I was at home packing up some of my books when I came across several academic survival guides. (I discuss a few of these books here and here.) Prior to graduate school and throughout both my masters and PhD programs I consumed these books like food. Survival guide to graduate school for women students, and how to write your dissertation, and getting the most out of graduate school were just a few of the themes in these publications. I guess reading them did me some good--This is assuming that having been granted your PhD and living to tell the tale qualifies you as having survived.
But there is always another level of "survival" in the higher ed game. Having survived graduate school, how can one survive a post-doctoral experience? If you survive that, what about the tenure track job search process? Assuming you make it through that hoop, what about surviving the promotion and tenure process? If you decide (or are forced) to go the non-academic route, how are the survival rules different there?
Well, I have few answers to these questions (though I do have several books covering those topics). What I have found helpful, though, are a couple of recent Inside Higher Education articles that have effectively used non-scholarly metaphors to give helpful advice for getting on and getting along in the academy.
In this piece posted just today Rob Weir calls on academic types to learn from cats:
Academic squabbles are often compared to cat fights, but as one who has owned cats for several decades, I’ve come to believe that such analogies are unfair to felines. Cats, for instance, instinctively know to terminate a chase when they would consume more calories than their prey would provide. And even the pugilist tabbies I’ve owned eventually learned to give wide berth to rivals who consistently bloodied them. All of this suggests that cats may be more evolutionarily advanced than a lot of academics.
Weir then goes on to discuss several academic debates from 2007 that he believes "aren’t worth the calories, let along the anguish" and thus should be terminated, cat-like, by folks in higher education. In light of my interest in the transformation of higher education into a more market-based delivery model I was particularly interested in his third example of a battle that needs to be walked away from:
Should the Academy Operate According to a Consumer Model? If you answered “no,� prepare to be boarded; your ship has been vanquished. The high price tag of higher ed makes it a market-place commodity and it’s as naïve to assert that a college education is its own reward as to believe that the Olympics are a still bastion of amateurism. Whether we like it or not, kids shop for courses just like they hit the mall. Profs and departments can assume the crusty purist’s demeanor, or they can start making course offerings jazzier and sexier. The latter path leads to the vitality, the first to extinction.
Among other issues, he also gives feline-inspired responses to the questions What Do We Do About Poorly Prepared Incoming Students? ("How about teach them..."), Why Should Faculty Be Forced to Be Tech-Savvy? ("Because it’s the 21st century..."), and Should Colleges Be Required to Dip Deeper into Endowment Funds? ("Yes...").
Some very relevant thoughts. Though I do not agree with all of the specific points, I do agree with the overall premise of the advice. Not to say that there are not some battles that are worth fighting. But I agree we can learn a lot from our fine feline friends by developing the ability to know when to slink silently away: our tails down, head up, and paws at the ready--just in case. (By the way, my only quibble with this article is that I wish it had been illustrated with some lolcats!)
Now, maybe you are not a cat person. In that event, you might be served by the simple observation that "all hustles obey the same logic"--thus the academic hustle can be informed by guidelines of a hustle in a very different sphere. That is the premise of this piece I read in IHE last summer. I did not revisit the comments this time, but did recall that when the piece originally appeared folks either hated it or loved it. At any rate, Phil Ford introduced his advice with the following:
We’re staring down the barrel of another academic year. Time for a refresher course in professional deportment — by which I mean “The Ten Crack Commandments,� by The Notorious B.I.G. All you professors starting out at new institutions (like me) will be getting orientation sessions to show you the academic ropes — procedures on academic misconduct, FERPA guidelines, sexual harassment policies, etc., but you can save some time and just listen to hiphop.
Ford directs the second point particularly to academic bloggers:
Never let ‘em know your next move/Don’t you know bad boys move in silence or violence. Or, as MF Doom says, never let your so-called mans know your plans... Seriously, bloggers, always assume that everyone you know, and everyone you might want to know, will read your blog. It’s easy to get suckered into the illusion that you’re confiding your innermost thoughts with an anonymous Them you’ll never actually meet. Nope, and when you confide stuff about yourself that you wouldn’t announce from the lectern of a plenary session of the American Musicological Society, you could end up like Youngblood Priest from Superfly, who accidentally kills his best friend when he drops the name of his connection in a nightclub.
I do not want to get into the whole "Tribble Controversy" here again, but suffice it to say that this is a good piece of advice. Yes, blog if you want to. But though it may well be good advice to "dance like nobody is watching," the same is not true for blogging. Even, I might add, if you do so (or think you are doing so) anonymously.
I also appreciated the advice about not believing your own BS, or, as Biggie would say "never get(ting) high on your own supply." Ford notes about this point that it may be hard to see its relationship to higher ed types:
But think of it this way: when you are up in front of your students, you are not necessarily “being yourself.� You have a persona, or several personae, that you adopt as a way to frame the meaning of the material you’re teaching, and to impart a sense of your own relationship to that material... Keep clear, if only in your own head, the distinction between who you are for professional purposes and who you are at home.
I think the same thing holds for one's "research personae" and any other Self one displays in an academic setting. Not partaking of your own product is advice easier rapped than followed. We tread a fine line in the higher educational setting that runs right between needing to bolster our confidence--for example, so as to overcome the "imposter syndrome" that many of us suffer from--and needing to maintain a sense of perspective and humbleness. On that note I'll close by offering my own piece of survival advice courtesy of a joke I adapted a while back. It doesn't have a happy ending. But I know you would much rather hear real advice than a bunch of feel good lies, right?
| Once there was a Turkey, who also happened to be a graduate student working on her dissertation. (Perhaps you did not know that turkeys are admitted into graduate programs...) One day, completely frustrated with her lack of dissertation progress, the Turkey took a walk outside. Soon she came upon a huge tree. She stood at the base at the tree for some time, looking up longingly at its massive and heaven-reaching branches. After a few moments, a Bull lumbered over.
"What are you looking at," asked the Bull. "At this tree," replied the Turkey. "It is such a great tree, a towering tree. I am certain that--if only I were able to get to the top of the tree--I could see for miles around, my dissertation block would be overcome, and all my problems would be solved." "But alas," the Turkey continued, "I am unable to fly to the top of the tree..." "Ah," said the Bull, "it is only that your wings are too weak. If you had the proper vitamins and proteins, you would be more than strong enough to reach the top." At this the Turkey brightened up a little. "Here," said the Bull, "eat some of my dung. It will give you the strength you need to fly to the top of the tree." The Turkey thanked the Bull before he lumbered off. Although she was somewhat hesitant about following his advice, after some moments of staring at the dung heap and looking up at the tree, she decided to go for it. She bent and nibbled a small amount of the dung. She immediately felt a tingling in her wings. Somewhat encouraged, she took larger and larger bites of the heaping pile. The Turkey then flew effortlessly onto one of the uppermost branches of the tall tree. Thus situated, she looked far and wide, clucking happily at the new vistas now afforded her. Before long, some fellow Scholars were taking a break from their own research by doing a little hunting. (Perhaps you did not know that academics hunt...) The Turkey's loud clucking caught their attention. The Scholars observed her for a few moments, quite amazed that the Turkey would be able to fly so high into a tree so tall. Then they promptly unholstered their rifles and shot the Turkey from the branch. The moral of this story is: Bullshit can get you to the top, but it cannot keep you there. In dissertating--as well as any other academic endeavor--you must be willing to do the hard work. |