Monoculture week: The big idea in two nutshells.

"I found myself reading Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything non-stop, with a pencil in hand, underlining like crazy. That totally took me by surprise, but then, I didn’t know I’d be reading an astute explanation about what I’ve been feeling recently, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It’s an uncomfortable sense of how everything seems to be monetized, from our work to our personal relationships to our education to our creativity to our charity work. A sense that nothing should be attempted unless its value can be measured and brings advantage.  A sense that we should be motivated by keeping up and constantly improving and optimizing ourselves, as if who we are and what we’re doing isn’t and never will be enough because there’s always something new to be achieved."

- Kassie Rose, NPR Ohio (full review here)

and

"Oooh, that's a beautiful bubble book!"

- Tiny Niece, age 3, while rubbing the cover over her cheek.  

Daily Bird 75: Out of the nest you go!

Or on making a book. 

There's a lot of talk about the future of publishing these days. About the nature of a book. About its form and its value in an increasingly digital environment. It's quite the jungle gym out there.

As is our Hedgie nature, we think books can be winged things that carry stories and ideas to friends known and unknown. That's the nature of most things that are created to be shared - along the way they create conversations and communities. 

A good book is a difficult thing to make. A good smart book filled with big ideas? And then produced and distributed independently? Well that is both difficult and a wondrous thing among us. And something I want to help out of the nest.

One of our own little Hedgies, F.S. Michaels,  has produced a good smart independent book called Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything.

Here's the gist: 

As human beings, we’ve always told stories: stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, narrowing our diversity and creating a monoculture. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world — your work, your relationships with others and the environment, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity — are changing, or have already changed, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And because how you think shapes how you act, the monoculture isn’t just changing your mind — it’s changing your life.

In Monoculture, F.S. Michaels draws on extensive research and makes surprising connections among disciplines to take a big-picture look at how one story is changing everything. Her research and writing have been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Killam Trusts, and regional and municipal arts councils. Michaels has an MBA, and lives and writes in British Columbia. 

I had the opportunity to help a little in getting this book on its way. I am an unabashed fan of the writer and a wannabe builder of the conversations that will take place around these big ideas. In the meantime, during Monoculture week at the Hedge, we're going to give this winged thing a little push out of the nest. Y'all come back now...

PhDs and time-wasting.

The Economist posted an article the other day about why PhDs are often a waste of time:

Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

To that I’d like to add that as someone who spent 5 years in a business PhD program and then left to do something I found more interesting (research and writing for a broader, non-specialist audience, not to mention gardening and renovating), I think the problem exists for “professional doctorates” too.

If you’re at a top research school, the “practical value” that your degree has isn’t so practical. At my school, for example, people were socialized away from being interested in something like human resources, mostly through criticism and public humiliation, and socialized toward theory that never seemed to have much practical utility at all.

Let me say too that theory CAN be incredibly practical - theory drives practice in many ways. But some theoretical conversations, even in business, are extreme examples of navel-gazing - of interest to a handful of specialists who cite each other’s work and keep each other’s careers buoyant, and of not much interest or use to anyone else.

I started the Phd program because I was incredibly interested in following a particular idea to its natural end. I thought academia was the place to do that, the place to pursue ideas, and research and writing. I was mostly wrong.

The changes that have been ongoing in academia since the 1970s - changes that have to do with the rise of the economic story in higher education - mean universities aren’t what they used to be.

Ideas don’t get the same play that they once did. There’s an academic underclass forming, fewer jobs all the time, and yet my old school still posts on its webpage that their students who graduate go on to great positions and six-figure salaries. When classmates a couple of years ahead of me had a hard time getting jobs, eventually getting hired on different continents that they never wanted to go to, for not as much money as they had hope for, faculty seemed genuinely puzzled. I still don’t know if they were just willfully ignorant about the changes in the system or believed, as many of them do, that if you’re having problems, it must be your own fault somehow - not the system’s.

In my experience, PhD-land ended up being more about careerism and doing work that would get you graduated and then get you tenure at a school that would push your alma mater up in the rankings, regardless of what your true interests were.

When I finally figured that out, I decided to follow my own interests anyway. In my case, the research and writing that I did ended up in the book MONOCULTURE instead of in a PhD dissertation.

And I’m OK with that. The learning that I did at school was absolutely not a waste of time, but it was almost 100% self-directed and I had to fight for it, though because I had external funding (from national science councils instead of from my department), I had much more latitude to pursue my own interests while I was there.

But I found that where I was, the degree process itself, sad to say, was no longer about the learning. And that truly makes a PhD a colossal waste of time.