David Calverley I don’t want my comments to come across as insensitive or uncaring towards people struggling to get a university position. I attended the first CHA panel about precarity in the historical profession. I felt a lot of sympathy for those who outlined their anger and disappointment with either not obtaining a full-time academic position or the stress they… Read more »
by Steven High “We all love what we do deeply. … This love is taken from us by our institutions, employers, and administrators. It’s used to exploit us every time we do extra work or support the students we teach or mark papers properly even though we’re not paid enough to do it, or get a course outline just right… Read more »
The comments here were first shared during the Canadian Historical Association’s second of three panels responding to the “Precarious Historical Instructors’ Manifesto” entitled, “Precarious Historians, Trade Unions, and the Neoliberal University.” Along with Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon, Peter McInnis, Christine Gauthier, Catherine Larochelle, and Janis Thiessen, Jeremy Milloy discussed his insights on precarious academic work and working-class organizing. What follows is an… Read more »
The Active History collective is thinking about how to address precarious employment, both in the way we operate and in the wider history profession. We want your help to do it. In February, Active History was asked to support and publish the Precarious Historical Instructors’ Manifesto. Written by a group of historians who have experienced, or continue to experience, the… Read more »
We are caught in a cycle where a large chunk of historians in the field are precariously employed. Tenured faculty and university administrators often ask about solutions to precarity from the people who are facing it during faculty meetings or when our professional associations meet, but they rarely act on suggestions. Precarity and those who face it are ignored as… Read more »
Mary-Ann Shantz A recent episode of CBC radio’s Sunday Edition highlighted the exodus of PhD graduates from academia and enumerated some of the many reasons for this phenomenon. The story prompted a flood of responses from other former graduate students and junior academics (“Life After Academia: Your Stories”). Recent blogposts such as, “Why So Many Academics Quit and Tell,” are… Read more »
