In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
One of the more frustrating aspects of academia is how often senior faculty, including those tasked with supporting job candidates, assume that people on the market are young, naive, and not quite fully adult.
Why is this the default assumption?
I'm a 36-year-old married scholar with two young children, and yet I'm frequently treated—especially by North American colleagues—as if I were a grad student in need of unsolicited life advice or professional guidance. The tone often implies that I’m too inexperienced to know my own mind, and seems to show tacit commitment to the assumption that postdocs are somehow too young to know themselves, or something. In my case, I have been offered tenure-track positions, but I have turned them down for very good personal and professional reasons.
Can we stop equating job market status with youth, naivety, or incompleteness? Why is this even an assumption? Can any senior or mid-career scholars weigh in on how they have critically reflected on their treatment of those who are professionally junior, and changed their treatment of those who are professionally junior as a result?
One analogue here, I think, is how I was treated before and after having children. Before children, I was sometimes treated as though there was some sort of incompleteness as an adult stemming from the lack of children, which is rubbish.
I'd be interested to hear from others who’ve experienced this, and from senior or mid-career scholars who have advice on how to speak to junior colleagues without condescension.
Another reader reported similar experiences:
I do not have a solution. I just want to say that my experience is pretty similar: I find the North American attitude towards researchers in precarious jobs very disrespectful. Although I have to say that there are some people who are very supportive and treat me like an intellectual peer (usually those are people with an international profile, though...).
Have other readers had similar experiences? Any concrete suggestions for how senior faculty should do better?
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