Missy Molloy  Victoria University of Wellington

Adrian Martin’s statement on the challenges facing screen studies at present provides a useful recap of the strange condition our field finds itself in alongside academia at large. Although not particularly oriented to an Antipodean context, it itemises noteworthy characteristics of the crisis (a term I consider more apt than emergency in that the latter implies a situation that emerges suddenly, requiring immediate attention, while the former implies a slower burn situation of instability). As screen studies academics, we are no doubt at a crossroads. Yet it’s not clear that there are any solutions available beyond those manifest in what has become known as the Great Resignation. In other words, the only solution may be to jump ship. Staying the course, by contrast, will require a level of vocational faith and commitment that is hard to come by in academic circles today, even among those who rode out the pandemic in full-time gigs.

In my view, the critical change taking place in higher education involves a wholesale reevaluation of its public role as priorities and values rapidly shift. This crisis is existential yet responding to the profound questions that have continually surfaced of late demands an energetic response that we aren’t up to mustering. From my position—on the verge of graduating from early to midcareer (a stage Martin elides)—I can report a sense of abandonment as I’ve watched three out of five of my closest colleagues, all of whom are in my age group (born late 70s/early 80s), leave academia to pursue alternative paths in industries far afield of the subjects they spent a decade or longer intensely training in. Moreover, my personal experience overlaps with broader trends, namely ‘senior slide’ tendencies that dovetail with the erosion of a younger workforce. To be frank, I have strong concerns about the capacity of our field to meet the significant challenges it faces after watching proficient, high-functioning colleagues edged out of their academic roles in states of exhaustion akin to chronic illness. So, in my mind, the question of who stays and who goes is an important one, as, for instance, many departing colleagues have been women whose initial hires supported gender equity goals that are now suffering setbacks. On a related note, an Inside Higher Ed article ‘Calling It Quits’ reports that ‘faculty members of color make up disproportionate shares of resignations.’ Although this article mainly focussed on US university sector stats, it aligns with what NZ-based colleagues who tick off any diversity boxes have shared with me regarding the special pressures they have been under as the problem of inequity in higher education approaches breaking point. One (blessedly non-Zoom related) positive of the pandemic might in fact be its glaring revelation that the strategies to which higher education has long committed to combat systemic problems have failed, and I hope this failure has become clear enough that we scrap the well-worn strategies and go back to the drawing board. Otherwise, we will probably dig ourselves deeper into the hole we are in, in which many academics wonder whether the sense of vocation that originally motivated our career aspirations was tragically misguided when it comes to the current (and future) conditions of academia.

In this short response to Martin’s piece, I’ve generalised about academia rather than narrow my focus to screen studies. That said, I will close by mentioning two points that might prompt further discussion about how the broad crisis in higher education impacts screen studies in particular. The first is that the colleagues I know well who have resigned from screen studies positions have not lost passion for cinema and media studies; on the contrary, among them are formidable teachers and scholars who came to the conclusion that academia had become toxic to their work in film and related media. One referred to academia as a cult immediately after professing her unshaken belief in the importance of cinema in contemporary culture, and this disjunct resonated with my sense that our professional energy is too often misdirected, leaving us unable to perform the rewarding labour we are actually suited to and trained for. My second closing point is to propose that efforts to more gracefully merge theory and practice and/or to embrace interdisciplinarity on a new level (both of which Martin mentions) seem inadequate to the tasks at hand—namely the recuperation of job satisfaction and the recalibration of our field in a changing culture. Overhauling what and how we teach seems more to the point. That said, and as indicated above, my chief concern is where the (material, intellectual, emotional) resources for such a Herculean task will come from…

© Missy Molloy, 2022