by Melonie Fullick

Shameful self-promotion vs. meritocracy

Meritocracy is a theme to which I keep returning in my blog, mostly because as a core feature of academic culture it never seems to lose relevance. In this post I discuss the relationship between the academic disdain for (certain forms of) self-promotion, particularly social media, and how this is related to assumptions about “merit” and the intrinsic worth of one’s research. Here is a link to the original post, from August 16, 2011: Shameful self-promotion vs. meritocracy.

On August 4th, an article titled “How not to get left on the shelf” by Dale Sawak was posted on the Times Higher Education web site. In it, the author argued that if academic authors want their books to be read by a wider audience (or at all), they’ll need to engage in some self-promotion.

The article produced an incensed response from some readers. In order to understand why, we need to translate its thesis into Stereotypical Academic Logic. Once translated, the argument looks something like this: Sawak tells researchers who already see themselves as successful (i.e., they have written and published books), that their success is actually limited (by audience, no less; practically an accusation of elitism). He also suggests that in order to achieve “real” success, authors should engage in an activity that’s disdained in academe–advertising oneself.

A disclaimer here: part of my research is about the spread of entrepreneurialism and promotionalism in university governance and practice; I wrote my MA thesis in sociolinguistics, and it was a critique of internal public relations at a university. I’m not particularly keen on the idea of having to be a competitive, “marketable” academic, or that we should be forced to participate in phoney promotional activities (I don’t think they work anyway) or in the kinds of performance assessments that measure “impact” with a variety of suspect statistics. But as with so many issues, there are elements of self-promotion that relate positively to doing a good job as an academic, rather than buying in to neo-liberal market-oriented self-reformation.

In all fairness there’s an underlying critical point in Sawak’s article, which is that self-promotion is something that all very successful academics engage in–whether or not they acknowledge it. No-one can argue that Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek and Noam Chomsky don’t “put themselves out there” (though usually the term public intellectual is applied). The suspicion of self-promotion is also part of the reason that blogging and other social media activities are often dismissed by academic colleagues and peers.

Not only are self-promoters more successful, but so are graduate students whose supervisors “push” their students’ work actively. Ever wonder how so-and-so managed to get that article published in a good journal, or a helpful research assistant job, or an item that showcases their work on the faculty web page? Committee members and supervisors can help with this too, behind the scenes, and it’s in their interests because your success reflects back upon them.

While the necessity of at least some degree of self-promotion may seem obvious, given the academic fear and loathing of public relations (where PR is often conflated with advertising and/or marketing or even lying and propaganda) it’s actually a tough admission for professors to make.

The admission needs to be made, though, because it further disrupts the assumption made by many that meritocracy is the (only) engine powering the university. Passing on advice about appropriate networking and promotional skills should be a part of mentoring undergraduate and graduate students: one needs to know how to put one’s best foot forward, simply because it opens up opportunities. As frustrating as this may seem, it’s true that ideas don’t tend to be recognised due to “merit” and nothing else, just as great scholarly partnerships and collaborations don’t develop out of thin air. You need to meet people and they need to see your work.

Female academics, in particular, are vulnerable to the trap in which they remain silent about their own work and its value–as Lee Skallerup Bessette writes in her blog post, “Shameless self promotion”. Women in general are less likely to claim expertise, which can be a detriment when it comes to succeeding in an academic career and a public profile. Female graduate students are more likely to suffer from “Imposter Syndrome” and to lack the sense of self-value that helps them develop crucial professional networks.

Granted, there’s definitely some promotion-related career advice I would consider to be cynical and unproductive. For example in this article the authors assert that early-career academics must cite important scholars in the field even when their work is only “tangentially” related. I doubt this is necessary for every paper, and I’d agree with some commenters that most authors can see through a meaningless reference and many will dismiss it. Then again it’s also true that we don’t live in an academic utopia; some scholars do want their egos stroked. If you’re willing to engage in that, then take the advice.

If you still find distasteful the idea of engaging in some form of self-promotion, think of it this way: no-one can assess the “merit” of your work unless they have some exposure to it and to you.

