This goes beyond Humanities, but that is my field. I’m wondering how folks are positioning themselves now that grants, opportunities for publications and exhibitions, and in general all the things that would make a successful tenure package are being eliminated/defunded/taken over.
I feel like I need my own Academics Anonymous group: “I am in the arts; my work deals with race, gender, and incarceration; and I have no idea how to make tenure in the current climate.”
How are others managing?
Comments
Publications should still be possible if you have the sources to write. If your source gathering depends on research travel funding, ask your institution about internal resources. They may not match the level of NEH funding, but they might do something to keep you publishing. Our university is very aware of the impact on TT folks and we’re doing our best to address their needs.
In all honesty, in history it still feels like every third entry level post, fellowship, or postdoc is catering to that ever popular trifecta of race, gender, or some form of imperialism/postcolonialism.. If you work in say, business, legal, or military history, you’ll be lucky to find a fraction of the opportunities that crew gets. So if you went into one of the less trendy elements, it’s pretty much business as usual – you never expected to have funding of any kind easily lined up in the first place. You’re used to getting the leftover crumbs on the plate of general ‘all-comer’ opportunities.
If other strands of study end up down there as well, it’s more or less the way of things. Economic history was hot shit in the sixties and seventies, but it’s at a fraction of what it was these days. Give it forty years and we’ll all be wondering how otherkin history ended up being the next big thing. You sort of have to expect these changes and pivot with them if you want to stay on the funding gravy train. Tailoring your research direction is always the best way to ensure employability, even if it’s less fun in terms of studying what this personally want to spend time on.
I find a lot depends on where you are geographically and at what institutions. There are a lot of places that are capitulating to the attacks on DEI but there are consortiums of some universities fighting back.
In terms of grants, it sucks to not have the NEH as an option (I planned to apply for something this year actually) but in the humanities I feel like we gave always learned to deal with minimal funding and find alternative funding as a way of being. In my years of being a grad student and TT professor I never once won federal funding, I was always funded from private grants and foundations.
I guess all that is to say I am not any more scared of the future than I already was with the state of academia and attacks on the humanities in general. I might feel differently if I lived in a different state or was at a different institution. I am more worried for folks far more vulnerable than myself, like grad students here on student visas.
No, but I’m not based in the US. If I was, I’d be a hell of a lot more concerned – and that’s as someone whose work only touches upon issues of climate change (my teaching is more climate change focussed, but I could easily change that if it was an issue)
To me, unless your subfield is explicitly targeted, the humanities is less affected by the chaos, since grants are far less critical to keeping the research program active.