Career-Making in Post-Modern Academia: Process, Structure, and Consequence (review)

About once a week a student sits in my office and talks about wanting to become a faculty member. He or she usually invokes the memory of a favorite professor who embodied what it meant to be an inspiring teacher, a notable intellectual, or a respected researcher.

Like those students, I found myself similarly situated several years ago when I contemplated jumping head first into the academy. How I wish someone could have given me Victor N. Shaw's Career-Making in Post-Modern Academia: Process, Structure, and Consequence. It's the type of book you want to thrust into the hands of every student who sits in your office and says, "I'm thinking of getting my Ph.D. and teaching at the college level" or every junior faculty member who walks through the door.

Shaw's book provides exactly the kind of insider knowledge every graduate student and faculty member must know to negotiate the often inscrutable academy, laid out in three parts. Shaw carefully and completely walks the reader through the process (Part I), the structure (Part II), and the consequences (Part III) of academe.

Part I explores the path an academician must travel to become degreed in his or her field, conduct a job search, negotiate institutional placement, and nurture professional networking. Unlike most graduate school preparation manuals and job-seeking guides, Shaw skips the nuanced how-to's in favor of frank discussion regarding the mysteries exclusive to higher education. For example, his explanation of why an aspiring graduate student should aim high for institutional reputation is straightforward and logical; although few care to admit it, one's degree pedigree often speaks louder than actual production early in a career.

Part II revolves around the structure of higher education and the construction of the curriculum vitae as a "miniature of academic personality that a career professional must present to the community of scholarship." Shaw outlines elements a working scholar must navigate as he or she builds career identity on the way to tenure. Academic positioning, publications, teaching, presentation, service, grants, awards, and membership in academic associations are all given equal treatment. The chapters are short—but very effective—in conveying critical information to those at various points in their careers.

Part III finishes with a look at what Shaw identifies as the "consequences" of academia. It is here that Shaw is his most critical and heavy-handed. Covering a broad set of outcomes that arise from a life within—and because of—academia, Shaw discusses the demands an academic career places on individuals, the implications of career-making for social authority and the support of the cultural consumption market, and the threats to individuality and creativity that result. He paints with broad brush strokes academia's place in contemporary society. While academic career-making takes a toll on individuals, it also operates as a "social process that supports and sustains the educational system, the research industry and the entire knowledge enterprise." Without it, we would stagnate.

Within Parts I and II Shaw presents each chapter topic by offering analysis, innovation, and suggestions. This approach works well for presenting information, but the innovation sections tend to overreach at times and, at others, is completely unrealistic for the academic universe Shaw describes. In parts he decries practices that he later advises graduate students and faculty to participate in. This approach seems to undermine the desire to implement true reform—or at least demonstrates how difficult reform in academia is. In addition, the innovation sections often lack a roadmap for change. Shaw does an adequate job of presenting more egalitarian practices and procedures, for example, but how to achieve these lofty goals is often vague.

Thankfully, Shaw more than compensates for these shortcomings in the suggestions he offers for everything from successful publishing and researching guidelines to managing departmental politics. Much of his advice rings true and is not the usual...