Roundup: The History and Academic Job Market

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Ryan Cordell, "Useful Resources for the Academic Job Market," Chronicle of Higher Ed, September 26, 2012

Last week on my personal research website I published a link roundup, “Useful Resources for the Academic Job Market.” I prepared this list for a job market workshop offered to graduate students in my department. The post was well received both at Notheastern and on Twitter, and I thought ProfHacker readers might also find it useful. While tailored to graduate students entering the market for the first time, I suspect these resources will be useful to others braving the market as well. This could be considered a “From the Archives” post, as I link to many of my ProfHacker colleague’s best posts on the job market.>>>

Gerry Canavan, "Going on the Job Market, ABD -- II," Inside Higher Ed, September 26, 2012

. . . . Don’t assume you can know in advance where you will be competitive. There are so many different factors at work in these things that you can’t possibly predict in advance which departments will be interested in you and which won’t. You just have to apply everywhere.>>>
Stacey Patton, "Stale Ph.D.'s Need Not Apply," Chronicle of Higher Ed, September 19, 2012

When Harvard University and Colorado State University recently posted job ads indicating that applicants should be very recent recipients of Ph.D.'s, many people saw the ads as confirmation of something they already suspected about the unspoken hiring preferences for entry-level positions in the humanities.>>>

Gwendolyn Beetham, "Recruitment in academia: is there no room for compassion?" Guardian, September 17, 2012

We all know the score: despite the continued growth in postgraduate degrees, full-time permanent positions in academia are increasingly rare. Certainly, to search for work in today's over-saturated academic market, in the depths of a recession, is no easy task – as a newly minted PhD, this is a fact I know all too well. In such a market, every position opening receives scores, if not hundreds, of applications. With so many qualified individuals for each post, the question arises: how can one ethically respond to unsuccessful applicants?>>>

Allen Mikaelian, "AHA and Employment: Recent Activities Concerning the Job Market and the History Student," AHA Today, September 12, 2012

There’s a possible bright spot emerging in the job market. The October issue of Perspective on History last year included 133 job ads, but this year’s issue will feature 189. This does not in itself constitute a breakthrough, and we should point out that what matters most is how many total ads are placed by the end of the season. Still, we hope that this increase over last year’s numbers is the start of a trend. Over the past year, the American Historical Association has been active in addressing the tough academic job market, the single most important issue faced by history students and recent graduates. These efforts have taken place on several fronts.>>>
 
Cathy, "Help wanted: Thoughts on the recent boom in academic public history jobs," History@Work, September 17, 2012

In recent years, the number of tenure track academic jobs in history has dropped to some of the lowest levels in 25 years. In response, Anthony Grafton, James Grossman and Jesse Lemisch have suggested that historians shift their attentions outside of the ivory tower, with Grafton and Grossman encouraging PhDs to get jobs in public history and Lemisch calling for historians to create new public history opportunities. Meanwhile, as they debated these issues, public history became a hot commodity in the academic job market. In 2008, the number of job announcements rose 27.9 percent and last year the number of postings rose significantly again.>>>

Advice for the Job Season: How to Think About Applying for a Job, Part 1

Heather Cox Richardson

The academic job market is in full swing. That’s the good news.

And as usual, there are way too few jobs. That’s the bad.

At this point, I’ve spent significant time on both sides of the hiring equation, and have a few suggestions for navigating the job search.

First of all, you almost certainly will not get your dream job. But please, please hear this: THIS IS NOT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A GOOD CANDIDATE!!! It is because there are too few jobs. The C.V.s that come in for a search these days are frighteningly impressive. Yours is one of them. When committees have to choose whom to interview, I promise you they do not look at your materials and say: “Gee, why did this loser apply?!” They say: “And yet another terrific scholar. Fortunately for us, his work doesn’t quite fit what we’re looking for.” And they put your application aside.

While this is incredibly depressing when you’re going through it—and many schools contribute to the darkness by ignoring you, announcing the interview schedule before informing you you’re not on it, and so on—there is one important light to remember. YOU DO NOT WANT A JOB THAT IS NOT A GOOD FIT FOR YOU. I know, I know, you want any job right now. But actually, you really don’t. Unlike many professions, it’s very hard for academics to change institutions. Try moving your family across the country for a job only to tell your partner six months later you hate your department and are going back on the job market to apply for a job on the other side of the country. Not a good idea. If a search committee doesn’t jump at the chance to interview you, you don’t want to interview them, either. The fit would have been a bad one.

