For those trained for the professoriate, the options can seem stark in hard times: adjunct or leave academia. Are you resisting this narrative by starting a business that uses your academic training to teach, consult, research, or build? Where have you found role models? How have you learned to price, market, and perform your job? What challenges do you face in relating to colleagues inside academe? How / do you maintain a scholarly agenda in the absence of institutional sponsorship? Do you have chances to collaborate or do you work mostly alone? How was or wasn't your academic training helpful in your new career?

Although business schools embrace the idea of training entrepreneurs, and universities themselves are moving more toward market-based models, entrepreneurialism is largely anathema to large swaths of the humanities and social sciences.  At the same time, the university is over-producing and under-hiring its own graduates—a situation that is not only profoundly unsustainable, but threatens to rattle the walls of academe as more people seek alternative ways to teach, learn, and produce scholarship.  

We are soliciting content for a new cluster of  #Alt-Academy essays on this topic, to be edited by Dr. Daveena Tauber.

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