Another reason is that you’re already producing PR about yourself. You re-write your own CV and cover letters, send copies of your papers for review and revision, organise and/or participate in conferences; you’re concerned about your reputation and the impression you make on peers because it affects your work prospects. There’s nothing wrong with all this–it’s not “beneath you” to consider and engage in these things and and there’s no professional penalty for it (quite the opposite). Expand your idea of “public relations” to focus on the broader idea of “relations”, relationships, and it’s clear that much of our communication is a part of that process; stop assuming that PR is “evil”, and you’ll realise it’s necessary (as well as omnipresent).

As a final note, I’ll talk a little bit about this blog. Did I set out to “self-promote” by writing it? Frankly, no, that wasn’t the goal; I didn’t start blogging because I thought it would be “good for my career”. I wanted the other benefits of blogging such as dialogue with peers, sharing of thoughts and commentary, and a space to “mess around” with ideas that haven’t yet made it into my formal academic writing.

The blog has led to many great conversations and connections, but it’s also had a much wider readership than I ever imagined (though still fairly narrow-!). Blogging here led to guests post at University of Venus on the Inside Higher Ed site (I’m now a regular contributing writer there); it led to one of my posts appearing in the Guardian UK online, and to another post receiving attention in the Times Higher Education. While those aren’t the peer-reviewed academic publications that are required for a career as a professor, they’re valuable for me especially in that they relate directly to my field of research, and will reach much broader audiences than my own blog.

Let’s try to avoid allowing self-promotion to be one of the “dirty secrets” of the academy, something to be sneered at or reserved for the egotistical and vainglorious, something that “real” academics don’t do; after all, what’s a book launch for?

by Melonie Fullick

Minding the gaps – PhD students and social media

For HASTAC I participated by helping to create a panel with Bonnie Stewart, sava saheli singh, and Trent M. Kays. The panel was titled “Cohorts without borders: New doctoral subjects”.

I have the basic outline of my talk in a set of PowerPoint slides (I’ll possibly turn it into a better version on Prezi later on): Minding the Gaps: PhD Students & Social Media.

by Melonie Fullick

Know your value

In this post I addressed the idea of the “academic economy” (and culture) being one in which we’re required to offer up our time without compensation, a holdover from a past time when more elite students would be attending (and would have more resources at their disposal).

This post never seems to lose its relevance; I see the issues I raised here being discussed and re-discussed regularly on Twitter and in other blogs. I’m raising the issue of a part of the “hidden curriculum” of graduate education, which is that we learn not only to work for free but also to de-value our own labour – within academe but also if we choose to leave and work elsewhere.

The changing demographics in graduate education over the past 30 years should be reason enough to question these assumptions. As it is, those with privilege will always find it easier to get ahead in an environment where not only do we have to work for free to earn the right of recognition, but we’re even expected to pay for the opportunity of sharing what we’ve done (i.e. the conference model). This long-standing arrangement is not one that supports inclusion, and I think that point should be made more often and more loudly, since graduate enrollments are expanding and the amount of financial support for their academic participation is diminishing.

Here is a link to the original post, from July 19, 2011: Know your value.

Summer is “conference season” in higher education, a time when many professors, graduate students and administrators find themselves hastily packing the smallest possible suitcase in order to spend three or four days in some remote and/or obscure location.

Conferences can be a great academic opportunity and are presented to graduate students as such. You can meet others and share ideas, as well as giving and receiving feedback and discovering new possibilities for collaboration. But to be realistic, conferences are also an expensive (and therefore a somewhat exclusive) opportunity. Attendees must pay for travel, accommodation, and of course the ubiquitous registration fees. In the past I was able to do presentations in the U.K. and in Washington D.C., and at other conferences within Canada, only because I had a federal grant supporting my studies. These were incredibly rewarding experiences that I wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise.

The high cost of conferences is an example of the strangely skewed economy of the academy. For many graduate students, it’s an expense that is beyond their limited budgets. Yet there is little hope of finding an academic job without attending and presenting at conferences during the course of the Ph.D. Grad students aren’t paid for the time we spend writing conference presentations, or for the presentations themselves; nor are we reimbursed for the travel costs. It’s all considered part of the investment we make in our own careers.

