Spilling Academic Tea ... From Professor to Independent, By Choice
We came across the following Tweet and thought some of you might be interested. The M2M Research Network has been amplifying the voices of African descended women in religious scholarship with a focus on postdoctoral scholars, early career researchers, and people who are independent scholars.
One of the assumptions your colleagues may have, is that they believe you are an
independent scholar because you are not good enough to be a full-time academic.
We know that is untrue.
One example of why that is untrue, is we have a rising number of Black women who are already full-time professors leaving the Academy to work independently. The assumption is that the Academy is so essential that, even if we are working in a toxic and harmful environment, that type of job is the one verification that we truly belong.
We are sharing the following blog by Dr. Brandeis Marshall. She is writing from a background in data science, but what is important is understanding the challenges to working as a full-time professor, the possibility that you may lack support within your school and the way that shifting from full-time Academia (meaning a professorship or lectureship in “Higher Education”) could be a solution for you.
We hope that other independent scholars will step forward and share their stories. If you are working in a different type of opportunity such as working with foundations, NGOs or as a consultant, please let us know this as well.
We need to do this to: 1) rip the veil of silence regarding the Academy; 2) encourage other Black and African descended women that they do not have to "waste" their doctoral training and can use it in a variety of ways; 3) allow the Academy to see that there is a consequence for mistreating Black and African descended women.
You have value.
You are needed.
You are important. Please respond to our call to action and read the blog below.
Call to Action
While we offer both free and paid subscriptions, we do ask that you will at least support us by clicking "like" (the heart icon) and sharing the post with others today. We also ask that you join us on:
Substack
Twitter @misogynoir2mishpat and Facebook.
The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2023
Bye, Academe
Why I’ve left my faculty position and full professor rank behind
Brandeis Marshall
U.S. higher education is broken and broke. Now, I have a lot to say about academia so before I share my observations let me share my academic appointments, overlapping roles included: 6 years as a graduate teaching assistant, 1 semester as an adjunct lecturer, 18 months as a postdoctoral associate, 6 years as an assistant professor at R1 PWI institution where I subsequently took tenure, promotion to associate professor and then left, 5 years as an associate professor at an HBCU institution, 2.5 years as department chair (it should’ve been 3 years, which I briefly discuss later in this article), 4 years as full professor at an HBCU institution. It’s a grand total of more than 20 years of teaching, researching and servicing inside and around higher education with 15 years serving as a faculty member. Quick note: R1 is a classification given by the Association of American Universities, where R1 refers to doctoral universities with very high research activity. PWI stands for predominantly-white institution and HBCU stands for Historically Black College and University.
U.S. higher education trains generalists while the workforce expects specialists. That’s part of what’s broken: the blatant mismatch of outcomes for the students and
their potential employers. Most students, both at the undergraduate and graduate/professional levels, are basically have an empty knowledge slate that need to learn fundamental concepts and skills. They need to build their expertise through engaging in relevant projects that make them challenge their newfound knowledge. Potential employers ideally want great communicators and critical thinkers who will have the confidence and resourcefulness to figure out and execute good solutions in a timely manner. But being a great communicator and critical thinker means having the prerequisite set of experiences, e.g., real-world projects and maturity. The 22-year-old college graduate won’t likely have a robust list of said-experiences in their chosen discipline. And let’s say the quiet part out loud: their brains aren’t fully developed quite yet (it happens in our mid-to-late 20’s). The master’s and doctoral graduate (if still in their 20’s) likely have more maturity but not
enough completed real-world projects in their portfolio.
Higher education is treated as a premium subscription service in the United States. Everyone wants the degree completion paper, but our capitalism model makes quality teaching and learning unaffordable. That’s one of the reasons why higher education is broke: people are getting student loans from the government to pay public/private institutions that are themselves getting subsidized by the government. That $200,000 4-year bill is exchanging swapping hands amongst students and their parents/guardians, higher education institutions and government. The buck eventually and unfortunately stops with the student who was lent the funds. Higher education institutions can’t unshackle themselves from the merry-go-round with a business model that relies less on student tuitions and fees. The additional competition with online learning providers, immersive targeted programs and other non-academic learning environments have made it harder for higher education to articulate their $200,000 price tag. As someone with a bachelors, masters and doctorate, I wouldn’t trade my degrees for anything. They have opened doors that were closed and locked. But I would encourage anyone looking to obtain any degree to prioritize earning merit-based need-based scholarships.
