Humanities Scholars Get Help with Future Plans

Alison Greene wants to be a tenure-track professor of anthropology. But after getting her doctorate at UNC in 2002, the job market looks pretty grim.

So on Friday, she went to a symposium designed to help people with Ph.D.s in the humanities and social sciences look beyond academe to other job possibilities. About 60 students from as far away as Charlotte came to the daylong program at the John Hope Franklin Center to find out how they might make a living -- and a life -- outside the tenure track.

"Whereas I spent all my life thinking about academia, now I'm considering other options," Greene said. "I'm here to network, even though I hate that word."

The event, which attracted mostly students from Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central University, was sponsored by John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute's "Making the Humanities Central" Project, the Graduate School, Career Center, and the Office of Alumni Affairs.

Before the practical advice and networking began, the group heard from keynote speaker Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, an independent, nonprofit educational organization in Princeton, N.J.

"Now I'm going to give you hell," Weisbuch said.

He urged the group to think beyond the tenure track, because limiting their job search to the tenure track is not only impractical, it's also shortsighted.

"There are no alternative careers. There are only careers," he said.

He urged scholars in the humanities not just to dedicate themselves to the inner life of discovery but also to the general good.

"Apply the gains of learning to the growing good of the world," he said.

Too often, those in the humanities complain that the world has turned its back on them, he said. But the problem is that too often academics become part of "a small, select family closed off from outside influences."

"The world did not reject the liberal arts. In important ways, the liberal arts rejected the world," he said.

Panelists in the afternoon sessions were very much in the world: Audience members chose between sessions on government work, consulting, working in nonprofits and publishing and journalism. They heard from an archaeologist working for the state Department of Transportation, a writer for the New Times newspaper in Miami, a museum director and a human resources consultant, among others.

One session also focused on faculty life, and included professors from Duke, Meredith College and Durham Technical Community College.

Wendy Kim, a first-year student in religious studies at UNC, said she already knows she doesn't want to stay in academia. Though her subject might seem esoteric, she said after Sept. 11 it's clear that religion is entwined with politics, international relations, and other real-world subjects. But she said that attitude isn't the norm in academia.

"There's not a lot of support out there for people like me," she said. "You have to be careful who you're honest with."