We want to thank James Grossman and Allison Miller for taking the time to respond to our essay, “A Moral Stain on the Profession.” We appreciate the hard work the American Historical Association (AHA) does on behalf of our profession and are cognizant of the limitations the organization and its leadership face in an age when historical mistruths are rampant, budgets for the humanities are being cut, and history majors are in decline. We hold no personal animus toward Grossman, Miller, or any of the staff at the AHA, who we believe have the profession’s best interests at heart and who labor under conditions that are less than ideal.
Furthermore, we do not think the AHA is in any meaningful way responsible for the present, degraded condition of the humanities — indeed, we specifically stated in our piece that “the AHA did not cause this [jobs] crisis.” Rather, our critique was a structural one. We sought to provide suggestions that in the medium and long terms might help a “lost generation” of unemployed historians find the tenure-track jobs for which they have been trained. We are sorry that Miller and Grossman found our essay a “travesty” and our claims “specious,” indicative of “sheer ahistoricality.”
First, we concede that in its current form as a 501(c)(3) organization, the AHA cannot organize strikes. As Miller rightly states, the AHA would have to “chang[e] its mission” to do so. But this was precisely our point: Given the circumstances of the history job market, the AHA’s mission needs to change. Presently, the AHA’s emphasis on career diversity unwittingly accedes to the defunding of the humanities that has characterized U.S. academia for decades. The AHA, in other words, has accepted that tenure-track lines will not return and has organized itself around accommodating this “reality.” As Joy Connolly writes, “in the best of times, the number of academic jobs will always be fewer than the number of students graduating each year.” Our question is: Why? Why can’t we organize society’s resources differently? After all, we live in an extremely rich country, and tenure-track professors are actually not very expensive. Why not work to transform the austerity consciousness that has degraded academic work instead of merely accepting it? Grossman affirms “that the AHA does not have the power to restore” a past in which tenure-track jobs were plentiful. But how will we know if we don’t even try?
Relatedly, we are a bit perplexed as to why changing the AHA’s mission would, in Miller’s phrasing, “hur[t] the labor movement,” rather than provide this movement with a centrally-organized body that could help it reach its goals.
But Grossman and Miller’s points regarding the AHA’s legal status are ultimately of secondary importance to our thesis that a focus on career diversity, alternative careers, or alt-ac jobs (whatever term one wishes to use) distracts from what should become the AHA’s central mission: advocating and organizing to ensure that history departments remain robust and enduring intellectual spaces within our universities and colleges. We believe that the protection of tenure-track jobs, and tenure itself, is central to this goal. Without stable employment, history will not be written.
Measuring the tenure-track success of pre-2009 Ph.D.s is like measuring the ice stability of Greenland’s glaciers before industrialization.
Moreover, the fact remains that the primary purpose of getting a Ph.D. in history is to become a tenure-track professor. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of graduate students in the humanities who enter a Ph.D. program want careers on the tenure track. This is borne out in 2017 survey data gathered by the Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan, in which 84 percent of first-year humanities students polled said they hoped to become tenure-track professors. But as Grossman notes in his response, only 47 percent of those who received history Ph.D.s between 2004 and 2013 have a job on the tenure track — and the number is surely much smaller for those who received their Ph.D. after 2009. Simply put, measuring the tenure-track success of pre-2009 Ph.D.s is like measuring the ice stability of Greenland’s glaciers before industrialization; it doesn’t tell us much about the present situation. The AHA must advocate on behalf of those who, under the present system, want tenure-track jobs but cannot get them.
We in no way intend to deride historians who choose to pursue nonacademic careers. We firmly believe that a diversity of fields would benefit from an influx of academically trained historians. But we want such choices to be as freely made as possible. In her letter, Connolly notes that many students “grow curious” about other careers as they move through graduate school. Our question is why. Is it because students have decided that a career as an academic isn’t what they want, or is it because they have recognized the abysmal realities of the job market? If it’s the latter, this is hardly a “free” choice. In other words, while we fully support our colleagues who determine that the academic life is not for them, we desire to create the conditions in which pursuing a nonacademic career is a choice and not a necessity.
This brings us to our final point, one neglected by Grossman and Miller: the precarious structure of the overall humanities job market. Our analysis of job postings on Archivesgig.com (H-Net for archives jobs) from January to March 2019 reveals the existence of a beleaguered market for history Ph.D.s looking to transition into archival work. Of the almost 300 jobs posted during this period, 104 were either temporary positions or internships; only three required a Ph.D. We also surveyed the 24 jobs posted on the website of the Society of American Archivists and found similar results — 11 positions were either part-time jobs, paid internships, or term positions; of the 13 full-time permanent jobs, only four were entry level, and most required a master’s of library science (MLS) degree (none required or requested a Ph.D. in history).
A study conducted by Matthew R. Francis published in The American Archivist in 2015 supports our findings. Francis surveyed job conditions for MLS graduates since 2008 and found “a high reliance on part time and temporary positions.” More than half of all respondents to the survey (56.2 percent) “did not believe that their salaries and benefits were commensurate with their professional experience and expectations.” Archive jobs — or museum jobs, or journalist positions, or what have you — will not save history Ph.D.s.
Judging from the many emails, messages, and posts we have received in support of our essay, we believe there is a broad desire for the AHA to reconceive and redefine its mission for an age of austerity. The associational politics that served the organization well in the past are unable to address the challenges the profession faces today. The AHA must do much more for the lost generation of scholars whose collective pain is a blight on academia.
Daniel Bessner is an assistant professor in American foreign policy at the University of Washington. Michael Brenes is a lecturer in global affairs and a senior archivist at Yale University.
