Pages

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Academics: The Next Generation

This blog, which started as gymnasium for thought exercises, may actually outlive my doctoral training and dissertation. I recently accepted an assistant professor position, and writing is built into my job description. This is exciting for a number of reasons, including the fact that I love to write. In deciding to go the academic route, I seek to follow the example of a few others (here’s an example from David Perry) who have worked hard to ensure that they apply their training to issues outside narrow specializations and write for broader audiences. My hope is that this blog may continue to evolve—and improve—in order to serve as a launching point for strong writing about important issues. Ambitious though it may be, I am setting a goal to write one post a week.

When I received my informal job offer letter, the dean of the college remarked that he was excited to share that I will be joining a strong cohort of in-coming assistant professors. I started to speculate about who these other neophytes might be and how we might relate to one another, if at all. Inspired by the Beloit College Mindset List, I started thinking not just about my soon-to-be colleagues, but also about the characteristics of all new assistant professors. What might be the defining experiences of my generation of academics? Here are a few predictions, based entirely upon my own opinions and stories from few friends who recently started gigs at colleges and universities. Empirically-driven? Not at all. The hop from “generation” to “generalization” is a short one.

#1 We won’t be called professor. I’m not referring to whether our students call us Dr. X, Professor Y, or just plain Z. Rather, trends tell us that very few of my generation will be on the tenure-track, and given the inability of academic reward systems to recognize the plurality of scholarship, many of us on the tenure-track will struggle with being evaluated by the standards of the older generations. Not only will few of us be called professor, but virtually none of us will bear the adjunct title. Instead, institutions will respond to the growing ranks of non-tenure-track faculty (both instructional and non-instructional) and develop new titles that reflect the diverse and sometimes specialized job responsibilities of these hardworking friends and colleagues.

#2 We’ll complain about work-life balance. But we’ll have no idea how to achieve it. This is a generation that highly values careers that bring us meaning, and we wholesale subscribe to the idea that work should not conflict with our ability to be well and have a family. And this is a good thing. However, we are also a generation that has been competing in a Darwinian model of academic meritocracy for years. We are hard-wired for achievement and striving for success. Although we will constantly bemoan the difficulty in finding enough time for work and outside life—and frequently blame our employers—we will come to realize that our expectations and goals are the biggest impediment to balance. This realization won’t come until after a long period of talking and writing about the topic.

#3 We’ll teach courses online. Not because this is necessarily our preference or because we are advocates of some innovative revolution in higher education, but because we were hired into departments or programs that were structured around online teaching. We want jobs, so online we go. My generation will largely be responsible for answering lingering questions about quality and scalability in online teaching. We will also be the generation that contends most frequently with the matter of ownership over courseware and other instructional materials designed in the process of teaching online.

#4 We’ll write for popular online publications. Academic publishing is rapidly changing, and my generation will approach the dissemination of our scholarship in novel ways. We are a generation rather accustomed to having a public presence through social media, and we devour listicles and online journal articles with addict-like ferocity. Look out for a generation of academics who are more interested in publishing for Slate, The New Yorker, or The Chronicle of Higher Education than an academic journal. This is not to say that we’ll abandon more scholarly publication outlets—we know we’ll need peer-reviewed books, chapters, and articles to earn tenure. But when we are in charge of departments, we’ll vote to broaden the umbrella of appropriate means for sharing scholarship.

#5 We’ll have less power on campuses. Sure, faculty on some colleges and universities will unionize. However, the power of administrators will continue to grow, and my generation will be ill-equipped to retain the faculty voice in decision-making or protect institutions of shared governance from being hollowed out. We are not a generation of activists, and we express our outrage through Twitter and Facebook, not sit-ins and picket lines. Given the high salaries of administrators compared to faculty, many of us will be motivated to assume administrative roles. This is not a bad thing, but the demands of running complex organizations usually require acquiescence over civil disobedience.

#6 We’ll completely reinvent the academic conference. With a few exceptions, academic conferences are astoundingly out of touch with how my generation communicates. We will work to make academic conferences more developmental and experiential. I’m talking about the death knell of PowerPoint presentations and the excommunication of whomever decided that reading a paper word-for-word constitutes an engaging way of sharing your life’s work. Picture, instead, TED talk-like presentations, more interactive workshops, and partnerships with local communities. And we’ll stop wearing those plastic name badges—just because.

Some of these predictions capture unfortunate new realities in academic life, and I don’t particularly welcome those changes. However, some of them are remarkably exciting and provide opportunities for my generation to translate our work in new, more accessible ways. I look forward to thinking about this list and adding to it. More importantly, I can’t wait to see if my predictions materialize in the future.

What would you add or refute?

No comments:

Post a Comment