Transcript
Speaker: We are making history on episode 8 of Academic Defectors and I do mean every terrible pun.
Speaker: Today we have Dr. Joseph Steubenrock, PhD in History at Indiana University.
Speaker: After completing his degree he actually went on to earn tenure at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Speaker: which is a first for us here on Academic Defectors because we've never actually spoken to someone who made it to the other side, yet still ultimately chose to leave.
Speaker: Dr. Steubenbrock's research on modern British history was supported by the North American Conference on British Studies, Midwest Victorian Studies Association, the American Historical Association, Huntington Library, Winterthur Museum, and the American Interquarian Society, in addition to other support sources.
Speaker: And his book, The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2016, received the book prize from the American Society of Church History as the best book on religious history by a first-time author.
Speaker: No stranger to the post-academic conversation, Dr. Steubenrock opens up today about the importance of listening to that inner voice inside of you that's questioning, wait a minute, am I actually happy?
Speaker: As well as the importance of, in his own words, talking about our disasters.
Speaker: So, without further ado, Dr. Joseph Steubenrock, I am curious to hear about your career trajectory because you actually made it to the tenure track, right?
Speaker: I was tenured, yes.
Speaker: Well, that's amazing, and it actually marks an occasion for academic defectors because we've never had someone who actually made it to tenure.
Speaker: And where were you again?
Speaker: Baylor University.
Speaker: And forgive me, where is that located exactly?
Speaker: That is in exotic Waco, Texas.
Speaker: Baylor is an R1 university.
Speaker: It was, it should have been the dream.
Speaker: They had a light teaching load, research support.
Speaker: I had tenure.
Speaker: I was the graduate program director of my department, very collegial department, and should have been happy, but I wasn't.
Speaker: Wow, a lot to unpack here.
Speaker: But first, you were a history professor, correct?
Speaker: That's correct.
Speaker: And just out of morbid curiosity, I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind explaining your specialization a little bit.
Speaker: Late 18th and early 19th century British history.
Speaker: And if we want to get very narrow, I was interested in religious culture and the way that religion underwent in Britain, underwent some very interesting changes through kind of almost a symbiotic relationship with what we could think of as the transitions of modernity.
Speaker: So mass market, mass print, mass audiences.
Speaker: And I was really interested in the ways that religion
Speaker: rather than being kind of in conflict with modernity, the way that it's repackaged and remade and starts reaching audiences in new ways.
Speaker: So I was looking at early 19th century tract distributors on the streets of London and looking at religion basically as a form of commerce.
Speaker: Honestly, I have to say your research sounds really interesting and appropriately multidisciplinary, which I feel like certainly in the environment of humanities discourse today is really required of us.
Speaker: So, you know, it makes sense that you, you know, would have made it to the tenure track, which leads me to ask you what your career trajectory was when you were actually
Speaker: in graduate school?
Speaker: If you had any kind of rearing from your professors, if you really wanted to be a professor, what do you feel led you on this path as a graduate student?
Speaker: So I, in some ways, had a very traditional kind of on-rails experience of academia.
Speaker: I went straight to graduate school from being an undergrad, in part because I didn't know
Speaker: what else to do and I really liked school and I seem to be good at it and I imagined myself as a professor with the tweed jacket and a relaxed lifestyle and life of the mind and maybe writing some novels on the side.
Speaker: A very sickeningly stereotypical view of what it would be to be a professor.
Speaker: I went straight to graduate school at Indiana University.
Speaker: Very nice.
Speaker: I did have some twists and turns at Indiana.
Speaker: I started
Speaker: So maybe I've always been doing a little bit of pivoting in retrospect.
Speaker: I started as a medievalist and for a variety of reasons, switched to the modern period and switched advisors.
Speaker: And though actually I have lots of fondness for my advisor when I was a medievalist, but ended up switching.
Speaker: I spent a long time in graduate school, a very long time, but this was
Speaker: before 2008.
Speaker: And so it was in a moment where, especially I think at the big state schools, it was a massive program and you could sort of spend as much, as long as you were sort of reasonably competent, you could spend as much time as, there was no hurry to leave.
Speaker: They just kept giving you funding, you know, minimal amounts of funding to grade for these enormous courses.
Speaker: So I spent almost a decade in graduate school.
Speaker: Once you add in the
Speaker: the shift in year four from being a medievalist to a modernist.
Speaker: But I was fortunate enough to get a job offer in the final year of my dissertation work while I was ABD.
Speaker: And it's always when you talk to people, usually it's the one lucky break.
Speaker: I had one on-campus interview.
Speaker: and I happened to get the offer, right?
Speaker: It wasn't like I had lots of offers or lots of success on the job market.
Speaker: So the rest of the dissertation came together very quickly after that job offer.
Speaker: And I went to Baylor as an assistant professor and did the tenure track there, histories of book fields, got my book out, was tenured and was settling in for the rest of my life.
Speaker: I wasn't enough of a superstar
Speaker: that I was going to be probably moving around to other locations.
Speaker: Yeah, that really is like another level of professordom, isn't it?
Speaker: Like not just getting a tenure track job, but getting multiple tenure track job offers and then leveraging that to get more benefits and a higher salary or a spousal hire or wherever at your original institution.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that is a really good point.
Speaker: And that's something we actually haven't talked about on the podcast yet.
Speaker: And, you know, given that this whole project of academic defectors is partially to demystify the academic world, I think that's, you know, pretty salient.
Speaker: But yeah, so your trajectory was, yeah, pretty one right after another undergrad to grad school, grad school right into a tenure track offer.
Speaker: And you mentioned that this was before 2008.
Speaker: So when when did you matriculate at Indiana University?
Speaker: My first semester of graduate school was 9-11.
Speaker: So really my graduate school experience was, I felt very defined actually by 9-11 and the war in Iraq, but I graduated in 2011.
Speaker: So kind of at the bottom of the housing market, but
Speaker: Jobs hadn't fully collapsed then and graduate programs I don't think had fully responded yet where at least my understanding is my program now really emphasizes, okay, you're out in five years.
Speaker: Like we've got to keep, you know, people.
Speaker: I don't know if that's true, but I feel like programs have moved to be more accelerated and more responsible and not letting people sit around for a decade.
Speaker: That is really responsible, out in five years.
Speaker: And you're right, 2011 was actually the year that I started graduate school and I did my PhD at Cornell.
Speaker: But I didn't really detect that same level of responsibility that I guess you were describing at Indiana.
Speaker: And if anything, I actually, I felt like there was a lot of self-congratulatory, like,
Speaker: insular kind of, you know, we're in the Ivy League.
Speaker: This doesn't apply to us kind of a feeling when I was in grad school.
Speaker: And that any kind of talk about the job market or about like socioeconomic precarity was just completely swept under the rug.
