Tag Archives: academia

Basic Income for “Unaffiliated” Scholars

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I wonder what I would have done with my life, if there had been a basic income (of, say, $2500 to $3000 Cdn. per month) available to me after I completed my Ph.D. I wouldn’t have had to deal with (roughly in chronological order) part-time adjunct/sessional teaching, part-time arts admin and choral singing jobs, three temporary full-time academic jobs each most of the way across the continent, applying for several hundred full-time academic jobs, several periods on welfare (averaging around $550 per month, including shelter!), bankruptcy, attempts to get into IT and LIS, leaving academia for a series of part-time and temporary customer-service type jobs not at a living wage, and getting approved for a consumer debt proposal.

The job I have now as a medical courier is full-time, with some benefits, and I was very lucky to be able to upgrade my casual/on-call role to that. However, it’s still on the low end of a living wage and way below the national average annual income of around $69,000 Cdn. It’s okay, though, because I have places to keep my stuff, a place to live, a person to share my life with, a dog, an extended family that helps me with my elderly Mom, and financial help from my Mom (via my aunt and uncle) to get a used car.

However, without being an exploited academic or an exploited worker and with having a basic income to live on, I could have become what I should have been. I would have continued as an “unaffiliated” musicologist: writing scholarly books and articles, presenting papers at academic conferences, developing music-related websites and web content, and performing and composing music–without ever stopping any of those things.

(Friday, July 24, 2026, 9:15 p.m.): Oh, well, back to work: the final four hours of my 40-hour work week.

See also: https://drbdurrellbowmanphd.bandcamp.com/album/the-tower

“The Tower” (concept album)

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album cover of "The Tower" (concept album) - by Dr. B. (Durrell Bowman, Ph.D.)

Welcome to The Tower – by Dr. B. (Durrell Bowman, Ph.D.), 2024, 47:05: a Progressive, Pop-Rock, Experimental-Electronic Concept Album about One Person’s Path into and Exit from Higher Education. It’s available for streaming and/or download for $7 Canadian (approximately $5 US) on Bandcamp. You can choose to pay more, if you want to. Some of the eleven songs are new or new-ish, but often evoking certain existing styles and/or artists … especially from, say, 1969 to 1984. (I guess that’s my “Eras!” 🤪) Some of the songs are not so recent (one is as old as high school old!), but re-written with new words and re-arranged. The three weirdest pieces were composition-course projects to which I’ve now added words and vocal effects.

Continue reading →

Sports vs. Academia

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I like the PWHL, and I also like that its player salaries are in a reasonable range for what is, after all, just a game: from $35,000 to $80,000 US (averaging $55,000, or lower middle-class). On the other hand, if it’s going to sell out Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, perhaps it could try to double that, so all professional women hockey players would be at least solidly middle class and only some of them above that. If the NHL’s salaries didn’t range from $750,000 to $12.6 million US (averaging $3.5 million), I might also take it seriously. Not to mention football, baseball, basketball, etc.

It’s too bad other professions, also with highly-credentialed/experienced/talented people, can’t be bothered to guarantee an annual income of at least $35,000. Instead, organizations such as academic societies give amounts on the order of $500 a year to a handful of unaffiliated scholars. That doesn’t even cover the cost to attend a national or international scholarly meeting, let alone pay anyone anything like a month’s rent. Academic publishers also continue to expect people to write book chapters and journal articles without paying them anything. They should at least find money to pay people who don’t have any related income coming in.

Graduate School and Alternative Career Paths

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I find it amazing that academia abandons tens of thousands of people every year and that some fields have almost no contexts for other types of career paths. I wish I had pursued an alternative career path as much as twenty years ago. In addition, if I had never pursued graduate school at all, I could have started working as a Customer Service Representative for the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, an Order Support Agent for a call centre, or a Rural & Suburban Mail Carrier for Canada Post in my twenties and been approaching early retirement by now. I also wish I had continued composing music to a much greater extent after my twenties. I’m 56, have a Ph.D., and have accomplished a great deal, but I have never had any kind of continuing full-time job that pays a living wage.

