Anthony Grafton’s LRB review (17 November 2022; archived) of The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are, by David M. Henkin, is full of interesting historical tidbits (we’re passing it on to a postmaster acquaintance for the mail-related stuff: “Meanwhile American culture developed a rich epistolary strain, with distinct rules for the brief, matter-of-fact business letter that should not be written on a Sabbath and the long, personal letter that could”), but its appearance here is due to the mention of “Saint Monday,” a phrase I hadn’t seen. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a decent article:

Saint Monday is the tradition of absenteeism on a Monday. […] The tradition of taking Monday off has been common among craft workers since at least the seventeenth century, when the workweek ran from Monday to Saturday as had been the custom and expectation for centuries.

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin refers to the practice, saying of his youthful employment in a London printing house, “My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to the master”.

Later writers often ascribed Saint Monday to the organisation and improvement of working class life which occurred with industrialisation. Pay day was typically Saturday, and therefore workers often had spare money on Monday. In other industries, business owners had become accustomed to workers not showing up on Mondays and were prepared to put up with it. Food would commonly be left over from the weekend, thus workers did not need to visit the works canteen, and since many workers were taking the day off, there was often company to be had.

The tradition declined during the nineteenth century, but the provision of entertainments, such as railway excursions, was initially common on Saturday and Monday, and it was not until the middle of the century that workers were able to enjoy a weekend. In part, the decline can be attributed to the adoption of half-day working on Saturdays, which legitimated leisure time for workers.

Saint Monday remained in place longest among the better-off workers, including the self-employed who retained some say in their hours and were not economically compelled to work long hours.

I wish I’d known about that back when I worked in an office; it would have been a useful reference. (Also, workers should go back to grabbing as much time for themselves as they can and stop letting bosses treat them as available around the clock. But I digress.)

* Extinct is a professional blog. But part of professional life is the job market— the worst part, really. That’s what I (Max) want to talk about today. The essay is a personal one. I'm going to share some details from what has been a pretty rough year in my life. Hopefully it won't seem like a pity party. My goal is self-reflection rather than self-pity. But probably it isn't entirely successful. Be warned: there is no paleontology, no philosophy, here. Just some reflections on grief and loss. Here goes…

I was at the library with my two year old when I got the call. My father had been in a bicycle accident. Near the Kwik Trip. Flipped over the handlebars. I could picture the intersection. It’s busy, but not especially dangerous to an experienced cyclist like my dad. Anyway, dad fell hard. He was alive, but was being rushed to North Memorial Hospital, which is a good hour’s drive from the Kwik Trip. The words “traumatic brain injury” might have been mentioned. I can't remember. Anyway, I knew he had hit his head and there was a chance he might not survive.

He did survive, but only after being intubated, then extubated, and then reintubated two more times. Before the last intubation he went into respiratory failure and had to be rushed to emergency surgery. During the operation they found a blood clot that was occluding a good 90% of his windpipe. Dad was so frightened that he hardly slept for days. After a bout of ICU delirium (look it up) he was finally released from intensive care about three weeks after the accident. From there it was on to another hospital where he stayed for a month. Finally he was discharged, outfitted with a tracheostomy tube and a neck collar. He has since been re-admitted to the hospital so many times that I've lost count. 

I am processing my father's injuries in fits and starts. I haven't had any other choice given the madness of my life at the moment. Just three weeks before my father's accident my daughter was born. A week before that I began a one year visiting professorship at Macalester College in St. Paul. Because of the nature of my appointment I took just one day of “paternity leave.” (At this point, I'll remind you that I also have a two-year-old.) The crash happened in October. Then, in November, one of my closest friends suffered a brain aneurysm. Against the odds, he survived. Three surgeries later he is rehabilitating at his parents’ house.  I've been down to visit him just once, which is something I'm embarrassed about.

Also, during this time I was conducting a job search, and that's what this essay is really about. The search isn't over yet, but it’s already contained a year's worth of disappointment. The details don't matter, and wouldn't interest you anyway. Suffice it to say that I suffered the most painful rejection of my career and now find myself struggling to regain my bearings. At the same time I'm left wondering whether I want to regain my bearings in a profession I am coming increasingly to dislike; surely there is something I could be doing that would cause me less emotional distress. Of course, all of this will sound familiar to anyone who has spent any amount of time on the academic job market. So, let's talk about it.

Sometimes it takes an unhappy coincidence to discern a perfectly obvious connection. In this case, the connection takes form around the concepts of grief and loss. What is grief, exactly? I don't know. I'm not that kind of philosopher. But I know that grief isn't just sadness. I might describe it as a cocktail of disorientation, frustration, and helplessness. Grief is absence and all the stuff that comes along with it. To grieve isn't to do anything, really. It's to not know what to do because something valued has been lost that can't be recovered. People need to grieve to heal, but grief is not the same thing as healing. Better to think of grief as a sort of precondition for healing. It’s more scab than scar. And like a scab it isn't especially pleasant.

What I want to suggest is that grief can be a useful lens for understanding the experiences many of us have on the job market. But I'll come back to that. First, I want to say a bit more about my dad. My dad's life changed forever in October. For one thing his vocal cords are paralyzed. This means that he now speaks in a low, gravelly tone that doesn't sound at all like dad, only it does, because that's how he sounds now. More seriously he is unable to swallow. For a while he was fed through a tube in his mouth. Then it became a tube in his nose. Then a tube into his stomach. And now, because the stomach tube made him nauseous, a tube into his intestine. His doctors say there is a chance he will be able to recover a partial ability to swallow, but the prospects don't seem very bright. Failure to recover would mean that he will feed through a tube for the rest of his life.