Speaker: And if, and really, if anything, I recall more or less explicitly being told, you'll be fine because you're at Cornell, you will get a tenure track job.
Speaker: That is what getting a job means.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's different from what you're describing.
Speaker: And actually, I recently caught up with a tenured professor at Cornell who actually lives in New York City, where I am, which means he commutes upstate to Ithaca, which takes about four and a half, five hours on four wheels.
Speaker: But given that he is...
Speaker: he researches experimental music.
Speaker: And of course I'm a musicologist.
Speaker: New York is a good place for him.
Speaker: But anyway, we recently caught up and he himself was kind of the superstar hire.
Speaker: I think he started the year that I did at Cornell in 2011.
Speaker: And he was fresh out of his PhD at Columbia where he really excelled.
Speaker: And I actually broached this topic with him because I, of course, left academia.
Speaker: And I said, I really think
Speaker: like that PhD programs really owe it to their students to let them know what they're up against.
Speaker: I mean, the statistic is 93% of PhDs in the humanities and social sciences are not going on to tenure track professorships.
Speaker: So what are they doing instead?
Speaker: It's like the endless postdoc hopping.
Speaker: It's adjuncting indefinitely for, you know, like slave wages.
Speaker: And he said, you know, I tell new PhD students when they come in that this is basically a gamble.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And while I commend the brutal honesty, on the other hand, I find myself kind of thinking, you know, how can professors in good conscience still think that this is acceptable?
Speaker: How can you mentor people under these conditions?
Speaker: You know, why does it have to be a gamble?
Speaker: Why can't PhD programs at least equip their students with the knowledge that
Speaker: of how to make their skills more transferable, especially in this, as we were kind of talking about, this highly interdisciplinary environment that the humanities and social sciences of today finds itself in, right?
Speaker: Where certainly in musicology, our department at Cornell went through a tremendous shift after I left, going from musicology with an ethnomusicology concentration, if that's your thing, which it was mine,
Speaker: to now what it currently is music and sound studies, which is so obscure and doesn't have any like real hard skills to it that, you know, what transferable job skills are you even offering?
Speaker: That is going to be the saving grace for 93% of PhDs who after seven years in their degree program, which it took me seven years, it's about average for musicologists at Cornell, and I think for a lot of us in the humanities, um,
Speaker: But that's part of it, right?
Speaker: Is it's not just, oh, there's no professorships on the other side.
Speaker: You're out of the regular job market for seven years.
Speaker: And even if you do get tenure, which at Cornell, I can only think of a handful of people, I think, one, two, three,
Speaker: four people off the top of my head in all of the cohorts that were on campus when I was there who actually are in tenure track positions, two of whom are married to each other and who cannot get jobs on the same campus and have been in a long distance marriage now for over five years.
Speaker: Even if you do get tenure, I guess the point is, I'm kind of going off here, is that it's not exactly the pot of gold on the rainbow that we're told it is in the institution.
Speaker: So anyway, back to you here.
Speaker: So you mentioned that you had this big pivot moment when you were in graduate school from being a medievalist into going into modernity studies.
Speaker: And just as a side note, I think a lot of us PhDs are pivoters.
Speaker: You know, we go into graduate school because we're not really sure what else to do.
Speaker: And hey, if you can stay in school forever and it works for you, you know, it seems like a pretty sweet gig.
Speaker: But I'm wondering if you could speak more about that moment where you change courses and whether or not there was a moment of panic involved in that pivot.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: No, it wasn't panic.
Speaker: Well, almost.
Speaker: I haven't even thought about or told this story in a very long time.
Speaker: So sure, it's important to hear about people's disasters.
Speaker: I think I was getting signals as a medievalist that I should have, in retrospect, interpreted broadly about academia and my fit with academia.
Speaker: but I was apparently too stubborn and too fixated on what I thought I wanted to do.
Speaker: And I did.
Speaker: Academia, to be clear, right, I'm pretty privileged from the position I'm talking in.
Speaker: I had a great experience of academia, one that I feel almost guilty about.
Speaker: But as a medievalist, I was perhaps medievalist for the wrong reasons.
Speaker: I was so young.
Speaker: I was 22 when I entered the program.
Speaker: I didn't know what I was doing as a graduate student.
Speaker: And it sort of culminated in me, trying to say this in a succinct way, culminated in me not preparing properly through my coursework for the work that was ahead of me.
Speaker: And there were some structural issues, I think, at the program, but a lot of it lay with me.
Speaker: And I went into quals and completely bombed them.
Speaker: uh-oh and was considering leaving graduate school in that moment devastated and i even had gotten uh the because back then things were still on paper sometimes i had gotten the paper applications for the life for the indiana university library science program and i was thinking maybe i'll take my history ma and go to library science but the person who ended up becoming my advisor
Speaker: um, reached out to my best friend in the program and said, don't let Joe leave over the summer.
Speaker: He was, um, the person from my inside field in my quals.
Speaker: And then at, toward the end of the summer, when he was back from his travels, he set up a coffee chat with me and said, you know, so how are you feeling?
Speaker: What's ahead for you with, you know, preparing for round two of quals.
Speaker: And I said, well, I'm thinking of leaving and
Speaker: He responded, I mean, he was a wonderful mentor, is a wonderful mentor.
Speaker: He said, well, you know, if this isn't for you, go off and have a great life.
Speaker: Academia is a really weird gig.
Speaker: Well said.
Speaker: It's not for everyone.
Speaker: And it doesn't mean you're not smart.
Speaker: It doesn't mean you're not valuable.
Speaker: It doesn't mean you're not competent.
Speaker: It is a really weird job that can only be for very odd people that it fits with perfectly.
Speaker: So go off and have a wonderful life.
Speaker: That said, don't leave because
Speaker: you think you can't succeed.
Speaker: I think you can.
Speaker: And I said, well, I don't think I can be a medievalist here in this program.
Speaker: And he said, have you thought about modern British history?
Speaker: And I said, no.
Speaker: He said, would you like to?
Speaker: So he just poached me.
Speaker: And I moved to modern British history because I loved him.
Speaker: I loved the course I had taken with him.
Speaker: I took an introduction to cultural history course with him.
Speaker: And so I moved into British history purely out of
Speaker: liking my advisor and knowing that I could, through him, do a project on any time period that would be interesting.
Speaker: And that was how I became a British historian.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I haven't told that story in a very long time.
Speaker: So it was a very random pivot.
Speaker: In retrospect, maybe I left, but I didn't.
Speaker: No, it's great.
Speaker: And it's interesting.
Speaker: It's kind of like we're given like an omen of sorts.
Speaker: And I don't mean to say like, oh, a moment of panic.
Speaker: You know, I don't mean to project.
Speaker: I certainly had lots of panic moments when I was a graduate student.
Speaker: Oh, but it was.
Speaker: But that advice that your mentor gave you is pretty profound.
