Keeping Our Boots on the Ground: Independent scholars maintaining academic identities

Keeping Our Boots on the Ground: Independent scholars maintaining academic identities

Introduction

The "challenge of non-university researchers" has still to be met. Nevertheless, research beyond traditional university structures is here to stay: indeed, in subjects where overheads are low and cutbacks are high, such as the humanities and social sciences, we could be on the verge of a new age of independent scholarship. While the academy is "rethinking," independent scholars are busy doing.

Background and Purpose

In the last two decades, global economic trends have impacted higher education at international, national, and state levels. Reduced investment in higher education has resulted in faculty layoffs, employment of short term and intermittent faculty and a contraction of the traditional trajectory of tenured faculty pathways. In the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, these changes resulted in increased numbers of part-time and adjunct academics who are peripheral to academic institutions. Tenure track positions are redesigned to meet specific twenty-first century market demands and educational innovations decentering the role of faculty in their own governance. Greater numbers of online degree offerings and packaged online courses designed for teaching greater numbers of students, refocuses teaching to the moderation of course analytics. As Herstein explained, in this model of the "Corporate University," students are "customers," education is a sellable commodity, and the professoriate is replaced by disposable teaching staff with neither wages, nor benefits, nor job security (in other words, easily intimidated lackeys), whose only option is to cave and cavil to their corporate directors, or face the abyss of being independent.

As one sector of the "diversifying workforce" in higher education, there is a need to embrace what it means to be positioned, valued, and legitimized as independent scholars. Researchers have explored the tensions, challenges, frustrations, and realities of being an academic experiencing the volatile shifts of the twenty-first century enterprise of higher education. There is also increasing research that examines the careers, academic development and challenges faced by non-tenure-track instructors and research associates. What has been left under-examined, are the perspectives and experiences of those who attempt to maintain academic research work outside institutions as independent scholars.

The phenomena of academics working outside the walls of institutions and making significant academic contributions is not new. In fact, PhD's have been independent scholars as early as the twentieth century. Cole and Pomata identified that in the United States, independent scholars became even more widespread as universities disgorged ever-increasing numbers of PhD

graduates onto a stagnant job market. In response, many highly trained researchers, who may have hoped for academic positions, become by choice or necessity freelance researchers. They work within non-academic organizations or "under their own steam to produce scholarly articles, books and discussion papers, without university administrators breathing down their necks or any chance of tenure." They continue to work because they have created a life as a scholar that they were later reluctant to change. Consequently, less boundary-laden forms of academic identity are emerging in the field of higher education.

We address the "abyss of being independent" through a lens on academic identities as independent scholars in unique career trajectories. In this work, we represent the nuances and lived experiences of transferability in terms of the academic identity. We also frame and substantiate a new lens for independent scholars regardless of discipline who conduct ethical and meaningful research. Thus, our purpose is not to juxtapose our experiences to other academic disciplines, but rather share our journeys as independent scholars.

In twenty ten, Joyanne and Makini met at an American Educational Research Association annual meeting. At that time, J was an assistant professor in the field of teacher education at a Caribbean university and M was a newly minted PhD in the field of education. They were intrigued by each other's work on teacher development and vowed to work together to get some work completed for the twenty eleven AERA meeting. In twenty eleven, by happenstance, Anne was present in a meeting at AERA twenty eleven that Joyanne attended. That meeting was the starting point of an experimental collaboration among women fourteen women who were early career academics, some of whom were on the tenure track. Makini was invited by J to join the group. The members of the newly formed group interrogated their experiences of informal peer mentoring for career advancement as a focus of research between twenty eleven and twenty sixteen. The result was that the large group had several successful research and presentations at successive professional conferences based on peer-mentoring within the global network.

In time, each of our academic positions changed. In twenty twelve, Joyanne resigned from her assistant professor position and has not worked full-time since. Anne resigned from a tenure track position, relocated as a research associate then educational consultant and since twenty fifteen, has been a learning specialist. Makini worked at a four-year institution as a Research Associate. In these new contexts, we remained engaged the research work within our global network. This collaborative experience continues to play an important role in helping us to maintain our academic identities.

In this paper, we explore how we, all former faculty, have navigated, negotiated and maintained our academic identity as independent scholars engaged in academic research. Through autoethnography and narrative inquiry we articulate our selfhood as educators and academics to shed light on the ambivalence often assigned to the work of academics unaffiliated with traditional institutions. Our work contributes to the emerging body of literature on academic identity and provides insight into workforce shifts in higher education. Through our research work in the field of peer mentoring, we have managed to keep doing and growing as academics. We have managed to 'keep our boots on the ground,' and keep marching on as researchers, and in so doing keep our dreams of being academics alive. If we had not done so, we would have nothing left of our academic lives, a part of ourselves that we had invested so much in. Boots on the ground is not just about traditional notions of combat, but with regards to our scholarly work, it is about marching forward to continue vitality as researchers due to the marginalized status assigned to an academic outside the institution.