An essay published in The Chronicle Review (April 26) grabs the attention of readers with the title “A Moral Stain on the Profession” and proceeds to lambast the American Historical Association for the work it does and the work it doesn’t do. The essay’s authors, Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes, are entirely correct that the academic job market is a source of anxiety, exhaustion, and despair for many history Ph.D.s. They are also correct that higher education’s reliance on contingent labor compounds the problem. But that much has been said for years, often in the pages of The Chronicle. Bessner and Brenes set their analysis apart by offering a series of specious propositions that rely on dubious claims and naïve assumptions. Their argument ignores facts readily available at the AHA’s website and misrepresents the AHA’s efforts at changing the culture of graduate education. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, as the cliché goes, but not to their own facts.
Contrary to the essay’s opening premise — that “to be a historian today is, for most people, to be jobless” — the vast majority of Ph.D. historians (the population with which the authors are concerned) are employed in full-time positions. This fact is readily gleaned from Where Historians Work, an AHA database tabulating career outcomes for all history Ph.D.s awarded degrees from 2004 to 2013. If the authors mean that most history Ph.D.s are not employed as tenure-track professors at four-year colleges and universities, that’s true — only 47 percent have such appointments. Adding community colleges nudges the total to half. The issue is whether history Ph.D.s employed full time in occupations other than the professoriate are also “historians.” There is a reason the AHA’s annual meeting often includes a session titled “How Can I Be a Historian in This Job?”
Bessner and Brenes acknowledge a few careers in which history Ph.D.s have prospered, but they seem unaware that roughly one-fifth of history Ph.D.s work across a wide variety of occupations in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors. Indeed, they consider it “insulting” to professionals such as “teachers and curators” that “the AHA assumes that scholars will be able to move easily into such positions.” Transition into any occupation for which one has not specifically prepared is difficult, and often requires unfamiliar skills. Knowing this, the AHA has convened recent Ph.D. recipients to help identify the skills graduate students need to succeed in careers beyond the professoriate — which has the added benefit of making for more-effective teachers and faculty members too. Incorporating such preparation into graduate education requires a cultural shift because historians who seek work beyond the professoriate often receive the message — from their advisers, mentors, and even other graduate students — that they are failures. That’s why the AHA, the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and one-fourth of the 161 history Ph.D. programs in the United States are encouraging broader perspectives on the purpose and content of graduate education.
Those careers are decidedly not “alt-ac,” a term that implies that the only legitimate employment for a Ph.D. is “academic,” and that any pathway other than the professoriate is “alternative.” Here the essay turns on fundamental untruths: that the only historians who matter are those engaged in academic work, and that the only jobs real historians want are positions that pay them to do research. Hundreds of history Ph.D. recipients disagree. Some of them volunteer their time with the AHA, in our “career contacts” program or at our annual-meeting career fairs. At a moment when humanities disciplines are defending their relevance to any audiences that will listen, especially those with leverage over budgets, it seems particularly perverse to cast these colleagues to the winds and argue that the only meaningful employment for a historian is at a college or university.
Bessner and Brenes rely on specious propositions, dubious claims, and naïve assumptions.
Indeed, Bessner and Brenes wholly mischaracterize the AHA’s Career Diversity initiative, and by implication those of our collaborators, funders, and counterparts, as “legitimizing the status quo.” They do their colleagues and our students a grave disservice by dismissing such efforts as merely a “job-retraining program” that forces “Ph.D.s to look for jobs for which they are not trained and which they do not want.” No. We are suggesting to Ph.D. students and to faculty members that they take a realistic view of the academic job market, consider the purpose of their Ph.D. program, and reconsider curricula accordingly, looking forward to the many applications of historical thinking and expertise across employment landscapes rather than backward to a past that the AHA does not have the power to restore. The AHA provides unflinching data and supportive resources to students making life decisions while trying to broaden both horizons and options.
The AHA does not control Ph.D. education any more than it controls academic labor markets; Ph.D. curricula are and ought to remain the purview of faculty members. Our work facilitates transparent and informed conversations about history Ph.D. career outcomes in higher education, and, more important, helps departments think clearly about what they are and are not preparing their graduates to do. The goal is not to shunt Ph.D.s into gloomy nonacademic careers, but rather to prepare the next generation of historians to argue forcefully for the value of history inside and outside the academy.
That move toward a purpose-driven Ph.D. represents exactly the transparency that Bessner and Brenes are calling for when they implore the AHA to “urge history departments that have Ph.D. programs to publish comprehensive statistics on job placements.” The AHA already publishes accurate and comprehensive research on its website, disaggregated by individual departments, as a service to the discipline and to future generations of students. We are also working with those departments, enabling them to continue the work we have begun.
As for the essay’s suggestion that the AHA stop sponsoring interviews at its annual meeting: The AHA’s president, John R. McNeill, recently noted in Perspectives on History that the AHA Council has this topic on the agenda for its next meeting. The AHA has already recommended that departments scale down application requirements in the realm of recommendations.
We can do more in terms of guidelines that might ameliorate the frustration of looking for academic jobs, and we appreciate the suggestions in this essay. We cannot and should not, however, “name and shame” the very institutions we are trying to change. Such tactics would be neither appropriate nor effective for a membership association that is trying to nudge those members — individual and institutional — in new directions.
Therein lies the rub. Bessner and Brenes wish the AHA and its counterpart scholarly societies were something other than the membership associations that they actually are. Their fantasy of universities terrified by the specter of “members of all these associations threaten[ing] to strike” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the institutional landscape. Scholarly societies are 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations under the IRS code, making them very different from unions, which are designated as 501(c)(5)s; each has its attendant privileges and limitations. We cannot organize our members to strike. The AHA has two principal modes of leverage: the power to legitimate and the power to convene.
What does that mean? That there are things we cannot do. We cannot mandate anything. We cannot force anyone to do anything. Again, we cannot organize strikes. Instead, we can provide our members, especially those who teach, with the professional-development opportunities that Bessner and Brenes deride within scare quotes as “resources” — and we do. We can provide data that enable the AHA, its members, and other interested parties to assess the professional landscape in an informed manner — and we do. We can create standards, endorse innovations, maintain arenas for discussion, debate, and collaboration, and provide a wide variety of services that enable all historians to prepare for jobs, do a job well, enjoy that job, and share expertise with our communities — and we do. We can articulate guidelines and standards for the hiring and employment of historians — and we do.
We can expand and improve our guidelines relating to the employment of contingent faculty members, including inviting those not on the tenure track to department meetings — we have done so, and will continue to do so. We can advocate for our members, and for the role of history and historical thinking in realms far beyond our classrooms — and we must do so. To advocate better conditions for historians employed as contingent labor and to envision a broad and diverse landscape of employment for historians are complementary, not mutually exclusive, endeavors.
James Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association. He tweets @JimGrossmanAHA.
