SUPPORT THIS PROJECT

Thanks to the industrial restructuring of American universities over the last half-century, the vast majority of scholars in the social sciences and humanities no longer receive enough funding to support research, expertise provision or public programming. Most historians, anthropologist, sociologists, philosophers, linguists and their ilk make poverty-level wages without benefits in a intellectual gig economy whose heavy teaching loads leave little time to apply for those few grants that are open to what universities cynically call “adjunct” faculty, who do the bulk of the work and get the least of the lucre. The grant ecosystem, to boot, has been decimated by the mad king, but even before the rise of his regime had become so overburdened with administrative overhead (a fancy term for endless paperwork) that the value of such funding for scholars was already bowing under the crushing weight of unpaid grading was dubious.

Scholars who wish to pursue projects like this one have but two recourses in the absence of traditional institutional support: to panhandle or peddle. Your host, an adjunct associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, funds this project out of pocket, and would be grateful for any contribution to it.