Academic Job Discourseᵀᴹ is back (it’s never gone).

Tl;dr: There are no jobs.

Headline: Commodification of academia has decoupled the value of research from the chance of employability.

Long read: Research and teaching simply cannot be conducted on business principles... 1/

...but since the marketization of the higher education sector, the output in academia *is* reviewed according to capitalist principles. In effect we are led to believe that people producing research output (primarily social capital: what allows the society to run) should be... 2/

...employed according to the principles of the market. This is insane. There is no „market saturation“ of palaeographers or biochemists. The number of people researching a particular topic or discipline cannot be dependent on the perceived market value of their output. 3/

But in effect researchers (whose output is not monetary capital) are forced to compete for the right to conduct their research as if it was. This causes a severe deficit of jobs and job market becomes job lottery. 4/

This has to be presented as a meritocratic competition because the system will only sustain itself if enough brilliant minds buy the lottery tickets (do PhDs, publish, teach and research in precarious posts). 5/

The technological progress in research is not a byproduct of the marketization. Accessibility of data changes nothing in the sheer knowledge and training needed to assess it in order to produce actual *research*. 6/

The progressive drive to monetize research output (sth that can be given a price, sure, but this price will always be *completely* arbitrary) causes basic research and teaching posts to first precarise and then disappear (no „market value“) 7/

This process only inflates the lottery model making brilliant researchers leave their fields not because they didn’t produce good work but because they didn’t have the resources to keep buying the lottery tickets (they couldn’t survive the precarity any longer) 8/

In completely marketized systems (UK for example) this leads to sharp decline in student numbers in those areas (students are forced to pay large sums of money and thus forced to treat the education system like the stock market) This allows to further limit the number of jobs. 9/

This system allows also monetary exploitation of researchers‘ output and skills through the academic publishing system. Articles become lottery tickets first, research capital second. 10/