This recent post here at HTLA has me thinking about the way we conceive of our post-ac careers. We hear lots about the career “path” - heck, I’ve used this language myself - but a path implies a linear progression, something mapped out, progressive, and even logical. But I think pinball might be a better metaphor, at least for some of us. We may bounce from job to job for sometime. We may shoot across the board to a totally different work or field than we’d originally intended, for a variety of reasons, some purposeful (“I want a different job”) and some incidental (“I’m moving, we’re downsizing, I need benefits, I’m having kids” - whatever).
I thought it might be illuminating to talk about the different career trajectories of people who have worked in my office in academic advising (anonymously and without identifying details). Many of the people hired here have backgrounds and advanced degrees in humanities, social sciences, etc, so I think their career trajectories will illustrate how much things can change -- may change -- for post-acs. I also want to normalize this fact of life: everything doesn’t proceed in a straight, beautiful line. I think this is much more common than we may realize, especially as we start out in the “real world.”
This is just a sampling of people I know about, not necessarily know personally. Again, identifying details removed, and this is purely anecdotal. We have a big office with somewhat high turnover, so I have a lot of examples here.
Advisor Amy
Field: anthropology
Advisor: 3 years
What came next? Went back to school to become a nurse.
Advisor Betty
Field: women’s studies
Advisor: 4 years
What came next? Full-time English position at a Community College.
Advisor Craig
Field: unknown
Advisor: 7 years
What came next? Moved to be closer to home, admin position at small liberal arts school.
Advisor Dan
Field: English
Advisor: 8 years and counting
What came next? Nothing, likes the job and moving up the ladder.
Advisor Eleanor
Field: Architecture
Advisor: 9 months
What came next? Moved due to partner relocation, now advising at another major University.
Advisor Fritz
Field: unknown
Advisor: many years
What came next? Went back to school for Counseling Psychology degree.
Advisor Gru
Field: Education
Advisor: 2 years
What came next? Did side work for a testing org that turned into a FT job.
Advisor Harrison
Field: English
Advisor: 20+ years
What came next? Still in advising working primarily with pre-med students.
Advisor Ingrid
Field: Theater
Advisor: 2 years
What came next? Adjuncted for awhile, then FT lectureship in Theater department.
Advisor Jan
Field: Communication
Advisor: 3 years
What came next? Left to be a full time mother.
Advisor Kevin
Field: American Studies
Advisor: 3 years
What came next? Moved because partner went to grad school in different state, became full-time father for awhile.
Advisor Letitia
Field: Psychology
Advisor: 5 years
What came next? Moved into a senior advising position in an academic department unrelated to field of study.
Advisor Magnus
Field: Engineering
Advisor: 7 years
What came next? Took a position at a rural CC to create a new pre-Engineering program.
Advisor Nina
Field: unknown
Advisor: 1 year
What came next? Took a position at a small lib arts school where had been adjuncting during grad school, works with first year orientation.
You can see here that for some, advising becomes the new career path, and for some it's a "just for now" job. Some job opportunities came along, some made choices based on life circumstance, some progressed into new positions along the same lines as advising. Some end up in positions closely tied to their field of study, some work in something unrelated. Some stay! And so it goes.
Showing posts with label post-ac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-ac. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Privilege Divide Clarified
The response to our recent post on privilege in post-ac has been animated and contentious. We've heard from folks experiencing the "divide" we described, and from detractors who disagreed with the content and purpose of the post. We briefly wanted to clarify our goals for the post.
First, mistake: "privilege" is a loaded word, and we regret using it in this context, as we can see that the focus of the discussion has been on that concept rather than the message we were trying to convey. What we hope is that active post-ac and alt-acers will recognize the relative ability of people quitting academia to access the resources and conversations essential to moving on. We hope that alt- and post-ac can be more inclusive and sensitive to this reality.
Second, error: we should have pointed out the resources that are freely available. VersatilePhD is a great resource. Vitae is growing and becoming more inclusive of post-ac materials, and is free. We are really glad these are out there. Props to both.
Twitter may be free, but it's not a democratic playground. There is relativity to access and presence on twitter. We would like to see other venues for engagement and networking that don't rely on 24/7 access to twitter. Twitter is great, but it has limitations. We're not condemning it (we use it) but hoping that as post-ac grows, its online presence diversifies.
We wish we'd framed our conversation more as our goals for -- hopes for -- post-ac as it flourishes and less as a critique that can be interpreted as "sour grapes" or just plain ignorant.