Often, by the way, you won’t be able to tell whether or not your work is a good fit with a department. A scholar of the Taiping would seem, for example, to be a good candidate for an advertised job in nineteenth-century Asia. But that same (hypothetical) ad will not have mentioned that the department has a European scholar who is fiercely protective of his favorite course on world revolutions that highlights the Taiping. So even if you look at the description and think the fit should have been perfect, remember that there could have been a wide range of internal reasons you were not.

So if you’re almost certainly not going to get the job you want, or maybe any job, what’s the point in applying? You should consider jobs outside of the academy (more on that later), but you will have a better relationship with the academic job market if you reorient how you think about it.

If you can, try not to see applying for a position just as a job application. It is advertising. You are letting people who are in a position to appreciate the importance of your work know who you are and what you do. Until now, you have interacted primarily with just a handful of scholars, and most of them are at your own university. It’s the right time for you to take your scholarship to the world, and there is no better way to get an audience for it than to hand your materials to specialists around the country who are on search committees. They may not be able even to interview you because you do not fit the job at hand, but they may still be impressed with your materials. They might well remember you when someone asks for a recommendation for a conference panelist, or tell their editors that you have written an interesting manuscript and should be on their radar screens.

The only way to navigate such a bleak job market is to recognize that historians are a large community of scholars—to which you already belong—and that we are eager to hear what you’re bringing to the table.

Academic Novels as Therapy

Randall Stephens

"He was so tired of this: this job search, this whole process emptying him out like a vast, brutal enema again and again," the hapless protagonist thinks to himself in Ian McGuire's raucous, delightfully funny academic novel Incredible Bodies (Bloomsbury, 2006). Morris Gutman, a 37-year-old deadender, waits in his car, in a cold sweat on a typically gloomy English day, before his interview with Coketown University. The school is something like an updated, slightly better off Rummidge from David Lodge's hilarious classic Small World. "How many interviews had he had over the last five years? He added them up - Eccles, Peterborough, Gwent . . . twenty-two. Twenty-two interviews. He needed to bring it to an end one way or another. It had to stop." The book's dark comedy is a great distraction from the toils of academic labor.

Academic novels are surely gazpacho soup for the sick academic soul. Served cold and with a side of schadenfreude, it's still weirdly therapeutic.

Will the wretched job market turn around any time this side of 2112? Maybe, as Audrey Williams June writes in the latest Chronicle. But in the meantime, if you're adrift in the uncertain seas of the market, try reading academic novels for a little help.

“No More Plan B”—Apocalypse or Opportunity?

Dan Allosso

Graduate students in the humanities are well aware that, in the words of Inside Higher Ed this week, many of our disciplines have promoted alternate career paths outside the academy while at the same time encouraging us to hold onto the hope that although others might need them, we won’t. Now, however, the president of the American Historical Association (AHA) has apparently committed his organization to admitting to history grad students that there are not enough jobs to go around, and the situation is not getting better.

These sentiments appear in a statement issued by Anthony Grafton, president of the AHA, and James Grossman, its executive director. The essay, titled “No More Plan B” and posted on the AHA website on September 26th, criticizes the traditional department’s approach to grad students on the grounds that it “ignores the facts of academic employment . . . it pushes talented scholars into narrow channels, and makes it less likely that they will take schooled historical thinking with them into a wide range of employment sectors.”

Now it would be easy to blame faculty for candy-coating both the overall change in the academy (or at least, in the humanities), and for making their program seem like one where these issues need not concern grad students. Would we be angry to find how few people our department has placed into significant, tenure-track positions in the last five years? But we’re all adults: why didn’t we know this going in?

Or—and this is where it gets interesting—if we really did suspect that the old center would not hold, why did we come anyway? Forgetting about the traditional academy and its appointment with oblivion, and remembering what we each, individually love about our discipline and subjects might be the key to personal solutions that will change not only our own outcomes, but the academy itself.

Yes, departments that can’t place PhDs should probably stop producing them. But what if this apocalypse for the academy liberates us, the grad students, and forces us to refocus? What do we hope to achieve by our work? What difference do we want to make in the world? Do we see ourselves teaching undergraduates in ten years, opening young people’s minds to creative, critical thinking; sharpening their analytical and interpretive skills; helping them learn to read, write, and speak effectively? If this is our core mission, does it matter whether the students are sitting in front of us in a lecture hall or convening in an online forum? On the other hand, if our main interest is research, or writing—either for expert audiences or for the general public—then perhaps the breakdown of the traditional professional model offers us a chance to focus on what we are really good at, and leave the rest behind.