In fact, budding academics do a lot of unpaid work, including peer reviewing, writing book reviews, and producing journal articles (we even hand over copyright to the journals, who then profit from our labour). It’s considered both a privilege and a necessity to have something published, since reviewed publications are another “must” in the process of building an academic career. While we are paid to teach, that’s the work that tends to lack prestige and is not considered as helpful for long-term career development.

What this means is that in graduate school we get used to working for nothing, even as we’re expected to invest heavily in expensive professional development activities. By attending conferences, we pay for the opportunity to present our work to our (future) peers, who are the primary “gatekeepers” to academe. This system helps to perpetuate privilege because only “those who have afforded to work for free will get jobs. The vicious circle is maddening” (Ernesto Priego, July 2, 2011, Twitter).

Thus in spite of increasing accessibility in terms of enrolments, graduate education still tends to be stratified by socioeconomic class (and plagued by high attrition rates). Who can afford to spend time on publication papers and conference proposals and travel, when they must earn money for tuition and rent?* For grad students, especially those from under-privileged circumstances, this can be a trap; and the assumed, eventual “payoff” is now less available than ever as tenure track hires decrease and low-paying contract teaching becomes the norm for an ever-greater proportion of new Ph.Ds.

While all this may seem “normal” to those working within academe, just try explaining the conference system, for example, to someone who’s completely unfamiliar with the way academic careers work. My mother has often asked “when are they going to start paying you to go to these things?”. Viewed from this angle, it’s no surprise that the “investment” in graduate education, specifically the Ph.D, can seem like an illogical one (in spite of all the non-material benefits)—or even a “raw deal”, as many other commentators have framed it already.

The “academic economy” I described may have made more sense in the now-distant past when tenure-track jobs were more readily available, and when publishing was something you could leave until after graduation. But permanent-track professors actually don’t really do these things (publishing, conferences, and so on) for “free”. They earn a stable salary and they receive institutional support for research-related activities, which are considered part of the job. On the other hand, graduate students and early-career academics—particularly those who find themselves doing a lot of contract teaching or other part-time work—are less likely to have the time and resources to fully develop their CVs; and as the academic job market has tightened, the bar has been raised in terms of the level of professionalisation required.

It matters how students “get ahead” in graduate school because the most successful Ph.D students go on to become faculty who help carry forward the university as an institution. If the academic profession becomes a “labour of love” for all but the most elite students and professors, what are we saying about the worth of our education system and our concern for diversity and accessibility within it? What example are we setting for future students (and potential professors)—who will they be?

The contemporary university appears to undervalue the skills, talents, and education of many grad students, rewarding only those committed to an extremely narrow track of professional development and willing and able to make the (material) investments necessary to pursue it. Meanwhile, in other contexts our Ph.D-related experience is much sought after. My recent experience in a career course has been somewhat eye-opening in this respect. While all members of the group are Ph.D candidates or graduates, we each had a hard time coming up with lists of our “skills” because we’re so used to taking our own capacities for granted. Yet once “translated”, our collective experience and expertise was impressive, and applicable to many of the most interesting positions turning up in job searches.

My point is not that we should do nothing for free, or that we should all leave the academic profession for higher-paying jobs in other areas. What I want to emphasise is that many graduate students have little sense of the worth of their contributions beyond the logic of the academic system (and this has psychological effects, too). While it may no longer lead to a full-time, permanent faculty job, the PhD is not a devalued degree; it’s only under-valued in the academic marketplace, because desirable jobs are scarce.

Because academe presents itself as a meritocracy, often those who “fail” tend to blame themselves for it. But “pure” meritocracy is a myth. This is why knowing your own value means understanding not just what you have to offer in multiple contexts, but also that you have real choices, that there are fruitful possibilities, and that given the kinds of sacrifices involved, “traditional” academic work may not be the best among them.

