Thread by @BretDevereaux

Good thread. 'The discipline and the public culture' want the research work of lots of teaching-track and adjunct historians (and classicists, by the by), but have no idea how - or worse yet, no intention to - fund that. Or really incentivize it at all. 1/20

https://twitter.com/Robert_Z_Larson/status/1404786067815997445

And it does need to be funded. While a lot of pop history can be written with nothing more than google and a public library (though not necessarily written well!), doing real, rigorous historical research requires expensive resources. 2/20

The books needed for research are often very expensive, meaning that you really need the support of a university library which can buy these things. Research trips to archives or museums to examine primary source material directly are expensive and need to be funded. 3/20

And of course you need time to do all of this. A system in which, apart from an elect tenured few, most historians are doing the work of history as second jobs is one in which only the leisured class does history - because only they will be able to afford to. 4/20

And to be clear, the kind of historical work that really moves the field forward is generally the short which requires years of research to produce narrow, technical books only other historians read. 5/20

Yet, as I've already discussed, without that work producing original history, none of the popular oriented history - the documentaries, youtube channels, popular books, even the high school and college classes - can function: acoup.blog/2020/07/09/col…

I suppose I must seem to be the exception - I've managed to crowdfund my research. Except I haven't really - I've created a public engagement history/classics presence which throws off enough money for my research.

That's a meaningful difference, I think. 7/20

While my patrons know they are helping me to do my research work and get monthly updates on my work, the nature of academic publishing means I can only rarely share the final products of that research with them directly, b/c I don't hold the copyright unencumbered. 8/20

And the response I frequently get is "why not publish open-access?" but the answer goes back to incentives: because I'm on the job market every year, instead of being in a permanent position, I have to aim my activity towards 'prestige'... 9/20

...because that is the kind of thing that hiring committees value (even if it is no guarentee of actually getting a job) and I can't afford to deviate from that because - again - I must face them every year.

Academic freedom doesn't exist in the precariate. 10/20

In theory, of course, history and classics departments - and their permanent faculty - want to be hiring. They blame university administration, which is fair. 11/20

But then, at the same time, what are they willing to do? Are they willing to hire scholars with non-traditional publications? Or with less prestigous pedigrees? Or who focus more on public engagement than on prestige scholarship?

Of course not. 12/20

Are they going to reach out to independent and precarious scholars? Stop treating conference badges with SLCs or 'independent researcher' as the academic affiliation as pariahs? Of course not. 13/20

What about job applications with less onerous required documents, since precarious scholars need to do dozens each year? It is literally a zero-cost intervention and - of course not. "Here is our one-year adjunct position, please supply complete teaching portfolio and..." 14/20

I know - we all know - that permanent faculty in history and classics would rather be hiring. Would rather the deans and deanlets and trustees gave you the funds to solve away this problem by just hiring.

But they're not going to do that. We all know this. 15/20

So the question becomes, 'what are *you* going to do? What are the major professional associations - the AHA, the SCS, the AIA - going to do?'

The miserlyness of universities becomes an excuse for those with power to do nothing. 16/20

There are exceptions, of course - I do not wish to paint with too broad a brush. But where is the SCS or AHA statement pleading for departments to adopt standard application materials? Why not highlight the work of precarious scholars at annual meetings more? 17/20

"Oh, well we have this one panel at oh-God-o-clock on adjuncts..." - uh huh. Call me when that is the topic of the keynote.

Why not encourage departments to hire from their adjuncts instead of fresh PhDs from the Ivies? 18/20

Rather than endlessly blaming things we, as a field, cannot control, I think we could actually do a lot to focus on the things we can change and do those. There are a lot of them, but they have been left mostly untried. 19/20

In any event, the only resource I have is my wonderful readers and I am perfectly willing to share - if you have a project that you want a popular audience to know about, I am happy to feature it: acoup.blog/guest-posts/ end/20