Eira Tansey

Crumbs for our young

WELCOME TO 2020

Last month 52 archivists submitted a petition to add a third candidate for Vice President/President-Elect to the Society of American Archivists spring election ballot. It’s unclear if this has ever taken place before, but if it has, it certainly hasn’t in the last 30 years. I found out about the petition shortly before I walked to a neighborhood restaurant to eat dinner, and I walked down the street with such fury and live wire anger about what I just learned that it felt like I had jet fuel coursing through me. Over the course of the next couple days, as I revisited the petition, I kept seeing names of mentors and friends I hadn’t seen the first or second time, and soon I felt heartbroken.

I think I had more contact with more far-flung archivists in the couple days following the petition than I’ve ever had outside of a conference setting. All I could think over and over was, “52 of my colleagues – many of whom are highly networked, highly visible, mostly securely employed and some even retired, mostly white, and mostly older – indicated they don’t trust the current Nominating Committee.” I’m friends with the current Nominating Committee chair and have worked with her a lot on planning STAND forums. I’ve also been on Nominating Committee myself, having been elected in 2014 and having a front row seat to trying to build a good slate. So this petition landed very close.

But more than that, this was a slap in the face to the newer generation of SAA leadership, and a major turning point in an already escalating pattern of disconcerting decisions within SAA. My friends’ immediate reactions were to post smart things things or start fundraisers. The nominated candidates and NomCom shared their reactions. We ended up with yet another cringey hashtag. I wrestled with nights of bad sleep and rage-crying and shitposting so much on Facebook that at least a couple of my friends said “you seem really upset.” I did my best to check in frequently with others who I suspected felt similarly.

And then I began reaching out directly to some of the petitioners, women who throughout my career had shown me care and mentoring, to ask them what in the world they were thinking.

ON FEELING BETRAYED BY YOUR ELDERS

Last year I attended a week-long workshop on climate grief. Much of the workshop is based on the work of Joanna Macy, and it was pretty woo-woo in a way that I secretly love. One of the rituals we did was a grief circle. During my turn in the grief circle, I talked about a painful feeling I’ve grappled with for a long time, which is the acute sense that my elders have betrayed my generation. That after the environmental gains of the 1970s, the adults of the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s failed to collectively organize in order to protect my generation’s ability to enjoy clean air, clean water, and the diversity of animal and plant species around us, even though everyone knew about the dangers the year I was born, when James Hansen presented testimony to Congress on global warming in 1985.

The same week I was doing my climate grief ritual was also the same week of one of the more remarkable events of the early Trump presidency. A woman with a baby on her hip confronted Scott Pruitt at a restaurant about his destruction of the environment. I’m sure there were people around that woman who felt embarrassed by her witness, who thought that she was using her baby as a prop, who thought above all it was a display of incivility.

Scott Pruitt resigned a couple days later. Maybe he knew the mounting lawsuits were getting to him. Maybe he thought that being a grifter wasn’t all that he thought it would be. Who knows. But the symbolism of this young woman and this young child – two people who will inherit the earthly legacy of Pruitt and all of his cronies who make the world unlivable because it enriches them – was undeniable.

It is not easy to talk about feeling betrayed by your elders. The first problem is defining who our elders are. “Elders” is a squishy definitional category, and it is always contextual based on relationship. While many cultures have concepts of elder identity that are decoupled from linear time, I’m going to work with the more mainstream idea of defining elder status as a function of age. Elders are only elders in relationship to those younger around them. If a society solely existed of a single generation, would we still have the concept of elders?

The second problem is that similar to other generational cohorts, power and capital and visibility is not evenly distributed among our elders, and intragenerational records of hostility or support for social justice often reflects that (for example, older white men often have a legacy of making life a living hell for other people in their generational cohort, older women of color often have a legacy of pushing for the most meaningful changes in social justice).

But the biggest problem of talking about feeling betrayed by your elders is that doing so publicly invites phenomenal levels of defensiveness from people older than me. Whenever I have attempted to do so, I am met with the generational equivalent of “not all men!” What’s most bewildering is that this reaction is often strongest from older men and women I have been close with and really look up to, and so I’ve all but given up trying to talk about generational justice in public.

Ultimately, the politics of addressing climate change are shaped more strongly by the forces of capitalism and international relations. Clearly, millions of people of all generations are profiting from climate change, or are trying to mitigate the worst of climate change, and will be impacted by climate change.

