Alternative academic professions — alt-ac — are "less a matter of where you work than how..."

"'... 'with the same intellectual curiosity that fueled the desire to go to graduate school in the first place and applying the same kinds of skills, such as close reading, historical inquiry or written argumentation, to the tasks at hand.'"

Ethan Watrall, a professor of anthropology at Michigan State University, runs the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative as part of Praxis. “I try to destigmatize this idea of not going on to a tenure-track job,” he said. “It doesn’t matter — who cares? If you’re happy and that’s what you want to do, that’s awesome.”

He believes the culture has begun to change, “mostly because of the sort of desperate need for it to change.”