Academic Callings: The University We Have Had, Now Have, and Could Have
Janice Newson & Claire Polster, eds. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc, 2010; 264 pp; ISBN: 978-1-55130-369-7, paper $34.95 cdn.
By Matthew Hayes
A new professor entering academia on the tenure track is usually given plenty of advice. And we need much of it. Indeed, there are a great many books written to help new academics navigate the publishing and research requirements of getting tenure. There are even a few advising budding academics how to “write a lot.”
Yet few of the “How To” books young academics will be advised to read have much to say about the development of our profession, or the historical trajectory of the universities in which much of our careers will be housed. Academic Callings recounts both and is an important contribution.
On their own, this collection of essays reads like a series of personal stories about the challenges of being an academic over the past five decades. But taken together, they are more than the sum of their parts. The contributors provide a reflection on their personal careers in the academy against the backdrop of the profession’s historical trajectory over the last generation.
Academic Callings is an echo of the movements that came out of the late 1960s to democratize the university. During the 1960s, the university sector in Canada, as in other advanced industrial countries, expanded significantly, offering many new opportunities for employment, and a variety of different types of academic careers.
This expansion did not merely reproduce the university as it was up until then. It created a new type of university, one which would be open to all social classes, to women, to racialized groups and to aboriginal people in a way that embraced ideals of democratic and autonomous collegial self-governance. Some of the book’s contributors started their academic careers in the 1980s and 1990s, and recollect the advancement and continuation of this project amid setbacks and the repositioning then well underway.
The ideals of this period were never fully realized, and the contributors are careful not to romanticize the past. Yet, these ideals shaped a vision for the future development of the university and its relation to society for an entire generation of faculty. One can hardly expect that all members of the professoriat from this generation felt the same way, however, the attempts to democratize the university and society generally were important external references for many embarking on their personal projects as professors.
Today’s generation, by contrast, has been trained largely in the absence of such idealist notions of the university. Indeed, many of us have little experience with academic self-governance, and graduate programs place limited emphasis on it when they do not penalize students who may take longer to finish as a result of service to the academic community.
This lack of experience creates new challenges for us in the struggle to preserve the privileges of our profession, now threatened as never before by casualization and the pressures of corporatization. If we are unable to meet these challenges, the university we could have at the end of our careers may be a far cry from the one so central to the project of democratizing complex, globally-integrated and highly technical societies.
Academic Callings is a highly readable book. It contains short chapters, divided into five sections, each organized around a theme. Not all readers will be satisfied with the picture the book provides. It’s a useful place to start for a sense of the trajectory of our profession, but it is by no means a comprehensive scholarly account. I recommend it especially to PhD students grappling with their own academic callings, to graduate student leaders involved in university governance, and to young scholars who want a quick entry to the lay of the land in our profession.
The book serves as a useful guide, and to that effect fulfills its central purpose: to leave a calling card to the current generation of scholars entering the university. If we want the rewarding personal careers we seek, we must pay collective attention to the conditions that make them possible.
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Matthew Hayes is an assistant professor of sociology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton.