It might be easy to mistake Thomas Ernst for a traditional academic. His CV has a long list of journal articles, and he can often be found on the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He attends lectures, works with graduate students, and spends time in its libraries. But Mr. Ernst is not on the tenured faculty at UMass, nor is he a professor anywhere else.
He is an independent scholar, who does most of his research and writing from the solitude of the second bedroom in his small apartment near the Amherst campus. In the past 20 years he has written a book, published a dozen journal articles, and contributed two chapters in encyclopedias.
“Tom is a known quantity in the field. He is an expert on adverbial constructions and how they contribute to meaning,” says Rajesh Bhatt, head of linguistics at UMass. The department has given Mr. Ernst the title of visiting scholar, which comes with an e-mail address and access to the university’s libraries and to academic presentations by UMass professors and visitors, but nothing more. “It’s remarkable that he has persisted,” says Mr. Bhatt. “It’s not an easy life.”
Independent scholars like Mr. Ernst, however, are a growing part of the academic landscape. They may have been jilted by the academic job market, or are uninterested in either being on the tenure track or in cobbling together full-time work as adjuncts. Like traditional professors, they perform research, secure grants, and publish books and papers. In some cases, their work is having an impact on their disciplines, challenging established views and advancing knowledge in the field.
But independent scholars say their contributions are frequently discounted by tenured professors, who, as gatekeepers of scholarly conversations and the distribution of intellectual ideas, tend to exclude those who lack university credentials. Some prominent professors acknowledge that such scholars do important academic work. Yet professors question whether the blogs, podcasts, Facebook posts, and tweets that independent scholars sometimes depend on as alternatives to journal publishing are more harmful than helpful to the quality of scholarship.
The work life of an independent scholar—with its freedom from the performance requirements of the tenure track—can be attractive to those with young children and those who can’t or don’t want to relocate for a faculty job. Yet theirs can be a spartan existence, lacking intellectual colleagues or recognition, a calling that most can afford to pursue only by working extra part-time jobs or relying on a partner’s income. The financial needs of independent scholars can also get in the way of academic freedom by limiting the kinds of questions they are able to ask and the projects they are willing to pursue.
“You have to fight to use a library, you often don’t get funding to go to conferences, and you don’t have easy interactions with colleagues about ideas,” says Mr. Ernst, who pays his bills by teaching off and on as an adjunct at Dartmouth College and doing contract work developing questions for the Graduate Management Admission Test. In good years, he earns as much as $50,000, in lean ones as little as $20,000.
Mr. Ernst doesn’t want to give up his life as a scholar, to which he devotes about seven hours each day. “I probably could have landed a teaching job in southwest Alabama, but I didn’t want to,” says the linguist, who had an academic post in the early 1990s but was denied tenure. “I’ve thought many times, I could get a 9-to-5 insurance job, but my reaction to that is: Yuck. I’d rather live on the edge and be uncertain in life, and do what I love.”
Support Groups
The National Coalition of Independent Scholars has been around since 1989 to try to give those people operating outside the halls of academe some kind of home. About half of its 200 members are historians.
Other groups for independent scholars have sprouted up in the past year, attracting a more diverse array of researchers, including some in the hard sciences. Patricia Appelbaum, who earned a Ph.D. in religious studies from Boston University in 2001, started Hidden Scholars last summer in the Amherst area. “I want this to be a support group and a resource for people,” says Ms. Appelbaum, who belongs as well to a national group of independent researchers called the Ronin Institute, which also started last summer.
The Chronicle talked with Ph.D.'s who work as independent scholars in anthropology, Asian studies, biology, education, English, evolution, history, political science, religion, and theater. Some set up shop on their own after they failed to earn tenure or grew disillusioned with the culture of large research universities, which they found too limiting, in terms of the kinds of projects they could pursue, or too competitive. Others sidestepped academe from the very beginning, some for jobs outside higher education, others because they didn’t want to be tied down to a full-time position.
Alice E. Ginsberg worked for eight years as a program officer at the Pennsylvania Humanities Council while pursuing a Ph.D. in education from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her doctorate in 1999, but by that time had two preschool-age children to care for. Handling a full-time academic job, too, wasn’t feasible, she says.
So she quit her post at the humanities council and began working as a consultant on projects that involved research and writing on women’s studies and community-education programs, the topics she had specialized in at the council. In 2004 she published her first book, Gender in Urban Education: Strategies for Student Achievement (Heinemann), and has since turned out four more. All of them were published by academic presses and shopped at academic conferences, which she attends if they are held on the East Coast and have registration fees that she considers affordable..
Now she is assembling an edited volume on educational philanthropy, involving 23 contributors, including professors and officers of philanthropic organizations. “Part of how you gauge your progress when you’re working independently,” Ms. Ginsberg says, “is whether you can call somebody whose 10 books you’ve read and say, ‘Can you write a chapter for the book I’m doing on educational philanthropy?,’ and they say, ‘Yes.’”
Marybeth Gasman, a well-known professor of education at Penn, says Ms. Ginsberg commands respect because of the quality of her work. “A lot of people wouldn’t have the motivation she does if they didn’t have earning tenure hanging over their head,” says Ms. Gasman, who worked with Ms. Ginsberg on one of her books, about gender and educational philanthropy. “But she’s incredibly passionate about what she does.”
Ms. Ginsberg acknowledges that she never would have been able to support herself or a family on the less than $5,000 a year she figures she’s earned from her books. She has done some consulting work for companies and foundations that pays $150 an hour, but not steadily.
The financial aspect of working as an independent scholar has caused some tension between her and her husband, who is an information-security architect. The family’s only car is 15 years old, and they are saving to repair a hole in the floor of their first-floor bathroom, from a leaky toilet.
“We are not building a hot tub on our deck,” says Ms. Ginsberg, who is looking for a tenure-track job in academe now that her children are older. “I always thought I would end up in an academic job, but with two children under 5 it didn’t seem possible at a particular point.”
She has accomplished almost everything she set out to do as an independent scholar. “Every topic I’ve wanted to really make a statement on, I’ve done that, and I’m thinking it might be interesting to try something else,” she says. “It would be interesting to go to an office, be surrounded by other academics, and teach more than one class.”
For Kristina Killgrove, being an independent scholar was only ever a step on the way to getting an academic job, which had always been her goal. After earning a Ph.D. in anthropology in 2010, she knew she had to keep churning out scholarship to be competitive on the job market. Over three years’ time, she applied for 150 jobs.
“I just tried to keep writing and getting out more publications rather than take some other job where I wasn’t publishing much,” says Ms. Killgrove, who wrote four papers based on her dissertation research during the two years she worked as an independent scholar. “It shows you know what’s going on in your field.”
She enjoyed life as an independent scholar. “It’s pretty nice to work full time on my research, and you don’t really get that in the academy,” she says.
But in the end, taking an academic position seemed like a better choice. She began a job last fall as an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of West Florida.
“Part of what I liked about being an independent scholar was the ability to work on anything I wanted at my own pace,” says Ms. Killgrove. “But while that freedom was liberating, I also wanted a paycheck.”
The decision of a Ph.D. to work as an independent scholar is often viewed with skepticism by family members and friends, who see it as consuming lots of time for little payoff. “I invested so much time and energy to get the degree, my family doesn’t understand why I’m not driving around in a BMW yet,” says Daniel Bullen, who earned a Ph.D. in English from New York University in 2003 and has worked as an independent scholar ever since.
He has published two books in the past couple of years, which he advertises on separate Facebook pages. He supplements his income by scoring exams for the Collegiate Learning Assessment.
“I’m working as little as possible, making just as much money as I need, and putting all my time into the writing,” says Mr. Bullen, who chose not to pursue a tenure-track job because he wanted to focus full time on his books. “Obviously I’m making sacrifices to survive as a freelancer, but I have time to write, and the work is getting done. It’s just slow.”
For Jay Ulfelder, who is his family’s chief breadwinner, it hasn’t always been clear that his work as an independent scholar will pay the bills. He’s been on his own for about two years, after earning a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 1997 and then serving as research director of the Political Instability Task Force, a government-supported program that uses statistical models to forecast political events worldwide.
He quit that job in 2010 so he could explore questions beyond what his work at the task force involved.. Since then Mr. Ulfelder has spent about half of his time on contract work for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is considering a system to warn the public of threats of mass atrocities. He spends the rest of his time on his own research and writing to help explain and forecast political crises and change in countries worldwide.
To distribute his work and ideas, Mr. Ulfelder has bypassed academic journals and gone straight to Twitter and his blog, dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com. “Why would I do something that didn’t appear for two to three years if I can just post it on the blog and immediately get into a conversation with others who are interested?” he asks.
Some of his ideas have attracted the attention of editors at Foreign Policy magazine, who have asked him to contribute pieces about prospects for political liberalization in North Korea, the threat of authoritarianism emerging in South Africa, and the challenges of statistical forecasting in international affairs. Those articles, in turn, attracted the manager of a private investment fund, who hired Mr. Ulfelder to do some work forecasting political risks.
While he enjoys the research, he acknowledges that he doesn’t always have the freedom to define his own agenda, because he must respond to market demand for his ideas. It is important for an independent scholar to avoid “turning into a crank or a contrarian,” he says, which can turn off potential employers.
“I might have opinions, and I won’t say them,” says Mr. Ulfelder, “because they may be in an area where I don’t feel strongly enough that there’s some great thing that’s going to come out of it—and it may have professional consequences.”
Robert M. Price is one independent scholar who isn’t worried about offending anyone. He holds two doctorates, one in theology and one in New Testament studies, both from Drew University. Last year he used his podcast, the Bible Geek Show, to take shots at a book by Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The book, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (HarperCollins, 2012), includes a critique of arguments by independent scholars like Mr. Price who say that Jesus is a myth.
Mr. Price says Mr. Ehrman discounts scholars outside academe as a way of delegitimizing their views. “The whole point of his book is to question the deniers and say that we shouldn’t treat them seriously,” says Mr. Price, who has written widely on religion but has never had a formal academic post.
Mr. Ehrman says he respects Mr. Price but believes that the way he and other independent scholars distribute their views on the Internet harms academic scholarship.
“Instead of disseminating knowledge that has gone through the grind of peer review, this is people setting up their views and being given equal credibility because people don’t know any better,” Mr. Ehrman says. “It does a huge disservice to scholarship because there are systems in place that help assure that knowledge is true knowledge and not just ignorant opinion.”
‘Career Suicide’
Some independent scholars, however, argue that it’s time for academe to stop being the gatekeeper for intellectual ideas. The Ronin Institute, which started last year with 25 members, in fields as diverse as biophysics, philosophy, population genetics, and chemistry, is based in part on that idea.
“The Ronin Institute is creating a new model for scholarly research that recognizes that the world outside of traditional academia is filled with smart, educated, passionate people who have a lot to offer to the world of scholarship,” its Web site says. “There are tens of thousands of people in the United States alone who have advanced degrees yet do not have jobs that are making use of their knowledge and passion. We are creating structures that will leverage this vast, underutilized resource.”
Jon F. Wilkins started Ronin primarily as a home base for himself. But after he wrote about it on his blog, Lost in Transcription, he started receiving e-mail messages from other independent scholars who wanted to join.
For Mr. Wilkins, who earned a Ph.D. in theoretical evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 2002, a traditional academic career always seemed “too narrow and prescriptive.” He is deeply interested in things besides evolutionary biology, including poetry (he has published one book and has another planned) and Web comics (he writes one called Darwin Eats Cake). He knew it would be difficult to pursue those interests plus earn tenure.
“One of the problems of academic culture,” he says, “is that if you do anything but get up in the morning and do your work all day, then you’re not a real scholar.”
Mr. Wilkins passed up a tenure-track job offer at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005 and became a member of the resident faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent scientific-research center. Last year, when his wife got a contract to write a novel for middle-school readers, the family decided to move to New Jersey to be closer to her publisher. And Mr. Wilkins decided to try life as an independent scholar.
He soon realized that going solo would be difficult. The first thing other scholars ask at academic conferences, he says, is where you work. That’s why he established the Ronin Institute.
Ronin gives scholars an affiliation and an e-mail address. Mr. Wilkins hopes that the institute will eventually be able to provide grant money to help members travel to conferences and do research.
He is working with some collaborators on a $200,000 research project financed by the John Templeton Foundation that focuses on the way that genes interact and how evolution has shaped the genetics of complex diseases. For another project he is developing, which does not yet have financial backing, Mr. Wilkins is trying to come up with new tools for understanding the evolution of HIV within the body.
A ronin is a masterless samurai, explains Mr. Wilkins. “Traditionally, if a samurai lost his master, he was supposed to commit suicide. The ronin were those samurai who decided not to kill themselves and became free agents, often working as mercenaries or bodyguards.”
Similarly, says Mr. Wilkins, the conventional wisdom in academe is that if you’re not at a university, you’re no longer a scholar. “Effectively, you are expected to commit career suicide,” he says. “What we are doing is rejecting that conventional wisdom.”
