Escape the Ivory Tower

Monday roundup

Excerpts from some interesting 2011 commencement speeches.

A scholar who was denied tenure five years ago looks back, and his wife shares her recollections as well.

Dual career couples bring up all kinds of anxieties and institutional quirks. Here’s an A to Z of dual careers.

Introducing Alt-Ac, a collection of essays on the alternative academic career.

Daniel J. Ennis predicts that, somewhere, a university has hired its last tenured professor.

Julia Mortyakova reflects on the transition between graduate student and the tenure track.

Dr. Crazy shares an experience that reconnected her with the passion and excitement of her work.

Notorious PhD talks about the experience of being scooped and how she’s responded each time.

The importance of being curious

When we’re faced with the necessity of figuring out something else to do with our lives than the academic career we planned for, well, it’s easy to have a complete brain shut-down. Nothing freezes us up more than the idea that we’ve got to come up with something that will determine the rest of our lives.

I liken it to the panic a lot of PhD students feel when they have to finally sit down and choose a dissertation topic. I mean, this topic is going to help determine everything from what kinds of jobs you can apply for to what kinds of institutions you’re going to land in to what you’ll be researching for the rest of your natural born life.

Now, the I’m-choosing-for-the-rest-of-my-life fear isn’t quite accurate in the case of the dissertation, and it’s certainly not accurate in the case of figuring out the next right step.

In fact, the most important thing you can bring to the table to get to the other side of that fear is curiosity.

Start with the assumption that you’re only choosing the Next Right Thing

In order to let curiosity kick in, we have to get rid of the assumption that you’re determining the rest of your life.

I don’t mean to traumatize you when I say this, but the very fact that you’re having to contemplate figuring out what to do next suggests that the last time you thought you were choosing forever, you were wrong.

That’s not to say anything you did on the basis of that assumption was wrong – I pretty much think every step of the path is necessary, and you learned a lot of fabulous things and did a lot of cool stuff on your way to right now.

It’s just to say that, once upon a time, you probably thought you were going to be in academia forever, and you aren’t going to be. All of which suggests that anything you choose right now probably isn’t going to carry you into retirement.

And that’s okay. In fact, if you can let go of the idea that you should choose something that will carry you into retirement, you can open yourself to the possibility that there are a lot of delicious choices out there – and you don’t necessarily have to choose between them.

Where curiosity comes in

Once you can think about possibilities as the Next Right Thing, it’s time to bring your curiosity to bear.

Be curious about yourself. What have you learned about yourself through your experiences in academia? What parts of yourself have you left behind? What dreams are so precious that they’re layered under piles of denial? What are you really, truly passionate about? What do you only think you should be passionate about?

The more you can be curious about your own experience, your own passions, and your own dreams, the more you can learn what it is that really rings your bell.

Be curious about what’s out there. Just as people who aren’t in academia think we get summers off and don’t understand what a provost is, we have lots of misconceptions and holes in our knowledge about other careers out there.

One way to be curious about what’s out there is to browse job boards, not to find one to apply for but just to see the range of what’s out there. Another way to be curious about what’s out there is to ask everyone you meet what they do and what they like and dislike about it. You’ll have some surprising conversations that may lead you in directions you wouldn’t have expected.

Be curious about how the world is linked together. Do you remember that old game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”? The goal was to choose any other entertainer and figure out a way to get from them to Kevin Bacon in six moves or less.

Well, that came out of a play and movie called “Six Degrees of Separation” that mused on the idea that we’re connected to every other person on the planet by six moves or less. Now, I’m not entirely sure about the six or less part, but I can get to both Pope John Paul II and Ted Bundy (the latter two different ways) in less than six moves, both of which freak me right out.

What that means for your curiosity is that, within six degrees of separation from you right now is the person who can answer any question you have about any career path you can think of. Becoming a motorcycle technician. Running programs for the Department of the Interior. Being the executive director of a non-profit that serves transgendered youth. Raising money for the whales. Guiding climbers in state parks.

