If you've graduated, here's Catch 22. You might have done everything right or wrong or half-way, but you won't know the results 'til later. By then you'll have your failure options open and a chance or two to screw up some more. About everybody's in the same boat in case you're worried. With a bit of luck you'll succeed in something or other.

It's not an overly pessimistic view according to both Joseph Heller and the better known, but ficticious Murphy of Murphy's Law. But they didn't invent the absurd. For all you non-English Majors, and some of those too who skipped classical allusions, you won't recall this 2500 year old Greek chestnut: "Call no man happy until he is dead." It's not the first citation of absurdity in human history, but you could Google back further and write a dissertation yourself if you're going nowhere on Punctuation in Middle English.

Sounds like a degree isn't much of a guarantee. Depends. Sure, Harvard beats Okiedokie Law School and even if you have no aptitude for law as a lawyer, it won't matter, except to your clients who'll never know that lousy lawyers graduate too from Harvard OMG. Always room for one more lawyer too. So there is a future at least in prestigious degrees and the Bar. Make that a Whisky Bar.

If you're in a serious quandary about what to do now, I beg your pardon. I've been there myself. Oddly I never got any good advice either. Of course good advice can be wrong, so luckily I didn't have to go through that. Bad advice was the big thing. It was everywhere.

The best bad advice I ever got at university was from three profs who independently agreed that there was no future in teaching as the competition was fierce, openings few, and even if you got in, tenure would probably be dangled forever like a carrot, leading you deeper and deeper into the infernal muck of extremely petty university politics on campus and the equally absurd descent into a meaningless social life at home, entertaining and toadying colleagues to death to score some points before you were dismissed for a trifle. Something downright Dickensian at best. They were right about a lot of moldy ivy colleges, but also very wrong to meddle in someone's future. What made it worse was they were all brilliant in their fields. Like Darwins telling you you had no future in Evolution.



So stick to your guns if you're still aiming for a teaching position or anything else of value to yourself. Ask around. Maybe you'll get some good advice. Not from people with a professional and sometimes secret egomania. They can do it. Nobody else can. Now with the economic meltdown, you'll probably hear the same thing from everybody. Don't waste your time trying to get a faculty position or a fellowship. Better odds with Powerball.

On the practical side you should have some passion and aptitude for your chosen field, beyond a high GPA. Here's where Oprah's Gut Feeling might make sense.

But most of you with your first degree are wondering what to do next, not sure you've landed in the right ballpark or in the right team. A BA or BSc doesn't open many doors. It opens personal ones at least, so there's always value in education even if no one else sees it.

Going on to a higher degree would seem best if you can. This I'd say is foolproof. You're bound to win as you've already got a minor degree in beating the system. Here too you might be able to change or refine your career focus. A complete change of direction is only for the brave. To go from Arts to Medicine via another Bachelor's Degree and wing it for another decade is OK if you're sure you're going to win the Nobel too.

But should you? If you're a nerd, get all the credentials you can. You'll need them. You might even grow out of this phase by working hard or at least convince everybody that you're some kind of genius. It could backfire if you go for multiple PhDs. Then the truth will probably come out, that you're a professional nerd. There's a nervous breakdown hazard too. A nerd space develops.

If you're happy-go-lucky and lucky to boot, there's not much you can't do if you've got some talent and ambition. In any field these are the people who make it. And they make it look easy. But if you want to be a rocket scientist you need a Master's at least. For an artist you can do just about anything as long as you produce. There are some rules.



If you're still not sure what you want to do, then play it safe and stay in school, but browse around and sit in on other classes you're curious about, until you hit something great. It's a U Turn that might work. If you're in a big rut it might be your school or the people you hang out with. Take a higher degree where you want to be, like trading the snowbelt for California.

Packing in education for awhile, to get a job or travel and get back in school later, is also better left to the brave.

Easy to get sidetracked if you can get a decent job by falling into the standard routine of making a living and going into more debt to make yourself comfortable, to reward yourself for working. Often a fatal career move, but if you're lucky you could discover something worth doing and do it. Here you'll be making it on your own. You're bound to get little encouragement and help if you're not so lucky. Your best chances are counting on the family fortune or the family spa business you can take over just in case. If not, you might wind up married with kids before you know it, and slaving away to make it work.

If you are working you'll be the junior and that means everybody will try to steal your ideas and get the credit for your work. Watch out for mentors who say they'll keep you under their wing. Nowadays they'll use you like the bosses you hate, but you won't know it 'til it's too late. Of course there are exceptions, but if you're not as astute as some writers of fiction, you'll be embarrassed at how gullible you can be.

