Anger, 2021
In which I’m very angry about higher education.
Let me not bury my lede: I’ve recently seen some Tweets about digital humanities in/and higher education that have made me very angry. Specifically, I’m angry about how the realities of the job market appear to escape the grasp of those who benefit from and maintain that reality, and the willful blindness that permeates “guidance” offered to those attempting to enter academia.
If you don’t want to watch me be angry, this might not be the piece for you at this moment. With that said, let’s get into it.
The Tweet that has really set me off is this: “Grad students: in a shitty job year, TT gigs at Princeton, Wash U, U Wash, Notre Dame + others in cultural analytics/DH — with few strong applicants & lots more jobs to come. If you find data science at all intriguing, consider learning more. This is a wide open, exciting field.”
Wow. Ok.
Let’s take this piece by piece, with the appropriate caveats: I understand that faculty want to give hope to their students, and that they probably take seriously their role as givers of hope. This is important. I understand that Twitter is not a peer-reviewed publication, and this unfortunate phrasing is perhaps not able to withstand even a cursory close reading. This is important. I trust that this person is operating in good faith, and it’s not my intention to attack an individual for what may well be a quick tweet in between too many zoom sessions.
But one of many problems is that this particular tweet is by no means unique; every job season, increasingly-desperate job hunters are told “it will work out!” and increasingly-clueless professors point to the one or two job ads they’ve personally seen as mystical augurs of positive change to come. After the year we’ve had, after the decade of austerity politics and an utterly uncertain future, to spout blind platitudes is the worst kind of toxic positivity that harms everybody.
That said, and caveats properly caveat-ed, here are a few of the most pressing questions that I have about this kind of job advice.
1. What does it mean to address “grad students” here?
2. Why are we still limiting our ideas of academic success to tenured and tenure-track jobs?
3. What qualifies as a “shitty job year”?
4. Who is excluded from the phrase “strong applicants”?
5. What can we do?
And here, to the best of my ability, are my answers:
1. In addressing “grad students,” I believe that this particular tweet is irresponsible, and ignores the reality of higher education in this moment. That is, faculty lines today are not opened to create opportunity for our newest members; in this environment of (artificial) crisis, departments are likely going to play it safe and give jobs to people who can demonstrate they have already successfully done that job — and gathered the accompanying publications, accolades, and/or grant funding that accompanies such a position.
If we are cynical we might call this hiring formula intellectually lazy: rather than rolling up one’s sleeves and engaging with the exhausting list of materials applicants have been asked to create, search committees focus on scholars that harder workers have already vetted. If we are generous we might consider this a survival mechanism for faculty who have watched their service obligations explode over the last few decades. Whatever the cause, the practical outcome is a narrowing of the pool for this particular lottery to people who have already won the lottery. This is how privilege works, especially when the privileged do not reflect on their role in it. In short: grad students won’t get these jobs; already-employed faculty will.
There is a real and pressing discussion to be had among faculty about how to mentor and advise their students in a situation like this, when a pandemic and its tangible economic implications have exacerbated already-existing inequalities. But I’m not tenure track, and it’s actually been made pretty clear to me first as a graduate student, then as a postdoc, and now as a Visiting Assistant Professor, that the tenure-track is the price of admission to be taken seriously here.
This should change, but it won’t change without labor solidarity. Graduate students across the country and around the world are fighting to form unions and to maintain them. And they are facing incredible barriers, from the bad-faith bargaining from institutions, as at the University of Michigan this summer, to the simple apathy of those securely-employed professors who are afraid to rock the boat, at everywhere else. Graduate students, nevertheless, are fighting to form unions that would benefit those people who are afraid.
2. Having four whole “cultural analytics” TT jobs does not mean that the jobs crisis is solved. Rather, ONLY having four “data science” jobs is itself a crisis; and more deeply, celebrating the existence of four jobs reflects the impoverishment of our intellectual worlds in a crisis context. And here’s the thing about crisis thinking, which people much smarter than I have articulated (thanks Hannah!); it limits you. Living in an economic or emotional crisis narrows your world so that you focus on survival. You do what you have to to make it out alive and whole and mostly healthy. The last year has bombarded us with countless calls for solidarity and sacrifice; the rallying cry of “we’re all in this together” rings hollow. Not all sacrifices are equal; for some, quarantines and austerity have restricted nightlife activities. For others, those conditions have threatened rent, child care, and groceries. For TT people, they might lose their job, because TT jobs no longer carry even the nominal promise of job security. For non-TT people, they might never get one, and are faced with a decade of lost wages, lost career advancement, lost investment in their communities and families and friends, all in service of something they have worked hard for and are prevented from getting.
But the most insidious thing about crisis thinking is that the mindset makes it so much harder — even impossible — to envision an expansive and reformed graduate education that does not rely on a dying model of serving a decade of underpaid apprenticeship to fight over the scraps of a profession. For that matter, I’m fairly certain that there is so much more to digital humanities than data science; data science is one tiny branch of a field that I, as a participant, do in fact find incredibly exciting. For example, there’s virtual reality in/and performance. There’s creative practice. There’s public humanities. There’s historical research. There’s Black DH, which I would argue is actually the “wide open, exciting field” that this tweet locates in data science (which is often narrowed even further to mean “text analysis in English”). What else could graduate education look like?
3. This phrasing — “in a shitty job year” — implies that there is a year in the last decade that hasn’t been shitty. It implies that things will, at some point in the future, not be shitty. As someone who started grad school in 2008 and has been looking for permanent jobs since 2014, this tweet indicates willful malice at worst and woeful naivete at best. (It may only indicate that this person has tenure.) If I felt like it, I would link to one of those yearly despondent posts about how there are no jobs. Also, for fuck’s sake; FOUR jobs?! This is how we predict a strong future for cultural analytics/DH/data science? I would imagine that at LEAST five people will graduate this year.
