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I’m still waiting for the academy (generally) to recognize the toll that this pandemic will take on precarious and junior scholars and graduate students, particularly if our social distancing extends into the new school year.
That is, not only has an entire semester been lost, but an entire cycle of the job market. Actually, I’m willing to say an entire two cycles of the job market given administrative reluctance to fill lines and the oncoming damage to higher ed budgets in the wake of the virus.
Yet, there has been little acknowledgement of this on a systemic level. Individuals have expressed concern, members of these groups have expressed nothing short of despair, but none of the folks with the power to make change have done anything about the oncoming situation.
(Well... except for extend or pause tenure clocks. They did that.)
Moreover, this is going to impact different fields differently: the humanities will likely go down in flames, given the unwillingness of higher-ed and institutions generally to support these programs, and it will start with the area studies and move quickly through other fields.
STEM folks might be more insulated, and this is a big MIGHT depending on their institutional relationships and the effect that cultural shifts post-corona have on STEM research. E.x. the AI research boom retools to serve epidemiology and virology and health functions.
(This, I think, is NOT GOOD because our culture has not demonstrated itself capable of not misusing technology)
But to the point, a bunch of us are watching the oncoming end of our lives as we know it, the end of the futures that we once thought possible, and it is in no small part due to the ways that we have been deemed irrelevant by the actions of our institutions.
Which, not to be Deweyan about it, is continuous with the way segments of our society have deemed those most vulnerable to be acceptable losses at the altar of the economy. I say continuous but not identical (big distinction) because the decisions are made based on value.
Values which are made clear by the moral documents that are budgets, by the budgetary decisions to protect some faculty, some members of the academy, and not others. Decisions which, as Dewey says, reveal the character of institutions and fields.
That said, I am asking you to once again stick up for your precarious faculty, your junior scholars, your grad students, because we’re literally watching our future crumble around us, and some of us aren’t even out of the gate yet.
