First, Inside Higher Ed discontinued open commenting, apparently because it was too much work to root out the trolling that sometimes got on. Now, it appears as though they're moving toward a paywall. I wonder how much interest there really is in whines like Megan A. Carney's "
Nothing Normal About Getting Tenure This Year." Somebody tell this kid to check her privilege, stat!
Moreover, those of us in this generation of newly tenured scholars are stepping into an environment where the stakes for defending the democratic university and the institution of tenure itself are arguably higher than ever.
While the process of tenure has always been tethered to various forms of marginality falling along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability, the pandemic has intensified those exclusionary dynamics. The recent prolonged controversy about granting tenure to highly acclaimed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones attests to an overall lack of transparency behind such decisions and is inciting more fear about how research can be subjected to political scrutiny, pressure by trustees and donors, and other forces that inadvertently challenge the very principles of tenure and academic freedom.
Now that you have tenure, Professor Carney, perhaps rather than calling for a continuation of Gramsci's march, you ought consider
being a proper steward of your university, and restoring it to a state of good repair. That's not, apparently, received wisdom at the soon-to-be-paywalled house organ for All Woke All the Time.
It wasn’t a surprise that the gendered division of reproductive labor still present in many American households became even more entrenched or that the productivity of women in the academy took a nosedive as they fulfilled caregiving obligations. Feeling squeezed from all directions, I and other academic mothers I know fought for what little, if any, personal time we had to process our rage through writing. Many universities encouraged -- or in some cases, required -- faculty to submit COVID-19 statements along with their dossiers to explain how the pandemic had impacted their productivity as well as gave them the option of extending their tenure clocks. But often notably absent was systematic attention to how racism, sexism, trans/homophobia, ableism and other forms of discrimination and bias had shaped trajectories to tenure and promotion decisions.
That was followed by a summer of historic organizing and protest around Black Lives Matter and calls to defund the police. With antiracist activism and calls for abolition entering the mainstream, my discipline of anthropology, along with many others, began experiencing a long-overdue reckoning. In a June 2020 statement against police violence and anti-Black racism, the Association for Black Anthropologists urged members “of the discipline to start at ‘home,’ to accept the ways that anthropology has been and continues to be implicated in the project of white supremacy (both in its implicit and explicit manifestations), and to lay out a clear path for moving forward.”
In response, some of us in my department at the University of Arizona -- including faculty, students and staff -- formed a committee in midsummer to address structural racism within our discipline and institution. We then proceeded to develop antiracist curriculum, overhaul syllabi and scrutinize practices around student recruitment, admission and faculty hiring and promotion.
Wow. Ex-wife from hell,
crying with her mouth full, somehow finds the time to ... contribute to the continued self-immolation of anthropology, and participate in yet more committee work that will almost surely be hailed by the Arizona administration as making the place
more inclusive and less academically serious than it already is.
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