First, mistake: "privilege" is a loaded word, and we regret using it in this context, as we can see that the focus of the discussion has been on that concept rather than the message we were trying to convey. What we hope is that active post-ac and alt-acers will recognize the relative ability of people quitting academia to access the resources and conversations essential to moving on. We hope that alt- and post-ac can be more inclusive and sensitive to this reality.
Second, error: we should have pointed out the resources that are freely available. VersatilePhD is a great resource. Vitae is growing and becoming more inclusive of post-ac materials, and is free. We are really glad these are out there. Props to both.
Twitter may be free, but it's not a democratic playground. There is relativity to access and presence on twitter. We would like to see other venues for engagement and networking that don't rely on 24/7 access to twitter. Twitter is great, but it has limitations. We're not condemning it (we use it) but hoping that as post-ac grows, its online presence diversifies.
We wish we'd framed our conversation more as our goals for -- hopes for -- post-ac as it flourishes and less as a critique that can be interpreted as "sour grapes" or just plain ignorant.
Monday, March 3, 2014
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?
We want career advice for post-academics to be broad, and take into account the variation in privilege, positionality, and resources of post-academics.
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.
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.
Friday, November 1, 2013
"Finding Life After Academia...:" HTLA, Currer, and Lauren featured in NYT Article
The New York Times published a thorough and interesting article about the trend of post-ac and alt-ac in the last few years. Journalist Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow covers the gamut from Versatile PhD meetups to reports done by the Council on Grad Students, NSF, and Stanford. Currer Bell and yours truly are featured on the second page, linking to HTLA, Currer's article about hating your post-ac job, and our co-authored post-ac manifesto.
We're really proud of our work here, and we want to thank Rebecca for the article!
We're really proud of our work here, and we want to thank Rebecca for the article!
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Academic Advising as a Post-Ac or Alt-Ac Career: Info and Advice
This post originally appeared on my personal blog, Mama Nervosa.
It’s been awhile since I rapped at ya about alt-ac life and my work as an academic advisor. Last year, when I started my position as an undergraduate advisor at an R1 school, I wrote extensively about what it was like, how it felt, etc etc. I haven’t written about it since then because, well, it’s work, and eventually it stops being that novel and compelling and just becomes your day job. Nevertheless, I get regular queries from friends and readers who want to know what the work is like and how it’s going, so I wanted to give you an update at just under 1 year of work as an advisor. Obviously, this reflects my personal experience and doesn't speak for all advisors in every context (although a colleague in my office with 20 years' experience read this and said it was pretty representative of our gig, at our school). YMMV.
What is Advising Like? Who Is Cut Out For It?
Overall, I like advising. I work with students almost all day, every day, and feel satisfied that I make a difference in their college experience. Although the relationships aren’t as in depth as teaching, I do get to know my 200-odd students well. If you enjoy teaching at the college level, and like freshmen and their quirks and personal issues, then you’ll probably like advising.
Advising keeps me on my toes. There’s always something new happening, and the way advising is set up at my U means that I work with students across a variety of disciplines, which is cool. If you are behind the whole liberal arts mission and enjoy hearing about and learning about stuff happening in different departments, you’ll probably like advising. On the other hand, if you like a lot of consistency, advising can be challenging. Rules, requirements, and policy change all the time. Just when you get something figured out, it will change on you.
Advising can be stressful, but there is really no such thing as an academic emergency. I think that people who can avoid taking on their students problems, emotions, or decisions will find advising less stressful than people who will fret over a student’s schedule or whatever. I can lament a student’s choice or look at something and say “uh oh,” but at the end of the day all I can do is what my job title says: advise. The rest is on the student.
A lot of advising stress comes from the feast-or-famine intensity of it. Some weeks, we are working very hard from the minute we hit the door to the minute we leave. We’re dealing with last minute crises, making phone calls, seeing a dozen students. The next month, we may see two or three students total. We may have nothing on our calendar, and few responsibilities, meetings, or tasks. It’s extremes with few periods of regularity. I kind of enjoy that, because I know the intense periods end, and I don't struggle to find something to do during down time, although I often struggle with boredom. But for some people, the unpredictability is really challenging.
The things I enjoy least about my job are things most people don’t enjoy about jobs. Being here for 40 hours can be a drag, especially if I’ve wrapped up my work early. Meetings are… meetings
. Sometimes productive, sometimes frustrating. Advising focuses quite a lot on broad, institution-wide, bureaucratic stuff. There’s a TON of policy and procedure talk. We can be at the mercy of administration at times. This is higher ed, after all!
