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May 23, 2003
This is so good. It says there is life outside the academy for those with PhD's. It says it so well. In doing so it counters a common view amongst academics who do not
"...seem able to imagine that PhDs who step outside the academic fold might find employment anywhere other than the typing pool. Is it so astonishing to consider that people with the skills and intellectual acuity to complete a doctoral degree might actually thrive outside the academy, in a wide range of jobs?"
The problem lies with the academics, their cultural capital and job snobbery. They---radicals included--- look down on those PhD's who fail to gain employment in academia and engage in intellectual practice outside the academ. This looking down happens even though these academics feel, and are, betrayed by an educational system they once had a vocation for.
'Look down' is too weak. They disdain, and have a deep contempt for, the non-academic world---especially for those engaged in intellectual practice (researchers) in political life. It is cultural snobbery.
And this rings so true:
"My other friends who were leaving, or thinking about leaving, academia and I could often, in my last year or two of graduate school, be found having what I came to call "detox sessions," where we would simply rehearse to one another the psychic assaults academic life can make on one grown dissafected with it, and reassure one another that leaving didn't make one bad, or stupid, or a failure."
That is the attack---you have to leave because you are a failure and stupid, even though there is a general "understanding in [our] bones of how bad the economic "restructuring" of higher education is for us all in the humanities. The charge of being stupid and a failure is a weapon employed by the senior academics over those in grad school doing their PhD's and over the junior faculty. Its an instrument of governance---like guilt in the Catholic religious system. Its a snobby little worldwhere knowledge is used as a weapon.
The academy turns its back on you. Closes the door. Spurns you. Rejects you for choosing an alternative career. Its the violence of that rejection by those living the tenured life which is what is so suprising.
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Gary,
You have got to be kidding with the Michele Tepper article link. I think it’s awesomely benign that some academics want to work outside the quadrangle – who on earth cares if they do, or don’t?
A much bigger, and more real, issue is that it is a miracle, in Oz in 2003, for a newly-minted PhD to get a job inside or outside academia. They’ve got choice, all right – it’s Work for the Dole with Provider A or Provider B. No doubt things were different in the US during the dotcom boom, when Michele wrote her article, but to incorporate it now, without comment, is just bizarre.
Thus:
“I'm going to try my luck in new media — you know, Internet stuff … if it doesn't work out, there's always another job list next [autumn]."
Before realising that Michele Tepper’s broader website could well provide me with the postscript to what happened, five years down the track, I was going to make a wager here that (i) her foray into “Internet stuff” did work out, at least in the short term, and that (ii) the “Internet stuff” was now pretty much over for her, BUT she would not be in academia.
And guess what - her full resume is online (itself a sign, of course), confirming her current status as a self-employed “Information Architecture Consultant”. If I wasn’t in much the same boat myself, I’d feel sorry for her. In hindsight, there may well have been another academic “job list” in the autumn of 1999, but I’d bet that if there is even one being drawn up now for autumn 2003, Michele’s got Buckley’s of getting anything. And as for her continuing to hang on with the status quo, designing web pages part-time, I’m afraid that the outlook here is even gloomier – for all its cutbacks, academia has so far proved immune to third world outsourcing, unlike so much else.
Academic “job snobs”? – gimme a break.