Will there be any jobs this year?
Two years ago, I wrote a series of columns for The Chronicle on the job market for Ph.D.s in English. Back then this question would have been useful hyperbole. The number of jobs had fallen by more than 50 percent in 10 years. We were at the sharp edge of an employment crisis long in the making.
Now we find out what happens when a crisis becomes a catastrophe. For all practical purposes, there may be no jobs at all this year, or next, or the year after.
When the Covid-19 pandemic assaulted already weak university finances last spring, the first effect was across the board hiring freezes, including on searches that were already underway or near completion. At that point, there was some hope that the virus might abate over the summer, allowing campuses to return to ordinary business in the fall. Nothing like that happened. We are entering the school year with wide-open questions about what the future will look like, but with certainty that it will be grim.
The pandemic was a surprise, but the fallout for budgets was not. Hiring falls squarely on the discretionary side of the ledger. Compared to other expenses, new faculty lines are an especially easy area to cut. No one on your payroll loses a job or gets furloughed. No money gets pulled from retirement plans. No bulldozers squat idly over partially constructed parking lots. The cost savings are considerable.
Less-visible misery and more permanent consequences follow, all the same.
The misery will be felt, first and foremost, by graduate students and Ph.D.s who are looking for work. The long-term aftermath will be felt by the academy as a whole.
For those looking for a perch to begin their careers, Covid-19 upends what is possible. At a minimum, it demands that job seekers go through the arduous process of a search in the absence of anything to search for. Further out, it puts into radical doubt the path they have chosen. There already were vanishingly few jobs. What’s next for our youngest scholars?
In my survey two years ago, I noted several trends that are now likely to intensify in the post-Covid-19 job market. Online platforms had dispersed ads across the internet. Remote interviewing was bypassing the MLA convention. Hiring committees were asking for more materials, often tailored directly to their missions and needs. The old timeline, with its predictably syncopated schedule, had given way to a new one in which candidates were always applying for whatever was out there. Departments and administrations were giving candidates less time to make up their minds.
All of this will worsen in an economy of intense and unpredictable scarcity. Here is some of what to expect:
- Earlier and shorter deadlines. No one knows when the pandemic will halt re-openings and cause shutdowns to return. Therefore, many departments will grab whatever lines become available and attempt to wrap up searches as quickly as possible, before money gets taken away again. There is some indication this is already happening.
- An even more dispersed and erratic schedule. Lines might emerge as the pandemic fluctuates and freezes briefly thaw. Covid-19 doesn’t care about the old MLA time table. The rushed hiring in its wake won’t either.
- Even more specification and tinkering. Departments that manage to secure a line will be all the more careful and demanding that candidates fill agreed-upon needs, “fit” with the local culture and mission, and are likely to thrive. That means ever more detailed proof in application materials.
- Required online experience. This is obvious but bears attention. It may be some time before any institution returns entirely to face-to-face teaching. Many will shift to a permanent hybrid of online and in person. Remote pedagogy is here to stay. The people doing the hiring will demand that candidates are much better than they are themselves at using and exploiting the technology.
- More supra-disciplinary and thematic cluster hiring. Now more than ever universities and colleges are sensitive to their position in the world. As they bundle resources, hiring institutions will tag positions to the huge problems that beset us. These problems will align only indirectly with the fields in which candidates are trained.
There’s something paradoxical about listing expectations for a market that for practical purposes will not exist. But there you have it. A brutal landscape with little respite.
What does the end of hiring mean for our collective endeavor? The 2008-9 financial crisis offers only limited guidance. That crisis also led to hiring freezes, but it didn’t impede the university’s ability to exist and go about its business, to offer classes and enroll students, hold conferences and host guests. The demise of hiring comes now as academic life itself is held in abeyance or altered permanently.
At the extreme, we should contemplate the end of intellectual continuity and transformation from one generation to the next.
With respect to jobs in the literary humanities, moreover, the 2008-9 crisis arrived at a point of relative stability, if not expansion. It’s what came next that matters. Jobs fell off dramatically and then never quite returned. The present job loss builds on the former with a vengeance. There wasn’t that much hiring to freeze anyway, and now there is none.
