My So-Called Life…as an Academic Administrator

Remember how Clair Danes walked the halls of high school longing to be with Jared Leto while trying to survive her so-called life, stuck in a world that she can’t escape? That’s how I feel – longing to be a scholar, to spend my time to spend reading, writing, pontificating important questions and theorizing world-changing solutions while trying to survive my life as an administrator.

Being a faculty member and an academic administrator is a very weird purgatory space,

particularly in business. I spent over 10 years after high school earning degrees related to marketing. I majored in marketing as an undergraduate, wrote a thesis on marketing in my MBA, and a dissertation on markets and marketing to complete my PhD. Yet, yesterday, I found myself in a room of marketing professionals who do “real” marketing work and no one seemed to care that I have spent my whole adult life studying, learning about, writing about, and teaching about markets and marketing. It was astonishing.

I’m not one to flash my degrees or expertise – I don’t ask people to call me Dr., or try to provide free lectures when my subject matter comes up in conversations, or correct people when their views don’t align with mine (well not often). But it was very clear that the marketing that I know and love was vastly different then what they believed they were there to do. I’ve been wrestling with this tension for a while, but it wasn’t until yesterday when I really felt like a marketing outcast. Then I realized, maybe that is why marketing has such a bad rep. It’s why we continue to try to sell shit to people they don’t need, because we are literally training people to do that…still.

This unfortunate realization makes me want to get back to my research to better understand how we can shift our way of thinking about markets and marketing and be in the classroom more so I can teach what I learn. Right now, however, higher education is on fire. I need to help stabilize the infrastructure before I can go back to do the work I really came to academia to do. I need to pull people together in uncomfortable ways to solve problems people don’t fully understand with solutions for which we cannot predict the outcomes. I need to keep being an academic administrator. Who knows, maybe this will actually help me be a better scholar one day.

Update: I came back from yoga and my teacher said that I need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable (which begs the question if I become comfortable with being uncomfortable how will I know that I'm uncomfortable?). So I do think this is a growth opportunity for me, I'm grateful to take what I've learned in the field I study to actually build a brand and leverage marketing to create value in real and meaningful ways. I guess it remains to be seen...can those who teach, actually do?

*This was written by me in its entirety. The words, opinions, ideas, and mistakes (grammatical or otherwise) are my own. Take them or leave them.