The journal my first first author paper was published is shuttered. Friends are losing jobs and grants that support their and others’ jobs left and right. We’ve lost the security of winning fellowships = your funding is taken care of. No form of once-meaningful security means anything anymore.
It's passe to think of a job as a vocation or calling but for many of us it is- we find motivation and meaning and community in being part of this larger scientific enterprise. It's provided a form of structure to lives that are nomadic and stressful. And now it all might just be... gone?
It’s a fox hunt. The point is destruction for cruelty’s sake and constant fear. Their own insecurity consumes them and the conspiracies they’ve spun give them an excuse to “punish” us for imagined crimes. They’re burning the fields & salting the earth because missing easter 2020…saved their lives.
The constant nightmarish precarity of academia used to also mean there were ways to achieve temporary security within it. The last bit of trust that underlaid the tradeoff of ‘precarity for independence & curiosity’ is gone now. I have no intention of leaving, but what will be left to not leave?
May 15, 2025 06:16
