Jessica Langer, PhD

I’ll be on the road a fair bit more than normal this June!

On June 11th, I’ve been asked to come and speak to the graduate students in the English Department at Carleton University about career paths for PhDs outside of academia. I hope they’re prepared for a good dose of reality… delivered kindly, of course.

From June 16th-20th, I’ll be teaching a course called “Digital Branding: Frontiers and Futures” in the prestigious McMaster-Syracuse Master of Communications Management program down at McMaster University. It’s an excellent low-residency program that brings together professionals from all over Canada and the US. From the program website:

This two-year independent study master’s degree program represents the output of a powerful partnership between McMaster University’s Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia, DeGroote School of Business and the internationally recognized S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, the world’s leading provider of public relations and communications education. The program of study has been tested and expanded over the past 20 years and boasts nearly 400 graduates worldwide….

We combine the best of advanced professional communication, communications management and business administration courses. Unlike other elective or specialized Master’s Programs, MCM incorporates the numbers side of management training to let you develop the broader business acumen you need to find your place in management in the public, not-for-profit and private sectors.

We’ve also got some great guest speakers for the course. Like Mike Leon, CEO of Brand Heroes, and Casie Stewart, Director of Social Media at Community (and “social media cool kid” with her own blog, of course), as well as a couple of amazing organization partners for the final project.

Over the last little while, I’ve encouraged humanities PhDs to go into marketing, and I’ve suggested several things that grad students can do to prepare themselves for the possibility – in some fields, the probability – of going into a non-academic career once grad school is finished. (And this doesn’t just go for PhDs; a lot of this is applicable to holders of other terminal degrees, too.)

The thing is, though, the business world is much, much different from academia. It functions differently and it values different things. Although we – for the values of “we” who are likely to be reading this post – don’t live in a purely free-market society, we live in one based economically on the principles of capitalism, mixed more (Canada, Sweden, France, et al) or less (USA) with socialist ideals to create a big, messy, imperfect, but generally mostly functional economy in which businesses exist.

Keep in mind here also that I’m talking specifically about for-profit businesses here, though many non-profits function similarly – and many should do so, frankly, if they are concerned about making the best possible use of their grant or development funds. There are some businesses and organizations in which other values are prioritized over the fiscal health of the organization, but I’m not talking about those at this time.

So if you’re thinking of going into business, whether it’s starting your own or becoming an employee of someone else’s, here are 3 things you should keep in mind. They aren’t universally applicable, but they’re applicable enough of the time that you should be aware of them, and they’re different enough from the academic system that they may surprise you – if not in concept then in execution.

1. You’re only as good as the value you bring to the company. There’s a common complaint among people with graduate degrees who are seeking work outside of the academy: “no one cares that I have a PhD/MA/MFA/whatever!”

That’s right. No one cares.

OK, now that I’ve been harsh, let’s unpack that a bit. This is not to say that no one cares about you, or that your degree is worthless. Your degree is actually quite likely to be worth a fair bit… provided, of course, that the skills and abilities it has helped you to develop are of use and value to your employer and/or your clients. My PhD has proven invaluable to my work as a marketer, in part (but not wholly) because of the things the PhD process taught me to do: synthesize information, write well and cogently, teach and present effectively, and hold myself to high standards in the work I present to clients. And many employers, though not all, are impressed by the fact of an advanced degree if it’s accompanied by relevant skills.

But in and of themselves, those letters after your name mean nothing. Your value rests on what you can do to create value for your employer or your client, not your academic profile or the prestige of your degree.

It’s a simple concept, but it’s one that I actually find fairly freeing. It strips away the BS, frankly. It’s not personal in business: it’s just business. If you provide value, you’ll be sought-after, and if you don’t, you’re likely to be let go. And if you’re going to succeed in business, then this is probably the approach you’ll want to take, too.

2. No one owes you anything. Not a job, not an opportunity, nothing. This is the case inside the academy as well, and it’s getting to be more and more true by the year. But there’s a narrative thread through academia that goes like this: if you go to a good graduate school, if you teach enough classes, if you publish enough good papers, if you get a good book contract, then you’ll achieve success in academia. You’ll get a tenure-track job, or tenure, or whatever it is you’re chasing. You’ll have a Career, and you’ll be a Professor. And if you don’t get those things, well, then, you must have failed somewhere along the way. And because you are your academic work, in this mindset, it means you’re a failure.

The narrative thread in business is this: if you prove yourself valuable to a company or organization, they’ll keep you around. If you’re not valuable, they won’t. If you don’t succeed, it’s not because you’re a failure: it’s just because you didn’t provide value to the company to justify your compensation. You haven’t lost your opportunity to be what you want to be; you’ve gained an opportunity to try something else and see if you can succeed at that instead.

I mean, heck: there’s a whole sub-category of articles in magazines like the venerable Harvard Business Review that talk about the value of failure.

This, also, is freeing. If no one owes you anything, then what you achieve, you’ve earned. (Or you’ve gotten by unfair means, but that’s the way things go in business. Which brings me to…)

3. All’s fair in love and war… and business.

That is to say: business isn’t fair.

