Speaking with Joy Connolly
As We Face Changing Jobs and Markets
This is the second of a two-part conversation with Joy Connolly and Joseph Howley during a special April 23 session of the Columbia University Graduate Research Colloquium convened in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Read the first part for introductions and big-picture thoughts on the future of higher ed.
Joseph, continuing from Part 1: This does take us into the next set of questions, which are basically about what’s going to happen to the job market and what should graduate students be doing about it.
Joy: The job market is going to be really rough these next couple of years. … But the two-pronged approach I would take is: [First] think about presenting yourself for academic jobs as somebody who’s in touch and aware, wants to make a difference, is aware of the pressures, and has ideas about what to do about them that play to your strengths. Because there are as many good answers to what one can do in an academic job right now as there are people.
But secondly, I think this is a really interesting time for PhDs going into non-academic jobs. There’s a lot to learn out there, whether it’s the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows Program or efforts run by learned societies or consultants [some useful alt-ac resources are linked below]. The SCS also has increasing resources for people seeking non-academic jobs. …
[There’s] a sign in my neighborhood that says: “The future has no format.” And as clichéd as that sentiment is, it’s also true. This is a moment to ask ourselves what we really want to do, and think about how to present that talent and action in a variety of places inside and outside of academia or in the spaces in between, like the one I’ve managed to land in.
Nandini: I think there are going to be jobs that we’ve never heard of that don’t yet have a definition. The days where you could just go and [walk into assured, predictable jobs with unchanging expectations] are over. And I think there’s going to be a very interesting fragmentation and tailoring of how various necessary functions are being delivered. The good news is that higher education is something that people will always need. I was just reading a McKinsey report about the future of work in America that was written a couple of months before this whole thing happened. … We can’t call our pockets yet, but [many of us in higher ed are still] better off than the 25% of Americans who are unemployed right now. And you have skills that are going to [survive major economic trauma, and help you] “skate to where the puck will be,” to use this annoying image that business guys use.
I think there’s still going to be a lot of room for educators, but in a really interesting and innovative way: maybe making uses of new technologies or modes of content delivery. Institutions are going to go out of business. There are going to be mergers [and] program closures. It’s going to be really ugly. But in the end, I actually think that the need [we serve] is a permanent one. The need of humans to connect, and the need of humans to get out of those jobs that are easily canceled at the drop of a hat and [find ones] that can continue when the economy slows down — we are the people that are going to be training those people. So I think that we’re comparatively well positioned in this terrible moment for all of us.
Joseph: You mentioned the way that the discipline of classics has these inertial and conservative tendencies. And I’m thinking about graduate students’ tactical considerations [as they approach the job market]. I think that some of us often feel this temptation to believe that at the end of the day, if you’re just a really, really good reader of Greek, you will get a tenure-track job. So I could see one impulse people have, whether it’s students or their faculty advisors, is to say: this is the moment to recommit yourselves to the traditional excellences of the discipline. Just double down on being a philologist because Yale is still going to be hiring, or whatever.
But that’s not what I’m hearing from both of you. And this is a substantial question for graduate students because the hours in their day are very limited, right? And if they’re thinking about how to spend their time and energy — how to skate to where the puck is going to be — we already have long-standing assumptions about where that puck is going to be. And I think what you’re trying to tell us is that the puck is going in a really different direction. But that we face the challenge [that] we can’t be in two parts of the ice at once.
Nandini: Or there is no puck, actually, also. <laughs>
Joy: Part of me wants to say, well, it’s not quite either-or, but I also want to run with the either-or. Because keeping the whole ecosystem [in mind] … we have a tenure system that’s rewarding a very, very narrowly defined kind of achievement. And that is what has to change, in my view, because it has gone along with the decline of enrollments, the decline of interest in the humanities. It’s part of a big system that privileges work that only very well-resourced and large departments can do because they can sustain specialization on a certain level, but that smaller departments just can’t, and I think they shouldn’t. And it builds more walls and widens the gap between the interests of undergraduates and the needs of society and the needs of humanity.
So, if I had to finish the thought of thinking about how you want [to divide] the pie and how you want to spend your time, it is incumbent on departments and on associations like ACLS and university administrations to recognize the crisis we’re in and say it’s not business as usual. We’re not going to expect people to turn out articles and books at the same rate. Not because they’re having trouble or their productivity is going down, but because they’re finally putting their work in the right direction. They’re actually focusing on students. They’re trying to reach larger publics. They’re dealing with different modes of communication. And that’s what we should get tenure for. … It’s not a good habit to talk about one piece of the system. We need to be thinking about all the ripple effects.
Nandini: I couldn’t agree more. Just on a pragmatic level, I think the same way that tenure clocks are being extended, normative time [to PhD] should absolutely be extended. But I want to pick up and fully endorse Joy’s point about the kind of reward structure that we create in academia. And I want to add that emphasis on research and publication itself has not always been the case for the centuries in which classics has been taught. And there’s no one-size-fits-all version of the classics professor. Each of us are good at different things and each of us, whatever job we take, will end up defining the job around us … based on what skills and interests [we] bring to it.
So yeah, I think we need to look at the whole picture here besides just progress on your dissertation. Because dissertations, as we’ve said often in this field, don’t really prepare us very well for the actual job of being a professor, even if you’re lucky enough to get one of those. I mean, we spend so little time preparing our grad students to do the teaching where [most of us put] more than 50% of our time. We spend zero time teaching academics how to be competent administrators — which is really important in keeping this whole ivory tower standing. So I hope that this crisis can cause us, as Joy is suggesting, to reevaluate what we’re rewarding. Because our reward structures certainly don’t reflect what’s really important.
