 whatever time you're viewing this. I'm Nancy Frischberg. I'm one of the organizers of the Linguistics Career Launch this summer in 2021 and with me is Robin Badasen who was recruited for this by Nancy Frischberg, my former colleague and longtime friend. We're going to talk about how people thought about the idea of careers outside the academy 40 years ago because that's when we have the best records from. There may have been other things previous to that but I don't recall. So here's a brief history, a brief history of some of the thinking about alternatives to careers in the academy for linguists in the U.S. In 1974 at the Georgetown Round Table that was the 25th. I was there. Were you there Robin? I don't think you were there. Roger Shai told us and I think this is still true, linguistic suffers from not having a natural apprenticeship domain making it difficult for graduates to find work and then he recommended that we break into jobs in all these different fields and so that was 74. That's more than 40 years ago. In 76, the Center for Applied Linguistics said the supply of linguists at the doctoral level will continue to exceed demand as faculty for academic institutions. That's more than 40 years ago and in 79 CUNY declared a program called applied in urban linguistics and I'm not even sure exactly what the content of that graduate program was but they felt that it was related to this theme of non-academic careers. The thing we're going to spend a little bit of time on is the one day program but one day meeting in December of 2008 I can't even say the words 1981 in conjunction with the annual meeting of the LSA used to be held the week between Christmas and New Year's and that year it was in New York and the theme of this one day program was or the title was careers in linguistics new horizons. Let me if you can see me here I don't know I'm going to hold up the printed version of the transcript so this was audio recorded somebody typed out the transcript of all the different presentations and it looks like this so it's old fashion typewriter who I remember typing you remember typing. I think Mary Niebuhr I think was the one who did that right I think that's correct Mary Niebuhr did that the meeting was organized by Donald R. H. Bird and I went looking for him the summer and realized that we missed him by a year he died in the summer of 2020 and I'm very sad about that because I think he would have been thrilled to see what we're doing today we are in a sense realizing the dream he had and he wasn't applied linguists he did a lot of textbooks for I mean I read his obituary and he wrote like dozens of books about language instruction in different languages so very productive and very interested in non-academic careers for linguists. Sue can you talk about linguistic enterprises? Sue Steele I mean here okay who's also on the organizing team and has been both an academic linguist and employed outside the academy. Yeah so uh Janet Fodor who was the president of the LSA was very interested in this problem um and her idea was to create a a website that would have some information and a place that people who are looking for non-academic careers could go and she asked me to put it together I don't know why exactly she asked me but she did and so um at that point I was a I was a visiting scholar at Berkeley and I hired a graduate student to to do the work I actually don't know whatever happened you know I mean so we put this website together and and um you got a lot of hits which was one of the things that you motivated you to say there is a demand. Yeah so but I don't know I mean but it just sort of as far as I know disappeared I don't I mean the LSA didn't keep it up I probably after Janet disappeared there was no more impetus I mean she didn't appear but she she as a leader of the LSA went on to other things and somebody else can't rotate it in and that for whoever that was or whoever the next people were didn't find that a priority right right okay well I would say then the next thing I'm aware of and I don't want to claim that this is an exhaustive list but these are the things I'm aware of and as you can tell I've been paying attention off and on for a long time I know that I was part of a gathering at the LSA meeting in 2015 and and I believe that a SIG was formed either in that year or the following year and we offered I say we because now I'm definitely part of the SIG but I wasn't initially offered networking and career panels and the career mixer during the summer sorry the winter meetings the LSA's annual meetings and we've been doing that for I guess five or six years and yes it's Alex if I may break in just to shout out the Georgetown masters in language and communication program when was that founded 2007 were our first graduates of that program in applied professional social linguistics that was a program that was developed by Debbie Schifrin named social linguist right and based on the history of Georgetown with Roger Schuy and the interest in professional applications of linguistics and in fact the SIG was formed by former directors of this program in language and communication which focuses on careers outside of academia and business government nonprofits and right so it only took from Roger saying it in 74 until sometime oops between the things that I've got the last two items I've got mentioned right so that was a long time of a long gestation can I say that and I will be happy to insert that into the final version of these slides so I appreciate your mentioning that Alex because I didn't remember when that was formed so how far have we come we've got this one month program where you've got about 200 people who are being exposed to these ideas and trying to figure out how to achieve lift off out of the academy and so I want to share with you what happened in that one day event and what and the lessons I learned from that to