Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Contemplating a World Without Planning Academia

Annalise has this odd habit of making me think. Her first post here was no exception. Namely: what if one ends up with a PhD in city and regional planning and does not become a professor of city and regional planning? To some degree, the psychological burdens of sunk costs apply: if you enter a program bound and determined to get a PhD because you don't particularly want to be a municipal transportation planner or economic development consultant (or, in my case, journalist) and end up, at the end of the road, deciding that the main thing that the additional three letters qualify you for isn't a good career move either . . . suffice to say you might at least end up with some sleepless nights wondering what those extra years of studying and lost wages got you.

Which sounds a little like pre-emptive self-pity (and if there's one thing graduate students have nailed down, it's self-pity) but is meant to prompt a thinking exercise: if tomorrow all the academic planning departments in the world were to be swallowed by a giant global-warming-enhanced land shark, what would you do? What would the PhD have taught you that a master's, or even just working in a planning-ish position, would not have? How would you take those new skills and apply them towards your goals? How would your goals change in the absence of a potential tenure-track position?

For myself I generally enjoy (a) developing ideas and then (b) communicating them to a wider audience, which is the main reason I keep blogging even at the risk of some future hiring committee doing a future Google search and then indulging in a future collective sigh of disappointment. Unlike Annalise, I started out with enough race-, nationality-, and class-based privileges, and have enough tendencies towards social cluelessness, that you generally have to hit me over the head with a thick plank to get me to notice exclusionary processes. Even so, the idea of a life without a planning faculty position leads me to wonder how else I would be able to get ideas out into the wider world, or even whether a planning faculty position is the best perch for such goals of communication.

1 comment:

annalise said...

Jessica,

Your post makes me think of the wonderful conversation we had in Vancouver about our interests in science fiction literature, or, at least, for those authors who are writing in that literary genre.

So, I'll take the leap and ask, what dialectical relationships might we imagine for planning and science fiction? Is there a methodology, pedagogy, or practice waiting for us to create the changes we need to succeed?

Just think, if we don't write about these connections, who will?

annalise