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May 10, 2007
academic twinkies
Yesterday I attended an all-day faculty meeting. I say "attended" because that was pretty much all I accomplished. I looked out the window a lot, squinting while I tried to will the sweet, sweet release of death. Alas.
I've been away from academia for too long. It's torturous for me now. Perhaps it was the long-winded Twinkie whose every unit begins with an acronym, like the seven components of good writing:
Respect for the reader
Entertaining all options
Staying in focus
Providing good organization
Enabling the reader
Changing prose as necessary
Technically accurate
I include this so that my friends can imagine my discomfort as the windbag pontificated about the virtues of this acronym for a half-hour. It's been successful beyond his wildest imagination, he says. The students get it, now. All they needed to become good writers was a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t.
Below are my exchanges with a professor who's been growing roots in her office for nine years.
"I don't know that I buy that for tech writing and editing to prosper, humanities classes have to suffer in stature," I say. "Why would it be a zero-sum game? Why is there this institutional resistance to our students being able to get a job when they graduate?"
A senior professor is appalled. "If that's what they want," she snaps, "They should transfer to the University of Washington."
An junior faculty member asks me how I look at resumes when reviewing them. "First, I look at the Objective," I begin.
"No one looks at Objectives anymore," corrects the same senior professor. "That's, like, so 20 years ago."
"I do."
"No one does."
"I'm saying that I do. Half of the resumes sent to you aren't even relevant to the job for which you're hiring, and that's the quickest way of moving people looking for part-time, FTE editing work out of the full-time, contingent writer pile."
"You could better get that from other sections of the resume."
"No I couldn't. I don't want to spend more than five seconds on a resume I shouldn't even have."
"The average is two minutes," she corrected yet again.
"Like hell it is. Anyway, my only claim is that I look for the objective first. You're really correcting me on what I, myself, do?"
"Hmmm. Maybe objectives are coming back 'in' recently and I haven't heard."
I'm exasperated. "I don't know that they were ever out, except maybe in academic textbooks."
"IT'S NOT JUST ACADEMIC TEXTBOOKS! I get my information by going to job fairs and talking with recruiters from actual companies. Including," she sniffed haughtily, sensing the kill, "Microsoft."
"The HR twinkies you talked to aren't doing the hiring. They never hire anyone except one another. Hiring managers hire. Hence the title. And more often than not, the managers rely on a network of contacts that completely circumvent Twinkie Central."
"Twinkie?"
Yeah, Twinkie. An in someone with zero nutritional value who manages to get a job for which he or she is utterly unqualified. Someone with an improbably long shelf life. Like, say, nine years.
posted by john at 7:05 AM • permalink