As part of a seasonal celebration of Imbolc — it’s about creativity, right? — I took a day and cleaned my big home office desk. Took everything off the top, stained the scratches with Old English Scratch Cover, and then polished the mahogany-veneer top with paste wax for protection against spilt coffee, tea, and whiskey. After sort and organizing all the papers, etc., I felt ready to begin a new season.
Part of that cleaning is cleaning out drafts of blog posts, such as this one:
At Academy Mercenary, Amy Hale holds up adjunct teaching against the concept of “the portfolio life” and thinks that they are compatible. (Plus more about the recent AAR annual meeting.)
In the past week or so I have been particularly inspired by the notion of the “portfolio life”, which is the idea that we start to see ourselves less as “having jobs” and more as possessing a variety of skills and interests that we can add to our portfolio. We can use our portfolio for marketing ourselves and also for making decisions on how we want to spend our time and resources. Portfolio lives also require knowing what resources you need, because the income streams are seen less as an identity anchor and more of a way to finance how you want to live. Although the portfolio life is frequently used to promote active retirement, I think there are plenty of ways for those of us not working 9 to 5 jobs to use this idea to use this concept to consider a more integrated life that is less defined by our jobs, and more defined by what we love. For people not engaged in standard employment, or do not have a single institution based position, this can be a very empowering life reframing exercise.
I graduated with what amounted to a BFA in Creative Writing, although Reed College called it a BA in English. I certainly knew that that degree offered no clear career path—having the concept of the “portfolio life” might have been helpful when I was in my twenties.
As it happened, I did pretty much what “the voices” told me to do, and it has worked out OK, so far.
Meanwhile, at Inside Higher Education, two essays imagine a new model, where both full-time professors and overworked adjunct professors leave the university to form guilds of academic ronin.
This picture of the “future” of higher ed is interesting and reminds me in some respects of the “hedge schools” found for a time in Ireland. How to revive this concept today is a question to which I have been giving some thought, although more as a response to the lack of meaningful curriculum at the secondary, and even primary school level, than as an alternative to higher education.
Thanks for sharing this.