To get through grad school, particularly unfunded, takes a huge personal commitment. It also puts you in a position where anything that looks like security is remarkable. And success means a job you likely can’t leave for another of the same kind.
Don’t think for one second that university administrators don’t know, and bank on, this.
There’s a LOT about the job I love and wouldn’t have elsewhere. And I identify as a historian so strongly that without some way to make a living at it, leaving doesn’t appeal. But I often wonder what it would be like to work in a sector where moving was a realistic possibility.
The more universities become shells for think tanks and shills for industry, the more the rhetoric of pedagogy is hollowed out by the progress of precarity, the less unique their role as social institutions seems to me to be, and the less value my work under their aegis can have.
NB I get that the original poll is not particularly serious. It produces a caricature; I don't feel bound to stay because of sunk costs, nor do I think I couldn't do other work.
But the lack of options within academia speaks for itself. How many jobs are there in your subfield?
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Anyway, apparently she's taken it upon herself to make some things up about me. I'm not the first she's done this to (see images 2-4), and I don't know what she imagines the point is, but here you are.
Also, there's plenty of space in my Irish Studies class, coming in January!
I don't know if it's funnier that celebademics and grandees bit at a "campus free speech" scam *by someone known for trying to get profs fired for speech*,
or that they couldn't even stick it for two weeks,
or that Haidt and Gladwell are "sending" people to a nonexistent campus
Maybe it's just my rationality talking, but if the Board of Advisors wasn't supposed to endorse the University of Austin's claims... then why are they leaving?
Anyway I love that Steven Pinker, who plainly signed onto this without looking into it, taught them about the importance of critical thinking. He taught me about not fabricating sources the exact same way
I guess this is what it's like to be cancelled in the back
Anyway, I don't think anyone watching excuses be made for kids shooting protestors (or neo-Nazis driving into them, or whatever it'll be next time) gets to wonder how violence becomes normal in domestic political life. For a lot of people it seems to be perfectly normal already.
This is to say nothing of vigilantes at the border, or Jan 6, or attacks on statehouses.
Reading a lot of fairly mainstream right-wing or pseudo-centrist commentators and the audience they cater to, you could easily forget that Kyle Rittenhouse killed anybody, or that the lives he took were human.
I don't think there's any coming back from this kind of thinking.
"thinking that someone who killed protestors maybe dehumanized protestors -- ha, classic projection"
"wow so now a guy who took an assault rifle to protests and killed people must be *guilty*, huh. sounds like you need to get your story straight"