It is the intellectuals who have betrayed us

My personal experience in grad school sucks. My course work was great. I loved the classes, the debates, the stimulation. Ok, the last three classes just repeated the same themes as in all my other classes but it was still pretty good. Then I began preparing for my exams. About a month before I was to take my exams my advisor decided to quit teaching altogether. I can't blame her too much. She didn't like teaching undergrads because she thought they were too stupid. Of course, she should not have been a teacher....but I give her credit for at least figuring it out....eventually. It just sucked that she figured it out a month before she was to examine me. But I figured this was ok because my second examiner had actually been attempting to oust my advisor and poach me. She sent one of her students to recruit me. Initially I resisted, but when my advisor abandoned me, I decided to go over to the other side. What a huge mistake. My new advisor had been plotting to leave for some time but she never let any of her students know about it. She was here about a year before she left for some posh job out in California. Which is cool, i respect quality of life issues and all. But I also hate her because she telephoned all the faculty members personally to tell them she had taken another position but waited a full week later to email me about her decision. Of course I already knew about it several days before she sent her email. The sad thing was that she did this to all of her students. After recruiting them so that she would look good in the eyes of the faculty, she then high-tailed it out of town as soon as she could. I was in the middle of writing my prospectus when this happened. On the one hand I was glad she left because her feedback on my drafts was really pathetic. I got the sense that she really was just placating me. In hindsight, I realized she really was. Anyway, I now have my third advisor in a year-and-a-half and I can't figure out which way is up in all of this.

My point is that the tenured faculty at American universities have sold out the non-tenured, the grad students, and even the undergraduates to secure their own comfy seats in the conservative ivory tower. It is in their immediate interest to do this. But what is happening is the liberal professors are pushing more and more people to the margins of academia by not including them into the ranks of tenured professors at precisely the time that conservative university presidents are trying to shrink the numbers of tenured faculty on their campuses. This is a crisis that cannot long continue. Maybe I'm just jaded. After all this is probably not the typical graduate student experience. I am at a second-tier school, perhaps I am jealous of all the smart people at prestigious research schools. I think I just want to teach students and I naively believed that is what academia was all about. Which kind of makes me a damn fool.