The Post-Academic Privilege Divide: Troubling Trends in a Growing Movement

How to Leave Academia founders JC, Kathleen “Currer Bell,” and Lauren collaborated to write this piece after a conversation concerning recent trends and themes we believe are developing in the “post-academic” movement, which we find troubling. In this post, we describe some of the assumptions that we see undergirding recent themes in the “postac community” -- the network of bloggers, writers, and publications that focus on leaving the ivory tower and finding outside employment -- and connect them to a “privilege divide” that we believe exists in today’s visible postacademic movement.

In short: we believe that the most visible and vocal part of today’s post-academic movement is serving primarily (or only) the most privileged post-academics - those who can pay for professional services or who are seeking careers in a specific range of entrepreneurial/writing fields after leaving academia. We would like to call attention to this troubling trend, as we believe that it leaves less privileged post-academics in the lurch when they go looking for advice. We understand that many of our fellow post-acs are currently embarking on entrepreneurial careers related to offering advice to or writing about folks who are leaving academia, and we would like to be clear that we support those ambitions and projects wholeheartedly. However, we strongly believe that the postacademic world at large needs to offer free, open-source advice for all post-academics in all situations, so we would like to stake a claim for our website as a resource for people who may desperately need income/assistance after leaving, or for those who may not want to seek a career related to writing or research or other pseudo-academic fields.

While all post-academics - privileged and nonprivileged - deserve support and advice as they transition out of academia, we believe that less privileged academic leavers need particular, unique types of support that are not being offered by many postac voices today - but that we at HTLA are specifically and deliberately offering with our site. We end this “manifesto” by noting our vision for the post-academic movement and how it (and we) can best serve all post-academics - not just those who can pay or those who will transition into careers that are very close to academia (policy research, curriculum writing, university administration, etc.).

Introduction

Nearly two years ago, JC wrote several posts about privilege in graduate school. She argued that differences in pre-existing privilege between graduate students (who later become adjuncts and faculty) leads to major inequalities in financial and emotional well-being among academics. Her basic thesis was that grad school exacerbates existing class inequalities: that grad school is set up to benefit people who already have financial resources and support, so that privileged grad students have an easier time doing the types of things that make progress and success in the academic world possible (living on meager fellowship money, attending expensive conferences, etc.). Those things that mainly privileged grad students can do, in turn, become the defining criteria by which academic success is identified, so that ultimately the students who are given the most support and have the best job market records after graduation are often those from more privileged backgrounds (since their resumes are full of fellowships, independent research projects, and conferences rather than teaching positions and scut work done for other academics in order to earn extra money to pay their bills).

Unfortunately, we believe that we are now seeing these privilege divides replicating themselves in the post-academic world, whereby post-academics who are more privileged (who can afford to take time off after quitting, or who can pay for new training programs or survive on freelance or part-time work until they land their “dream jobs”) are the targets of much postacademic advice being handed out publicly today. In turn, post-acs who have to take any job they can find out of financial necessity have been are telling the three of us (via emails and blog comments and posts of their own) that they feel somewhat ashamed or even marginalized by the larger postac movement for not having landed the “perfect” postacademic job, or for not working a job that is considered prestigious enough for their education level.

This worries us, since we firmly believe that no one should feel bad about the type of post-academic job they get (see recent posts that touch on this sentiment at all three of our blogs). But perhaps more importantly, we are deeply concerned that the post-academic movement and community may be on its way to marginalizing and even ignoring the financial/emotional crises that many post-academics face after leaving, and the social justice issues therein.

A lot of today’s post-ac advice talks about networking, consulting, freelancing, etc. - activities that a lot of visible post-academics are involved in themselves. And of course, it is easiest to give advice about things that you have firsthand knowledge about - we understand that! But engaging in these activities without another source of income (or a family or partner who can support you) requires a certain level of privilege in order to make it work. And unfortunately, there are many people who want or need to leave academia who do not have that level of privilege. Their first focus must be on paying rent and feeding their kids, and they cannot survive on freelancing work alone, nor can they take some time off to network or to hold out for the “perfect” nonacademic job.

