On Your Mark. Get Set. Jump. Safe Landings: Stories of Academics Who Leaped From the Ivory Tower

by
Chris Cumo

Allison Baker, who holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania, felt ambivalent about an academic career. She didn’t want to fritter away years teaching part-time while trying to publish her way into a job. Nor did she want to move around the country in search of a series of temporary appointments only to end up somewhere she didn’t like earning a substandard salary. At the same time, she sensed that her parents (her father is a molecular biologist) and friends expected her to do something with her degree. She taught a semester at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California but didn’t enjoy the experience. Her passion was fitness rather than academe. A competitive runner since age 13, and now an avid swimmer, she gravitated toward a neighbor who trains Hollywood celebrities in Los Angeles, California. With his encouragement she started her own business as a personal trainer, a job that gave her the independence she had wanted as a scholar and the chance to help others improve their quality of life in ways that are more concrete than anything she had done in the classroom.

This transition from the library stacks to the weight room has drawn on the writing and research skills she honed in graduate school, only now she writes fitness articles rather than monographs, and researches diet and exercise rather than cultural history. Baker is quick to add that she is as much a teacher now than she would have been at a university, only the interaction is more personal than is possible in a large survey course. The point is that graduate school can be a path to all sorts of interesting careers for those who are willing to take risks.

“Someone once told me that if you could think of anything else you’d rather do, to give it a try rather than try to stick with academia,” she said.

The advice has given Baker a career more rewarding than any she could have imagined in the academy.

Her success is fodder for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which embraces careers outside the university as an answer to the current job crisis in high education. The Foundation provides grants to support internships in business, government and nonprofit organizations, a career-resources center, a mentoring program, tips on writing résumés and cover letters, interviewing, negotiating salary and perks. Between 2000 and 2001, the Foundation matched 40 humanities Ph.D. holders with corporations or nonprofits. The Foundation’s clients range from Encyclopeadia Britannica to Bristol-Meyers Squibb. Think twice about accepting a part-time lectureship when you can get “double or triple the salary at A. T. Kerney, Microsoft, Merck, or the National Park Service,” writes Foundation president Dr. Robert Weisbuch in “The Year of Full Employment.”

The Foundation is part of a growing movement: Peter Stokes, co-creator of PhDsWork, a Web site which touts alternative careers, assures Ph.D. holders that their degrees are assets outside the ivory tower.

Academic expatriate Gwendolyn Bradley has written about finding work in technical writing, at private schools and nonprofits, and in academic administration, has won a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation grant, and has fashioned an alternative career of her own as a writer and editor for Academe, the magazine of the AAUP.

The University of Texas at Austin has an intellectual-entrepreneurship program that focuses on how graduate students can reconfigure themselves for the corporate world. Susan Basalla, who holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton, coauthored So What Are You Going to Do with That? A Guide to Career-Changing for M.A.s and Ph.D.s in 2001 and writes about alternative careers for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

However, the transition from graduate school to a job outside the university may not be easy for those who aspire to the tenure track. Joe Coulson, who holds a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, admits growing bitter after a three-year job search netted only two offers, both temporary positions in composition. He turned them down and instead taught at a series of prep. schools only to find that even the brightest students couldn’t penetrate literature to a depth that satisfied him. After 13 years, he felt burned out and had fallen into the trap of thinking that a Ph.D. in English qualified him only to teach. He looked into work at publishing firms, but couldn’t afford to restart his career at the entry level. He refocused his search on nonprofits, landing at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago, Illinois, where he is Senior Editor and Director of High School Programs. The job pays him to immerse himself in literature. He has written reader’s guides for The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter and collaborated on a series of guides in philosophy and science.

“It’s fun to do something as anachronistic as a book,” says Coulson.

His job allows him to concentrate on literature and ideas without committee meetings, departmental politics and squabbles over whom to hire for the sole tenure-track line. No longer bitter and burned out, Coulson has adapted to life outside the academy.

