A funny thing happened on the way to the AHA this year — American Historical Association staffer Robert B. Townsend issued his annual report on tenure-track employment in the field. Unsurprisingly, he concluded that holders of freshly minted doctorates face grim prospects. What raised my eyebrows — and those of many others doing scholarship in academic labor — was his insistence that the labor market for faculty in history is a matter of an “oversupply” of persons holding doctorates, and that the profession needs to control “the supply side of the market,” i.e., “cut the number of students” in doctoral programs.
This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers — as what I call part of a “second wave” of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration. Thanks to the third wave of thought arising from graduate students and contingent faculty in the academic labor movement, you just don’t hear so much of this sort of thing anymore. In most fields, it’s pretty well understood that the real issue is an undersupply of tenure-track jobs, i.e., that the issue needs to be addressed from the “demand side.” There’s no real oversupply of folks holding the Ph.D. because what’s happened is an aggressive, intentional restructuring of demand by administrators — in many fields, work that used to be done by persons holding the Ph.D. and on the tenure track is now done by persons without the terminal degree and contingently. Increasingly, even undergraduates are playing a role in this restructured “demand” for faculty work, participating in the instruction of other undergraduates.
In this context, it was a bit unsettling to read Townsend’s 2010 analysis:
The near perpetual sense of crisis in history employment over the past 20 years had very little to do with a diminishing number of jobs, or even the growing use of part-time and contingent faculty. … The primary problem today, as it was a decade ago, seems to lie on the supply side of the market — in the number of doctoral students being trained, and in the skills and expectations those students develop in the course of their training.
Red flag, bull, etc.
Now, before I unpack this I want to say several nice things about Townsend. As a long-term staffer at the AHA, over the last couple of decades he’s produced over a hundred useful articles, reports, and analyses on the employment prospects of persons holding the Ph.D. in history. He is also himself the holder of a newly-minted Ph.D. in history from George Mason (2009), where they do fantastic work in the digital humanities (another topic on which Townsend has also written prolifically and well), thanks to Townsend’s late thesis advisor, the brilliant Roy Rosenzweig. The thesis (not yet listed in DAI or the GMU library) is on the early professionalization of history, and apparently overlaps a bit with his staff work. He’s especially to be congratulated for his continuing presentation of disquieting data on the low proportion of women and ethnic minorities amongst historians and history majors, and on the role of privileged backgrounds in shaping interest in history, including careers in the field. Many of the concerns that Rob has expressed in print as a staffer are the same concerns that have shaped my own career, and if he’s job-hunting with that new Ph.D., I’d be thrilled to see him land a job and raise the same questions from a faculty position.
I also want to offer some caveats: Circumstances differ from field to field, and I willingly acknowledge that my own perspective on academic labor is shaped by my more intimate understanding of working conditions in English. I sometimes make erroneous assumptions on the basis of that more intimate understanding. History is different, perhaps very different, and I’ve made no special study of it — and really would like a chance to see Townsend’s dissertation (hint). History is a smallish field, hence more volatile, and has recently seen growth in the undergraduate major and hiring.
Caveats and compliments out of the way, I want to say, though:
I’m confused. I wish some really smart folks in history — who I happen to know think about these issues — would help me out. Historiann? Jonathan Rees? (Both folks I’d love to see added to Ye Olde Brainstorm’s lineup, btw.)
I think I get what Townsend is driving at. Is it something like this? “In our particular discipline, history, we’ve had a bunch of relatively good years in recent memory, and whatever’s going on out there with casualization in other disciplines, our issue is more straightforward: We wouldn’t have all this stress if we shrunk our doctoral programs.” That would be the “obvious solution,” as Townsend puts it.
As I look at Townsend’s good work for AHA over the years, I believe I see the data driving his conclusion that what history needs is a good supply-side fix.
