Reflecting about my research career has put me on the lookout for people writing about academic careers. I just read Karen Kelsky’s recently revised best-seller The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning your Ph.D. into a Job. Kelsky, formerly a tenured professor of cultural anthropology and East Asian Studies, has a thriving second career blogging about academe and, as her title suggests, advising people applying for academic positions.

Launching an academic career, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is now very challenging. Approximately 90 percent of people who earn Ph.D.’s in those fields end up in some other line of work. Kelsky, therefore, is focusing on the tiny minority who are intent on academic careers. The academic world was very different when I entered it in the 1970s: departments were expanding and there were plenty of jobs for new Ph.D.s.

Winning is Everything

Kelsky is advising her clients on how to win in today’s enormously competitive academic hiring environment. She tells them to consider themselves campaigning for a job. I will quote what she considers to be the essence of such a campaign:

“You have to create a professional persona. That persona is a full-fledged scholarly professional who demonstrates a tightly-organized research program, a calm confidence in a research contribution to a field or discipline, a clear and specific trajectory of publications, innovative but concise, unemotional plans for teaching at all levels of the curriculum, a nondefensive openness to the exchange of ideas, and, most importantly, a steely-eyed grasp of the real needs of hiring departments” (p. 94). Her book is devoted to helping the reader implement this vision both when on the job market and after having been hired. Her advice includes a focus on publishing in top-tier journals, aspiring to add a line to the c.v. every month, deciding which conferences are worth attending, and networking effectively and dressing appropriately at those conferences.

Kelsky’s message of focus and professionalism when on the job market and pre-tenure makes sense in the current dog-eat-dog academic world. Should it be relevant, however, to those who have achieved tenure? Tenure exists not only to protect faculty members who espouse unpopular views but also to encourage faculty members to take intellectual risks. Such risks can include exploring fields that are new to them, launching interdisciplinary research projects, and collaborating with practitioners.

Sorry Not Sorry

Applying Kelsky’s advice to my own career, I would not have been her best client, especially after receiving tenure at the age of 32. I didn’t focus solely on top-tier journals. I wrote books and I contributed to edited books, which she describes as “where good ideas go to die.” I even edited a book and led a research project in which six of us contributed to a book. And I wrote publications intended for practitioners.

I did more than my fair share of administration. I was the founding chair of the Department of Management at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. I served four years as President of the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration at a critical moment in its history. In both cases I had the satisfaction of successful innovation and stewardship.

And I had some rewarding non-academic gigs, including serving on the board of directors of the Crown corporation that developed Ontario’s electronic toll road (407ETR) and serving as conference rapporteur for the Commonwealth Association of Public Administration and Management in the Nineties. I look forward to writing more about these experiences.

Kelsky makes an eloquent case and detailed prescription for a particular way of being an academic. But I regret that circumstances in the academic world now appear to force scholars to adopt an approach in which focus can lead to narrowness. And, even after receiving tenure, these habits may remain as constraints on exploration.

I am glad I spent my career in an environment that was more receptive to intellectual risk-taking, to interdisciplinarity, and to working with practitioners. This enabled me to have a range of intellectual and professional experiences that were personally rewarding and that made a variety of contributions to society.