Junior Scholars and Professional Organizations

I've been a bit frustrated with the Medieval Academy of America, one of the scholarly organizations for medievalists, as it has been holding its annual meeting this week. The bits and pieces of the annual convention that have been coming across Twitter — and those that, crucially, have not — have painted a pretty bleak and alienating picture. I recognize that I'm getting the positive doubly or trebly mediated through listeners at the conference and their social media feeds, but the negative is (not) coming straight from the organization.

I applied for a grant for junior scholars that the MAA was administering, and also submitted my first article for consideration for their best first article award. I wasn't expecting to get either — it's a numbers game, it's mostly an organization for Latinists and not for Arabists or Hebraists, I don't think that well of myself, etc. — and I didn't. But the only way that I know that is via the total radio silence from the organization. Nobody at the Medieval Academy bothered to notify unsuccessful applicants prior to the meeting where the prizes would be announced. I found out about the first article award because the journal where the best article appeared posted the news; and I still don't know who received the grant or for what project. The MAA tweeted the fact that it was being announced but left out the relevant data and didn't respond to a direct query. They're now busy sharing detailed information about plaudits to senior scholars that already appeared on their web site before the meeting even started. None of the prize information has been updated on their site.

 

(Click to embiggen.)

It's helpful to publicize information about successful grant applications to give people who might reapply a sense of what the adjudicators are looking for. But it's that's not what's left me in a medium-grade bad mood over the last two days, watching the meeting transpire from afar. It seems petty to complain about not being notified that an application has failed or stalled when there are so many greater problems with the state of the academy, but in fact it's all part of the same thing. This kind of radio silence telegraphs a serious disregard of the pool of applicants, in this case junior scholars.

 In a profession where so much of a person's worth depends on what other people believe it to be, where we all question ourselves and feel like imposters even at our very best, it's especially insidious to ignore junior people from the top-down. I already intuited that my work didn't measure up; now I know that I do not even merit acknowledgement. I don't think that reinforcing the low-man position, the disposability, of junior faculty is the role that a scholarly organization should be taking. My impression was that these organizations were meant to be on the side of their members in a wider academy that might treat us as worthless.

I don't like feeling like my only real choice is to be an insider by implicitly accepting that junior faculty are disposable and ignorable; I don't want to have to accept that for myself, for my peers, or for the people who might one day be junior to me. But I don't like the alternative, either, which is to reject the framework and be a kind of perennial outsider. I can embrace not fitting in — after all, I am the odd-duck medieval Arabist in the back corner of my home, a thoroughly modernized Spanish department —  but at the same time a certain kind of rejectionism doesn't seem to be an intellectually or professionally productive out in the wider academic world.

I don't think I have a choice, though. What am I supposed to do in a group where the best advice I can get about how to help the discipline and the profession along is 1) to be polite to scholars working in later periods and 2) to stop screwing around and drinking coffee and to actually do something instead when I meet with other junior colleagues in other discipline and (in tweets I didn't screen-cap) 3) to work with people in other disciplines like anthropology and linguistics and 4) to leverage popular interest in the Middle Ages for programmatic purposes?

These are all things that I am doing already and that all the young medievalists I know are doing.

Maybe the folks at the top should try talking to some junior scholars and junior faculty before simultaneously writing us off and condescending to us.

Maybe it's too much to expect a scholarly organization to be a refuge from the indignities of the rest of the academy, but I do believe that some of that is necessary to foster the basic level of intellectual and scholarly dialogue. I'm not railing against heirarchy; I'm not asking to be treated like the vaunted senior faculty; I know I'm junior and have to pay my dues to the profession; but I don't think it's too much to ask for some very basic acknowledgement when I speak (or write an application). Otherwise, I'm just left shouting into a void. And while I'm stubborn, I'm not so stubborn that I'll keep standing there, shouting into the dark for very long. I'll stay a member of the Medieval Academy if for no reason other than to continue receiving the journal, Speculum, which I do read and use to keep up with books published and reviewed in my field. But as junior faculty still struggling a bit to figure out which scholarly organizations and groups really represent her professional home and house her best interlocutors, I think I can strike one more possibility off the list. I don't think this is my crowd.

"Aaay." (Or, What Does the Fonz Say While Grading and Jumping the Shark?)

The current iteration of the "adjunct movement" has jumped the shark.

Its self-appointed spokesman, who has been making far too much of a career out of being post-academic to legitimately call herself post-academic (does a general news-reading public actually care about sex at the MLA?), has written that her rageful, vulgar, over-the-top rhetorical style is a deliberate way of showing other people that it's possible to speak out without the world coming to an end. Except apparently it has:

Losing your job and rendering yourself unemployable technically isn't one of the signs of the Apocalypse, but it's also completely disingenuous to exhort people to do the things that have gotten you fired without admitting that fact except off-handed and buried in a comment thread.

