Okay, let’s imagine the impossible of total supply-side control. Clamp off admissions to EVERY doctoral program in history immediately and what happens?
They all keep pumping out new PhDs at contemporary levels for ten years. Scratch that. They actually pump out higher levels, because fewer of those enrolled will drop out, believing that they have better chances. So that keeps the “supply” at status quo rates for, say, thirteen to fifteen years. Then of course there’s all the underemployed circling the drain. They’re good for at least another five years’ supply.
Another thing. Young people being so clever, they’ll find ways around that job czar and the gerontocracy, enrolling–as so many already do–in American Studies, cultural studies, women’s and ethnic studies. So while history is choking off “supply,” the “competition” will continue merrily.
So even after total lockdown on admissions, this “oversupply” will continue for two decades at minimum. When could “production” start again? After a decade? At what level?
One more thing. Since we’re still staying hands-off on the demand side–what administrators want is what administrators want, and what can us chickens do about that?–that “demand” will continue to be restructured downward on a dozen fronts: dumping humanities from curricula, more casualization, automated courseware, etc.
So I remain confused, if not downright skeptical. To those of you scoffing at how impractical it is to try and attack the problem where it lives–on the demand side, with aggressive administrator restructuring of demand, I want to say this: Really? You think this is the practical alternative?
Here are some demand-side questions, all of them far more practical, doable, and approachable than the Wiley E. Coyote-style fantasy of clambering atop a giant people pipeline and shutting ‘er down.
1. How much teaching should graduate students do per year, for how many years en route to a degree? At what rate should they be paid?
2. On what basis should teaching-intensive faculty in history earn tenure? If monograph publication isn’t the gold standard for professional activity, what forms of “doing history” should count? What size should their classes be? How many should they teach in relation to participation in governance and “doing history”? What degrees should they hold?
3. What’s the limit to standardization, automation, and “scaling up” schemes? Historians and many other faculty, especially academostars, are susceptible to the idea that the nation really only needs a handful of doctorally-degreed specialist stars in each field, and we can “scale up” their teaching infinitely by streaming their lectures (plus enlarging the army of cheap teachers/volunteers leading discussion sections).
4. When faculty are employed on a “temporary” basis, when is temporary an honest descriptor and when is it a loincloth for exploitation? Shouldn’t “temporary” faculty be paid more than nontemporary faculty (to contribute to self-funding of benefits, inconvenience, etc) What are the academic rights, including academic freedom in the classroom, and to teaching their own syllabi, of “temporary” faculty when they’re truly temporary? What are their rights in that respect when they’re really permanent but being treated as temporary?
Since we’re all so fond of imaginary “basic economics” at one stroke, wouldn’t removing the incentive for exploitation (super-cheap wages for grads and contingent faculty) solve the problem now masquerading as an “oversupply”?
Part 1 At the AHA: Huh?
Part 2 Who’s a ‘Historian’ to the AHA?
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This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 9:20 am and is filed under "job market theory" and why it's silly, "quality" and other fighting words, Precarity, academic labor system, administrators, higher ed in the news, intellectuals are workers, solidarity and a tiered workforce, this blogging life, 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.
[…] out and started reading the rest of the conversation that Marc Bousquet started. His third post is here. I’ve written a response to it in the comments which I’m sure will show up as soon as […]
Did the comment get lost? It’s not in the “in moderation” queue… how frustrating.
Track back to jon’s home blog (more or less bunk) for his thoughts and my reply.
My reply: Hey man. Thanks again for this dialogue. It really helped me to think some of this through (and do some digging): what’s emerged in the conversation so far I think is a broad agreement (between you, me John T, Alan, Ellen, historiann, etc etc), that the AHA data are flawed, hugely, by tracking only a fraction of the overall labor market (which includes a contingent majority, plus a bunch of tenurable positions not in the AHA dir.) Seems pretty clear at this point that these gaps yield big flaws in the analysis. Just so I’m clear: I absolutely don’t think there’s a reason not to pay some attention to the supply-side line of ideas–they’re fine as far as they go, and often they have merit independent of any putative labor-market impact. What I object to is the huge, magical-thinking reliance on them to solve what are clearly demand side issues. Sorry about your comment–it really isn’t in the moderation queue! Solidarity, M
Oh, Geeze.. It’s…it’s…the supply-side eternal return:
Supplyside Historio-Jesus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK7gI5lMB7M
I have yet to meet any historian “academostars” who want to replace regularly appointed history faculty with streaming video (even of themselves) or with adjuncts. In fact, most of these “academostars” are also the people you call “gerontocrats,” who want to retain the past career track, with which they are familiar–the Ph.D., the published book, the tenure-track position and the like. Finally, as to employing graduate students as TA’s, I don’t remember the 1960s and 1970s as an era of close personal interactions between professors and undergraduates. Quite the opposite, large lecture courses and TA’s were omnipresent then. Being a TA is also useful preparation for the academic job market. As someone who went to a graduate program where there were no TA’s, I had a very difficult time finding work, because people were always wanting to know where my teaching experience was.
The problem is the business model. It imposes continual growth (i.e., increased income) while diminishing investment. The administrations tell the department heads what they may have in terms of resources and the dept. heads, lacking cajones, accept the constraints (of course, dept. heads in the humanities have little or no understanding of how business actually functions and are thus steamrollered into meek acquiescence). While I don’t currently have an answer to the problem, although it would need to account for both supply and demand sides, I keep dunning on the history discipline to address it. See my essays in *Perspectives on History* (Sept. 08, Feb. 09, Dec. 09).