Joseph: Joy, I want to try to circle back to a question that I know you’ve thought a lot about. We could be thinking and talking about a crisis in higher ed [or] in the humanities [or] in classics. We could be advocating for the specific value of classical studies [or] the humanities as a whole. … And this is happening when we’ve had decades in this country of a political climate that’s eroded the value of public education. How do you suggest we think about that? I mean, are we advancing on three fronts?
Joy: That’s a really good question. I tend to think that overall, as Nandini, said we all have different talents and different interests. So to think about redefining what we count as good scholarship — that’s going to mean one thing for one person and another thing for another. And what I’m advocating for is not getting rid of anything we do, but just expanding the envelope.
[As for advancing on these fronts,] I tend to think that local action is best. Picking up the phone and calling a high-school teacher, getting on Zoom with a community-college professor, talking with somebody in anthropology within your university … reaching out and doing something positive within your community writ large, but with a subgroup or an area that you haven’t had a lot of local contact with — [the] kind of networking that pulls us up and out, that broadens our vision, and gives us experience in understanding how the university works and how the bigger higher-ed ecosystem works, I think will have the most long-term impact.
Because if nothing else, it’s a relationship and that’s what changes the world: our relationships among people. And so if we start thinking about the conventional relationships that graduate students have always had to forge, that you’ll continue to forge with your advisors and leaders in the field and so on and so forth — I think the most powerful political and cultural change can be brought about by broadening that envelope and strengthening the connections that are less obvious but really just waiting to be made.
Nandini: I’m glad you circled back to that question of how change happens. And I like that you’re indicating that little actions we can control can have powerful effects. I just want to put out as an example the WCC/SCS joint COVID relief fund to support graduate students [and contingent faculty]. This began because [Suzanne Lye] mentioned in the WCC Steering Committee that she really wanted to work on this project and several of us were like, “That’s a great idea.” And then we found out that the SCS was working on something similar. And then you post it on Twitter and somebody reposts that. And I love that “going viral” can ironically help us in some way. [We can] reach out and build those connections, co-teach a class with someone in a different department or country [as Jinyu Liu mentioned in discussion following her recent keynote for the Association for Ancient Historians]. As Joy says, we can do anything we want right now. And that’s a very exhilarating thing.
Joseph: That’s a really exciting set of ideas. I mean, with the caveat that any new thing is extra time and work and some people have much less time and energy now with the absence of childcare or with illness in the family or whatever. [Even in] an ideal world where every one of our PhD students who finishes gets a [tenure-track] job, very few of them will be jobs at institutions like this. I’ve talked to grad students who’ve gone from Ivies to SLACs or state schools and had culture shock. And it’s really interesting to think that this could be a time when it’s never been easier to visit someone else’s class, right? … We could be visiting each other’s classes at different institutions, the high schools that feed us students, or the high schools that don’t feed us students — a way of essentially stepping out of our offices when we’re not allowed to step out of our homes. … Maybe we should talk more in the department about what that could look like.
Joy: I think this is a really neat opportunity for grad students and faculty to sit together and say, how would we design tenure requirements? Let’s do a blue-sky thought-experiment … What do you want to keep about your doctoral education? What do you want to change? What do you want to toss? And then, as I said, it’s got to be connected to the way people get jobs and the standards people use in job hiring and then in tenure. This group could … brainstorm a kind of ideal, our twenty-first-century definition of what we expect a tenured professor to be able to do in classical studies and take that to the dean. And there’s nothing that disarms a dean like a bunch of well-organized people with positive ideas.
Nandini: And ways to fund them!
Joseph: Yeah, they’ll actually say yes to a bunch of things just because they’re so surprised. We can get a lot done that way.
Joy: No joke. So that’s another local action that could be meaningful. [Let’s get] it out there on social media as an idea to get concrete change about what we value!
<Soon after this, Joy had to leave to participate in an online panel for the Association of Ancient Historians on the COVID-19 crisis. Nandini and Joe stayed on to speak with Columbia grad students about their responses and concerns. Then Joe wrapped up proceedings with thanks to all participants — which I echo here, with special thanks to him for organizing the event.>
Joseph: I think it’s pretty clear to all of us that, whether we like it or not, we are in for the academic version of disaster capitalism. … And the idea that we could at least come back with some disaster radicalism and disaster progressivism, I think is, is kind of an inspiring one. … “We’re all in it together” is something we’re hearing a lot these days from people who are not, in fact, in it [with us]. But I feel confident saying that within the total set of the professoriate, there is a subset of people who actually give a shit and are trying to figure this out, and I feel confident saying that Joy and Nandini are in that set. Thank you. And this would not have happened if you [grad students] had not asked for it, so thank you too. I hope you all stay well.
Please refer to the first part of the conversation for more on the speakers and context, with thoughts on the post-COVID future of higher ed.
Some resources for PhDs on non-academic jobs, from Joy Connolly:
- MLA Connected Academies
- American Anthropological Association — Anthropology: Education for the 21st Century
- American Historical Association — Career Diversity
- Imagine PhD
- American Academy of Religion — Aurora by Beyond the Professoriate
For anyone seeking traditional jobs in classics, I highly recommend Joy’s “Going on the Market…and What Comes Before.” See also the Society for Classical Studies’ Careers for Classicists Series (Undergraduate and Graduate versions), career networking LinkedIn page, candidate advice, slate of speakers from the most recent Career Networking event, statement of board support for a variety of humanities careers, and the most recent Placement Report detailing the initial stages of integrating non-academic jobs into the Service.
Nandini Pandey is grateful to all who participated, above all Joy and Joe for this conversation and their kind permission to share it with you. Thanks also to everyone who’s followed “Romans Stay Home” these past eleven (!) weeks. I’ll be taking a little breather til June. In the mean time — bon courage to us all!
