BY RACHEL WHEELER

For my sanity, I’ve had to cut back on my doom-scrolling habit and limit my time on Twitter. But there’s one type of content I’m totally there for: over the course of spring semester—our fifth pandemic semester—as more faculty ventured back into physical classrooms and back to in-person conferences and lectures, what I call “academic women’s Twitter” was filled with sartorial advice for those looking to up their office-wear game while maintaining the comfort of work-from-home dressing.

After two years on Zoom in our sweatpants and fuzzy socks, many of us found it hard to return to our closets. It’s not just that some of us have changed shape by working in such close proximity to the fridge but also that the clothes hanging in our closets now feel terribly constraining in ways we didn’t realize before. Now, my low-heeled dress boots might as well be power pumps as I glance at them next to my shearling-lined slippers. And my “hard pants” are a nonstarter. How did I do this in the “before times”? And more importantly, why?

After two years of pandemic life, it’s not only our clothes that are an uncomfortable fit. Our CVs are also proving to be confining and rigid and binding in all the wrong places, structurally incapable of dressing our pandemic experiences. Suddenly, the standard academic CV feels as restrictive and as ridiculous as a pencil skirt and heels.

To understand why this is so requires a closer look at the job the CV was designed to do. And then we can consider whether we can build a CV better suited to the collective faculty body.

The CV is the multitasking driver of academic life: it records titles held, papers published, and courses taught. It serves as the key to unlock employment and promotion opportunities and as the measuring stick of our institutional worth. Its form is defended as the mechanism of meritocracy, pushing the most accomplished candidates to the top of the applicant pile.

The CV purports to be a comprehensive representation of our work lives. But if we view the CV as the packaging—or clothing—of our work, rather than the work itself, we can better appreciate and address the crisis lurking within its pages.

Viewed as a garment, the academic CV is the Gordon Gecko power suit—padded shoulders and all—that Michael Douglas wore in Wall Street. Not only is the off-the-shelf version built to flatter the form of the ideal (read: white male) worker unencumbered by the demands of home and family, it is ill-suited to the actual labor performed by faculty today.

The CV in its current form fails the majority of faculty, for it is designed to accentuate publications, at a time when research is part of the job description for a shrinking slice of the professoriate. Teaching is rarely given the same proportion of space on our CV as it consumes of our working hours.

Fully two-thirds of college instructors are not in tenure-line positions and thus they are not compensated to engage in research. These faculty are especially ill-served by the scholarship bias of the CV: they received the same training in research as their tenure-line colleagues, yet as the years go by the reality of 4–4 or 5–5 teaching loads means that their CVs will effectively bar them from competing for a tenure-line position and the financial security it brings.

The current CV also fails women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) faculty on the tenure track. Like the Gordon Gecko suit, the academic CV doesn’t fit the diverse bodies who must don its form. Women continue to perform more of the domestic labor at home. And women and BIPOC faculty bear a substantially greater responsibility for the “domestic” labor of universities, most of which remains unheralded on a CV.

The labor of the tenured faculty has always been subsidized. Professors once had spouses who hosted dinner parties, typed manuscripts, managed the household, and provided childcare— allowing the university unimpeded access to their employees’ labor.

Now, it is the labor of non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty and female and BIPOC faculty that effectively subsidizes the labor of the tenure-line white male professors, who—at least in the aggregate—underperform service at home and on campus. Now, the freedom to research and publish is exacted from the exploited labor of the NTT ranks.

So, just as we’re exploring the boundaries in our clothing choices in this new phase of pandemic life—looking for options that feel liberating rather than constraining—it is also time that we interrogate the off-the-rack version of the academic CV. The work of the university has changed dramatically, and the standard CV is no longer well-suited to the work of the modern university any more than a power suit is to running a marathon.

It is relatively easy to appreciate that the CV is an instrument of a bygone era. Much harder is imagining a new type of CV adequate to the task of challenging, rather than reinforcing, longstanding inequities in the academy.

Since the pandemic hit, I have been thinking through these issues with a team of researchers at IUPUI. We built an app, CovidCV, to help faculty document their pandemic experiences. In the course of developing the app, our conversations have led us to focus on one issue in particular: what might an academic CV look like if we take a page from industry and focus on skills rather than products (publications)?

Innovative research should remain an important part of the modern university, but there has to be a better way of valuing the essential labor of classroom teaching—and all that goes with it—the majority of which is done by those who are compensated the least. A makeover for CVs alone won’t fix the inequities of higher ed. But if a skills section became standard to the academic CV, it would represent an important step in rendering visible the often-invisible labor of faculty members.

Rachel Wheeler is professor of religious studies at IUPUI.