When Eliot Bates finished his Ph.D., in 2008, he quickly realized he could hardly have chosen a worse time to go looking for a permanent faculty post in the humanities.
In spite of a paper trail of publications and several semesters of teaching experience, the best job he could find that year was a position as a visiting assistant professor in the music department at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he hoped to wait out the economic downturn.
But, as one-year hiring freezes in departments he was eyeing turned to two and then three, he began to realize that his prospects for finding a permanent faculty appointment might not improve anytime soon.
“You have this situation where everyone is applying for the few tenure-track jobs out there,” he says. “Your 250 closest friends are probably also applying for the position you want—and your adviser might be too.”
When he went on the market for the second time, last year, Mr. Bates still couldn’t find a permanent job. But he managed to snag what he says was the next best thing: a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University.
For decades postdocs have served as the first step in the careers of many newly minted science-doctorate holders, offering young scientists time and space to hone their research skills before they take on the full responsibilities of the professoriate. They have played a much smaller role, however, in the humanities. In 2008, the year Mr. Bates graduated, for instance, only 9 percent of new Ph.D.'s in the humanities had a firm commitment to complete a postdoc after graduation, compared with 43 percent in the life sciences.
But a new emphasis is being placed, by colleges and by foundations, on increasing the number of postdoctoral positions for graduates in the humanities and better designing such posts to help young scholars land permanent jobs down the road. To do that, many institutions are moving away from the narrow conception of postdoc-as-researcher taken from science fields and are instead developing programs that emphasize teaching—particularly in a liberal-arts setting—and pair postdocs with a faculty mentor to help them cross the divide between graduate-student life and the professoriate.
A few programs are even going so far as to develop a tentative pipeline to the tenure track by purposely hiring postdocs into departments with impending permanent faculty openings. Officials at Cornell, for instance, told Mr. Bates they were likely to hold a job search in his field within a few years.
As the number of open tenure-track positions in the humanities continues to stagnate, the benefits of postdoc positions have not gone unnoticed to either scholars or institutions. The most popular humanities postdocs can draw a pool of applicants in the hundreds, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest source of money for postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities, says the number of positions it sponsors has almost doubled since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2007. Although that increase was originally meant to serve as a stopgap measure until the job market improved, the foundation now says the number isn’t likely to fall significantly in the near future.
Compared with other temporary academic positions, these career-development-oriented postdocs offer new Ph.D.'s somewhat more of a pathway, with specific training and an implication that the job is a steppingstone to something bigger in a scholar’s career.
“It’s given me a lot of conviction about the direction I’m going in,” Mr. Bates says. “I’m getting a sense now of who I am as a scholar and a teacher that I’ll take with me when I apply for jobs again.”
Dearth of Permanent Jobs
Mr. Bates has reason to be excited about the position he is in. His job at Cornell is, in many ways, equivalent to winning the postdoc lottery. He has a salary of $50,000, receives an annual $5,000 stipend for conference and research travel, and teaches just three courses a year. Cornell has also made him a fellow in its Society for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary research center on the campus.
Mr. Bates landed at Cornell through a program sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. The council began the program, called the New Faculty Fellowship, last year to soften the effects of the dearth of permanent jobs in the humanities by placing approximately 60 scholars at the beginning of their careers in temporary positions at elite private and large research universities each year.
The fellowships are paid for by the Mellon foundation, which says the total number of humanities postdocs it bankrolls has risen from approximately 110 in 2007 to about 200 this year. Those new positions were developed in the wake of the recent economic crisis but retained because they proved valuable for both young scholars and the universities that brought them in, says Philip E. Lewis, a vice president at Mellon who oversees the foundation’s postdoc program. The Learned Societies fellowship, for instance, was meant to be offered for only two years but will likely continue in a revised form next year.
Mellon’s support for humanities postdocs began in the 1980s, Mr. Lewis says, and the initial programs were modeled closely on science postdocs. Give young scholars a couple of years unencumbered to work on their research, the thinking went, and they should have no trouble finding tenure-track jobs when they are finished.
Over the last 15 years, however, that logic has gone the way of the job market. Mr. Lewis says that, especially since the most-recent economic downturn began, Mellon has increasingly felt the need to nudge institutions to rethink what their humanities postdocs are trying to accomplish. For instance, he says, while more time for research and writing is always valuable to young humanities scholars, what many of them really need to transition to a faculty position is more teaching experience. They also need mentors to help them navigate other aspects of faculty life for the first time, including work-life balance, departmental politics, and advising.
“Many students become incredibly specialized during their Ph.D.,” he says. “That specialization produces young scholars who are not very familiar with the broad features of academic life.”
Mellon sent a letter this summer that provided suggestions to all the liberal-arts colleges it works with about how they might create or improve postdoc programs. The letter stressed the value of linking postdoc holders to senior faculty members who could serve as mentors. For the first time, Mellon also suggested that colleges make postdoc appointments in departments that are likely to have a permanent opening in the near future, as one way to make the opportunity more valuable for young scholars.
