Job Slump Worsens for Language and Literature Scholars

The job market for language and literature scholars, already weak before the recession hit, is likely to leave job seekers chasing a rapidly shrinking pool of jobs for the next several years.

A new analysis of employment advertising conducted by the Modern Language Association, to be released on Thursday, projects a 37-percent drop in faculty positions advertised in the association’s electronic job list this academic year, compared with last year. The projection is based on a comparison between the number of jobs listed in October 2008 and October 2009.

The decline would top last year’s drop (26 percent), which, at the time, was the steepest in the list’s 35-year history.

Among the report’s findings:

• Positions in English language and literature are expected to number 900, a 35-percent decline from last year. The projection for foreign-languages jobs is 750, a 39-percent drop from the year before. Listings for both are well below the 1,000 to 2,000 positions typically advertised.
• Rhetoric and composition positions made up the greatest percentage of jobs (20.1 percent) on the association’s October 2009 list, followed by British literature (17.9 percent).
• In foreign languages, openings for Spanish professors made up 35.5-percent of positions on the list, a slight uptick from the year before.

According to the MLA, which is the largest association of academics who study languages and literature, the job list is the most accurate way to track academic hiring trends for full-time faculty positions in language and literature. One such trend highlighted in the report is a continued decline in the number of tenure-track positions advertised. Those are the jobs typically sought by new Ph.D’s.

Tenure-track assistant-professor positions made up 53 percent of the jobs advertised in English and 48.5 percent of those in foreign languages. From 1997 until recent years, the association said, tenure-track assistant-professor jobs usually made up between 55 and 65 percent of advertised positions.