Philip Holden

PHILIP HOLDEN describes himself as a "recovering academic." Formerly a Professor of English at the National University of Singapore, he has since left the academy to pursue a second career in counselling psychology. He presently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

In this conversation, we discussed:

Philip's life story and his reasons for leaving the academy
the evolution of the post-colonial university in Singapore
the state of Singaporean literature

This conversation was conducted in 2019 and has been lightly edited for clarity.

JY 00:00

In 2018, Philip Holden left the National University of Singapore after 24 years as Professor of English. In this episode of Lecture Theatre, we talked to him about his career and his assessment of the state of higher education in the country. Hi, Philip. Thank you so much for being with us on lecture theatre today. How are you doing?

Philip 00:30

Yeah, doing very well. I'm happy to be with you.

JY 00:34

So thank you for joining us . Tell us more about your life story. How did you become an academic and end up in Singapore?

Philip 00:41

Yeah, well, it's actually interesting. It's a long story. And I think it's a series of accidents, really. So I wasn't somebody who always wanted to be an academic. I liked studying. And I liked it from really early on. So my parents are both teachers, which may have something to do with it. I kind of changed quite a lot. My A levels were Science A levels. And I had a contrasting subject, which was going to be French, which was a second language, and then Literature fit the timetable, and I ended up doing that for university.

When I finished university—so that was in London, in the early 1980s—I guess I figured, what should I do now? I didn't really want to do academic work. So I spent a bit of time in children's theatre, actually, in London. But there was a recession. And there was a chance to go abroad on a scholarship to do a Masters. So I went to the US to Florida to do my Masters there for two years. And then from then I went on to teach in China for a bit in the 1980s. And I came back to the UK and I still wasn't sure. I worked with Vietnamese refugees; for a time I was a social worker. And then I'd heard about UBC [University of British Columbia] and I heard about Canada. And I heard about possibilities there. So I applied, more on a kind of a whim than anything, and I got a scholarship. So I went to UBC do my PhD. And really, it was only a couple of years into my PhD, that I guess I got really serious about it. If I was going to carry on, I might as well make this a profession. And so I spent the last two years of my PhD being a bit more serious. I went to Taiwan for a year to learn Mandarin, as well. But then after that, I came back and got very serious about it. I had two or three Singapore friends—quite close friends who had been studying with me at UBC in Vancouver. And I wanted to go back to Asia. I was thinking actually of Taiwan and China. But a Singapore job came up. And Singapore was more plugged into the English speaking network. And so maybe as a kind of career move, it was more strategic. And also I had been to Singapore and had Singapore friends; one of my roommates was a Singaporean. I actually could have gone to Taiwan, I had an job offer from Tunghai University in Taiwan. But I ended up coming to the NIE [National Institute of Education], as it was then, in 1994.

JY 03:19

Tell us more about that. What do you do it at NIE and how did it work out?

03:25

Yeah. Well, NIE was a funny place at the time. And still is actually, in terms of the way it fits into Singapore's higher educational network. So what had happened to NTU was NTU had transitioned in the late 1980s, if I'm not wrong, from being NTI—Nanyang Technological Institute—to Nanyang Technological University. And there was a big sort of panel that was set up in the late 80s, early 90s, to guide it. And one of the thoughts was that NTU would become a fully comprehensive university.

But the initial try at it actually involved the Institute of Education being folded into NTU, and so it became NIE. And so what I joined was the division of literature and drama. So it wasn't an English department. That was an interesting sort of ideological move—it studied all literature rather than just literature in English. We did have a BA program, but then we also had quite a lot of teachers on the PGDE [Post-Graduate Diploma of Education] program. And also at that time, there was another diploma program, which was designed for teachers who were upgrading, who weren't graduates. So for those three courses, I was basically hired to teach postcolonial literature. I was a bit of a strange fit. And after two or three years, the decision was made to move NIE more towards simply teacher training. And so what happened was people like myself who were really subject specialists—we were sort of feeling a little bit left out. So I did a lot of strange things—I would go to teaching practicum, for instance, to supervise students, which is really interesting. But I would do things like going to supervise Chinese practicum. Yeah, or supervising someone teaching music, which is even worse.

It was an interesting place. It was the second university at that time. And it was the only other English department apart from the English department at NUS in Singapore at that time, so I think there was a conscious decision by people who came to that department, from NUS, to try and make it something a bit different.

06:17

And so that's kind of the origins of the humanities at NTU.