Odds are if you leave school you're not going back, so think about it carefully. If it's too difficult to continue your education for financial or other reasons, then you could make something of your future if you're entrepreneurial or a budding impresario who can manage people and get them to work for themselves and you. Otherwise it's likely to be a 9-5 world.

Then there are those who are tired of school and want a break. See the world while they can. For dilettantes or artists, travel's a good way to find out where you stand. Others might fall in love with the Grape and go into viticulture. History comes alive when you travel and you could find that magic place and period that fills you with wonder. Architecture is best lived too in some fabled old city. If all you know is your own backyard you're likely not to have been exposed to much beyond a dry museum culture. The decaying beauty of Ancient Rome is still in Rome and could inspire you to be a conservationist, a restorer of antiquities, an antiques dealer or historian, maybe a romance novelist or why not an architect? Travel is about discovery.

The trick though about travel is if you save your money for that, you might not go if you have to work for it. Thousands in the bank. Should you go or spend it on an Alfa Romeo Spider? On an extreme makeover? If you want to breeze through Europe or check out some other fantasy for a few months it's expensive and exhausting. It's worth it in the end, but consider working abroad. In a lot of places you can teach English if you have a degree and the easy to get before you go TOEFL certificate. If you don't have these two, you'll be stuck on starvation wages tutoring and washing dishes.

So you've got options. Take one and investigate it first. Make a move when you get that gut feeling.

--Alan Gillis

One thing the French are very proud of is their universities. Not only are standards high, apart from yearly fees of about $300, higher education is free. It's also independent of commercial interests. Big business doesn't have any control over the curriculum like it has in many countries now through financing job training for business and commerce, and university research to suit itself and its goals: profits from new product development. In France you don't go to school to get a job. You get an education first.

The contrast couldn't be more extreme between the high costs other students pay or can't pay and so don't go, and the ready access to education in France. As fundamental, is the decline in education that France has largely avoided, with students more literate before they go to university, and more mature on the need to work once they get in. Anything threatening a solid French education is taken seriously. The new threat is government reform.

Universities are slipping everywhere with huge classes and an assembly line approach. Worse is the trend in many American and European institutions of transforming themselves into extremely expensive glorified Community Colleges, with Arts and Humanities especially relegated to the dustbin of we can't afford this and who needs this anyway. The proposed reforms aren't tackling these problems. French reform is about efficiency, accountability of lecturers-researchers and the value of their research or lack of it. It's also about giving universities more autonomy, a new direction toward a corporate merger with industry and commerce: a new source of financing. It's the current game plan in American Universities for better or worse. The reaction in France from academics and students has been an overwhelming no way!

General mobilizations of profs and students since February 5th against the new proposed law reforming universities, the LRU, have broken out from university campuses into the streets, paralyzing French higher education. From a public Princesse de Clèves read-in in Paris to make a point on the importance of a liberal education, to mass demonstrations against the LRU's barrage of reforms. President Sarkozy and Co are under attack. Some protesters have even accused the President not only of being out of touch with the French esprit but of using poor French to knock the University Establishment, so what does he know about education?

So little it seems that he's alienated 70-odd universities against his reforms, not just students but the lecturers-researchers who started the massive strikes throughout France since his colloquial jab in January at the cushy non-competitive university life enjoyed by unproductive profs and researchers who publish 30% to 50% less (in some disciplines) say than their British counterparts.

In the name of greater university autonomy and efficiency Sarkozy wants to give university presidents, presidential powers over academic staff and researchers and research itself. Staff performance will be reviewed every four years. Researchers who don't publish enough could be punished by having to teach more. Universities will be encouraged to find private financing for research and programs, pitting them against each other. Some 900 jobs cut. Already in place, one in two vacant positions due to retirement, not filled as the Sarkozy policy goes in the Civil Service.

Sarkozy's January get with it speech from the Elysée, in defense of the LRU reforms made public last October by his minister for higher education Valérie Pécresse, has sparked a May '68 reaction that has shutdown nearly all universities in France. Though many lecturers-researchers supporting the strikes are still drawing salaries while they strike, an element of farce not ignored by their non-striking colleagues, still most strikers claim they are trying to save the semester by carrying on with classes where they can, even in cafés. The strikes and marches go on in spite of French government backpedaling on the LRU. Entirely peaceful, good-humored protests that have simply closed down the universities without any use of force.

Only at the Sorbonne in Paris have tensions skyrocketed. The anti-reform movement took the offensive, finally clashing with the forces of order. Here's the direct link, if your reader doesn't support the window below, to a dramatic student video on the Sorbonne occupation from the Sorbonne's student newsmagazine, Contrepoint.

