With full-time, tenure-track jobs increasingly scarce, more Ph.D.’s are going into #altac (alternative academic) positions. As a result, altac professionals are becoming essential personnel upon whom universities and faculty rely; however, it is not always clear what the role of Ph.D.-credentialed #altac staff is (or should be) within the university and what value they bring to the research and teaching missions of the university. This talk will examine the role of #altac staff and suggest strategies for how universities can better understand the contributions of this cohort and support them.

About Dr. Brenda Bethman

Dr. Brenda Bethman has been working in higher education since 1993, when she began studying for a master’s degree in German literature at Temple University. Originally she went to graduate school with the intention of becoming a faculty member and headed off to UMass Amherst for a Ph.D. in Modern German Studies. Along the way, she started working as a conference and grant coordinator for the DEFA Film Library and discovered that while she liked teaching and researching, she was clearly born to work in administration. Dr. Bethman has been the Director of the UMKC Women’s Center since January 2007. In addition, she serves as Acting Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and teaches for the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Honors Program.

Dr. Bethman is the co-founder of Alt/Academix, a consulting firm that provides workshops and individual consultations to help graduate students and PhDs make themselves marketable for academic administrative positions.  She has presented and published on #altac careers, social media, assessment, women’s leadership, women’s literature, Elfriede Jelinek, Marlene Streeruwitz, Ingeborg Bachmann, and feminism in a variety of venues. She is the author of “Obscene Fantasies”: Generic Perversions in Elfriede Jelinek, published in Peter Lang’s Austrian Culture Series. She is also the co-founder and co-editor of the Student Affairs Women Talk Tech blog, and one of the founding members of the #femlead Twitter chat. She holds a B.A. in German Literature from Dickinson College, an M.A. in German Literature from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in Modern German Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from UMass Amherst.