Escape the Ivory Tower » Uncategorized

It’s that time again — Open Office Hours are tonight!

Julie — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:00:45 +0000

Tonight! 7:30pm! Operators (okay, I) will be standing by. (301) 927-0083.

Here’s how I’ve described Open Office Hours.

Once upon a time, office hours were for us.

When we were overwhelmed, when we were confused, when we were excited, we could march down the hall and take our turn in the old, uncomfortable chair. We could pull our legs up onto the seat, point at books we’d dogeared, ask that question we’d scribbled in the margin of our class notes, plunk down half-written drafts that just refused to cohere.

Sometimes they were big questions, learning-the-discipline questions, and sometimes they were small questions, more about touching base and reassuring ourselves.

And in the best cases, we left refreshed, invigorated, comforted, heard. In the best cases, we left with new direction and new information. In the best cases, office hours were a security blanket, always available even if we didn’t need them right then.

But somewhere along the line, office hours stopped being for us. Maybe they got taken over by newer, younger students whose questions were more pressing and more particular. Maybe we graduated and didn’t have teachers in the same way. Maybe we started offering office hours instead.

Just because we’re all growed up now doesn’t mean we don’t still need to plunk ourselves down in someone else’s office chair now and again and have a good whine or ask that burning question we just can’t for the life of us figure out.

Introducing…

Open Office Hours for Questioning Academics

That’s right — a time set aside just for you to ask questions, tell your story, brainstorm solutions to the things that are troubling you, or just get some sympathy and commiseration.

During Open Office Hours, you can call me with whatever is on your mind — the latest upsetting situation you need to vent about if you’re going to present a polite front, confusion about where your life and your career are going, questions about what you might want to do next, frustrations about your research project or writing progress.

If you aren’t sure what you want to talk about, but you know you’re unhappy, that counts too — give me a ring and we’ll see if we can untangle it just a bit.

It’s something like Speed Coaching — we won’t be able to cover or fix everything, but if we can help one small thing be less painful or confused, then everything else will gain a sense of ease and possibility. And wouldn’t that be nice?

How Open Office Hours works

During the designated time, you can call me at (301) 927-0083. If I’m not on another call, I’ll answer. If the phone is busy, try again in a few minutes — it’s first-come, first-served.

Monday roundup

Julie — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 09:00:49 +0000

A weekly collection of interesting things I find around the Internet. Find something I didn’t? I’d love to hear about it the comments!

The tightened job market means going out ABD is tougher than ever. Worse, positions that accept ABDs may be structured in ways that prevent ever finishing the dissertation.

Is the university predicated on an assumption of honor? Stephen G. Kellman believes it is — and that it makes dishonorable behavior in higher ed even more disturbing.

Tenured Radical thinks about the importance of single-sex education and the feminist project. (part 1 / part 2 / part 3)

Dean Dad says goodbye to Bitch, PhD, one of the early and influential academic blogs. I appreciate his sense of blog history here, since I’d been reading her since near the beginning.

A few comments about comments

The whole question of being unhappy in academia — no matter what stage you’re in — can feel fraught. If you’d like to comment but are feeling shy about “being out there,” feel free to make up a persona or comment anonymously. You can also email me directly.

First-time commenters are always moderated (because you wouldn’t believe the spam I get), so if your comment doesn’t show up immediately, hang tight! Chances are, I’m not right on my email.

And most of all, let’s all practice compassion for ourselves and others in this difficult time and space.

Book and test review: StrengthsFinder

Julie — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 09:00:38 +0000

Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.

One of the ways to think about calling is the thing that is both so effortless for you and so enjoyable that, even if you’re working hard, you’re hardly working.

Finding that means knowing what it is that’s effortless for you — which is harder than you think. Because of our well-ingrained Puritan ethic, we tend to assume that if something is effortless for us, then it doesn’t count, because it’s not “work” where “work” equals misery and pain.

In other words, we tend to discount the very things that are our greatest strengths.

Enter StrengthsFinder 2.0

One of the most well-known and well-validated tests of people’s strengths is the StrengthsFinder Profile, developed by The Gallup Organization and publicized through their books Now, Discover Your Strengths and StrengthsFinder 2.0.*

They collated hundreds of thousands of surveys about people’s experiences and found 34 common “themes,” everything from Analytical to Context to Includer to Restorative, each of which is detailed in both books. (Ignore the lack of parallelism if you can. Clearly, I can’t.)