4. Ok, here’s where I get rude. I’m particularly interested in the choice to talk about “strong applicants” in the phrase “with few strong applicants [for these four jobs] & lots more jobs to come.” I would like to ask what makes a “strong applicant.” What graduate students have been told is that there are TOO MANY strong applicants! That there are simply too many people graduating! This is why the program is not admitting anyone this year! This is why your time to degree has been capped at five years! This is why your funding is getting cut short; it’s not our fault, you’re not strong enough!
I don’t have tenure or even a tenure track job; perhaps this is another hidden curriculum piece that I’ve missed, to know what truly constitutes a strong applicant. A personal failing of mine, no doubt, since structural factors simply couldn’t be at play in this, our academic meritocracy. Perhaps this person has been on all of these committees, and knows this for a fact. But what this looks like is someone who has SIMPLY NO IDEA of the work being done by young or untenured scholars, and who refuses to do the hard work of finding out.
Snark aside, the phrase “with few strong applicants” does a lot of work here, work which pushes us toward the amorphous, racist, sexist, ableist framework of “rigor.” Who, exactly, is a strong-enough applicant to get tenure at Princeton, a place infamous for refusing tenure? (Those people usually go on to other jobs, probably at a place like, as the tweet says, “Wash U” or “U Wash” or “Notre Dame.”) In this context, a “strong applicant” seems to be someone who fits this particular person’s definition of strength, which further equates data science and cultural analytics with DH and excludes a vast swath of vibrant and underrepresented scholarship.
And this is what has made me so angry. I’m angry for my friends, who are in fact “strong applicants” but aren’t willing to move around the country for 1-year positions until they land that TT job (which statistically, they won’t. They haven’t.) They are “strong applicants,” who can code and visualize and write and teach and publish, but didn’t go to the right schools (you know what the right schools are, don’t pretend). Or maybe they did go to the right school, but someone from another right school got that job. They are “strong applicants” who just didn’t win the lottery of — let me count — FOUR whole jobs in one year for an entire continent (and really, the globe). They are “strong applicants” who maybe didn’t smile at the right time and pissed off a senior faculty member. They are “strong applicants” who smiled too much and came off as unserious. They are candidates who come from marginalized communities. They are candidates who have caregiving responsibilities during (and before and after) a pandemic. They are candidates who have even slightly deviated from that ideal path towards becoming a “strong applicant.” But most of all, they are strong candidates who weren’t lucky enough to already have a job.
This isn’t just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. (That implies that everyone in this scenario is in/on the same boat, that the disaster is natural, that we couldn’t have seen it coming…) This is a distraction, a call to keep on telling grad students to work on their chair-shuffling skills while the people who will actually get these jobs, the associate and full professors (and MAYBE some upwardly-mobile assistants), are already in the lifeboat and paddling happily off to new opportunities while the Titanic sinks and all the deck chairs and everyone in them slowly drowns. And don’t you dare ask for one of those empty seats in the life boat, because we’ve had so many strong applicants for these four open seats we were forced to make some very difficult decisions, and we regret this sincerely. Because let’s be honest, when that Associate leaves their position for one of these lovely new jobs, that old position won’t be refilled. This isn’t growth. It’s not even musical chairs. It’s getting in the lifeboat and waving goodbye.
5. So what do we do? For me, that depends so much on my own positionality, and I’m struggling to balance making my anger articulate with a desire to help others in this same position. I know the grief and rage of this place too well to leave you here alone; really all I think I, alone, can do is to hold space for myself and others to just be so angry.
But what happens if I am not alone? What if we do this together?
If you are tenured and reading this, I am asking two things. The easiest one is, if you don’t have grad students or are talking to grad students who aren’t yours, is to just…stop. Stop giving false hope. Stop giving bad advice. Stop pretending it’s ok. Start saying “how can I support you?” and then buying them a drink or a meal (venmo exists, you have no excuse). The harder/hardest ask is: I ask you to face your fears. If you are afraid of getting fired for speaking up…I’m sorry, but if your institution wants to fire you, they can and they will, and they won’t need a reason. If you are afraid of making people angry…I would bet that some people, maybe your students, are already angry with you. They are just afraid to tell you. And the truly shitty thing, this year as every year, is that their anger has no consequence, which is why they haven’t told you, because telling you would mean they trusted you to make a difference in your behavior. One way you can demonstrate your commitment is to support graduate students when they unionize. Even better, you should be the one leading the charge. Don’t leave the work to those people who have so little job security they don’t even count as workers.
If you are tenure track, I’m asking you to find the power in your life. You have more than you think; the institution has decided to invest in you and actually might have something to lose if they fire you. You’ve been told for a very long time that you have none, and guess who benefits from that? The people with more power. You might also attend conferences like this one on the future of graduate education.
If you are securely employed either on or off the tenure track, perhaps consider uploading your job materials to the Academic Job Market Support Network. Models are a concrete way to make a difference to someone who is looking for secure employment, a way for you to pass on your skills and talent.
If you’re a graduate student, I will continue to hold this space for you. You might also find your people; I’ve found mine in the Visionary Futures Collective, and they help me keep my anger from suffocating me. With them I’ve found some joy even as I mourn my lost profession.
In conclusion: come, be angry with me. Maybe together we can laugh at how truly awful it is that someone thinks four jobs is exciting.
Thank you to the Visionary Futures Collective; this is for you.