I tell you what, though, I love getting paid. I enjoy my weekends and evenings free from grading, prepping, or student emails. I like coming to work, having a special place where I do my work, and then leaving it all behind when I depart at the end of the day. I like the social nature of the work, and have great colleagues. I think there’s far too much ignorant poo-pooing of working life among grad students. Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.
My situation is unique to my school, its advising structure, and the (frankly) amazing group of people I work with. And to me and my preferences. I never got super hung up on research or fell deeply in love with my discipline in grad school. I like students, and I can get into just about anything. Every school has a different way of doing advising, but in my opinion, it’s a great career option for teaching-oriented grad students. I hope someday I can get back into teaching, but in general, this is a good place to land if you care about students and like academics.
So how can you get into advising?
As always, your mileage may vary, caveat, etc etc. But here’s what I think:
Work closely with college freshmen. TA, tutor, etc. Teaching experience at the college level is a huge factor in the hiring done at my center. Work with different populations of students — high achieving, low achieving, first gen, transfer, international, whatever. You’ll need lots of stories and strategies to work with different students towards their goals.
Do some research about the school you’re applying to so you can speak to their specific population, resources, challenges, etc. Being knowledgeable about the school makes you stand out. A metropolitan campus with a largely commuter population will have very different issues in advising than a flagship state school in an agricultural town in the middle of nowhere. If you have time, do some light research in advising websites and journals about advising any special groups that that school serves (NACADA is the place to start). Does this school have a large Native American population? Learn a little about advising them. Is the position for a special subset of student, such as Honors? Learn about it. If you have institutional access, you should be able to read journals and such. But don't get carried away -- this isn't grad school!
Learn about the advising structure of that school beforehand if possible. Is it a large center or small? Will you be in a department, or an office that acts only as an advising center? Is advising mandatory or optional? Will you work with one major or multiple? This is good in terms of preparing for an interview, but also in terms of understanding if you want this gig. I work at a large advising center that serves mostly first- and second-year students, and advising is mandatory. I like this setup because I don’t have to deal with faculty meetings and my students are compelled to come sit in my office, which is better for both of us.
Look at the backgrounds of advisors at that school, if possible. It seems that some schools are very open to, or even actively seek, former academics to staff their advising. Other schools may lean more heavily towards people with backgrounds in higher ed admin or student services. This may help you suss out your likelihood as a candidate. Again, there is a huge variance across schools as to how advising is structured, staffed, and managed.
Lastly, think about what you can contribute as a colleague. This is kind of different from how grad students typically think of work life, because teaching and research are largely independent activities. But advising is often a team thing, and people will want to know what it will be like to work with you. If you can speak to experience team-teaching, collaborating, etc, that will probably be good. Sound competent and fun.
You may want to do an informational interview or ask to do some job shadowing at an advising center. Although I’ve never heard of that happening at my center, I can’t imagine we’d have a problem with it, although you may not get to sit in on student meetings due to privacy concerns. The more you can speak to the actual work of advising, versus the fantasy or hypothetical, the better your candidacy is. In my humble, novice, non-hiring committee opinion.
So there you have it: my final say on advising as an alt-ac career for quittas and post-PhD leavers. Feel free to ask questions!
It’s been awhile since I rapped at ya about alt-ac life and my work as an academic advisor. Last year, when I started my position as an undergraduate advisor at an R1 school, I wrote extensively about what it was like, how it felt, etc etc. I haven’t written about it since then because, well, it’s work, and eventually it stops being that novel and compelling and just becomes your day job. Nevertheless, I get regular queries from friends and readers who want to know what the work is like and how it’s going, so I wanted to give you an update at just under 1 year of work as an advisor. Obviously, this reflects my personal experience and doesn't speak for all advisors in every context (although a colleague in my office with 20 years' experience read this and said it was pretty representative of our gig, at our school). YMMV.
What is Advising Like? Who Is Cut Out For It?
Overall, I like advising. I work with students almost all day, every day, and feel satisfied that I make a difference in their college experience. Although the relationships aren’t as in depth as teaching, I do get to know my 200-odd students well. If you enjoy teaching at the college level, and like freshmen and their quirks and personal issues, then you’ll probably like advising.
