Historian worries that austerity, not #MeToo, will set the future course of the academy

... The #MeToo awakening and academic downsizing may seem like strange bedfellows, but as a female professor, I toggle between their implications daily. That is because I can't help thinking that my chosen profession may be as obsolescent as that of a West Virginia coal miner. We are told to chill out — our job as professors is not to reproduce ourselves. This is the refrain I've heard as our profession threatens to be phased out. It is also shortsighted.

We are here for nothing if not to provide students the opportunities for intellectual empowerment we had ourselves. I'm reminded of this every day I look onto a sea of 18-year-old faces, most of whom, like me, came to college with no experience beholding the terrifying and ennobling power of ideas. The best professors don't just tend to their own intellectual gardens, they teach others how to do the same.

My fear is that austerity, not #MeToo, will set the future course of the academy. What if that means there are no professorships left in which women can _______ (fill in the blank: achieve self-empowerment, assert their power, continue challenging sexism in academe)?

I don't know the answer to that question. But one thing I am sure of: When universities hand all of their teaching over to online courses, instructors with female names will get lower student evaluations than those with male ones.