be able to improve it so that when we put together this one month event it was significantly different in our expected outcomes okay if you were to sit down and read this book you would find there are that there are a number of different speakers who talk during the day they were divided into morning and afternoon sessions and I'm going to show you the table of contents and a bunch of call outs which is my editorial opinion about what the speakers said please I hope you've had a chance to read it and if you haven't I encourage you to look at it and you'll find other things and I hope you tell me other observations you make about those presentations so call outs that I've you know the way in which I've represented each speaker's talk is by a call out and like a little speech bubble and if they have a solid line my opinion is that there is some continuing usefulness to the remarks or they were practical even in those days and the ones that have dotted lines represent remarks that are noteworthy but they don't necessarily point to actual jobs with a career ladder that learn use skills learned with linguistics training I've used color as decorative only don't it's if you're colorblind don't worry about it it doesn't mean anything okay now see if I can stay straight okay so here's the table of contents and I'm looking at the morning session and I'm hoping you can read some of that there Arthur Bronstein who was head of LSA for a long time started out in speech and hearing sciences and moved over to found the linguistics department at CUNY that's the city university of New York was the moderator of the morning session and he talked about the theme what linguists can do then we had Frederick Mish talking about lexicography and the memorable comment from him is you may be familiar with Frederick Mish he was the editor of the Merriam-Webster dictionary of the English language for many years based in Hartford lexicography is not a growth industry it's fun and it's a good job for linguists but not a growth industry W Baker spoke about computers and he mentioned for at least areas that linguists might participate in where computers were making headway in all kinds of information processing Frank MacIerola and I believe he was associated with the city of New York school system the K-12 school system talked about non-teaching parts of education and he said find some let me get the zoom controls out of the way he says find some appropriate skills that can be taken to that job but he didn't actually say what skills we might have that were so appropriate Tracy Gray I found very compelling because she talked about policy and language planning and what she said was there is a plan for how you go about making change and getting other people to adopt policy changes she said know the legislators keep them informed of what you're doing know the legislative schedule so that you know when it's a good time to give them new information and to support the old information they have and find some organization that you can join with that will help you promote whatever the policy efforts you want to promote are that are related to your efforts the reason I say I think this is wise advice is it's certainly the way policy gets changed for nonprofit organizations and when I realized that I said oh this is what we need to do in dealing with the LSA we need to pay attention to the executive committee we need to keep them informed we need to know their legislative schedule that is what's when do they make decisions how do you get on their agenda how do you present to them and and convince them that all whatever change we want to make is a useful thing so I have kept Tracy's ideas in mind during the last two or three years as we've been moving toward participating either in the summer programs or the winter programs and in this case developing our own program Lothar Simon whom I don't know well and I don't know exactly where he ended up talked about publishing a traditional landing place for people who care about language and he talked about editing marketing and copywriting all of which are fine careers but they don't necessarily pay a lot depending and depending on what part of the publishing world you're in and Alan Westaway spoke about translation and I was surprised that he did not he talked about the UN and the UN has six official languages which I think is still the case but the UN is not a pragmatic solution for people who have multilingual skills there are so many other places in the community and I think we see them more obviously now where translation skills are needed but he didn't talk about interpreting so I distinguish between interpreting which is live simultaneous or consecutive in you know translation and translation which refers to written work and I think that's the habit in the industry so I found his remarks a little less than compelling because he didn't refer to things outside of conference interpreting high prestige but not necessarily the high volume so let's go on we took a lunch break I hope you had a chance to stretch a little in that lunch break and we went on in the afternoon to talk about what linguists are doing and Richard Tucker was the moderator for that and you may remember him as one of the authors about of Quebec bilingualism French bilingualism in Canada who was the second author with him I'm blanking on the name but I remember the two names together generally okay so we were introduced to Norma Reese who urged us to think about speech pathology audiology and communication disorders which certainly are appropriate careers for somebody who wants to go into somebody with linguistics background who wants to go into a kind of clinical setting of course you can't be accepted as a speech pathologist or audiologist without further training that is you you probably need a master's from some speech pathology program and a supervised practicum or