A Moral Stain on the Profession

Regardless of whether they study ancient Byzantium, colonial Latin America, or the modern United States, most historians can agree on one thing: The academic job market is abysmal. To even call it a “market” is an exaggeration; it’s more like a slaughterhouse. Since the Great Recession of 2008, there have been far, far more historians than jobs. 2016-17 was the worst academic year for history positions in 30 years, and though there was a slight uptick in 2017-18, this improvement, as the recent jobs report released by the American Historical Association notes, did “not indicate any sustained progress recovering from the 2008-9 recession.” To be a historian today is, for most people, to be jobless, suffused with anxiety that one has wasted years of one’s life training for a position that will never materialize.

The American Historical Association, and the tenured professoriate that mostly composes it, has done frustratingly little to ameliorate this situation. Though the AHA is the major professional organization in the discipline, it has displayed a marked unwillingness — or, perhaps, inability — to rally historians against an unjust labor system. Instead, the organization has responded to what must be seen as a social, psychological, and economic crisis with solutions that would offend even Candide’s Dr. Pangloss, who famously affirmed that “all is for the best” in “the best of all possible worlds.” For instance, in the above-mentioned jobs report, the AHA proclaims that the poor job market, while lamentable, has nonetheless “forced a recognition of the tremendous range of careers historians have long pursued” outside the academy. In essence, the group has responded to the collapse of the historical profession by telling people that the best — really, only — solution to the crisis is to find non-university jobs. This is not so much a solution as a surrender.

For decades, members of the historical profession have acquiesced in the neoliberalization of the university system, which has encouraged false — and self-serving — notions of “meritocracy” to dominate thinking about those who “succeeded” and those who “failed” on the academic job market. Indeed, the majority of AHA leaders are themselves tenured academics, often from elite universities, who have been spared the market’s many indignities. If the leadership more genuinely reflected the historical profession, perhaps we would have long ago abandoned the quiescent path that endangers the fate of academic history writing in the United States — a genre that might very well disappear.

Given the magnitude of the discipline’s collapse, the AHA must address head-on the profession’s systemic inequality. Thus far it has failed. In its misguided emphasis on “alt-ac,” the AHA reinforces a stratified and unequal system of academic labor and obfuscates the structural problems inherent in the job market. Many professional historians, especially those of the younger generation, are not on the tenure track (part-time positions account for 47 percent of university faculty overall); the organization and its mission must change to reflect this disturbing fact.

What makes the AHA’s inaction all the more inexcusable is that the employment crisis is not new. As far back as 1972, The New York Times reported that the AHA was “facing open discontent in its ranks as a result of the recession, academic budget trimming and an oversupply of trained historians,” which engendered a “job crisis” that showed little sign of abating. Nevertheless, for nearly a half-century, historians have failed to organize to halt the disappearance of positions. This must now change. In short, the AHA must become an organization that serves the needs of the many and not the few. It must try to reverse the damage caused by decades of unnecessary neoliberal austerity, corporatization, and adjunctification; it must transform itself into an advocate of contingent labor, of those academics presently lost to a capricious and inequitable system; and it must recruit non-tenure-track scholars into its leadership class. To achieve those goals, we propose the following ideas.

‘Alt-Ac’ Is Not the Answer

The AHA’s focus on “career diversity,” or “alt-ac” — a term that eludes definition — legitimizes inaction on behalf of the profession’s winners. As it stands, gestures to alt-ac careers are a form of boot-strappism and market-Darwinism that provide no consolation or concrete assistance to an embattled labor force. To alleviate the conditions of a lost generation of historians, the AHA does little but offer dubious “resources” — syllabi, workshops, publications — that in the end are characterized primarily by rhetorical encouragement. Historians don’t need assistance transitioning away from stable academic jobs; we need stable academic jobs. And while the AHA offers “Career Diversity Implementation Grants” to departments re-thinking how they teach graduate students, these programs amount to little more than job-retraining programs. There is no reason that someone needs to receive a Ph.D. in history to become a high-school teacher or museum curator, two of the most commonly cited alt-ac careers. This is not to disparage those jobs, but only to underline that they are careers with different norms, standards, and training programs. In fact, it is insulting to teachers and curators that the AHA assumes that scholars will be able to move easily into those positions.

Indeed, none of the AHA’s “career diversity” programs seem to appreciate the fact that much of the humanities alt-ac market is itself beleaguered, rattled by financial cuts and dependence on part-time, low-wage work. Take jobs in archives and libraries. Outside of subject specialists and curatorial positions, which are headquartered mostly at sizable academic libraries with adequate funding (of which there are increasingly few), there are hardly any full-time entry-level jobs in libraries and archives.

The AHA’s current concentration on alt-ac shifts the blame for an abysmal job market from the universities who have hollowed out their labor forces onto a generation of underemployed scholars. While the AHA did not cause this crisis, its focus on alt-ac diverts attention from the needless austerity programs responsible for the present catastrophe. Moreover, by legitimizing the status quo, alt-ac forces those with graduate degrees in history to compete against one another for scarce resources. Such initiatives encourage Ph.D.s to look for jobs for which they are not trained and which they do not want, sowing antagonism rather than fostering the solidarity that is necessary to overturn a patently unjust system.

Equitable Job Postings, Interview Practices, and Graduate-School Statistics

The AHA exerts almost no oversight in regard to the jobs offered to historians; universities freely post positions that they should be ashamed to advertise. To take an egregious example: in 2010, East Tennessee State University posted an advertisement for a job in which the winning candidate would teach six courses a year for $24,000 plus benefits. And East Tennessee State is hardly the only offender. In January 2019, the University of Arizona advertised a three-year position for director of a “public history collaborative.” The successful candidate — who should “have produced historical work of recognized excellence and have experience in fundraising, grant writing, and project management,” and who should also “have significant and acclaimed teaching experience” — would lead the program while teaching four courses a year and producing “scholarship of engagement” (whatever that means). Examples like these are legion.

