The clock is ticking for a generation of scholars who got doctoral degrees -- but not permanent faculty jobs -- in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.
Tantalized by predictions of a turnaround in the academic job market, they are frustrated to find that such talk hasn’t changed their own chances for steady work -- at least so far.
They wonder: Is time running out?
Will Ph.D.-holders who got their degrees years ago, many of whom work on the fringes of academe, have a shot at new tenure-track openings? Or will they be a “lost generation,” the victims of a boom-and-bust cycle that many fear higher education is about to enter again?
“Hearing and overhearing department chairs, my sense is there’s not much hope for these people,” says David Laurence, director of English programs for the Modern Language Association. “There’s a lot they have to overcome.”
“You step off the track very long and you’re done,” adds Patricia Rose, director of career planning and placement at the University of Pennsylvania. In the early 1980’s, she directed a program to retrain Ph.D. holders interested in switching to business careers.
Many did leave, and found satisfying work elsewhere. But the scholars who have hung on, mostly in the humanities and social sciences, fear that theirs is the generation higher education would love to forget. They argue now that they should not be lost in the shuffle when campuses begin to hire again.
The odds will be long, however, according to academic administrators contacted by The Chronicle. Members of this generation are likely to be seen as too old to start as assistant professors, and too removed from current scholarly trends to stand out from among the hundreds of applicants that face faculty-hiring panels. White men, the observers say, will have the hardest time in a climate where minority hiring is given a priority.
Still, while few administrators or professional associations appear to have thought about the group in a coherent way, there are signs that on certain campuses, older Ph.D. recipients are being considered for new jobs. Their chances could improve later in the decade as the need for new faculty members increases.
Adrienne Fulco, for one, doesn’t consider herself lost. After almost 10 years in temporary posts, she believes she is on the verge of getting a tenure-track job.
When she finished her doctorate in political theory in 1981, the job market was dead for scholars doing non-empirical work. She taught part time in the City University of New York system, then at the University of Hartford and Central Connecticut State University. Since 1984, she has been a visiting assistant professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, in a full-time, non-tenurable post.
“I’m not driving a cab, but I’m always on this precipice,” she says. “I’m hired year to year, every year.”
She knows there are large gaps in her resume. “I haven’t written a book because I had to work up 20 different courses at Trinity,” she says. But she does public-service work, speaks about First Amendment issues before alumni groups, and recently delivered a paper on abortion and the courts at a meeting of the New England Political Science Association.
A job may open up in her department, in her specialty, and Ms. Fulco wants to be considered seriously. She takes hope from the fact that another professor in the history department -- one without a Ph.D., in fact -- was hired for a tenure-track job. But he was the second choice, and got the job only when the top candidate, a woman half his age, turned down Trinity’s offer.
David D. Cooper, who holds a non-tenure-track post in the department of American thought and language at Michigan State University, wants a shot, as well. But in vying for one of four tenure-track openings in his own department, he will have to compete both against his colleagues and with candidates recruited through a national search.
Mr. Cooper arrived at Michigan State in 1988 after 10 years as a lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This academic year he also applied, to no avail, for nearly 40 other academic posts around the country.
Since finishing a Ph.D. in American-studies at Brown University in 1977, Mr. Cooper has published one book (on the philosopher Thomas Merton) and numerous journal articles. He has been nominated by his department for a university teaching award. Still, to point out what he calls his “Kafkaesque” situation, he has been known to sign his correspondence “Invisibly, David Cooper.”
“I took a real run at the national job market this year and turned up nada,” he says. “Yet I ended up with an endowed visiting chair [at Berea College]. So obviously I’m doing something right. But just as obviously I’m doing something wrong.”
He adds: “When my credentials get looked at seriously, I tend to float to the top of the pile. But the problem with people of my generation is that our credentials don’t get looked at.”
Leonora H. Smith, a colleague in Mr. Cooper’s department, is angry that the university has asked long-time faculty members to compete for what amount to entry-level jobs. The impending competition has frayed nerves in a generally collegial department, she says.
One casualty was a Friday reading group among writers and poets in the department, which had met weekly for years. Says Ms. Smith: “We haven’t been meeting because we’ve been too busy applying for our own jobs. We have to jump through the same hoops that we’ve jumped through already.”
Regardless of whether she gets one of the tenure-track openings, Ms. Smith says the employment of non-tenurable faculty members has and will continue to cause problems for the university. Many are older women (“invisible waitresses,” she calls them) who, she points out, will not be as deferential as freshly minted Ph.D.'s.
The issues of age, race, and sex are likely to complicate the prospects of the 1970’s Ph.D.'s who are battling for newly opened assistant-professor slots. While the academic job market has by no means turned around, it has begun to improve, especially in fields like English, philosophy, sociology, and political science. Several recent studies have concluded that colleges and universities will have to replace a large number of professors in the next decade, because of an anticipated wave of faculty retirements.
