An article in Chronicle of Higher Ed suggests that in order to aspire to tenure-track positions, graduate students need to become entrepreneurs.
I find the idea very disturbing. As much as I respect people who possess entrepreneurial spirit and are talented in this area, I thought the whole point of choosing a career in academia was to be in an environment where you don’t have to be an entrepreneur. If I wanted to be in sales or marketing, I would have done just that and probably ended up making a lot more money than I do at this point. However, I chose the life of intellectual contemplation, research, and teaching. I don’t want to sell anything to anybody, not because I think there is anything wrong with selling but simply because I think that there should be some form of balance in each society. For every group of people that sells stuff, there should be a group that doesn’t.
I have no interest in approaching Google with business ideas, taking courses in statistical methods, or learn computer programming, as the author of the article suggests. I especially don’t want to do any of these things if they will take time away from my engagement with my own field. I also feel no shame when I confess that, in all probability, I will suck something fierce at these endeavors. Just like talented programmers, business people and statisticians will probably bomb at creating literary criticism and teaching Spanish.
When I worked as a Visiting Professor at a university of great renown, I had an opportunity to observe a tenure-track colleague in a contingent field who dedicated her every free moment to aggressive networking. I don’t think I ever saw her alone or with other tenure-track people. She was always in the company of higher-ups. I’d often see her interrupt conversations with students and colleagues to dash across the street towards a senior faculty member and administrator. She had an actual database of useful people she already met and had yet to meet. In terms of networking, this academic was a pro. When the tenure review came by, though, she did not have a single publication to offer. And there was nothing that any connections she had been able to develop could do to offset that.
What annoys me especially in this article is the suggestion that if graduate students embrace entrepreneurial values, this will somehow serve public good. It isn’t like we see many exhortations for business people to improve themselves intellectually and pick up a book on philosophy or literary criticism every once in a while, even though that would bring more visible benefits to society than academics who start trying to sell, market, and network.
Academia has already suffered a lot of damage because of the efforts to apply business mentality to running universities. It is a sad testament to how pervasive this push to transform colleges into businesses has been if a graduate student in English Literature writes an article for Chronicle of Higher Ed trying to sell entrepreneurship to academics.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’ve never heard of this before. How sickening!
I’m so tired of having to justify my existence as a humanities student.
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You know? It’s hard enought to do what I do as it is without having to master computer programming at this late date.
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It’s the trend and it’s aggressively here and well, yuck.
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One of my favourite webcomics made fun of this in terms of science academia versus business once (http://xkcd.com/664/)
I decided after a lot of soul-searching that I wanted to get a master’s and then decide whether or not to go into a PhD program and then academia. I don’t think students like me, who are generally very focused and appreciate a contemplative and reflective existence, would appreciate being pressured to be something they are not (type A personalities who are aggressive and in-your-face about self-promotion or the idea of selling themselves) in order to have their passions fit someone else’s ideal of useful and worthwhile. I know I don’t.
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Really?
I have no plan to be stuck in Academialand for all eternity. I can see what Research Assistents and PhD Candidates spend their time on and I am not going to do shit as boring as theirs, that is for sure.
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That, of course, should be totally up to you. But the people who really dig the boring shit should be able to choose to do it and not forced into fields they have no interest in. 🙂
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Why are you in it at all if you find it boring?
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About turning entrepreneurial: I am trained as a theoretical physicist and work in an applied science department. I love math and programming, I love research. Yet I spend almost all of my time writing grants to support my students and postdocs and I keep getting stupider because I have no more time to actually do research myself. Instead, I have to keep money flowing in so the younglings can do research. I knew I would have to write grants going in but I didn’t realize how completely grant writing will devour my time, energy, and the will to live. At below 10% funding rates, it’s beyond demoralizing.
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Yeah. This situation is now hitting humanities, too. I feel ya.
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It’s a weird post. In the comments there’s a more interesting link, to a related, more developed initiative at Austin. Because it’s more developed, it’s even more depressing.
I only skimmed it but there seems to be one good aspect to it: career awareness for people who are in graduate school due to having certain interests but don’t want to go into academia. That’s it.
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CS is not boring in itself when applied properly and to interesting things. But if you are not a nitpicking skeptic that feels the need to be right about everything (NOTE: I am exaggerating here) then researching if a decentralized time synchronizing protocol can negotiate synchronisation in 10ms per peer or 13 ms per peer is not that interesting.
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People in smaller language fields like Italian and Portuguese often need to take the initiative to organize groups and events. They often have more of that “entrepreneur” ethos than I have seen in my own field. That is because they are often called to build a program rather than merely teach within an established framework.
As someone lacking in this quality myself, I admire it in others. I think I would have had more success early on if I had had more of it then. It is also a way of setting yourself apart in an environment where a lot of people don’t have it. Especially at an early stage when a lot of graduate students have similar profiles, wouldn’t you choose to hire one who had some initiative in grant-writing or event-planning? Would you choose the person who had started a journal or a conference? Who organized fellow grad students to bring in outside speakers? Sure, not everyone who will go on to be successful is a leader in this sense, but I think it can be a desirable quality.
What I didn’t like in the article was the implication that everyone should do this. I see it as a particular personality type that not everyone will have.
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Well Jonathan, I have it and I need it since I have to constantly save Span/Port in a French/English state but those of us who have it are usually looked down on. I also resent being asked by the current zeitgeist to develop even more of it: I’ve already given so much, sacrificed so much to this.
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well I mean self promotion is good and necessary to a certain extent, and I’m all for say digital humanities if it brings history to the masses, but I too am finding it hard to get psyched to figure out Omeka or whatever. I prefer to provide the content and let someone else do the widgets thank you
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How depressing, but what can you expect from chronicle of higher ed? The author of the article did not read The New Spirit of Capitalism, obviously.
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I haven’t read it either. Should I? I looked it up on Amazon and it sounds fascinating. Do you recommend?
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Highly. I think that you will like it.
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It its original French version, that is 🙂
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Personally, if some management expert wants to join me, I’m interested to become an entrepreneur in private teaching.
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“Even students in the humanities should consider taking classes in statistical methods, sociological research models, computer programming, information technology, and other such topics. ”
Statistical methods are useless, he ‘s wrong on this. Other ideas are not bad, though.
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But generally, this is a great post.
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I also have a proflund dislike of marketing in all its forms. Both my brothers are very good at it. To me, it is just really despair-inducing.
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What Bellamy said. Salescrittership is creeping into everyone’s job description, in academia and everywhere else. Thanks to the Iron Law of One Price, production work can only be done in poor countries. That leaves for us Americans the task of loosening each other’s purse strings and charming the $ out of each other’s pockets. It’s a house of cards, of course. Burn, baby, burn.
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I’ve explained precisely this to my students today. Their collective shocked response was, “But if this system hurts people in the US and hurts people in 3rd World countries, then why does it even exist???”
Then, I had to explain to them that there are people and then there are the few people who actually matter.
“But that’s like. . . return to slavery!” a black student exclaimed.
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A return to slavery, indeed, which is what we’ve been returning to ever since most revolutions occurred, including feminism and the revolution in Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe’s culture having now been entirely colonized by US evangelists with their creepy sentimentalism, wishful thinking and petty bourgeois aspirations).
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