Live from El Paso: **: Essay on a Long Academic Job Search: "not all of the attention the essay received was positive...
...Some didn’t like that my story, as opposed to the many others out there, was getting attention. Some thought Ph.D.s who accept contingent employment are responsible for their own victimization. Others thought I was foolish to have children before finding job security. Trolls in the comments section helpfully suggested that my wife should leave me. (So far, she has managed to ignore them.) More serious critics thought that I came off as arrogant or entitled....
I... had seen that most writers who express public frustration with their outcomes on the [academic] job market saw their credentials attacked and were told that they were inadequate in some way. In trying to link my personal tragedy to the systemic crisis of adjunctification that had made it more likely, I had to establish that I was doing everything that could be asked.... Only then could the essay convince people of the depth of the jobs crisis and thus make an important contribution to a conversation about responsibility and reform. Most readers, as far as I could tell, took it in that spirit....
Then one place reversed course: a teaching program in political economy at the University of California at Berkeley, the same university where I had been working as a lecturer in history.... I finished my book.... As teaching began in the fall, I was grateful to be able to design courses on topics such as the historical origins of inequality and on capitalism in U.S. foreign relations that are among the best syllabi I’ve ever assembled.... Berkeley’s lecturers have been unionized for decades and enjoy good benefits. If you can get a full-time load (I had half), your salary will resemble that of a public school teacher. And if your teaching is good, you can count on continued employment and even go through a review after six years and get a kind of tenurelike security....
Mine has been a good workplace, and I’m grateful.... But it’s worth noting that even if in this relatively optimistic projection... we will have institutionalized a new form of non-tenure-track work.... The jobs crisis will continue to exert downward pressure on wages and conditions everywhere except the academic stratosphere....
Even if I was not first choice, I did in the end get a job offer.... But... even this year was a near thing. And I continue to see accomplished scholars and creative teachers go unhired, year after year.... 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...
