Last summer I got two job offers: a mashup of well-compensated contingent jobs at an elite university, or my current position.

Leaving academia was scary, but I am grateful every day that I had the opportunity to say no to job insecurity.

And guess who has a hiring freeze now.

The people who offered me the job were lovely individuals but contingent labor is not and has never been a tenable career stage.

And the people who told me that if I really wanted to be an academic I should wait it out were wrong.

All this pandemic has done is reveal what was always true: that universities use contingent labor because that labor is expendable.

All of us deserve better.

I've really been trying to not to rage tweet about academia right now. But I'm so angry that so many people I love and admire or don't even really like but still think deserve a decent life are being played with by universities who have the choice to do better and won't.

these are peoples' lives & futures and we should not tolerate an institutional response that depends on firing and rehiring staff cheaply and at will.

Asking people to live with uncertainty is cruel. Stripping staff of compensation during a time of devastation is unacceptable.

Enough.

Normally I have a rule that if I'm going to write something angry on the internet I have to end with some kind of action. Like: upload your cover letters to the internet! or: write to your dean!

But the level of action required here is beyond what I can do on twitter.

I'm not talking about #GenerousThinking, though I invite you to spend some time revisiting those tweets today.

I'm not talking about giving money to the MLA emergency fund, though yeah, you can do that.

https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/MLA-Grants-and-Awards/COVID-19-Emergency-Grants

I don't know, you tell me. Where do we go from here?