We are beginning to worry that the most visible parts of the post-academic movement are focusing too strongly on the first (more privileged) group of post-academics, and are leaving the less privileged groups out to pasture without advice or support for their particular situations (how to deal with student loans, how to make ends meet, how to deal with emotional fallout in ways other than writing publicly).

When JC first left academia in early 2011, her biggest inspirations in the post-academic blogosphere were Recent PhD of the (apparently shuttered) blog After Academe and the writer of the blog Postacademic in NYC. Both of these early postac bloggers left academia after finishing their Ph.Ds and worked as a secretary and a white-collar temp worker, respectively, before moving onto different positions. JC - who left academia knowing that she needed a full-time job to pay the bills but being unsure of exactly what she wanted to do with her life (because she had never planned for anything but an academic career!) - found both of their stories incredibly inspiring. Their jobs weren’t ideal, but they were still happy, and were utterly convinced that leaving academia was the best choice for them. They gave JC the courage to quit.

In the current post-academic universe, we fear that stories like this are missing, to the detriment of those who are leaving. Of course, we would love nothing more than for every academic leaver (including ourselves!) to be able to move immediately into their dream postacademic job. But the reality for many post-academics looks much different, and we are sad to no longer see stories like RecentPhD’s or PAINYC’s out there, positioned prominently in the post-academic world.

The post-academic movement simply cannot talk about “what academic leavers should do” (during or after their time in grad school) without talking about the wide range of experiences people have in academia, the effects of which they carry with them when they leave. Not everyone networked or thought about postac careers while they were in grad school. Not everyone can afford to take time off after leaving (or even to adjunct or freelance) while they figure out what they want to do next and take a year or so to start earning a real income.

Many post-academics need to find a steady paycheck with benefits before they can think about next steps or long-term career goals. Many will have student loan collectors or credit card companies breathing down their necks after they leave, and will need to formulate a plan for dealing with those issues before they can think about what their ideal postacademic career would be and sacrifice to prepare for it. Yet other people may not even want to seek out a new career immediately after leaving, but may be content to just find an administrative, paper-pushing job that will allow them to spend time with their families and to enjoy their lives away from academia, without the stress of freelancing or entrepreneurship or other such endeavors.

All of those life situations and choices are perfectly valid, and all of those groups of people deserve to be helped by the postacademic movement. Unfortunately, the focus of the public post-academic movement in recent months has noticeably shifted toward the more privileged or ambitious groups, and is leaving the rest of the post-academics without much visible help.

In 2011 and 2012, there were no national news articles about the plight of the post-academic or the adjunct. There were few conversations about these issues on Twitter or Facebook. There were simply a few post-academic bloggers, writing entries in the evenings after their office jobs or during their frantic post-academic job searches. Bloggers sitting on the couch on the weekends, answering emails and responding to comments, offering whatever tiny pieces of advice we could think of to the desperate people who wanted to leave but couldn’t find any help or support outside of our little blogs.

Today, however, post-academia has exploded. We are getting national attention from journalists, Twitter conversations fly fast and furious, and there is a whole industry developing around helping academic leavers negotiate the transition out of academia and onto something new.

That “something new,” however, far too often involves a narrow range of career choices like freelancing, coaching, or working in alt-ac positions in universities. And the new post-academic industry too often reserves its advice for those who can pay, while ignoring the more ad-hoc, casual, unstructured requests for help. Twice in recent memory, editors of this blog have noticed tweets in which potential post-acs asked for general advice about leaving or career guidance from any of the post-acs who are active on Twitter….only to see those tweets go unanswered until one of us from HTLA answered, sometimes hours later.

Meanwhile, post-academic blogs seem to have fallen by the wayside, to a large extent. There are articles in national magazines and websites offering up services for hire to people who want to leave academia...but the old stories of “how I left academia and how you can, too!” are all but missing today. We find this pattern problematic. Post-academia, in our opinion, should be about helping all leavers get through that tough time.

We are not asking all post-academics to pay attention to all groups of academic leavers, or for everyone to offer advice ranging from how to become a freelancer down to how to become a secretary.