A small number of postdoc programs are already testing that idea. This fall Washington and Lee University is welcoming the first two appointments through its Junior Faculty Fellows program, a two-year, Mellon-backed effort that pairs a new Ph.D. with a senior faculty mentor in a department with impending retirements.
June R. Aprille, who retired in June as provost of the Virginia university, says she designed the fellowship that way in part to avoid the “holding pattern” mentality that many graduate students have about postdoc positions.
“People are looking at these jobs as a way to keep food on the table and keep going,” she says. “I’m not sure if that’s good for them or good for the profession.”
The program at Washington and Lee was also built with recognition that graduate students rarely earn their doctorates at the kinds of institution where they’ll end up teaching. Less than 7 percent of colleges in the United States grant doctorates, and young Ph.D.'s may not be prepared for the culture of the types of institutions where they might work, such as liberal-arts colleges, community colleges, and small public universities. Ms. Aprille says she was troubled by how often she encountered very talented young doctorates who were “rather clueless” about what was required of a professor at a liberal-arts institution like Washington and Lee.
As for the potential to turn the postdoc into a tenure-track job, Ms. Aprille is quick to point out that just because the Washington and Lee postdocs will be in departments with likely retirements doesn’t mean that a job will open up while the scholars are on the campus—or that they would necessarily get the position if it did.
Unequal Opportunities
A similar Mellon postdoc program is run by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, a consortium of liberal-arts colleges. In 2009 the organization sent its first class of six postdocs to member colleges, not only setting them up with a faculty mentor but also sending them to workshops to hone their teaching and practice giving presentations on their research for job interviews. Some of the colleges also held out the carrot of a possible tenure-track opening at the end of the two-year appointment, says John Ottenhoff, vice president of the organization.
Two years later, just one member of that first class of fellows has a permanent job at the institution where she completed her fellowship. But all six are in tenure-line positions somewhere.
Kyhl D. Lyndgaard was a member of the next group of fellows, selected in 2010. In many ways he is exactly the type of scholar the fellowship was designed for: a graduate of a public research university (the University of Nevada at Reno) looking to make the transition into teaching at a liberal-arts college. But his situation also indicates a potential downside of postdoc positions for institutions that host them. In 2011, after only a year as a postdoc at Luther College, in Iowa, he left the job to take a tenure-track position at Marlboro College, in Vermont.
Nevertheless he says he feels lucky to have found a postdoc position that gave him exactly the research time and teaching experience he needed to find a tenure-track job.
But not all postdocs in the humanities are created equal. Outside of Mellon-sponsored programs are many teaching-heavy positions that provide little in the way of professional guidance. Often they are jobs a department gives to its recent graduates, so-called internal postdocs that may not even be advertised beyond word of mouth. There is little data on the prevalence of those types of appointments, but they were of enough concern to the Modern Language Association that, in 2003, the organization’s executive council issued a statement noting that internal postdocs posed “a serious ethical question for the profession.”
“In a sense, then, you’re just creating a contract position off the tenure track and calling it something else to make it seem more prestigious,” says John A. Stevenson, dean of the Graduate School at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He says he recommends these appointments to his recent graduates in the humanities only if the alternative is a “less attractive form of contingent labor or flipping burgers.”
Many humanities postdocs exist somewhere on a spectrum between the generous Mellon programs and the internally administered positions that Mr. Stevenson and other advisers say lack much benefit. The Thompson Writing Program fellowship at Duke University, for instance, hires recent humanities Ph.D.'s for a three-year period to teach freshman composition. Fellows design their own courses and teach two or three sections of the small, writing-intense seminars each semester.
Gretchen Case, a fellow from 2007 to 2010, took the position at Duke after she was unable to find a tenure-track job when her first postdoc, at Northwestern University, came to an end. She came to the position with an unusual skill set: She is a performance-studies Ph.D. interested in teaching humanities courses to medical students. The Duke program, she says, allowed her to create a stable of science-oriented humanities courses that she says were instrumental in landing her current job as an assistant professor of medical ethics and humanities at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
Despite how well Ms. Case’s path may have served her in the end, many advisers of new Ph.D.'s say stories like hers are troubling indicators for the profession. She spent four years in postdoc positions before landing a permanent job.
“Because the market is so tight, institutions can hire assistant professors who are so far advanced that their dossiers look more like a tenure dossier 30 years ago,” says Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association.
As for Mr. Bates at Cornell, he is going back on the job market this fall with a book published and another book proposal under review. The second project, he says, was written in large part during his postdoc. Still, he knows that finding a tenure-track job is far from a sure bet. Cornell, he says, will probably have an opening in his field, just as officials told him when he took the job.
But if it does, he adds, it will be filled through an open search, and he’ll have to apply just like everyone else.
