Negotiations for academic positions are always high-stakes, given the scarcity of tenure-track jobs in many disciplines, and the fact that job offers come at the end of a long and grueling search process. But this year, negotiating a position — should you be lucky enough to get one — may feel especially fraught.

The faculty job sector — already reshaped by academe’s major shift to contingent labor over the last two decades — is having a particularly austere moment thanks to budget cuts, hiring freezes, and legal challenges over remote learning. All of those factors are a fractal part of a much larger maelstrom of anxiety, uncertainty, insecurity, and trauma that Covid-19 has been this year.