The Case for Generalists Working in Higher Education
Advice & News / HigherEdJobs
Should higher education professionals aspire to be specialists or generalists?
A response to this question comes with a lot of “But what ifs” for faculty, staff, early-career professionals, and those looking to transition into higher education. To be clear, all professionals specialize in some way. Also, there are generalist jobs in higher education, from student affairs to the president, which would demand a broad understanding of an institution, and in some instances a variety of job functions.
However, becoming a generalist, as in acquiring a knowledge breadth through career experimentation, even outside the academy, is more becoming more valuable despite the popular belief that being an expert in a specific area leads to career success.
According to David Epstein, author of “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World,” specialization made sense in an industrial economy when people faced similar challenges repeatedly. But through a shift to a knowledge economy, as Epstein shares in “Range,” there have been more contributions made by generalists who spread their work across a large number of technology classes, as determined by the U.S. patent office.
Generalists thrive by transferring interdisciplinary knowledge and merging domains, which is easier to do when specialized information can be disseminated so thoroughly and quickly, Epstein said.
“There are many more opportunities for combining knowledge in new ways as opposed to just creating some totally new piece of knowledge,” Epstein said on an episode of the “How to Be Awesome at Your Job” podcast.
The specialization bias is not just from residual industrial-economy thinking, but also from dramatic stories of specialization that people want to believe. That story of “always wanting to be a scientist since I was little girl” or that persistent, focused climb up one career ladder (“This is the job I always wanted!”) always seems to get favorable responses during job interviews and at cocktail parties, right?
Well, maybe the way of the specialist is not the best approach, both for job candidates marketing themselves or for what employers desire when acquiring talent.
“We learn who we are -- in practice, not in theory -- by testing reality, not by looking inside,” wrote Herminia Ibarra, an organizational behavioral specialist and author of “Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career.” “We discover the true possibilities by doing -- trying out new activities, reaching out to new groups, finding new role models, and reworking our story as we tell it to those around us.”
In a previous HigherEdJobs article, we identified such stories of experimentation as being a “Scrapper” instead of a “Silver Spoon.” The generalist story is gaining more traction in higher education as institutions are stretched thin from limited resources and constant turnover.
“Our ability to offer a wide and coherent curriculum depends on having a handful of people with generalist academic and professional backgrounds,” said Gary Daynes, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Barton College, a small, private liberal arts college in North Carolina. “It allows a small institution to become flexible and respond to turnover and adjust roles to meet the needs of our students, our curriculum, and our community.”
Daynes said institutions are increasingly relying on faculty versatile enough to teach outside of a particular discipline, whether that’s a history professor picking up a philosophy course or a first-year seminar or capstone course. Likewise, on the staff and administrative side, Daynes said colleges and universities need people with the transferable skills to move from overseeing one functional area to another in a pinch.
The benefits of generalization go well beyond contingency plans. Daynes said that generalists have greater empathy in the workplace, because “one of the things that tangles up at work is people can’t see the perspectives of others.”
“The other benefit is the ability to collaborate in a meaningful way,” Daynes said. “Oftentimes, when we talk about collaboration, what we really mean is specialization. You take a big project and you divide it up into narrow chunks and you distribute those chunks to individual people and they send it to some central place and it is compiled into a document. That’s not really collaboration. The ability to think and act in a number of those sectors is really desirable because it provides greater coherence, flexibility, and innovation in the product as well, and that comes from being a generalist.”
Daynes said that smaller institutions are more likely to covet generalists than a Research I university, the same way a small business of 100 employees might be reluctant to hire a specialist with a defined role in a large corporation. The traditional model for faculty also doesn’t leave much room for career experimentation as aspiring professors must pursue a doctoral degree before going right into a teaching job.
“Things may be changing in that area, but it depends on the discipline,” said Michael Ignelzi, professor of student affairs in higher education in the counseling and development department at Slippery Rock University (SRU). “There are doctoral programs that want people with work experience. You can argue someone may be a better teacher if they had jobs outside of higher education and they can apply what they know and make it real for students. In non-collective bargaining institutions, they are starting to look at faculty with life and work experience as being valuable. They still might have to have a Ph.D., but it’s not based on that.”
Ignelzi earned a Doctorate of Education in Human Development and Psychology at Harvard University before later becoming dean of students at Wells College and landing a faculty position at SRU. He said it’s possible that in the next 15-20 years institutions might move away from organizing by academic departments.
“If different discipline areas share information out in the world to get things done, then maybe a more collaborative piece of that is what’s needed (in higher education),” Ignelzi said. “If that happens, people with a more generalist background are going to be even more highly desired.”
Generalists are desirable in higher education for both faculty and staff roles, but it depends on the type of institution. Early-career professionals need to be strategic in their career experimentation while taking the fastest route to a job in higher education, and those further along in their careers with a breadth of experience should be encouraged to make transitions into higher education.
“It’s a balance,” said Ignelzi, coauthor of “Complex Cases in Student Affairs.” “It’s valuable to have things that you specialize in and it’s useful to have general knowledge, and a lot of the problems institutions face need a lot of different ways to think about them. It’s always getting more complex.”
Source: https://www.higheredjobs.com/Articles/articleDisplay.cfm?ID=2040&Title=The%20Case%20for%20Generalists%20Working%20in%20Higher%20Education