But climate change is also unique compared to other issues of social justice in that it has a clear time-based “point of no return” for ecological systems that makes the stakes of generational (ir)responsibility particularly stark. And that’s where my sense of betrayal kicks in. It’s been clear for decades that the best time to do something was 30 years ago. The next best time is now. And if we don’t do something in the immediate future to decarbonize, the future will be very unpredictable for future generations. Both 30 years ago and now, older generations than mine had the most capacity to do something at the most opportune time to slow down climate change. Their abject failure to do so has created a much more difficult and frankly existential problem for my generation and future ones to live with. And the older generation will likely leave the Earth before they have to suffer the worst effects of it.

I often hear from my elders that my generation does not respect what they sacrificed, does not understand they faced similar challenges of political resistance, and do not appreciate the gains they made for us. (For the rest of this essay, please assume that when I talk about “my elders” I mean the mirrors of people who share my demographics: white and middle class.) This is defensiveness talking, and it’s completely deflated when you actually spend more than 5 minutes looking at leftist millennial culture. Bernie Sanders is the oldest man running for president, but he has such strong support among young people because he speaks directly to our concerns. Almost no one in my generation remembers Jane Fonda from her Vietnam War era activism or exercise videos or marriage to Ted Turner, but they love seeing her arrested because she speaks directly to our concerns. Young activists have revived the memories of people like Marsha P. Johnson because their legacy speaks to our concerns. The song “Solidarity Forever” which was written decades ago is seeing an unprecedented revival at socialist gatherings because it speaks directly to our concerns.

For a long time, my feeling of generational betrayal was mostly quarantined to the issue of climate change. But seeing that SAA election petition and the age distribution of those on it made me feel that the generational betrayal was trickling outwards, from climate change into my profession. Because as long as I’ve been in the profession, we have had warnings that there was a short window in which we could at least attempt to prioritize the needs of the younger generation and speak directly to their concerns and make a healthier world for all of us, or we could keep doing the same things that got us to this tenuous place.

THE LAST DECADE

Ten years ago I attended my first annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. It was 2010, and it was in Washington DC. I don’t remember if I had any conference funding but I definitely remember staying in a youth hostel in Washington DC because I definitely could not afford a hotel. I was making around $20,000 a year.

A few months after that conference were two pivotal milestones in the discourse around the work and professional identity of archivists. Rebecca Goldman, an archivist known for making webcomics about archives, created her post-SAA Howl post that spoke to the concerns of many of the younger and more precariously-employed folks at the conference that year. And then Maureen Callahan launched the You Ought To Be Ashamed collectively-authored blog (with the URL “Eating Our Young”) to discuss and shame shitty archivist job advertisements. Rebecca Goldman led the efforts to organize the Students and New Archives Professionals roundtable (which later became a section). For those of you who missed this the first time around, it’s worth going through and reading the posts because it’s pretty stunning how much archival labor precarity was being discussed years ago, and how clueless the leadership of SAA was. Although it’s rarely referenced in the blog posts, the larger cultural context at the time included Occupy Wall Street, which no doubt was influencing some of our perspectives.

After SNAP was established in early 2012, another major turning point was controversy over the use of volunteers in archives. At the 2013 conference in New Orleans, then-President Jackie Dooley addressing the issue of archivist precarity in her plenary address (pdf version). The address, titled “Feeding Our Young,” provoked some strong reactions, and by this time, archivist twitter was a lot more of a vocal force than it was in 2010. As a result there were some strong real-time backchannel responses. Following Jackie’s plenary, Council took up the issue of internship practices. Several years later SAA made the decision to only post paid internship advertisements.

By this time, it was starting to become clear that the response of SAA’s leadership to the crisis of well-compensated archival labor was wholly organized around individual responses – after all, guidelines and best practices are voluntary and not enforceable. One thought experiment I like to occasionally entertain is whether if archival leaders had followed through with some of the fleeting discussions in the 1970s about unionization or the 1980s about institutional accreditation, SAA theoretically would have the foundation to issue some kind of sanctions – even if only symbolically – against institutions. It’s great if you mentor students and new professionals or donate to scholarship funds, but it’s not on par with systematic and collective changes that help everyone – especially archivists who may not fit the mold of a potential mentee.

