Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track. ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded.

The news was grim. Columbia University’s English department had failed to place a single current Ph.D. candidate into a tenure-track job this year. And 19 new doctoral students had accepted admission into the program, raising questions about why the cohort is so large when the job prospects aren’t plentiful. This had “given rise to some alarm,” concerned graduate students wrote in an April 30 letter to department leadership.

According to the letter, circulated by the department’s graduate student council and obtained by The Chronicle, the lack of tenure-track placements exacerbated continuing concerns about the department’s structure and culture, namely large student cohorts, uneven mentorship, insufficient teaching opportunities, and the deprioritization of non-academic work. Graduate students were asking the department to take “meaningful, measurable steps” to address these concerns.

“We understand exactly why they were so worried,” said Alan Stewart, chair of Columbia’s English and comparative-literature department. (He noted that since the letter was sent, one Ph.D. candidate has landed a tenure-track job, another landed a permanent, non-tenure-track job in academe, and five others got multi-year postdocs.) At the time, there was a feeling of great anxiety among the graduate students who were on the academic job market, Stewart said, and not without reason. In the past decade, the number of jobs in English advertised by the Modern Language Association has dropped by 55 percent. Of the jobs that are left, a shrinking percentage exist on the tenure track.

For anyone who dreams of tenure, the pressure is constant, and the chances are slim. It’s a truth English departments are having to reorient toward. Columbia kept its head above water for a while, in regard to placing graduate students at academic institutions, said Stewart. And it’s always placed people outside of academe. But the letter prompted the department to think about how to make alternative career paths a part of graduate school “the minute our students get to us,” he said.

‘Find Where Else They Might Be Happy’

These issues are broader than just one department, the letter acknowledges. But the current agreement with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences regarding cohort size “forces graduate students to compete with one another for opportunities that should be guaranteed.” As it stands, the department culture is “unacceptably hands-off and competitive,” the letter says. (Stewart said there’s nothing unusual about admitting 19 doctoral students. And the claim that the department is hands-off and competitive “surprised and slightly dismayed” him.) Carlos J. Alonso, the Arts and Sciences dean, did not respond to an interview request.

The letter, signed by more than 80 people, demanded active mentorship from all faculty members. Students must feel comfortable discussing a range of employment options with their advisers, it says, and Ph.D. candidates should be familiar with things like job-market terminology, dossier formats, databases, and job listings well before the placement seminar begins. Students also want a policy that bans discrimination against Ph.D. candidates who decide not to continue in academe. Among other things, they also want the department to publish “transparent and accurate” placement information, including the total number of current Ph.D. candidates on the market. (Currently it publishes yearly data on which students landed academic positions, including at high schools. Last year, four candidates landed tenure-track positions at colleges.)

Once the letter was sent in early May, the department acted immediately, Stewart said. A faculty meeting was held, then a town-hall meeting with the graduate students where they went through all of the concerns, which was a useful first step, he said. There’s also been follow-up contact with the graduate student council, he said.

The graduate-school operation at Columbia is very hands on, Stewart said. What the English graduate students want is for the department to open up its idea of what placement should be, he said. And what they want requires more resources, he said. “We’re willing to do that, and we’ve started.”

The department will spend this year developing a course that will directly introduce graduate students to careers outside of academe, Stewart said. Faculty members are looking into bringing people to campus who have been part of its graduate program in the past, who currently work outside of academe, he said. The department wants to emphasize internships and help students spend summers working in galleries or museums and perhaps “find where else they might be happy.” A placement officer has begun meeting with everyone on the academic job market during the summer, Stewart said, so that they are not letting those months go by without assistance.

And, Stewart added, the department is also trying to discourage people from going on the academic job market before they are completely ready, because sometimes Ph.D. candidates can invest a lot of emotional energy into something that is not going to pay off.

Professors have to be honest from the minute students arrive on campus, or even the minute they turn up on visiting day, about the fact that this very likely won’t turn into a tenure-track job after six years, Stewart said. “That’s the exception nowadays.” When they do land tenure-track jobs, he said, it’s often two or three years out.

‘All Work Under Capitalism Sucks’

Honesty is crucial for any professor of Ph.D. students, said Jonathan Kramnick, a professor of English at Yale University. It’s irresponsible and professionally unethical to not be aware of the lousy job market, he said.

And the current situation is vastly different than it was a decade or two decades ago. When Kramnick got his first teaching job in 1995, the process was analog, uniform, and “backed up by relative affluence, even in the leanest of years,” he wrote in an essay for The Chronicle. Now, not only are there fewer tenure-track jobs, but they appear “scattershot over the course of the entire year,” and they are advertised and filled “in a manner that is poorly understood,” he wrote.

On the one hand, Kramnick said, it is vital for departments like Columbia and Yale to think about how the training that’s specific to obtaining a Ph.D. in English might provide skills that lend themselves to jobs off the tenure-track, or outside university walls altogether. At the same time, he said, departments need to be honest about how many of those kinds of jobs exist. It might not be many, he said. “It’s a tough middle road that we need to walk.”

With that context in mind, Kramnick said, limiting enrollment is a difficult question, but one that Ph.D.-granting departments “need to think seriously about.”

But limiting enrollment can present its own problems, said Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University who writes about graduate education for The Chronicle’s Advice section. If colleges trained only enough graduate students to replace retiring faculty members, you’d lose out on all kinds of racial, socioeconomic, and intellectual diversity, he said, and “I don’t think anybody wants that.”

It is important to be transparent with incoming graduate students about their chances, but “most prospective graduate students did not fall off the turnip truck yesterday,” Cassuto said. Tiana Reid, a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in English who signed the letter, said in an email that she’s “not particularly worried about my future place in the academy as I have never expected the university offer any kind of refuge or even knowledge.”

“Sure I hope I get some kind of a job,” she said, “but I say that with the opinion that all work under capitalism sucks.”

What Cassuto thinks will work best is a student-centered approach that works backward from what students will actually need. Because for every eight students who enter a humanities Ph.D. program, about four will not finish, he said. Of the four who do, statistically, two will eventually get full-time teaching jobs. Less than one will get a full-time job teaching at a research university. Yet the curriculum is almost entirely geared to that less than one person, he said.

“So what are we doing, when we’re teaching those eight? What should we be doing? Those are questions that I think we should be asking.”

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.