Speaker: I mean, did it ring in your ears at all throughout the rest of your time in graduate school after you had successfully transitioned into modern British history?
Speaker: Well, you know, the lesson I took from it was a good lesson.
Speaker: It is not the lesson I would take from it now.
Speaker: The lesson I took from it was that my advisor, the person who became my advisor, had...
Speaker: faith in me and was going to support me and that he had sort of seen my value.
Speaker: And that helped me get past, I think, a lot of doubts that I had.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And in a sense, he was right because I want this to come off the right way, but I didn't win the biggest prizes in my field as a graduate student, but I won some substantive, like,
Speaker: prizes along the way.
Speaker: I got an article published, which in my field is not always a given, especially coming out of my program.
Speaker: You know, we weren't the top Ivy League.
Speaker: And I got a tenure track job at a good university.
Speaker: So he was right.
Speaker: I was able to do it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And by the way, for the record, Ivy League, shmivy league.
Speaker: And as it turns out, you know, Indiana University has one of the finest music programs in the country.
Speaker: Well, it does.
Speaker: That actually made it very nice to go there because of all of the amazing performances that were happening any night of the week.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: And I have several friends who are graduate students in the opera program there.
Speaker: And going to parties with them where they would sing was amazing.
Speaker: I actually have very fond memories of that.
Speaker: There was sort of this, because of actually one shared friend who had good friends in both, there was many like gatherings that were history and opera.
Speaker: And yes, the historians would just sit around sort of in amazement as the opera students would suddenly hold for it.
Speaker: So those were some good memories.
Speaker: Honestly, opera people know how to party.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: We had someone actually in my cohort who to this day is one of my dearest friends.
Speaker: She was an opera scholar and nobody threw it down like she did.
Speaker: Shout out to Annalise.
Speaker: But anyway, you're touching upon some broader themes.
Speaker: that I've been kind of observing that a lot of us PhDs all kind of experience in one way or another, particularly not just this kind of yearning to have like a different kind of lifestyle than like a typical nine to five, but also the shadow side of this quixotic way of thinking
Speaker: doubt, feeling like you're not good enough.
Speaker: And you mentioned, for example, that, oh, I wasn't like the strongest history scholar, right?
Speaker: But you still managed to publish an article in your field as a graduate student.
Speaker: That's a big deal.
Speaker: I come from the humanities as well.
Speaker: And it's not like, as far as I understand, physical sciences where publishing is just really part and parcel of the whole PhD gig.
Speaker: As humanities scholars, getting an article published as a graduate student is a big deal.
Speaker: Yes, right, yeah.
Speaker: And plus the other aspect of this too is that as humanities scholars, we're not just researchers.
Speaker: We are also technicians of prose.
Speaker: We're writers and we have to write coherently while also dealing with archives and texts that came before us and synthesizing all of that while carving out our own special niche.
Speaker: And of course, what binds all PhDs together is that that leaves us at the frontier of new intellectual territory.
Speaker: And finding that balance between standing out and finding the niche that you can occupy, which I think is a substantial part of the intellectual labor of humanities and social science PhDs.
Speaker: For me, I felt like, okay, is my work, it has to be different, but is it too different?
Speaker: I ended up feeling like I kind of was in this area that I wasn't sure if it would even be accepted by my field.
Speaker: And relating back to your really powerful story about the shift that you made during your qualifying exams, I actually experienced something similar during what we at Cornell called the Q exam.
Speaker: So the Q exam came at the beginning, actually the end of your first year, you submitted your best paper to be reviewed by the professors.
Speaker: And then you did well that, you know, they just wanted to make sure that you were on track.
Speaker: Then we had our A exam, which is what everyone else calls qualifying exams.
Speaker: And then the B exam was the defense.
Speaker: So my Q exam was kind of a disaster.
Speaker: So basically what happened was at the beginning of my second year after the summer and the professors had reviewed our Q exams, the director of graduate studies, the DGS, Professor Neil Zasla, the world's foremost scholar of Mozart, sent me an email and said, you gotta come to my office.
Speaker: So I was like, oh crap.
Speaker: So I go in and he was like, look,
Speaker: we took a gamble on you.
Speaker: And I know that sounds pretty intense, but what was meant by that was I don't actually have, up until that point when I started at Cornell, I didn't have a formal background in musicology.
Speaker: At the University of Chicago, I studied East Asian languages and civilizations with a concentration on Japanese history.
Speaker: So history also, by the way, is something that's
Speaker: very much something that I'm interested in.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, that it was it was pretty devastating.
Speaker: But on the other hand, it also was kind of validating because I kind of knew that I, I was a wild card.
Speaker: I was the only one on my cohort and really the only one in any of the cohorts on campus at that point, that wasn't
Speaker: I was kind of steeped in the musicological tradition.
Speaker: I took one musicology class as an undergrad with a person who was a postdoc who then became a tenure track professor at Cornell and he wrote one of my letters of recommendation.
Speaker: He was the one that actually said, hey, you should apply to Cornell because his class really changed my life.
Speaker: music 1800 to present i mean this is like the all-star hour right yeah so anyway um yeah obviously having the director of graduate studies tell you that you're not pulling your weight and you need to do better it was really hard to hear but on the other hand he qualified that and he said but we believe in you we accepted you for a reason and we know you're going to go on to do great things and the the irony of the whole situation was
Speaker: was really twofold.
Speaker: First of all, the paper that I wrote, it wasn't bad, it was just different.
Speaker: It was just very different than what other people were doing.
Speaker: I wrote about conceptions of Asia in Wu-Tang Clan, whereas everyone else is, you know, submitting like score analyses of
Speaker: you know, operas or whatever.
Speaker: It was just very different than what other people were doing at that time.
Speaker: But the other, I guess, part of point of irony was that when I left Cornell, at that point, our department had gone through the shift of being kind of more old school in our approach to musicology to kind of embracing this new school that would end up becoming music and sound studies after I
Speaker: would have graduated.
Speaker: So people like Professor Zaslaw, they no longer were the big men on campus, and I do mean men, but you know they were sort of considered almost passe, almost out of fashion.
Speaker: But I always respected Professor Zaslaw because he knew his shit and he
Speaker: He dealt with me so directly and so clearly during this meeting with the during my Q exam and I actually asked him to get a coffee so I could just thank him and say goodbye to him and just pick his brain one last time when I was graduating and he actually said to me he looked me in the eye and I'll never forget it.
Speaker: It has stayed with me now for five years and really honestly helped me through some tough times on the other side of academia as I've been You know crystallizing what my life path actually is he said
Speaker: Jillian, you can't help but rise to the top of wherever you are.
Speaker: And I took that to mean pretty much what he said, but basically that I did, after the Q exam, I did kind of think to myself, I got to get myself in gear here.