Academia isn’t fair, either, but it has a veneer of ostensible fairness. Like so many things in academia, this is an illusion – and it’s actually quite destructive because of the tautology that comes along with it. If something unfair happens, then it couldn’t be that unfair, because it’s the university, and the university is inherently elevated to fairness in a way that for-profit companies aren’t, right? Nope.

Business is just unfair in a more transparent way. Talent doesn’t always find its way to the top. Often, success comes as much or more from who you know and can impress than how purely good you are at whatever task people are hiring you to do. (This is why networking is so important.) People who have more social capital – whether it’s because they come from a wealthier/more connected background, they’re better at networking, or they’re friendlier and make a better impression – will have a much easier time in business, at least initially. It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is. (As an aside, this is why I love Ask A Manager so much. You’ll find that her constant refrain is “No, it’s not fair, and it sucks, but that’s the way it is. Now you have the information you need in order to make a decision.”)

But in some ways, business is actually more fair than academia is. If you aren’t good at what you’re setting out to do, fewer people will pay you to do it, and you aren’t likely to be successful in the long run. But conversely, if you’re talented in a way that provides value, then you’ll be indispensable and in demand, and you’ll find that success is likely – not guaranteed, but likely – to come.

What do you think? If you’ve left academia, do you find these things to be true for you? Why or why not?

I’ve written a fair bit about academia from the outside in: about how to be an academic outside of the traditional TT path, about how to prepare yourself in graduate school for an academic career, and about why marketing – my own career path, with which I’m very happy – could be an excellent choice for humanities PhDs who are preparing to leave the academy as a primary career.

Today I’m going to make the first in a multi-part series of blog posts about the responsibilities that universities have, in my view: to their students, to their staff and faculty, and to the society that funds them. Often, I would argue, universities are not fulfilling their responsibilities to their stakeholders. This is due in part to difficult financial limits, in part to financial decision-making that I would question, and in part to a value system that, I believe, sometimes values the wrong things.

(A caveat to all of this: I happen to teach part-time for two institutions that pay well and that value the contributions of part-timers, which is much more common in Canada than it is in the States, I think. The universities where I teach, in particular, have innovated their offerings and their employment policies in a way that generally benefits both students and faculty. But it is, perhaps, because I am to some extent on the outside of these issues that I feel more invested in questioning them.)

Overview: the retail academic, the under-educated student, the frustrated graduate

The challenges of the part-time academic are well-documented. The report “Who Is Professor Staff – And How Can This Person Teach So Many Classes?”, prepared by the Centre for the Future of Higher Education, is one of the most incisive and comprehensive studies of the current system’s effect on higher ed.

The percentage of teaching done by low-paid, low-security post-secondary teachers has skyrocketed in the past decade, and we all know how bad this is for them. But what sometimes gets lost in this rhetoric is the effect this system has on the students being taught. After all, teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. And if teaching conditions deteriorate, then learning conditions will do the same, no matter how much considerable effort a teacher makes to mitigate that harm. A part-time professor who must teach eight writing-intensive sections of an introductory English class in order to make ends meet will simply have less available time to meet with and support students outside of class. A school that pays teachers only for the hours they are in the classroom provides a specific incentive for teachers to limit their outside-of-class support of students, support that full-timers are obligated to provide. Simply put: the more part-timers replace full-timers in the system, the worse off students will be. This is not a problem of insufficiently dedicated instructors; it is a sheer physics problem.

Further to this issue – in fact, another facet of the same issue – is the trouble with unemployed graduates. Professors are often students’ first professional references, and part-timers are often either unable or unavailable to provide these references for former students. The transient nature of the job means objectively less support for new grads who took classes with these profs. Of course, it is also a student’s responsibility to keep in touch with former professors and to build their side of the relationship, but it is much more difficult to do this with a professor who’s teaching part-time.

So, the verdict seems clear: for faculty and students, the current set-up is less than ideal. But is it the best way forward for the universities themselves? Is it even the only way for universities to survive in the current economic climate? Or is it an unnecessary redistribution of resources along the lines of a for-profit corporate model?

Public vs. private

It would seem initially important to make a clear distinction between public and private universities and four-year colleges. Here in Canada, of course, all universities and colleges – except for Quest University, an outlier – are publicly funded, in a similar but not identical method to that of state schools in the United States. Similarly, universities in the UK are publicly funded, and in fact tuition fees are pretty much standard across the board. In the States, though, you have both public and private universities and colleges, with tuition at some private schools exceeding $40,000/year.

So, do American private universities have less of a responsibility to society than do universities that are publicly funded? Should they have more freedom to structure themselves according to a corporate model, including the use of casualized labour, than would a government-funded institution?

The fly in the ointment here is the extremely widespread use of US government-subsidized student loans to fund education. In fact, the majority of student loans taken out in the United States are subsidized by the government, which means that plenty of “private” education is publicly funded, just in a more indirect way. Of course, this is no different to corporations that are “publicly funded” through tax breaks or bailout funds – remember how General Electric paid no federal taxes on over $5 billion of profits in 2010? – but it speaks to the fact that there is no bright-line distinction between publicly funded and privately funded higher education.