06:22

Yeah, well actually it was rather strange. What actually happened in the end was that they decided no, NTU would not be fully comprehensive. NIE still existed; it had its own departments, including a department of English Language and Literature. But then NTU decided to have another stab at becoming a fully comprehensive university. And that was about 2000. I'm not sure exactly when. And so they set up their School of Humanities and Social Sciences, which was different. So yes, some people from NIE then did go across to NTU. I actually moved across to NUS at that time to the University Scholars Programme. But this was the kind of second stab, if you like, at trying to set up a comprehensive university.

07:11

So tell us more about the University Scholars Programme. You were involved in the founding of the program in 2001. And that has evolved. How do you feel about it right now?

07:23

It was an interesting program and I think it was part of a series of different changes in the university. So this happened as the Scholars Programme was being set up. Shih Choon Fong—he was actually not at that time yet president of the university—but he had been recalled from Brown University, where he was quite senior. And what he was doing was trying to change the university in many ways and make it in some ways more like a US university. A Scholars Programme was part of one of a number of initiatives that happened at the time that were part of that. So Scholars Programme actually came from two different programs that were started. One was the thing called the core curriculum. And the idea behind that was something that never quite evolved fully at NUS. The idea was that everybody at NUS would take a number of different courses across the curriculum. Right, so you're moving away from a British-based model where you're going to the degree and from day one, you just do the degree, to a US model, which is [the University of Chicago] or other schools of that kind, where you have a big general humanities and social science foundation, no matter what you do. So the core curriculum was going to be that, but it never quite got scaled up. It was a pilot project, and it merged with something else that was called the talent development program, which was really to push students, undergraduate students in their last couple of years doing research. And so it became the Scholars Programme with students from different faculties, something like what would be called an Honors College at most state universities in the top state universities in the US. And I guess the idea behind the Scholars Program was: can we offer in Singapore, the kind of experience that you would have at an Ivy League, or at a top university in the US— doesn't have to be Ivy League—could be a top state university, or Oxford or Cambridge or something like that? So it's not to say don't go abroad—in some ways, it's good to go to open the mind. But we could offer something rather like that— very intense, small group teaching, very interdisciplinary, here in Singapore. That was the idea, the vision of the founding dean of the program, George Landow.

JY 07:52

And do you think it succeeded?

Philip 10:00

I think it succeeded to a degree. I think one of the difficulties that happens in Singapore and elsewhere is that things become flavor of the month. And then after maybe a few years, they attract less attention from the university. So I think this Scholars Programme pioneered many kinds of things—very innovative kinds of work with students. We actually did one of the earliest service learning style courses, where students would be attached to civil society organizations, not simply to study them in political science terms, but to be part of them to see what was going on. And then to start understanding how they actually function, but also to give back to the organization in some kind of work. So I think it worked quite well in those terms.

I think one of the difficulties that USP faces now—and this is faced by many programmes at NUS—is differentiation. What's happened is there's been a move to [University Town]. There are a few colleges at U-Town now, like Tembusu College, which are, you could say, USP-lite. And then also of course, there's Yale-NUS, which is a different model— a liberal arts model—but it has some similarities as well. That's become the really high-profile programme there. So Scholars Program survived; it has done quite well.

For me, thinking things through—and it's easy to say with hindsight—one of the things that I'm less taken with is this idea of residential living. And this was something that was very, very much pushed. Many of us sort of went on board with this maybe about 10 or 15 years ago, and this led to the founding of U-Town. And then USP moved from being non-residential to being a residential programme. And I can see why it's an attempt to model on an Ivy League model, maybe Oxford and Cambridge—the idea of a kind of total education environment. It sounds great, but there're a couple of problems. One, it is socially quite exclusionary, because you can do various things, you can provide funding, you can fund a bursary. But what happens if someone is part of a single parent family? They're an older child, they have responsibilities looking after their kids, one of the siblings, it's not going to work, right? And I don't have a definitive statistics on this. But I do think the demographics of the Scholars Programme changed.

And the second thing, I think is something that again, we hadn't thought about too much. But in some ways, if you're in a residential college, and you're in there 24 hours, you never get downtime. And it can end up being a very supportive, wonderful learning environment. It can also for some students become a very stressful environment as well. So the programme is still a really interesting program, it has got some great teachers, there're some really good things going on in it. But there are maybe a couple of things that not just apply to the Scholars Programme, but maybe to other programmes in Singapore. If we're trying to think of a unique model of higher education we might develop in Singapore, then maybe just simply taking from elsewhere and not really adapting isn't the way to go. That said, I do think the Scholars Programme actually did very successfully adapt. And the writing and critical thinking programme actually became a very uniquely Singaporean way of thinking about the problem of teaching, writing and critical thinking.

