Tag Archives: Ph.D.

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

Public Musicology – How to Get There

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http://chronicle.com/article/Making-a-Public-PhD/130716


Highlights:
Yale University has a public humanities initiative. As one of its American Studies professors puts it: “Students have to invent their own jobs.” Similarly, a Yale historian says: “Historians have to get out and reach the broader public…the ultimate audience. … If academic historians don’t get involved, we have no right to complain about what we see at public historical sites.” A professor at another institution says: “I’m alarmed that there aren’t more people with strong history backgrounds actually doing public history.”


Followup: 
In a related vein, George Mason University has the Center for History and New Media, which has a Ph.D. program in digital history, dozens of IT professionals and developers, a number of original software tools, and over one hundred web-based projects with more than 16 million users annually.


“Public history” should certainly be expanded to include “public musicology” (public music history & culture, etc.). However, musicology presently exists almost exclusively within music departments, as one of a number of music sub-disciplines that focus mainly on “specialized knowledge” about classical music performance, music theory, and so on. Musicology thus almost never participates in such humanities’ contexts as Yale’s or even in what is arguably the ultimate public forum: the internet. However, it absolutely can and should!


The American Musicological Society’s brand-new professional development guide (188 pages) spends only two pages (i.e., that aren’t document samples) on the non-academic world, yet it exclusively seems to mean by that such contexts as museums. In addition, the document does not update the sample documents from the Harvard Arts & Sciences publication that it borrowed for this purpose. Those resumes and cover letter do not have anything to do with music or music graduate degrees, and they are also all nearly twenty years old.