Advising keeps me on my toes. There’s always something new happening, and the way advising is set up at my U means that I work with students across a variety of disciplines, which is cool. If you are behind the whole liberal arts mission and enjoy hearing about and learning about stuff happening in different departments, you’ll probably like advising. On the other hand, if you like a lot of consistency, advising can be challenging. Rules, requirements, and policy change all the time. Just when you get something figured out, it will change on you.
Advising can be stressful, but there is really no such thing as an academic emergency. I think that people who can avoid taking on their students problems, emotions, or decisions will find advising less stressful than people who will fret over a student’s schedule or whatever. I can lament a student’s choice or look at something and say “uh oh,” but at the end of the day all I can do is what my job title says: advise. The rest is on the student.
A lot of advising stress comes from the feast-or-famine intensity of it. Some weeks, we are working very hard from the minute we hit the door to the minute we leave. We’re dealing with last minute crises, making phone calls, seeing a dozen students. The next month, we may see two or three students total. We may have nothing on our calendar, and few responsibilities, meetings, or tasks. It’s extremes with few periods of regularity. I kind of enjoy that, because I know the intense periods end, and I don't struggle to find something to do during down time, although I often struggle with boredom. But for some people, the unpredictability is really challenging.
The things I enjoy least about my job are things most people don’t enjoy about jobs. Being here for 40 hours can be a drag, especially if I’ve wrapped up my work early. Meetings are… meetings
. Sometimes productive, sometimes frustrating. Advising focuses quite a lot on broad, institution-wide, bureaucratic stuff. There’s a TON of policy and procedure talk. We can be at the mercy of administration at times. This is higher ed, after all!I tell you what, though, I love getting paid. I enjoy my weekends and evenings free from grading, prepping, or student emails. I like coming to work, having a special place where I do my work, and then leaving it all behind when I depart at the end of the day. I like the social nature of the work, and have great colleagues. I think there’s far too much ignorant poo-pooing of working life among grad students. Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.
My situation is unique to my school, its advising structure, and the (frankly) amazing group of people I work with. And to me and my preferences. I never got super hung up on research or fell deeply in love with my discipline in grad school. I like students, and I can get into just about anything. Every school has a different way of doing advising, but in my opinion, it’s a great career option for teaching-oriented grad students. I hope someday I can get back into teaching, but in general, this is a good place to land if you care about students and like academics.
So how can you get into advising?
As always, your mileage may vary, caveat, etc etc. But here’s what I think:
Work closely with college freshmen. TA, tutor, etc. Teaching experience at the college level is a huge factor in the hiring done at my center. Work with different populations of students — high achieving, low achieving, first gen, transfer, international, whatever. You’ll need lots of stories and strategies to work with different students towards their goals.
Do some research about the school you’re applying to so you can speak to their specific population, resources, challenges, etc. Being knowledgeable about the school makes you stand out. A metropolitan campus with a largely commuter population will have very different issues in advising than a flagship state school in an agricultural town in the middle of nowhere. If you have time, do some light research in advising websites and journals about advising any special groups that that school serves (NACADA is the place to start). Does this school have a large Native American population? Learn a little about advising them. Is the position for a special subset of student, such as Honors? Learn about it. If you have institutional access, you should be able to read journals and such. But don't get carried away -- this isn't grad school!
Learn about the advising structure of that school beforehand if possible. Is it a large center or small? Will you be in a department, or an office that acts only as an advising center? Is advising mandatory or optional? Will you work with one major or multiple? This is good in terms of preparing for an interview, but also in terms of understanding if you want this gig. I work at a large advising center that serves mostly first- and second-year students, and advising is mandatory. I like this setup because I don’t have to deal with faculty meetings and my students are compelled to come sit in my office, which is better for both of us.
Look at the backgrounds of advisors at that school, if possible. It seems that some schools are very open to, or even actively seek, former academics to staff their advising. Other schools may lean more heavily towards people with backgrounds in higher ed admin or student services. This may help you suss out your likelihood as a candidate. Again, there is a huge variance across schools as to how advising is structured, staffed, and managed.
Lastly, think about what you can contribute as a colleague. This is kind of different from how grad students typically think of work life, because teaching and research are largely independent activities. But advising is often a team thing, and people will want to know what it will be like to work with you. If you can speak to experience team-teaching, collaborating, etc, that will probably be good. Sound competent and fun.
You may want to do an informational interview or ask to do some job shadowing at an advising center. Although I’ve never heard of that happening at my center, I can’t imagine we’d have a problem with it, although you may not get to sit in on student meetings due to privacy concerns. The more you can speak to the actual work of advising, versus the fantasy or hypothetical, the better your candidacy is. In my humble, novice, non-hiring committee opinion.