Speaker: And I ended up securing a couple national fellowships and, um,
Speaker: In fact, the person that wrote the letter of recommendation for me, shout out to Professor Roger Mosley, who's absolutely brilliant.
Speaker: He too was like, your progress has been pretty astronomical, like you've hit an asymptote.
Speaker: So that was all really validating, but at the same time too, kind of set me up for confusion later on down the line because my work continued to be even more different than everyone else's.
Speaker: Plus, too, as you point out, you know, getting prestigious fellowships and presenting at the major conferences in your field, that doesn't even really make you a superstar.
Speaker: I was not a superstar either.
Speaker: You know, I wasn't, I was just sort of ticking the boxes, which I think is also to your point about the pressure that we're under as PhD students to just basically be perfect or
Speaker: or perish.
Speaker: And that leads me to follow up on this piece of advice that your mentor gave you about how academia, you know, it's a weird gig for a very particular kind of person, which is so true, right?
Speaker: After hearing that advice at the time when you were a graduate student, I'm very curious to know how you felt you were
Speaker: could fit into that matrix?
Speaker: Did you think, yeah, I am that kind of person and I'm going to make this work?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I had invested a good amount of my identity and the way I thought about myself into I'm an academic.
Speaker: What else could I be other than a professor?
Speaker: It's that very two-sided unhealthy coin of it's both like
Speaker: self-criticizing and you devalue yourself, but at the same time, you're sort of taking pride from it.
Speaker: Like, look at my expertise that makes me completely useless, but as a sign of how brilliant I am.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Oh my God, that is so true.
Speaker: Like I'm not like the rest of you.
Speaker: I am brilliant and in my brilliance, I'm useless.
Speaker: But that uselessness is a sign of my passion because I am willing to be impoverished.
Speaker: I'm willing to have no career options.
Speaker: because I am so dedicated to my weird niche.
Speaker: I am the sort of fevered artist, the enthusiastic scholar who can't tear myself away from my books.
Speaker: And I wanted to be that, honestly.
Speaker: I wasn't, but I wanted to be.
Speaker: My mind is being blown right now.
Speaker: You just articulated it.
Speaker: You just articulated it so perfectly.
Speaker: It's this inferiority complex slash superiority complex, which really, if you think about, they're two sides of the same coin.
Speaker: You can't have one without the other.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So were you aware of this kind of dueling dynamic within you when you were a graduate student?
Speaker: No, probably not.
Speaker: I mean, maybe a little bit.
Speaker: I was aware to the sense that I was reproducing that discourse all the time.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Like what am I, what value could I ever have?
Speaker: I, I definitely had doubts.
Speaker: I mean, I think we all do.
Speaker: And just because you have doubts, it doesn't mean you're on the wrong path.
Speaker: I had a lot of doubts, but I tended to interpret them as an obstacle rather than as something I should be more curious about and explore.
Speaker: I think in part, it was trying to compensate for having failed my quals, having pivoted to a new field.
Speaker: You know, one of the other things my advisor said to me is he said, look, I'm willing to take you on in British history.
Speaker: I think you can succeed if it's what you want.
Speaker: But you are switching fields.
Speaker: You are already done with coursework.
Speaker: You have to learn British history in one year.
Speaker: You have to be able to pass quals in one year.
Speaker: Are you ready to work your ass off?
Speaker: Basically.
Speaker: So you did two sets of quals.
Speaker: I did one in medieval failed and then I completely reset and a year later
Speaker: past quals in modern British history.
Speaker: But because of that, I then tended, I think, or at least contributing to it, I then tended to view any time I was like, am I on the right path?
Speaker: Is this the right fit for me?
Speaker: I wasn't sophisticated enough to be asking, is this causing me to flourish?
Speaker: Am I thriving?
Speaker: But really, maybe underlying it, those were some of the questions I was asking.
Speaker: I would tend to say, that's the voice of poison.
Speaker: That's the voice that
Speaker: causes you to fail, right?
Speaker: Academia is a battle against yourself, ultimately.
Speaker: And the winners are the ones who do the work and shut out that voice.
Speaker: Then same experience on the tenure track.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: I built sort of, I would always have these kind of extravagant escape fantasies, which I interpreted exactly as that, like, ah, I'm under intense stress.
Speaker: this is my like both my weakness and my coping strategy i'm my mind is always somewhere else i'm always wanting to start some side project not related to what will advance me in academia i'm always dreaming of some other thing right this is this is me trying to sabotage myself shut it out ignore it head down keep working then i got tenure and the voice hadn't changed
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And I recently found, and I forgot about it in the intervening years because I left academia at the end of 2020.
Speaker: I found in when I was moving from Texas to Seattle, I found in an older journal that I had written shortly after getting tenure.
Speaker: What if I was living on the West Coast working for a big tech company?
Speaker: right?
Speaker: Like I just like thrown that, why don't, could I have that life, you know?
Speaker: And that was like a throwaway sentence and I had forgotten about it for years.
Speaker: And that's where, where I ended up in the long run.
Speaker: So I had like those like visions of like dreams of some other life.
Speaker: I shut them out, got tenure and was, you know, this connects back to our very first part of our discussion about, you know, when you're,
Speaker: If you're not a superstar, what does your career look like?
Speaker: Even once you're tenured.
Speaker: And it was, oh, I have a very comfortable life teaching these same set of courses on repeat, living in this nice small town, working at this nice university for the next 35 years.
Speaker: And there were some moments that caused me to begin to think, if I could design my life from scratch,
Speaker: Is this what my life would look like?
Speaker: Is this what I was actually building towards and dreaming of?
Speaker: Or have I actually been dreaming of something else, but not letting myself think about it?
Speaker: And in fact criticizing myself for dreaming of that other life.
Speaker: Oh, why aren't you more passionate?
Speaker: Why aren't you more productive?
Speaker: Why are you such a flake?
Speaker: Why do you get energy when you're sort of interacting with other people versus when you're alone in the archive?
Speaker: I even, I was starting to build a academic administrative career because one of the things I did some reflection after getting tenure and I was like, what did I enjoy most on the tenure track?
Speaker: And I almost felt guilty about it.
Speaker: One of my favorite things was in the final year on the tenure track.
Speaker: So I was almost tenured, like the book was coming out.
Speaker: So it wasn't something that was going to derail me.
Speaker: I shared a department search committee for another tenure track hire.
Speaker: I loved the process because I got to talk to all sorts of people.
Speaker: I was running this and coordinating.
Speaker: I'm like, why did I enjoy that so much?
Speaker: And then starting to come to a realization of like, oh, well, maybe instead of beating myself up about liking regular feedback and clear and short-term deadlines and getting energy interacting with other people,
Speaker: maybe instead of that being my failure as a historian, that just means, like, that's a strength in other places.
Speaker: Maybe I should, maybe instead of, like, trying to defeat myself, I should, like, do what I get energy from and just make that what I do.
