My 15 minutes, one year later

My latest column for Inside Higher Ed updates my viral essay from March 2014 about the job market, and asks us to use a bit of Rawls to think about our fate:

And for those of us who do (or will, in my case) have the privilege of working as part of an increasingly rare model that supports our activity as researchers, I have increasingly found myself thinking about what we do and do not deserve, in the manner of the philosopher John Rawls. For Rawls, we cannot possibly deserve our lot in life. This is for many reasons: our skills and attitudes depend on accidents of birth and parentage, for example. More fundamentally, the qualities that we happen to possess are (or are not) valued in certain ways by our particular social arrangement at our particular point in time.

Rawls, famously, suggests that we should design a just society from behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing which position in it we will occupy after our birth. Under these conditions, Rawls thinks, we would grant everyone basic rights, and those inequalities that exist would exist only insofar as they benefited those least well-off. It would be hard to argue, looking only at the system of higher education employment that we have today, that it would meet any kind of Rawlsian standard of justice.

Those of us who have had good fortune to be on the tenure track need to be humble about our luck. We have indeed worked hard for our position, so it can be difficult to feel that we don’t deserve it. But the number of astonishingly talented people who also deserve what we have should shame us from such feelings. We are not behind a veil of ignorance, and we cannot build a new order from scratch. But we should make sure that we are attentive to ways that we can use our positions to improve conditions for those who are least well-off. We cannot deserve our privilege, and they deserve no less.

How to Treat Adjuncts

My latest on issues in higher education is up, on the subject of how to treat contingent faculty with respect.

It used to be the case that non-tenure-track faculty were assumed to be inferior to their tenure-line colleagues. These days, however, jobs have become so scarce in many fields that one’s position in the academic hierarchy is largely an accident of birth. One could probably instantly create a new university that would rival the world’s best simply by hiring from the pool of the un- and under-employed.

Suggests for best practices, at the link. I want to hasten to emphasize that I myself feel I have been generally well-treated, and that some of the these practices are based on things I have experienced.

An Anti-Conference (Interview) Manifesto

Now up at Inside Higher Ed:

The basic argument against the conference interview is straightforward: It imposes considerable costs on the interviewees at a time in their lives when they are likely to be painful to absorb. Professional membership dues, conference registration, airfare, and lodging can easily run to $1,000 or more. Most job-seekers are, naturally, people without secure jobs: graduate students, lecturers, adjuncts, and postdocs. Only the latter (and occasionally the first) are likely to have a support budget from their university to attend the conference, meaning that for most the money will come, in whole or in part, out of pocket. Candidates are sometimes only notified if they will have an interview a few weeks — or, in egregious cases, just a few days — before the conference begins. 

For a graduate student, $1,000 probably equals a month’s salary; for adjuncts and lecturers, it still represents many weeks of labor: money that they will be forced to spend on a kind of grotesque parody of an actual vacation. To this might be added the environmental costs of flying and the difficulties imposed on families, especially those with young children, and you have an institution that would seem to have little to recommend it. If it were not already a tradition, and someone proposed that candidates hoping for tenure-track jobs should have to pay a four-figure dollar amount simply to be eligible for possible employment, it would be considered an unconscionable form of pay-to-play. Yet because it is already the norm, it is accepted.

Read the whole thing here. Also read Rebecca Schuman, who makes a similar case.

Since writing, a friend in Stanford's History Department wrote to tell me that they've voted this year to eliminate conference interviewing. And the positive examples I give in the piece are based on experiences I've had on the job market. Best practices, or at least better practices, are available!

Refusing to quit academe

An essay I wrote about my experience on the academic job market, my children, and my mother's death, has been featured at Inside Higher Ed. The key sentences: "how do you ask a year to be the last one to die for a mistake?" and "The academic job market has taken so much from me over the last years; I don't want to let it take away my career as well."

Update: the piece was picked up by Slate.