Tales of Tenure Terror: Do what you love and you'll never be paid for a day in your life
Since I have written the last one of these, there’s been so many potential to write about because academics keep! Going! Wild! Whether its double downing on bad ideas and then claim to be a victim of bullying, being fired for assault, or just being plain horrible human beings, their shenanigans never cease wonder of why people are scrambling for these “coveted” academic faculty positions. So, good luck in submitting a thirty page application and then living in constant stress during your job and being trapped somewhere once the tenure clock starts!
I think this will be my last TENURE TALES OF TERROR unless there is some really wild thing that happens, but sometimes this is too dark for me. I spent the last week following a twitter argument among gender critical philosopher professors and I finally woke up in a cold sweat questioning my choices in lieisure time. The point of the argument is the same....we’re just AAAAAASSSSSSKING.....we can’t let parents turn their kids trans....what about the women..... but the real journey is the same pattern of these that repeat after another.
Step 1: Make a dumb statement, thinking that it is provocative, expecting to be an edgy figure. ANd maybe catch the attention of transphobic media darling, Jesse Singal. If you want to go down that path, it’s brutal.
Step 2: People disagree with you. They are silencing you!
Step 3: The person who you are referring to actually joins the convo and says they never said what you claim they did.
Step 4: Everyone was just misinterpreting you. It’s about semantics!
Step 5: People literally take screenshots of your actual tweet and send it back to you. That’s just a tactic! They don’t understand the philosophical art of debate! Did Jesse Singal notice me yet?
Step 6: Start a twitter poll with the attempt to still try to prove your point, which was…well no one cares anyway.
Step 7: Instead of admitting wrongdoing, claim that you “went viral,” proudly pinning the tweet to the top of your timeline, ignoring the actual transphobic and inaccurate information you shared about a vulnerable population. Isn’t it so funny how the woke mob came for you. Do you think Jesse Singal will have be on his podcast?
UPDATED: Step 8: Deactivate Twitter. Sorry to go through that but the original poster did a Chrissy Tiegen (quits Twittter dramatically but then will ultmately come back because she misses the attention.
I’m trying to move off Twitter and onto the Page Six of academia, Inside Higher Ed. How about this one, who thinks that, as a graduate student, if your department is not giving you the career advice you need you should just do it for yourselves as free labor! I got stuck in this trap my early years in graduate school, thinking I was ”taking initiative” when meanwhile I was just…working for free. Meanwhile, thinks that people that....omg, this is bad…ASK TO BE PAID FOR THEIR SERVICES ARE BAD. And just “go to your university’s career center.” No offense to career centers, they do great things, but they rarely have the capability to fully support doctoral students.
Then there’s this:
A couple weeks after I received that email about the new business venture, I received another email from a late-stage doctoral student in the humanities who had diligently worked on her postdoctoral plans for a couple years, with promising early results. She was writing to let me know that, along with two of her peers, she had started “a digital free community for current and former Ph.D.s who are moving into nonacademic career paths.” They’d set up a Slack group, “in which we are sharing resources related to networking, personal branding, and the job search,” and were planning an initial first Zoom meeting. I did not hesitate to share that information with my advisees. It’s wonderful to see doctoral students — acculturated into a model of individual striving — create an accessible, visible community around nonacademic career searches. Not only are they building something much larger than themselves — a vibrant campus culture of peer mentoring — but they are redefining professional development in a way that eschews the centrality of “the expert” altogether.
They literally had no choice, because they don’t have the money to pay, and this free labor is cosplaying as some sort of collective think tank.
If (when) I write my guide to graduate school, I would advise people that if they are planning something that benefits your department, or replaces advising/career prep, do not do it for free. Negotiate it through an assistantship, course credit, whatever. “But what about the CV line?” Yes, so what about it?
There’s also Mia Bloom, who acts like a Real Housewife when someone criticizes her. and is an academic terrorist. There’s a petition too.
Let me surround myself with toxic positive vibes, gaslighting myself into thinking that all my problems are because of imposter syndrome.
I’m going to jump out of the duldrums of academia…into the duldrums of the idea of work, since I am unfortunately on the precipice of having to live in the real world again. I’m interested in the idea of hope labor, which keeps people in a perpetual state of misery. Break free from the internalized capitalism!
Happy Oscars, by the way, the night where we all get angry online about an arbitrary awards system about subjective art forms!