University of California Press
The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World Around Us by Mark Robert Rank
Published in April 2024
Universities as workplaces are a worthy topic of inquiry. Alternative academic (alt-ac) career paths should be studied.
If those two statements are true (debate, discuss, report back), then luck is a variable we need to incorporate into our thinking. The higher ed–as–workplace and alt-ac career lens is how I read Washington University sociologist Mark Rank’s excellent book, The Random Factor.
Rank examines the role of chance at two levels: The individual, as a unit of analysis, and random events, such as how we met our partner, often have more impact on our life course than the factors social scientists typically model as explanatory variables, such as class, race, gender, etc.
At the macro level, randomness can also prove determinative. One of Rank’s examples is to ask how the world might have been a different place if Hitler had not been rejected by art school, or if he had not changed the timing of a speech in 1939 and therefore narrowly avoided being blown up by a well-placed bomb.
If you are interested in how we might think about luck in our lives and big events and even begin to try to incorporate randomness in our decision-making and model chance in our explanatory frameworks, then you will get much from the book.
But let’s think about chance and the alternative-academic career.
My hypothesis, formed only after reading The Random Factor, is that randomness plays a greater role in the careers of alt-acs than in those academics following a more traditional path. Why might this be so?
A traditional academic career has a well-defined sequencing. If you are lucky enough (and here the random factor is strong) to land a tenure-track gig, you have some visibility into how future steps may unfold. Five years of publish or perish (assistant professor), with tenure either achieved (promotion to associate professor) or not. Once an associate, going to full is more variable, but often (sometimes?) the bar to go over is known.
This description vastly oversimplifies the tenure-track journey. (And it is one of the rare times I’m happy that IHE did away with comments, as I’m sure you have many.) But, at least with the fortunate few that make it into one of those diminishingly few tenure-track roles, the future is at least somewhat legible, if treacherous, simply because that path has been so well trodden by so many before.
An alternative-academic career? Not so much.
After nearly three decades of alt-ac work, I still feel as if I’m making things up as I go. A hallmark of the alternative-academic role is that we are often the first people to hold the job title that we have and to do the work that we do. For many of us working in areas of digital learning, online education and academic innovation, the work we do did not exist when we were in grad school.
There are exceptions. Faculty developers working in centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) draw on a rich history, starting with the founding of Michigan’s CRLT in 1962. I often think of academic librarians as the OGs of alt-acs, as, while some have academic appointments and are eligible for academic tenure, most (to my understanding) do not. Academic librarians have therefore been navigating that liminal space between faculty and staff for generations. We can learn much from their journey.
With no defined professional road map, the career of an alternative academic will be especially susceptible to the vicissitudes of chance. An individual alt-ac can usually do little to influence the institutional priorities and funding sources needed to create (or uncreate) their jobs. Lacking any of the job projections of their counterparts on the tenure track, alternative academics are largely at the mercy of forces beyond their control to determine whether they will be able to get and keep their jobs.
Where does thinking about the random factor come in when considering how the plurality of academics actually navigate their careers as non-tenure-track, contingent and adjunct faculty? In most fields, luck plays a huge role in determining whether a tenure-track role is offered.
Rank talks about his own luck at Wash U, being able to move to the School of Social Work shortly before the university (unwisely) eliminated the sociology department in 1991. (Note: 1991 was the year I graduated from the university as a history major, before then going to grad school in sociology and demography. WashU brought the sociology department back in 2015.)
Getting that tenure-track role hinges on a range of random factors (when senior faculty are retiring, the dean’s priorities) and long-term trends (enrollments, majors, funding, etc.). With multiple qualified candidates for every tenure-track opportunity, luck will play an outsize role in the academic career path.
For alt-acs, the big lesson from The Random Factor is that we should give ourselves less credit for our career successes and less blame for our challenges. If your role ended, or if you are having challenges finding that next opportunity (as many alt-acs are now), it may have less to do with you and your skills and abilities and more to do with the luck of the moment. And if you’ve been able to make it through an alt-ac career unscathed (a goal that feels less and less obtainable as time goes on), then the best thing to do is count your lucky stars.
What are you reading?