JY 11:05

So in your time in NTU and NUS—do you have a high point?

Philip 14:25

I think in terms of moments—it's very difficult. But I think maybe in terms of things, the high point were the students. And I think that's something that occasionally you start to forget, in academia, because of way you're really benchmarked. Ultimately, although teaching is important, it is a bonus. Right? And as you go further and further up in your academic career, you're also given more administrative tasks and so you start doing things at a higher level in the university. But I think for me, really, the high point is that engagement with undergraduate students. So people who are at a certain time in their lives when they're becoming citizens, they're becoming having a sense of who they are in the worlds. And you shouldn't dictate to students how they become. And you can't. But I think being part of that exchange, being part of that possibility of exploration, and then just looking at what some of my students have become—not really because of me—but maybe because I had a small part in that, is something that makes me very, very proud. So the high point for me is definitely students.

JY 15:39

And how about the low point?

Philip 15:41

Yeah, so the low point would be a similar kind of answer. And for me, I think the low point would be doing administration. And I served for two different terms as a Vice Dean or equivalent, in the University Scholars Programme, which is a good programme, in many ways a very flexible and small programme. I think the difficulty is that there's a lot of changes in higher education at the moment. And they're moving towards the marketization of higher education. I don't think it's just in Singapore, this is happening worldwide. But the problem is that if you're in the position, you often have to deliver policies that you don't necessarily agree with. And to some degree that's fair enough. I think you've got to be a team player. Everybody can't be going in different directions. But at the same time, I think for me, eventually, I felt a real sense of disquiet about some of the changes that were happening. And again, I'd have to emphasize, it's not simply in NUS that the changes were happening, or even Singapore. I think these are global changes in the way higher education works. And in a way, if you're in middle management, you end up delivering the bad news. Yeah, you just try to be pleasant, and deal with it.

JY 17:02

So let's talk a bit about those changes. How would you characterize those changes? What is driving them? And what are the effects?

Philip

I think one example would be university rankings. When I was an undergraduate, and really into the 90s, I think they didn't exist. And what's now happened is, there's a huge number of university rankings. Some are more influential than others. What happens then is that there's a competition of measurement between universities. And it's measured using proxies. Even the people who are devising the rankings agree are pretty useless. But it drives certain kinds of behaviors, which are maybe not the kind of behaviors that you necessarily want to instill in higher education. Now ranking is an example of that, you can look at it in many other ways. Maybe what's happening increasingly now is that we're trying to measure research in the university. So we look at citation count, we look at how cited somebody is, how much are they mentioned by other people. It seems reasonable. But of course, what then happens is people start gaming citation accounts, right? I am not saying people do illegal things. I think most people become more conscious of the idea of a citation count as a measure of success, rather than actually writing a really good paper that influences or changes your field. And so I think that research becomes more cautious. People become more selfish; they are encouraged to compete against each other in terms of reward. And so it's infiltration of measurement into the university. And again, it's global. There are particular circumstances in Singapore. But I don't think Singapore is unique.

What are these particular circumstances?

Philip 19:20

It's due to Singapore's own unique history, and in a way, the success of the state from the 1960s onwards. It's a standard analysis: a successful party being returned every five years in elections with a high percentage of the vote and an absence of independent non-governmental actors. A huge contrast would be the Philippines where the state is absolutely dysfunctional. But then you get a huge number of very, very active, non-governmental organizations. Now start thinking in the university. So the [University of Singapore] in the 1960s had two independent staff organizations, and a very strong independent Student Union. So what can happen is that this in the university, these different organizations can be part of this open discussion about larger issues about higher education. And there is nobody outside the university who is actually informed enough to have a debate about the university. But when I was in NUS, I would have to defend the university publicly, which is fine. But then what I think it means is we don't have that space of critical debate, informed critical debate of what is the university’s place in society, because all the experts are actually inside the university. And they're mostly part of the university administration. There are no spaces of autonomy within the university itself.

JY 20:27

So what do you think is the solution to marketization globally? Or in Singapore?

