It is common for posters on various academic forums to note how they wish they had been on the job market in the 1990s or 1980s or 1970s or, basically, any time that is not now. These people long for the days of yore when one publication would get you a job and two would get you tenure (though a penis and white skin were probably required for both). (Actually, somebody should make a time travel movie where a graduate student from the present goes back to the 1970s to get a job at an R1 and then grows old and becomes the “dead wood” that graduate students in the present wish would retire so that they could get jobs.)
Anyhow, Elizabeth Popp Berman’s travels into the LBJ archives reveal that not everything was different back in the olden days. In the papers of Donald Turner she finds that he complained about grading, publications, and alcohol. Combined with Tolkien’s complaints about teaching, we have evidence that professors have been whining for over 70 years!
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