Gimlé

Like a moth drawn to a flame, my thoughts return time and time again to the subject of academia.

It gives people hope and then, in the suicidal manner made famous by Mad Cow-propagating English farmers, it grinds its veterans up and feeds their torn flesh and pulped brains to the hopeful young. The same young flesh that will be the teacher-meat of tomorrow.

What is frightening is the fact that I tend to consider the academic system to be little short of a wholesale industrialisation of our intellectual and cultural processes…

… And yet, here I am doing a Phd full-time, teaching part-time and attending conferences once or twice a year.

So, like a moth drawn to a candle-flame, I am being pulled to the subject of academia, the compulsion being the age old question of Why?

Why am I in academia?

The question is not of the sort where the asker is going through a slow but sure realisation that he is out of place, in the wrong field of work, or making the biggest, career-annihilating mistake of his life.

Sure, I’m piss-poor and will end up owing a lot of money.

Loans are a burden, sure, but remain manageable. And we all know that the best way to make your finances unmanageable is to not manage them.

And it’s not as if I expect to get an academic position out of it, those things are rarer than those few speciments of red-bellied, four-eyed koalas that are capable of pulling a perfect three-pull pint of Guinness.

Rarer than bartenders capable of pulling a perfect three-pull pint, for that matter.

Universities are moving almost entirely to using freelance or part-time academically-qualified intellectuals to teach its courses. A manager-in-all-but-name will be used to run the course. A person that, most of the time is likely to be miserablee because he or she’s likely to be an academic shoehorned into a managerial position.

So that leaves those of us interested in working in academia with the option of pursuing positions of teaching where we will be competing with intelligent, highly-qualified and less specialised freelancers.

Less specialised but specialised enough, mainly because that will increase their chances of finding a teaching-position somewhere.

Being a narrowly focused specialist is going to be a job liability soon, no matter how detrimental that change might be to the fields in question.

Is this the job market we’re heading for?

I think so.

And the reason why I’m doing a Phd, chasing after short term projects, doing part time teaching and all that lark is that I like it.

I plan to be one of those less-specialized freelance academics—a jack of all trades.

Very few job markets give its employees space to pursue organised, intelligent and ambitious projects in their own time, on their own terms.

The only profession that comes to mind are a few select areas within software engineering and programming where having an employee working on open source project in his or her own free time is taken to be part and parcel of hiring those pesky programmers in the first place, maybe even a sign that that person really enjoys coding. Which can only be a good thing if your hiring that person for his coding skills.

Academia has traditionally been another one, where your own private research projects are almost mandatory if you wanted to get anywhere in the field.

That, of course, is going out the window in an industry where in many cases applying for funding requires to to declare, authoritatively, what your conclusion will be, and job security means that your course and faculty still exist in a year’s time.

It does mean that the attitude is still in place. That you should be working on your own stuff in your own time.

Combine that with the change in the academic job market that means that it’s one of the few fields where, with a bit of perseverance, you should be able to have space to work on your own projects while still being able to pay your bills at the same time.

Not a recipe for an impressive career or a joyful bank account.

But it sure as hell looks more interesting to me than the industrial alternative.

We’ll see.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.