They also developed an online test which uses forced-choice pairs to create a profile of your five strongest themes — but here’s the trick. You can only take the test if you buy the book, and each book is good for exactly one test. That means not only can you not borrow a book and take the test, you can’t just take the test online without going through the hassle of purchasing and receiving a hard-copy book.

The themes are very, very useful

Despite my irritation with the whole must-buy-a-hardcopy-book-to-take-the-test thing, the themes themselves are very, very useful, partially because they highlight strengths many of us wouldn’t have thought of as either strengths or as particularly relevant to a calling or a career.

Take “Individualization,” for example, which is described this way:

Your Individualization theme leads you to be intrigued by the unique qualities of each person. You are impatient with generalizations or “types” because you don’t want to obscure what is special and distinct about each person. Instead, you focus on the differences between individuals. You instinctively observe each person’s style, each person’s motivation, how each thinks and how each builds relationships.

This came up as one of my strengths, and while it’s not something I would have thought of on my own, it’s a useful prism through which to think about, say, helping people find their individual callings. (Put that way, it feels like a “duh.”)

Or take “Includer,” which is described this way:

“Stretch the circle wider.” This is the philosophy around which you orient your life. You want to include people and make them feel part of the group. In direct contrast to those who are drawn only to exclusive groups, you actively avoid those groups that exclude others. You want to expand the group so that as many people as possible can benefit from its support.

That one doesn’t remotely describe me — but how good to know that consciously!

All of which is to say, I found the descriptions of the types incredibly illuminating as another framework through which to examine what we each bring to the world.

The test, not so much

I didn’t find the test all that helpful, however. Because I had read the book, the results weren’t entirely surprising to me, and the test didn’t give me a lot beyond what it says in the book, despite the claims that there are lots of additional things.

If your experience of reading the book is that everything seems relevant or that nothing seems relevant, then it’s probably worth the $25 the book costs to have their profile help you sort that out. But if you can at least sort the 34 themes into “me” and “not me,” then you’re going to have a lot to work with already.

The bottom line?

This is a useful and robust tool — but you’ll benefit as much from borrowing it from the library as you will spending the money.

*These are affiliate links, which you can read more about here.

A few comments about comments

First-time commenters are always moderated (because you wouldn’t believe the spam I get), so if your comment doesn’t show up immediately, hang tight! Chances are, I’m not right on my email.

And most of all, let’s all practice compassion for ourselves and others in this difficult time and space.

Reminder: Open Office Hours today!

Julie — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 12:50:18 +0000

Today, from 1-2:30 ET, I’m all yours. If you’ve got a question, a frustration, a tangle you’re trying to sort out, give me a call! I’d love to talk to you.

(301) 927-0083.

Monday roundup: Double edition

Julie — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:00:34 +0000

A weekly collection of the interesting, intriguing, and otherwise notable stuff I find around the web. If you have something to add, comment!

(Aside: Sorry for the disappearing act. My father-in-law died a week and a half ago and it’s taken me this long to get myself back on track. I’ll tack a week on to the calling thread into September….)

The New York Times wonders if the hiring debacle is the fault of tenured profs who just won’t retire. A panel of academics weighs in.

Has your ability to do simple things (addition! division!) disintegrated under the weight of academia? Now I know I’m not alone.

The AAUP and the New Faculty Majority both submitted statements advocating for tenure for adjuncts and the dismantling of tiered academic labor. Favorite dissenter/pragmatist/whipping-boy Dean Dad weighs in and then again a few days later.

How to avoid being a jerk in the classroom. Really, the title says it all.

U.S. academics don’t really understand the systems abroad, and vice versa.

A faculty member in psychology considers the social trap of both being responsible for graduate students (and their job prospects) and needing to admit and graduate lots of grad students to be deemed “successful.”

One woman’s story of being a trailing spouse.

Editing to fix that last link — thanks Cate!

Open Office Hours Tonight!

