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Career Sense is a blog for academic job seekers.
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Avoiding the ‘C’ word in academe – ‘career’
A reader sent me a link to an article recently published by his supervisor, Jonathan Sterne, in the Journal of Communication Critical/Cultural Studies, “The Pedagogy of the Job Market” (6: 4, 421 – 424). This article should be required reading for all graduate supervisors.
His main point is the status of the academic job market in general is not a holy quest nor is a tenured position in a large research university the Holy Grail of academe (my metaphor). He goes on to offer seven principles to realign the position of the academic job market in graduate education and admonishes graduate supervisors for perpetuating this myth. He calls on them to be as critical of their own occupational environments as they are of any other human institution.
This last point of Sterne’s is the closest I have ever heard an academic admit that this profession has a dysfunctional relationship with the term ‘career’ even when it refers to their own – some might say ‘especially’ here.
As a person who has spent more than 20 years in a university setting – 12 years in grad school (MA, ABD and PhD in progress) and 12 years in a university career centre, I have frequently run head-on into the unacknowledged prejudice of all-things-career-related which seems to permeate academe.
I have to be very careful how I introduce myself, or how I describe my background when I speak to academics, because as soon as I use the ‘c’ word, I can see the blinders go on, the frozen stare that says “I’m pretending to listen – but I’ve already made up my mind” and then they quickly change the topic. There is no glimmer of intellectual curiosity, no spark of recognition in a shared sphere of professional interest; nothing to suggest that anything someone for the ‘career’ centre could be involved in might in anyway be relevant to academe at all. In fact there are more than a few professors who would be much happier if career centres simply disassociated from universities altogether. Honestly, I’m not overstating this (too much).
At first I was just plain offended. But it happens so predictably that I’ve come to accept it as one of the great idiosyncrasies of universities. They will unabashedly recruit students by the thousands with allusions to high-status careers, but once said recruits arrive, they are fed misinformation, or no information about the likelihood of realizing their career dreams. To insert any connection between course content and it’s relevancy outside the ivory tower is unilaterally avoided.
Many professors aren’t at all sure where their universities’ career centres are, let alone, what they can do for students. I’m constantly astounded how out of touch faculty members are at universities across the country when it comes to understanding the roles of career centres their own campuses.
Historically, career centres were ‘placement centres’ and were essentially branches of the Department of Labour with the primary task of helping war veterans reintegrate to the workforce after upgrading their educations at university. But that was over half a century ago, and things have changed no less radically in career centres than in the rest of society during that time.
Here is my challenge: if you haven’t yet, seek out your university career centre – online and physically. Feel free to ask them about their philosophy of career development and how that impacts their practice. You may well find their programs and services to be much more grounded in theory and research than you ever suspected.
In the meantime, share Jonathan Sterne’s homepage with grad student who don’t have quite as enlightened supervisors as he obviously is. Thank you Jeremy for sharing Sterne’s article with me – I hope you appreciate how lucky you are!
Funny. I’ve been contemplating writing about how grad students shouldn’t assume that their advisor is qualified to advise on their careers. Since his/her job is to advise on their research.
And this looks at it from the other side. Very interesting. Thanks.
This article is bang on – the relationship between profession and career is indeed dysfunctional. Profs really have no clue what the marketability of grad degrees are yet so many encourage students to pursue grad degrees under false pretenses about the marketability of their degrees.
Talking about career options (basically anything other than a professor position) is like talking about failing. Career is a dirty word in academia because the reality is a dirty secret.