In response to a 2014 notice from SAA leadership that they were definitely still talking about employment, I suggested that SAA should immediately implement a comprehensive regular salary survey, investigate salary improvement mechanisms tried by other similar associations, and explore accreditation standards as a way of improving employment for archivists. A year later, I did some quick math following the annual business meeting about a proposed dues change and then got 52 people (a far more diverse and young group than the more infamous and recent group of 52) to sign on to a letter calling for SAA to make the dues structure truly progressive. SAA didn’t create a truly progressive dues structure, though they did implement a new higher-income dues category.

This is just scratching the surface of what was happening with SAA governance in the 2010s. In addition to the question of employment, internships, volunteers, and salaries, another issue during the 2010s was the shutting down of “that darn list” aka the A&A listserv. Incidents of transphobia and intimidation by right-wing media happened in connection with our annual meeting. At two annual meetings in a row I was subjected to harassment by two different male members of the profession (one incident I reported in accordance with the code of conduct, one I did not. I was happy with the way the reported incident was handled with care and attention by SAA staff).

WAKE UP CALL PART INFINITY

My faith teaches me that listening is an integral part of conflict resolution. My politics teaches me that power is rarely shared or relinquished without protracted struggle. Both my faith and my politics teach me the importance of telling the truth.

The truth is that the Society of American Archivists is failing to meet the needs of younger and more precarious and marginalized archivists – and much of this failure is institutionalized by our reliance on managerialism and business leadership thinking, our obsequiousness to “experience,” and an association budget model that relies on stable salaries and institutional funding which fewer and fewer archivists have. Perhaps this massive failure of care was easier to ignore in the past (though I tried to warn y’all back in 2014) but it’s no longer tenable to keep doing so if the association is going to survive. To paraphrase a sentiment on a recent conference call: “SAA can afford to lose people close to retirement. It cannot afford to lose people just beginning their careers.”

The day after the petition came out, I sent off this email to Council:

Hello colleagues:

I am writing to express my increasing alarm at a series of events that have recently taken place within SAA’s elected leadership. This concern involves what the organization is doing to prioritize the needs and leadership of early-career, precarious (underpaid and/or temporary), and/or underrepresented archivists. I believe that the significant declines in membership levels under $50k can partially be explained by an association that is failing to meet the needs of these groups. I am writing this from the perspective of someone who has been active in the organization for over a decade. Among my SAA roles, I have served as a student chapter president, a member of the Communications Task Force, member of the Nominating Committee, chair of the Records Management Section, and current member of the Committee on Public Policy. 

SAA has been an instrumental part of my professional development, and it is vitally important to me that it continues to be a healthy professional association so that other archivists may benefit from it in the way that I have. I am very worried that if SAA does not prioritize the needs of archivists who are early-career, experiencing precarity, or underrepresented, it is at risk of sowing the seeds of its own demise and irrelevancy.

I am organizing some of my concerns for public sharing via my website (which I have done previously before on SAA dues structures and the Frank Boles preprint). Before I put out anything out, I want to get as many of your perspectives as possible on the questions below. I am deeply aware of how difficult and thankless professional association work is, and this is why I wanted to reach out to you first.

Please forgive the length of this email. If it’s easier for you to share your thoughts via phone I am more than willing to set up a call. I am currently out of the office this month on sabbatical, but despite any auto-reply you might receive, know that I am still checking my email.

Dues structure

With the membership report that “Calendar year 2019 has seen the largest decline in membership in SAA’s history” it is worth noting that the majority of the loss in membership is in membership bands below $59k – a loss of 261 members. There has been only an increase of 50 members in upper bands (more than $60k salary), so a transfer of lower-income members to higher-income member levels cannot account for more than perhaps a handful of losses in the lower bands. In other words it seems that these lower band declines are “total losses.” 

More than 50 of my colleagues and I raised concerns in 2015 over the dues structure. I again disagree with SAA’s claim that its dues structure is currently progressive when it in fact is regressive despite the tiered dues structure (although lower-income members pay a smaller dollar amount, they pay a higher overall percentage of take-home income as dues). I strongly object to the potential option of flattening the dues structure without an analysis of likely effects on lower-income bands. This has the potential to be an even more regressive step and depending on the price point, perhaps lead to even further losses of membership dues at the lower bands. 

There is nothing unusual about tiered income-level dues membership for a professional association. Given that our membership works across various sectors for which there is no comparable professional development funding structure, let alone salary scales, it seems that retaining an income-level dues structure is the fairest way to ensure that poorer members are not subsidizing the costs of wealthier members who can and should pay more in dues. 

