Submitted by gerrycanavan on Jan 08, 2010, 12:36 PM

With all the talk of the importance of the digital humanities at MLA I'm surprised there hasn't already been a post here on the subject of Brian Croxall. Brian, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English at Clemson University, decided to present his paper at MLA by proxy as a combination stunt-protest over the catastrophic job market:

...I'm not a tenure-track faculty member, and the truth of the matter is that I simply cannot afford to come to this year's MLA. I know that we as a profession are increasingly aware of the less than ideal conditions under which contingent faculty members (and graduate students) labor while providing more than half of the instruction that undergraduates receive across the nation, a fact that The Chronicle of Higher Education (see articles from December 2008 and May 2009, as just two such examples) and other publications have reported on throughout the last twelve months. If we are talking about today's teachers, then more of them look like me -- at least in a professional sense -- than look like the people who will be on the dais at the Presidential Address later on this evening. And that means that most of the students in America are also taught by people that are like me. In a very real sense, I -- and the people situated in a similar professional and economic quandary -- are today's teacher's of today's students. And for the most part, were not at the MLA this year.

He goes on to discuss the various expenses and indignities involved in the job market in the humanities, all of which are likely very familiar to the readers of this site.

Through Twitter and other social networking media, Brian's post very quickly went viral, receiving attention on big-name sites like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Bitch, Ph.D. Brian's critique is not new -- I can't recommend Marc Bousquet's How the University Works highly enough, particularly this brilliant dissection of the rhetoric of "job market" -- but the decision to present his paper by proxy and simulcast his very personal paper via blog in this way has given the issue a tremendous amount of publicity and visibility it simply wouldn't have had otherwise. The job market, and personal successes and failures within it, are generally viewed a kind of embarrassment; they just aren't talked about. Brian shattered that silence, at least for this year, and has potentially inaugurated a new style of protest for disaffected contingent faculty at MLA in the process. It will be interested to see whether something like this occurs again at MLA 2011.

In a recent piece pouring some cold water on the notion of the rise of the digital humanities (heresy!), David Perry performed some back-of-the-envelope calculations and concluded:

Let's be honest, at any given session you are lucky if you get over 50 people, assuming the panel at which the paper was read was well attended maybe 100 people actually heard the paper given. But, the real influence of Brian's paper can't be measured this way. The real influence should be measured by how many people read his paper, who didn't attend the MLA. According to Brian, views to his blog jumped 200-300% in the two days following his post; even being conservative one could guess that over 2000 people performed more than a cursory glance at his paper (the numbers here are fuzzy and hard to track but I certainly think this is in the neighborhood). And Brian tells me that in total since the convention he is probably close to 5,000 views. 5000 people, that is half the size of the convention.

Naturally I can't vouch for those numbers, but if they're accurate they suggest the scope of Brian's achievement. Even if this was a stunt, it was a successful one, with far wider consequences than if he'd actually made the trip to Philly -- another way in which the digital humanities are ascendant, if one that strikes a slightly downcast note.

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Posted on Jan 09, 2010-02:17pm by Cathy Davidson

Thanks so much for writing this, Gerry, and reblogging it here.  I've heard so many great reports about the Brian Croxall event. 

 

I know everyone is bored to death from me talking about how I came out of my Ph.D. program in what, then, was the worst job market in academic history since the depression.  600-1200 applications for every job and I was on the market for three years.  In retrospect, I am glad I worked at Fermi Lab for a year and in a prison and a mental institute, too, and also in a Franciscan monastery.  Those are precious experiences---but only in the retrospect from an incredibly lucky career.  If one woman on the faculty hadn't gone back into the pile and plucked my rejected application, I would not have gotten my first tenure-track job at Michigan State, a wonderful job with fabulous students, and the place that gave me my academic sea legs.  I had tons of publications but utterly un-prestigious degrees and it really was one accident and one person who saw a spark or I would not have had this career, and I have never forgotten that.

 

Nor have I ever forgotten that for thirty years humanists have fought to keep the basic structure of their discipline pretty much as it was thirty years before that, even as the numbers of new positions decline.   I do not understand this mentality.  When I was a Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, my turf was an entire university saw I saw how different fields and departments respond to changing economic circumstances and changing social priorities and interests and needs of students.  Many fields radically and dramatically shift what they offer, what they emphasize, and who they recruit as graduate students relative to changes in the larger world beyond the academy.  Many find it astonishing that some humanists consider it demeaning to even think of doing so.  What are our investments in remaining 'who we are' even as we diminish and dwindle?  Is that who we are?  The dwindlers?

 

I hate that definition.  And have my entire career.  As David Theo Goldberg and I said so many years ago when we wrote the "Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Era," if the humanities don't have a role in the "Information Age," who in the world does?  Everyone is perplexed by issues that, as humanists, we have a historical perspective on and critical expertise in. Rarely do we claim that.  Instead, we are bent on keeping periodization and genre as our ruling principles and making "coverage" our normative criteria for future requests for hires.   Does it matter if there are only two people a class in a given field?  Do we offer other kinds of generalist classes with huge enrollments that can help cross-subsidize our specializations?  Sometimes, but not enough and often not articulated, to administrators and to ourselves and to future members of our profession, as our response to a changing world.  Our pride at not changing means that we give up control of the change that is happening to us and to future generations of humanists.  

 

Needless to say, HASTAC was founded partly to underscore that the humanities have a vital and central role in the world we live in but that needs to be a battle cry of the humanities more globally.  Humanists just don't do a good job of claiming our role, our expertise, or our relevance to students' lives.  Tragically, the result is that we have an increasingly marginal role. 

 

And potential members of our profession, like Brian, have no way to enter it.