However, we would like to directly call out this shift in the public movement and identify it as problematic, and we would like to clearly and directly stake a claim for our space in the post-academic universe. And we are asking the most public and active post-academics to remember that there are other types of (less privileged or less confident) academic leavers out there, and that there are resources out here for them as well.

What How To Leave Academia (HTLA) Offers to the Post-Ac Movement

At How to Leave Academia, we have traced the history of the post-ac movement in some detail, and note that while the movement actually started several decades ago, the past few years have seen exponentially more voices entering the scene (with, surely, more to come). More and more grad students, adjuncts, and full-time faculty are quitting, and we are proud to be significant contributors to the resources available to those who are on their way out of the ivory tower.

But one aspect of How to Leave Academia that is at least somewhat unique is that we are a free, collaborative, peer-to-peer resource, created by post-academics, that offers not just career support, but life support. We are, to our knowledge, the only post-academic clearinghouse that targets struggling post-academics who have to rebuild their lives from the ground up after departing. This was our explicit goal when we started HTLA: from day one, our site has focused primarily on issues of debt, desperation, and hard choices for post-academics who are leaving academia with no safety net to catch them and no idea of how to progress in this new life.

This focus arose from the fact that none of the founders of HTLA were able to financially endure a prolonged period of unemployment (or marginal employment) after leaving, and that all of our post-academic life choices have proceeded from that point. We’ve applied for unemployment; we know what it’s like to feel as though our loans are a life sentence of punishment for graduate school; we struggle to create savings, let alone retirement funds; and, out of necessity, we work jobs we are indifferent to or even hate. Dropping out of grad school or refusing adjunct work was an important step for us, it’s true: but in our cases that step needed to be immediately followed up quickly with something. Putting thought into long-term career plans and into what our skills and strengths are was definitely something we did and continue to do, but by necessity those steps had to come after the steps of “consolidating and starting to pay on our student loans” and “finding a job - any job - that pays actual money so that we can buy food.”

It seems that this reality - that many academic leavers can’t survive a year of adjunct/freelance pay or marginal employment while they figure out what comes next - is being ignored by many in the postacademic movement. Many post-acs who exit grad school or adjuncthood in financial ruin and emotional turmoil are suffering from the consequences of the academic house of cards, yet they are given little to no support (as compared to the attention paid to the “success stories” who leave academia for a prestigious position elsewhere). And further, we worry that the glorification of the success stories (as opposed to the folks who left and are happily working as secretaries) can alienate some people who want to leave, but worry that they will be “doing it wrong” if they don’t find an awesome, Ph.D-level job right away.

Because of our experiences, we all believe that new post-academics need more than platitudes about “unlocking career potential” or “beginning new learning journeys,” and they need more than rousing rants about the corruption of academia or advice about how to find an industry research job. Those things are certainly important in the postacademic journey … but “not becoming homeless” is also important. And for many less-privileged academics, adjuncts, and grad students, “becoming homeless” is a very real fear. And getting yourself gainfully employed after you leave - no matter what job you take - is a goal that the postacademic movement needs to highlight and champion.

Rants and mental exercises and virtual support sessions for launching a freelance career are great, but post-academics also need practical, compassionate advice about entering the world of “9-5 employment,” if that’s what they have to do to survive. Historically, websites and articles have touched on this, but today’s public postacademic movement is absolutely not focused on those mundane, “how to survive in an office job while you get back on your feet” types of things. We at HTLA want to stake our claim for that audience of post-acs, and want to state - loudly and clearly - that that type of life choice is a good and valid one that should be applauded.

The fact that this is not currently happening - that twitter calls for people to “network” get more attention than any acknowledgement that some people need to find “any job” after leaving, and that coaching businesses are booming while publicly-accessible postacademic blogs are falling by the wayside - has led us to conclude something that is hard and sad for the three of us to come to terms with.

Yes, Virginia: there is a privilege divide in the post-academic movement.

A Way Forward

We neither demand nor expect that everyone agree with our critiques about today’s postacademic movement or with our stance on the future of post-academia, but we are hoping that more folks will share our vision. So what are our hopes for the postac movement, and our personal goals going forward?

