Professor University

Category: Broader Career Thinking

  • Alt-Ac Careers for PhDs: How to Thrive Outside the Tenure Track

    The phrase “alternative academic careers” — alt-ac, in the shorthand of the academy — was coined to describe careers adjacent to academia that draw on doctoral training without requiring a faculty position: policy work, publishing, research roles in foundations and government agencies, higher education administration, data science, nonprofit leadership, archiving, and more.

    The phrase was intended to destigmatize those paths. It has done that work imperfectly, because the word “alternative” still implies a primary path — the tenure-track position — from which everything else is a deviation. This framing is worth questioning directly: for a significant majority of the people who complete PhDs, careers outside the tenure track are not alternatives. They are the path.

    The Scale of the Situation

    In most humanities disciplines, the number of PhD graduates significantly exceeds the number of tenure-track positions available each year. The gap has widened over decades as doctoral programs continued admitting students at rates the job market cannot absorb. Many of the people who leave academia do so not because they lack ability or ambition, but because the market did not produce a position that fit them in the years they were searching — or because, after years of searching, they made a deliberate choice to stop.

    Understanding this at the beginning of a doctoral program — rather than discovering it at the end of one — changes the relationship to the degree. A PhD is not only valuable if it produces a tenure-track position. It is a credential that certifies advanced analytical, research, and communication skills that have genuine market value in a wide range of sectors.

    How People Reframe the Transition — Three Versions

    From Failure to Clarity

    Many people describe the moment of deciding to leave academia not as a defeat but as the moment they finally stopped performing a version of their life that did not fit and started building one that did. The work of figuring out what you actually want — not what academic socialization trained you to want — is demanding but generative. It often produces more clarity about values and priorities than years of conventional academic striving did.

    From Departure to Transition

    The skills developed in doctoral training — rigorous analysis, complex argument, sustained research, clear writing, the ability to navigate ambiguity and manage long-horizon projects — are genuinely transferable. People who have moved into policy, publishing, data science, and nonprofit leadership frequently find that their doctoral training gave them capabilities that distinguish them from colleagues who came to those fields through more direct routes. The degree is not wasted. It is differently applied.

    From the Academy to the World

    Some people who leave academia discover they can do the work they care most about through channels that do not require a faculty position. A historian who moves into public history work, a political scientist who moves into policy analysis, a literary scholar who moves into editing and publishing: these are not retreats from the intellectual life. They are different forms of it.

    Practical Guidance for People Considering This Path

    • Start thinking about it before you think you need to. The doctoral students who navigate alt-ac transitions most smoothly are the ones who began informational interviews, networking outside the academy, and building transferable skills — grant writing, data literacy, project management, public communication — while still in the program. You do not have to commit to leaving academia to benefit from knowing what is out there.
    • Translate your work into non-academic language. “I study the discursive construction of racial identity in antebellum print culture” is a description that makes sense inside academia. “I research how racial stereotypes were built and circulated through media in the nineteenth-century United States, and what that history reveals about contemporary media dynamics” is the same work described for a different audience. Develop the second version. Practice it until it is fluent.
    • Seek out people who have made this transition. Their accounts are almost universally more varied and more interesting than the single narrative of failure that academic culture projects onto departure. Find those people. Let their actual experience complicate your assumptions about what life outside the academy looks like.
    • Give yourself permission to want something different. Academic socialization shapes desire as well as behavior. Many doctoral students find, when they are honest with themselves, that what they want — in terms of income, stability, geography, the kind of daily work — is not what the tenure-track path provides. That honesty is not a betrayal of intellectual commitments. It is an accurate reading of values. It deserves to be honored.

    For the accounts of people who faced this decision from inside the academic path — including professors who almost left and those who did — explore the Professor University archive and read our companion post: The Professor Who Almost Quit.

  • The Professor Who Almost Quit: What Held Academics Through the Hardest Years

    Ask a room full of professors whether they ever seriously considered leaving academia, and a higher proportion of hands will go up than most people expect. Not the polite acknowledgment that the path was difficult — the real version: the year they nearly withdrew from their doctoral program, the job market cycle that broke something in them, the semester they applied for jobs they barely understood, the moment they called someone they trusted and said they were not sure they could keep going.

