Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Real: Professional Education for Professional Humanists

We’ve generally done everything we can in the humanities to ignore that a PhD is a every bit as much a professional degree as a degree in law, medicine, educational administration, information science, or business. The irony is that explicit training in the professional tools employed by professors, would actually make PhDs who end up off the tenure track, more widely employable. This presentation is intended to open up a discussion to identify professional tools that will make PhDs better professors, better alt-ac employees, and create better paths to non-academic careers. All we have to do is shake the fantasy that scholarship alone will save us, that everything practical can be absorbed through osmosis, that even admitting contingency is tantamount to failure. It’s time to get real about who we are and what we do.