CAA News Today

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Delaware Art Museum’s Deaccession Debacle: My Q&A with Its Former Director, Danielle Rice

While the Delaware Art Museum has been the target of considerable criticism among museum professionals for its decision to sell art to repay debts and enhance the endowment, no one has been more distressed by this development than the museum’s own former director, Danielle Rice, who left at the end of August to direct a program in museum leadership at Drexel University. In a candid, in-depth conversation, Rice expressed her strong disapproval of what the trustees did after she left, outlined what should have been done instead, and commented on what lies ahead for her former institution. (Read more from Culturegrrl.)

Detroit Creditors Demand a Full Reckoning of Museum’s Art

The Detroit Institute of Arts has hit an obstacle in its ongoing quest to safeguard its collection from the city’s creditors amid Detroit’s bankruptcy proceedings. Over the past week, two groups of creditors served the museum with wide-ranging subpoenas for records covering the past hundred years and documenting the ownership history of every work in its 60,000-piece collection. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

What I Learned from Organizing a Conference

Conferences are an integral part of developing oneself as an academic, especially for a graduate student. They provide the chance to practice public speaking, are a great way to get feedback on the progress of one’s work, and are one of the best ways to network with others in your field. But what if you want to be on the other side of the conference? What if you want to organize one? (Read more from GradHacker.)

Galleries Are Man’s World, and Micol Hebron Is Keeping Score

While browsing the glossy pages of Artforum, the artist Micol Hebron kept getting the feeling that male artists were disproportionately represented in the magazine’s advertising. “People assumed that there was an inequity there, but no one had any data,” she recalls. “So every time I got the physical magazine, I would count the ads—the full-page ads for single artists—since that tells you who the galleries are putting their weight behind.” Month after month, she says, the count was roughly the same, “Usually, about 70 percent men.” Sometimes it was worse. (Read more from KCET.)

I’m the Biggest Man on Campus

Overweight professors across academe describe similar battles to achieve self-acceptance, full inclusion in academic life, and genuine respect from students and colleagues. Some struggle daily to navigate campus spaces that don’t comfortably accommodate their size. Some stand in front of classrooms and wonder whether their bodies influence how students perceive their minds. Some say they have trouble adhering to exercise plans or healthy eating habits because their jobs come with lots of research and little structure. Yet larger professors often grapple with these concerns in isolation and silence. (Read more from Vitae.)

What Can You Do with a Humanities PhD, Anyway?

There is a widespread belief that humanities PhDs have limited job prospects, yet recent studies suggest that these tragedies do not tell the whole story. It is true that the plate tectonics of academia have been shifting since the 1970s, reducing the number of good jobs available in the field. What is less widely known is between a fifth and a quarter of them go on to work in well-paying jobs in media, corporate America, nonprofits, and government. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

Stuck in the Middle

Associate professors, in theory, should be hitting a stride in their academic careers. In the middle ranks of faculty, they have typically earned tenure and started to take on broader responsibilities in their departments, juggling more service and governance roles with their teaching and research. But the earning power of these professors is diminishing compared with their peers in ranks above and below them. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Room to Grow

Flexibility stigma is a term scholars use to describe work places that punish those who don’t fit the “ideal worker” profile: solely devoted to one’s job, available twenty-four hours a day and traditionally male. Lots of studies suggest that in academe, such biases are particularly prevalent in the sciences, and that women with young children are the most frequent targets. But a new study argues that both men and women with small children report and resent inflexible department cultures. It also finds that even nonparents resent flexibility stigma, with negative consequences for the department over all. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)