Bursting the Bubble, Knocking Down Silos, and Other Metaphors We Live By

A while ago I came across this provocative interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who's so adamant that school no longer teaches us what we need to know to succeed in the "real world," that he gives money to schools' best and brightest to leave school and start a business. Such a move implies that colleges aren't teaching students what they need to learn in order to succeed "out there."

I consider this now well-trodden metaphor of the "bubble." The dotcom bubble burst a while ago. The housing bubble just recently burst. When thinking about this metaphor, a few aspects of a bubble come to mind. First, a bubble obviously isn't sustainable. It floats in the air without the ability to avoid something that might break it. The thin membrane filled with air is bound to either land then burst, or pop in midair. But watching a bubble can be mesmerizing and peaceful, a seemingly undisturbed journey that ends suddenly (if one can't see what pops up in the bubble's path). The bubble can't last forever.

Have we, as Thiel argues, become so mesmerized with the seemingly undisturbed "journey" of higher education? Hardly. Some of us have gotten pretty good at spotting things in our way and have begun to adapt.

In the midst of considering this, I came across this news story regarding an open letter from the University of Texas-Austin Student Body President, Natalie Butler. She accompanied some UT regents on a trip to Arizona State University, my alma mater, about which I've written before. The trip was apparently an effort to learn how to increase UT's online learning program. The letter, however, warns the regents about becoming like ASU, who practices a "use-inspired" research, rather than the "intellectually-inspired" research practiced at UT-Austin.

While I admire this Tempe native's dedication to rigorous study, I take umbrage with this dichotomy of use-inspired versus intellectually-inspired research. All communication research should solve problems. Period. Granted, to some people, some of the problems we're tackling in higher education and communication research may seem needlessly esoteric or theoretical. That's to be expected. But whether we're building on theory or out in the streets with protesters, we're solving problems. Unfortunately, we often think of certain types of problems as being the domain of a particular discipline. We've built these silos around ourselves and claim ownership over problems, issues, approaches, etc. I think part of what Ms. Butler is witnessing is a move away from these silos.

ASU President Michael Crow's move what toward he calls a "New American University" has been accompanied by, at times, seismic shifts in the symbolic identities scholars craft for themselves. This includes changing the names of departments whose presence on the university campus has been a mainstay for perhaps as long as higher education has existed in its current, more-or-less, publicly accessible form. For example, ASU no longer has an Anthropology department (or school); instead it has a School of Human Evolution and Social Change. No longer is there a Political Science department; there is, however, a School of Politics and Global Studies.

For all the flak ASU President Michael Crow has gotten, I appreciate his move toward issue- or problem-oriented research. I also understand and appreciate the resistance toward such a move. For those unfamiliar with academia, talk of solving "real-world" problems often includes applying for grants--external funding from philanthropic, private and public not-for-profit agencies.

What's wrong with that? Getting money for your research is a good thing, you might say. Yes, but. The "but" is that often these granting institutions and the grant application evaluators expect reports that quantify results. Many in the communication discipline don't use a quantitative approach to gathering and analyzing data. This leaves some of us forced to employ methodologies we're either not familiar with or disagree with on an epistemological level. Sure, this thinking might be akin to the silo metaphor I invoked earlier, but I can empathize with these folks. The communication field is broad and deep, and those more humanistic researchers who qualitatively analyze texts of all kinds may not identify a place for them in this "problem-solving" approach.

Some have managed to cross this divide in interesting and uncompromising ways. I've been taught well by these folks and strive to incorporate it into my own research. Selling out? Compromising? Tacitly accepting the devaluing of humanities and reifying the place of the almighty dollar in academic research? I suppose some might say that's where this line of thinking leads. But I prefer to view it optimistically as an opportunity to begin chipping away at these calcified silo walls.

When research and teaching isn't enough

Getting tenure this past Spring has got me re-evaluating my role of as a professor (Associate Professor, to be more precise). I'm sure everyone who gets tenure goes through a similar process. But this and other events have also prompted me to re-evaluate what it means to be a professor more broadly.

As the higher education system comes under fire, including tenure, tenure-jobs become scarcer, and budget cuts in many states threaten the very foundation of higher education, a lot of teachers have realized they have to look out for themselves as much as for their students.

This chain of thinking is not new and didn't originate with me. Our organizational communication textbooks have consistently discussed the "new social contract" between companies and workers that has resulted in a diminished sense of loyalty on both sides, portable 401/403 k/b etc. plans, and regular attendance at self-help classes, self-improvement seminars, and graduate schools. Certainly, academics aren't exempted from this and may have been some of the first to capitalize on this. After all, what are research agendas, pubs, and grants if not vital parts of a CV one can market to other universities for better pay?

So, I'm sitting on the couch thinking about all this, and my colleague and former office mate appears on television. He's one of the newest house guests on the CBS reality show Big Brother. This person, in addition to being a great writer and super smart, is also adept at self-branding. Again, I'm not the first to make the connection between personal branding and the academy, but I worry (even though I've embraced it to a certain extent).