internship under some other speech pathologist so that's a fine fine career it's not going to get you from undergraduate school directly into a job Stuart Flexner echoed the mish comments in the morning and said optimistically there are 40 full-time jobs for linguists in lexicography and by that I hope you all understand his meaning which is 40 existing jobs not 40 new jobs every year okay and I think probably there are more than 40 jobs for linguists in lexicography in the digital age because there are so more so many more kinds of places where lexicography happens but still lexicography by itself is not a growth industry or a big career for many people mark Lieberman who many of you may know from University of Pennsylvania spoke about several kinds of things that we could do that linguists are doing with computers and I think he had a similar vision and probably even more well developed than my own about what you can do with computers in speech and text and artificial language design and processing and all those good things Robin who is our guest here co-presenter talked about his work in business communications and we're going to hear a little more detail about that bill above had fabulous I think platitudes dare I say about the issues of public issues of injustice and inequality that are ringing you know true still today but he didn't have very many pragmatic ideas of what roles linguists were going to step into it was kind of like you had to make your own job in order to address those issues of inequality so you know I'm I'm all for the agenda I just didn't see the actual jobs in that particular presentation Marsha far talked about language research especially under the auspices of the national institutes of education and she made several different designations of places where people could be useful however she did not talk about how you were going to get paid surely you can get some grants from foundations which I found to be a less than adequate solution and then we had questions and answers Dr. Battison will now advise us and ask me to advance when you're ready there we go well thank you Nancy for that historical review we're talking about the future and we're talking about transitions and one of the things about being in a transition your transition is that it doesn't always feel like a transition it may feel like a continuum and one of the things that surprised and annoyed me after I made my transition was that former colleagues and professors would approach me and say so Battison what are you doing now that you're not doing linguistics I would be taken back because of course I was doing linguistics you can't stop doing linguistics as long as you're working with language so there's a there's a continuity feature there now um not yet no I know I just wiggled my hand off keep your hand off that dial yes yes I'm I'm imitating a laurel now you know there we go so like like Nancy I had a career doing linguistics of ASL American Sign Language and doing the basic descriptions of the work that was done in the 1970s and extending that into cycle linguistics and even neuro linguistics working with defophysics but then I made a transition to working with applied linguistics and text comprehension and then on to document design usability testing and finally landing in international business communication business development and branding so that was a that's a long set of transitions that was there and I don't know if you listened to Jenny Reddish's talk on Wednesday morning but she talked about one element in making transitions is often serendipity the right opportunity came coming by and my opportunity came in 1979 when Jenny Reddish of all people offered me a job as the assistant director at the document design center at the American Institute for Research so that was wonderful uh at the moment as Jenny noted that PCs were just coming in computers were landing in offices for the first time and the major challenge was for computer manufacturers was how to get people to understand and use and get some value out of the computer systems that are being sold so of course that involved coursework documentation and online information which was pretty primitive at the time and those are all language domains and therefore they're all linguistic domains wonderful wonderful so uh thank you Jenny for that start in life and eventually it morphed into work with many different we'll call them sectors or domains I mean I've worked in IT telecoms software food processing and I don't mean food processing little grinder that you have in your kitchen counter we're talking about food processing where you you pour in 10 000 liters of milk into a a vat and yogurt comes off the other end after a while that kind of food processing uh law education banking financial technology such as the building of IT systems for stock exchanges around the world insurance medical technology pharma transportation and heavy trucks yes I have driven a 60 ton vehicle chemicals defense military intelligence and commercial real estate so wonderful I got to sample all these things in my so the the essence of that is languages everywhere and language and linguistics is there for everywhere and you know I ended up being what I am now a very shy and retiring business writer and editor semi retired there we go and now we can have the next slide please Dr. Frishberg here we go thing so this is about your transition and back in 1981 the advice that we had what I offered in this in this booklet which Nancy held up is that there's a very different mindset and setting quite simply what goes on and what you're used to in academics and what's going to happen to you if you go into something called loosely business when you how you spend your time well you sort of do what you want when you're a student you pick a topic your advisor says okay and then you try to make sense of something but in business