Philip 21:45

I think that's a good question. I think one of the things to do—and actually, this isn't revolutionary for me to say, because the education minister said this—is that we don't have to be so worried about ranking. I think we need to think very clearly about rewards that are given to staff. For instance, I think a lot of management in the university, not just in Singapore, but elsewhere, is based upon 1990s business psychology, which has been actually largely discredited. So actually, if you pay people bonuses and money, and you rank people against each other, it actually doesn't make people happier. So these kinds of changes, I think, could be made. And I think there are some interesting initiatives. For instance, at NUS, Provost Tan Eng Chye, who is now President, introduced a grade-free first year. So I think there are some attempts to swim against the tide. But I think it's very difficult to do that. Because there's the tide of marketization globally, this push for universities to be ranked against each other. Honestly, if you talk privately to people in administration at NUS, they don't want the pressure of these rankings. And yet, at the same time, you've got to perform. You've got to justify yourself to a larger public, the larger public is not very well informed. What does the public see? Oh, NUS went up three places, and NTU went down three places. So I think we've got to find a way of dialing back all the systems of measurement. But how you do it is actually a very, very difficult question. And this one, I didn't solve in my time in academia as well.

JY 23:45

So let's talk a bit more about your most recent article published last year in Modern Asian Studies about the post-colonial university. I think it was titled, "Spaces of Autonomy, Spaces of Hope," which is a phrase that you mentioned earlier. Tell us that story, and how you think that history is relevant today.

Philip 24:09

It's part of a general project I've had in my time in Singapore. I think it's really useful to bring other intellectual histories to bear on Singapore; it will be very foolish not to. But at the same time, Singapore itself does have an intellectual history. And it's good to honor those intellectuals and not to forget about them, I think. And we tend to forget about them all the time. So I see time and time again, I'm asked to review stuff and it's a Singaporean student abroad, in a top university who's applying a wonderful theoretical model, but isn't thinking about other Singaporeans who have already thought about this at some point.

So the article itself was looking at the University of Singapore, which has just moved from being a division of the University of Malaya in 1962. And the first vice chancellor of the University with the a man called Baratham Ramaswamy Sreenivasan. And he got into a clash with then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew which led in 1963 to his resignation as Vice Chancellor. And he's the only Vice Chancellor in the Anglophone system in Singapore who resigned for political reasons. So what was the dispute? The dispute was about the role of the university. And Lee Kuan Yew wasn't completely wrong in any way. I mean, in some ways you could sympathize with him. He thought: it's early the 1960s; in 1959, we've come to power with a massive majority. Isn't it legitimate that the university should serve national interests and be subordinate to a government that has widespread popular support? So that was his argument. And I think there was also an argument that the university needed to be decolonized. Many of the professors were still expatriates; they didn't necessarily have Singapore's interests at heart.

Now, there's a second story, because you get the rise of the Barisan. And you're getting a lot of discussion about who is representative of Singapore, politically? But that stance itself has some merit, I think. So Sreenivasan was different. He said, yes, there was a need to be responsible for the place you're in, but what's very important was the university needed some space of autonomy, it needed to be insulated from the everyday demands of society. For instance, with budgets, you shouldn't keep the university on a yearly budget stream. Give the university the money, let the university decide what's best to do with it, make it a space of free inquiry, with people coming from all over the world. So I was interested in this clash of ideas. And I was actually lucky to find quite a lot of material for this, including the original correspondence between LKY and Sreenivasan. But I was also interested in the aftermath of that, which was after the resignation, how, for many years, the Student Union, the two different staff associations, and politicians, and the university administration would have various kinds of discussions and events and demonstrations, thinking about what the role of the university was.

And even someone like Tommy Koh, who was a student, and then became a junior professor, had some very interesting ideas about how you could be responsible to the nation. How you could decolonize. And yet, how you could also preserve the autonomy that is necessary for university to function. And I just thought, well, that's the kind of debate that we don't have so much today. And it was a debate carried out by pretty heavyweight people who really had thought about this in in rather interesting kinds of ways. So part of the function of the article was simply, well, let's dig into historical archives. Let's look at correspondence. Let's look at various kinds of archival sources. And let's get a sense of the terms of debate. And so I get this sense, could the university be another space of thinking about the nation? That's different from the space of politics? And could it contribute to thinking about society in a different kind of kind of way? And it was an interesting time. And it's interesting to remember that time.

