Jonathan Goodwin was going to give a talk at last weekend’s Modern Language Association convention on “Jobs of the MLA,” a look at the history of the MLA’s Job Information List. Unfortunately, he got sick and was unable to travel; happily, he was able to post the talk online. The MLA gave him almost 50 years of page-scans of the JIL, which were then OCRed for ease of searching. As he read the ads to plan how to make a database of them, he began tweeting some of them. For me, the lesson was inescapable: The academic hiring system has been dysfunctional for as long as I’ve been alive.

The ads are kind of amazing:

Sometimes, they over-emphasize extracurricular activities:

But it’s hard not to sympathize with some of them:

Jonathan is continuing to post ads to his Twitter feed, so do follow along there! The wunderkammer that is Twitter meant that I was reading Goodwin’s tweets at about the same time as Kim Wilson was posting choice bits from “Higher Education: A Market for Racism?”, which definitely enriches the experience. In that article, Malcolm James and Sivamohan Valluvan consider how academia is not exempt from, but rather an exemplary instance of, neoliberalism, as well as the disparate consequences for minority scholars and academics:

Related to this problem is the precise manner in which minority academics within the humanities brand themselves. Let us remember, lest we misunderstand academia as somehow a pursuit nobly removed from the whims of the society which encases us, that academics are among the more enthusiastic proponents of individual brand management (read citation anxiety and impact profiles). We are perhaps one of the more zealous professions in rehabilitating the ‘technologies of self’ associated with neoliberalism. Put simply, academics are in effect self-entrepreneurs, anxiously curating at all times their personal brand/image.

It’s important not to reduce Goodwin’s work to a kind of antiquarianism–”look at these old job ads! Such adorbs, so academic-freedom!”–but rather as part of an effort to understand more fully the ways in which a hypothetically progressive or liberal-minded academia ends up reinforcing, rather than ameliorating, inequality. (Or, put slightly differently, the ways in which the liberal beliefs of academia founder on the neoliberal structural forces shaping higher education. As the language gets more bureaucratic, the number of full-time jobs gets smaller and smaller.)

Photo “Gifts from the Redneck Professor” by Flickr user Bill Rogers / Creative Commons licensed BY-NC-ND-2.0