Conference Disgust.

So when I was at my field's big annual conference over a month ago, just walking around, I was overcome with a feeling of disgust, and I'm not sure it's ever going away.

Over the past year, I've been in touch with people who have been eaten up by the job market: people who rushed through dissertation and didn't have articles, people who went into renewable one-years that overwork them and never let them publish, people who went to one-years that turned into dead ends, people without spousal income, since the best position to have is a spouse who can support you while you adjunct for a class or 2 and write articles that make you competitive.

Then, I see a guy who graduated a few years ago and is nice enough, and he a prof are chatting it up in some chairs, and I realize that he's graduated into being a colleague, and the other people really haven't.

For one thing, I realized that that was random, about who made it and who didn't.

For another, I realized that people can buy their way into that, since if they have an outside source of income, they can keep themselves in the running and a lot of times ease their way into academia.

Overall, I realized that money can buy collegiality.

Profs at my school emphasize collegiality, that it's how you treat colleagues and conduct conversations and it's a form of relationship that defines the professional world, but they never stop their valorizations of it to really look at the bottom line, that some people can afford collegiality and others can't.

Everywhere I looked, I saw well-dressed profs on junkets, and the grad students and non-tenure track faculty hanging on and overlooked.  I was just overwhelmed with disgust, and even if I make it, I don't think that's ever going away, that feeling of privilege.