The number of job openings for assistant professors in English rose for the fourth year in a row, but job prospects for new Ph.D.'s in the field will be less than rosy in 2002, according to the Modern Language Association.
Entry-level job openings in English grew by 5.3 percent, to 671 in 2001, up from 637 the previous year. The total number of academic positions in English rose only slightly, to 983 in 2001, up from 959 in 2000, an increase of 2.5 percent. Unfortunately for job hunters, the number of Ph.D.'s granted in English also jumped by 4.7 percent in 2000 to 1,070, the most recent year for which statistics were available. That's the first increase in the production of new Ph.D.'s since 1997.
"The uptick in jobs is a good thing," says Phyllis Franklin, executive director of the MLA, which holds its annual convention December 27-30, in New Orleans. "But along with that good thing comes the increase in the number of new Ph.D.'s, which means there will be more people looking for those jobs. If the number of Ph.D.'s had continued to go down, the situation might have looked more promising."
New Ph.D.'s already face stiff competition on the job market, says Elizabeth McHenry, director of placement in New York University's English department. "Some schools have been hiring what we call 'advanced assistant professors' -- people who've already acquired a wealth of experience as a result of having worked as an adjunct or a postdoc for a few years -- and that's raised the bar for new Ph.D.'s. It's very hard for them to compete with the Ph.D.'s who've been out for some time."
The current economic recession in the United States may make matters worse. Some states are cutting back spending, and that's having an adverse effect on university hiring.
"The number of actual positions available could be lower than it first appeared when we did a count of advertised searches in the MLA's Job Information List because some of those searches ultimately didn't go through," says Deborah Carlin, an associate professor of English and director of graduate studies in English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
For example, budget cuts in Massachusetts have put three job openings in Ms. Carlin's department on hold. And her department is not alone. The English department at the University of Georgia canceled four advertised job openings after being ordered to return a portion of its budget. Dan Bivona, chairman of Arizona State University's English department, says he plans to go forward with two searches -- for an endowed chair and an assistant professor in American literature -- although both are "pending budgetary approval."
Some private institutions have scaled back hiring, too. Michael Kuczynski, chairman of the English department at Tulane University, says he advertised three positions, but two of them were eliminated after concern over the fallout from the events of September 11.
The news for Ph.D.'s in foreign languages is also mixed. While the total number of job openings crept up by 1.4 percent in 2001 (to 675 in 2001 from 666 in the previous year), so, too, did the number of Ph.D.'s awarded -- by 2.1 percent. Some foreign language departments fear they will be unable to fill positions because of the economic downturn. For example, Mark Pietralunga, chairman of the modern languages and linguistics department at Florida State University, says he initially had hiring authorization for three positions, but the university scaled that back to one.
Still, the situation isn't entirely bleak. Many departments -- including the English departments at Indiana and New York Universities, as well as the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane -- already had the money for their positions in place and are unlikely to lose them. The department won't feel the impact of the recession until next year, if it feels it at all.
This year the largest number of openings were in fields that traditionally do a lot of hiring, such as British literature and rhetoric and composition. Openings in the subfield of multiethnic literatures are growing, while American literature, which usually has a lot of listings, seemed to have fewer this time around.
Nearly half of the total number of foreign-language jobs listed were in Spanish; the number of jobs in Chinese, French, Italian, and Japanese rose slightly. Experts predict that recent events could lead to higher student enrollment in Arabic and Hebrew, and potentially more openings in those subfields.
Despite the competitive market of recent years, some new Ph.D.'s have found tenure-track appointments. Nicholas Williams, an associate professor of English and director of graduate studies at Indiana's Bloomington campus, says that 7 of his 15 Ph.D.'s who were on the market last year landed tenure-track jobs. At the University of Georgia, eight of its nine English Ph.D.'s on the market last year found jobs, although only five on the tenure track. It's too soon to say how this year's Ph.D.'s will fare.
"I was tempted to advise some students to go out on the market now, even if they weren't too far into their dissertations, because next year is so iffy," Mr. Williams says. "Anything could happen."