Scholars squeezed out of full-time faculty posts during the depressed academic job market may be candidates for those jobs. Just how many are interested is unclear. But many observers of the academic job market doubt that an entire generation of academics will be absorbed.
James Bennett, a research associate at Northwestern University, believes that generation has been unfairly stigmatized in discussions about how to replace retiring senior professors. “The stereotype is that these people are failures. They couldn’t get jobs,” says Mr. Bennett, who is writing a book about independent scholars. Many of them, he says, are perfectly qualified for full-time academic work.
He has sharply criticized the recent studies that have prompted administrators to urge more students to enter graduate programs to replenish the faculty ranks. “To rev the machine up again” when so many Ph.D.'s are currently underemployed is irresponsible and unethical, Mr. Bennett has argued.
In fact, he says, some 20,000 independent scholars keep up with academic research even if they do not have full-time academic employment. Many don’t want to teach, but Mr. Bennett estimates that 3,000 might like to get full-time positions.
Some 60 per cent of the independent scholars are women, according to Mr. Bennett, who believes that keeping them out amounts to both age and sex discrimination.
“Why not make the effort?” he asks. “Wouldn’t that be the moral thing to do? These people have been waiting longest. They’re at the head of the line.”
Experts generally expect two-year institutions, small colleges, and comprehensive universities to be most receptive to hiring faculty members of the 1970’s generation. Many administrators say they believe such scholars should get a fair shot, but acknowledge that they rarely become finalists in faculty job searches.
Robert M. Berdahl, vice-chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says his counterparts at research universities talk more about recruiting and retaining senior stars than making a place for academics on the fringe. “Anybody who spent four or five years in graduate school and believed they were assured of a job through much of the 70’s and early 80’s was very naive,” he says.
William Benz, provost at Ohio Wesleyan University, also finds few 1970’s Ph.D.'s as finalists on his campus, which is primarily a teaching institution. He says he would support a statement by chief academic officers urging hiring panels to be on the lookout for such scholars. But he acknowledges it may be unrealistic.
“I don’t believe that academe is a very forgiving community. The view seems to be that the best ones would have made it.”
To Mr. Bennett, scholars from the generation in question should not be lumped together and tossed aside. He worries, however, that, faced with mountains of paperwork, faculty hiring committees do just that.
“At triage, at the level of paper, you want to get rid of anyone that has a stigma,” he says. “And not having had a faculty position, being two or three years past your Ph.D., calling yourself an independent scholar -- those are stigmas.”
Ted I.K. Youn, assistant professor of education at Boston College, divides the generation into three groups: independent scholars, who do research outside academe; gypsy or itinerant scholars, who teach extensively at one or more colleges and have little time for research; and academic refugees, who have left higher education altogether.
Mr. Youn, the co-editor of a book called Academic Labor Markets and Careers, believes that independent scholars who have kept up their research will have the best chances. Those who have left academe have little chance of returning to academic life, he says.
Gypsies -- part timers and adjuncts -- will have a modest shot, he predicts, provided they have stayed active professionally and have established good rapport with their colleagues. They will have the most luck at institutions where they already teach, says Mr. Youn, now at work on a book about the mobility of part-time professors.
His initial findings bode well for professors like Mr. Cooper, Ms. Smith, and Ms. Fulco, all of whom have taught for a while at a single campus. And they could offer a glimmer of hope to Richard E. Schubert, a lecturer in philosophy at San Jose State University.
Since 1982, while working outside academe, Mr. Schubert has taught at least one class a semester at San Jose State. He now teaches three classes a term there and another at Evergreen Valley College.
When Mr. Schubert finished his Ph.D. in 1977, job prospects were dim. At the American Philosophical Association meeting the year before, “I remember walking into this smoker -- they called them smokers back then -- and looking around at all these philosophers,” he recalls. “A friend said, `Where’s Legionnaire’s disease when you need it?’ ”
He ended up at General Electric, eventually assigned to a nuclear power-plant construction project. He was laid off in 1987, forcing him to step up his teaching commitments, a move that could prove fortunate now that the job market shows renewed signs of life.
He isn’t holding his breath.
“It would be nice to consider myself a viable member of the job market,” he says. “But I’m 44. While others my age were publishing books, I was building nuclear-power plants.
“I don’t feel like I’m owed anything,” he adds. “I knew it was a crapshoot coming in. But I wanted to get my degree in philosophy, and I did.”
Next: A look at scholars who, unable to get jobs during the Ph.D. glut of the 1970’s and early 1980’s, found satisfying careers outside academe.
