or standard job search cycle. But music is worse than that. Lots of jobs in music aren’t publicly posted at all. If I had to point to a single thing that makes searching for a job feel futile, this is it.
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As part of my series on leaving academia: the music job market is poorly run. Applying for jobs is inefficient. It makes it harder to stay on the market than in other fields.
A lot of articles out there blame women for not promoting themselves and being assertive enough in the workplace. I don’t want to pick an article that activates Poe’s Law, so here’s Clay Shirkey’s rant about women. He’s clearly really concerned about a lack of diversity in his discipline, he just can’t seem to think of any way to address the problem besides blaming women for it. His problem is that women aren’t aggressive enough. Women don’t ask for raises. Women don’t exaggerate their expertise when applying for jobs. In general, we fail to self promote the way men do.
In my previous post, I talked about the existence of Christian Patriarchy. I estimated that it left one quarter of women in the US effectively out of the running for education-requiring professions. It’s hard for people in education-requiring professions to recognize the problem because the Christians they encounter are primarily Mainline Protestants and Catholics. Professional Evangelical Christian men are unlikely to talk to outsiders about how they treat their family unless they are the sort of luke warm, backsliding, liberal evangelicals who don’t follow the biblical literalist beliefs of keeping their women in their place and beating their children into submission.
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As part of my series on leaving academia: patriarchal indoctrination is widespread and has profound implications for disciplines trying to achieve diversity.
Totalitarian, patriarchal religious sects are more common than anyone wants to admit. In the US we really like to pretend that misogynistic patriarchy is a Muslim problem. We’ll sometimes mention ultra-orthodox Jews. But we really, really don’t like to acknowledge that extremism shows up in Christianity. Continue reading
I haven’t blogged for a while because I realized that I’d been doing a lot of explaining why I was leaving academia and not so much engaging in my compositional process. Today, I’d like to figure out why.
As part of my series on why I’m no longer in academia: mentoring is important. If are in the position to mentor and you don’t do it, you suck.
As part of my series on why I’m no longer in academia: mentoring is important. Mentoring includes helping your students network. It doesn’t matter how amazing your students are; if you act like you’ve never met them at a conference, people will think you don’t think highly of them.
As part of my series on why I’m no longer in academia: mentoring is important. It turns out people aren’t just born with an innate store of arcane knowledge about academic publishing.
As part of my series on why I’m no longer in academia, I offer to you a well nigh complete lack of mentoring.