The beginning of wisdom about the academic job market for historians is to realize that it has no default state. By examining the market’s development over time, we can gain new understanding of the problems that historians, and humanists in other fields, now face. When history Ph.D.'s first entered academe in the late 19th century, the market was fraught with problems even for promising young men who rejoiced in elite educations and three names. John Franklin Jameson, the first history Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University, spent three uneasy years as an instructor at his alma mater before he obtained his first professorship. A generation later, a young Samuel Flagg Bemis bemoaned his situation in a letter from his first job at Colorado College, lamenting the lack of institutional support for his research, and a salary that meant “to buy a pair of shoes … is the subject of a family conference of no mean importance.” As the profession diversified in the next generation — and opened up for the pioneering African-American historian John Hope Franklin and for Jews like Frank Manuel and Jack Hexter — more serious obstacles arose.
Too often our profession looks back to a brief “golden age” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a generation born in the demographic trench of the Depression entered the market just as the first of the baby boomers began to swell college enrollments. As Princeton University’s James M. McPherson reminisced in the American Historical Association’s newsletter, Perspectives, that facilitated an “old-boy network” that worked all too smoothly. His appointment rested on little more than a call from the chairman at Princeton to his adviser at Hopkins, “without a real interview and without having seen any dissertation chapters.”
But that moment was fleeting, and baby boomers emerged from Ph.D. programs to a very different job market. The New York Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas watched with horror as thousands of young scholars competed bitterly for fewer than 200 jobs at the American Historical Association’s 1971 meeting, while senior historians hired in better times blithely called for decorum and floated draconian proposals for cutting the number of graduate students and programs. The job market swung back into alignment at a lower level in the 1980s, but then careened again into disorder in the 1990s. Like The New Yorker’s vision of America, the widespread belief that the job market in history became troubled and difficult only in recent years foreshortens reality.
The present and future are just as complex. Structural shifts have transformed the market and career trajectories of recent graduates. The easiest changes to see are at the point of supply. Over the past two generations, the history profession has grown more diverse demographically, but as still small but growing numbers of women and members of minority groups have been trained and placed, the field has become less diverse in terms of undergraduate origins. The generation receiving history Ph.D.'s today seems more likely than earlier ones to have earned baccalaureate degrees from elite private institutions, even though the number of history students earning degrees from public institutions has grown significantly over the past 40 years.
Conversely, the traditional elite universities confer a diminishing number and proportion of history Ph.D.'s. The number of programs conferring history doctoral degrees more than doubled between 1970 and 2000. At the same time, the top-tier programs tightened their admissions standards to provide better financial-aid packages for smaller classes.
As a result, historically large numbers of new history Ph.D.'s come from programs below the top tier. In the abstract, that seems to validate complaints that history programs are feeding larger numbers of less competitive Ph.D.'s into a saturated job market. That complaint is too simple, as different tiers seem to serve different markets. Still, surveys by the American Historical Association show that graduates from the top-tier programs do better on the academic job market than students from programs further down the rankings. To that extent, the “social capital” that accrues to those from elite programs plays a substantial part in their success.
But those same surveys suggest that students from elite colleges often set their sights on a particular tier of institutions — institutions with strong graduate programs and prestigious liberal-arts colleges. Many move on to jobs outside of academe if they fail in that segment of the job market. In contrast, Ph.D.'s from lower-ranked institutions appear more willing to take jobs at nearby two- and four-year colleges — positions with high teaching loads and limited support for research. Apparently, the academic job market requires the wider range of history Ph.D. programs that now exist to deal with the full range of teaching needs.
Meanwhile, the process of getting onto the tenure track has experienced its own transformations. In the 1950s, many scholars spent two to four years as instructors while writing their dissertations before they moved to tenure-track posts. By the early 1960s, that stage shrank almost to nonexistence. Competition drove many — probably most — institutions to hire new faculty members as assistant professors, even before students had completed their doctorates. But with the job crisis of the 1970s, institutions reintroduced an ever-widening “threshold” stage into the process, by offering postdoctoral fellowships, “visiting” appointments, and part- or full-time adjunct positions that might or might not lead to tenure.
Today several dozen postdoctoral positions are advertised each year. They offer extra time for research, and in some cases research support. They keep accomplished young historians from leaving the profession, give them second and third chances on the job market, and help them turn dissertations into books. To that extent, they are a clear good.
But the 1970s also marked the rise of a new class of short-term and visiting appointments that cover undergraduate-teaching needs for a fixed period (often from two to five years). Usually such lecturers and visiting assistant professors know that they have no chance of promotion to a tenure-track position and accept that limitation as the price of staying in the profession. At their best, such appointments might provide time and teaching experience, which facilitate the transition to tenure-track positions. At their worst, though, they exploit junior historians to the benefit of their seniors, hampering the younger scholars’ long-term career prospects.
Non-tenure-track full-time positions, however, do far less damage than the growing use of part-time or adjunct faculty members. The advantages of adjunct jobs for the employing institution are clear enough — they are less expensive, allow more flexibility, and often play a vital role in maintaining a history department’s teaching program at the introductory level. But hundreds of historians spend years — and some spend whole careers — barely earning a living by teaching at several colleges at once.