Julie — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 09:00:40 +0000

Just a reminder that our first set of Open Office Hours is tonight, 7:30-9pm ET.

If you’ve got a question, a problem, a story you want to tell, or you just want to check in with someone who understands, give me a call. I really want to hear what you’ve got to say.

More information and the number to call is here.

Looking forward to talking with you!

What do you need?

Julie — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:00:56 +0000

I spend a lot of time listening to unhappy academics and thinking about ways to help unhappy academics — but I know that my experience, even with my clients, is always limited. There will always be questions or situations I haven’t encountered directly. But I don’t want to leave them — or you — out.

So this post is an opportunity for you to tell me what you want to hear about — no matter where you are in the academic process, no matter what kind of unhappiness you’re experiencing.

Are you a grad student wanting to find ways to make graduate school less painful? Tell me what you need.

Are you looking for a job and finding the experience demoralizing? Tell me what you need.

Do you have a tenure-track job but you’re struggling with your research? Tell me what you need.

Feel free to comment anonymously, making up a name and an email address. That’s always okay around here.

Not quite right

Julie — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:00:46 +0000

If academia were just out and out exploitative, abusing people with no reward whatsoever, leaving would be easy.

If the work were completely unbearable, leaving would be easy.

If the administration were uniformly awful and crazy, leaving would be easy.

If academia’s sense of itself were unrelated to what we really want from our lives, leaving would be easy.

If the purpose of higher education didn’t matter, leaving would be easy.

But leaving is not easy, and it’s not easy partially because, for many people, their experience of academia is so very close to being right.

The work is meaningful at the big-picture level — but too often at the everyday level, it’s rote and repetitive and soul-sucking.

There’s a lot of freedom in research and teaching — but sometimes, depending on the institution, the discipline, the needs of the students, not enough.

There’s plenty of room to challenge ourselves, to engage our own needs for mastery and improvement — but often not enough time in between the things that “have to get done.”

Often, our experience of academia is so close to being right that we can go along for years telling ourselves that it is right. And when we realize that it’s not, part of the pain is how very, very close we came to having what would have fed us.

The sad case of Amy Bishop

Julie — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:01:13 +0000

I’m sure you’ve all heard about Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama biology professor who, on Friday, opened fire during a faculty meeting, killing three of her colleagues and wounding two more professors and a staff person. (I would say “allegedly,” innocent-until-proven-guilty, etc., but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that she did it.)

While there are clearly many different things going on here (for example, she apparently shot and killed her brother some twenty-odd years ago), the one that keeps playing in the media is this: She was turned down for tenure the previous year, had filed appeals, and had recently found out her appeals were denied.

In other words, tenure denial made her do it.

Now, I’m not the person to look towards for defenses of tenure. It’s too weighty, too all-or-nothing, too vague and subject to the personalities at hand, and too overly identified with “academic freedom” when that either means 1) “I reject all communal governance and say fuck you when you want me to teach to some departmental goals”; or 2) everyone who doesn’t have tenure is getting exploited even more than before.

So yeah, I’m not actually a big fan of tenure, especially as it’s now practiced. But using this tragedy as an “object lesson” in “why we need to rethink tenure” is making my stomach turn.

People are denied tenure all the time, unfortunate and problematic as that is. They don’t turn around and shoot their colleagues. So, while I would argue we do need to rethink tenure, it’s not because it makes people snap and shoot their department chair. It’s because it’s part and parcel of a system that is unsustainable and which sacrifices excellent scholars on the altar of unreasonable expectations.

Struggling with academia? Sign up for this teleclass!

Julie — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:02:57 +0000

When we struggle with something as huge and all-encompassing as our career, it’s all too easy to get paralyzed — and thus we stay in the very situation that’s making us unhappy.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. On Wednesday, November 4th, I’m offering a 90-minute teleclass that will give you three tools to help you get centered, get clarity, and get moving — whereever it is you’re supposed to go.

It’s happening on Wednesday, November 4, 8pm ET / 7pm CT / 6pm MT / 5pm PT — and since it’s on the phone, location is immaterial. Interested? Sign up here.

If you’d interested but can’t make the call, sign up anyway — I’ll send a recording of the call to everyone who’s signed up.

Questions? Put ‘em in the comments.