Bret Devereaux

A thread worth reading. I've seen this slow drain at work in both history and classics departments and it is bad for students, bad for department morale, just bad. Watching good, well-enrolled programs allowed to wither away while enrollments still rise is infuriating.https://twitter.com/profyarrow/status/1460975981657837575 …

I run into the assumption that, "Oh, these positions probably aren't being replaced because no one wants to take critical basket weaving or whatever" and that just isn't what is happening.

For instance, my adjunct gig *right now* is partly filling the gap left by an unreplaced retirement. His courses were always full; demand was nuts. Once, some students *camped out overnight* to register for one of his classes to make sure they got spots. I am not kidding.

No immediate prospect of getting a hire to replace him, so right now they have me sort-of-kind-of-filling in. And my courses also filled basically instantly. No problem here with student interest. But replacing that tenure line? ::crickets::

And to be clear, the department absolutely wants to fill that slot permanently (though they'll likely need someone rather more senior than me) and even started a fund to try to fill the funding gap, but they're having to do it basically on their own; chances of success slim.

I suppose I should add, if you happen to have a ton of money and want to do good with it, you could fill that funding gap (here https://history.unc.edu/give/  scroll down) to keep UNC's ancient history program alive. (To be clear, again, there is a 0.0% chance they'd hire me for this)