Whether you are a hovering “helicopter” mentor or more of a “free range"-style adviser, you have a responsibility to your graduate students beyond the dissertation. Given the dearth of tenure-track jobs, how do we as advisers move from commiseration to action — as individuals, as departments, and as professional organizations?
As president of the American Historical Association, I take pride in the multispoke efforts it has undertaken on this front. A quick visit to the AHA Career Diversity website reveals a range of initiatives dealing with, but not necessarily limited to, data collection, career pathways, and the contingent faculty.
In a recent article on migratory, temporary employment, Leonard Cassuto, who writes a monthly column on graduate-school issues for The Chronicle, wrote: “The problem is not limited to historians, of course. They just have the best data.” In their 2013 report to the association, called “The Many Careers of History Ph.D.’s,” L. Maren Wood and Robert B. Townsend provided a benchmark survey of the career paths of historians who received their doctorates from 1998 to 2009. Based on a sample of 2,500 out of a universe of almost 11,000, Wood and Townsend found that 51 percent of the respondents had secured tenure-track jobs at four-year institutions with an additional 2 percent on the tenure track at community colleges. To make a finer point, only a sixth of recent Ph.D.’s secured employment at major public and private research universities.
Does the academic job crisis for historians vary according to subfield?
According to Wood and Townsend, only 44 percent of both North American and world historians find tenure-track jobs at four-year institutions, compared with 52 percent of Europeanists and “65 percent or more of specialists in the histories of Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East and Islamic World.” And time-from-degree does matter when on the job market, with five years as a mark of diminishing marketability.
Restricting the job search to a particular region, moreover, can also markedly increase the likelihood of a Ph.D. turning to non-tenure-track or administrative employment. “Most faculty members in non-tenure-track or administrative positions were employed in the same region in which they had earned their Ph.D. (61.1 percent),” wrote Wood and Townsend, “nearly twice the proportion of those employed in tenured or tenure-track positions.”
At the department level, the parsing of employment data should spur internal discussions about graduate training and cohort size, as well as provide eager applicants critical points of comparison among different programs. (Think of it as truth in advertising.)
Given those sobering placement numbers, how can departments prepare doctoral students for a rewarding life outside the classroom?
With a $1.6-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the AHA will further develop its Career Diversity for Historians project. Four partner campuses (Columbia University, and the Universities of Chicago, of California at Los Angeles, and of New Mexico) have started pilot programs that introduce their doctoral graduates to an array of positions in the nonprofit, government, and private sectors.
As Julia Brookins and James Grossman explain, “the AHA is not asking faculty members themselves to … develop new expertise. Rather each pilot, and all of the AHA national project activities, will be focused on cultivating students’ own agency, as they engage in the kinds of training, experiences, and exploration that excite them and broaden their career choices.”
Turning on its head the notion that a career outside the classroom is some sort of consolation prize, association leaders, professional staff, and partners have been seeking a more expansive vision of graduate education in our discipline that would value service to multiple publics.
Forty percent of my own dissertation students have staked out satisfying careers in documentary film, libraries, higher-education administration, student affairs, and public policy.
For example, Emilie Stoltzfus (author of Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for Child Care After the Second World War) is a senior social policy analyst for the Congressional Research Service. In preparing her reports for Congress, she relies on historical context, identifying the origins of an idea and then where and when it entered the arena of public policy. Congruent with the attention paid to numeracy within the Career Diversity for Historians program, Stoltzfus emphasized the importance of quantitative skills to her work as an analyst — skills she acquired after she received her Ph.D.
Encouraging the exploration of varied career paths early on will provide aspiring historians with fresh ways of learning, knowing, and doing. While there are platitudes aplenty about the intrinsic rewards of the doctoral journey, destination does count.
The academic job crisis spans four decades, but perhaps our sharpened awareness of its presence stems from the steady rise of faculty members employed off the tenure track in our midst and among our students. Indeed, these colleagues, often imprecisely lumped together under the category of adjuncts, now make up 50 to 75 percent of those teaching in higher education.
Aiming toward a consideration of this problem from the perspective of the quality of history education provided to our students, the AHA has established an Ad Hoc Committee on Contingent Faculty, chaired by Lynn Weiner and Philip Suchma. The committee’s charge revolves around data collection and analysis with an eye toward policy. Where do faculty working on contracts, rather than within the tenure system, teach? What proportion of those instructors attempt to cobble together a livelihood from classes scattered across several campuses? How can department chairs, within the limits of their authority and their resources, improve the working conditions of contingent colleagues?
Data around these and related questions will provide a more precise picture on which to base meaningful recommendations. The new committee has an ambitious agenda to better understand and possibly bridge the fault line of tenured/tenure-track and off-track.
As Len Cassuto suggests, “Instead of thinking wishfully about how great it would be to have a better system, let’s focus on what can be done with the bad system that we have.” To mitigate what he calls “the ‘VAP” — Visiting Assistant Professor — “trap,’” he encourages the type of career-diversity programming already underway through the AHA’s Career Diversity for Historians.
I remain hopeful that our efforts will widen opportunities for current Ph.D.’s. However, this optimism is tempered when I reflect on the job prospects for my recent doctoral graduates. Out of four accomplished junior historians (with seven prestigious research prizes and fellowships among them), only one has secured that elusive tenure-track position. Of the others, one has retreated from view, while the rest remain freeway flyers and/or part-time administrators. Trite as it may sound, it breaks my heart to watch them struggle.
With an additional four mentees in the pipeline, I have placed a personal moratorium on Ph.D. recruitment. I respect and support colleagues who desire to guide a new generation, but my priority remains on the career paths — inside and outside the academy — of people with whom I have a longstanding mentoring relationship. My personal moratorium embodies my hope that the association’s Career Diversity project will stimulate the retooling of graduate programs to prepare our students for wider opportunities. That will take time. In the interim, some of us are likely to slow the pump of history Ph.D.’s into the overflowing adjunct pool.
Furthermore, we should acknowledge the considerable debt that many students have accumulated to further their education. In my experience, even multiyear packages rarely sustain historians through the completion of their dissertations. Besides the seemingly endless negotiations (or more like downright battles) over internal graduate support, especially at public universities, departments can take steps to supplement campus allocations. Organizing a Friends of History committee, a community lecture series, or an alumni network can build relationships that lead to enhanced fellowship support and dissertation grants. At my campus, the University of California at Irvine, for example, Charles Quilter, an alumnus of our Ph.D. program, and his wife, Ann, have established a fund for graduate travel to archival collections, while the family of our beloved late colleague Dickson Davies (Dave) Bruce has honored his legacy through the establishment of a dissertation research award that bears his name.
More institutions are taking career diversity seriously for their Ph.D.’s, committing significant resources to professional development. A number, including Claremont Graduate University, Columbia University, and the Universities of Notre Dame and of Maryland have created dedicated graduate placement offices. The Graduate Career Consortium represents a robust network of campus administrators who offer job-centered services and coaching for doctoral candidates across the spectrum, from chemistry to classics.
The AHA stands at the forefront of this paradigm shift in academic training and expectations. As James Grossman, executive director of the association, explains: “Success means flexing our disciplinary muscles and asking how we can inject historical thinking and humanistic values in a variety of contexts.” In other words, let’s work together to prepare more seats at Clio’s table by extending her reach.
