This Friday and Saturday I went to the American Historical Association's annual conference (held this year in NYC, if you didn't know.) Many of my friends were perplexed as to why I would do such a thing. I am no longer a professor and even when I was I knew my fellow academics saw the conference as something best to be avoided.
Back then I understood, because I only went to the AHA to interview for jobs and shop my book project to university presses. I typically spent the weekend in a near constant state of crushing anxiety. My usual problems in that area went completely off the charts, and the week after I got home from the conference was usually accompanied by a horrible depression brought on by all of my emotional reserves having been drained.
When I left the profession in 2011 I assumed I would never be back, but I've managed to come back twice, mostly because I live in the New York area, so why not? I enjoyed it last time, and I enjoyed it this time, too. I got to see many dear old friends who sadly live far away from me. I got to hear scholars I admire discuss their ideas. I got a bunch of new insights into how to teach certain subjects with my students. I bought a bunch of interesting books at rock bottom prices and discovered a whole lot of stuff I did not know about before.
There are precious few times anymore that I get to be a scholar. I have a couple of projects going, but I have so little time and so few resources for research that it's next to impossible to get anything done. (That's why I write stuff for the internet instead!) In any case, I am probably a better person for spending my spare time with my children, rather than working furiously to complete a book no one will read. But I still yearn to learn new things and investigate the past, and once you strip all the bullshit away, an academic conference can be really good for that.
I also really have no shits to give anymore about the status game of academia. I gave a paper at the first conference I went to after leaving the profession (the panel had been accepted the year before) and was so worried about how people would treat me. Now I just don't care. I have a job I love living in a place I love with a family I love. That sounds like success, not "failure." Because none of the people at the conference can make or break my career anymore, my anxiety just melted away. I no longer have to fear judgement. It's been liberating. (Twitter, which is hugely democratizing and has put me in touch with fellow rats who jumped ship, has also helped.)
All that said, my feelings at the conference were not entirely positive. The decay of the historical profession was constantly on my mind. When I went to the book exhibit I talked with a friend about how many great new works were being created in the midst of the jobs crunch. This is not a sign of health, but sickness. Young contingent scholars are working harder to get their stuff out in hopes of getting a tenure track job. Most won't, and so will never have the resources to continue producing new work. All those glittering new monographs represent nothing more to me than the massive squandering of talent and potential perpetuated by the strangling of the academic humanities.
Of course, the bigshots in the profession who set the cultural tone of the AHA probably didn't notice that. Just last week the organization's new president gave an interview where she seemed to think that the problem with the job market was that candidates were being offered jobs too early in the process, not that most young scholars will never get one. As much as going to the AHA has changed for me, being confronted by a profession incapable of taking collective action on behalf of its most vulnerable members has not.
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