What to Do About the History Job Crisis

What Should Be Done About the Academic Job Market Crisis?

              A historian friend once told me that when he went on the job market, he put in three applications and received five job offers. That was in the early 1960’s, during the heady years of post-war economic expansion and university expansion. Ten years later, both expansions abruptly ceased, and the academic job market crashed. It recovered somewhat after the mid-1980’s, although with frequent downturns, but in the past few years it has crashed again, to new lows. A recent article in Inside Higher Ed noted that of the 1799 historians who received Ph.D.s between 2019 and 2020, only 175 have so far landed tenure-track faculty jobs. That number can be expected to rise at least a little, since students often only get jobs after several years as post-docs, visiting faculty members, or adjuncts. But the figure is still dispiriting in the extreme. Meanwhile, another article from the same publication shows that faculty numbers in history departments at many midwestern public universities have fallen catastrophically over the past decade or so, in some cases by over 50%.

              In my own area of French history, the numbers tell the same story in miniature. Since 2010 I have been tracking the number of North American tenure-track jobs my advisees can reasonably apply for each year—everything from positions described simply as “History,” to “Europe,” to specialized jobs in modern and early modern France. In 2010-11 the number was 43, and after a dip throughout much of the 2010’s it returned to 42 in 2017-18. But the next year it crashed to 18, and during the pandemic year of 2020-21 crashed further, to just 8. This year, again, the number again, so far, stands at 8 (the figure only counts full-time tenure track jobs in US and Canadian universities and four-year colleges). The pattern also tracks with my experience as an advisor. Of my ten Ph.D. students who defended their dissertations before 2016, all but one got a tenure-track job (and the one who didn’t limited the job search to a single metropolitan area for personal reasons). Of the eight who have finished since then, only one has so far gotten a tenure-track job. Five of these eight have landed very competitive postdocs, so the problem is clearly not with the students. But will the jobs be there when the fellowships end? Will jobs come back to the older level? We can hope, but I don’t know anyone who would bet on it at present.

              It is now graduate admissions season, and given these bleak numbers, the question is more pressing than ever: does it make practical or ethical sense to admit new advisees? Despite the bleak numbers, there is an argument to be made—and several of my colleagues make it quite forcefully—that it does make sense, at least at my home institution of Princeton. Princeton is a wealthy university, and it provides graduate students with a reasonable income: close to $50,000 a year (I received just $6000 a year there in the 1980s), plus some subsidized housing, and extra funds for research and conference travel and language study (not to mention a lot of free food). Princeton graduate students don’t even have to work as teaching assistants to receive this stipend, which lasts for five years, with the possibility of further extensions. During this period, they can read and study to their hearts’ content, learn languages, travel, receive guidance from brilliant colleagues of mine like Anthony Grafton and Linda Colley, and produce serious scholarship of their own. There is a serious argument to be made that this is a valuable and fulfilling way to spend several years of one’s life, even if it doesn’t lead to a job in the professoriate. Every year, when I speak to prospective graduate students, I emphasize the state of the job market and tell them that these intellectual satisfactions may be the principal thing they gain from graduate school. They often say this is a deal they are ready to accept.

              The problem is that the tradeoffs are not always clearly visible to these prospective students. They generally enter a Ph.D. program at around age 24 and take at least six years to get the Ph.D. Afterwards, it is not uncommon for them to spend at least three or four more years in post-docs and non-tenure-track appointments before deciding, if a tenure-track job has not come through, to pursue opportunities in a different field. At that point they are in their early to mid-thirties and often find themselves competing for entry level jobs in these other fields with more recent college graduates. When they start these jobs, they will be behind their peers in salary and retirement benefits, not to mention the sort of professional security and stability that makes it easier to start a family.

              So what is to be done? The issue of the tradeoffs makes it difficult for me to accept the idea that we should just accept the situation as it is. Many colleagues suggest a different solution: dramatically cut the size of our graduate cohorts. Quite a few universities have already done this. There are two problems here, however. First, many public universities cannot cut the size of their cohorts very deeply, as they rely on graduate students for cheap labor, and the solution only makes sense if the overall number of graduate students in the country shrinks dramatically. Furthermore, cutting cohort size means that graduate students will have fewer or no colleagues in their own subfields, which not only damages intellectual community, but also makes it impossible for them to take specialized seminars in those subfields.

              Many other colleagues argue in favor of introducing serious training for non-academic fields into our Ph.D. programs, so that students can enter these fields with less of a lag. The problem here is that these fields are numerous and diverse—they include publishing, academic administration, museum work, library work, high school teaching, community college teaching, foundation work, thinktank work, journalism, diplomacy, etc—and History Department faculty generally have expertise in none of them. Yes, we could subsidize internships and bring in guest personnel to run programs. But doing this sort of “alt-ac” preparation also takes serious time away from dissertation work, which could hurt our students’ chances of getting the few tenure-track jobs that do come up.

              Here is my own solution. It’s more radical, and probably a fantasy, since it would require the sort of large-scale structural change that our decentralized university system isn’t really capable of (unlike, for instance, the French, with their Ministry of Higher Education, not that I have any desire to see the creation of a US equivalent). So here goes: Reduce the Ph.D. to four years: two years of course work, plus two years of research and writing, with the goal of having two published articles, rather than a book-length manuscript at the end of it. Eliminate stand-alone master’s programs, which would now be redundant. Also, eliminate teaching requirements for Ph.D. students. And eliminate all current post-doctoral fellowships. At the same time, create a relatively small number of full-time, paid (and benefit-conferring) Instructorships to cover the teaching that graduate students now do. People would hold these positions for a maximum of five years. At least at some institutions, the funds currently used for post-docs could be repurposed to provide research and writing leave for them. At the end of five years, Instructors could apply for jobs as Assistant Professors. The large majority of doctoral students would be winnowed out after the initial four-year program, but they would not have invested anywhere near so much time in the process as graduate students do now. Those lucky enough to go on to Instructorships would have a much greater chance of eventually landing Assistant Professorships and could move on to this tenure-track rank after a total of nine years, roughly equivalent to the time it currently takes for most current graduate students to reach the same point now. Hopefully, Instructors could also take on much of the work currently done by adjunct faculty.

              Here is a question for readers. This new system would probably work for wealthy private universities like Princeton. Would it work, financially, for public universities that currently rely on graduate student labor? I am presuming that it would, because these schools could always reduce the number of fellowship-receiving Ph.D. students to the level necessary to make their books balance. But I may be entirely off base here.