The Job Market in History

This is an entertaining piece and, from my experience, accurate as a light-hearted “ethnographic” study.  The role of “brokers” or “informants” is critical to the system.  However, as fun as this piece is, with its clever graphics, “brokers” point to “brokenness”–a  broken system that gives up transparency for secret processes.  On my campus or as I see my campus from a non-broker perspective, “brokering” is the name of the game.  If one were to read the official dispatches, reports, and attend the meetings, one would be left CLUELESS as to what is really going on.  The “real” story is told around the coffee kiosk.  The problem, of course, being in the “know” comes at a price–you need to be on the “right” side.  So, brokers dispense information, maintain the interest of their “masters,” and do the dirty work of the powers that be by only telling what they want you to know.  Lesboprof is right in this regard–don’t trust them!  Let’s not forget that “brokers,” along with their duty to spread harmless gossip, can be responsible for maligning and marginalizing people, too.

My question is, how does one manage the hostile spinmeister? After I admittedly made a mistake in class as a grad student, a powerful prof with zero knowledge of me as a person, a student, or an instructor took some heavy-handed (and extraprocedural) action against me. I fought this, won, and still have had it spun against me ever since, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so, including a misleading read-between-the-lines memo that I assume was placed in my file. When I was informed I would not be funded for my final year (supposedly due to “budget cuts” in a department begging to staff summer classes), I became aware of this individual’s continued innuendo in writing, sent out several years after the fact as a preemptive heads-up. Suffice to say that this is a legendarily toxic work atmosphere, for many reasons/years.

This is very good.