Since I’m an assistant professor of anthropology, my social media threads are buzzing with conversation about the new Netflix show “The Chair.” Over the past month my friends and family have been asking me things like; Is “The Chair” really what being a professor is like? Is that how academic departments operate? Do they really treat BIPOC scholars that way? I know the show is about an English department but is that what anthropology departments are also like?
The answer: Yes….kinda.
I’ve talked about it with other professors. We understand that this is just a show so it’s not real. It takes place at a fictitious university and the entire first few months of the new department chair’s tenure is summed up in 6 episodes stretched across 3 hours. But, there are a lot of things from The Chair that can be readily applied to today’s anthropology departments. For example:
—University administrations place extraordinary pressure on departments to either perform (e.g. have lots of enrollments) or cut costs (e.g. decrease payroll). It’s hard for most students to understand how pervasive this pressure is at all levels. It’s behind every class you take, on the mind of every professor you talk to (especially if they’re an adjunct, lecturer, or untenured professor), and behind many of the decisions departments make.
—In the 2020s, improving “performance” is really difficult for humanities and ‘soft sciences’ because what we do doesn’t directly translate into the business world. Preparing students to work in cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology is not seen the same as preparing students to be entrepreneurs, doctors, or lawyers. Without the ability to demonstrate a direct connection from your department to big money donors, universities periodically question the relevance of departments like anthropology.
—A large number of professors with institutional power seriously plan on dying in their offices. Tenure is turning into lifetime employment in the United States, which means each tenure track professor hired today will be in that department or another anthropology department for 30+ years unless they choose otherwise. Folks hired in the 1990s (≈30 years ago) are in charge of many anthropology departments. This means people born before there was cultural resource management are running the same departments tasked with teaching you cultural resource management.
—Universities and student bodies are rapidly changing but anthropology departments change very, very, very, very, very…(deep breath)…..very slowly. Because professors stay forever, they are able to keep doing what they’ve done for decades without having to worry about losing their job. They can keep teaching stuff from the 1990s as if it’s current. Meanwhile, universities are doing what they can to keep from hiring tenure track professors because it saves money and generates a comparatively powerless caste of instructors that can be treated at the whim of university budgets. The influx of scholars with new ideas with the job security to follow through on those ideas is very constrained.
—Fresh, new ideas are welcomed, then wither on the vine. New ideas always seem fascinating, but they rarely stand up to the financial and workplace culture realities of 21st century universities. New professors, inspirations, collaborations, institutes, etcetera seem like a good idea but these arrangements rarely last as long as the professors who introduce them. Similarly, administrators get kudos for introducing new rules, programs, organizations, and other deviations from the university’s mission. There is incentive to create new bureaucracies because administrators can use them to job hop to higher levels and make more money. Professors are encouraged to introduce new research labs, collaborations, ventures, but there is very little support to maintain, remodel, or reinvigorate existing programs. It takes a very special group of university employees, faculty, administrators, students, and others to keep a new initiative going for longer than a few years because of this incentive to invent something new.
This is one reason why things are so confusing for students. People conjured up tons of new stuff without evaluating or getting rid of the old, which means a mélange of ridiculousness that we all have to deal with on a daily basis.
—Universities are political places. They are lightning rods for political interests, low hanging fruit for politicians, and are easy targets for activists. The aforementioned factors are good reasons to reform universities, but we are not living in a country where people spend the same amount of energy fixing things as they do demonizing things. Social media amplifies negativity to a very targeted audience and it can be used to motivate people to violently oppose things taken out of context that they don’t understand. Social media can be marshalled to make widespread change in our society, but it can just as easily be used for political gain, disinformation, discrimination, and harm.
Social media + Universities doing Business as Usual == an easy target for those who wish to make a name for themselves by making fun of universities.
(SPOILER ALERT: In “The Chair,” a professor flippantly uses a Nazi gesture to his class which leads to him rightfully getting suspended from his job. This character uses fragility and privilege as an excuse for not apologizing for his conduct and, rather than acknowledging wrongdoing and harm, the character unrepentantly tries to fight to get his job back.
I just want to be clear, in no way do I support Naziism, anti-Semitism, or racism, nor do I think hate speech should be covered under academic freedom or free speech. The concept of free speech and academic freedom has been used to justify all sorts of discriminatory acts and can be used as a form of supremacy.
