While We’re Talking, Let Me Offer You Some Free Advice
E(i)ditorial — March 2019
If you haven’t been following Eidolon for years, you may not know that we briefly had an advice column. It was called Prudentia, in a nod to Slate’s “Dear Prudence,” and for a few months in late 2015 and 2016 our editorial team answered questions about teaching and loving Classics while in a state of professional precarity.
Although Prudentia is long gone, there are plenty of people still seeking guidance on how to be a classicist in 2019. So we’re creating a new advice column — and this time, Eidolon’s editors won’t be the ones giving the advice.
The reasons for this shift are manifold. First and foremost, I personally feel that I’m in a terrible position to give advice to anybody (although that doesn’t always stop me). As this great interview with several internet advice columnists made clear, impostor syndrome is normal for advice-givers, but in this case I think my impostor syndrome probably has a point. My advice about alt-ac careers is full of hedging, caveats, and privilege-checking because my own career has been so hard to predict or replicate, and because I’ve had so much help along the way. This Twitter thread by Kelly Baker from January resonated with me, because I too feel that my path was one that only looks like a path in retrospect. At the time, it felt more like a series of probably-bad decisions to invest my time and energy into projects that might never amount to anything.
While I feel unequal to the task of giving advice on alt-ac careers, I’m obviously unqualified to give advice on traditional academic careers, because I’ve never had one. Eidolon’s status at the very edge of academia has mostly been a benefit to us, because it positions us well to address the kinds of issues about the discipline that traditional scholarship might lag behind on. Our Philomela’s Tapestry series wouldn’t have been possible in a different venue. But we’re very poorly positioned to give advice on navigating the academic job market or advancing within the field: three of us have called it quits, and the fourth is a graduate student who hasn’t yet succumbed to the pessimism and cynicism of the other three.
Most of the time, our non-insider status doesn’t bother me. We can’t be everything to everyone. But there are some questions I can’t answer that do trouble me—like “Will writing an article for Eidolon help me or hurt me on the job market?” or “How will colleagues react if I’m more open about my commitment to an activist Classics?” Last week’s anonymous graduate student post on the SCS website showed that people are very afraid of the answer to the latter question — and, honestly, I think they’re probably right to be.
Anecdotally, I can say that several people have told me that evidence of public engagement is generally looked well upon in a job application. But I’m very aware of how self-selecting such viewpoints are. It’s hard to imagine someone coming up to me to tell me that they would automatically disqualify any candidate who had written for my publication. (Well, it would have been hard to imagine a few months ago. After this year’s SCS, anything seems possible.) And honestly, common sense and experience does suggest that people are right to be worried: in this job market, evidence that you’re the kind of person who might rock the boat may not be looked well on. But since I’ve never been part of a job search, I don’t know for certain.
Later this month, look for our very first advice column by Sarah Nooter, with some answers to questions about early-career publishing. If you’d like to contribute a question, please send us your questions at pitches@eidolon.pub, and our advice columnist will try to answer them. Confidential questions can be sent to confidential@eidolon.pub. Only one member of our editorial team will see your name and email address, and we’ll pass the question along without any identifying information.
Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton, and her writing has appeared in the TLS, the Washington Post, and Jezebel. Her book Not All Dead White Men (Harvard University Press), a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is available now.