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  We want career advice for post-academics to be broad, and take into account the variation in privilege, positionality, and resources of post-academics.

  
  


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  We want open-source stories, advice, and information to be available. Those who want to pay for access are welcome to do so, but that should not be the only way for post-acs to receive information and help. Because not everyone can pay.

  
  


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  We want a shift from ranting to genuine, purposeful critique; support; and a sense of community responsibility to advocate for others in the same position, or positions different from our own.

  
  

The lone genius in the ivory tower, the cutthroat competition within subfields of subfields of study, the ruthless job market, the inherent privilege bias on the ladder to success: post-academia is dangerously close to replicating these structural disasters that we all recognize in academia. Is this what we really want to reproduce - the prestige-based and unequal structure that we all fled academic to escape? What if the post-academic movement was instead about collaborative creation, mutual support, and social justice and was available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay?

For our part, we hope to live out these values in the collaborative space of How to Leave Academia, where the advice will always be free and written by post-academics on a volunteer basis, where ads will always be free, and where we will soon have a free, open forum for postacademics to seek help and advice. Our e-book, Moving On: Essays on the Aftermath of Leaving Academia, is value-priced so it is affordable for anyone who wants it, and its proceeds will go towards maintaining and expanding the site for the postac community. And we will continue to rattle our swords for structural reform to higher education (since we have no skin in the game other than a volunteer-staffed website), and will continue to offer advice for all post-academics, not just those who can pay.

We hope that other post-academics will follow suit, or will at least pay attention to different (less privileged) groups of academic leavers … and point them to the free resources that are out there. After all, we are all in this together. And if you remember how scared you were when you left and how grateful you were for the support that you received from those of us who were already out here … you should realize how important it is for those resources to be out here for everyone.

What Does It Mean to Be Postacademic? A #postac Manifesto

Currer Bell and I collaborated to write this. We welcome your feedback.

Recently, the crises in higher education have sparked numerous discussions regarding academic institutional reform. Many of these conversations have been started by the various stakeholders in academic cultures -- Deans, Regents, tenured and contingent faculty, and current and former graduate students (among others). Also in conversation are those individuals more tangentially related to the academy in alt-ac positions that are affiliated with but peripheral to traditional academic disciplinary structures and organizations.

But what about those who have left the “academy,” literally or psychologically/philosophically? For these individuals, we have taken up the term, “post-ac” or “postacademic.” We feel that there is an important distinction to be made between post-ac and alt-ac, and wish to account for that difference here. In our experience, post-ac is more than just being outside of academia or past one’s academic career: it’s a set of values about, and way of relating to, academia. We envision “postacademic”/”post-ac”/the “postacademic movement” as a separate (but related) phenomenon from alt-ac with its own history and its own momentum. If alt-ac is the good daughter of academe, post-ac is the family’s black sheep--ready to air the dirty laundry in the hopes of shaking up the (damaging and corrupt) status quo.

What Is Alt-ac?

First, we think it's important to articulate our understanding of "alt-ac." We draw primarily on resources linked from the Alt-Academy website, mostly written by Beth Nowviskie. This seems to be the clearinghouse for alt-ac conversations, although we know that some might disagree with or dispute our interpretation of this term. In "Alt-ac in context," Nowviskie writes of alt-ac:

... it's really about an alternative academia, a new imagination for the systems in which we operate.

Nowviskie coined the phrase alt-ac to disrupt the binary thinking in academia, in which there are only two options: valid, academic careers, and invalid "non-academic" careers. She writes in "Two and a Half Cheers for the Lunaticks:"

Too much of the discourse suggested that, beyond tenure-eligible employment, you may either be an adjunct in Limbo (presumed to be seeking a “real” academic job) or someone who has moved beyond the Pale, to a “non-academic” career. “Academic-as-fulltime-faculty” or a “non-academic” everything-else. That was it, that was the message we were giving our grad students. But my own experience was very different — first as a member of UVa’s research faculty (my final title in that role was Senior Research Scientist – perhaps the only one ever with an English PhD) and later in leadership roles in a library, a digital humanities lab, a university-based think-tank, and a number of professional societies – all of which certainly felt to me like academic employment. So, a couple of years ago, I began to see a clear need for a banner (a temporary one, I’ll emphasize) under which to host conversations about the special challenges and opportunities facing humanities scholars who choose to keep their talents within the academy but who work outside the narrow zone for which grad school prepared them.

