Disagreement is a central feature of scholarly debate, so why should the advice offered in a new book on academic careers be any different?
The three authors of a new guide out this month -- The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars From Graduate School Through Tenure (University of Chicago Press) -- wanted new Ph.D.'s to understand that no single piece of advice will work in every job situation.
That's why John A. Goldsmith, Penny Schine Gold, and John Komlos decided not to paper over the complexities of the academic career. They wrote the book as a conversation among the three of them, using their combined 75 years of experience in academe to take turns answering questions that any graduate student might ask them during office hours or over coffee.
"We did not try to make one unified voice," says Ms. Gold, a professor and head of the history department at Knox College in Illinois. "It's important that you know how to negotiate between different advice to find your own way."
The 255-page guide tackles the academic career in its entirety -- with chapters on choosing a graduate school, managing the tenure track, and earning tenure, among other topics. You won't find sample cover letters and vitae in this book, like you do in The Academic Job Search Handbook (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). Some books on the faculty career are written in the voice of job applicants, such as On the Market: Surviving the Academic Job Search (Riverhead Books, 1997), a collection of essays written by graduate students. Don't look to the The Chicago Guide for that. What it offers is the experience of three academic elders.
The advice they give differs partly because they differ in backgrounds. While Ms. Gold is a professor at a small liberal-arts college, Mr. Komlos and Mr. Goldsmith both hail from large research universities. Mr. Komlos is a professor of economics and chairman of the Institute of Economic History at the University of Munich, while Mr. Goldsmith is a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. This fall, Ms. Gold and Mr. Goldsmith will visit seven campuses to promote their book, including Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.
Consider their answers to this question in a chapter on landing an academic job: "Is there anything I should be doing while I'm writing my dissertation to prepare for entering the academic job market?"
"As your dissertation nears completion, you should think about ways to disseminate that information and increase your visibility," Mr. Komlos writes in the book. He suggests sending copies of your paper "to major figures in the field, soliciting comments for revision prior to publication. The point is that you ought not to keep your work a secret." Not so fast, writes Ms. Gold. In general, she suggests sending the dissertation to only a few people, "probably just one or two, whom you have reason to think would be able to give you helpful suggestions for revision. It's a lot to ask of someone."
"Gee," replies Mr. Komlos, "I was more frivolous about sending my dissertation around. I must have sent a couple of dozen copies to scholars in the field. As I recall, I had some nice feedback, too."
Their differences of opinion were even more pronounced in answering this question from a chapter on family, gender, and the personal side of academic life: "What is the extent of discrimination in academe?"
Mr. Komlos tells readers he hasn't seen any "covert" or "overt" gender, racial, or ethnic discrimination and thus believes these are "nonissues. After all, women now play a very significant role in academia, and that could not have come about if hostility toward them would be overwhelming." Mr. Komlos is not just speaking about his experiences in Germany. He earned doctorates in history and economics from the University of Chicago and has held appointments at American campuses throughout his career.
Mr. Goldsmith has not seen any "overt" discrimination either, but writes in the book that he recognizes that both he and Mr. Komlos "are young (well, relatively young: postwar baby boomers), white, and male. We've both made an effort in this book to limit the advice and opinions we offer to those areas where we have some personal experience." Derogatory remarks, commonplace in the past, would be "unimaginable" today, he says, but he acknowledges that "empirical studies do show that academia still has a good distance to go before it can feel satisfied with itself."
Just because certain derogatory comments would be "unimaginable" today, Ms. Gold says in the book, that doesn't mean the sentiments have disappeared. All it means, she says, is "that the climate has changed enough that the people who still feel this way judge that they should not say such things publicly." She then devotes two pages to listing the ways "debilitating" prejudice "manifests itself in the academy." For example, since students may expect more personal attention from female professors, Ms. Gold says, "women who are resistant to this expectation may be more harshly judged than a male professor who keeps a distance from students." And if your academic colleagues perceive you as "an 'affirmative-action hire,'" Ms. Gold says, "you may be subject to the opinion that 'the only reason' you got the job was because you are female, black, Hispanic, or some other minority. This will usually not be expressed to you directly, but can still be felt, and it is demoralizing. And this will be thought by some no matter how stellar your credentials."
One thing the authors do agree on: Too many college students have gross misconceptions about careers in academe. When he was a young graduate student, Mr. Goldsmith recalls, he believed that people above him in the academic hierarchy would look out for his best interests. "It's rarely the case," he says in an interview. "Life doesn't work that way anywhere."
Mr. Komlos agreed, saying that hurdles abound in academe for the young scholar. After about 25 years in the profession, he says in an interview, he still faces challenges. Alhough he has about 100 publications now, three different journals over the last two years have rejected his most recent article. "This does not hurt me at my stage," he writes, "but for someone before getting tenure, this could be quite stressful, indeed."The piece, he says, is still not published. But he advises people in his situation not to give up. "That is one of the points in the book. Perseverance is important." So he has sent his article to yet another journal.
The obvious question, although it's not posed this way in the book, becomes: Why enter graduate school when your job prospects in academe are limited and the pay is hardly commensurate with the years of training? The answer: Because, Ms. Gold says in an interview, "you have to love what you do. I can't think of anyone I know in academia [for whom] it was just a job choice. It's that you've got a passion for learning more and teaching others whether through the classroom or research."
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Questions and answers from the authors of a new book, The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career.