Is Council developing an outreach plan to former members to determine why we have experienced such a drop-off in dues membership, particularly at the lower levels? If dues affordability is an issue, then this is critical information necessary for reconsidering dues. 

Has SAA undertaken a comparable dues comparison to other similarly-sized professional associations? How is the information derived from the 2017 WArS salary survey being used to inform membership dues discussions? According to the salary survey (pages 15 and 16), approximately 920 respondents made a salary of $59,999 or less. 777 respondents make $60,000 or more. In other words, membership level declines are only happening around the lower half of archivist salary ranges. No further discussion of membership dues should take place unless it prioritizes the needs of archivists making less than $59k a year, especially as early career and precarious (i.e. temporary or underpaid) archivists are far more likely to be represented in this group. 

Salary transparency

I strongly oppose the recent decision of SAA to defer decisive action on mandatory salary disclosures in job ad postings that so many regional and specialized archival associations have already taken. An incentive does not send as strong of a signal as a complete ban on ads without salary disclosures. Why is SAA deferring to the preferences of employers, who often wish to obscure their salaries? SAA has few enforcement mechanisms for standards across the profession, but it has failed to seize this opportunity to make a meaningful action by being the largest association to back salary disclosure requirements. 

I would like to know why SAA’s leadership did not choose to make salary disclosure mandatory, and why it has effectively chosen to side with the only group that benefits from salary obscurity – management. Obscurity of salaries puts job seekers into an unfair position. If SAA is worried about the loss of income given its understandable budget concerns, then information about advertisements as a source of income should be included in these discussions.

Recent ballot changes and elections

As a former member of Nominating Committee, I know first-hand how much work the Nominating Committee puts into crafting a slate based on a list of nominations provided to NomCom and NomCom’s own professional networks. This work is monumental, considering that asking already busy individuals to dedicate a significant part of the next 1-3 years of their life to unpaid service work is not an easy task. I understand that the recent ballot change caused by the petition on behalf of Kris Kiesling is in accordance with the bylaws, and that Council does not have any formally-defined obligations concerning this situation. With this in mind, I want to register my deep concern that this petition has so many former SAA council members, presidents, and fellows as petitioners. 

The fact that so many former SAA leaders signed off on such a petition has given me the impression that many of them do not trust the decision-making process of the current Nominating Committee. This is a very serious proxy signal for leaders of the profession to take, and frankly it is disappointing as no statement has been issued along with the petition about why such an unprecedented action was taken. 

I will be blunt: seeing a petition of 50+ signatures primarily composed of long-time members who share close network ties with one another as well as many demographic characteristics (mostly older, mostly white, and many of whom do not have recent employment experiences of short-term project positions) only adds to my concern that SAA is sliding into a posture that is more concerned with gatekeeping than it is with expanding the scope and reach of SAA’s leadership capacity. I hope that this catalyzes a larger discussion within our elected leadership about how this is only just the latest event in a series that has made many members question whether SAA is an association they can contribute to their talents to, particularly if they do not fit the mold of previous leaders.

Finally, I have retained a concern since serving on Nominating Committee about the low turnout of the elections. I would like to request that Council investigate the possibility of whether the election service provider is capable of providing turnout data that an appropriate body (Council, the Membership Committee, or the new Committee on Research, Data, and Assessment) might use to inform the membership of anonymized voting trends, akin to exit polls used in civic elections. For example, what would the cast ballot distribution look like across membership dues levels? This data may help inform where to target “voter outreach efforts” to achieve higher turnout in future elections. An example may be finding that student members rarely cast ballots – in which case, a voter outreach effort might be undertaken to SAA student chapters and SNAP.

Thank you for your service, and for your patience in reading this long email. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

TALKING TO THE PETITIONERS

Over the course of the rest of January, I had in-depth conversations with five of the 52 petitioners. All the conversations lasted at least a half hour, some even went for close to an hour. The reasons people gave for signing the petition were wide-ranging, and the reactions of people I spoke to varied from some sense of regret to utter bafflement that anyone would be angry to complete defensiveness.

But the common thread I found across the petitioners I spoke with was that they rarely connected their signing of the petition as the latest link in a chain of events that has been highly discouraging for those of us trying to make a more inclusive and worker-friendly SAA. All of the petitioners I spoke with were completely unaware of the massive drop-off in members under $59k. Almost no one had been following the most recent developments in the salary transparency issue. And a couple didn’t even realize the extent of the Frank Boles preprint disaster, because they had consciously stepped away from SAA work for several months.