    These stories exist in enormous numbers. They are told in private, in whispers, between people with enough trust to be honest. They are almost never told publicly — because the implicit narrative of the professorial career does not easily accommodate the reality that many of the people standing at the front of classrooms nearly did not make it.

    What the Crisis Points Look Like

    The causes vary as much as the people:

    • The fourth year of the PhD, when the dissertation that seemed clear in the prospectus had collapsed into something unrecognizable, the advisor had gone on sabbatical, and the stipend ran out three months early
    • The job market year when sixty applications produced three preliminary interviews and no campus visits — and the candidate had to spend the summer figuring out who they were if not a professor
    • The first year on the tenure track, when the course load, the committee work, the publication pressure, and the complete absence of community in a new city produced something that felt like a breakdown

    What these stories share is a moment of genuine decision: not the background uncertainty that accompanies all doctoral and early-career experience, but a specific crisis point at which continuing required an active choice rather than passive momentum.

    What Held People Through

    A Specific Person Who Told the Truth

    Not a platitude — “you’re so talented, of course you should continue” — but a honest, specific assessment from someone who knew them and their work and could say: “I have read what you are doing. I think it matters. I think you can finish this.” Or sometimes the honest opposite: “I think you are in the wrong program, and here is what I think you should consider instead.” The person who provides this — an advisor, a peer, a mentor outside the direct supervisory relationship — is almost always named when scholars describe what held them through. This is one reason that learning how to ask a professor to be your mentor is so consequential so early in the academic path.

    An Active Choice to Continue — Not Just Inertia

    Many scholars describe a specific moment when they stopped persisting by inertia and made a deliberate choice to keep going — with full awareness that they might not succeed, some idea of what they would do if they did not, and a genuine renewed commitment to the reasons the work mattered to them. This sounds subtle. The scholars who describe it say it was not subtle at all. The quality of the work and the experience of doing it often changed substantially once the choice was made consciously.

    Structural Support That Arrived at the Right Moment

    A fellowship that extended funding. A workshop that produced the intellectual community the program had not. A writing group that meant someone was waiting for pages. A new advisor relationship that replaced a broken one. These structural supports are not entirely within any individual’s control — but scholars who found them were often those who had built enough relationships and visibility that support had somewhere to reach them from.

    A Source of Meaning Not Fully Contingent on Outcome

    The scholars who made it through the hardest periods were often those who had some access to a sense of why the work mattered that was not fully dependent on whether they got the job or finished the chapter. The work itself — the intellectual engagement, the teaching, the commitment to a set of questions — had to be worth something independent of the external validation that academic life withholds for years at a time.

    What These Stories Mean for You

    The stories of professors who almost quit are not cautionary tales. They are maps of terrain you may cross yourself, offered by people who crossed it and came through.

    They mean that difficulty along the path is not evidence that you are wrong for the path. They mean that the moment of crisis is not the end of the story unless you decide it is. They mean that the resources that help — the honest mentor, the deliberate community, the renewed choice — are things that can sometimes be sought and found.

    They also mean something more uncomfortable: that some of the people who almost quit should have. That leaving, for some of them, would have been the better choice — the one that led more directly to a life that fit. The stories of persistence are worth telling. So are the stories of departure. Understanding the difference requires the kind of honest self-examination that no one else can do for you. See our guide: When to Leave a PhD Program — and How to Know It’s the Right Call.

    The Professor University archive was built precisely to bring these private conversations into a public space. If you want to hear the unfiltered accounts of professors who have been through the hardest parts of this path and kept going, start listening here.

  • What Is Academic Tenure? Before, During, and After the Review

    Ask a first-year graduate student what they want from an academic career and many will say, eventually, tenure. Ask them what tenure actually means — legally, professionally, financially, emotionally — and most will go quiet. They know it is the goal. They do not always know what the goal is.

    This post is an attempt to fix that. Not because understanding tenure will make the path easier, but because walking toward something you can see clearly is different from walking toward something you can only feel.