Professors, students, and administrators should be able to ethically express themselves in a non-offensive way that does not contribute to structural inequality and discrimination. Also, professors need to adhere to a professional code of conduct that prevents them from harming students in any way. Nobody is paying to go to college so they can take classes from anti-Semitic professors. And, professors should not try to hide behind academic freedom or free speech as an excuse to not apologize to the people they harm with their actions. I am fully against fascism, sexism, racism, ageism, and any form of discrimination that harms anyone in our society. Acknowledging the politicization of American universities is not an excuse for hateful behavior among professors. Nor am I excusing the behavior of a character in a fictional show.)
If you watch The Chair, you can see a dramatic way of how each of these factors plays out. There are a lot of storylines but, at least tangentially, you can see how economics, politics, and workplace culture plays out in humanities departments like your average anthropology department.
How did these factors converge to discourage me from blogging about archaeology?
I used to think that archaeology professors didn’t blog because it didn’t count towards tenure or that we don’t have time. While that is true, I now realize that many of us don’t blog because it’s a potentially a huge liability.
The things that count for academia include teaching classes, conducting research, writing journal articles, peer-reviewed books, refereed book chapters, landing grant money, winning awards, and doing “service” (e.g. an amorphous category that includes laboring in university bureaucracies). The entire system recognizes these things because the academic system comes from a time when few people went to college, professors were rare, and they wrote down their thoughts on paper that was published in paper books for a select few Americans to read. This was all created before most of us had the capability to reach thousands of readers or listeners using an electronic box we could carry in our pocket. A time when the only BIPOC people on campus were trimming the hedges or doing laundry for fraternity houses, when the sight of a white woman or BIPOC student in your class was extremely rare, and there were almost no women or BIPOC professors.
Things in America have changed since the seventeenth century but the corequisites for academic achievement have not. Rather than blogging being respected for its contributions to scholarly discussion, it’s an easy vector to stymying the recognition for the things that academia does care about. It also opens professors up to negative attention that could cost them their job.
Here are three reasons why I’ve stopped blogging as much since I became an assistant professor:
My Colleagues: I’m going up for tenure in the near future and this wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the colleagues in my department. They’re responsible for taking a chance and hiring a CRM project manager to be a university professor. That had to have taken guts and I can’t thank them enough.
It’s not the folks in my department that I’m concerned reading my blog. It’s all the other colleagues I have throughout the country who don’t interact with me on a regular basis. The folks who just clicked on this blog post and got angry that it existed because it doesn’t jive with their personal conception of the world. The CRMers who are angry that I have a job in academia and aren’t fighting it out in the Battle Royale that is CRM. The subaltern folks who don’t know me but got angry that I didn’t take into account the experience of every single hyphenated American in every single blog post. The old timers who don’t think they’re the problem and got mad that a young whippersnapper like me things professors should retire at 65 if not sooner (FYI: I’m part of the FIRE movement so I hope to retire sooner than 65. By then I’ll be leading meditation retreats for BIPOC folks and working part-time in some field other than archaeology. By the time I’m 65 I will have spent 45 years of my life doing archaeology. I’ll be ready to be done by then.)
I’m too worried to put out as many blog posts because now I’m concerned that some random archaeologist with institutional power will try and fu¢k up my tenure case because they’re mad about something I wrote on my own personal blog. If I get tenure, I will be among the less than 30 African American anthropology professors in the United States. I can’t jeopardize that over a blog post.
The Students: I can do archaeology for any CRM company that will hire me. There are dozens of CRM companies in the American West and I’m sure I could get a job with one of them. If I wanted to do archaeology, I’d do CRM. I could teach the field techs and crew chiefs I worked with, write articles on company projects, and grind contracts like the rest of you.
But I teach archaeology because I never had a professor like me. I’m trying to become the kind of instructor I’d always wished I’d had. I’ve already written about how so few of my classes taught me anything worthwhile. Most of the time this wasn’t about course content. It was because the instructors were milquetoast at best AND the content sucked.
I also do what I can to teach students how to get a job in archaeology, which means working in CRM. I was always amazed that students would drop five and six figures on a university degree where nobody ever told them about CRM. It led to many burnt out new hires, hours of wasted payroll on people who didn’t want to do archaeology after all, and a lower quality of work. Nobody taught me about CRM when I was in college, so I’m going to do it for others.
However, I’m always worried that something I write on this blog will spark the ire of a group of students who will launch a social media campaign to doxx me or run an online smear campaign because they think they’re doing social justice. They may mean well but sometimes seemingly small things get blown to pieces on the internet. In fact, the simple fact I wrote that last sentence can get taken out of context, spammed across the internet, misrepresenting the meaning of this blog post, and making me look like a villain.