Why I decided to leave academe
The COVD-19 pandemic laid bare the cracks, gaps and craters within the undergraduate and post-graduate system. I was already on the fence before the pandemic because teaching and professor-ing started to be a chore. It was more stressful and less joyous with increasing pressure to make the students happy. The pandemic times and Zoom teaching (that’s being generous) gave me time to reflect on my pain and pleasure points about being a professor. I’ve provided my top 3 reasons.
1. Being a professor is more like being the cheating police.
Trying to teach with the students’ 24–7 access to the interwebs and social media platforms remains a frustrating uphill no-win in sight battle. Students would rather spend time to find the answer online than read the assigned chapter. They’d rather view a YouTube video from someone they don’t know than ask me a series of questions. More of my classroom time was trying to find ways to hold their attention by crafting problem sets with no access to solutions online. They just wanted to know the answer. They had little to no interest in know the path to a correct answer. I didn’t feel like I was teaching anymore. No more insightful questions that sparks an intellectual conversation during class. No more aha moments when that concept clicks for that student. I was merely the bouncer for cheating offenses.
Additionally, there’s a professor shortage that many people in higher education aren’t discussing. According to a recent study, “In the 1990s and early 2000s, at least 49% of US PhD graduates had academic positions lined up after their thesis defence. In 2020, the percentage of PhD graduates headed into industry or business (40%) surpassed the figure for academia (39.6%) for the first time in US history. And as of 2021 — the most recent year for which survey data are available — just 35.9% of recent PhD graduates had academic jobs lined up after graduation…”. This reality coupled with a 2015 study that gave an eye-popping statistic for the PhD-to-Professor pipeline: “…tenured and tenure-track hiring in history, business and computer science Ph.D.-granting programs found that just 25 percent of institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors.” The decreasing number of PhDs headed into academic positions only makes the higher education institutions that much more unstable and weaker. I’ve been in the crosshairs of trying to hire faculty and managed the toll of more enrolled students than the existing course delivery system is designed to handle. It’s not pretty.
2. Being a department chair is a thankless appointment and provides false sense of influential power.
At the start of my department chair appointment, I was looking forward to making a more substantial impact to help students navigate the higher education system a bit
easier, improve conditions for faculty and expand the department’s reputation. But while having a vision is an important precursor to the job, executing on my vision wasn’t the expectation. Everyone has an opinion and an angle: college leadership, alumni, parents/guardians, industry partners, faculty and students. The department chair must balance many conflicting conditions that leaves no one particularly satisfied. In the end, the department chair remains the last voice of reason and final line of defense from harmful consequences.
If the common overlap between college administration and department aren’t aligned, then it’s an entanglement. And I had a drag-out meet-me-at-the-playground-after-school sort of entanglement. My goal of maintaining a trusted and transparent community, quality course delivery and increasing the prominence of the computing degrees weren’t as highly prized. Aligning with and collaborating with certain industry partners trumped how it would impact the department’s established culture. I was supposed to be department chair for 3 years but I was removed from the appointment 2.5 years in. The reasons for my removal weren’t substantiated with evidence and no one who had disagreements with me said me anything to my face. It was a pretty crappy time. There’s so much more to this story, but that’s a whole professional development workshop. In short, I experienced a series of traumatic professional abuses. Being department chair opened my eyes to the professional abused I’d experience as a faculty member. And the days of continuing to cope with any form of professional abuses were no more.
I learned, however, what sort of educator I didn’t want to be as a result. I didn’t want
to execute someone else’s vision, especially when it was ill-conceived and lacked contextual awareness of the discipline. I wanted to make a positive impact of the people who were eager to level up their data skills.