    What Tenure Actually Is

    Tenure is job security — but a specific, unusual, and constitutionally significant kind of job security that exists almost nowhere else in American professional life. When a professor is granted tenure, they receive what amounts to a presumption of continued employment. They cannot be dismissed without cause, and “cause” is defined narrowly:

    • Serious professional misconduct
    • Financial exigency (genuine institutional financial crisis)
    • Program elimination

    They cannot be let go because enrollment dropped, because a new dean wants to take the department in a different direction, or because their research has moved into territory that makes administrators uncomfortable. That last point is not incidental. It is, historically, the point.

    Tenure was formalized in American higher education largely through the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, issued jointly by the American Association of University Professors. The underlying argument was straightforward: scholars cannot pursue truth — and teach what they find — if their employment depends on their findings being acceptable. Tenure is that protection. It is not simply a reward for years of good performance.

    Life Before Tenure: The Probationary Years

    Most tenure-track positions carry a probationary period of six years, at the end of which the faculty member goes up for tenure review. Six years sounds like a long time. It does not feel like one.

    What the Record Must Demonstrate

    The tenure clock begins on day one. The record that accumulates falls into three categories — weighted differently depending on institutional mission:

    • Research and scholarship. At research universities: peer-reviewed publications, a book manuscript in many humanities fields, grant funding in many sciences, growing recognition within the field. The informal benchmark: you should be becoming the leading authority in your specific area. At teaching-focused institutions like the CSU (see our CSU faculty guide), the balance shifts but scholarship remains expected.
    • Teaching. Strong teaching is expected everywhere. Weak evaluations can complicate a case; exceptional teaching rarely rescues one that is thin on scholarship at research universities. At liberal arts colleges, teaching carries far more weight.
    • Service. The quiet tax. Necessary, often meaningful, almost universally undervalued in tenure decisions. One of the most consistent pieces of advice from senior faculty: protect your pre-tenure time from service commitments.

    The Emotional Texture

    The pre-tenure years carry a sustained, low-grade anxiety that most people who have been through them describe with striking consistency. You are producing work under a deadline whose outcome is genuinely uncertain. You are often doing this in a new city, in a new role, teaching courses you have never taught before to students who expect you to know exactly what you are doing — while you are learning how to do it. For more on navigating this psychologically, see: The Professor Who Almost Quit.

    The Tenure Review Itself

    In the sixth year, the formal review begins. You assemble a tenure dossier: a personal statement, complete scholarly record, teaching evaluations and materials, service documentation, and a set of external letters from senior scholars in your field — some selected by you, some by your department — who assess the quality and significance of your work.

    The dossier is reviewed by your department, then typically by a college-level committee, then by the provost, and sometimes by the board of trustees. A positive recommendation at every level results in tenure and — almost universally at research universities — promotion to associate professor simultaneously.

    If tenure is denied, the standard outcome is a terminal year: one additional year of employment, then departure. This outcome is not rare enough to ignore. It happens to people who have worked diligently and in good faith.

    Life After Tenure: What Changes, and What Doesn’t

    What Changes Most

    • The anxiety lifts. Most faculty who have been through it describe the period immediately after tenure as disorienting in a pleasant way — a spaciousness they had forgotten was possible. You can say no to things. You can start a project that will take ten years without calculating whether it will be finished in time to matter.
    • Research freedom becomes real. Pre-tenure, many faculty make strategic choices about what to publish and where. Post-tenure, those strategic constraints loosen. Many describe taking on riskier, more interdisciplinary work — the questions they had been saving for after the review.
    • Service obligations increase substantially. The junior colleague who was protected from heavy committee work is now expected to carry more of that weight.

    What Doesn’t Change

    The intellectual life — the reading, thinking, writing, teaching — continues on its own terms. The relationships with students and colleagues that made the work meaningful do not reorganize themselves around a tenure decision. The questions that drew you to your field are still there, still open, still worth pursuing. And the next milestone — promotion to full professor — brings its own timeline, expectations, and review process.

    What This Means for You, Right Now

    If you are a first-year undergraduate, tenure is fifteen years away at minimum. That distance is actually useful — it means you have time to decide whether this particular destination is the right one for you. Ask the professors in your life about it honestly. Ask what the pre-tenure years did to their relationships, their sense of self, their sleep. Ask what they did differently in the years after. Ask whether they would walk the same road again.

    Their answers will not all be the same. That is precisely the point. The Professor University archive is built to give you access to those answers across every field and institution.