Why Can’t You Just Keep Doing Your Research on the Side?

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Why can’t you just keep doing your research on the side?

I get this one a lot. My friends back in the academy want me to keep researching and maintaining a scholarly output. Increasingly, professional societies want this too. Academics like the idea of “independent scholarship” as a way of keeping people in the profession. When I told another academic that I’d gotten a job as a software developer, one of the very first things I heard was, “You can use your paid time off for research!”

In many cases, the underlying impulse is kind: you don’t have to abandon what you love doing. I loved my research, and to be clear, I’m still doing some academic writing. It’s true that it’s not impossible to keep doing your research on the side. However, possible and sustainable are two very different things.

Once you’re out of the academy, many of the supports that existed to help you research are gone. You lose institutional library access, leading you on merry chases to find books and articles. Attending (and paying for) multiple conferences to workshop a paper is near-impossible with many careers, and keeping up with all of the literature in your sub-field is a demanding job. Frankly, even if I could, I wouldn’t want to.

Independent scholars can’t count on financial support, so they have to fund their own research out-of-pocket (an absurd expectation for most people). And while I’m very fortunate to have paid time off, I can’t dedicate two months a year just to visiting archives like I used to. Having a full-time job makes those long research trips impossible, and without those trips I cannot produce the kind of scholarship I did before. Digitization is not going to change this any time in the near future.

Academic research also makes for a lousy hobby. Peer review takes forever and is difficult to navigate, especially when you lack library access. When you are published, you don’t generally get a wide audience. Academic books pay a pittance, and journal articles pay nothing. Employers don’t care whether or not you’re publishing, and scholarship competes with any other writing or freelancing I want to do. Whether it’s because of family, having a social life, or just not wanting to work more than 40 hours a week, the trade-offs are frequently not worth it.

The American Historical Association (AHA) might want everybody who flees the tenure track to remain independent scholars, but it’s not practical and it’s not fair. You would need to reshape your entire career to accommodate it, or be independently wealthy. And it leaves an important question unanswered: what does the scholar receive? If the AHA wants independent scholarship to be the goal, it needs to dramatically rethink how scholarship should be produced and what should be valued.

Photograph of unidentified man perusing the card catalog at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, 1963 (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, via Wikimedia Commons).


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