Brutalizing academe
Timothy Burke, who teaches history as Swarthmore College, is a brilliant mind and thoughtful writer. For years he’s maintained one of the best academia-adjacent blogs on the internet, called Easily Distracted. Recently he switched over to Substack, where (by/through/from which?—the terminology here seems opaque, platform- and mediation-wise) he’s been sending daily emails to all subscribers (until such time as it switches over to paying subscribers only). The Substack is called Eight by Seven, and a week ago the post for the day was titled “Academia: Falling Away.” It starts this way:
I have had three strikingly similar conversations in the last few weeks with colleagues (two at other institutions, one at Swarthmore) about their perception that younger tenure-track faculty at their institutions are wary, disaffected and disconnected not just from the institution they’re working for but from departments, disciplines, and the more abstract professional activities and obligations that compose “academia”. My conversational partners weren’t thinking about a mood limited to the pandemic, but instead about a deeper sense of alienation and malaise that preceded and seemingly survived it.
In each case, while I was wary about the generalization overall, my main response was, “If so, can you blame them”? On the whole, that structure of feeling rests on something real—and the people who might be able to shift it towards a more connected, enthusiastic and trusting posture seem unaware of the problem or are unwilling to make the changes that would encourage an attitudinal shift.
What justifies it? For one, the simple fact that if you’ve been hired into a tenure-track position in an American university or college, unless you are supremely arrogant or unobservant, you know you’ve mostly been lucky. There were likely twenty, thirty, fifty or more people just as well-qualified and capable as you hoping for that position, in a profession whose leaders and governing authorities are steadily eliminating such jobs in favor of poorly-paid, poorly-treated temporary teachers (who are nevertheless expected to have full professional qualifications). In your first three or four years as a tenure-track professor, you may receive even further verification of how seemingly random your employment is by participating in a job search on the other side. You can’t easily embrace a professional future that seems built on discarding and exploiting so many other people as qualified and capable as yourself.
He goes on at length, both to describe and to indict what life is like for far too many junior faculty in the academy right now. I’m fortunate in having few, perhaps no, experiences on a par with his account here. But it resonates nonetheless, since it brings to mind names and faces of friends and colleagues who have had similar, and similarly awful, experiences. It’s harrowing and alarmist, in other words, but it’s true.