So there you have it: my final say on advising as an alt-ac career for quittas and post-PhD leavers. Feel free to ask questions!
Friday, March 1, 2013
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:
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:"
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:
As already noted, Alt-ac is seen by some as the “future” of the academy. The academy will become alt-ac.
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:
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:
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!
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!
Monday, February 25, 2013
A Brief, Working History of the Alt-Ac and Post-Academic Movements
This timeline originally appeared on my blog, Mama Nervosa, on 12.27.2012. This version includes a few additions to the first version of the timeline.
As the humanities unravel, as alt-ac gains steam as "the future of the academy," as our stat counter registers more and more hits from folks distressed, disillusioned, and desperate in their post-academic lives, I've felt like there's more need to articulate the relationship of our website, or more accurately, of the post-academic movement with the rest of the crisis in higher ed. I've been putting together a timeline that I think traces the roots and chronology of the modern "post-academic movement." Currer and I are working on a post that more fully fleshes out what it means to be post-academic (versus alt-academic, or whatever) because we feel like being "post-ac" is it's own thing, it's own branch on this baobab tree of higher ed, grad school, culture, time, history, etc.
I believe that "post-academic" can be used an umbrella term that indicates the counter-academic movement within and without institutions broadly: critiques of academia from within (institutional critiques, etc), including concerns about labor structure, grad student exploitation/experience/professionalization, and the contingent faculty movements that have sprung up; and the proliferation of post-academic, ex-academic, and anti-academic blogs and advice books outside the academy. Not that these are equivalent in terms of impact, but more that they're concurrent. I'm connecting dots here. I believe alt-ac and post-ac share the same roots, but are now diverging in key ways (that Currer and I will get to shortly). But this timeline traces those shared roots and tries to highlight key events/moments/ideas. Please feel free to submit additions in the comments or via email (lauren.nervosa@gmail.com)
1967
1960s-90s
1987
1993
1993-2003
1994
1997
1998
1999
2000
2000s
2001
2003
2004
2005
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
Other bloggers or armchair institutional historians, please chime in with your start dates or other significant contributions. Crowdsource this, people!
As the humanities unravel, as alt-ac gains steam as "the future of the academy," as our stat counter registers more and more hits from folks distressed, disillusioned, and desperate in their post-academic lives, I've felt like there's more need to articulate the relationship of our website, or more accurately, of the post-academic movement with the rest of the crisis in higher ed. I've been putting together a timeline that I think traces the roots and chronology of the modern "post-academic movement." Currer and I are working on a post that more fully fleshes out what it means to be post-academic (versus alt-academic, or whatever) because we feel like being "post-ac" is it's own thing, it's own branch on this baobab tree of higher ed, grad school, culture, time, history, etc.
I believe that "post-academic" can be used an umbrella term that indicates the counter-academic movement within and without institutions broadly: critiques of academia from within (institutional critiques, etc), including concerns about labor structure, grad student exploitation/experience/professionalization, and the contingent faculty movements that have sprung up; and the proliferation of post-academic, ex-academic, and anti-academic blogs and advice books outside the academy. Not that these are equivalent in terms of impact, but more that they're concurrent. I'm connecting dots here. I believe alt-ac and post-ac share the same roots, but are now diverging in key ways (that Currer and I will get to shortly). But this timeline traces those shared roots and tries to highlight key events/moments/ideas. Please feel free to submit additions in the comments or via email (lauren.nervosa@gmail.com)
1967
- Doctor of Arts programs established -- programs briefly flourish, then precipitously fade in the early 90s (seems related because it is a reformed doctoral degree focusing on teaching and application of research).
1960s-90s
- Process theory gains momentum in composition classrooms. This is significant, IMO, in that it generates some serious cognitive dissonance in the academy, and those effects are borne out through the practices of graduate students.
- Foucault. Come on.
1987
- The Wyoming Conference Resolution opposing unfair employment/pay practices for post-secondary English teachers (that is, comp instructors and TAs).
1993
- Susan Miller writes Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, which is significant IMO because it (a) uses cultural studies to study the institution itself (b) furthers a conversation about hierarchies and exploitation within institutions and departments and (c) talks about how grad students/teachers are complicit in their own exploitation. (There are many other important publications like this. This is the one I could remember off the top of my head.)
1993-2003
- Preparing Future Faculty project (seems related because it focuses on professional preparation for academics.)