Speaker: Okay, so first off, might I just say that you're so easy to talk to.
Speaker: You're such a good podcast guest.
Speaker: Oh, thanks.
Speaker: No, no, I mean it.
Speaker: And I think it's what you're saying, too, is a testament to how in academia, it's like we have to pathologize our need for human interaction.
Speaker: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker: I'm really picking up what you're putting down here.
Speaker: And just to relate to what you're saying, when I was ABD and I had come back from my first year of fieldwork, and my research was on music in contemporary Japan, I did a three-way comparison analysis of underground music, traditional music, and performed in contemporary contexts and popular music.
Speaker: And, you know, my fieldwork was really, you know, I designed it to be fun on purpose.
Speaker: I'm going to raves in the woods near Mount Fuji.
Speaker: I'm, you know, partying in Tokyo and Osaka, you know, just living my life.
Speaker: I mean, my research ended up really just sort of blending in with who I am as a person.
Speaker: And actually, I feel like I really discovered who I am as a person because of my fieldwork.
Speaker: And like you were saying about having these escape fantasies of what if I worked at a big tech company on the West coast dot dot dot.
Speaker: I was starting to have similar fantasies of like, what if I moved to New York city to focus on my creative projects and just live my life there.
Speaker: Like I've been doing in Japan.
Speaker: And perhaps similarly to what you were describing, it just was this idea that kept popping into my head.
Speaker: But I guess, unlike you, I didn't have a tenure track job waiting for me at the end of grad school.
Speaker: In fact, I didn't apply for any jobs.
Speaker: I knew the odds are stacked against me after the academic job market nosedive in the mid-2010s.
Speaker: I knew this would be a waste of my time and my energy to stay here.
Speaker: So I took the leap then.
Speaker: When I came back from my field work though, when I was ABD, I started to do something like you were talking about being an academic administrator and how that really lit something up in your soul.
Speaker: For me, I started waiting tables.
Speaker: I just wanted to make some extra cash on the side.
Speaker: I was running off to Japan any moment I could.
Speaker: You know, two weeks for winter break, I'm there.
Speaker: Because I just love my life there so much.
Speaker: I was around people.
Speaker: Whereas in Ithaca, at Cornell, I was just alone all the time and...
Speaker: miserable.
Speaker: And maybe subconsciously I was at that point starting to rebel against academia.
Speaker: I mean, you know, I wasn't, I wanted more money, but I wasn't really willing to grovel at the institution.
Speaker: But the other thing too, I wanted to be around people.
Speaker: And from the get go, what I noticed was that the same things that I was doing
Speaker: I was rewarded for the same things as a waitress that I was kind of reprimanded for in academia.
Speaker: So I'm, you know, I'm very tall, I'm over six feet, and I'm very bubbly, and I have blonde hair, and I experienced quite a lot of bullying during my time in academia from
Speaker: a professor in my department that I talked about in another episode and then also one of the big Japanese underground music scholars like I you know presented a paper at the big ethnomusicology society for ethnomusicology conference and I did the whole coffee networking thing and he just completely dismissed me completely dismissed me and was like actively very rude to me and it was if I didn't already kind of know what I was up against it would have been frankly a real mindfuck but you know I knew
Speaker: that at that point I had already realized this is after when I was ABD, I'd already realized like, yeah, I think this is just the way this world is going to treat me.
Speaker: And conversely in, as a waitress, those same qualities,
Speaker: made me very popular with customers.
Speaker: I received positive feedback from my supervisors.
Speaker: It was a completely different feeling of being valued for who I am as a person versus whatever kind of abstract output I might be able to excrete from my brain
Speaker: And so for me, how my career trajectory ended up shaping up after I finished was I moved to New York City with the intention of being a waitress.
Speaker: I figured, hey, this is at least a place where I know I can A, make money, B, something that I have some experience at now, and C, you know, is a place where I at least, yeah, I feel valued, at least for the time being.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: It also allowed me to stay present because you've said it so well.
Speaker: In academia, we can't stay present.
Speaker: We are always thinking about something else, be it the work that we have to do.
Speaker: I mean, God knows writing a dissertation is, you know, this...
Speaker: notorious exercise and just never feeling like you make enough progress right you know there's two kinds of dissertations perfect and done right and you know just feeling guilty if you're not if you're actually in the moment enjoying yourself i mean i remember my 30th birthday i went to the philippines i went to manila i was already i was in japan at that point so it was kind of close by just because you know why not never been there and i
Speaker: I thought to myself, okay, I want to have a really good day.
Speaker: So I'm going to work on my dissertation for four hours this morning.
Speaker: I brought my dissertation to Miami after I walked in my graduation ceremony, you know, knowing that my defense was in like a month or two.
Speaker: I brought my dissertation to Miami.
Speaker: Like no one brings a dissertation to Miami, but that's the PhD life.
Speaker: And the flip side of it too, as an ethnomusicologist where I,
Speaker: you know certainly during the course of writing my dissertation i realize i'm writing about this incredible life that i have in japan but here in the us it's like this quiet studious lonely lonely thing i realized if even if i were to get a tenure-track job this would be my life would be writing about my life somewhere else well i just want to say everything you just said is a different version yet of my life but yet really resonates and and if i could tell i've
Speaker: I've told this story a couple of times before on very different podcasts from yours.
Speaker: So hopefully it's okay.
Speaker: For me, a key moment, a catalyst in what was already happening, but of my journey out of academia was I led a semester abroad trip in Scotland.
Speaker: And it's probably one of the best experiences of my life.
Speaker: I got to live in downtown St.
Speaker: Andrews, Scotland.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Beautiful, medieval.
Speaker: Everything was in walking distance.
Speaker: My daughter was four at the time and there's this cute little Montessori kindergarten and I would like walk her there in the morning and pick up some groceries on the way, you know, it just like, it was just amazing.
Speaker: And we got back and we're driving from Dallas to Waco.
Speaker: And it was that like, oh, I am one.
Speaker: Why is it that my life turns out that I live here?
Speaker: And I don't mean to be like bashing Texas.
Speaker: It's just like different places are your place, right?
Speaker: Like New York or Japan might be your place and not Ithaca.
Speaker: And that's okay.
Speaker: I used to.
Speaker: Again, beat myself up.
Speaker: I need to be cosmopolitan.
Speaker: I can flourish anywhere.
Speaker: No, actually, there's some places that are my place and that's okay.
Speaker: And it was this realization of I am counting down the days, even though it's probably three or four years away till I can lead that trip again because I want to be somewhere else.
Speaker: And then that sort of thought of like, why is my life me here like dreaming instead of just going and doing it?
Speaker: So anyway, an aside that sort of affirms that.
Speaker: I'm kind of blown away because you're really hitting the nail on the head here.
Speaker: I mean, when you described coming back to Texas and being like, okay, I guess this is my life.
Speaker: That's how I felt too.