But Nowviskie goes on to elaborate that in her mind, alt-ac is more than merely about where you find work. It's also about practices and relations to the academic institution. She describes alt-acers as "hybrid humanities scholars" for whom "service was never a dirty word" and collaboration, sometimes messy collaboration, is standard (versus the lone genius in the tower with a candle) ("Alt-ac in context"). Currer and I note the importance of this open source attitude, evidenced by the Alt-academy website, which is a "grassroots, publish-then-filter approach to networked scholarly communication" ("How It Works"). William Pannapacker believes this fresh and flexible approach to academic training is the reason that "alt-ac is the future of the academy."  It should be noted that alt-ac is not synonymous with the Digital Humanities. As Michael Berube has written, the two share similar values and mission and have become the repositories of hope for folks in academia: “The alt-ac discussion also tends to be conflated (reductively and mistakenly) with the DH discussion—that is, the emergence of the digital humanities, onto which, in recent years, we have deposited so many of our hopes and anxieties. Somehow we expect the digital humanities to revolutionize scholarly communication, save university presses, crowdsource peer review, and provide humanities Ph.D.'s with good jobs in libraries, institutes, nonprofits, and innovative start-ups.” (“The Humanities, Unraveled”)

See here and here for more lengthy definitional excursions about what alt-ac means. You may also be interested in this Storify conversation, in which I ask a number of alt and post-academic folks to articulate the difference between alt and post-ac.

Currer and I note that alt-ac is at heart scholarly. It is interested in research, publication, and disciplinary conversation. “Academic” is an active and meaningful identity to an altac person. Alt-acers call themselves “Dr. So and So” and/or identify as academics. Alt-ac has people who identify as “independent scholars.” They maintain CVs. Alt-acers often maintain a research (or R&D) and publication profile, and bring their disciplinary training to bear every day on problem sets of great importance to higher education. ("Alt-ac in context") We also noted that alt-ac conversations often encourage people to finish graduate school and thrive in academia, and to maintain academic activity even if not working on the tenure track. Alt-ac sites/bloggers also invite others to openly share their tips/tricks and “hack” institutional life (e.g. Gradhacker, Profhacker). This seems to be part of the service/open source ethos of alt-ac. To cut through, to a certain extent, the BS.

Alt-acers want to “do academia on their own terms” (Brenda, comment on “Are Post-Ac Bloggers...” at Mama Nervosa). Alt-ac is minimally concerned with the “wholly non-academic (what-color-is-your-parachute, maybe-should-have-gotten-an-MBA) job” (Nowviskie on Prof Hacker). Yet there is an emerging interest in academic entrepreneurship, which expands the definition of “academic” in an interesting way, but also calls into question the parameters that bound alt-ac. (See here as well.) What about people employed at for-profit schools? Are they alt-ac? What if you write novels after leaving grad school, like Barbara Kingsolver: is she alt-ac because she draws on her science graduate work when she crafts fiction? Where does alt-ac end and post-ac begin?

Currer and I feel like there are some problematic hierarchies at work within alt-ac that might reproduce the same marginalization and inequality that already plagues traditional relations in the academy. This is especially concerning when we consider that alt-ac conversations take place in graduate departments across the country, as frustrated faculty frantically try to find places for their graduates to go after the degree. Often, alt-ac careers -- Special Collections librarian, grant writing, adjuncting -- are the only alternatives to faculty work mentioned to graduate students by their advisors and mentors who do not know/understand life outside the academy.

Who is Alt Ac?

And here we mean more than just who "counts" as an alternative academic, but who is doing the talking about Alt-ac. Who are the alt-ac pros?