3. The student-as-the-client (unspoken) operating model creates a degreed and knowledge-starved workforce.
Learning is overshadowed by the student’s grade point average (GPA). Failing is avoided at every corner. There are alternative options to assignment deadline such as turning in assignments well past the deadline via email, receiving points back on exam re-dos, changing the scope of course/group projects, allowing submissions of extra assignments (if you haven’t done the regular work, I’m not creating more work for you to do), applying for course withdrawal, requesting an incomplete in the course, submitting a grade appeal, asking for a grade change and so on. Right here, there’s a “when I was in college…” monologue that I won’t write, but if you want that monologue, then ask anyone who attended college before Google.
A vast majority of higher education institutions operate under the preconceived notion that students (and by proxy their parents/guardians) are ‘the client’. This model has made their opinions of the course delivery and professor-student interactions more important than the actual circumstances and verified facts outlined in the course syllabus. As a professor, I’ve had to complete more documentation about my student engagement inside and outside of class in recent years. And the students who half show up to class, don’t ask one question during lecture time or don’t attend my office hours are the first ones to email incessantly about 5 points on an assignment from week 2 of the semester. And this same student doesn’t buy the course textbooks, bothers to read the free/downloadable course chapters or other materials. They also want PowerPoint slides before class but never look at them. They want the solutions to the assignments but don’t take the time to understand how the solutions were achieved before exams. Nevertheless, I’m asked to consider offering one of the alternatives, mentioned in the previous paragraph, to resolve the student’s self-inflicted circumstance.
On the flip side, there are a large pool of students who don’t cause any disruptions — legit in class to learn, but aren’t equipped with the skills to engage. It’s like they are waiting to learn. It’s a neutral zone I haven’t figured out how to shift them into an active student gear. But it happens more often than I’d like to see. They need customized guidance, which isn’t part of the college experience. You’re supposed to hit a few rough patches and figure out how to navigate through them. Many are stuck in the pipeline though. They’ll come to class, listen, take notes but aren’t comfortable or confident enough to engage in the in-class exercises, or ask questions in class or ask questions outside of class. They sit in confusion…and fail the course as a result.
All of this deflection to actual teaching and impactful learning masks the real roots issues, at least in computer science. Students’ attention deficiency has become normalized. You have to deliver the relevant content in very short spurts (2–4 minutes maximum) as an instructor. And you have to repeat yourself three to four times because taking notes isn’t typical. A student will take a picture with their mobile device after the whiteboard is filled and that student will share that picture with the class using Group.Me. As a result, the important connections and tensions used in learning are skipped by students. Second, students’ math maturity levels are deteriorating. When I started as an assistant professor, first-year first-semester students were taking calculus. It’s now pre-calculus I. That’s a 2-college course differential, which means the overlapping and supporting mathematics equations that appear in computing concepts aren’t connected for the student. The deep fear of mathematics courses and corresponding abstract mathematics concepts stifles the analytical development of the student with respect to coding, algorithmic design mastery and confidence in their computational thinking skills. Lastly, students aren’t
reading for comprehension: the course textbook, the supplemental materials, the course learning management platform and any other instructional resource. Reinforcement of what’s shared during class time isn’t happening. And this observation has been too frequent and very disconcerting. Knowledge comes through reading, listening, discussing and debating. Without a foundation of reading, I’m at a lost for how deep learning, quality communication and critical thinking can be obtained.
Onward and upward
Honestly, I’m tired of seeing and patching the cracks, gaps and craters in higher education. The system isn’t working as professors are overextending themselves, quality of instruction isn’t a priority, students are struggling to student and college leadership isn’t equipped to navigating our digital-first society. So it’s time for me to leave academe as a faculty as of today, June 1, 2023. I’ll be 100% self-employed, full-time founder and CEO of DataedX Group LLC.
My next professional adventure won’t abandon my educator roots — just expanding them. I’ll still be sharing my perspectives through writing scholarly work, facilitating workshops, coaching cohorts of rebel techies and Black Women in Data and delivering keynote speeches. But my criteria for engagement has changed. I won’t be focused on the undergraduate or graduate level anymore. I’m building a data ethics learning and development agency for educators, scholars and practitioners to counteract automated oppression efforts with culturally-responsive instruction and strategies. Yes, I’ll be working with adults — one-on-one or in a group, particularly people in positions of influence who are guiding data operation changes right now for a more responsible data tomorrow.