Online student activism is changing the world for professors in a good way. Things like the Nazi salute depicted in “The Chair” and the one that occurred at the 2021 SHA conference need to be shut down. There is no space for that stuff. Student activism was critical to stopping it. While I’d never do anything like that, there’s no way I can control how people will take the things I say on this blog. I also don’t want to be on the receiving end of some misguided retribution.
You cannot control how other people will use the stuff you put on the internet. Because so few people research things for themselves, negative memes can ripple throughout online echo chambers until people start digitally firebombing. None of this is good for an assistant professor’s career so I just maintain partial radio silence online by publishing way fewer blog posts.
The University: I am happy to work for my university. It’s a good one. There are many out there that try to be like it but this one is mine and there’s nothing like it in the world.
That being said: I don’t trust that my university will have my back if one of my blog posts causes a digital $hit show.
Blogging exists in a grey area in academia. It’s part free speech, part publishing, kinda social media, and partially a reflection of your character. There are no clear boundaries covering professors for the things they publish on their own personal blogs, which means there are no clear rules on how universities can protect their scholars in the event that problems arise due to blogging. Professors find themselves in free speech situations all the time for blogging, but it doesn’t mean we get to say whatever we feel on the internet. This also means my university doesn’t have any clear policies covering what I say on my blog, nor does it have a mechanism to protect me from a lawsuit caused by something I said while blogging. Given this, I’m not sure my university can protect me so it’s not worth the risk.
I also have a feeling that there’s the potential someone may try to find the university liable for my blogging activities. Readers may come after my university because of what I say, even though it is within the realm of free speech as I blog about archaeology, which is something within my expertise, and something I do on my own device using hosting I pay for personally. While I try and stay away from controversy, I cannot control what people find controversial. I also cannot prevent them from trying to get my employer to compel me to change what I say, take a blog post down, or sanction me in some other way that could affect my career.
Most importantly, my employer controls my paycheck and the success of my tenure case. Pressure from people who don’t like my blog may prevent them from fairly reviewing my tenure package, which is something I’ve been working on since 2017. For me, not getting tenure would be like doing a CRM project for 5 years and not getting 50% of the contract guaranteed upon delivery. It would also be a slam for any BIPOC archaeologist or CRMer who ever dreamed of becoming an archaeology professor because it would show exactly how thin the ice we’re skating upon is.
These are the reasons why I’ve decided that it’s not worth the risk to blog as frequently until I have tenure. I’m not independently wealthy (yet) and I like having a job more than I like writing blog posts. I’m also worried something I blog about could come back to impact my career. I know other CRMers who don’t blog about archaeology for the same reasons. My desire for self-preservation is not unique.
I still have a lot to say. Not everyone will like it.
What you say and do online can and will be used against you. Ethical online conduct will help further your career while also reaching audiences around the globe. However, any slipup online will be amplified against you in the court of public opinion. I work for a good employer, but I do not have confidence it will support me if my blogging goes sideways in a negative way. Just like in The Chair, I feel like my university would cut me out to prevent bad publicity and a potential lawsuit if a blog post was poorly received. This may not be true but BIPOC people in academia live by a different, unstated set of rules. We can’t do the same thing other professors can do because we are judged through a different lens. It’s sad but true. While the hundreds of blog posts I’ve already written are still being read by over a thousand people each month, I always wonder if one of them (like this one) could come back to hurt me someday.
However, I’m close to getting tenure. Only have about a year or so to go. Perhaps after I get tenure, I’ll be able to write some blog posts about what it’s really like to be an African American archaeology professor at a R1 institution. Keep reading until then.
Do you have something to add to this conversation? Write a comment below or send me an email.
Having trouble finding work in cultural resource management archaeology? Still blindly mailing out resumes and waiting for a response? Has your archaeology career plateaued and you don’t know what to do about it? Download a copy of the new book “Becoming an Archaeologist: Crafting a Career in Cultural Resource Management” Click here to learn more.
Check out Succinct Research’s contribution to Blogging Archaeology. Full of amazing information about how blogging is revolutionizing archaeology publishing. For a limited time you can GRAB A COPY FOR FREE!!!! Click Here
“Resume-Writing for Archaeologists” is now available on Amazon.com. Click Here and get detailed instructions on how you can land a job in CRM archaeology today!
Small Archaeology Project Management is now on the Kindle Store. Over 300 copies were sold in the first month! Click Here and see what the buzz is all about.
Join the Succinct Research email list and receive additional information on the CRM and heritage conservation field.
Get killer information about the CRM archaeology industry and historic preservation.