very often you have to account for your time you have to write it down you have to think about planning your time in a different way because you're responsible for delivering things to others accountability again that's self-determined whether you do well on this and less well on that or where you put your energies as an academic you have a great deal of freedom but in business you are responsible to your manager your team and your customers and maybe to your investors as well if you're a public company individual or teamwork the settings differ because as I recall how it was back then linguistics was a cerebral exercise you did it in the privacy of your own home or office and you wrote down things on paper and then show them to people so and you got rewarded with tenure or promotion or wherever you were heading at that time of your career but in business it's essentially a teamwork thing you're constantly checking with other people you you have longer projects you have to have them well managed you have a project manager you may have dozens of people on a project you have to promote the right kind of communication and there is quality control in the best projects some projects didn't have quality control but that's another story and then what you create what happens to your work products well you create knowledge and it's it's open that you have to make it accessible to everyone you publish you give talks and work products in business they're more carefully controlled and some things you generate for public audiences other things you hold as internal reports so you begin to distinguish between public information something called internal use only confidential or business confidential and even the very highly restricted confidential which means that some of your colleagues are not permitted to benefit from your thinking because they're not in a need to know there's that need to know and the next slide please Nancy so out of all that that changes the business settings the advice or realizations that have some practical value at that time were that as a linguist and getting out of link academic linguistics you have to recognize how esoteric linguistics is it's not something people have a consumption of of of what you're doing and the most frequent question you'll get I'm sure you've heard it or how many languages do you speak because that's the essence of being a linguist people think or do you translate okay so it's not intuitive and you have to explain it again and again and I remember I was rewriting a very important brochure for a very large insurance corporation they had 20 000 people they sold insurance they had sold insurance group life insurance and other benefits to their own employees and their own employees did not understand their benefits or how to claim them do you remember that Jenny I'm sure you do the equitable life assurance society who invented group life insurance back in 1911 so I had to go in and restructure reorganize interview their people find out what they weren't understanding and why reorganize the entire booklet and move forward at some point in there I was talking with a vice president who controlled the whole project and I mentioned the word cycle linguistics and he drew back in his chair and said cycle linguistics cycle linguistics in that tone and I knew I would never repeat that word to him again because I was on the border of what he understood was rational I have a similar story and it probably was within the same month as you're talking about because we have these parallel lives there we go where I wrote a memo at IBM uh well maybe it was a little later than that so I wrote a memo at IBM and used the word disambiguation and was told how about speaking English same same story right yeah that is that is so you have to concentrate as a linguist in transition on speaking with non-linguists who don't understand the lingo and you have to make it into various packages so you have to be able to talk about your work or your skills or experience whatever is relevant in little packages an elevator pitch to me is 15 seconds that's the elevator journey and you're suddenly with that important person who might influence your journey or introduce you to someone and you have a few seconds to tell what you're really working on in ways that they understand two or three sentences and if they're successful they stop and ask for more but that's all you have time for so again uh using a term I first heard from Jenny Reddish on on Wednesday the bike snack meal you can have your five minute talk as well on your 10 minute talk and your 20 minute talk the bike the snack the meal according to whatever the audience is consuming at that point I think the bite is actually the elevator pitch uh and the snack is either five you know a two minute or a three minute in a talking version it's all proportions right right so the bite is the headline the snack is the short explanation and the meal is the white paper whoops I'm pulling my headset out okay so the general point is that you have to learn to adapt to a non-academic audience to make progress in the world outside of academia and learning to write and I'm saying write now rather than talk for a general audience is important you may be a good writer but you have to improve your writing um you have to learn how to consider the context of your written product and in what context will it be read and you have to master different styles or registers not just the academic as it says there not just the academic but even the academic uh another point is that you have to get into selling yourself promoting yourself and other speakers have covered the differences between curriculum vita or cv and resumes they're not equivalent I won't go into that here but also the special role of the cover letter which is attached to your cv it focuses the reader's attention on your cv and briefly elaborates on the