I clocked some of Emma Stamm’s recent posts on para-academia months ago but, because I was fully entangled in graduate school applications, I couldn’t really bring myself to read them. Of course I know, and knew then, that things are bleak in the American academy. It’s certainly because of Trump’s assaults, but these wouldn’t have been so effective and sweeping if higher ed hadn’t already been hobbled by decades of neoliberal austerity and privatization.

Still, maybe because I had to believe in an increasingly fantastical best case scenario, I think I just said I’d do it later. Now the acceptances are in and I’ve decided which school I’m attending, and come to grips with the mediocre deal they’re giving me to attend, I’ve given these pieces a read and I must admit I got a certain positive bump in outlook. There’s a very good chance that after I get this PhD (Inshallah…) I won’t really be able to ply my trade without some kind of relationship to “para-ac.” This is something I think I knew already but reading this is helping me articulate it better, to picture different scenarios in which I might be able to make a living (or at least part of a living) doing something actually fulfilling, that I’m actually good at. I can’t deny that I’d love to be able to teach courses for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and the like. If for no other reason than their embrace of the non-traditional, the subversive, the underground.

Naturally, I still long for the old, stable, perhaps fictional model where I would be able to find a tenure track position with relative ease. Insofar as this ever existed, it comes with real shortcomings, elitist pitfalls. My own work revolves heavily around the role of art, culture, and education in shaping the democratic subject, whose existence can’t really come into full view until we have a real, viable model of an egalitarian society (yes, in other words, communism). Before that there’s always going to be brilliant and talented people without the means to develop the full scope of their capacities. My concern with para-academia is that the price tag associated with institutions like BISR, Acid Horizon Research Commons and other replicates these same problem. No doubt they are aware of it and try to mitigate where they can, but within the confines of this system, there isn’t much that can be done before the rupture.

A similar concern (or maybe just a noted irony) is that a great many of the scholars who will be teaching at the growing number of these institutions will very likely need to have some set of letters after their name from a more traditional school. This raises questions regarding their viability in the long term as things continue. Though, like most questions regarding the future, I can’t see a clear answer coming anytime soon.