Looking at his graph of job ads vs new doctorates, 1970-present, a couple of things stand out: 1) in two periods of about a half-decade each, there were more job ads than doctorates awarded, and 2) the raw number of job ads, flirting with 700 annually in the 1970s, were more like 1,000 a year between 2000 and 2010. So one first-pass reading might be that there’s a market in jobs that has boom periods and bust periods, and — with rising interest in the history major, there has been growth in hiring for faculty. This leads Townsend to relative peace of mind about contingency, at least within history, and to further represent nontenurable appointments as “threshold” positions, way-stations to eventual stable employment (though he does note that some folks stay in the threshold, give up, drop out before running this gauntlet, etc.).
But it does seem there’s still a bunch of dots needing to be connected.
For starters, most disciplines have added raw numbers of tenure track lines in the past 15 years, English and sociology being notable exceptions. The percentage of faculty teaching nontenurably, however has soared. Rising raw numbers of job ads isn’t particularly meaningful.
So I’d like to know: What percentage of the history job ads were for nontenurable and senior positions in 1970 versus 2010? What percentage of the faculty in history were teaching nontenurably in 1970 versus today? What percentage of undergraduate sections are taught by graduate students and nontenurable faculty today vs. then? How many folks with doctorates pass through “threshold” positions into stable employment — after how long? How do those considerations relate to the disproportionate whiteness, masculinity, and privilege in tenure-track employment, interest in the field, etc? For that matter, how does AHA account for the labor of graduate students? They too are contingent faculty, when responsible for direct instruction, and also in leveraging the labor of tenure-stream faculty, when serving as teaching “assistants,” permitting larger and larger lecture enrollments, etc. (Related question: Is a lecture course ever too big? If the only function of the tenured is to deliver lectures and supervise subordinates who conduct discussions, why can’t we “scale up,” as our school-reform friends urge us, and have half of the lectures delivered by video? Why not 80 percent delivered by video?)
Which gets me to my second question: Why is the number of jobs “just enough” in this analysis, and the number of historians too many?
One major risk of supply-side analysis is the naturalization of demand — what the market wants is what the market wants.
But is that how professions, and professional associations like the AHA ought to be thinking about professional work? A traditional characteristic of professions is regulating who is qualified to do the work of the profession. And in this case, the word “market” is a heavily loaded abstraction for an actual group: administrators. The “market” is what administrators permit faculty to hire. But what administrators want (or allow) isn’t neutral, or connected to student needs, preferences, etc. in any natural or obvious way; it’s enormously activist, and intentional movement, with the overt intention of changing the faculty workplace. Perhaps a more useful analytical frame is one that captures the struggle between faculty and administrators.
In the end, even if all the history grad programs affiliated with AHA made someone on the AHA staff into a jobs czar — Stalin of the profession! — and allowed her to say how many each could graduate, would that fix the problem?
If AHA shrunk graduate-student assistantships, what would keep administrations from hiring talented undergraduates or volunteer history enthusiasts lead the discussion sections? Don’t you still have to answer the tough questions: Who should teach, on what terms?
It’s well understood by most folks doing serious work on academic labor that regardless of how one analyzes the problem, most “supply-side” solutions are doomed to fail so long as administrators have so much control over the contours of demand that they can put staff, permatemps, and students — including undergraduates — to work at activities that were formerly done by persons holding doctorates.
Also, overall the AHA data seem gappy. The AHA 2004-05 analysis couldn’t account for the employment of two-thirds of persons with history Ph.D.’s over the preceding 15 years!
Wow. When I went looking at the method, which involved searching history departments in the AHA directory, though, I didn’t see any discussion of community colleges. Which led me to look at the directory, which doesn’t seem to list too many community colleges (unless I was using it wrong). And a lot of other departments don’t seem to maintain membership.