points in it the ones that are designed to get their attention for your resume or resume yes I meant I rent mezzamay yes thank you I'm glad you're in there providing quality control very good and alex is there well correcting another great thing to do is to publish your dissertation as a book length or in any other form you can to get your work and your knowledge out there in digestible chunks and my understanding afterwards was that that was one of the reasons that jenny hired me because I had published my dissertation la dita and again uh look at improving yourself you've had an academic role and and been educated and you have to determine what gaps in your training or education that you have and fill them and in 1981 uh the idea was that programming design and statistics would be appropriate but Nancy let's fast forward to 2021 to today let's do that oh thank you thank you so things have changed in 40 years I mean the internet didn't exist back then and lots of other things didn't exist let's not enumerate them but some things haven't changed uh I'm just describing with different words now and today you still have to seek relevance and to improve relevance to your audiences to your colleagues to your future colleagues and future employers because theories are not appreciated outside of academia you have to have practical results to deliver this means that if you're if you're in charge of something in charge of designing a an educational program or uh redoing some documentation of something or developing a training program you have to be able to motivate reach back into linguistic principles and say why it should be done this way rather than that way all right um and of course you have to again promote and explain the relevance of your own work why was it so important if now you're going to be relying on your own work now in the 40 years since 1981 and 2021 I finally figured out this a week or so ago that I have cracked the code I cracked the code and the realization is that linguists are good at cracking codes that's what we do we crack codes what does that mean well it means that we can describe and analyze the language codes used by subcultures such as the jargon used by company X and you know that IBM and Hewlett Packard and other companies and Apple have completely different ways of using language that they have developed as a subculture and if you are going to be inserting yourself into those situations and uh and making sense of it or helping them do something achieve a goal you have to understand that that language and it is a language um you have to linguists are good at understanding the role of context and determining meaning as well and we're good at interviewing users about what they understand or don't understand we're good at extracting meaning from users and of course decoding complex sentence structures and identifying those key things ambiguity vagueness and contradiction and if you're working in editorial situations then uh that's extremely important now given that linguists are good at cracking codes and developing those things that means that linguists are can be I say they are we are good at translating which means finding logical and semantic equivalence in useful contexts and the context in which I worked was often an industrial company or a tech technical company had developed a thing a product a service software or something which was going to revolutionize the world but they couldn't talk about it themselves to the people who were going to buy it that's one level or the people who are going to use it which is a totally different level so you as a linguist could be very good at doing that kind of thing converting the technical information that the specialists have created into useful information for non-specialists in the particular situations that they encounter that information and also converting information created for one purpose like a technical memo into information to suit another purpose or another audience such as installing something or using something in a dialogue with other people or writing a press release or writing a press release exactly and uh yes don't get me started on press releases no no we don't have time for that now we'll take that into gather later so uh some of the previous two points is that linguists are very suited to become generalists you can also become a specialist in something but think about generalists because your power is the ability to manipulate and understand language and therefore that can be applied in many different situations language rhetoric and semantics are everywhere and you can plug yourself in anywhere so you can even work in a specialist area as a generalist you can work with technical specialists and help translate information from one department to another or from those departments out to their user communities or their investors or the distributors who are handling their product and you can actually get quite a lot done without actually becoming a super super specialist in their area um but again uh there are contents of pieces which might be relevant there and you can expand yourself by expanding your tools so learning about product development in different or uh industries is good learning about marketing and branding user design user interfaces usability testing seo the dreaded seo search engine optimization and analytics would be useful tools to to use these days and finally uh getting into a content area as well is going to give you a boost towards some employment in some areas and i can simply cite here law health it process industries and manufacturing and there's a chat thing in the and also financial technology and well that's that's a journey that's advice contrasted between 1981 and 2021 what else do we have for our public today nancy well i'm going to take the last few minutes because i think we're supposed to end by the before the top of the