Longreads 
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2017. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
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Michelle Weber Philosophy professor Tommy Curry’s work (and part of the reason Texas A&M hired him) asks, in part, whether violence is politically necessary for dismantling white supremacy — an exploration of “violent resistance in the context of American racism ‘not as a call to arms, but as an open-ended political question.'” A frequent guest on a friend’s radio show, it was only a matter of time before the right-wing internet outrage machine found him. The repercussions are still reverberating through his professional and family lives, and shaking the foundations of academic freedom at A&M. Steve Kolowich walks through the story for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“You and your entire family of low-IQ, affirmative-action herpes-infected african monkeys might need to be put to death.”
There were dozens like that. The professor forwarded them to the campus police department. Mr. Curry says a detective told him some of the messages appeared to have been sent from within the county.
Police officers made a point to drive past his apartment building often for several weeks. But Mr. Curry worried about whether his 6-year-old was safe at her elementary school. Driving her home at the end of the day, he would circle the block a few times to make sure they had not been followed.
Nobody came to his door, knocked him down, disarmed him, fired a bullet between his legs, or made him beg for his life. The mob that came for Mr. Curry reflected his own time. It was digital and diffuse, everywhere and nowhere.
The goal, however, was the same as ever: fear. And it worked.
Longreads This week, we’re sharing stories from Steve Kolowich; Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg; Taffy Brodesser-Akner; Carolyn Murnick; and Jamie Lauren Keiles.
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Ben Huberman Last week here on Longreads, Josh Roiland shared an unflinching account of his struggle with debt and economic precarity as a tenure-track professor. It was a sobering story — especially since the tenure track, for anyone not on it, appears like a lush, care-free, wood-panneled paradise. At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard adjunct Kevin Birmingham takes a step back to examine the systemic injustice at the core of today’s humanities: adjunct labor. He does it with a gutsy, powerful move, delivering his critique of academia as the acceptance speech for a prestigious literary-criticism award.
No one, of course, signed up for this. You wanted to teach Milton and Toni Morrison. You wanted to change the way we understand novels and plays. You agree that the current state of affairs is awful. You have written all about the patriarchy and racism and poverty and the subaltern. You call administrators “neoliberals,” and that feels good. You have little job-market chats with incoming grad students. It makes you sad the way local decisions ripple out across the wide surface of a culture, how literary intentions end up serving unforeseen interests, how people may grow rich or suffer, how what was an expression of freedom now becomes a trap, how what was virtuous now becomes immoral.
I sometimes wonder when the ripples widened out beyond what I had imagined. Recently, I sat next to two professors at the plenary session of a graduate-student conference. The students had been presenting their research all weekend, and now they were listening to us. “What is your advice?” a student asked. “Get your hands dirty,” one of the professors said. “Throw yourself into your work. Don’t be afraid.” He is a good person. He is an important scholar and an inspiring teacher. He immigrated to the United States decades ago and threw himself into his love for literature. He worked his way up, as we say, published several books, received tenure, won fellowships and awards, and now, in 2016, he was offering advice about bravery to graduate students surviving on $10,000 a year. This is the carefully dressed underclass of his department, the people who, when he wasn’t looking — because he didn’t go to yesterday’s luncheon — furtively filled their tote bags with leftover fruit and potato chips.
Bullies, teachers, classmates—it’s time to head back to school with these six stories from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Los Angeles Times and more.
Em Perper Bullies, teachers, classmates—it’s time to head back to school with these six stories from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Los Angeles Times and more.
Hana Schank navigates a disturbingly complex bureaucracy to advocate for her four-year-old daughter, Nora, who is exceptionally bright and low-vision. Read more…
Em Perper In college, I rearranged my majors and minors, all in the humanities, for years. I loved everything. Finally, I majored in English. It was fate—second-grade me was constantly in trouble for sneaking books under her desk. Majoring in English was both the joy and bane of my life. I struggled with a Faulkner-heavy Southern Lit course, even though Faulkner remains beloved. I groused about Shakespeare. I wrote my senior thesis on Michael Chabon. And I transformed my love for editing into a prestigious position on the college newspaper. My Lit Crit class—a notorious gauntlet at my college—introduced me to Derrida’s jeu and the revelation of feminist theory. I spent my time studying and socializing in the English department suite. I TA’d for the head of the department. When I am nostalgic for college, I am nostalgic for the English suite—for the camaraderie among my fellow students and best friends, my professors and mentors, and the dusty books and teacups and flyers.
A confession: today, I whined to my boyfriend about the great gigs my journalist friends have procured. Daily papers! Grad school! Photography internships! New York City! On my worst days, I feel envy and inferiority. On my best days, I go to the library and check on a huge stack of books, remind myself to be grateful for my temp job and come home to write for Longreads. I remember that I did something right. If I remember that, I will continue to do something right, to do something, write.
Aileen Gallagher Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower this week.
Academics used to be a part of public discourse, and now they’re not. Blame them.
As usual, it’s about audience.
Graduate programs can be revenue generators, but not when enrollment goes down.
High-school students take accelerated classes for college credit. But once on campus, they can struggle to keep up.
Fraternities thrive at colleges thanks to a culture that markets them and a risk-management system that protects them.
“How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?”
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Julia Wick —Mark Edmundson, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on his time at the Yale English department in the late 1970s. Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education in the Longreads archive.
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Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
I read a brilliant piece, “Zen and the Art of Cover Letter Writing,” that reminded me that I had not yet featured the stories of those suffering under the yoke of this abusive economy.
These are stories about injustice, about broken promises, about frustration and desperation and of course, debt. This is a list for anyone caught in a gross transition period, in a dead-end job, who is trying to make something, anything work out long-term. This is a list for anyone who has been told to “just find a job” or “you can do anything you set your mind to” or “your generation is so lazy/narcissistic/vapid.” This is a list for anyone who has been late on their rent, or hassled by credit card companies, or received overdue loan warnings. You’re not alone.
The Billfold is my go-to site for voyeurism, empathy, financial advice, and great storytelling. Schiller and her friends attempt to “ford the murky river of the hiring process” of self-employment, multiple part-time jobs and internships—anything but traditional full-time work.
Retail workers work long hours for practically minimum wage, with hidden physical and emotional abuses, few benefits, and intolerant leave policies.
A single mother of four shares the harrowing experience of living on her part-time job’s minimum wage.
The recently founded Association of Transgender Professionals (ATP) works to further transgender equality in the workplace in the U.S. and abroad. ATP helps trans* individuals prepare for interviews, apply for jobs, and find employment; it also assists companies in recruiting LGBTQ folks.
Silva spoke to over a hundred working-class citizens in Lowell, Mass. and Richmond, Va. She found that education for working-class teens is no path to success; rather, these students have no one to advocate for them or explain the labyrinthine bureaucracy of higher education and financial planning, which ends in a dead-end of debt and frustration.
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