Can academia be recognised as a legitimate architectural career pathway in itself, or must every architectural academic ultimately validate themselves through the traditional practice pathway?
By Arch Christine Matua
Some of my students ask why I don’t share more personal anecdotes about my career journey, and I always dodge those questions. They claim there’s a lot to learn through candour. I doubt, but let me indulge them in this one:
Next year, at the end of January, I will have made 7 years teaching at the university where I am currently employed. A common question I get is, how did I find myself here? There was no damascene moment. I was a graduate architect burnt out at my job and asking myself, “Surely, this cannot be it?” when I saw an ad for a teaching job and applied. That’s the full story.
By the third year of teaching, I had started to feel like it isn’t right—morally—to teach people how to build if you yourself do not build. So, I found a place to do my graduate training that would let me work 4 days a week, and then the other day would be for teaching.
At that time, teaching was the thing I wanted to do, and every other pursuit was to complement my teaching. You see, when one describes teaching, it is not only the classroom 2-hour lecture—there’s research, finding all these collaborations internationally to enrich the learning experience, and, for me, I had found an interest in heritage—specifically documenting buildings and sharing about those, mostly on my social media platforms.
The thing is: to teach, one has to log in a minimum of 15 hours per week. And yet, to practice architecture (the pathway to which requires doing graduate training), requires that the trainee logs in 24 hours per week minimum. If one decided to teach and do their graduate training to acquire a license to practice, the minimum hours required to be logged is 39 hours.
Remember, the average work week is 40 hours.
That 15 hours teaching does not account for commuting time, for time prepping lectures, researching, etc. Those are just the hours standing in front of students in the classroom.
On the other hand, practicing in an office for 24 hours a week, in my opinion, is hardly sufficient training to learn all that needs learning in order to become a solid architect.
Someone started the rumour that one needs 10,000 hours to become a master at anything. And even though unverified, the consensus is that, yes, whatever craft one intends to be a master in, it requires time.
The implication is that, in order to do both academia and qualify for practice, one would have to eat up a lot of their personal time. Late nights, longer weekends, poor work-life balance, compromised mental health. Or, do both, poorly, for a much longer period of time.
So, can’t one just do academia and leave practice things alone? It depends on one’s long-term goals. If teaching at a university is the path one chooses to pursue, with its potential for career growth and progression, one would logically be interested in eventually attaining the highest offices within the department, no? For most architecture departments, this requires one to be a practicing architect. And yet, to achieve that position, one must also have completed a master’s, PhD, and published a number of papers. All of that takes a significant amount of time to achieve.
On the surface, it appears like both careers can happen simultaneously, fairly easily, but… when one squints just a bit… it looks like one must first practice, get the license, and then begin on the journey of academia. But then one would be in their late 30s to qualify to start applying to begin a whole new career lecturing.
What if, at 26, one already knows they want to teach?
Then this young educator has to be confronted with the fact that, eventually, they will need to have some sort of professional practice credentials. Do they pursue it now (get a masters, PhD, etc.), or start later? By 34 after establishing themselves in academia, someone has likely built an identity, responsibilities, and career momentum. Going back to trainee status to earn an architect’s license means sacrificing income, status, time, and perhaps family commitments…
It’s a catch-22.
In my USA/ARB professional exams’ oral interview last year, at the end of what I can only describe as the closest I have come to one of Dante’s circles, when given the opportunity for “any closing remarks,” I explained how difficult it is to try and do academia young and also pursue practice legally. I asked,
“Is academia in itself not a legitimate career path?”
Because having those clearly invested in academia go through the same rigmarole as someone who only has the concerns of a traditional 9–5 architecture firm training is a failure in the system to recognise that the two paths have fundamental differences in modus operandi.
That being said, I do not know if it’s because of the “systemic challenges” that then makes those in academia need to have like two other things they are doing. I do not know if it’s that thing of, “because we already have the skillset, might as well do it,” but that leaves the practice of academia as an elaborate side hustle, with the participants only half applying themselves. Too busy, in many cases, to actually nurture the process of architectural education. Too busy to do new research for the sake of generating new knowledge. Always trying to finish [teaching] quickly and then run to the next meeting. Giving the allowable minimum.
So, what happens when that is how architecture is taught?
Can there be any meaningful innovation? When do all participants involved engage in meaningful exploration?
To render a question I heard from someone on a random podcast clip I listened to on one of my doom-scroll evenings—forgive me, I am chronically online—
“Do you think Elon Musk has a side hustle?” Not the best example because he is famously a serial entrepreneur, but you get the spirit of the sentiment; for something to be done well, one must lock in; “burn the ships,” so to speak.
See, if you have read to this point and have come to the conclusion that I think people should exclusively teach- or exclusively practice-, that is not my point. I think being engaged in the day-to-day of practice related to building makes one a better teacher of architecture. Whether it’s as a contractor, project manager, green design expert, I think the students deserve to be guided based on some understanding of lived working experience. Even if that looks like personal projects done quietly, if you catch my drift. Otherwise, it’s all speculation, and the students will be ill prepared for the world in which they are to enter and practice.
So, now what?
That’s the question, isn’t it?
But if the status quo persists, we’ll be celebrating architecture at 100 and still asking ourselves, “but what is Ugandan architecture?”