Coulson’s story is part of a larger context. The Modern Language Association acknowledges that more than half of all Ph.D.s in English and foreign languages don’t find tenure-track jobs the year they graduate, and anecdotes suggest that this estimate understates the problem. Mills College in Oakland, California once received 735 applications for a single position in English. These surreal numbers leave many aspiring academics little choice but to work outside academe.

Were supply and demand not so askew, Kevin Walzer might be on the tenure track. He has co-edited a book and published two more. However, one year after receiving a Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio he was working retail and teaching part-time. He’d had enough and launched a furious search, landing a series of jobs that led to his current position as a marketing writer in Cincinnati. He now earns more money than would have been possible in academe. Yet one senses ambivalence in his stance toward alternative careers. He advocates them as a way out of the penury of part-time teaching, though he admits being angry and bitter at having published more than most of the full professors in his former department without finding the academic career they enjoy. But ambivalence is not vacillation. He knows he has crossed the Rubicon.

“I never expect to work in academe again,” he says.

Universities do not yet know how to describe people like Walzer: productive scholars who have no academic affiliation. Some departments list only their recent Ph.D.s who have tenure-track jobs, omitting those who are journalists or product managers as though these professions don’t count as careers, laments Alex Pang, who earned a Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of Pennsylvania, and works a technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future in California. The problem is partly taxonomic. Universities are struggling to classify careers that don’t come with professorial rank. Princeton English professor Elaine Showalter has suggested the phrase “post-academic careers.” But even this language has the academy as its reference point. The discourse about alternative careers, if it is to mean anything, must begin with the premise that Ph.D.s who work outside the university are as legitimate as those in it.

Angela Bilia, who has a Ph.D. in English from Kent State University in Ohio, began to consider alternative careers upon realizing in graduate school that a tenure-track job might elude her. She visited Kent’s career center for advice, but the counselor didn’t know what an English Ph.D. could do besides teach. Bilia subsequently taught in Greece, but returned home at the end of the semester after learning she was pregnant. At first she stayed home with her son, but the family couldn’t live on her husband Mike’s salary as a librarian at American University in Washington, D.C. They found themselves borrowing money from his parents. Bilia became desperate and began applying furiously for jobs in government, business and nonprofits but found nothing. She turned to temporary agencies but couldn’t find work until an agency that specialized in placing people in universities found her a position as an administrative officer at Georgetown University. The title is a euphemism for secretary says Bilia, who feels trapped in a clerical job that leaves no time for teaching and scholarship.

“I am very unhappy and depressed and feel stuck and dispirited,” she says.

She would like to leave her job at Georgetown, but doesn’t know how to translate her degree into a job that isn’t a dead end.

English and history Ph.D.s aren’t alone in seeking alternative careers either by necessity or choice. The market in the sciences is so dismal that 33 percent of biologists and 20 percent of physicists are in low-paying postdoctoral jobs three years after receiving their Ph.D.s according to the National Science Foundation. The prospect of being an itinerant lab rat chases some scientists out of the university.

Zaid Ayer was one of them. A nuclear physicist with a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and a postdoc at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he couldn’t find a tenure-track job. Rather than settle into a holding pattern of postdoctoral positions, Ayer completed a computational-finance program at Carnegie Mellon University and is now a financial analyst for PNC Bank in Pittsburgh.

“You spend all those years, and you just throw it all away,” he said. “I don’t look upon it as a waste. But in the big picture it [a Ph.D.] really doesn’t get you anywhere.”

Ayer and others like him aren’t aberrations. They are the products of a system that churns out Ph.D.s without regard to the market, and unless enrollment trends change drastically their numbers will only grow. What will this growth mean in human terms? It may liberate people like Allison Baker to redefine themselves, or it may crush the spirit of people like Zaid Ayer, who have invested so much of themselves in a futile search for an academic career.

One thing is certain. University officials can make the transition for graduates less painful by acknowledging the legitimacy of Ph.D. holders who work in fields outside of higher education. If university administrators help faculty and graduates see that we live amid opportunities that stretch beyond the university, the Ph.D. may some day again be seen as an opportunity to enrich a student’s life and, subsequently, the world.