Perhaps it's not unconscionable to ask other people to put their jobs on the line for systemic changes, but it's completely unconscionable to claim that you're being completely honest about what you're asking and about what it implies — the only truly honest one out there, in fact, because you have nothing left to lose — and then not to be.

Theme and variation on that conclusion, which also starts to get to my next point about this discussion just becoming a lot of noise, is this:

As I said the last time I wrote about all of this sound and fury, I hope that in a few years I will be in a position to do something both about academic publishing, which is my pet issue (about which I have written angrily and honestly but completely differently), and about the state of hiring, which is a far greater systemic issue. I'm fortunate to be in a department that is very supportive of non-TT faculty, so the idea that I would be in such a position isn't at all far-fetched. But that'll never happen if I were, say, to pull the house down on myself right now; so I'm going to do something that is completely self-serving while also being the thing that will position me to do something other than shout.

For the first time since I signed up for Twitter, I'm finding the cacophony of the academic Twitterverse to be far more distracting than productive while simultaneously being completely tedious. So I'm taking a social media break, if not until my book manuscript is finished, then at least until the end of January when my book-manuscript marathon is over. It's a bit like putting on my own oxygen mask in a depressurized airplane cabin before helping others with theirs. I'm able bodied, to continue the analogy, and yes I'm helping myself first, but if I were to pass out from lack of breathable air, I wouldn't be any good to anybody.

I don't want to continue to watch what is, in effect, someone having a huge professional meltdown, and that's what's come to dominate these last few weeks. It is no longer a social movement but rather has become voyeuristic social-emotional gore:

I'll continue to write in this space, and I may even post the occasional link on Twitter or Facebook, but other than that, I'm checked out. The din in my head, to borrow a turn of phrase from Cynthia Ozick, has just gotten too much.

Fact-Checking and the Job Market

The post-ac series of MLA job posting naming-and-shamings as a way to call out a broken system of academic hiring continued this week, and was picked up by Inside Higher Ed. As I noted in my links roundup last week, there's starting to be some pushback against blind, self-righteous rage as the primary response to the state of the market. This most recent effort garnered a response from Claire Potter in her Chronicle of Higher Ed. column, in which she takes on both the tone and the fast-and-loose-with-facts methodology.

As Potter concedes she has done, I have written some angry blog posts about frustrating aspects of the profession. But I also agree with her that the tone and flailing scope of this discussion is problematic and singularly unproductive. (Though apparently that puts me in the oppressive category of the "tone police.") In fact, almost everything that I would have wanted to say has been said by others: Potter herself, Historiann, and a few commenters in the Tenured Radical thread, of which Schuman has questionably declared herself victor. So this will be a quick post, one that elaborates just a bit of Potter's point about fact-checking.

This was one salvo in the back-and-forth:

In a later blog post, Schuman says that this isn't meant as an ad-hominem attack on Potter, just a reflection of the truth of the current state of affairs. I know that the market sucks and that while some good people do get good jobs, loads of good people don't get good jobs or don't get jobs at all. But the fact of the matter is that new and very green PhDs are still among the set of good people getting good jobs. I was hired into my current TT position three years ago while ABD and with no publications. The next person in my graduate program to go on the market after me (tiny program — one or two students per cohort) fared similarly. A friend in another field and with a PhD from a different university was hired into a TT job at a prestigious liberal arts school just as he was finishing his dissertation. It happens and not in isolated cases. In other words, I know I was exceptionally lucky, but I also know that my luck wasn't exceptional. And so yes, while the job market is unquestionably tighter than it was twenty years ago, to say nothing of fifty years ago, to say that Claire Potter wouldn't have been hired into her job were she applying today with her 1991 CV is nothing but an unfounded ad hominem attack that's as ungrounded in reality as a search committee that gives candidates five days' notice for an MLA interview.

I can imagine some of the criticism I might get for saying this, specifically that I'm inured to the suffering of the masses on the job market because of my own success and that having someone like me on board doesn't matter because I'm now officially part of the privileged class. But I do get it: I can see the numbers and as much as I have done well and know people who have done well, I also have friends who are struggling, taking their second or third adjunct gig or postdoctoral fellowship in the hopes that they'll get a "real" job soon. I can see that both experiences are reality, I believe that hiring should be more fair, humane and accessible than it is, and in another couple of years (inshallah) I may well be in a position to do something about it at the institutional level. But I definitely don't want to jump on board with a shrill movement that disregards some realities in exclusive favor of the ones that suit its purposes.