Blog post from Benjamin M. Jacobs, Program Director, Israel Education; Research Associate Professor, Experiential Jewish Education, GW Graduate School of Education & Human Development
Sometimes I wish I could just crawl back into an archive, open a box of dusty old papers, read through them one-by-one, take meticulous notes, analyze the data, and construct a narrative about some relatively obscure historical circumstance that has long-term implications for the way we think about or practice education—as I was originally trained to do. The work of a ‘bench historian’ can be quite exhilarating and rewarding when one is able to unearth and follow breadcrumbs that lead back to the beginnings of the American Jewish education enterprise, or to the complex connections between social studies teacher education and curriculum reform, or to social foundations courses in education schools and core curriculum courses in colleges and universities, and the other topics I have eagerly pursued over my academic career. My mostly solitary research efforts were complemented by opportunities to learn from others in courses on curriculum and educational historiography that I taught to receptive and ambitious graduate students. Ideally, these students would learn the historical craft and challenge its assumptions while forging their own pathways toward interpreting the past and its relevance for today. Although part of my motivation for this work was fueled by the promise of extrinsic rewards—“publish or perish,” as the cliché goes—it mostly was driven by my intrinsic interest in history and education, which endures to this day.
Thing is, I rarely have the opportunity for such cloistered academic pursuits anymore. About a decade ago, a simultaneous transformation in the culture of higher education and in how I perceived my career trajectory, moved me from the pursuit of breadcrumbs from the past and toward more engaged activities in the present. As university culture has evolved in the twenty-first century, increased value has been placed on the pursuit of ideas and initiatives that have more immediate, tangible, and even marketable relevance and impact, alongside the continued nurturing of research that sometimes can take years to blossom. Accordingly, many of our most distinguished universities have grown their human resources by creating space for bright, talented, innovative, entrepreneurial scholars who are as committed to generating, developing, and disseminating ideas as their traditional academic counterparts, but who also seek different kinds of rewards for their outputs—rewards that can seem on the surface to be more extrinsic to the academic mission.
Public, institutional, or market impacts are not always obviously compatible with the more foundational scholarship undertaken by tenure-track faculty, who often pursue knowledge production for its own sake. I and many of my academic peers, especially in practical fields such as education, have always navigated the choppy waters of so-called “basic” and so-called “applied” research. Many of us have therefore become professorpreneurs, willing and even to some extent eager to launch enterprises based on their research; develop novel educational programs, curricula, and learning experiences that enhance traditional academia; serve as consultants, advisors, or thought leaders in their field; create omnichannel platforms to market their ideas; and partner with communities, schools, organizations, industries, or governments to scale impact. Importantly, professorpreneurship is not a not a departure from academia, as is often alleged; rather, this work generally happens alongside the core academic missions of teaching, research, and service to the field. It supplements academic culture without necessarily supplanting it, enabling more strategic expressions of academic excellence—including sometimes more business-oriented opportunities—that have visible and immediate public value.
I first learned of the notion of professorpreneurship from a prominent figure in the field of history education. (With my curricular specialization in social studies education, complementing my disciplinary expertise in the history of education, I often say that I am interested in both the teaching of history and the history of teaching). Some years ago, Sam Wineburg, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, gave an invited talk at a large academic conference about the arc of his noteworthy career (he is an elected member of the National Academy of Education). He began with a lengthy retrospective on his stellar, award-winning, peer-reviewed research, and ended with a surprising, very humble confession about his most recent endeavor, the creation of the Stanford History Education Group (now known as the Digital Inquiry Group). To paraphrase Wineburg: ‘I spent most of my career doing rigorous research that got published in all the very top journals in the field and got cited thousands of times in other top journals in the field. I won at academia. I reached its pinnacle. And yet, at some point I realized that it was a mostly closed circle of colleagues and acolytes who were just recirculating my ideas amongst themselves in sophisticated, technical research journals, while the people for whom I thought I was toiling—the history teachers—barely caught wind of them. Since starting the Stanford History Education Group, which translates scholarship into practical activities, I am finally having a tangible impact on thousands of educators, not just on the field of education. THIS is my greatest achievement.’
At the time, I was a tenure-track professor doing my best to publish not perish, and so I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘this is what you can do once you’ve won at academia, but first I need to win,’ and filed his message in the back of my mind. But then something at once unfortunate and fortuitous happened: I published but then perished anyway. I was the winner of a unanimous vote for tenure from the faculty of a top-10 school of education, and the loser of a campaign to raise funds to support the academic program I was directing; and so, the university closed the program and I lost my job. Like most professors in my position, I immediately turned my attention to the job boards in the Chronicle of Higher Education in search of another tenured or tenure-track position in my field (‘if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere!’). I also began networking and was introduced, by chance, to Michael Feuer, an economist/policy analyst-turned-senior research executive-turned-academic—another professorpreneur, in other words, who was then serving as dean of the education school at The George Washington University—who told me he was getting a new, innovative academic program off the ground, he was looking for seasoned leadership, and I seemed like the perfect fit. Bingo!