——————————————————————

*In Canada, there’s some assistance to be had: students may win non-repayable merit scholarships through provincial and/or federal governments. Some universities have options for reimbursement, through graduate students associations, academic unions, faculties or schools of graduate studies, and sometimes through individual programs and departments. There’s increasing demand for all these different forms of funding, but at least some support is available.

by Melonie Fullick

Refusing to be silent

When UBC graduate student Rumana Manzur was attacked by her husband, several of the writers (Afshan Jafar, Lee Skallerup Bessette, and myself) at University of Venus blog on Inside Higher Ed felt compelled to write responses. These were combined into a collaborative post, which appeared on June 28, 2011.

The post was republished on the University Affairs website on June 29, 2011.

On July 13 2011, my section of the post appeared in the Guardian UK under the title, “HE internationalization: Why awareness of cultural conflict matters.”

I thought some of the comments on these posts were sadly predictable. For my part, I wanted to bring attention to the fact that internationalization of higher education is not a simple process in which people move around the planet, magically unhindered/unaffected by the constraints of things like gender, class, race, and cultural norms. These challenges can’t be reduced to a two-sided debate, and yet I find they’re often ignored altogether (or radically simplified) in accounts of international education.

by Melonie Fullick

Universities and the media, part 2: Why the media matter.

This is the second of two posts that I wrote following the Worldviews conference in June 2011. Here is a link to the original post, from June 23, 2011: Universities and the media, part 2: Why the media matter.

Yesterday I wrote about some of the main themes we find in current media coverage of post-secondary education, and of universities in particular. Much of this coverage is highly critical of various aspects of university education and in many cases these criticisms are entirely justified, particularly from the perspective of students and parents, who represent a large audience for education coverage.

In spite of highlighting relevant issues, the critical arguments made in the media and in the “crisis literature” (and even in the comment sections of news websites) often seem ill informed. So while there are serious problems with some of the changes happening in universities, the debates that happen in the media don’t necessarily contribute to public debate in a productive way.

This is why one of the themes throughout the WorldViews conference was the presence or absence of “trust” in the university-media relationship and the ways in which the university can be “mis-represented” when it does not actively seek to inform publics about the nature of its role, its functioning, and its usefulness to society.

The assumptions underlying many critiques of post-secondary education tend to be the same assumptions that then frame suggestions for the reform, or renewal, of universities. It’s often argued that we must either return to (the best aspects of ) the university of the past, or destroy the institution utterly and begin again with a lighter, cheaper, more innovative and adaptable model, one that can somehow resolve the weighty tension between democratic and meritocratic that has become so much more evident in recent years; all the while becoming financially self-sustaining.

By some commentators, the techno-futuristic (and somewhat libertarian) argument is made that the introduction of new disruptive technologies, particularly the Internet and digital media, will force universities to change themselves and offer “value beyond content” as it were–since all “knowledge” will be available to students on the Web.

I think these arguments often ignore or discount the relational nature of education and conflate information with knowledge, assuming that education is the “delivery” of a product. They also reflect commitment to technological determinism, the idea that technologies drive social and cultural change; and they seem to assume that a high degree of individualism is necessary/desirable.

One issue I did not hear discussed at the WorldViews conference was whether post-secondary education earns more media attention now than in the past, and whether the nature of the coverage has changed over time. Because this question informs a part of my dissertation, I had it in my mind throughout the conference. I became interested in the question through having done media discourse analysis in the past, and through analysing universities’ public relations materials for my MA project.

The small amount of preliminary research I’ve done shows an increase to the amount of coverage universities receive, over a 30-year period. I’ll need a much more exhaustive corpus of news coverage from the 1970s and 1980s before I can say for sure, but I think the coverage has probably changed quantitatively as well as qualitatively, and that that’s the case then there are plenty of reasonable explanations for the change. (I was focussing only on one university, as well; I’d love to expand that and study the issue in more depth for a larger project.)

For one thing, universities now receive far more “exposure” to different publics; more people come into contact with universities than in the past. This is a process that began decades ago and has waxed and waned over time, but at the moment PSE enrolments are higher than ever before and so the student exposure alone has increased significantly. This process of massification (which I’ve also discussed here) was mentioned by Philip Altbach at a panel on the second day of the conference, but that was the only time I saw the issue raised explicitly.