Viewed from the outside, postdoctoral positions look very different from short-term lectureships, and both seem very different from adjunct positions. Yet all share qualities. They offer greater advantages to the employing institution than the employee, since colleges have no obligation beyond the short term and spend far less than it would take to create enough tenure-track jobs for each new cohort of Ph.D.'s. In short, the new system maintains a reserve army of talented academic labor — and only prolongs the misery for many of those who enlist. Every senior historian has known bright young doctoral students who failed to find anything except a series of dead-end appointments and finally left the profession in despair.
At this point, it is hard to measure the disruptive effects of short-term hiring. It seems clear, though, that many new history professors will pass through a number of short-term appointments before they land a tenure-track appointment. The constant motion and prolongation of apprenticeship exacts a number of penalties. Moving from job to job and place to place, young scholars have to abandon existing support systems and rebuild them, over and over again, learning to make their way through new bureaucratic labyrinths. Demands for institutional loyalty are hard to reconcile with those experiences. Meanwhile, standards for beginning jobs and promotion to tenure are rising as longer apprenticeships allow more chances for conference appearances and publications.
Many of those who achieve tenure find the nature of their employment little different than the short-term positions they left behind, since heavy teaching loads and little time for research are the norm at a majority of institutions. To the extent that most graduate programs in history — even those below the top tier — still concentrate on training research historians, there seems to be a troubling disconnect between their priorities and the subsequent careers of many of their students.
The recent disruptions of the job market also seem to be changing conditions for those who finally make it onto the tenure track. Salary surveys over the past two decades suggest that the severe problems experienced by the job market a decade ago, and the commensurately lower salaries new assistant professors could command in the 1990s and early 2000s, have depressed the salary scale for the discipline as a whole. As the assistant professors of 10 years ago moved up the ladder of tenure and promotion, their low starting salaries seem to have translated, by a cascade effect, into lower incremental pay increases. Accordingly, salaries for history faculty members fell from modestly above the average for academe in the 1980s to well below the average for all disciplines today.
Anecdotal evidence suggests, moreover, that even when demand for faculty members in certain areas of history enables them to negotiate for higher starting salaries, their chairmen and deans find themselves confronted with a very difficult choice: They must either pay new individuals as much as colleagues who have been teaching for a decade or more, or refuse to compete. The problems of the past linger on into the future.
Beyond the entry level of the profession, the level of mobility at later career stages is harder to determine. But statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests the existence of a hierarchical system that permits mobility only to a fortunate few. Most job searches for historians senior in rank and age are mounted by elite institutions. Some of them may regularly hire historians who have proved themselves at less-prestigious places. But other data suggest that faculty members tend to stay within particular institutional tiers throughout their careers, underscoring the career importance of entry-level appointments.
Mobility — or the possibility of it — matters even for those who have tenured positions. The last federal survey of postsecondary faculty members indicated that associate professors were the most disaffected group in the history profession. Almost 5 percent reported that they were “very dissatisfied” with their job — a higher proportion even than among part-timers in the field. Anecdotal evidence suggests that historians may be likelier than colleagues in other disciplines to see their careers bog down as they reach the middle ranks. In part, those breakdowns are rooted in entry-level issues about support for research and career advancement at different types of institutions. But as a number of recent studies about the “leaky pipeline” indicate, gender also plays a significant role in the flattening of career arcs. Responsibilities for child and elder care, which fall disproportionately on women, often become heaviest just as a career would otherwise be taking off.
Most students know little of this long-term history and larger context for their careers. But new information technologies can do a little bit to tilt the scales in their favor. The development of e-mail lists and blogs — above all the AcademicJobSearch wiki (http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/AcademicJobSearch) — has enabled young historians to share information about the progress of searches on a national and even international basis. This new system, like the market itself, inspires both fear and hope. The fuller information that candidates can glean from the wiki may include the fact that a given department has set dates and times for interviews without inviting them, or has made an offer to someone else. But departments must now bear in mind that their offers of interviews or jobs are likely to become public knowledge within moments after they are made — and thus that their failure to treat candidates with professional courtesy will also become public knowledge. Over time, transparency may enhance civility.
No one can predict how many history openings will be advertised next year. But by focusing on the larger contours of the market, we can help our students and junior colleagues understand the conditions in which they are now looking for work. More important, we can begin to think about the direction in which employment in history and related fields is moving — and to consider whether it might be time to exert pressure against some of the developments that we have lived through, and that younger scholars must now live with. That places an added responsibility on senior scholars. It is their duty to be stewards of their departments and their disciplines — to gather information about their fields, to assess the impact of recent changes in the academic life cycle on their junior colleagues, and, when necessary, to remind administrators that we cannot achieve economy and flexibility in the present at the cost of future academic generations.
Anthony Grafton is a professor of history at Princeton University and former vice president of the American Historical Association’s professional division. Robert B. Townsend is assistant director for research and publications at the AHA.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 44, Page B10