Countdown: At most 120 days until submission

I am going on vacation to North Carolina with my wife today after sending new chapters to my adviser and a member of my committee. The last 2 months have been very eventful for my dissertation work. There have been some changes in scheduling, hence the changed countdown number. In addition, I have finally developed a game plan for my future after completing my Ph.D. This game plan corresponds with my work in Social Entrepreneurship.

First, the developments. I have just completed the "fun" part of my dissertation research, after some innovative research on my part. As I mentioned in a previous post, it became obvious to me that Rep. Steve Solarz (D-NY, 1974-1992) was a key to my dissertation, but I had not been able to contact him through traditional methods, such as going through his secretaries at various organizations. About a month ago, after learning about events in Taiwan and the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s that sparked congressional hearings, I decided to do a Lexis-Nexis search for all news articles mentioning Solarz, Leach, Pell, Kennedy (The Gang of Four), Trong Chai, Mark Chen, and Peng Ming Min (the Taiwan Independence Activists) between 1970 and 2000. I had to process hundreds of news articles before I found some key articles about critical events: The Kaoshiung Incident in December 1979, the death of a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981, the death of an author in 1984. Finally, at the end of 1989 I found an article about Solarz's fundraising prowess in tapping into immigrant groups: Taiwanese-Americans, Indian-Americans, etc. He was apparently the first House member to ever deliberately target immigrant groups by appealing to their concerns over transnational politics: Help me win re-election and I will help address issues concerning your home country. At the end of the article I found a quote from his spokesman, Robert Hathaway, whom I spoke with in 2006 as I was trying to figure out a topic for my research. I emailed Mr. Hathaway, asking to speak with him about Solarz, and he sent me Solarz's personal email. Within 48 hours I was talking with Solarz. I learned that Solarz had completed his memoir and that I could use it for my dissertation. So, he emailed me a 300+ page memoir (which came to 180 pages in Times New Roman, 12-pt font). I spent two weeks reading it.

And what a read it was! Solarz was in Congress starting in 1975 as one of the Watergate Babies. He describes his early life – family and friends, high school, college, graduate school, politics. In the first 30 pages I essentially learned how to run for and win public office. Then he describes the New York delegation that he joined and their activities at the start of Congress. He mentions the Subcommittee Bill of Rights, which allowed him to become Chair of the Subcommittee on Africa after just 4 years in the House, and then become Chair of the Asia and Pacific Subcommittee. For the rest of the book I learned about his travels and meetings all over the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, including North and South Korea, The Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. He goes into the politics and history of every region and country, the key leaders and issues, and his role- if he had any – in each country. In short, I learned what is possible if you are a member of the House of Representatives, from probably the most-traveled representative in the last 60 years.

After that, I knew I had to obtain records of congressional hearings. The Congressional Records web site includes records only until 1990, so I had to learn where to access the records on micro fiche – a process that I knew would be very, very time-consuming. Fortunately, I learned that Northeastern University, where I taught for the Spring semester, had a micro fiche room. I went there and, after a couple days stumbling around, learned how to access Congressional hearings through Lexis-Nexis Congressional. I found every hearing I needed, saving me probably 2 weeks of searching for and scanning micro fiche by hand. Just recently, I also obtained free software that removed the security protections from the PDF files, thus letting me copy-and-paste instead of manually copying by typing. Since there are 2000+ pages of Congressional hearings from 1979 to 1989, that’s a great time-saving development.

In addition to obtaining Solarz’s material, I interviewed Coen Blaauw, the director of Public Relations at FAPA, for about 90 minutes. As a result, I am not able to start editing everything together to finish the remaining chapters.

Now for the schedule change. I thought 2 months ago that I had to finish everything by April 30. Then I learned that CUNY rules require a 30-day waiting period between completing the final draft and the defense date so that the committee can read everything. There also had to be a 2-week period between the defense and the filing date to complete the paper-work. I had thought it was the other way around: File and then defend. This reversed sequence meant that I had to finish everything by March 15 so that we could schedule the defense for April 15 and leave time for the paperwork. I knew that was unrealistic, but the problem was the timing: This is my last semester to be in “good standing” since I have been a student at CUNY for 16 semesters. However, I spoke with the administrative office and learned that I could get my degree in September if I defended during the summer. Thus, I am now aiming to defend by July 25, the day my mother-in-law returns to Bulgaria.

Finally, I have adjusted my plan for what to do after the Ph.D. I’ve calculated that in order to be able to integrate my professional life, my spiritual life, and my personal life within academia, I would have to wait about 5 years to get published just so I could get a tenure-track job, and then wait another 5 to 7 years so that I could get tenure. Once I had tenure – in about 10-12 years, I could start doing media appearances again and working with non-profits. However, between now and then I would have to be focused completely on publishing, first to get the tenure-track job and then to get tenure. And this is after already putting in 8 years to get the Ph.D. So, I have thought of it this way: I can wait 20 years overall (8 + 12) to do the things I really want to do, or I can start almost immediately to build a career for myself that involves social entrepreneurship and media appearances, while sustaining my family and teaching classes, but not shooting for a tenure-track position anywhere. Or, to put it more succinctly, up to now, for the past 3 years, my physical needs, my personal needs, and my intellectual/spiritual needs have been largely in sync. Once I finish my Ph.D., pursuing a tenure-track position anywhere will throw these things out of sync, and the only way to resolve this tension will be to give up a professional academic career for about a decade while I get established in Social Entrepreneurship and media while I help raise my family.

However, I plan to get back into academia after I get established, but on my terms instead of as a pure academic. For example, I could easily target teaching positions at small liberal arts colleges, working either in a political science department or the business department, or even leading a research center on Social Entrepreneurship and non-profits. In those capacities I could also recruit people who have real-world experience integrating their theoretical knowledge with their lives to start social businesses and non-profits. In this way I could be a force for change within academia: By my own example, I could recruit people who start out with real life experience first instead of specialized academic knowledge first, and then use that real-life experience to inform the academic research, thus making the research more relevant to our lives and more accurate as well. I would start a professional academic career about ten years after all of my colleagues who also received political science Ph.D.s and published books and articles, but I would arrive at a position of influence within the university before my colleagues because I would have the real-world experience that they lacked.

Thus, my research would be better, more relevant to practitioners, and more theoretically robust, and I would be a better teacher as a result. Hence, I would be a great candidate for tenure after a few years of publishing. I would be 49 or 50 around that time (34 + 10 years as a Social Entrepreneur and 5 years as a tenure-track professor = 49), which is exactly the time that I planned to run for my first public office. This makes much more sense as a professional sequence than trying to get a tenure-track position first. I don’t want to be an ordinary academic; I want to help academia become a citizen in the community again. However, I recognize that people who start out as academics and then become citizens in the community cannot be citizens while they are constantly publishing. Thus, I have to demonstrate that it’s better to become a member of the community first, and then transition into academia, instead of starting in academia and then entering the community. A group of professors with real-world experience and ties to the community through Social Entrepreneurship will be much more relevant to the community’s needs than professors with only theoretical knowledge who are merely on leave from an academic position for a couple years to work in the community. If I am going to be a professor at all, an activist-scholar is exactly the type of professor I want to be, instead of a scholar-activist who publishes before entering the community. It’s time to help the university enter the 21st century and become a member of the community once again!