This week the Chronicle published a fascinating essay about academic ghosting. I am quoted in it. The author and I spoke at great length and had a great conversation.

 

 

What I find interesting, however, is what she did NOT use from our long talk: all the things I said about the ECONOMICS of ghosting specifically in the context of academic hiring.

 

 

 

 

Ie, that catastrophic systemic defunding means we no longer have sufficient administrative staff to send the emails to candidates when they are no longer under consideration.

 

 

Because it was the administrative staff who sent them back in the day! And now those staff are gone, or overwhelmed with other work.

 

 

I said this over and over.

 

 

But she wanted the problem to be about morals. Which it absolutely is! Faculty should behave better and ghosting is outrageous and immoral. And it occurs all over the place, as she describes, not just in hiring. And it’s bad.

 

 

But. Morals are also a by-product of economics.

 

 

Because accountable hiring systems require money, money in the form of administrative staff, and reasonable work demands. IS IT A COINCIDENCE that the Academic Jobs Wiki started the same year as the Great Recession??

 

 

Late capitalism wants to pretend otherwise but the collapse of actual human accountability is rampant across all sectors of our economy now because of budget cut after budget cut. Cuts have consequences. Yes it hurts more in academia because of our peculiar structures of intimacy, but in the end, like everything else, it comes down to adequate or inadequate funding.

 

 

To say otherwise is to keep participating in academic exceptionalism, that academia owes “more” to the world because it “should be” finer or better. That academics are special people who operate outside the demands of capitalism. Which is the same logic that fuels adjunctification and the imperative to work for free or for peanuts in pursuit of some myth of “higher calling.”

 

She ends the essay with this:  “But some scholars, especially those who are early career, women, and people of color, are trying to deal with these conditions. We are desperately trying to renovate — to make the whole place safer, more welcoming. We are trying to add rooms, to guide guests through the various mazes, to build a more stable foundation. We take on this labor because renovating is the professional thing to do; building an academy where structures encourage us to be accountable to one another, to set and communicate boundaries, and to show up as best we can — that’s the work.

 

 

That rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is also its own form of unpaid labor, even as the ship sinks?

 

 So this essay as written is both brilliant and necessary, and completely wrong, at least about ghosting in hiring. It requires money to create and sustain the infrastructure for humane hiring practices. Let’s not gaslight about (the causes of) our gaslighting.