Winter 'Seminar' on the Subversive Intellectual: Foundational Resources, Guided Discussions, and Live Discourse

I'm calling in my fellow co-conspirators, especially those of you who have been following Post-PhD since the beginning. Get in touch, I want to hear your thoughts.

In this post: Winter 'Seminar' on the Subversive Intellectual: Foundational Resources, Guided Discussions, and Live Discourse
Next week: Readings on the Neoliberal University & Why We Must Support Graduate Students.
Last week: Research: The Structural Realities of The Neoliberal University

Dear paying co-conspirators,

I have finally built out the paid portion of Post-PhD in a meaningful way after months of wandering lost in the desert of half-baked ideas and not nearly enough time. Between awkwardly waddling into the world of endless querying to agents and publishers, that other newsletter I run, Not Safe for School, and you know, dev editing client work, the life of a freelance writer still feels very much like that of an over-worked and underpaid adjunct. Wamp wamp.

First of all, thank you for being an early supporter of this somewhat ambitious goal of mine to turn Post-PhD into a space for resources, community exchange, and discourse. Launching a paid content portion of a newsletter has been more challenging than I expected, but we have big plans for January.

Each month, I’ll post a resources page with curated readings around the crisis of the university. At the end of the month, we'll host a live seminar around a set of short readings and discussion questions where paying members will be able to ask questions, contribute to the discourse, and help form the backbone of the post-phd community.

For December, we’re starting at the foundations, with Introductory Resources: Structural Realities of the Neoliberal University. On this page, you’ll find the heavy hitters of writings on higher education, intended to give you an introduction (and go-to for citations for teaching/research purposes) of the current theorizations of how the university turned into a toxic place with zombie leadership, academic rockstars, and mass exploitation (as John Smyth would say). 

We want to hear from you, (yes, you), regardless of how much you know about the inner workings of the university, your personal experience is equally as important to forming a discourse around these important issues.

The easiest way to get in touch? Simply respond to this email or postphd@allisonharbin.com

Why Now:

I spent the weekend binging the gut-wrenching Hulu television adaptation of journalist Beth Macy’s groundbreaking Dopesick (a book whose structure has been deeply inspiring for me), feeling as if I too were dope sick, with the shakes and a nauseous stomach. The frustratingly abrupt ending left me shaking in quiet fury over the legacy of death the Sackler family continues to leave in its wake. We live in a world where Rittenhouse walks free for killing to white BLM activists, where Roe v Wade seems more and more destined to cease being reality and the true Trumpian legacy of permanent judicial appointments makes us terrified for what will happen next. It is clear that this shit isn't working for anyone else, save the ultra-rich. What allowed the Sackler family to poison a nation at a great profit is the same ideological structures that resulted in the forfeiture of the university by scholars into the hands of a corporatizing academic elite: deregulation, an internal disassembling of the federal government making corporations impossible to hold accountable in any meaningful way whatsoever, and the endless obsession with scaling. 

From the beginning, way back in 2017, I wanted Post-PhD the Blog to be a repository of stories and strategies for my fellow millennial academics, wading through trauma and anger, the grand majority of us are barely making rent nationwide, we are a truly lost generation of scholars in terms of lost research of what-could-have-been and the cold reality that we barely have enough time to teach a full course load, and what that pays is not nearly enough to build economic stability. Indeed, for over 75% of us graduating with doctorates and an interest in pursuing a professorship, we instead have contingent labor, paying, on average 24k a year. For labor so skilled and so important: educating the future.

For further reading on this topic: see the bottom of this email and for an even more exhaustive list: check out the resources page for December

To that end, I’ve begun organizing the research I have conducted over the past five years into the structure of the university, how it got this way, why it got this way, and what that means for our future. 

Each month will revolve around a central topic or theme and will provide resources in the form of peer-review PDFs, journal and newspaper articles, annual economic reports, as well as cultural criticism of the university from a global, intersectional feminist lens. 

The monthly resources pages are by no means complete, they are simply the ones I’ve managed to find, in stolen moments, when I probably should have been doing something else.  As we progress, I’ll get into more recent articles, but for now, some foundations are important to get started. 

How to use the resources page: Because to be a scholar is also to be an educator in some form or another, each month’s resources will be listed in a form of an annotated bibliography and guiding discussion questions to walk readers through a metaphorical lesson plan. 

Now, this new iteration of Post-PhD, is part newsletter, part live discussions, part comprehensive research archive, and entirely collaborative within and beyond our community. This is the key to coalition building, but we'll get to that in 2022.

12-13-21 Post: The Guided Reading & Discussion for December:

Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. "The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses," Social Text, 79 Vol. 22, No 2. Summer 2004.

Lorde, Audre. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. The Crossing Press Feminist Series:1984, 2007

Bousquet, Marc. "The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible." Works and Days 41/42, Vol. 21, No 1-2. 2003.

Having resources and a discussion generated, Post-PhD is close to fulfilling its new mission. The biggest obstacle, by far, has been:

How to create a platform for live discussion, collaboration, and resource sharing? 

For now, we are starting small, with just our paying subscribers, because that you are paying means you have an investment in this vision for Post-PhD. Beginning in the last month of January, we will host a live discussion around the themes introduced at the beginning of January. I’m in the midst of assembling a panel of respondents, the only pre-requisite for this first one is a familiarity with Post-PhD and an interest in learning how to repair and rebuild the university structure. If you are interested in contributing, either live or via email, get in touch. (You can reply to this email, at postphd@allisonharbin.com) 

Specifically, for January’s conversation, we are interested in exploring the role of the individual within the toxic and exploitative university. What can we do, as individuals? What can we teach, as educators? What can we learn, as researchers? If you have some ideas or are interested in being involved in this project, generally speaking, we have a role for you, so get in touch. 

Share this newsletter with those you are interested in having a conversation with. There will always be a free version of Post-PhD that allows supporters to follow along, but it won’t grant access to resources nor will you be able to submit questions or attend the live zoom, which will be recorded and immediately published under resources. 

Coming soon: Content Calendar aka Syllabus for the Subversive Intellectual.

January through April will be onboarding documents, a newsletter course delivered in weekly dispatches, culminating in a live fireside chat the last week of each month. Until then, we’d love to hear from you about this month’s themes, so we at Post-PhD can continue to craft this here newsletter into something much larger: a coalition-building source to disrupt the scheduled future for the university.

Until next time,

Allison

P.S. Get in touch! :)

Articles (quick reads):

n/a “How to Fix the Adjunct Crisis.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 30, 2018)

Tamayo, Ana M Fores. “The Adjunctification of Higher Education: Its Dirty Little Secret Exposed” Industrial Worker (Apr 1, 2014)

Swidler, Eva. "The Pernicious Silencing of the Adjunct Faculty." The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 30, 2017).

Dreger, Alice. “Take Back the Ivory Tower.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct 1, 2017)

Conley, Joseph. “Just Another Piece of Quit Lit.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Mar 8, 2018)

Jaschik, Scott. "New Study Documents Long-term Losses of New Humanities Faculty Jobs." Inside Higher Ed. June 6, 2016.

Warren, Scott. "Future Colleague or Convenient Friend: The Ethics of Mentorship." Counseling and Values: January 2005; 45, 2.