So, again, hard question kinda passed by: If AHA is truly “the professional association for all historians,” as the slogan has it, why aren’t you counting all the folks working in community colleges with their Ph.D.’s? Are they “historians”? Could community colleges use more folks with Ph.D.’s teaching? (Perhaps with some rethinking of the doctoral training?) If the answer is yes, then why talk about shrinking “production” of doctorates when you could be talking about the community college as a center for public history?
Even if Townsend is right that history is different from some other disciplines, I’d like to know just how different, and to have a lot more information before I could get on board with this analysis. This is just a blog post, trying to get some thought started, without a detailed review of Townsend’s overall work (again, which I’d be happy to do), but it strikes me that this report is running some risks — of minimizing the constructedness and gappiness of the data, naturalizing the “market” as force in history as opposed to seeing it as actual relations between persons in organized groups (faculty associations, administrative bureaucracies and college associations, etc.); simplifying a complex labor system by selectively looking at some sectors (tenure-track jobs) and ignoring others…
Update: part 2, Who’s a ‘Historian’ to the AHA? and part 3, History ‘Job Czar Shuts Down PhD Production (”Oversupply” Continues for Two Decades). All of this with more commentary x-posted to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm group blog, where I’m currently the token left-of-liberal and academic-labor person.
See Townsend’s latest report and the 2004-05 analysis, as well as my introduction (pdf) to How the University Works (NYU, 2008), which analyzes the failings of “job-market theory.” (The final chapter of the book addresses how job-market theory shaped the professional-association discourse over at the Modern Language Association.)”
Recently:
- Gallup: Citizens Smarter than NYT and Washington Post on Ed Policy, Again
- Cushy For Whom?
- NYT Offers Dianetics for Higher Ed
- Haiti, Six Months After
- The United States of Alabama
- Hooked on Measurement
- Who’s Teaching Johnny? Hold Administrators Accountable for Student Retention
- High-handed Administrators Generate High Costs
- OMG! DIY U means EM do RTW!!!!
- “Some of the Worst-Paid High-School Graduates in the Country”
Comments
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 1:08 pm and is filed under MLA, Precarity, academic labor system, administrators, higher ed in the news, intellectuals are workers, youth is a category through which class is lived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[…] Bousquet has read the AHA job report too and seems to have some of the same reaction that I did to the WSJ: What raised my eyebrows–and those of many others doing scholarship in […]
As a(n) historian I think there is more to Townsend’s position than you seem to think.
-In practice, limiting the number of new Ph.D.s is something that the AHA might possibly have some influence on, as opposed to making administrators hire more tenure-track people. (Yes, I am defeatist.)
-You point out that a lot of these Ph.D.s could be getting jobs at community colleges. True enough, but Ph.D programs don’t want that. They judge themselves by the number of dissertations completed and the number of good jobs their grads get. If grad students finishes and gets a job at a no-name school, leaves with an A.B.D and gets a job with the State Department or gets eaten by wolves its all the same to most programs, they don’t count. Yes, budding historians are exploited at one remove by the academic system, but they are exploited much more directly by senior historians, and that is something the AHA should be taking a stand on.
-You can sort of see the divide in the profession from the breakdown by of jobs by fields that Townsend always presents. Want a tenure track job in History? Study Asia! Why don’t departments take in more students in Asian history and fewer in 19th century US? Because placing students in jobs is not their goal. Providing existing faculty with assistants and T.A.s and adding to that big wall o’ dissertations in the department office are. I agree that “Perhaps a more useful analytical frame is one that captures the struggle between faculty and administrators. “ but it is hard to see how that can come about unless there is some common interest between the great and good of the profession and the lumpenintelligentsia of grad students and the doubtfully employed. Many Ph.D granting programs are, as you know, engage in false advertising, promising students the glorious R-1 job that they know is not in the cards for the vast majority of them. Townsend is pretty much the only person who tries to put information about job prospects in the hands of students. Programs make no effort to track job placements which would seem to me to the a minimal sign of good faith between the two sides of the profession. Data on placement rates would seem to be an obvious first step for any limiting of Ph.D production, and by itself it would do a lot to unify the profession. If what Townsend is doing somehow leads to this sort of data becoming available, and senior people suffer even the briefest moment of shame over their placement rates I think that will do a lot of good. Well, maybe not a lot of good, but at least some good.