The scary part is, we’ll have to really be good at it. The authors of “No More Plan B” hint that there’s something wrong with the idea that “the life of scholarship” protects us from “impure motives and bitter competition.” We shouldn’t see non-tenure track employment, they tell us, as a fall from “the light of humanistic inquiry into the darkness of grubby capitalism.” But it goes beyond simply embracing the market or awakening from a dream of the idealized, highly compensated academic life. The academy, after all, exists within society and the market, and responds—albeit slowly—to the needs and desires of students.

The rest of society has been struggling for a generation with many of the issues now facing the academy. Technology has been replacing humans on assembly lines, in service professions, and even in “Knowledge” work for decades. Globalization, outsourcing, and new media have changed or obsoleted entire industries. Along the way, the two questions that have been continually asked of each individual are, “what are your specific responsibilities?” and “what is your value-add?”

Steve Jobs was famous for promoting a corporate culture at Apple centered on the idea of the “DRI,” or directly responsible individual. Unlike many people at other companies (especially in Silicon Valley!) who rarely achieved anything from one staff meeting to the next, Apple workers got used to seeing a DRI name next to every task and action item. Individual responsibility helped the bottom line, of course; but it also gave people a way to say “I did that,” and know what they had contributed.

I’m not arguing that the academy should adopt direct individual responsibility—there are too many interests arrayed against it. I’m suggesting that each of us grad students can find a way out of the “Plan B” trap, by deciding what we do that benefits society (or the discipline, or the advance of useful knowledge, etc.), and then articulating it and doing it. What is our personal value-add? Regardless of whether we’re given an opportunity to do it in the institutional format we expected. After all, whose “Plan B” was it, anyway?

Got My Degree . . . Now What?

Randall Stephens

Get a job, first and foremost. . . .

At the HS blog we've had some discussions about careers for history majors. (Here, here, and here, for instance.) We'd like to keep the conversation going. Some questions that might be worth pursuing:

* What career information resources are available for history majors?

* Is history a portable major? Can the skills learned in the discipline transfer into other fields?

* What can history majors do if they choose not to teach history or go on to grad or law school?

* Why do many prelaw students major in history?

* If the job market is so bad right now, why should an undergrad major in history rather than majoring in a preprofessional program?

A recent graduate emailed me the other day. He was having trouble finding a job that was directly related to history. It made me think that my history department should sponsor at least one lecture every year that addresses the subject head on. I talk about what history majors can do with their degrees in my classes, but perhaps it's time to go beyond that.

Fortunately, my former student's question came right as the AHA blog put up an excellent post on "Finding History Jobs Outside of the Academy." Serendipity! "Looking for a history job outside of academia? While the AHA publishes job ads (including some outside the classroom) online and in the back pages of Perspectives on History, there are many other history job listing sites online. This post draws from our Careers in Public History page, where you can find a number of links to job postings for work in museums, historical societies, state and local government, archives, and more."

For more on this, see John Fea's thoughful blog, The Way of Improvement Leads Home. Fea regularly posts on "What Can You Do with a History Major?" For more, check out the AHA's "What Can You Do with a Graduate Degree in History?" Other resource pages include: Stanford University, Department of History, Careers for History Majors; American University, Careers in History; University of Texas at Austin, Career Resources for History Majors; and Wright State University, Public History, Career Opportunities.

Or, if you'd prefer old-fashioned print, have a look at: Stephen Lambert and Julie DeGalan, Great Jobs for History Majors (McGraw-Hill, 2007); What to Do with Your History or Political Science Degree (Princeton Review, 2007); Katharine Brooks, You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career (Viking, 2009); Jules R. Benjamin, A Student's Guide to History (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009).

History Job Market Looks Bleak . . . Again

Randall Stephens

There is nothing like ringing in the near year with bad news . . . But, here goes.

The history job market is still bleak. (Not really news to anyone, I suppose. We're used to this. It's like watching the film Groundhog Day.) As it stands right now, the number of jobs listed through the American Historical Association is at a 25-year low.

Scott Jaschik reports at Inside Higher Ed: "The reality of radically differing job markets may be especially clear as 2011 begins with disciplinary associations gathering for job interviews at annual meetings and releasing data on the number of available positions." There will be many sad faces at this year's AHA meeting in Boston. (If you are on the market, and would like to improve your odds, see John Fea's interview advice at the Way of Improvement Leads Home and Claire B. Potter's suggestions at Tenured Radical.)

The number of new history PhDs rose to a 9-year high in 2009. You don't need any training in economic theory to know that there's something wrong with that picture. (Speaking of economics . . . the American Economic Association announced that its job listings have recovered from a 21% dip in 2008.)