next hour and i want to take a couple minutes here to share with you some other aspects of my thinking and other people's thinking about what's been happening why have things moved uh so slowly over the last 40 years and i want to point out some and i guess this is another perspective which says a fellow named dan hershman wrote a blog post which i found very insightful and i hadn't thought about the issues in this way and he notices that in general people live where their relatives live they play they grew up in a place they stay in that place but academics probably moved away from the original place whether for undergraduate school or even more likely for graduate school and they may have moved multiple times because you're not going to necessarily get hired and unlikely get hired at the institution where you studied so you're going to get sent away somewhere else new and his dan's point was do these facts about dislocation affect the research topics that academics choose and do they affect the relationships in the community where academics live in or near and i'm i'm saying uh staying in academia may not be possible or practical for some people there are cultural reasons why you want to be and social reasons and family reasons why you want to be in the community that you grew up and so you may not feel like you have the you're not personally licensed in your family to make these kinds of adjustments in location that academia expects here's some assumptions that i have come up with i think you'll all agree with me that academic linguists hold many of these applied work is not theoretically interesting and if you want to counter example to that i would suggest charlotte lindy's work theoretical topics especially syntax and logic are the top of the heap of topics applied linguistics which used to mean mostly language learning materials are only related to education uh let's see text is valued over speech written is valued over interactive or emotive and i think this may be changing slightly but still i believe that we don't pay enough attention to language speech in its you know ordinary uses and all the international stuff that goes along with it we also spent a lot of time saying that language is unique and we need to consider it apart from everything else in communication don't think about gesture take audio data only ignore idea phones and you can write fabulous academic papers i would claim that's not that's not true to the human experience it's wonderful for advancing linguistics in certain ways but it it doesn't view us as situated in a social setting applied work is of less value because it's women's work i think we should look at the population of this event this one month and i think you'll agree that there are more females in role than males and you can do what you like without regard for earning a living let alone a good living with an advanced as long as you have an advanced degree you'll take an adjunct role while waiting waiting for something better to open up because the the best thing you can achieve is an academic appointment in the tenure track i'm sure there are other assumptions that i haven't mentioned here and i would be delighted to hear from those of you have you may not have them at hand but as you're thinking about them and i don't necessarily i'm not saying that these are wrong i'm saying that these are limited so maybe i'm saying they're wrong i'm guessing that many people here are not familiar with virginia valian and her work she's an essayist and she's a linguist and she asked the question in 1997 in a book called why so slow the advancement of women why are women not achieving academic appointments at the same rate as their male colleagues because in certainly in a field like linguistics women are being turned out to as graduates at least in the same numbers as men she talks about the two-body problem meaning what happens if you are both academics and you need to find jobs at related or close by institutions what happens if your partner doesn't get tenure and you do now what do you do and you remember all those assumptions we had many of them apply to women more than to men and who sees themselves in those desired roles in the usual time frame and who doesn't what happens if you don't love publishing academic papers what happens if you don't love grading student papers i remember um one of the first graduate seminars we had on asl with ursula belugian ed clima and our deaf consultant uh who was trying to teach us asl but we were trying to do it in a way with eliciting all kinds of uh oddball sentences especially about negation because that was one of ed's favorite topics uh and one of the things one of the sentences he put down on the list that week when we were doing negation was i don't like grading student papers and i thought oh how transparent of you and how do i feel as a first-year graduate student to hear you say that okay anyway it's sure it's surely the case that more women are earning phd's than the academy can accommodate i think that's an easy truth let's have one quick snapshot look of the governance of the lsa and i'll tell you what my point is i don't think i've demonstrated it uh quite clearly enough here but let me tell you what this is about if you look at the documents that the lsa has about who's been on the executive committee it's fabulous because you can really see who was there in what years so starting in 1925 and i i tallied this up to through 2019 i think the data are there for 20 also of the something like 260 people who have had roles on the ec only this many what is this one two three four five six seven eight eight of them have been from outside of academia and then i would say most of those there's really only two who came out of the corporate world so that looks like about three percent of the people but what i haven't demonstrated here very clearly and if somebody wants to