So, there's this one scholar who I follow on social media, who's done everything "right" with his project and has been one of "the lucky ones" -- that is, his project looked big and innovative by paying attention to a neglected ethnic group, but it threatened no-one, since they're actually decently small despite their prominence, and so he's been able to hop around multiple different institutions for years now, in endless post-docs that people dribbled at him and he managed to secure.
But now, they've dried up.
Online, he was saying something like how the collapse of tenure-track (i.e. "real") jobs has really affected his cohort, who spent so much time and energy and have done everything right, only for there to be nothing at the end, it seems to him right now.
To my ears, it was almost like him crying, "But I worked within the system, how can it have let me down!?!?".
It really does make my decision to just cut losses and never apply to anything back when I was graduating my doctoral program look smart...
I remember that the most recent economic shock then was causing schools to reduce their academic presses and so people with immaculate manuscripts couldn't get a book contract like they used to, and a few authority figures from my program were nevertheless continuing on like usual and saying stuff like I should try and start work on my book and look for jobs etc., except that I saw this huge chance that you would be sinking absolute **years** into very time intensive applications with no decent chance of a pay-off, and on top of that you'd be writing a book that's a rehash of your diss in a very inefficient way that is also very time-consuming, all with nothing really at the end, probably, and all while you weather just incredibly low and unpredictable and volatile wages.
(That's not even mentioning how I had around **three** years of my life wasted through dysfunction and malfeasance at my program, that kept me there way longer than I needed to be, despite my best efforts.)
It really is just astounding to me how this "career path" where you maybe had a decent shot has gotten completely insane and just collapsed, compared to when I embarked on it.
That's on top of how seriously unwell "lifetime jobs" folks (i.e. a significant portion of the tenured) have a stranglehold on fields more than ever, by ending people's careers by denying book manuscripts or screening out competition when they evaluate postdoc applications etc.
It's just sad and rigid and stagnant, and yet another realm while corrupt and debauched elites are more and more patently laughable, but have unshakeable control.
It's also weird how the rhetoric of vital intellectual inquiry and rationality maps onto very hierarchical and anti-intellectual power structures, more than ever. It's like a complete mismatch between what they say and what they are.
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