1994
- Cary Nelson and Michael Berube write "Graduate Education is Losing Its Moral Base," which stated that grad programs had largely become labor mills to teach undergrads, and pointed out the perilous job market for PhDs.
1997
- A number of "leaving academia" websites spring up.
- I think that Beyond the Ivory Tower becomes a fixture in The Chronicle at some point in the late 90s -- will have to follow up on that.
- Phinished board created with goal of providing peer-to-peer support for folks struggling in academia.
- Piled Higher and Deeper comic founded.
1998
- MLA President Elaine Showalter promotes alt-ac careers at that year's conference and is met with some serious backlash from the grad student caucus at the time, led by Marc Bousquet and William Pannapacker. Michael Berube writes, "Both, in different ways, have come to regard the enterprise as a shell game, and both, 15 years ago, construed Showalter's call as a disingenuous suggestion that people who had trained for a decade to be humanists could suddenly switch gears and become secretaries and screenwriters."
1999
- Paula Chambers founds the WRK4US listserv, which served humanities and social science graduate students in career changes. (See 2010 below.)
- RateMyProfessor.com founded
2000
- Re-envisioning the PhD project founded with goals of improving transparency, suggesting reform, and revamping doctoral education in the US.
- The Responsive PhD project founded to enhance transparency, improve public engagement, and promote diversity in doctoral education. Concluded 2006 with "goals achieved."
2000s
- Composition starts to come into its own right as a discipline by becoming everything it hates (ok, that's an exaggeration). But still, comp starts to feel its own cognitive dissonance as it gains institutional prestige and all the markings of legitimacy (departments! offices! tenure lines! a zillion conferences and journals with parentheses and slashes in the titles!) but continues to focus on vexing issues of racism, sexism, class, oppression, and exploitation in institutionalized practices and hidden pedagogy.
- Marc Bousquet presents "The Excrement Theory of Graduate Education" at MLA (later published as "The Waste Product of Graduate Education" in 2002), which argued that degree-holding graduate students are the waste product of higher education.
2001
- So What Are You Going To Do With That?, a guide for MAs and PhDs looking for careers outside academia, published.
2003
- Scholarly Communication Institute founded, which eventually makes graduate education reform a primary focus (in 2011).
2004
2005
- Rate Your Students blog founded, and stories of academic discontent abound.
- Anne Whisnant (under nom de plumme Natalie Henderson) writes "Questioning the Promise" in the Chronicle:
Is there a chance that the alternative-careers movement (which in many ways I laud and admire) has unwittingly sold humanities Ph.D.'s yet another professional pipe dream? Could it be that all of us -- both those still "in" academe (that is, in the professoriate) and those in the nonacademic realm -- still share a misguided optimism about the marketability of a humanities Ph.D.?
2009
- William Pannapacker's Just Don't Go appears in the Chronicle, followed up by part 2 in March.
- Adventures in (Post) Gradland blog founded.
- New Faculty Majority founded.
- #Alt-Academy founded.
2010
- Postacademic blog founded by Arnold Pan and Caroline Roberts
- Worst Professor Ever blog founded by Amanda Krauss
- WRK4US becomes VersatilePhD, a website for post-academics to identify and prepare for non-academic careers
- MLA President Sidonie Smith delivers speech about restructuring humanities doctoral programs and revamping the dissertation.
2011
- From Grad School to Happiness blog founded by JC.
- MLA President Russell Berman writes essay about restructuring humanities doctoral programs by cutting time to completion in half.
- SCI turns its focus to graduate education reform.
- AHA President Anthony Grafton announces that alternative employment will no longer be the "plan B" for historians.
2012
- The Adjunct Project founded.
- Mama Nervosa and Project Reinvention founded, among many many many others (see sidebar, I think over half are new within the last year).
- MLA President Michael Berube writes essay(s!) and delivers speech about restructuring humanities doctoral programs and revamping the dissertation. Argues that wholesale change is required and fixing or tweaking one aspect of grad education won't solve this problem (please see his comments on a former post).
- Russell Berman and other faculty follow through with his recommendations by encouraging Stanford humanities departments to make time to completion 5 years.
2013
- M. Berube sums up the crisis in "Humanities Unraveled," remarking that the alt-ac challenge is a good place to start with grad program reform, but also worrying that programs at the forefront of reform are also most vulnerable as investment in humanities programs drops more and more.
Other bloggers or armchair institutional historians, please chime in with your start dates or other significant contributions. Crowdsource this, people!
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