Alt-ac includes people with academic backgrounds who now work in “alternative” academic careers (Alt-academy says “off the tenure track but within the academic orbit”). Many proponents of the alt-ac mission hold advanced degrees and have prestigious appointments in traditional academic departments (e.g. Beth Nowviskie, Director of Digital Scholarship), in unique centers or projects housed in traditional institutions of higher learning and affiliated cultural institutions; but many are also adjuncts, grad students, or part-timers.

Alt-Ac is peopled with current graduate students who plan to finish their degrees and seek vocations in institutions of higher learning, or other legitimate and related cultural institutions, but do not plan to apply for or work as tenure-track faculty.

Where is Alt Ac?

And by this we are wondering where these conversations are occurring and how people access the alt-ac world. As we perused articles and websites devoted to alt-ac, we noticed that it is primarily in the academy. It is in universities and sanctioned satellite cultural institutions, such as libraries and museums, but it is primarily in institutions of higher education. Alt-ac conversations take place on websites hosted by institutions of higher education. Alt-ac conversations take place at conventions hosted by traditional academic entities, e.g. MLA 2013 featured panels about alt-ac careers for humanities scholars.

Alt-ac conversations take place on the internet in the form of career path advice websites such as Versatile PhD and #Alt-academy, both of which originated as institutionally sponsored projects (VersatilePhD originated as WRK4US, a listserv affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and hosted by Duke U, and#Alt-academy is affiliated with a think tank and hosted by NYU’s Digital Library). Both are open to the public (except some parts of Versatile PhD, which require institutional affiliation and subscription). Alt-ac is all over twitter as well.

What Reform Does Alt-Ac Seek?

From our reading, we created this list of reform actions that we feel the alt-ac community generally supports. Reform that:

• Improves the working conditions of adjuncts as an issue of pressing importance to the future of higher ed, and as an issue that addresses troubling class/labor divisions among tenured faculty, contingent faculty, and staff/service “alternative” academics.


• Transforms graduate education to prepare grad students with more skills for work beyond tenured professorhood. (see for example)
  Opens up the academy, breaks down barriers between the ivory tower and the real world, encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration and conversation. Interested in democratizing knowledge. See for example Visible Margin, a publication of Alt-academy. Alt-ac is willing to acknowledge messy process and the pain of transformation.


• Transforms disciplinary conversations to broaden the application of their theories and concepts beyond traditional academic genres and roles. Alt-acers maintain a strong grounding in their home disciplines and seek to expand what is legitimately embraced in academic conversations (example: “The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities currently features projects that employ mapping, transcription, and augmented reality technologies to make research in textual fields like history and literature more accessible to researchers and non-researchers alike.  Also see “Who We Are” at Alt-academy.

As already noted, Alt-ac is seen by some as the “future” of the academy. The academy will become alt-ac.

In contrast, we offer the following working explication of post-ac as distinct from alt-ac in definition, population, and practice.

 

What is Post-Ac?
At its most basic, post-ac is departure from the academy, either by choice or force. This is the most common definition of post-ac, the most literal take on what it means.   But we think post-ac is more complex than this. Post-ac is a separate movement, perhaps developing from, alt-ac discussions. See here for a rough timeline of these movements.

Post-ac can be both a refusal or an inability to engage with the academy. Post-acs opt out or get shut out. Post-ac is at heart a state of disillusionment.

Post-ac is an identity or way of identifying in relation to the institution of academia, and a belief that the current system is flawed, cruel, unsustainable, and therefore impossible to directly engage with (probably other adjectives could be included here). Lauren once wrote:

I see alt-ac mostly for grad students who plan to stay, selling them the notion that staying is wise and there are options that they can learn to love as much as they loved the fantasy of being a professor. This feels markedly different from the conversations in the post-ac blogging world, which are about breaking with the academy. Our pain is disjuncture from the identity that I think alt-ac is trying to maintain and expand. Our topics and methods feel similar, but our projects feel different.

For many post-acers, post-ac means being “over” academia. It is an identity characterized by completely divorcing oneself and one’s identity as an adult away from academia, as a thinker/writer/worker, away from the academy. (see Jen Polk, Amanda Krauss) Life eventually goes on for post-acers, although the academic experience is indelibly a part of who we are now. However, we claim/practice our academic identity differently than alt-acers. Post-ac makes clear that academia or higher ed is a place of work just like every other place of work. It shouldn't be exalted as a special place, as a place devoid of conflict or problems, or as an ideal. When the academy is demystified, leaving it or staying in it become less charged choices.

