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Catharsis. A facet of the humanities jobs crisis that I've experienced & others might have, too, is something one could call professional depression. Aside from obvious personal depression, I'm referring to the low motivation & burnout that sets in as career malaise deepens. 1/11
For academics, professional depression means ceasing to make the effort to organize conferences, forums, & other scholarly events. It means attending fewer such events, even if you have funds. It means not writing as much as you originally wanted. Because, why bother? 2/11
Regardless of my personal ambition, intellectual passion, love of teaching, & desire to advance knowledge together w my peers, the prospect of secure employment is my main incentive for continued participation in academia. 3/11
Even the most cynical grad student retains some dim prospect of secure employment as an incentivizing goal. Finishing the PhD itself is also a motivator. But after a few years post-PhD, professional depression sets in. Or at least it has for me. 4/11
Anxiety's refrain during grad school & well afterward is "I'm a fraud." For the professionally depressed early-career academic, it's "What's the point?" 5/11
If the ac job market really were meritocratic, then perhaps I'd want to continue beefing up the CV. But of course it's not. Aside from networking & nepotism, search cmtes are so overwhelmed & understaffed that they can't possibly evaluate 150-300 apps/position fairly. 6/11
With great interest & empathy I've read @erin_bartram's reflections on leaving academia, esp her orig piece about what's lost to the profession when early-career scholars are forced out. 7/11 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Everybody-Loses-When/242560
Professional depression refers to what's lost already to the profession when early-career scholars, who haven't left yet, withdraw their participation or diminish their productivity bc the prospect of secure employment has dimmed to almost nothing. 8/11
Professional depression is one reason why @dbessner & @mbrenes1 were basically correct in their critique of the AHA for putting all its eggs in the "career diversity" basket when the goal should be more good academic jobs. 9/11 https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-AHA-s-Mission-Needs-to/246243
Of course career diversity initiatives are humane & beneficial, even if uni admins can use them as ideological cover for casualizing academic labor. I'm suggesting that w/o the incentive of secure academic employment, the ongoing work of PhDs & postdocs suffers enormously. 10/11
Fwiw, I have yet to meet that mythical creature one often reads about in career diversity literature: the person who enters a humanities PhD program w the express intention of pursuing a non-ac career. Well, I did meet one. But he's a millionaire philanthropist. 11/11
My thoughts are influenced by @annehelen's piece on millennial burnout. Professional depression I'm sure occurs in many other labor sectors undergoing similar processes of precarization, ie, all of them. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work