Best,
Alan
P.S. I would not refer to community colleges as sites for public history, since public history usually refers to museum and archive work and such.
P.P.S. I think Townsend has written about some of the data problems. For one thing, temp jobs are far less likely to be advertised in AHA Perspectives nowadays, going straight to H-Net. I suppose AHA could give someone (Townsend would be ideal) a bit of money to try and dig into these things, but in practice they don’t really care about these issues.
[…] with the AHA report’s conclusion that the problem is an oversupply of history Ph.D.s, and says that it’s not an oversupply of qualified job candidates, but that it’s an undersup… because of university administrators’ decisions over the past 25 years to hire more […]
I really appreciate these thoughts. I do respect Townsend’s work on this over the years, including his parsing of the data on many fronts–especially “privilege,” which I believe informs his diss as well– or I’d probably have come on a bit stronger over the supply-side orientation.
I guess part of the problem, one which would be consistent with Townsend’s analysis is this perspective, as described by Alan re community colleges and small schools, etc:
“Ph.D programs don’t want that. They judge themselves by the number of dissertations completed and the number of good jobs their grads get. If grad students finishes and gets a job at a no-name school, leaves with an A.B.D and gets a job with the State Department or gets eaten by wolves its all the same to most programs, they don’t count.”
That’s a fairly unhealthy (not to mention undemocratic, etc) basis for reproducing one’s profession! I think fixing this sort of value–if it really is as widespread as Alan suggests–is far more urgent, and would do more to improve the working lives of historians, than ill-fated adventures in supply-side pseudoeconomics…
I also take Jonathan’s point (track back to his home blog), that eliminating certain programs might do the profession good. That’s probably true in most fields, but I wonder if that’s not a different sort of conversation to have?
Closing a dozen, even two dozen programs doing a bad job of preparing future historians isn’t going to answer real questions (should community college faculty hold the PhD?) or seriously alter hiring patterns (who hires badly-prepared faculty anyway?).
I think Jonathan’s saying that reducing supply is more doable (as Alan hints also) and would at least do no harm.
But I’m not actually sure about either prong of that observation, especially the doing no harm assumption.
Wouldn’t restricting supply (even if possible) answer in advance certain real questions (”nope, community colleges and small schools don’t need ‘real’ historians”)and bypass others (”what should teaching and learning at those schools be like anyway?)?
I’d like to see AHA giving good, tough activist answers to those sorts of questions, not knuckling under to the managerial dominant of the status quo.
I could go on a long time in this vein and may do a followup regarding the effectiveness of supply side interventions: just imagine the shrinkage of programs.
Who would do the work that grad students were doing? On what terms? Would they be more qualified or less? Administrations would want to replace grad student discussion leaders with undergrads…
How would supply-side shrinkage affect other, simultaneous managerial initiatives–increasing class size, teaching by nonfaculty, automation of instruction, standardization and managerial control of curricula, etc?
Supply side analysis falsely simplifies a complex historical struggle between real persons and groups, and–fancifully, unsupportably–imagines that the holder of a PhD is selling a commodity highly desired in an employment marketplace. (And further simplistically assumes that price can always be affected by supply, confuses price and value, etc etc). What actually affects historians’ lives is their working conditions–how much teaching they do, at what salaries, with what recognition by colleagues, etc etc. The “market for PhDs” is not the main shaper of those things: they can and should be struggled for directly. Imagining that all of those issues are explained by, and can be addressed within, a “job market” is intellectually lazy and an indefensible position for a professional association.
The real struggle for the AHA is to inclusively shape the working conditions of “all historians,” not play speculator in an imaginary “job market.”