Post-ac is primarily interested in helping the academically disenfranchised move on with life. Post-ac is focused on vocation inasmuch as you need an income to have shelter and food. Post-ac is interested in helping people find any job that can help them be healthy and financially solvent, and eventually a career path (whatever it may be, we don’t judge) that might even be fulfilling. That a post-acer may end up working in an alt-ac capacity is incidental to that person’s particular skillset and desires; we believe that it is possible to work in alt-ac but “be” post-ac. (Lauren, for example, does not consider herself alt-ac although she does work in an alt-ac capacity.) Post-ac is interested in issues of personal life and identity as well as vocational prospects. Post-ac is less concerned with “refashioning academic identity” as it is in helping people move on from their academic experience and build a new life and identity that is not centered around vocation or institutional affiliation. This is a hard process, and we acknowledge a lot of pain. Post-ac acknowledges the enormity of the crisis of un- and underemployment for grad students. Post-ac places a higher premium on being able to pay your bills than on CV lines. Post-ac is interested in survival. Post-ac has no shame about corporate employment, welfare, “selling out,” or the need to talk about dollars and cents when it comes to jobs and debt. Post-ac does not care if you finish grad school or not, and does not share productivity tips or talk about surviving the dissertation. Post-ac is a critique of the academy, its mythology, and its structure.

Post-ac discourages people from pursuing graduate work.

Post-ac no longer feels that school is an answer to many of life’s problems. We are skeptical that institutions will be able to fully address the reform needs of students.

We have a hunch that the future of rich, intellectual conversations might exist outside of institutions or conventions that cost hundreds of dollars. Maybe the future exists on some kind of information superhighway filled with smart people. Maybe.

And we're kinda hoping to reduce application and enrollment in graduate study a la Pannapacker. (Is Pannapacker post-ac? We think so. Is Berube? Maybe!)

Like alt-ac, post-ac wants to demystify the workings of academia and debunk myths about academic life. We hope to expose the flaws and negativity that exist within current academic insitutions, genres, processes, and relations, and opens the conversation about academia to include negative, dissatisfying, discouraging, sobering, emotional topics.

Where Do Post-Ac Conversations Take Place? Where does Post-Ac exist?
Post-ac is primarily ex (outside) the institutions of academia. It is on personal blogs of people who have left academia. It does not have access to institutional journals. Post-ac did not have a panel at MLA.

Who Is Post-Ac?
Grad school quittas.
People who hold advanced degrees but have not pursued academic employment.
People who hold advanced degrees and tried to secure academic employment but were unable to.
People who adjuncted and then quit.
VAPs and profs who bailed on academic life.

Some individuals who are currently in the academy -- administrators, faculty, and graduate students -- but dissatisfied with its current state and are actively seeking reform might consider themselves post-ac.

Post-acers may or may not maintain a strong allegiance to their home disciplines, and may not feel a strong need to talk about their fields of former study much once they’ve abandoned them. Although obviously all post-acers draw on their graduate education to find employment, and in their daily lives, they are not preoccupied with the synergy between academia and the real world, or their regular jobs.

Post-acers do not typically  identify as academics, use their official designations (PhD, Dr.), or call themselves “independent scholars.” They may go on to craft an identity (not just a career) that is completely removed from their former life as an academic. Some may call themselves “recovering” or “ex-academics.” If you’re recovering from academia, you’re probably post-ac.

Post-Ac is Interested In Reform That:

• Encourages people to look beyond the tenure track, but also beyond institutions of learning, for meaningful work.


• Is practical and serves the needs of graduate students, not the needs of faculty, departments, or schools.


• Improves working conditions for adjuncts but also encourages people to quit adjuncting.

Because we're writing this history as it happens, we know this may change over time, that these movements might merge or diverge more than they do now. But we think it's important to note that post-ac and alt-ac are not completely synonymous. We hope folks will chime in and add their perspective to this conversation!