Part 1 of an interview with Melanie Hubbard, a Columbia Ph.D. with articles, an NEH fellowship, and a book contract who has never been interviewed for a tenure-track job while serving on full-time contingent appointments for 10 years.
MB. How would you describe your situation?
MH. Downwardly mobile! I was a teaching assistant at an Ivy League school. I taught my dissertation at a proto-Ivy school. Then I taught the gamut of English courses at a second-tier school. I taught four years of composition at a tuition-driven third-tier private institution. Now I’m unemployed.
MB. As many as one-third of faculty have faculty partners. Did your decision to live with your husband and children affect your ability to find employment or get interviews?
MH. Interviews? Are you kidding? I’ve never had an interview… When the MLA Profession 2007 reports that there isn’t a lost generation of scholars, I have to say I am one. There is a lost generation of scholars. Here we all are. I’m not working. I’m depending on the kindness of my husband.
Read more: Job Market Theory (pdf, pp 15-20) and The Waste Product of Graduate Education (pdf, pp21-27).
Recently:
- Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
- Kindle or Netbook?
- Occupy the AHA!
- History “Job Czar” Shuts Down Phd Production (PhD “Oversupply” Continues For Two Decades)
- Who’s A Historian to the AHA?
- At the AHA: Huh?
- “I Re-wrote those Motherfuckers from Scratch”
- Spring Appearances
- UC Davis Occupiers Force Negotiations
- Students Occupy UC President’s Office
Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 5:48 am and is filed under "job market theory" and why it's silly, MLA, Precarity, academic labor system, faculty couples, feminization of the humanities, graduate education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[…] “Downwardly Mobile“: Marc Bousquet interviews a Columbia-educated woman who can’t get a job interview (Aug. 26/08). […]
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Thank you so much for putting all this out there! I only just found out about you from the SCU alumni magazine, of all places. Amen to you! Four years post-PhD in chemistry (!), the best thing I figured out to do was stop fighting for endless slave-wage postdocs and be a stay-at-home mom. My husband, with the same credentials, is being punished by his prof for having kids and told his five-year position is somehow out of money 3 years out. We are surrounded with science postdocs in the same boat, we feel stupid for listening to our advisors who recruited us away from professional school and into grad school, regretful of our past idealism, and trying to find our way back out with all the wrong degrees. Academia is a pyramid scheme!