Maybe I worry because I don't think I'm that good at it. I remember the difficulty I had in "branding" myself in my personal statement as part of my tenure files. Having to articulate and argue a particular research agenda, arc, and coherent body of work was difficult. Not because it wasn't there, or because I hadn't been trained to think that way by my great advisers, but it because it required me to think of myself as something more than a summation of my publications. And it was precisely this "summary thinking" that had prompted me to keep churning out articles.

Now I worry because I don't have much experience translating my ideas to a broader audience, something I think will become vital in the personal branding academics are and will continue to be required to do. Radio and television appearances, social media updates and plugs: all will become increasingly important. Does this mean the watering down of genuine (i.e., complex, problematic, heuristic) ideas? Does it mean a change in what we think of as ideas traditionally in the domain of academics? Both?

Fortunately, many academics are already blazing trails here. From podcast reviews of articles to blogs to more blogs to alternative forms of online scholarship. While not all even roughly fit into this notion of personal branding, they all illustrate the potential to move to more diverse, wider audiences, a necessary consideration in personal branding and marketing.

So, when is research and teaching (and service) not enough? Soon, if not already.

Work-Life-Furlough Balance

It finally happened. After months of speculation swirling like a hurricane off the coast, California State University Employees (faculty and staff) are on a furlough system. Other state workers have been furloughed for months before this, and getting IOUs on top on that. I think the IOU days are just about over. But my furlough days are just starting.

I'm sitting on the couch, laptop open, The People's Court is on television (glad I don't have to experience daytime TV too often, though there is something soothing about the easy conflict resolution portrayed on the show). And I'm thinking about how silly it is to expect someone like a professor, who doesn't normally work 9-5 hours, to reduce his or her workload simply by not coming into the office. Many of the academics I know write at home, on the weekends, and during off-hours anyway.

I'm resisting the urge to do any work, thinking that I may actually have to do some work today to stay caught up, and wondering whether writing articles counts as work. If the question is, "Would I write anyway?" the answer is yes. Do I get paid to do it as part of my workload? Yes. So, is it work? Is it enjoyable play? Yes on both counts. It's a wonderful part of my job that these two strands are intertwined. Even my writing this entry could count as a pre-writing for possible articles: work-life balance, organizational identification, emotion labor... I could go on. But am I allowed to?

And so, I've come to the point at which the furlough system breaks down, no longer makes sense, though I'm sure all my academic friends have already come to a similar conclusion.

I turn the channel from the People's Court to a Tool Academy marathon on VH1. On this show boyfriends who cheat on their girlfriends, verbally abuse them, and don't respect them (hence, the "tools") are tricked into coming to a school where they will supposedly learn better relationship and life skills or be booted out of the school and possibly their romantic relationships. I study the communication of gender and masculinity. This show could make a potentially interesting artifact of analysis. Uh oh. Am I suddenly working again? Should I change the channel?

Simple Answers to Difficult Questions

As Director of our basic course and supervisor of 30-40 Graduate Teaching Associates, I often have to complete online training courses about diversity, sexual harassment, ethics, etc. in the workplace. I (usually) gladly complete them, as I consider those topics important to doing my job well.

With some of the sessions, however, I can't help but be struck by the simple, black-and-white way the "correct" courses of action are portrayed. In the workplace ethics course, for example, if an employee took every "correct" course of action recommended by the program (like calling a co-worker out for using sick days inappropriately), that person would be ostracized at work, find his or her car egged in the parking lot, and generally find that others avoid him or her in the hallways.

I know these courses are meant for people in all positions, but quite a few of the situations just don't apply to being a professor. I used to be more sympathetic to criticisms of scholarly communication research that focused on life in the academy. While I do write autoethnography (not about life as a college teacher, though), and I've read some very good autoethnographies about life in the academy (see Pelias, A Methodology of the Heart, in particular), the label of "navel gazing" both stung and struck a chord with me.

After doing these online classes, though, I've realized how unique our position is in the world of work. We need more research exploring, detailing, and attempting to understand this sphere of work. Much of the Cultural Studies writing about education is a great start, but I'm thinking about more focus on us (the teachers)--If for no other reason than to be able to take online training courses more specifically tailored to our job concerns.

Ethnographically speaking...

I was invited to "translate" one of my articles into a Communication Currents column. Communication Currents is the National Communication Association's version of Psychology Today, except online. The editor, currently Joann Keyton, invites people who have recently published in a NCA journal to "translate" their scholarly article into something more accessible to a person outside of the discipline, a layperson.

My piece, "Smashing Stereotypes? Communicating Disability in Wheelchair Rugby," will up for a couple of months. You can find it here.

This idea appealed to me because like so many of the communication scholars I admire, Bud Goodall, Nick Trujillo, Amira DelaGarza, and Patricia Geist-Martin, I'm interested in the ways communication scholarship can be translated into books one might find on the shelves of Borders and Barnes and Noble.

The experience was a bit difficult, though, as I'm used to speaking in this language called "academia." Disciplinary territoriality, building walls around one's department for fear of invaders and intruders claiming to study the same thing the same way, has no doubt contributed to this ossification of our lingua franca here in the academy (see, I'm doing it again: "ossification," "lingua franca," good grief!). We don't get credit for learning the other, more widely spoken language of the popular press (at least not in communication). That leaves me tongue-tied.