It pains me to hear stories of unsupportive advisors in academia. In particular, it boggles my mind when I learn of faculty who do not support their advisees’ decisions to leave academia. This challenge came up during a Beyond the Professoriate Online Career Conference session. Many participants fear blowback from their advisors. One panelist mentioned that, after they left academia, their advisor stopped speaking to them for over a year.
One of the primary explanations for advisors who are unsupportive of their advisees leaving academia is that faculty have personal and professional investment in their advisees getting certain kinds of positions. I can’t verify either of these claims (personal or professional) but they certainly seem true. Professionally, a faculty member whose advisees get certain kinds of jobs implies something about that faculty member – their connections, perhaps, or their mentoring or research. The effect, in turn, is that faculty reap certain rewards from positive implications such as a positive reputation in their field. Personally, the argument goes, the faculty member wants their advisees, especially those they favor (let’s not pretend faculty don’t favor certain advisees), to follow the path they did. This desire could be because they truly believe in academia as a site for change and want their advisees to carry the torch. It could also be more selfish: by their advisees reproducing their career paths, these faculty may feel validated by that path. It is important for higher education professionals to confront these faculty and emphasize the reality that most PhDs will not get tenure-track faculty positions. Any career advice for PhDs and grad students that makes no mention of alternatives to tenure-track is professional malpractice, and any person offended by interest in those alternatives is deluded. At the same time, there is plenty of criticism to go around when it comes to career advice. Elsewhere in the Beyond the Professoriate conference, panelists expressed unilateral positivity about jobs outside academia, including how they enjoyed working with their managers, resolved workplace conflict simply through brief conversations with HR, and landed their jobs simply through great networking. In short, what some of these post-acs are doing is doling out a different kind of professional malpractice: unequivocally stating the bad in academic jobs and the good in jobs outside academia. Three panelists’ great experiences with HR and their manager does not mean corporate managers and HR units are positive across the board. (Although I briefly considered that all non-higher ed managers could be better, a colleague reminded me that Ask A Manager would not be a thing if managers were all that supportive and effective.) During one session, a participant remarked in the chat that non-academic employers seem better in general. This comment went un-addressed. The sunny experiences of corporate life went unchallenged. To me, this malpractice reflects the same personal and professional investments post-acs have in leading others to post-ac jobs. Professionally, if a person can attend a Beyond the Professoriate conference and afterward land a post-ac job, then it suits Beyond the Professoriate to have facilitated that transition. And personally, if a post-ac can convince someone else to leave academia, they might feel vindicated in their own departure. Certainly these are not the only impulses for post-ac advice; a great deal of advice is rooted in genuine caring. But as long as post-ac professional development ignores the complex nature of post-ac opportunities, it is professional malpractice. What I want post-ac advice-givers (like those at Beyond the Professoriate and, to some extent, The Professor Is In), to do instead is to present these post-ac paths like any other professional path: complicated. Corporations, non-profits, and universities all present potential employees with problems and benefits, which manifest in each organization within those fields in different ways. Moreover, individual job-seekers will interpret problems and benefits differently. Without this more complex view of post-ac, post-ac coaches risk repeating the harms of the faculty they regard with disdain.
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4/4/2023 05:52:48 am
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AuthorI am a higher education professional and sporadic blogger. I have opinions and tell puns. Archives
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