IMHO, anyway. Like I said, I’ll keep thinking and try to follow up soon! Solidarity, M
Thanks for directing attention to the demand side. As a historian who has been observing the profession for more than 20 years now I think some of your outsiders’ observations are spot on, while others could use some refinement.
You are correct that community college faculty are almost entirely absent from the directory of history departments. Inclusion in the directory is from self-reporting and the AHA has not reached out to community colleges very effectively. For the same reason, some programs in small colleges (especially those where history is combined with another discipline such as philosophy or political science) are also not included. On the other hand, the directory does include a large number of “related organizations” that employ history Ph.Ds in administrative/research positions (e.g. the Smithsonian). I don’t know the English job market so well, but I assume that there are fewer such employment opportunities than there is for historians. It’s hard to say how many of the historians at those organizations are there by choice or because they couldn’t get faculty positions. I know examples of each.
I think attitudes about placement from Ph.D. granting departments are more nuanced, and generally more positive, than Alan suggests. I taught at a third tier Ph.D. program where I was an advisor on three Ph.D. defenses. All three ended up in tenure track positions. I don’t think any of those positions were advertised in the AHA. And none are now in the AHA directory of departments, though all are still employed. Nor did we think that we had failed if a grad got a job at a community college. Indeed, getting a tenure track position in a desirable location at a community college isn’t that easy either. So you are correct that Townsend’s survey methods let a lot of employed historians slip through the cracks.
One problem with artificially reducing the supply side that I assume is important to you is that it potentially cuts off avenues for creating a more diverse faculty by making the key moment of decision so early in the candidates’ education. In history, perhaps moreso than in English, early decisions will also exacerbate perceived inequities between people in different fields. Some fields such as Asian or Middle Eastern history have much better job prospects because the supply of people with the requisite language skills is so small. The program where I taught placed one graduate at a “top ten” program because he had an exciting dissertation topic and unusual language skills. I think if we had been deliberately trying to reduce the number of graduate students in our program, he would not have been admitted.
I do think it is wrong to read Townsend as suggesting that we had a string of good years but now it’s time to restrict supply. HIstoriann is right that the “crisis” has been going on since the 70s. The call for limiting supply has gone on for nearly as long. But within that span there have been some stretches that have been better or worse than others. We’ve just entered a particularly bad situation. I’m not even sure that this particular bad situation has altered the dynamic between tenure track and adjunct positions all that much. Departments appear to be cutting back on both. Data for this are very hard to come by. Adjunct positions are almost never advertised in the AHA, nor even in H-Net. Fulltime visiting positions are advertised. I have not researched visiting positions systematically, but have the impression that there was a “second season” of such positions about 20 years ago that was already drying up before the current crisis. Again, at my old department we hired several people on one year appointments who went on to get tenured positions at R1 universities. The drying up of these stopgap measures is also part of the job crisis.
Thanks so much, John, Alan, Jon and historiann for these thoughts. This has been helpful for me to look a bit more closely at the job-market discourse in your field. I hope I’ve been fair, if not thorough, in parts 2 and 3. I often have trouble with gauging where to start with conversations of this kind…
[…] of course, is the same as Marc’s argument (with which I still agree) but there’s more!: Despite the recommendations in his 2004 report, […]
[…] before the conference. I really like the critiques of that report in the posts by Historiann and Marc Bosquet. It is simply galling to blame an overproduction of PhDs for the disjunctures of the academic job […]
Even if, as you say, a decrease in the supply of PhDs (and graduate student teaching supply), would lead to administrative workarounds like the “hiring talented undergraduates or volunteer history enthusiasts” to teach sections, wouldn’t that look bad for the university and put the AHA (and other interested parties) in a far better position to press for year-on-year increases in the percentage of tenure-track posts?
[…] of you who were following the dust-up over this post by Marc Bousquet from about a month ago probably remember the division that me and others were making between […]