Could it get worse? Maybe. The Inside Higher Ed piece draws from Robert Townsend's AHA report on the job market. (You may need to sign in to your AHA account to read this.) Townsend, assistant director of research and publications at the AHA, writes about long-term concerns in the new issue of Perspectives on History:

In addition to the chairs’ general concerns about what lies ahead for hiring in their departments, there are demographic reasons for viewing the coming decade with caution. First, the number of faculty approaching retirement age in the next 10 years is reaching the lowest level in 30 years. Currently, only 40 percent of the full-time faculty in history departments are 20 years or more from the time they earned their degrees.

Townsend wraps up his article with a note of caution. "Most history doctoral students are being trained for an academic job market that is now beset by crises," he observes. "Departments should begin to carefully reflect on the type of training they are providing their students and the number of students they are admitting to their programs."

See these related articles for more:

Eric Kelderman, "Colleges to Confront Deep Cutbacks. In states where new governors pledge no new taxes, higher-education budgets will suffer," Chronicle, January 2, 2011

Christopher Phelps, "A Move Abroad: Travels and Travails," Chronicle, January 2, 2011

Samuel Wren, "Rule Britannia. Being a job candidate in a British faculty search is a curiously different experience," Chronicle, April 10, 2010

Anthony Grafton, "History under Attack," Perspectives on History (January 2011)

Robert B. Townsend, "History under the Hammer: Department Chairs Report Effects of Economic Woes," Perspectives on History (January 2011)

Scott Jaschik, "No Entry," Inside Higher Ed, January 4, 2010

Hannah Fearn, "Shrinking job market sees nearly 70 applicants vie for every graduate job," THE, July 6 2010

Pomp and Circumstance

Randall Stephens

It's that time of year. Seniors are practicing their graduation cap toss. Parents are wondering how long their sons and daughters will grown under a burden of enormous debt. Will they get jobs? Did those courses in "Script Writing," "Daytime Serials: Family and Social Roles," or "Exopedagogies and Diacritical Phallocentric Imaginations" equip them for our new economy?

All are preparing for a long, long day. Plenty of time for daydreaming. Garry Trudeau once quipped, "Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated."

Here in Boston today the weather is beautiful: 63 degrees and sunny. Today and in the next two weeks a series of glittery celebs and pointy-headed public intellectuals will be lined up to fill the podiums at areas schools. (See Tracy Jan, "Big Names at the Podium," Boston Globe, 14 May 2010.) A sampling:

ABC News correspondent Lynn Sherr, Wellesley College

US Attorney General Eric Holder, Boston University

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Lesley University

Rachel Maddow, Smith College

Former Supreme Court justice David H. Souter, Harvard University

Governor Deval Patrick, Framingham State College

A few who took the dais in 1950:

Harvard University: Dean Gooderham Acheson, U.S. Secretary of State

Northeastern University: Frank W. Abrams, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey

Wheaton College: Erwin D. Canham, Editor, The Christian Science Monitor

Few speeches are memorable. Many are like long, de-deified, boring sermons. (Sometimes academics get the worst rap. W. H. Auden snarked: "A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.") Seldom do addresses rise to the level of oratorical art as did Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous "Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838":

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of man! In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in the powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, it is well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor. . . .

And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar. The evils of the church that now is are manifest. The question returns, What shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify. Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us; first; the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world; whose light dawns welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into prison cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being. Let it stand forevermore, a temple, which new love, new faith, new sight shall restore to more than its first splendor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of preaching, the speech of man to men, essentially the most flexible of all organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation?

I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.

John Fea on Interviewing for that History Job

Over at The Way of Imrpovement Leads Home, John Fea offers hints for all those individuals interviewing for history jobs at the AHA, ASCH, and, or, just over the phone. Along with giving general tips, Fea provides more specific advice for candidates who are interviewing for jobs at teaching institutions, research universities, and church-related schools.

Here's a particular useful bit:

Once you find out who will be doing the interview, start researching. By this point you should have already familiarized yourself with the department web site, but now you want to go a bit deeper. Find out as much as you can about the people who will be seated on the other side of the table. What courses do they teach? (You do not want to propose a course that gets too close to the "turf" of another professor in the department). What are their research interests? (You may want to mention how your work has some theoretical connections to the work of a particular interviewer). All of this stuff is pretty straightforward and most good candidates do not need to be told any of this, but you might be surprised to learn just how many people come to an interview unprepared.

Read more here.