Thread by @danroyles

The thing is that our market works differently than a lot of others. There is a very small, and inelastic, pool of jobs available, and many more PhDs than there are good—or even decent or livable—jobs available 1/

https://twitter.com/fednavarro/status/1651735352816832513

When I was looking for a job, people would tell me I should move where I want to live and look for a job there. It doesn’t work that way. We go where jobs are, because there are so few jobs available, not where we necessarily want to go. 2/

So when I see well-meaning people #onhere saying, “Come to Colorado! We’d love to have you!” I have to sigh and shake my head. If there’s not a job contract there with my name and signature on it, that’s just consigning myself to extreme underemployment 3/

And it’s not like you can go be an adjunct somewhere and work your way up. Paths from contingent employment to even more stable *un*tenured employment are so rare that they may as well not exist 4/

So those of us who stand to lose our jobs here stand to lose our careers as well. There just are not viable paths forward if we get fired for political reasons. And that’s because of the structural factors I wrote about in the piece 5/

Some will be forced into early retirement. A very small number may get snatched up elsewhere. Those who try to adjunct will lose 75% of their pay or more and will probably no longer be able to do any research 6/

And everyone else will have to… find new careers, I guess? I’ve talked to lots of other faculty who judging know what else they would do. We all did 10+ years of college education to make pretty modest salaries because we thought we would have job stability 7/

And get to do things we really love—teach and research. And now those things are under direct threat. 8/