How to Have a 50-Year Academic Career

Much of the conversation swirling around academia this summer is about leaving academia. In the midst of all this talk about higher education and the Great Resignation, I’ve been thinking about the opposite. Call it “the big stay”.

What could be the conditions that encourage and enable us to stay in science for decades? I have to look no further than my father to answer that question.

This summer, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies hosted a farewell dinner for my father and three of his colleagues who have also retired since the Covid summer of 2020 Family demographics, population dynamics, housing studies and household projections.

What factors contributed to its academic longevity? And what can we learn from his long university career that might help us join the Great Stay?

As I reflect on what the next 25 years of my academic career might be like, I hope that writing this article can help provide a roadmap for staying.

1 – Optimize for curiosity rather than careerism

Growing up, I never heard my father talk about university and faculty politics. When he talked about his work, it was about trends and ideas and how his research relates to our lives. The organizational dysfunctions of science are a perennial issue. There was never a golden age of university as each generation faces its own challenges.

A career-long focus on ideas and creating and sharing knowledge doesn’t have to be limited to professors. Student insights and their research have always been fundamental. Those who work on the Human Resources side of the Faculty/Human Resources department enhance the opportunity to focus our academic careers on learning and scholarship. Classrooms aren’t the only place to teach, and peer-reviewed journals aren’t the only place to share knowledge.

Throughout his career, my father has maintained his curiosity about the interplay between demographic trends (migration, fertility, household formation, etc.) and housing dynamics. That curiosity was the common thread of his decades-long career, not titles, positions, or appointments. It is up to all of us to find and nurture our curiosity if we are to sustain a lifelong academic career.

2 – Build recognized in-depth expertise

The development of nationally recognized expertise is a long-term project. It is the work that accumulates, year after year, decade after decade, into domain knowledge valued by academic peers and those outside one’s discipline.

For my father, this recognized deep expertise lay in housing demographics. He has spent much of his academic career collaborating and training academics and non-academics in this research area. His expertise was enhanced through a network of scholars from other institutions and organizations (such as the Census Bureau) and colleagues at his university, with whom he was able to collaborate on daily collaborative research and writing.

The lesson here is building our own recognized expertise as a goal that doesn’t come quickly. Stick with a series of questions and ideas long enough; Sooner or later you realized that decades will have passed. Think of the job as a team sport, not the only endeavor to develop in-depth expertise, and you will seek out those who know more than you do in your institution and beyond.

3 – Accept non-traditional academic roles

The second two-thirds of my father’s academic career was not traditional. He transitioned from a full-time position as a lecturer to one as a research assistant. This change was brought about in part by his desire to move from the Boston area to Montana and live a less hectic and community-driven life.

Due to his recognized deep expertise and the network of close colleagues he built up, my father was able to carry out his academic role at a distance from his university. Having helped establish the Joint Center during his Harvard years, he had a stable base from which to continue his research and writing. The fact that funders support the housing demographics research my father specializes in has helped him do this work from anywhere.

What I take away from my father’s story is that there are many paths to pursue an academic career. Post-pandemic, there may be even more ways to contribute constructively to our institutions without having to come to campus every day and outside of traditional academic titles and roles.

If you’re at the point where you’re considering leaving your current job, you may not need to leave academia — or maybe even your institution. First, focus on where you can make a difference in your recognized area of ​​expertise, and then try to find a way to adapt the role to the life you want to have.

4 – Work less

Maybe the internet and email and laptops and smartphones and Zoom ruined it all. As a child in the 1970s and 1980s, I have no memory of my father working evenings, weekends, or vacations. When he was home, which he was every night, he was there.

The fact that we all seem to be working full time these days may contribute to the Great Academic Resignation. It is worth asking how much of our constant labor is necessary and how much is self-imposed. If we knew that doing less work this week, this month, and this year would result in years of more productive contributions, would we accept that compromise?

Suppose we only have thirty years of intense academic work within us. Do we work full-time for 30 years and then give up? Do we pack those 30 years of work into 15 or 20 and then quit exhausted – as many academics seem to be doing now? Or do we do it like my father and spread these 30 years of intensive work over 50 years?

Do we see it as a goal to work part-time in some areas of our careers? Can we find the confidence to take a few breaks, do something different for a while, and then get back to what motivated us to become academics in the first place?

5 – Connect outside of your institution

When I think of how academia was the family business, I don’t think of a single university. Instead, I think of all my friends that my father had at his university and others and our family friends who worked for government, non-profit organizations and the housing industry.

Colleagues who become friends create a long-term career. Science may be unique among knowledge industries in that we benefit most from what we share outside of our workplace. Disciplines are made up of people, and knowledge in an academic field grows through conversation and collaboration.

The lifelong friendships with a network of far-flung colleagues that my father developed over the decades have always struck me as my father’s most important academic achievement. It’s an example I’m trying to replicate.

What advice do you have for a 50-year academic career?