Last week, in the basement of the Barker Center, a group of students gathered to mourn the death of a program that Sara Feldman built, that I have helped to build, and that those same students have helped to build. Every single one of them spoke movingly about the impact that NTTF have made on them, impact often far out of proportion with our role here, out of proportion with our impermanence and our compensation. Some of them wept.
The students in that basement gave us far more recognition of the situation we’re in than I’ve received at this table or from my supervisors.
The Corporation’s counters on the issue of time caps have again and again betrayed a belief that we as teachers are replaceable. It doesn’t matter if someone times out. You’ll always find a replacement.
I won’t argue that you’ll find someone to take the job. People are desperate. I don’t need to tell you about the state of the academic job market.
There have also been clear signals that you mean to replace us with AI wherever possible. We see this in the replacement of SEAS advisors last fall, and especially in the recent announcement that first-year (pre-concentration) advising would be replaced with a chatbot.
But teaching is not reducible to a number, an algorithmic output, a line on a budget. It relies on relationships and on trust. And both of those require time to build.
To take just one example: we’ve heard so much in the past few years about the need to foster classroom discussion on difficult and controversial topics, to make space for disagreement. Well, last week, the students in my course on the history of the Holocaust discussed the politicization of Holocaust memory in debates surrounding the war in Gaza. It’s hard to imagine a more difficult, charged, controversial topic. But because I’ve worked to build those relationships of trust, students were able to disagree with one another respectfully. We all learned from one another in that discussion.
I could also talk about the scholarship I won’t be able to produce if I can’t find another academic job because the Corporation won’t even provide library access to workers who are timing out. I have multiple projects in the works, including a book manuscript, a chapter in an edited volume, and a journal article, all with deadlines in the next seven months. Positions like mine are allegedly supposed to be “teaching postdocs” that provide experience and serve as bridges to tenure-track jobs elsewhere. But the bridges are gone. The landscape has changed. The Corporation has done nothing to reckon with that reality.
You have always had the power to do the right thing. You have chosen not to do it. I want you to reckon with the human consequences of that choice.