Speaker: Every time I went back to Cornell, whenever I was in Japan.
Speaker: And then, you know, I was also running off to New York City a lot by the end of grad school too, just trying to be myself, feel like myself.
Speaker: And in terms of
Speaker: In terms of location, that has to be one of the most, it's one of the biggest hurdles to happiness, I think, in academia is that we just, you don't get to choose where you live, starting with your graduate program, right?
Speaker: I remember I wasn't particularly excited about living in upstate New York for the duration of my 20s when I got into grad school.
Speaker: However, shout out to Ithaca.
Speaker: It really is a gorgeous place.
Speaker: You know, no
Speaker: all puns intended.
Speaker: I think it was actually fantastic.
Speaker: And it was, in retrospect, a very good place for me to be in grad school, especially like when I just kind of started to go crazy with my dissertation and stuff.
Speaker: But in terms of thinking about location too, when I was wanting to kind of start my life over after the PhD, I was 30.
Speaker: I was about to be 31 and I wanted to meet somebody.
Speaker: And in academia, it's not just, you're not just locked in to a particular kind of location.
Speaker: And for me too, I also, I like to move around a lot.
Speaker: I like to kind of be more mobile.
Speaker: I didn't want to be locked down, but you're also kind of locked into a very specific kind of person.
Speaker: And just thinking logistically about how, you know, like life choices, what kind of, where do I want to live?
Speaker: What kind of partner do I eventually want?
Speaker: you know, I dated another grad student and it was just, it was a lot of mental energy.
Speaker: Like we weren't really able to relax.
Speaker: It's like, I don't want to talk.
Speaker: I just want to like go bowling, you know?
Speaker: Let's feed each other's neuroses.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So, you know, what it really comes down to all of these things, you know, finding a partner where you want to live, how you want your life to look, how much money you want to make.
Speaker: These practical considerations are very much in competition with getting a job in academia.
Speaker: It's, you know, in academia, the stars have to really align for you to kind of have a good professional, personal life balance.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, again, I keep thinking too about my two friends who are married to each other and they can't even live in the same place all year.
Speaker: You know, it, there's so much in, in the academic lifestyle that is out of your control, like major things.
Speaker: And what I'm realizing now as I inch closer to 40 is that life is once and life is short.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And it's,
Speaker: You know, I feel cliche when I point that out to like graduate students that I do coffee chats with, but like you get one life and, you know, we all make different choices and there are people for which that academic life is the right thing and they totally flourish.
Speaker: And then they actually have trouble understanding why everybody else isn't flourishing in that setting.
Speaker: But yeah, I'm just affirming what you're saying.
Speaker: You get to do this once and...
Speaker: The years, now I'm sounding like an old person, but like the years start going by really fast.
Speaker: And it's a blur on repeat.
Speaker: I mean, if you're an old person, then so am I, because I really get what you're saying.
Speaker: And I have a feeling, yeah, it's just gonna keep going faster and faster.
Speaker: So I hear you.
Speaker: And I'd like to ask more too about what your way of thinking was and way of feeling about these issues that we talked about regarding academia and the lack of personal professional balance while you were a tenured professor, because ostensibly, you unwrap the golden ticket
Speaker: you made it, you know, you reached that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but what was it really like for you after achieving that?
Speaker: I think there was a growing pattern of becoming more intentional.
Speaker: And some of that was encouraged by advice, good advice I was getting after being tenured.
Speaker: It's very common for professors to, when they get tenured, to go through a stage of depression, like super common.
Speaker: Everyone told me like, it's coming, you're going to get tenured and you're going to be depressed because you've been so heads down
Speaker: after the goal and it's the moment everybody stops and goes like, so this is my life now.
Speaker: And like, was that worth it?
Speaker: And you know, for some people, I, it doesn't affect them, but it did affect me a little bit.
Speaker: That sort of feeling of like big life goal, what's next.
Speaker: And I was encouraged to use that post tenure moment as sort of reflection.
Speaker: I was warned, like you're gonna have a lot of service dumped on you.
Speaker: It's really easy to just continue in your current routine.
Speaker: Now is the moment to sort of stop and evaluate, like, what does the next phase of your life look like?
Speaker: So I was in that mode already of like, what do I do next?
Speaker: And I knew that I didn't want to do life on repeat.
Speaker: I didn't want the previous six years to repeat for the next six years.
Speaker: Even though like structurally it was set up that way.
Speaker: It's time.
Speaker: Oh, you want to become full professor time for book two.
Speaker: Like you had book one now book two.
Speaker: And I was starting on, you know,
Speaker: that I had my next project lined up and was starting that process.
Speaker: But I was also thinking about like, where do I want to go and what sort of career do I want to build in the university?
Speaker: What do I want to spend my time on most?
Speaker: What gives me energy?
Speaker: Like I was getting, that was all good advice I was hearing though.
Speaker: It was all meant to cause me to flourish within academia.
Speaker: So I was thinking through that, but at the same time, like I said, I was returning to the dreams of elsewhere.
Speaker: I mean, there's so many layers to put on top of here, right?
Speaker: So there's, there's, there was burnout.
Speaker: I was experiencing academia had never been good for my mental health and the narratives I told myself, but I had also never really allowed myself to acknowledge that or experience that.
Speaker: And I think I started to, I was in the wrong place location wise.
Speaker: And I was coming to terms with that, you know, at that point it was year six, year seven, and it still didn't feel like home.
Speaker: What does that mean?
Speaker: I had had a child on the tenure track, which I think contributed at times to depression because I was so sleep deprived.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Congratulations.
Speaker: But yeah, that's a lot.
Speaker: So let's see.
Speaker: So there was multiple, there was multiple strands going on.
Speaker: It's, you know, in my later twenties and early thirties, the idea of living far from family was something that didn't, wasn't on my radar at all.
Speaker: And, you know,
Speaker: as I got to my later thirties and had a child actually being near family, her getting to see cousins or grandparents more than once or twice a year sounded nice.
Speaker: The fact that all of our vacations had to be to family because we lived so far away, both from my spouse's family and my own that like, if it was vacation, it had to either be research or we were visiting family.
Speaker: Like, so just all those, those aspects sort of were
Speaker: piling up, but I didn't know what to do with them.
Speaker: Then I went to Scotland and came back and I was like, I know what to do.
Speaker: I want to move to Europe.
Speaker: Or, you know, I also had this dream of like the West coast because I have family still on the West coast.
Speaker: And every time the plane comes landing down like a turn, like, especially in Seattle, my wife's parents live here in the Seattle area, the plane banks and kind of like comes along parallel to the coast and you just see the ocean, you see the mountains, you see the trees.
Speaker: And like my heart was just like, ah,
Speaker: This landscape, this is my landscape.
Speaker: So I began to think of like, if I were to get out, what would that look like?
