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A plea to those who are in the (virtual) room when such decisions are being made and adjusted in the months and years to come: 1/? https://twitter.com/terry_renaud/status/1247618667803705344
There will be exceptions to these hiring freezes. Please be careful in considering what kinds of exceptions you choose to advocate for. 2/?
If exceptions are made only to hire senior faculty during this period of austerity, whatever the apparent short-term upside for the institution, know with certainty that this will only compound the damage done to the future of the humanities. 3/?
Whenever a tenured or T/T position goes to somebody who already has a T/T position, there is no promise of a trickle down—those junior positions can and will evaporate. This has been the case for at least a decade, but will be all the more true in the years to come. 4/?
If you administer a grant or fellowship which is open only to applicants who already hold a T/T position—or generally privileges T/T scholars over independent/contingent scholars—your award, too, is compounding the damage done and narrowing the future of the field. 5/?
(Again, this has been the case for at least a decade, but it is all the more true now.) 6/?
This is not to say that scholars already tenured or on the tenure track shouldn’t seek better jobs, better research funding, teaching buy-outs, etc. The average T/T humanities job is far from a gravy train, and people need to move institutions for all sorts of reasons. 7/?
This is to say that the folks who are making decisions and distributing resources must stop following that unstated rule of academic funding, hiring, and promotion: “Those that have, get.” The meritocracy has long since been exposed as a fantasy, yet this mindset persists. 8/?
The brutality of the market is about to ratchet up another order of magnitude. Past funding and contiguous employment cannot be the primary measure of whether a scholar deserves future funding or employment. (It should never have been.) 9/9