Alternative-academic and non-academic career paths—and ways to collaborate both with other scholars and with those outside academia—should be discussed and enabled. Those considerations should begin during the time-frame when doctoral candidates have traditionally worked on remarkably narrow concerns in their doctoral seminars, research and teaching assistantships, exams, and dissertations. Fewer people should complete doctorates and attempt to become professors. Post-secondary education usefully establishes and consolidates one’s interests, as well as the ability for critical thinking. However, pursuing it beyond a bachelor’s or master’s degree is unnecessary. I wish I had realized that a long time ago.

Academic Work for Free

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Spending hundreds of hours every year doing academic work on book chapters, journal articles, and conference papers when I don’t even have an academic job — and am thus doing it all for free — is highly exploitative. So, after my current projects wrap up in the next couple of months, I’m not going to do these things anymore. I want to do more academic research and writing, but the system is not set up to pay anyone directly. That needs to change.

Academic Research and Writing

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Of the eighteen people contributing to the forthcoming Cambridge University Press book on progressive rock, sixteen are university-affiliated academics (so it would be reasonable for them to expect to do such things as a part of their employment), one is VP of Education at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and one is a computer technology order support specialist making the equivalent of about $11 U.S. per hour. Guess which one resents doing academic research and writing for free, given that it has nothing to do with his employment?

Performance Studies conference

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I’m interested in proposing a paper for the 2016 Performance Studies Network conference at Bath Spa University. However, would the subject matter of my forthcoming listener’s guide to the music of thirty-year Bath area resident Peter Gabriel actually count? His “diverse, interdisciplinary developments,” “global perspective,” and so on certainly do seem to fit the themes of the conference, even though all of the confirmed activities are so far restricted to contemporary art music and world music. How could I afford to go, though?

Letting Academic Things Go

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Kelly J. Baker just posted an article called “Goodbye to All That,” about abandoning her recently-contracted plan to write an academic book on the cultural history of zombies. I have very similar feelings about my work on music in The Simpsons, including my proposed academic book, related possible journal articles, and already-presented conference papers (e.g., 2006, 2013). Without a tenure-track, professorial context, I have to let those types of academic things go and possibly reimagine them as public music history projects instead. I’ve already made that transition from my dissertation on the rock band Rush to Experiencing Rush: A Listener’s Companion (2014) and am currently working on Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion (2016). So, I don’t see why I should stop now. Maybe, I’ll be able to get to the point of making a living wage at it!

“Public Musicologists” Ignore Public Musicology

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Institutionally-unaffiliated PhDs in my field are routinely swept under the carpet. Amanda Sewell’s report in the August 2015 newsletter of the American Musicological Society about an early 2015 conference on the Past, Present, and Future of Public Musicology confirms this by not bothering to mention my paper.

My contribution was called: “The Untapped Doctoral Majority of Potential Public Musicologists.” The paper begins by covering such things as:

  • the over-supply of musicology PhDs for the number of academic positions
  • what some musicology PhDs actually end up doing outside of academia

It continues by covering my:

I also then explain that I created music history instructional videos and that I adapted my dissertation on the Canadian rock band Rush for a public book called Experiencing Rush: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). I end the paper with an example from Chapter 1 of my forthcoming book in the same series: Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion.

I have done almost all of that work outside of conventional institutional contexts, so does that mean it doesn’t qualify as “public musicology”?! The Musicology Now (blog) version of the report is only slightly better, with one, highly-misleading sentence about my work: “Durrell Bowman (independent scholar) spoke of the challenges he has faced in the decade-long search for an academic position in musicology.” Both my assigned title of “independent scholar”–which I loathe, in favour of “public music historian”–and the falsely-reported subject matter of my paper–which is actually a whole bunch of things I have done in Public Musicology–may explain why the editor of the AMS newsletter decided to exclude it. Not surprisingly, the newsletter version of the report also excludes the following sentence: “Felicia Miyakawa (academic consultant) explained why she left a tenured position and chose to pursue public musicology.”

I can’t speak for Miyakawa, but “we” are not amused.

The Untapped Doctoral Majority of Potential Public Musicologists (paper)

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Read my latest conference paper.