The opportunity came with a pretty major catch, though: the position would only be part-time, and it would not be tenure-line (not to mention that GW is in Washington, DC, and I live in New Jersey). With a family to support and tenured jobs still out there, this seemed like a risky proposition at best. But advice a mentor provided as my previous job imploded rang in my head—“go where the money is”—and this new, innovative academic program at GW had a new, large grant behind it. And so, I eagerly if a bit nervously said yes to Dean Feuer. To the observer, it may seem foolish or at least counterintuitive that I pursued a grant-funded opportunity when the reason I lost my previous job was that the funds ran dry. But there was something about the manifestly entrepreneurial and optimistic spirit of Dean Feuer that gave me confidence that this was only the starting point of something that could grow much bigger if we set our sights on it. And so we did.
The first opportunity I took advantage of in this newfound professorpreneurial role was filling in the rest of my part-time position with adjacent (and paid) work. To this end, I accepted another part-time position at a philanthropy to lead the creation of a series of frameworks and standards for the American Jewish education enterprise. This role was complementary to my work at GW because the graduate program I was coming to lead was in Experiential Education and Jewish Cultural Arts (later, Experiential Jewish Education), the only program of its kind to prepare and credential Jewish educators for non-school settings such as Jewish museums, cultural institutions, engagement programs, and the like. (To my point, the launching of that program was a good example of the mutually reinforcing currents behind academic scholarship and entrepreneurship, as it was funded by a philanthropy led by an imaginative executive who sought out only the most innovative ventures to support.) The work I led at my philanthropy job included inventive, research-informed outputs such as “The 18x18 Framework: 18 Things a Young Jew Should Know, Care About, and Be Able to Do by Age 18.” These two simultaneous endeavors—1) directing and teaching in a graduate program preparing educators for the field, and 2) creating evidence-based curricular frameworks to be employed by educators like the ones I was preparing—would become two of the key features of my “brand” as a professorpreneur.
Indeed, among the many skills, qualities, dispositions, and behaviors professorpreneurs need, one is self-awareness of your value proposition – and to whom; what you should be known for – and by whom; and what you are the ‘go-to’ for – and for whom. In a word, your “brand.” In the academy, a researcher typically gains a reputation for being someone who studies something; by contrast, a professorpreneur is typically known as someone who does something. Note that in the example of the two key components of my brand, both involve doing, even if I would not be qualified to be the one doing them unless I had competence in the substance of my work (e.g., subject matter, teaching, research, curriculum development, leadership).
Self-awareness also extends to anticipating the impression one leaves on others (all the “whoms” mentioned above), as your brand is only as strong as the brand ambassador representing it. This is an area which for me is still developing. I have a reputation for being pragmatic (an excellent quality for professorpreneurs!), as well as honest, frank, and transparent. I have found that directness is refreshing for those who too often are forced to read between the lines, while it can be off-putting to those who prefer a steady stream of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” I need to find more balance between my dogged realism (which, again, is often good for business, even if it may not be good for my business) and the eternal optimism that three of my biggest mentors and closest collaborators over the past 25 years have displayed (shoutouts to Robert Chazan [of blessed memory], Barry Chazan, and Michael Feuer).
In fact, I sometimes wonder if the successes of these collaborations owe to the yin/yang, cup full/empty, good cop/bad cop nature of our work together. After all, while unicorns ordinarily get all the attention, entrepreneurship is most often a deeply collaborative endeavor at some or all stages of the process. To this end, professorpreneurs need emotional intelligence (particularly with respect to social awareness and relationship management), effective communication and listening skills, a sense of humor, the ability to build trust with others and to navigate power dynamics ethically, the capacities and sensitivities necessary to manage conflict, and a disposition toward co-creating rather than hoarding expertise. These are among the skills we honed in the GW Academic Leadership Academy, in which I participated in AY 2025-26.
Professorpreneurs also focus on problem-solving, creating new opportunities, and having the courage to act on them. This lesson I learned at Robert Chazan’s knees as we co-founded the first full-fledged doctoral program in Education and Jewish Studies offered at a secular American university. Bob was a renowned, widely published historian of medieval and modern Jewry, of the sort I mentioned at the outset of this essay. But he was also a program-builder who founded and directed Jewish studies departments at several universities, most recently NYU. When he wanted to get this new doctoral program off the ground, he sought me out to help him design the kind of program that I would have greatly benefitted from had it existed when I was beginning graduate school (I was, by then, in the advanced stages of my own doctoral work at Teachers College, Columbia University). We spent the first year gathering information, conducting interviews and focus groups, engaging an advisory board, designing a degree map and syllabi, devising a proposal for the university and the state of New York to approve, budgeting, and so forth. Meantime, word got out that this program was in the works, particularly because the Steinhardt Foundation had given such a substantial gift to NYU, in part to support the program, that the university named the education school in Steinhardt’s honor. Inquiries began to come in from prospective students. My instinct, having been socialized in the academy long enough to know that degree program rules are made to be followed, was to stave these prospects off till the following year. Bob’s instinct, having been in the academy since long before I was born, was to bend the rules creatively, gently, and respectfully until they absolutely had to be followed. And so, we admitted our first two students to a non-existent program and told them to take coursework in the school until they could transfer to the new program. Once it was up and running the following year, we admitted four more students, and all of a sudden, we had our first cohort.