Not only are there more students in the universities, but these students are paying more for their education. Tuition tends to be on the rise in the U.S. (e.g. in the collapsing California system), in Canada, and most notably of late, in the U.K. where the government has raised the tuition cap from about £3,000 to £9,000. The cost of education is being transferred onto the individual even as the value of education to the individual is seen to be in decline.

This form of privatisation tends to encourage a consumerist attitude towards education, and changes the dynamic between universities, students, parents and also the media. Rankings tables create comparisons between institutions that allow for informed consumer “choice” (among other things); Macleans magazine designs its yearly university rankings issue as a guide for student/family stakeholders. Because students are assumed to rely on their parents or families for this money, parents too become increasingly invested in the “quality” of university education.

Universities have responded to marketisation, and to the privatisation/diversification of their funding sources, by investing more in strategic communication including advertising and branding, various forms of public relations, and reputation building efforts aimed at different key stakeholder audiences (public/taxpayers, students, parents, the government, granting agencies, donors, alumni and so on). These efforts tend to affect media coverage as well.

Why does media coverage matter? With all the trends taken into account, it’s clear that government policy, not only in post-secondary education but also in science and technology, intellectual property, and other knowledge policy areas, affects more people than ever. It’s therefore more likely to be the subject of heated public debate.

Universities need to pay closer attention the ways in which universities and PSE in general are discussed in newspapers, on TV, in magazines, and on the Internet, because these media have a strong hand in setting the terms of that important discussion. This is also where the terms of policy may be set out openly, where members of the voting public begin to make choices about what they support politically.

Attitudes and beliefs are circulated, reinforced, and re-formed both in the news and in the discussions that happen that are based on or triggered by media coverage. And what people believe, they tend to act (or vote) on. Universities have ramped up their efforts to present themselves positively, yet coverage of university education has been dominated by overwhelmingly negative discourses.

What is the disconnect happening here, and what can universities do to better inform the debate about them that ultimately happens beyond their walls, and beyond their control? How do universities adapt to this fast-paced communicative context wherein critiques and problems are amplified so rapidly? I think this is one of the major challenges not just for universities but for all organisations, at a time when negative messages can easily “go viral” through social media.* Universities, with their deep institutional roots and their immediate connection to young people, may feel this pressure even more. They’ll also need to find an answer to it, since the (real and mediated) experiences of today’s students will eventually shape the decisions they make about the educational systems of tomorrow.

[*I’m interested to see whether universities begin to engage differently with students who already attend, and to enlist them in ongoing efforts to build reputation and shape expectations of future students and their parents.]

by Melonie Fullick

Universities and the media, part 1: What they say about us

Following the first Worldviews conference in June 2011, I wrote two posts that take up the issue of media coverage of universities and postsecondary education. This is a topic that interests me partly because it beings together two areas that I’ve been looking at for some time – media studies (and discourse analysis), and PSE.

Another angle that I haven’t been able to dig into very much is the influence of media coverage on policy-making in higher education. I did do a conference presentation on the 2008-2009 CUPE strike at York University and how this was discussed/debated in public and in the English-language news, but I haven’t yet done an in-depth piece about coverage of universities in the long term, which would  really have to be a book-length project. 

Here is a link to the first post, from June 22, 2011: Universities and the media, part 1 – What they say about us. The second post can be found here.

Last week I attended The WorldViews Conference on Media and Higher Education, which ran from the 16th to the 18th of June, 2011 in Toronto. I was able to spend the full three days at the conference, and was lucky to meet face-to-face many of the people with whom I’d already chatted on Twitter (notably, Mary Churchill and Lee Skallerup), and whose articles I had read in the press or academic journals.

I made a Twitter list of conference Tweeps, based on tweets using the #WV2011 tag. I also wrote a live blog during the sessions I attended at the conference; here are the links to my rough notes from day one, day two and day three of the conference, if you’re interested in seeing the content in more detail. There’s an archive of tweets from the conference (created by Caitlin Kealey) available here.