In these respects, we are in uncharted territory. At the extreme, we should contemplate the end of intellectual continuity and transformation from one generation to the next.
Disciplines of study exist only to the extent that they are grounded in institutions and practices: in syllabi, in methods of argument, in archives that compel inquiry, topics that inspire debate, and above all in the human labor of research, writing, and teaching according to norms that one acquires by training. Hiring is the backbone of all this. It is an occasion for collective expressions of value, for stating what kind of work a department wants or needs or judges favorably. It is also the means by which a discipline both survives and changes over time.
Disciplines survive by hiring in the obvious sense that new positions maintain the skills and knowledge base for ongoing teaching and research. Younger scholars moving up through the ranks provide, for this reason, the very impetus for all scholarly engagement. To whom is one writing if not the scholars of the future? Everyone participates in this process, whether they are faculty in graduate programs or not. Every time we write we are engaging topics, pursuing methods, and visiting archives in such a way that provides a model for others to follow. We are asking questions that will be answered by those that come after us, using tools they have learned from us.
At the same time, younger scholars challenge how these questions have been asked, sharpen the tools used to answer them, and create altogether new paths of inquiry. Senior scholars cannot be trusted to challenge their own assumptions about what counts as a good reading or a solid argument, about whose perspectives and what archives ought to be consulted, about what questions are vital to ask and how to go about asking them. Hiring sustains the counterflow of ideas and practices from the young to the old. It makes sure that academic discussions and debate don’t calcify into a liturgy.
To whom is one writing if not the scholars of the future?
The past decade’s job crisis strained this dynamic almost to the breaking point. Already we have had to ponder whether the flow and counterflow among generations was being sustained. Already we have had to come up with alternative rationales for the Ph.D. and alternative audiences for our work.
We will be expected to do even more of this now, but there’s no easy palliative. Careers outside the academy are subject to the exact same pressure as those within, each buffeted by the pandemic. More to the point, no discipline can survive if its main job is to train people for other kinds of work, and no discipline can exist if its main audience lies on its outside. Why do a Ph.D. for a job whose skills can be gotten elsewhere, with less sacrifice of time and self? Why write only for a public that won’t contest or continue your work?
Alternative career paths and public-facing writing are valuable in themselves and crucial for the academy. There’s a genuine good in placing humanities Ph.D.s in jobs off the tenure track, both for the candidates happy to find work and the industries leavened with their talent. There’s also a genuine good in presenting academic ideas in readable style to the nonacademic world. But alternative career paths and public-facing writing don’t generally feed back into the disciplines from which they spring. They provide real goods, but they cannot exist on their own. Each depends on the prior existence of the disciplines, on ideas and practices passed down and transformed over time.
We need to contemplate the end of this cross-generational traffic so we can do our best to preserve it. An entire generation or two that fails to find work neither carries on nor challenges a field of knowledge. In its place, there is a long gap of immense human and intellectual loss.
Those of us who found work in a different world cannot repose on our luck. Here are some steps we can take:
- Lobby our own institutions to hire junior faculty into tenure-track lines. We shouldn’t resign ourselves to defeat. Recent history shows that administrations can and do respond to pressure from faculty.
- Commit to hiring those who haven’t yet found tenure-track positions rather than moving assistant professors from one tenure-track job to another. We can’t fool ourselves that abandoned positions get filled. They mostly haven’t, and now they certainly won’t.
- Lobby the major granting agencies (Mellon, the American Council of Learned Societies, etc.) to create postdocs, as they did after 2008, to keep young scholars afloat. Some of this, too, has happened already. There should be much more of it.
- Consider how best to reduce graduate-program size. Ph.D. programs are going to be shrunk. Some may be eliminated. We need to think about how to do this logically.
- Design strategies for off-ramping. Not everyone who begins a Ph.D. program ought to finish. The better part of a decade is a long time, especially when so much is in doubt. We need humane and productive ways to counsel students when they are suited for or would genuinely prefer another path.
Academic life is presently unrecognizable. Campuses, conferences, classrooms, lectures, and meetings as we have known them are gone. We all desperately want them back. As we work to carry on and rebuild, we cannot ignore the lifeblood that supports all this. We all stand to lose if we do, those with relative security and those most at risk.