help me do a nice little graph of this i would be very welcoming of help um if you count person years of service on the executive committee you'll see that edwards peer was there for so many years and hawkett was there for us a certain number of years so what i'm representing here is how many people but not how many person years of non-academic advice the executive committee had internally and it's way short it's much shorter than a three percent number so i think we have to not blame the lsa for making the decisions they've made so far but we also have to do something about it to change it and to open the organization up to non-linguistic sorry non-academic linguists which is of course in the strategic plan for the years 2019 through 24 or 23 and i would like for all of you to go ahead and look at the strategic plan it's a fabulous document it really states a lot of idealized goals for the organization and then consider what steps has the lsa executive committee and the programs offered through the secretariat what programs have been offered other than the ones by our sig to welcome people from all different occupations so here's an aspiration for the future and you can imagine the cake that's on the other side of here that we can all enjoy we think that this lcl is about all of you in the audience and i hope that we've given you a little bit of insight about where what we're coming from and how you're going to advance your careers and i'm hoping that by 2025 the 100th anniversary of the birth of the lsa that we can double its size because it will have opened all its borders to include linguists from all career paths and that then implies that we've got some work to do because the current program offerings need to be augmented to include events and publications and mentorships and all kinds of things we haven't mentioned that will be of interest to that new membership who are beyond the academy that's one vision i hope that other people will come to add to that or create alternative visions we're ready maryam asks if we know how many people have how many women have been on the lsa's executive committee over the years and i haven't counted maryam but i i would be delighted anyway i'm going to stop sharing for the moment and interact with humans and i'd be happy to entertain questions and comments from career linguists and from the participants in the summer program this is jenny if i may absolutely so i was a member of lsa for several years uh after i finished my linguistics graduate school but i dropped my membership because what you got was language which um was still intellectually fascinating to me but not at all relevant because the articles were so deeply academic and the meetings also so my question is um has lsa done anything to welcome non-academic linguists by publishing something for members that included material from non-academic careers or had sessions that were relevant uh so i have been very involved in other professionals organizations since i left lsa because they matched my non-academic career so i'm just curious as have i yes other than the stuff that the sig has been doing i am unaware of other programs anybody else want to chime in and alex didn't we hear from somebody within the last week about getting published in a non in non-language place for the work that they were doing i can't remember too many new uh factoids i think that i agree with what you say about the journal language as a sociolinguist that hasn't been a journal that i turned to since it's deeply formalistic um there's i have an inkling of a change of foot which i probably shouldn't say in a recording that's not bad words you can say it but it's private information and yes it's confidential right it's confidential but i i think with certain members of the ec and certain members of the new committees that are forming um cogl and cogl's not a new committee but it's being reformulated with new outreach and with the formation of the new social media committee there are members on the ec who are very open to what we are trying to do in the linguistics beyond academia sig so there are signs of change within the leadership of the lsa and the executive committee um but as far as language and language may have um a bit of a change coming okay right so i mean uh i think the fact that we keep hammering on it may help and that we are communicating with the ec may help and i every time i talk to them i invoke the strategic plan i hope all of you start doing that also because that's their promise to us of the direction that the organization will be taking and and i want to hold them to it and i want to help them develop rubrics that they can meet and know whether or not they're uh satisfying their audience which is academic and non-academic linguists or people Nancy why why not send them a copy of this video we we will and we we also invited them to come to this session and i keep every week i'm sending them little notes about you would be interested in these sessions and i hope that at some point they will show up or take the opportunity to view them when we post them later i hate to stop this because uh it was uh it's i think it deserves a lot more comment and a lot more interaction about it and so perhaps in our next uh mixer we can chat more about it and if you're interested in carrying on i could use some help with graphs and calculations and Miriam's already offered to start the calculation on how many women have been on on the ec which is certainly not in the first 50 years there were a zero i believe is the number but since then there have been more um and i thank everybody for showing up and yes we did record unlike what we had been saying so we didn't use any bad words and i think we were relatively polite and please do fill out the feedback form relatively polite and alex says of course here it was and uh sorry you didn't get the memo it's hawaiian shirt day