The conference addressed an array of issues including the effects of international rankings on university governance; the role of science journalism; the relationship between academic experts and journalists; the continued under-representation of expertise from women, people of colour, and members of developing/Global South countries; and, of course, the nature of media coverage of higher education.

What exactly does current (mainstream) media coverage of post-secondary education look like, and why does this matter?

One of the primary organising themes in media coverage of PSE is that of the value of education, usually its economic value (as measured by the additional income generated for individuals from a PSE credential). The question of value is usually posed as one of whether a degree is “worth it”—“it” being the cost of tuition and living expenses, or in some cases the debt that a student may incur if s/he cannot pay up-front. I’ve even addressed this theme a number of times here in my blog.

Advocates of the continuing value of PSE tend to argue that average post-graduation lifetime earnings justify the rising short-term cost of a university education, and/or that the non-monetary benefits of PSE should be recognised. But the chorus of critics has begun to drown out these optimistic (and often over-simplistic) arguments. Now that so many people are receiving university degrees, in an increasingly unstable global economy, there’s no “guarantee” that going to university will land you a job, let alone help you become “upwardly-mobile“. Since living costs and tuition are increasing rapidly, the calculation of “risk” and “reward” in higher education becomes more of a focus. More students are taking on loans, which increase the risk involved (one needs to be able to repay one’s debts from the additional income generated later).

Some coverage also focusses on how undergraduate students are “cheated” by a university system brimful of over-privileged professors who do very little work for high pay, and who would prefer not to have to deal with students at all. The university is already perceived as an arena for the elite, always somehow disconnected from “real” life and work, and such myths are reinforced by articles like this one from The Weekly Standard.

The assessment of value has also been applied to graduate education, and there’s a raft of commentary on the futility of the PhD, particularly in the Humanities. The “ponzi scheme” image is invoked as a means of highlighting the relationship between the “production” of new PhDs and the (proportionally) shrinking number of tenure track academic positions available.

The latest critiques link higher education directly to economic tropes, invoking concepts such as “sub-prime education” (a comparison between sub-prime mortgages in the United States, and student loans) and the idea of higher education as an economic “bubble”, popularised by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

News media articles, blog posts and think-tank reports are joined by books that represent not merely criticism but a “crisis literature,” like the infamous Academically Adrift in which the authors claim that universities are not performing well enough in their educative role (i.e. students are not “learning” anything), and even the more recent Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education from James Côté and Anton Allahar in Canada (both of whom also co-authored Ivory Tower Blues). While these books contain many valid critiques, and they do “stimulate [public] debate” as their authors usually intend (Côté & Allahar, 2011, p.3), the critiques are often presented in a sensationalistic or reductionist way.

Along with the many public arguments made about the failings of universities to educate students, there is a parallel if more specialised thread of critique. Often found in the business section of newspapers, this argument invokes “innovation” and commercialisation as under-developed in Canada—that universities should play a more effective (economic) role in their research and development capacity, too. It’s worth noting that this criticism has been levelled at universities, and at Canadian industry and funding councils, for decades (Dufour & de la Mothe, 1993, p.12).

In a second post tomorrow, I’ll take a look at the implications of some of these criticisms and the assumptions underlying them, as well as some of the reasons why media coverage of universities is important for students, faculty, and parents, and for politicians and policy makers.

Reference: Dufour, P. & de la Mothe, J. (1993). The historical conditioning of S&T. In De la Mothe, J. & Dufour, P. (Eds.), Science and technology in Canada (pp. 6–22). Harlow, UK: Longman.

 

 

by Melonie Fullick

Worldviews 2011 – “Liveblogged” (June 16 – 18, 2011)

The blog posts listed below, from the first Worldviews conference in 2011, are very long and more in the form of notes than actual posts. I created these posts before I moved to the practice of live-tweeting and then making Storify archives of the tweets. At this point I don’t really use Storify, though there are others who use Twitter’s Moments for a similar purpose.

Worldviews – Day 1

Worldviews – Day 2

Worldviews – Day 3