Blocage de la sorbonne 4 mars 2009
by contrepoint

Up until March 4th, the Sorbonne, France's oldest and largest university, managed to remain open until students and profs tried to occupy it twice. The next day they voted for a total strike and now the Sorbonne is under siege by security forces to keep militants out, hundreds of police and private security guards called in by the university administration. With classes disrupted anyway by anti-reform students and profs sneaking in, the lecture halls were finally locked.


Tensions throughout France were high the next day March 5th with planned demonstrations in many cities against La LRU - "mon cul!" and the Loi Pécresse - "mes fesses!" 24,000 to 43,000 marched in Paris countered by 9,000 police, and this just before Pécresse was to announce further concessions the next day.

Over three sessions of negotiations with 4 unions representing many of the 57,000 or so lecturers-researchers, Pécresse modified the LRU, meeting some objections, returning to the status quo on others, but hanging on to one important change:

a peer review of performance every 4 years.
Forcing researchers to teach more if their research performance wasn't good enough, was dropped. And evaluations would not come from the office of a university president as before, but from the CNU, the national university council.

Not good enough for the largest of the unions, Snesup-FSU, which hadn't even participated in the discussions with the government. Le Monde quoted a union representative as "noting" the new "inflections" but they were "far from being sufficient".
If the modified LRU goes ahead now this September it means no jobs cut through 2011.

The main bone of contention, performance evaluation goes ahead without any teeth, amounting to another academic exercise, embarrassing, time-consuming, stressful and perhaps unfair. How do you evaluate research and teaching and then measure it? And couldn't such a process become political?

Though some academics in France and Britain think a movement to accountability on

performance is a good idea. After all it's a well known fact that some researchers don't like teaching and some lecturers aren't good at teaching either. In the end it's the students who pay for these university indulgences. Though how do you fix abuses and poor performance without some penalties attached? How do you avoid alienating the majority of lecturers-researchers who do their best anyway, when you start poking into their careers, or fishing for personal problems they might have that affect their performance?


What it comes down to is an attack on university tenure. It's the same sort of protection awarded to judges in the courts of Europe. Once appointed they aren't accountable for their performance. It makes perfect sense to leave them to do their work, instead of having to defend it. The screening process should be enough to select the best people, and the laws of the land to keep them honest. The judges of the U.S. Supreme Court also have tenure and by and large tenure for university academics is longstanding practice and fundamental to academic freedom most everywhere.


It also means politics can't sink into university life, that profs aren't afraid of being fired for expressing opinions or being critical of anything in society. It's an essential right which shouldn't be compromised by governments and university administrations, even if there are some faults and abuses Sarkozy wants to fix.

In any case tenure is under attack in other ways since the 1960's when many profs supported the students over university policies and government failures. This is a hot issue which only simmers in the university community. If you haven't got tenure, complaining could get you fired.


Tenure used to be automatic after a number of years for an assistant professor. Now it's being withheld at some universities indefinitely on no other grounds except the additional costs of tenure, added salary and benefits and no other way of cutting staff during a downturn. This puts a considerable strain on the younger and financially strapped assistant profs still paying off enormous student loans who perhaps might feel obliged to earn their tenure in other ways, if they can't get it through their academic brilliance. It creates a corporate atmosphere of having to climb the ladder of success, where money, power and position become the objects of university life and politics the means.

The struggle between the French government and the universities goes on. There's no end in sight. A dozen academic and student unions and associations voted March 6th to continue the strikes.

When a million French took to the streets in January to voice their discontent with business and commerce and government inaction on the economic crisis, what could Sarkozy expect when he wanted to fix something French that wasn't broken? --NewsHammer 3/09/2009

French Sources:

Le Monde 7/03/2009, Compromis entre Valérie Pécresse et quatre syndicats sur le statut des enseignants-chercheurs

AFP 5/03/2009, Universités: des milliers de manifestants à Paris et en province

Contrepoint, coverage by students of the Sorbonne

Portail de veille sur le mouvement de l'Université, a message board on the LRU Protest

UniversitésEnLutte, a major association concerned with university issues and the LRU

Sauvonsl'Université, a major association concerned with university issues and the LRU

Elysée 01/22/2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy's speech on LRU reforms, video and transcript


English Sources: UniversityWorldNews

France: Academics strike over job status, 2/01/2009

France: Lecturers strike despite increased funding, 2/08/2009

France: Strikes spread despite mediator, 2/15/2009

France: End to academic strikes?, 3/01/2009

France: Lecturers vote to continue strike, 3/08/2009