The upshot? The majority of higher education in the United States, Canada and Europe is, in some way, paid for with public funds. Frankly, I don’t know enough about the higher education systems elsewhere in the world to make any kind of educated commentary, so I’m leaving them be for now. But in North America and (much of) Europe, this is the status quo.

So what effect does, or should, this have on the economic and social responsibility of the university towards the society whose students it educates?

Education for the greater good?

One of the biggest questions here is, I think, the role of education in a society. Are universities – and should universities – be primarily concerned with meeting their own bottom lines, with running themselves (both in and of themselves and in the context of their immediate communities), or with contributing educated citizens to the greater society in which they exist? Inasmuch as universities must fulfill all of these responsibilities, how should they be balanced?

And what happens when financial obligations and/or constraints force a university’s hand? To what extent does a university’s nature as an inherently public-private partnership determine its responsibility to each stakeholding party? Do different types of universities, with different constituent groups and student demographics, have different levels or types of responsibility in different contexts?

In Part 2 of this series, to come whenever I have time (i.e. in the next week or two), we’ll take a good long look at these questions, and break down a university’s responsibilities by stakeholder.

Preface: I’m writing this post as someone who has an ongoing affiliation with academia – I teach social media marketing in the MBA program at the Schulich School of Business at York University – but does not currently make her living primarily as an academic. Instead, I run a small marketing agency and develop and implement training programs for corporate clients, and I teach and research as well. That said, my PhD is in a humanities field, and I’ve spent many years now watching my peers beat their heads against the brick wall of the current state of academia in the humanities… and, more and more, this mismatch between the needs and structure of the university and the training and goals of the graduate students who aspire to professorships has spread to other fields as well.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, there are lots of routes out of academia for those who are so inclined. Marketing and communications can be a great field for grad-degreed folks in the humanities, for instance, and there are things you can do in grad school or shortly afterward to lay the groundwork for a non-academic career. But the thing is: even if you “leave” academia, even if you decide not to make your living at the life of the mind, you can still be an academic.

I am.

Whither a “Writer”?

There’s a novelist called Jay Lake whose books I love and whose blog I read. (I met him once, at Worldcon 2007 in Japan, but I doubt he remembers me; if he does, though, hi Jay!) Jay is an incredibly prolific writer. He’s very well known and highly regarded in the science fiction community. His books have been nominated for major awards and they sell well. Jay is, by all accounts, a writer. He’s a novelist.

Jay also has a day job to pay the bills (or as he calls it, a Daye Jobbe).

Take also my dear friend Trilby Kent, this year’s winner of the Canadian Children’s Book Award. Trilby’s books are extraordinarily well-reviewed and well-respected, and have been added to school curricula all over the world. Trilby is, by all accounts, a novelist.

She is also in the midst of doing a PhD in Creative Writing. When her PhD novel is finished, she will likely teach.

The majority of novelists I know are not only novelists. Most of them do other things as well. Lou Anders is a novelist, but is also the editor-in-chief of Pyr Books. Paul Cornell is a novelist, but he also writes comics and television shows. (OK, maybe Paul is pretty much a “pure” writer.) Nalo Hopkinson is a novelist, but she is also a professor at the University of California, Riverside. Joseph Kertes is a novelist, but he is also the Dean of the School of Creative and Performing Arts at Humber College.

What You Do To Make Money Is Not What You Are

I’m going to say that again: what you do to make money is not what you are.

There’s this corrosive idea, this scratchy little voice, that lives in the corners of the academy and whispers from the darkness: “If you were really dedicated to your work, you’d give up everything else in your life for your academic work.” Academia loves itself a martyr. But that voice is a lie. Ignore it.

Sometimes, what you do for a living coincides with what you love, or what you want to be, or how you define yourself at the heart of the matter. I happen to be one of those people; I am an academic and I love it, but I am also a marketing professional and I love that, too.

But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, what you do for a living doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what you really do.

A musician who waits tables is a waiter, but also a musician. A writer who teaches is a teacher, but also a writer. A painter who works as a lawyer is a lawyer, but also a painter. And an administrative assistant or a shoe store clerk or an advertising copywriter who does original academic research and/or teaches at the college or university level is an academic.

Academia Is As Academia Does

Ultimately, what I’m calling for here is a radical revisioning of what it means to be an academic. Just a small task! This process has already started, though, with the concept of “alt-ac” – that is, alternative careers within the academic context for those with grad degrees. It’s started with the advocacy of the Versatile PhD, which provides information and support on alternate careers for academics.

But what I’m talking about isn’t an “alternative” to academia. It is academia. It’s an academia of independent scholars, of salespeople who write articles in their hotel rooms on the road, of copywriters who spend their weekdays writing taglines and their weekends at the library. An academia that is, frankly, structured a lot more like many business schools are now: in which part-time faculty members are valued not only for the academic skills and expertise they bring to the classroom, but for the non-academic ones as well. In which the academy and the world outside are not adversaries but partners, and in which the doors between are open, not closed.

I’ll start. Who’s with me?