I'm grieving on behalf of my father. Grieving because his life has changed, probably for good. Before the accident he was usually in motion. Running, biking, doing home improvement projects, helping the neighbors. Now he spends a good amount of his time hooked up to a feeding machine that pumps food into his intestine in a steady drip. I'm also grieving on behalf of my children, and yes, myself. I was looking forward to my dad doing grandpa stuff with my kids. He's just a lot of fun: the kind of guy who's happy to get down on the floor and play and make silly faces. He's still going to be fun, but it's not going to look the way I imagined it would. It won't sound the same either. A few weeks ago dad remarked that my daughter, who is now six months old, will never know what he used to sound like. Neither will my son. They will know from videos but not from firsthand experience. For them, grandpa will be someone who looks and sounds a certain way, which differs starkly from the way I imagined it would. This is a loss: the loss of an opportunity to know my father as I hoped they would know him. It is the kind of thing for which grief is an appropriate response.

Now, it might strike you as melodramatic or even insensitive to describe job market experiences in terms of grief. So let me be clear about what I'm saying. I’m not saying that failing to find an academic position is comparable to losing a loved one either in terms of its emotional intensity or its influence on one’s well-being. It isn’t. What I’m saying is that I have found it useful to understand my response to my latest job market disappointment as a grief response. That is, I'm finding it useful to understand my present emotional turbulence and feelings of disorientation as an expression of grief. When you love what you do; when your ability to do what you love depends on landing one of a very few jobs in your area; when every application that advances to the interview stage involves considerable emotional investment; and when you fail to find a position (over and over again), grief is both a likely and an appropriate response. But grief is inconvenient. It fucks with your head and takes your joy. It can even alienate you from your interests and from the people around you.

This is basically how I feel right now. But what am I grieving? Lost opportunities I suppose. A certain way my career could have played out but didn't. Perhaps even my career itself, although I'm not ready to grab the eject handle just yet. 

A common way that people talk about their emotional response to job market disappointment is in terms of anger or resentment. It's almost as if we lack the resources to talk about professional disappointment in a more sympathetic register. The bitter and angry postdoc is a cliche of the seminar room. It’s as if those of us struggling to find tenure track appointments are incels furiously venting our grievances into internet message boards. But surely we can do better than this. I do feel some bitterness towards the profession, which has to do with specific ways I (feel as if I) have been mistreated. But I don't think I've become a bitter person, or that the best way to understand my increasingly complicated relationship with my profession is in terms of cynicism. Mostly I feel hurt, and my struggle is to reconcile my genuine love for my career with the amount of distress it regularly causes me.

Anyway, framing this latest and greatest professional disappointment in terms of grief has helped me be kinder to myself. And to sort through my complex, and constantly shifting, emotional response. I'm not sure if I'll have an academic appointment next year. That might mean I'm on my way to washing out of the field. Like, I hope it doesn't, but that honestly seems like the most probable outcome at this point. If that happens, it will be difficult. It will feel as if part of me has died. (This is the danger of integrating your work and your hobbies.) But I feel better prepared for this than I would have a year ago, and part of that is having the language to talk about it. As philosophers interested in scientific classification know, there is a power in calling something by the right name. I'm not (just) sad or angry, I'm coping with loss. Best to be honest about it. Good grief.

Brian McGill at Dynamic Ecology blog has an interesting overview of publishing trends. The paragraph that seems to have gotten the most traction is this one: 

Open access has been a disaster. Scientists never really wanted it. We have ended up here for two reasons. First, pipe dreaming academics who believed in the mirage of “Diamond OA” (nobody pays and it is free to publish). Guess what – publishing a paper costs money – $500-$2000 depending on how much it is subsidized by volunteer scientists. We don’t really want Bill Gates etc. to pay for diamond OA. And universities and especially libraries are already overextended. There is no free publishing. The second and, in my opinion most to blame, are the European science grant funders who banded together and came up with Plan S and other schemes to force their scientists to only publish OA. At least in Europe the funding agencies mostly held scientists harmless by paying, and because of the captive audience, publishers went to European countries first for Read and Publish agreements. So European scientists haven’t been hurt too badly. But North America has so far refused to go down the same path, leaving North American scientists without grants (a majority of them) with an ever shrinking pool of subscription-based journals to publish in. And scientists from less rich countries are hurt even worse. Let’s get honest. How long before every university in Africa is covered by a Read and Publish agreement from the for profit companies?

What is interesting about this assessment is that he calls the open access situation a “disaster” on the basis of one very narrow measure: “How does it affect writing scientists?” By “writing scientists,” I mean what are usually called “principle investigators” (PIs), faculty who are busy running a lab and need publications for career advancement.

Two things.

First, most of the paragraph is concerned about how article processing charges affect scientists without grants who need to publish. I emphasize “charges” because, as I have said before, we need to separate open access – a description of who can read scientific articles – from the business models used to support open access. McGill is complaining about the latter, and isn’t addressing the former.

I do agree that many researchers have unrealistic expectations about the costs of publication. I agree that there has not been enough discussion about alternative business models for open access.

Second, journal articles do not just exist merely for the benefit of scientists who need publications to get promotion or tenure. There are not only people who write articles, there are people who read journal articles. You should consider the sizable benefits of more people being able to read scientific papers before judging the success of open access.

Article processing charges do create barriers for researchers with limited resources. But the research of hypothetical African scientists is impeded by not being able to read the scientific literature, not just by being unable to publish in the scientific literature.

If we are concerned about African researcher not being able to pay article processing charges, should we not also be concerned about African researchers being able to buy journal articles or African research libraries being able to buy journal subscriptions?

I see increased ability to read the world’s scholarly literature as a good thing. I don’t see it as an unalloyed good that must be pursued above all else. But it should be in the mix as we’re taking stock of open access.