As you may have just read (and if not, go
read it now!), my fellow post-academic and co-editor Kathleen has landed herself a new fulltime job working for an online university! She will be working with and mentoring university students, teaching a few online classes, and will be staying in the geographic location that she is currently living in without having to relocate. Oh, and it will also pay her a generous full-time salary with benefits. Yayyyyy Kathleen!!
(Because I feel like I should say this: I know what school she will be working for, and it's not one of the "diploma mill" online schools that are often criticized. Though for reasons that I will outline below, I wouldn't care if it was ... because I firmly believe that
any nonacademic job is a valid choice for people who leave academia.)
So, the other night when Kathleen emailed Lauren and me to tell us about her new job, she was a little worried that she would be considered a "postacademic impostor" once she announced her new job: that she would be criticized for not taking the "right" kind of postacademic job (because online universities have come under fire lately from folks in academia and postacademia), or that taking a job that involved teaching and mentoring was not far enough outside of traditional academia to truly qualify as a postacademic job.
As I told Kathleen last week, I don't agree with that assessment at all. And thinking about that conversation has actually motivated me to write my first blog post in a long, long time.
I've been out of academia for nearly three years now, and the postacademic blogosphere and world have changed
considerably during that time. Most of that shift has been wonderful - we are getting national press coverage and having public conversations about leaving academia, and the decision to leave is losing a lot of its stigma and the people who do it are being brought out of the shadows.
But along with the growing visibility of the postacademic blogosphere, I've also noticed a not-so-great shift in the types of conversations we're having.
The postacademic blogosphere used to be primarily about how individual bloggers were leaving academia without a net or a guide, and about their success (or lack thereof) at finding some job -
any job - that would help them fully break free from academia's totalitarian culture and strict guidelines for what was acceptable. We had popular postacademic bloggers who worked as temps, as secretaries, as office managers, and even those who were unemployed for a while as they tried to find a new job. But we supported each other, and we reassured each other, and we talked about how even our not-so-glamorous jobs were terrific in comparison to adjuncting! And that our stable jobs (no matter what they were!) were better than begging for graduate funding every year while we took multiple futile stabs at the academic job market. At that time,
leaving was the end goal for postacademics. It didn't matter what you did next, as long as you broke free of academia.
In contrast, today's postac blogsophere has been more focused on scathing critiques of higher education and academia, and on profiles of successful people who have left academia and are well-established in new careers. I think that these types of pieces are certainly useful for new postacademics to read (scathing critiques abound in my archives, of course!), but this new focus has left a noticeable hole in the blogosphere. The highly personal, individual stories about the struggles and ups and downs of individual people
as they are initially leaving academia and trying to find some stable footing elsewhere are all but missing in today's postacademic world. (Though such stories abound in our e-book, which can be bought
here or
here!)
That's understandable, to a point - as postacademia becomes more public, the types of conversations that we have will change. But to tie this back to my conversation with Kathleen--in which she worried that her new job meant that she was "doing postacademia wrong"--I worry that the absence of stories about the struggles and hard decisions that many postacs go through as they leave may inadvertently make future academic leavers feel anxious or apprehensive. If new postacs don't know what kind of career they want after they leave, is that okay? Because most of what they will read in today's blogosphere is about people leaving and landing awesome, elite, PhD-level jobs.
Similarly, if they don't land a perfect, academically-approved postac job right away, are they doing postacademia right? If they wind up temping for a little while as they figure out what comes next, should they feel like failures? If they get a good job with a generous salary and benefits in an industry that other postacademics are criticizing publicly, should they stay quiet because it's not a "good" job??
I worry that if postacademia continues to highlight only the biggest postac successes, they will be inadvertently ignoring people whose paths out of academia aren't quite as blessed. And in turn, I worry that we may be doing a disservice to the people who will be looking to the postac blogosphere for advice in the future, especially if they don't know exactly what they want to do next. (You know...people like Kathleen and me, 2-3 years ago.)
So in today's shifting postacademic blogsophere, I want to be clear about something that I believe
with every fiber of my being (and that I do believe most postacademics believe, for the record):
short of contract killing or drug trafficking, there are no "good" or "bad" postacademic jobs. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to do postacademia.