Speaker: I started to listen to that voice more seriously, though I didn't really believe it, but I sort of was like, well, I have tenure so I can indulge these escape fantasies.
Speaker: So I started to think about it more seriously.
Speaker: And then the real catalyst was the pandemic.
Speaker: All of the feelings I had of being trapped, both like career wise, mental health wise,
Speaker: location, culture, then COVID comes along and it's like, let's turn that up.
Speaker: Double.
Speaker: Now you feel really trapped, don't you?
Speaker: And that was sort of this moment where I was like, I also was, I passed 40.
Speaker: And though I think there are many opportunities for people in their 40s and 50s to reinvent their careers.
Speaker: I don't mean it's impossible, but I knew that doors were only going to be closing for me.
Speaker: And it was sort of this moment of like, I have to act now.
Speaker: If I'm going to change things, I can't stop waiting and dreaming.
Speaker: I have to start taking action.
Speaker: My hat's off to your bravery because so many people, I think, they cling on for dear life in academia because of, you know, the amount of
Speaker: chutzpah that you need to make that change.
Speaker: I mean, it's your entire world that you've known and that you've worked for for decades.
Speaker: You have to kind of give that up and just start over fresh.
Speaker: So, I mean, my hat's off to you.
Speaker: That's really inspiring.
Speaker: So, you now are a UX researcher, correct?
Speaker: So, the first field I went to was called instructional design, which is very not... Well, it can be.
Speaker: I don't mean to knock the field.
Speaker: From the snobbery of academia, it seems like a very non-glamorous, not glamorous field.
Speaker: You are creating training for employees, generally.
Speaker: And it could be compliance training.
Speaker: It can be onboarding.
Speaker: It can be whatever sort of learning that a business needs its employees to go through.
Speaker: When I started to explore fields, you know, I began with like Googling, like, what can you do with PhD, right?
Speaker: Like, eventually, um,
Speaker: I chatted and in fact hired a career coach who is a program manager at Google, but has a PhD in comp lit.
Speaker: And she suggested to me among a couple of fields, she said, look at instructional design.
Speaker: And I looked at it and I realized that the skillset overlapped enough with my own that I wouldn't, I just needed to pick up a couple of technical skills and basically build a portfolio with e-learning.
Speaker: And then I had all the other pieces or convincingly kind of get there quickly.
Speaker: So during that COVID, that first COVID summer, I basically just dropped my research agenda entirely and put the pedal down on like, can I get out?
Speaker: Okay, wow.
Speaker: And at the time, I wasn't thinking anything beyond.
Speaker: I was just, you know, I was looking at learning a development or instructional design as a potential, like, longer-term career.
Speaker: It didn't turn out that way.
Speaker: But I got a job offer from a big tech company.
Speaker: And once I got the offer, I was immobilized with
Speaker: I was like the dog that has caught a car and it's like, oh my God, it happened.
Speaker: Like I've been dreaming of getting, you know, this and now like here is the job offer from the big tech company on the West Coast.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: If I accept this, I need to pick up the phone and call my department chair.
Speaker: I need to tell my colleagues.
Speaker: I need to tell the graduate students I need like, oh, wow, I'm walking away from tenure.
Speaker: And so it was three weeks from between the job offer and accepting it of,
Speaker: think i like sprained muscles in my like abdomen and core because i was just so tense i made the decision and everything felt wonderful so i took it and got into instructional design enjoyed that um part way maybe after about a year year and a half as an instructional designer a connection who she got her phd in history from from the indiana same program that we were years apart
Speaker: uh reached out just for like hey we should chat because she works at google as a ux researcher and by the end of the chat i was like wow i'm totally fascinated by her field so i moved not into ux design but into ux research is now my current field and i was able to do that in internally and my my hunch i think was correct when i got the job offer i knew that this was the first door opening and that there was many doors beyond that because once you're out in
Speaker: out of academia into industry, that first job begins to sort of cleanse your, your resume where you now have industry experience.
Speaker: You look legitimate and you can start making internal connections.
Speaker: So I work at a massive company.
Speaker: So when I became interested in user experience research, I just pull up the employee listing.
Speaker: I have access to like 1.5 million people.
Speaker: Now, not all of them are relevant for me to talk to you, but it's just find the closest UX team.
Speaker: to my own in the organization, start reaching out to them.
Speaker: We share a lot of the same internal and external customers as my team did and was able to sort of build my career towards UX.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: So what sort of tasks do you do as a UX researcher and do you enjoy the work that you do?
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: I'll start with the core UX research tasks, which are
Speaker: which I think is very similar to being a cultural historian.
Speaker: It feels like being an applied cultural historian, which is really a way of saying like I'm the anthropologist that cultural historians always want to be, except we work on dead people.
Speaker: So we aren't actually observing.
Speaker: And so I am trying to capture the behaviors, the needs, the wants, the struggles of our customers and how they
Speaker: of understand our product and how that product fits into their broader world of needs people don't use products generally because they love the product they are trying to get something done in their life and so if you understand those needs and wants and behaviors that can then help inform what your product should be how you should develop it what features what's working what's not and so my job is to help the product team make decisions i'm giving them data a lot of it's very heavy qualitative data about
Speaker: this is how people react to this new feature.
Speaker: Or when we're talking to people about what they do, they all have this strange workaround on the side, which shows our product isn't meeting this need for them.
Speaker: They need to do this other behavior and it's a hassle.
Speaker: Or they have to set up and do this extra stuff.
Speaker: We would be providing them a lot of value if this was just built in automatically.
Speaker: Okay, I see, I see.
Speaker: So I do interviews.
Speaker: I sit and talk with customers.
Speaker: Like, tell me how you set that up.
Speaker: Oh, like, why were you setting up that feature?
Speaker: Cause this is all in cloud computing space, you know?
Speaker: So, oh, what are you trying to achieve with that?
Speaker: How did that go the last time you did that?
Speaker: Oh, why do you say that?
Speaker: Tell me more about like that frustration.
Speaker: Uh huh.
Speaker: You know, like you're just getting them to talk and then you're synthesizing that.
Speaker: So
Speaker: It often feels a bit like being a historian where at the end of doing a bunch of user interviews, I might have 120, 140 pages of transcript.
Speaker: And now I'm pulling out what are the big themes, synthesizing like what is the customer's voice here that the product team needs to hear?
Speaker: Because if the product team is not hearing that voice, they will build a product for themselves.
Speaker: And sometimes that's a right bet, but often it's not.
Speaker: So interviews, but also surveys, usability studies where you're just observing someone, you give them a task like, oh, set this up in your account.
Speaker: And then you go back to the product team and you're like, yeah, nobody knows where this feature is, or everybody assumes it works this way, hits a wall and has to backtrack.
Speaker: And then you think, oh, like, how do we, do we change the feature?
Speaker: Do we change the messaging?