If you’re honestly curious about a particular field, the people you know will say things like, “You know, I have no idea, but my cousin runs a legal non-profit in DC and I bet he’d know the answer.” And boom – you have the person who can give you answers.

Curiosity gets you past what you know

The reason curiosity is so important is that it is what takes you beyond the boundaries of what you’re currently familiar with. Curiosity is what helps you ask the questions to learn new things, about yourself and the world. Curiosity is what takes you from “I have no idea” through “huh, I’d love to know X” to “hey, X is really awesome!”

So if you’re stuck in fear, inertia, or doubt when what you need is to think about what the Next Right Thing is and how to get there, ask yourself one simple question. “What am I curious about right now?” The answer will get you moving, and the answer will give you a path.

Being female in the academy

I want to talk about the ways that being female in the academy is complicated, the ways in which it still, despite all of our rhetoric to the contrary, matters.

I’m running up against my own internal, not-wholly-resolved, critic on this one, so let me say this at the outset.

There are lots of ways the academy is hard for different people, and lots of different “minority” identity positions get screwed in this system. (I put “minority” in quotes only because the people who are not marginalized in some way don’t actually constitute the numerical majority.)

I do not subscribe to any kind of Pain Olympics, in which only the experience or position that is the very most hardest counts. All of our pain and othering counts. All of it.

Okay? Okay.

Why I’m talking about this

Because academia relies on a narrative of merit, there is often a cultural assumption that academia is an equal playing field. And because of this, lots of smart, talented women have blamed themselves for the ways the system has undermined and devalued them.

And that shit has got to stop.

Despite all of our claims to post-feminism, the world – and that includes the academy – is still unequal. And blaming ourselves for that reality only makes it harder for us to identify it, respond to it, and find creative ways to call attention to it so it can be transformed.

So, to that end, I’m going to list all the ways I can think of that women experience inequality in the academy.

Let me count the ways

  • Women, especially junior women, carry a disproportionate amount of service work in many departments, which jeopardizes their chances for tenure.
  • Women in traditionally male fields (read: hard sciences) are often subjected to outright misogyny and abuse.
  • Women are punished for their desire to have a family through family-unfriendly policies and practices, unlike their male partners, who are often seen more positively for their family commitments.
  • Women have fewer mentorship opportunities.
  • Women have a more difficult time projecting and owning authority in the classroom, which is often worsened by the responses of department chairs, deans, and other higher authority figures.
  • Women are often perceived as threatening to the often-all-or-nearly-so-male “old guard.”
  • Women who are cross-hired into Women’s Studies and their “home” department are often denied tenure because their feminist scholarship is denied credibility in the “home” department.
  • Women who aren’t cross-hired are often denied tenure because their scholarship is considered “narrow” or “particular” because it doesn’t buy into the assumption that white men are universal and everyone else is “interested.”
  • The fewer women there are in any given field, the more the existing women are called upon to mentor those behind them – leaving them less time to do the work they’re rewarded for.
  • Women aren’t often taught how to negotiate, and for this reason among others, women are paid less well than men for the same work.
  • Women are assumed to be less committed to their work if they have a baby.
  • Women experience exclusion in graduate courses, in which they aren’t called on or in which their contributions aren’t considered equal.
  • When women outshine their male peers, their achievements are dismissed as exceptions.
  • Administrations are still, largely, male.

The important caveats

Now, not every woman will experience all of these. Departments and institutions vary, of course, and there are some that are doing their explicit best to address some of these issues.

But I’d argue that women in academia experience quite a few of them. Some will be obvious, and some will be the subtle kind that make you wonder if you’re crazy for thinking that gender inequality might be part of what’s going on.

If your gut says that gender inequality is part of what you’re experiencing, trust it. Trust that something bigger than you is at work. That doesn’t make it okay, but it means that it isn’t some fault of yours if you run afoul of the ways gender inequality plays itself out where you are. You are not the problem. A larger social and structural devaluing of women is.

What other ways have you seen or experienced women experience inequality in academia?

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