Another common theme among most of the petitioners I spoke with was many mentioned their deliberate choice to ignore social media conversations around the profession. While I am very sympathetic to unplugging from social media, and retain some of the concerns I’ve had for years about moving online conversations to interpersonal dialogue, the undeniable reality is that enormous expanses of archivist professional conversations continue to take place on twitter.

There is something a little weird and borderline anti-intellectual about refusing to acknowledge the conversations other people in your field are having, even if you aren’t an active participant (and as a personal note, this is partly why even though I’ll never join twitter again as myself, I do tweet occasionally behind the scenes for projectARCC because it’s such an easy way to reach tons of archivists). This is not to imply that one can only be aware of professional discourse if they’re visible on social media (again: logging off is a good thing), but I hope folks recognize that if you’re deliberately avoiding archivist social media discussions on a permanent basis (or don’t ask for occasional updates from those who follow the discourse), it means you’re also going to be clueless about what many archivists think about the state of the profession.

Perhaps what angers me more than the failure of my archival elders to pull their weight for the next generation was their failure to be good archivists. Archivists claim our bread and butter is context, that the records we preserve fill in the contextual background noise of society at a given time, and that one of the most important professional acts an archivist can perform is to contextualize records within the setting and function for which they were originally created.

Gerry Ham famously wrote, “Our most important and intellectually demanding task as archivists is to make an informed selection of information that will provide the future with a representative record of human experience in our time. But why must we do it so badly?” Since 1975 we figured out things like collection surveys and rethinking appraisal. But what we have not reckoned with is how we’re going to acquire a representative record of society if early career archivists are leaving the profession because of a systematic failure to advocate for their interests. This is the most important form of context we need to be talking about in the archival profession right now: without a workforce of well-compensated archivists, the archival record is endangered (open access).

It is scandalous and professional malpractice that our archival elders have not shored up the shaky foundations for new archivists to launch their careers. When even that bastion of legendary left-wing economic thought, the Federal Reserve, recognizes that student loan debt among millennials is double that of Gen X, and yet our professional association has never seriously adopted student loan debt as a professional concern (a concern that contextualizes the careers of more than half of millennials with a master’s degree), something is very deeply broken. I don’t know where SAA goes from here, but if we don’t immediately address the losses of younger, poorer, and marginalized archivists by prioritizing their needs instead of continuing to follow the road towards managerialism that Archie Motley warned us about in 1984, things are only going to get worse.

BREAD AND ROSES

I’m so tired of continuing to point out to those who have been in the profession longer than myself that dismissiveness of younger archivists’ concerns is a very real problem within the association. I’ve been trying to sound this alarm for years, and at over a decade in the profession I can’t believe I’m saying the same thing over and over for so long.

When I was going back and looking at some of these old posts, I found what I’m 99.9% sure was an anonymous comment from myself on the Howl post in 2010: “Although I know I got where I am by a large amount of hustle, hard work, and knowing the right people, I also realize that a lot of what separates me from an unpaid internship is just dumb luck. It sucks. […] I don’t know what the solution is, or if there is one, but bravo for this conversation taking place and may it continue on until the whole profession recognizes what we’re going through.”

In 2014 I said, “The archival record is only as good as the archivists charged to care for it. Archivists who are told their voices are not worth listening to because they are new will have difficulties developing into the thoughtful leaders we need. And we desperately need to grow these leaders to fight for the continued survival of our profession and our institutions.”

How often do the long-established members of our profession need to be warned about their inattention to new members needs until the profession falls apart? How many more wake up calls do we need? I’m not joking. I’m entirely fucking serious. And if you think I’m being dramatic, then I’m guessing you’ve never worried about student loan debt or working near the poverty line anytime in the last decade.

Shortly after the SNAP roundtable formed, I helped organize something called “lunch buddies” which tried to match up a lunch or dinner or coffee host with SNAP members. Despite requests for participation being sent to the SAA Leaders listserv, older and more established archivists rarely showed up in significant numbers to help out and host a lunch or breakfast outing for this newly established section of young and early career archivists.

If you aren’t even willing to host lunch with the next generation, don’t be surprised when they grow up to tell you that the individual crumbs you offered are no match for societal starvation.

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