(4). These mentored postdocs, writes Gilman, will solve the profession’s employment crisis by offering younger colleagues “serious, meaningful employment” (5) while also affording “the flexibility administrators demand in our fields” (4).
One can only guess at what “flexibility” might mean here (it seems to be a synonym for “fire-ability”), let alone why “flexibility” might be an employment criterion that a professional organization like the MLA would seek to embrace. Gilman notes, in a brief remark uncannily like that of Annabel Patterson’s insistence that Yale’s leading administrators are also Yale faculty, that his plan will be smiled upon by those above: “we can create new jobs in our departments if our administrators, many of whom are also members of the MLA, see that we are serious in our desire to reallocate resources” (4). In other words, our administrations are downsizing, but they are really “us”; the graduate students who were once part of that “us,” in an earlier paragraph, are now resources to be reallocated so that “we” can show “our” administrators how serious we are about signing on to the latest downsizing initiative. Gilman briefly suggests that his proposal is a kinder, gentler form of exploitation—“new Ph.D.s will become better teachers,” he suggests, as if they haven’t already done enough teaching as graduate students, and “faculty members will have rewarding mentoring tasks” (4). But what if the senior faculty don’t want to “mentor” these two-year, part-time, piecework pseudo-colleagues? No problem, says Gilman—we’ll just leave out the “kinder, gentler” part: “if we [note the “we” here] don’t want to take on a mentoring role because of our overloaded schedules, we can create two-year lecturer positions” (5).
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