Beyond the “alt-ac”

As scholars, we are constantly negotiating our relationships to our field(s) of study and to our job titles. In the sciences, a PhD can remain a “physicist” whether in a professorial job in a university, national lab, or industry

But what of the humanities? If an anthropologist with a PhD is not employed as an academic in a university, are they any less an anthropologist? For many traditional academics it is almost inconceivable to remain a scholar without being either in a tenure-track position, or on the road to one. The number of people willing to take poorly paid adjunct positions to stay on the treadmill is testament to the persistence of this idea, and even in the sciences the culture is slow to change as we’ve noted previously. Twitter and the blogosphere is overflowing with discussions of “alt-ac.

In a piece “To a Revolutionary Degree: Power to the PhDs” on Public Seminar, John Paulas is having none of it:

…we must strive to eliminate from our vocabulary ideas and language that label certain livelihoods of humanities PhDs as aberrant. This includes the language of “alt-ac,” “other careers,” “leaving the field,” and, of course, the use of “job” only to mean a tenurable faculty post. This language, revealing an element of narrowness of thinking in our PhD culture, diminishes the strength of the humanities. It must be replaced by empowering, community-building language.

The use of empowering language and modes of thinking is a vital counter to the “contraction and austerity we are seeing now within the university”, argues Paulas:

The humanities have taught us that the way we talk about things matters. We must be alert to the language we use that reinforces a limited view of the work lives of PhDs…

How to do this? To start: refer to any career that a PhD holds as a PhD career. Period. That solves a lot of problems. People with PhDs in Anthropology or Classics who work at banks must say without second thought: “We are anthropologists” or ”We are classicists.” No more “I used to be an anthropologist, but now I work outside the field.”

For us at the Ronin Institute, this is music to our ears. We firmly believe that scholarly identity transcends one’s employment status and Paulas’ piece is one of the clearest and spirited articulations of this idea. It is essential reading for all scholars in both the humanities and the sciences, check it out on the Public Seminar site.

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Alex Lancaster is a Ronin Institute Research Scholar, an affiliated researcher at IGDORE and a computational and evolutionary biologist.

This post is a perspective of the author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Ronin Institute.

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