Abolish Tenure, and Replace it with a 40 Hour Work Week

This is part of a series of posts on the abuse of power inherent to academia as a profession, and what we could do to reimagine and rebuild a more just, anti-racist university. Read parts one and two.

Although I have tenure now, as a new, African American faculty member I know I was strongly advised by my senior colleagues and administrators to keep my service to that so-called diversity mission to a minimum, and it was advice that I was happy to follow. I was happy to follow that advice even if it meant keeping as low a profile as possible and declining requests to take on important projects that I knew would not count when I came up for tenure. I’m not sure what choices I would make now.

“What Is Faculty Diversity Worth to a University?” Patricia A. Matthew, NOVEMBER 23, 2016,

When ever I meet up with friends or colleagues who are tenured academics these days, I’m struck by a rather depressing fact. They are all miserable.

It’s so disheartening! As bad as it is to be locked out of academia, it doesn’t seem all that much better to finally get the thing you’ve been struggling for all your adult life, only to find it sucks.

But apparently this is the case. Finally making it to that coveted position rarely seems to signal the end of the fear and stress inherent to pre-tenure life.

From the University of Copenhagen’s internal magazine, March 2017. Seriously, though – I was recently at a conference talking to an anthropologist whose biological anthro colleague announced he had published a book supporting CREATIONISM the week after he got tenure…

Covid-19 Essential Workers Deserve a G.I. Bill

Yesterday I floated the idea that essential workers deserve their own version of the ‘GI Bill’. Essential workers on the front-line of the Covid-19 pandemic will, in the months and years to come, be disproportionately traumatized by what they have experienced and endured.

Today I want to throw out some ideas on what that could look like.

The Gender of a Pandemic

Photo of an Instacart shopper from The Buffalo News (Robert Kirkham/News file photo)

Past global crises, particularly the devastating world wars of the last century, can teach us a lot about long term impact of trauma, both on those who are on the front-line and those ‘left behind’ at home.

What makes this pandemic different to those wars, however, is that it will be predominantly women who fight to save us. We should already be planning and preparing for how to treat this trauma, if we want to avoid it drowning a new generation.

Academics Are Workers Too. Use Your Damn Sick Leave

There’s a couple of documents circulating, whereby academics can sign up to guest lecture for colleagues during this crisis. The idea is that, if you are too sick to teach your college-level class or are taking care of sick dependents, you can find and arrange for someone else to do it.

I get that this is a lovely sentiment. But Jesus H Christ people.

Can we stand back and acknowledge what this means?

If we were talking about another industry, especially low paid ones, we would be up in arms at the idea employees had to find their own subs before they could take sick leave. (In California at least, it’s illegal.)

Academics: you are also employees. Take your damn sick leave. Cancel that f*ing class.

Not Shock: Can We Take This Crisis And Make A More Humane Society?

There are brief moments these days, where I suddenly realize the scale of what is happening, the full global horror of it all, and I am stunned.

It’s too enormous to hold in my mind all the time.

But at unpredictable moments, something cracks through my hazy feeling that this is just one long weekend at home, and I remember.

For half the world, Capitalism itself is shut down.

From around the time of the 2008 economic crash, but oddly still relevant…

And this is going to continue for weeks, perhaps longer. Capitalism is currently on hold.

Put aside for a moment the epidemiological situation: the fact that in some regions (and possibly everywhere this virus spreads) a whole generation has been wiped out in the space of a few weeks.

Economic life in the Global North has just… stopped.

I’ve been trying to get my head around what this means. And surprisingly, I see reasons for optimism.

From PhD to Academic Administration Part One: how did I end up here?

Last night J jokingly called me the Pied Piper of Academia. Since finishing my PhD a couple of years ago, I’ve been working in university administration.

And since almost the first month in my new job, I’ve been asked by fellow grads for advice on the pros and cons of taking that step over to the dark side.

At first it was just people I knew.

Recently I’ve had emails from total strangers, referred to me by people I hardly know, asking if I’d have time to talk over coffee.

So as academic job application season swings around, I thought it might be worth a blog post.

In this first post I’ll give you some background on how I ended up making the decision to apply for an administrative job in the first place. In the next I’ll leap into the bit you’re probably more interested in: the pros and cons of making a side-ways move in the university if you’d always assumed you would be an academic.

My thoughts on this topic are based on my own limited experience and to a certain extent my ethnographic work on universities. But if you in a similar situation yourself, please chip in in the comments!

The Flick: Portraying Low Paid Workers With Respect

We finally went to see The Flick by Annie Baker at Steppenwolf this month, catching it just before it closed. It’s one of those plays I first encountered in fragments, as I helped J learn lines from a handful of scenes, and was curious enough about to badger him into getting us tickets.

J seemed a bit concerned I might not like it. He reminded me several times it’s over 3 hours long and has a reputation for being a bit tricky. (I suspect he still hasn’t forgiven me for hating Waiting For Godot.) The trickiness, it seems, comes from Baker’s use of silence. The play runs 3 hours 10 minutes but only has about 70 pages of actual dialogue, which means there are a lot of long pauses or moments when the actors are moving about the stage but not saying anything to each other.

Apparently the first time The Flick was performed, the (mostly subscriber) audience was furious, and in every performance including the one I saw, the audience was a lot thinner after the interval.

All this throws up interesting questions about the extent to which we associate “something happening” in a play with “people are talking” as opposed to “people are moving around on stage.” But I found The Flick utterly absorbing, helped no doubt by the very high quality of the production and the wonderful cast.