Accomplished professorpreneurs approach their work as an effort to research and solve applied, relevant, and pressing problems. In contrast to the slow-cooker culture of academia, the flame-grilled culture of professorpreneurship is nimble, adaptable, reactive, and responsive as well as proactive, opportunistic, ambitious, and courageous. Professorpreneurs have instinctive “entrepreneurial alertness,” or the ability to notice opportunities and build on them quickly. They have the confidence to knock on doors and not be afraid to be turned away, with the hope that, if they succeed in opening the door even a crack, it may lead to greater possibilities down the line. (This is especially applicable to fundraising.) They may begin with a “minimum viable product” (MVP), or a prototype of something that they are continuing to research and develop, so that they can ultimately turn that MVP into a winner (the above-referenced doctoral program at NYU ultimately produced some of the top leaders in the field of Jewish education over its twenty-year run). And, they care deeply about what they are doing, why, and toward what ends, so that they are willing to go above and beyond to help it succeed, all the while convincing others (stakeholders, funders, end-users) to care about it as much.
Additional core skills and aptitudes of professorpreneurs include subject matter/disciplinary expertise and scholarly credibility; the ability to translate theory into practice without diluting complexity, so that their sophisticated ideas are relatable to non‑academic audiences (partners, funders, policymakers); the capacity to identify and pursue real‑world problems as much as they might also satisfy academic interests; an understanding of the workings of the university behind the scenes, including grants management, intellectual property, compliance, ethics, and governance; experience in designing projects, programs, curricula, labs, and other activities and apparatuses with structure, scale, sustainability and, foremost, user engagement, in mind; willingness to experiment, evaluate, accept failure or imperfections, revise, and try again, as well as persistence when work is undervalued, misunderstood, or slow to gain traction; abiding academic integrity, public responsibility, and understanding of boundaries between scholarship and commercialization; the ability to say no to opportunities poorly aligned with mission; adeptness in managing multiple roles while maintaining boundaries between them; openness to feedback, improvement, and further learning; and, a healthy dose of humility.
In my ten years at GW (the last nine of them full-time), I’ve tried to leverage my professorpreneurial spirit, skills, and dispositions toward the creation of The Collaboratory: A Center for Jewish Education at GW, along with two new graduate degrees in Israel Education to complement the Experiential Jewish Education program, two major public engagement initiatives on combatting antisemitism and improving Jewish visibility in schools and universities, and several curricular projects, among other endeavors. These projects have been awarded millions of dollars of support from more than twenty philanthropic foundations, most of which were new to GW when our work first attracted their interest.
None of this could have been accomplished without the very close and intensive collaboration of extraordinarily competent and highly motivated faculty and staff colleagues, university and school administrators, funding stakeholders, organizational thought partners, grant managers, logistical coordinators, and so many more amazing human resources who have shared in the vision and accepted the charge to strive for excellence and achieve measurable outcomes. I am gratified, humbled, and appreciative of the ‘village’ it takes to realize the potential of these efforts for the betterment of GW, the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, and the wider spheres we hope to influence.
Even amid all this activity, I thankfully have had occasion to go back into the archives to research and write a few monographs on the history of Jewish education and social studies education, and on the teaching of Jewish history and social studies—along with a book I co-authored with Bob Chazan (the historian) and Barry Chazan (a philosopher) that was decidedly traditionally academic. Citation tracking software tells me that some of my published works are read and referred to by scholars and students, which is gratifying, though the peer-reviewed journal article that earned me the prestigious Exemplary Research in Social Studies Award from the National Council for the Social Studies when I was on the tenure track has garnered only a few clicks over the years. On the other hand, that “18x18 Framework” I co-developed in my first years on the professorpreneurial track has been adapted by organizations serving thousands of constituents, and the graduate and fellowship programs I’ve directed have prepared hundreds of professionals for school and non-school settings, creating a significant multiplier effect. To paraphrase my friend Sam Wineburg once again: THESE are my greatest achievements in academia.
NOTE: I am indebted to the GWALA program for providing the learning, collegiality, space, and impetus for me to write this reflection; to my mentors for their feedback and encouragement; and to my colleague Ilana M. Horwitz, whose provocative book, The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2025), provided much of the food for my thought.