JY 29:14

Do you think you're seeing some of that comeback today? There has been a rise in student activism, student groups on campus. I'm struck by the term decolonization, because next week, there's a panel on decolonizing the academy at Yale-NUS. The vernacular is very much coming back

Philip 29:41

Yeah, I don't know. I think it's interesting. At Yale-NUS, there has been some political organizing, especially on LGBT issues. I think what happened within NUS is that in the student union itself, the constitution was changed in the 70s. And so it can no longer be as activist as it used to be. And I think also some of marketization pushes people into various forms of social entrepreneurship rather than activism. And the second thing is, I think that what is lacking is a debate about the university in larger society. It's a pity that we don't have some kind of space to talk about this in a larger kind of way, with independent bodies, such as the staff union, to facilitate this. So I think individual student activism is great. But you also need institutions to embody that kind of space.

JY 31:06

So last year, you made a move that is unusual for an academic. You left the academy and moved to Vancouver. So tell us more about that and why you decided to leave? And why now?

Philip 31:23

There's various reasons. But if I can talk about the pull rather than the push, I really enjoyed being an academic, I really enjoyed the life of the mind, and I really enjoyed my students. But what I found is as you get older, you, there're a couple of things. One is you're probably doing more administrative work. And fair enough, because you're now a full professor, you're being paid a full professor salary. But that wasn't something I really wanted to do so much. I valued the teaching more. And the second thing for me was to try and think a bit more about myself in the world, and how maybe, if you're in a position of being a quite well regarded academic, you end up talking a lot a lot, not listening very much. Because you're asked to talk and you have to embody a certain kind of behavior. At the same time, I think many of us had a sort of feeling of disquiet, with the rise of Trump and things like that. The sense that maybe some of this privileging of some kind of notion of the liberal arts, and teaching students who were quite elite, wasn't the only way to work in society. And so I became quite curious about listening, rather than speaking. Secondly, I wondered about what motivates people to behave in a certain kind of way. And why is rational argument often not very effective in discussions, and should it be or should it not be? So those two things. And the third thing was as I turned back [and reflected on my life], I was an accidental academic. Academia was a kind of 80% fit for me. I did pretty well, I enjoyed it. But there was always a 20% that I didn't quite like. And I was looking over my shoulder thinking, I want to do other stuff as well. Part of it was creative writing. Part of it was other things. So this all came together. For me, my previous profession had been a social worker; I thought, best to make this move in your mid 50s. You know, one of my friends actually said last year when he gave a talk, it's good to get out on the top of your game. And that's what I wanted to do. Get out at the top of your game, and then move on and do something. So I'm going to be in Vancouver, the next few years at least. And hopefully, if everything goes well, I will enter a programme in counseling psychology, and I'll become a qualified counselor in the next two or three years.

JY 34:15

That's awesome! Good luck. Well, let's talk a bit about your latest short story collection, Hook and Eye, published in 2018. You edited it. What was it about, why do you do it, and what went on behind the scenes?

Philip 34:39

Okay, so Hook and Eye is actually a collection. I wrote the introduction and selected the stories. Every two or three years, the Ministry of Education will put up a kind of a tender, if you like, for the next version of a short story collection that is going to be offered for O-level in Singapore schools. So we put up this proposal, and I was working with Ethos Books. And there's a good team at Ethos, Kah Gay and others, which really helped me on this. We put a proposal together. And then what happens is you select stories, you have a long dialogue with the team from the ministry, and you're trying to think of a series of stories that work together. And it was actually rather strange, because initially, we had a very different idea about the stories and we wanted to do something that would be historical, and then would move forward in time. But we find there are so many pressures on the stories. This one has to fit so and so; this one has to be in the 60s; let's try and get a gender balance in terms of the writers; let's try and get certain experiences. And it just got too messy. So we ended up going for stories that seem to be talking about society and the way people are in society. Let's just get some of the best stories and commission a couple from writers who are not that well-known, but I think are really good. And then let's start thinking how they fit together. So Hook and Eye eventually became the title: it wasn't me, it was actually Ethos that came up with the title. But the idea behind it was stories from the margins. And what these stories are about are figures who might be seen as marginal—new immigrants to Singapore; construction workers; a rich, young girl who goes to a neighborhood school. So it's not just people who are the wretched of the earth. It's people who have various forms of disability, people who are in a hawker center trying to struggle to make it to survive. And so we thought, well, these are all people who have some kind of marginal relationship to Singapore society, essentially. And then let's think of this metaphor of Hook and Eye. And for that, we thought, well, this is like the hook and eye on a piece of clothing. The way that literary texts work, and especially short stories work, is that to close that hook and eye, you've got to put something yourself inside. So the idea was not simply students empathizing, it's students actually thinking about their own conditions of marginality, and how they might actually be reflected or understood in the text. So we've got a great collection of short stories, which I'm really quite proud of. And that came together very, very well. It is just amazing how much the literary scene in Singapore in the last, say, 15 years has really exploded. So there's a lot of really talented young writers out there. And we dug them up.

