This post was intended to follow up on the panel discussions at last week’s CARTOON conference, and on last week’s post of the materials I prepared for my participation.   Events have taken a surprising turn in the meantime, and for now I prefer to focus on the issues raised by this important initiative.

Here, meanwhile, is what I had written as of a few days ago.

Simon Torracinta has just published one more gloomy forecast on the n+1 website:

Once the taboo of firing tenured faculty is broken, the floodgates will open. Under the cover of the crisis, university administrators will finally undertake the massive restructuring they have dreamed of for years.

The effect on existing staff and faculty will be painful enough, and worse still for those who lose their jobs.   For the cohort of PhDs in or graduating into the current academic job market, this amounts to a generational extinction event. There will not be a ‘poor’ market in 2020–21 and perhaps beyond, even by the anemic standards of the present: there will simply be no market.

and concludes

…the first step forward always requires an act of imagination. What would we build instead?

Torracinta is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale in History of Science and Medicine.  Naturally he is primarily thinking about the humanities.  But last week’s panels at the CARTOON conference made it clear that acts of imagination are required in our field as well.  Here is an example.   Editorial boards of French journals have taken a stand against neoliberal reforms continued by the current French government, in continuation of a policy pursued for more than 10 years:

The unemployment benefits reform is also expected to exacerbate the already great vulnerability of the very large numbers of precarious workers who contribute extensively to the day-to-day operations of universities and laboratories: they account for over 25% of teaching staff and far greater proportions of support staff.… In academia and research, the so-called Pécresse law on the liberties and responsibilities of universities of 2007 (commonly referred to as LRU) was the cornerstone of a twofold, seemingly contradictory shift: the state’s budgetary disengagement, reflecting a neoliberal approach, and the authoritarian strategic management of research by the very same state. The rationale behind the law consists in having the ostentatious (budgetary) autonomy of universities serve as a smokescreen for the deregulation of job statuses, the generalization of competition at all levels and the increased dependence of research on economic and industrial interests, ultimately threatening the actual autonomy of research.

Mathematical journals, and journals in the sciences more generally, are conspicuously absent from the list of participating publications.  And my sources tell me that at least one publisher of French scientific journals has explicitly refused to participate on the grounds that there is no place for opinion in their publications.