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"The Department of History invites applications for an assistant professor who will make enough leftist remarks to annoy conservative talk radio hosts but whose politics will ultimately support the neoliberal mission of the university." mcsweeneys.net/articles/hones…

Why in the world are we still forcing precariously employed academic job candidates to submit mass amounts of materials in the first round? Cover letter, CV, teaching statement, DEI statement, writing sample, 3 rec letters, plus whatever the heck a “personal statement” means. 🧵

academia is so brutal to ECRs. my current job ends this month & my email is vanishing that same day, which is causing havoc with the journal portals where Ive got articles submitted / accepted / in production. mayb Im naive, but is it rlly that hard to give us a few months grace?

Yep, this stuff is nonsense. They end access so abruptly I've started listing a professional gmail address as my contact for all articles. Also, debating just writing "contingent scholar" as my affiliation in the absence of someone paying me for my research time

13 of the 20 are members of the newly formed OUP USA Guild, which is rightly filing a grievance. It’s so hard for me to wrap my head around the scale of OUP. 20 in-house staff is more than most UPs have period—incl mine. The equivalent of an entire press—“redundant.” Shameful.

once I was on an academic job search for a one year appointment (!!!) where a committee member said one candidate wasn’t deferential enough to our institution and was too on their high horse — just a flagrant projection that had no basis in evidence. people are fucking nuts

Early career academics should unionize in recognition that their institution is their common nemesis

The right-wing funded Hamilton Center continues to hire in the humanities while mainstream universities abandon these fields. Hamilton is snapping up phenomenal scholars while the rest of US universities have become totally STEM-pilled h-net.org/jobs/job_displ…

When every other university abandons hiring in history, literature, and political thought, it creates the conditions for right-wing enclaves like Hamilton to hire amazing scholars in need of employment.

hard agree

This is an important story for everyone in academia, especially those of us who teach full time off the tenure track, to follow: just having a "good" NTT job doesn't guarantee stability or insulate you from precarity. Only a union contract does that.

I remember talking to Van about job precarity as I was about to graduate from my MFA program. He told me he'd painted houses, worked in a prison. And yet, here we are.

this attitude is all over the place, especially with tenured folks: understanding or even having class solidarity doesn't mean squat if you don't think of contingent folks as equals, as "real faculty" yet

The fact that the status quo right now is "history is vanishing as a professional endeavour" might be worth thinking about in this connection

I've been contingent for five years. It's been manageable; sometimes good. Even then, I've been replaced on courses without notice, told there's no courses at the same time that people chase new hires Failure to see contingent faculty as real or priority colleagues is chronic

back in 2018: tenured profs suck but they aren’t the problem, admin is 2024: admin is the problem. tenured profs are also very clearly the problem

I have a cover! Coming early 2025 from the University of California Press

Prediction: the material conditions necessary for actual free expression will not be part of the work of this hedge fund.

Working through editorial feedback for a book review for a Classics journal (not something I do often) and golly Classics is the only discipline I work with where positive comments about how a book helps redirect the field get read as an attack. *So* much defensive gatekeeping