Speaker: So that's, that's what it is to be a UX researcher, like the research side of the work.
Speaker: A lot of the work though is to use a jargon term, stakeholder management, it's
Speaker: going actually kind of doing UX on the product managers, going to them and being like, oh, what are you thinking about right now?
Speaker: What are your concerns?
Speaker: And like helping them work backwards to like, what are your areas of questioning or what do you need to know to make the decisions you have to make in the next three or four months?
Speaker: What would help you make those decisions?
Speaker: And it's my job to
Speaker: give them at least a firm, like it's all very ambiguous, but to give them a slightly firmer grounding on how they make those decisions.
Speaker: Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense.
Speaker: And it makes sense that you would be drawn to it given that you were interested in administrative work back when you were a professor at Baylor, which leads me to ask, why tech?
Speaker: What drew you to tech in particular?
Speaker: I think an important part of leaving academia is putting aside a lot of these pretensions that at least I had, not all academics have.
Speaker: So what is money?
Speaker: Good question.
Speaker: I like tech because tech has really high salaries that enable me to live in a city where I want to live.
Speaker: Amen.
Speaker: Tech is global, so I can move other places in my life if I want to.
Speaker: tech is growing.
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: I had always had some side interests in, I don't know if like tech is quite the right word.
Speaker: As an undergraduate, I'd actually thought about, should I be a computer science major?
Speaker: But then the first dot-com bubble popped and I was like, oh no, this is clearly overblown.
Speaker: Go get that history.
Speaker: What an idiot.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So it's, it's, it's kind of fun and energizing, even though I'm not a technical person.
Speaker: My role is not technical being a non-technical person in tech.
Speaker: It's a fun, energized world to be in.
Speaker: And it's just operating on this very different scale.
Speaker: You know, you think about like how many people read my book that I toiled over for six years.
Speaker: Well, longer than that when you count my, because it grew out of my dissertation.
Speaker: 20, 30, maybe?
Speaker: Oof, that's real.
Speaker: That might be a bit high.
Speaker: And now I do something which granted.
Speaker: It's not on like, it doesn't have the same stakes.
Speaker: It's not as like noble as perhaps the impact of my book or articles were.
Speaker: But I helped change something.
Speaker: And literally it's something experienced by hundreds of thousands of people the next week.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: And yeah, that's really cool.
Speaker: It's a different kind of value than what we're taught is valuable in academia.
Speaker: And actually another guest that we had on the show, she was sort of speaking to what you were saying about the nobility of academia.
Speaker: She didn't use that word exactly, I don't think, but she did say that there's a certain seduction to academia that for those of us that want to make some kind of big contribution, right?
Speaker: Because you're blazing new intellectuals,
Speaker: Territory.
Speaker: And that is something to be commended.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, what does academia actually offer?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: It's like, what does academia actually promise in terms of a livelihood?
Speaker: And what are the actual nuts and bolts of what the academic life looks like?
Speaker: And speaking of other siren songs, you know, I do know that for some of us, certainly me, I was drawn to academia because of what I saw as the kind of autonomy, you know, you can kind of be your own boss.
Speaker: And to me, I do kind of miss how I had built-in
Speaker: time where I could sort of, I don't know, be my own person, even if I did feel incredibly conflicted.
Speaker: So I don't know if you can relate to that as well.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: So I found, again, I knew academics who were able to, they were often the obsessive, passionate, and disciplined.
Speaker: I was never able to get on top of my work as an academic.
Speaker: in a way that allowed me to enjoy vacations or enjoy evenings.
Speaker: Every Sunday night I was thinking about if I wasn't grading or doing prep, I was thinking about it.
Speaker: Every vacation was, oh, I'll take some articles along and can I work on this?
Speaker: And, or thinking like, oh, I'm paying for this later.
Speaker: I'm going on this vacation.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Am I going to have to make stuff up when I get back or, oh, the summer's off.
Speaker: You have the dreams of how much you're going to accomplish over that summer and you never
Speaker: I never accomplished what I wanted.
Speaker: And so like, oh, I have the summer off.
Speaker: But in fact, I was trying to work, but beating myself up for not being more productive.
Speaker: And then the summer ends.
Speaker: Now I feel bad about myself because I didn't do what I've been dreaming of for the entire year I've been looking forward.
Speaker: And now I'm dreading the semester starting.
Speaker: It's like, why?
Speaker: That's not right.
Speaker: Like, like my Facebook feed still from professors is full of the dread of the semester starting.
Speaker: I was like, wait, why do I feel that way?
Speaker: So
Speaker: You know, I do have less freedom now in some ways, but especially like as a knowledge worker, maybe I'll be replaced by AI shortly, but for now, like working in tech.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I have to be mostly present between eight to five, nine to five.
Speaker: And sometimes, you know, depending on your team or projects, maybe you put in some evenings, but I have a ton of flexibility to do a podcast like this.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Oh, well, well, thank you.
Speaker: I mean, and might I just say again, like, I completely get what you're saying.
Speaker: I literally brought my dissertation to Miami.
Speaker: No one, no, like the cognitive dissonance of that alone is just wild.
Speaker: And, you know, I remember thinking to myself, like, okay, I can go to the beach after I like, you know, work on, you know, work on this section of footnotes, you know?
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: So we've had so many fascinating topics of conversation today, but to close up, especially because you actually were a tenured professor, I have to ask what you feel is the most urgent responsibility that universities owe to PhD students in the contemporary academic world in 2023.
Speaker: I don't think I'm that original in saying this, but I think training them for jobs outside of the university, changing the culture around the way, at least for the humanities, I think other fields, it's the norm to think about industry, but for the humanities and maybe for the social sciences, changing the way we talk about academia as a calling or a vocation, changing the way we talk about
Speaker: how we value people who stay versus people who go being and, and figuring out a way to train graduate students and a healthier ways of talking and thinking about that first, reducing the stigma.
Speaker: I know a humanities PhD student who got a
Speaker: Because very smartly, this person was decided to roll the dice and apply widely for some internships, got an internship at a massive global company you've heard of.
Speaker: And the response from the advisor was, well, why are you here in this program?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: And was immediately like,
Speaker: Oh, I am now going to start cutting off my attention to you because in a field in which, again, as you said, only a tiny percent of you are going to get jobs, the fact that you are preparing for your future beyond that shows your lack of dedication, right?
Speaker: That is what needs to change.
Speaker: Absolutely, yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's how we change that.
Speaker: I don't know because academia is a system in which the most obsessed
Speaker: will be the ones who are setting the culture.
Speaker: Articulate hardline real talk from Joseph Steubenrock, PhD, former professor of history at Baylor University.
Speaker: And in the meantime, we have epidemic defectors as a resource.
Speaker: So thank you so much for tuning into another episode.
Speaker: I am your host, Dr. Jillian Marshall.
Speaker: See you next time.