Applying for temporary, low-paying positions is a time-consuming process. Take a 2017 advertisement posted by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for a 4/4, one-year lectureship in U.S. history. Though the job is a temporary teaching position, the ad requires a cover letter, CV, graduate transcripts, teaching philosophy, sample syllabi, student evaluations, writing sample, and three references. Similarly, Mount Holyoke College recently advertised a one-year, nonrenewable position in European and Jewish history, for which the college requested a cover letter, CV, writing sample, evidence of teaching effectiveness, sample syllabi, three references, and two additional documents: a teaching philosophy and a diversity statement. Putting all of these materials together requires a significant degree of unpaid labor that for most candidates will never be compensated. It is obscene to require such elaborate applications for nonpermanent positions.

Search committees must become cognizant of the ways in which such jobs reinforce inequality in the profession. That they haven’t yet done so reflects the dominance of the tenured in the workings of the job market, of those ensconced in a system that believes paying one’s dues — taking substandard, temporary work — is the sacrifice one must make to work in the modern university. The AHA — and tenured professors more generally — must reject and dispel such thinking. While the AHA cannot, of course, control what jobs universities advertise or how they advertise them, it should name and shame colleges that ask historians to work difficult (or impossible) jobs for peanuts. It should encourage universities to stop asking candidates to spend an inordinate amount of time putting together materials to apply for jobs that everyone knows are crummy and exploitative. An AHA-published “shame list” would expose the institutions and departments that post job ads which are clearly inequitable. Over time, such a list might serve to arrest such egregious practices.

Some history departments are at long last recognizing that most job candidates have neither the time nor the money to travel to Chicago (where AHA 2019 was held) or a similar city to chase the prospect of a job that might — just might! — pay them a living wage. Skype, Zoom, or telephone interviews should not simply be offered as alternatives to in-person interviews; the AHA must mandate them. The AHA, in other words, must acknowledge that the conference interview is a relic of a bygone era and must change its policy to reflect that fact.

Finally, the AHA should urge history departments that have Ph.D. programs to publish comprehensive statistics on job placements that clearly delineate between tenure-track, non-tenure track, visiting professor, post-doctoral, and non-academic positions. Such statistics will help provide present and incoming graduate students with important information and will further underline to tenured historians and the public at large the severity of the present crisis.

Build Networks Across the Humanities and Social Sciences

The AHA should also work to institutionalize networks of solidarity within and outside the discipline. First, it should develop creative initiatives to connect tenure-track with non-tenure-track faculty members. We are all, for example, wary of “manels” — conference panels that consist only of men. The AHA should prompt historians to be similarly skeptical of panels that include only tenure-track faculty members. Furthermore, to build solidarity, the AHA should hold events throughout the year that bring all types of faculty members together. And, most important, it should pressure history departments to invite non-tenure-track faculty members to departmental meetings, so that they don’t remain invisible, as is usually the case. Tenure-track and tenured faculty members, in short, must recognize that they share interests with those who have not been lucky enough to land tenure-track positions. To help them do so, the AHA should publicly shame those who refuse to integrate non-tenure-track faculty members into professional events and decision-making processes. Non-tenure-track faculty members are in no way “lesser” than those on the tenure line, and the professoriate must stop treating them as such.

Second, the AHA should work with other professional associations — the Modern Language Association, the American Anthropological Association, the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, the American Library Association, the Society of American Archivists — to address systematically the job crisis that affects us all. Building inter- and transdisciplinary solidarity would be an effective means to pressure universities to recommit to hiring tenure-track faculty. Solidarity would also provide the communal basis for a collective strike, one that must be supported — indeed, led — by tenured faculty members. Can anyone imagine how universities would respond if members of all these associations threatened to strike? If we wish to reverse the decline of the academic job market, we must make use of our labor power. We might even consider creating an Industrial Workers of the World-type organization for the humanities and social sciences.

Transforming the AHA’s Leadership Class

Currently, the overwhelming majority of the members of the AHA’s governing council are tenured or tenure-track professors. In the future, the association must make a significant effort to recruit non-tenure-track and independent scholars into its leadership ranks. As things stand, most historians will not find stable, full-time academic employment. For that reason, it is crucial that the interests of the majority be represented at the highest institutional levels. This would provide non-tenure-track faculty members with access to the AHA’s bully pulpit, which could be used to highlight the collapse of the job market and to advocate for an increase in tenure-track hiring. As such, the AHA should consider holding more open and democratic elections instead of relying primarily on a Nominating Committee (composed mostly of tenured faculty) that determines who will run for AHA offices.

We are recent Ph.D.s in history who have stable jobs. But both of us also spent years on the job market and appreciate the intense psychological effects — insomnia, depression, anxiety — that come from being constantly worried about finding full-time and fulfilling employment. The situation in which historians and other humanists and social scientists find themselves cannot be allowed to continue. We believe that the most important role members of the tenured professoriate can adopt in coming years is that of organizer of and advocate for their contingent colleagues. Those with professional power can no longer confine themselves to promoting the latest scholarship, awarding prizes, and holding conferences. The AHA must instead adopt a more active role that challenges the casualization of labor that has degraded academic work. The jobs crisis is not natural; it is a crisis of political economy caused by a series of decisions made by corporate, governmental, and, yes, academic elites over the past 50 years. It is fully in our power to reverse these decisions. The future of History — and, perhaps, of history — is at stake.

Daniel Bessner is an assistant professor in American foreign policy at the University of Washington. Michael Brenes is a lecturer in global affairs and a senior archivist at Yale University.