JY 38:12

So where do you see that going? You studied postcolonial literature . How do you think the Singapore literacy is going to evolve?

Philip 38:23

That's an interesting question. I don't know. There're certain kinds of tensions at the moment. So I think if we were trying to promote Singapore literature in the mid 1990s, at NIE, we'd have been absolutely delighted with what we've got now. You've got formal support, you've got MFA programs. You've got creative writing programs at NTU. A few at NUS. You've got the Singapore Literature Festival, you've got NAC [National Arts Council] grants, you've got received money, you've got all these NGOs, like SingLit Station. And also a lot more translation work going on, which I think is really interesting. Recognition, especially of Chinese and Malay, and to some degree, Tamil too. So that's great, right? And I see that increasing. I think that the danger that comes with this, is a kind of commercialization of the scene.

And maybe for me, as someone who's a scholar, looking at the scene, I wonder that sometimes people in the scene are not more interested in being a writer than being a reader. So it's almost like the idea and the celebrity of being a writer has become a wonderful thing and everyone wants to be a writer. But writers need readers too. And you need a kind of a reading culture and a culture of people who are going to be reading, and reading in critical and interesting ways. And I think that could be developed more. I think the JB Writers Festival is called JB Writers and Readers Festival. And I think it would be very good for us to think in those terms. To think more about the process of reading, and then extending that process not just to literary texts, but to other kinds of stories we see told to us. And rather than just to focus on the genius of a writer, if you like, which is easy to do.

JY 40:34

So one last question. What advice do you have for young academics starting out in Singapore?

Philip 40:41

I think for me, one of the most important things is to have a really strong sense of your own values. And what you want to do with an academic career, that doesn't have to do with how you're going to be measured and judged by. You have to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; you have to give, you have to perform. And if you don't perform, it's a cold world in academia, you will have difficulty maybe getting a job, getting tenure and promotion, especially.

But I think the core of the academic life or the life of the mind is having that sense that you have some kind of project and something to work on in the world that's socially engaged. And also to have a strong sense of validation outside the university: you're spending time outside of the university with other people, and having a sense of self outside of the university. Because it is a difficult profession. If you think about it, academia, by the time you've got your PhD, even if you've been very precocious, you're probably in your late 20s, early 30s. What then happens is you might do a postdoc, you might get a tenure track job. If you've got a tenure track job, you're actually really lucky, you're probably one of like, 5% of people who started the MA program, maybe 15 to 20% who start a PhD program to get that kind of that job.

But even then, after six years, you could not get tenure. And then you're in a difficult position, you're maybe in your late 30s. And you're really struggling, what will I do next? So I think there're various things. One thing might be to think, if I'm going to do this, I'll have a very strong sense of who I am and what I have outside and values that I have outside the university. Or it might be, you know, I'm going to very consciously decide that I can have some kind of academic career that's different.

There is actually one of my colleagues in the Scholars Programme; he's an anthropologist, and he works on a lot of with indigenous people in Thailand. So he has got a deal where he spends some of his time away. And in many modules he teaches he actually brings people up to the these minority villages in Thailand and studies issues of development and the problematics of development. And then he does some consultancy for the Thai government. He doesn't attempt to publish many academic pieces. But he has managed to negotiate a place in Scholars Programme where he's immensely valued. He has an assistant professor style position that is not tenure track. The scary thing is, of course, that it's more precarious. And academia has become more precarious if you don't have a tenure track job. But there are ways. I was lucky. Things worked well for me, almost accidentally. But I think what really kept me going at times when things were very difficult was that sense, well, if it all goes down, if I don't get tenure, it's not the end of the world. There are other things that I can do, and other skills that you actually have as a young academic that you acquire, that are very, very transferable, even though it might not seem that way at the time.

JY 44:45

Thank you so much for being with us. And good luck on your new adventures. Philip Holden now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. To find out more about Lecture Theatre, check out our website, and find out episodes at iTunes, Spotify, and all the other places where you get your podcasts.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse