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…
Hoo boy. Much more to say, but playcare calls!
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.)
Part 1 At the AHA: Huh?
Part 2 Who’s a ‘Historian’ to the AHA?
Part 3 History ‘Job Czar’ Shuts Down PhD Production
(Oversupply Continues for Two Decades)
x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com
18 Responses to At the AHA: Huh?
ex_ag - January 6, 2010 at 11:19 pm
I likewise know little about history as an academic discipline, but I’m skeptical of Bousquet’s quick dismissal of this supply-side response to a glut of PhD’s in any discipline. From his own admission, it seems that this supply-side solution was not so much dismissed because it lacked merit but, rather, was shouted down by a “third wave” of folks whose motives in rejecting this draconian solution are clearly self-serving.In English–with which I am also intimately familiar–this proposal to limit PhD’s on the supply side still has merit. In fact, the current “Most Read” article on the Chronicle’s website is Thomas Benton’s discussion of the many ways Humanities programs “bait and switch” prospective graduate students with fantastic career promises that have little chance of coming true. Rather than the unethical approach Benton observes at work, why not admit that a PhD in the Humanities has limited applications and that those in academia are most limited of all?Sure, a lot of people who feel an attraction to these disciplines won’t get into graduate schools. But does that necessarily stop anyone from pursuing their interest on their own? Certainly not. There are scores of amateur historians out there. Likewise, there are any number of book clubs where literary enthusiasts can pursue their interests. But they don’t get lied to along the way. And they don’t have to shell out thousands of dollars to pursue that love. As far as Bousquet’s attempts to dismiss the notion that there is, in fact, an academic glut, I again have trouble accepting this. Putting aside the notion of jobs for a minute, one need only look at the logjam at any and every publishing venue to recognize that this glut is not merely a creation of administrators but is in fact a reality. There are simply too many scholars attempting to publish, too much useless material being published, and too little time for others in a field to keep up with the constant avalanche of publications that only keeps on coming.Contraction deserves a second, honest look.
stinkcat - January 7, 2010 at 10:06 am
In finance, the supply limitation works so well that top universitys have to pay $150,000+ for new doctorates. Perhaps history and english could learn a thing or two from finance.
ellenschrecker - January 7, 2010 at 10:20 am
Hey, Marc — Here’s one historian heading for San Diego today to spend two full days in a hotel suite interviewing 13 of the 175+ applicants for our full-time tenure-track assistant professorship in American history. In other words, a real job in History in a desirable location — at least for some, NYC — at an almost living wage. But 175+ applicants…. Admittedly, we wrote our job ad a bit too broadly, but we’re a small dept. of six people and we wanted someone with a lot of breadth. BUT, and this speaks to your comment about administrators’ unwillingness to hire people in the humanities, it took us three years to get our Provost and Deans (all scientists and mathematicians until this year) to give us a green light on hiring. And, we were forced to cancel our job search last year — (don’t ask, Bernard Madoff — THE Bernard Madoff — was treasurer of the Board of Trustees). Townsend is right, mainly, about the use of adjuncts. Big schools use grad. students. Others use adjuncts and other forms of contingent labor, usually, however, as we do, either when someone is on leave or else when the field is one (like E. Asian history, for example) where there simply isn’t enough demand for a full-time appointment. (Solution there might be to split a full-time position between several schools, since then there would be the kind of continuity that contingent appointments can’t ensure, while giving the instructor the security, benefits, and academic freedom that the tenure track provides. The logistics aren’t fun, but they are doable — at my school we teach at two separate campuses, each with its own dean and separate culture.) A more serious problem — which accounts for our 175+ applicants — is the imbalance in fields. There is a serious oversupply in some areas, like American history, and a more balanced situation in others. So, what to do? Clearly, let’s figure out ways to step up demand. Given the abysmal lack of civic knowledge and engagement among current undergraduates — I had an advanced standing studen who thought the Secretary of State took minutes –I could easily support a Lynne-Cheney-esque demand for more required American history courses. But, that would also require ensuring that the instructors of those courses get full-time tenure-track positions if History is not to become as casualized a discipline as English already is. But, the one bright spot in all of this is that we are going to be able to hire an amazing new colleague….
11159995 - January 7, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Following up the comment made by #1, I would be interested in knowing whether Dr. Bousquet believes there should be a demand-side solution for faculty publishing, too, by expanding the number of publishing outlets or increasing the output of those already existing. Of course, that would only exacerbate the chief problem that university presses have faced in the last couple of decades, viz., decreasing demand for their output by libraries. The whole history of university press publishing has been one of market failure, i.e., inadequate demand for the supply of academic writings. Increasing the number of tenure-track jobs will pose greater burdens on the already stressed system so long as P&T committees continue to insist on publication of the monograph as the “gold standard”–and not just one monograph now for tenure, but at some universities two. The analysis needs to go beyond expanding jobs for tenure-track faculty; it needs to deal with the crisis in scholarly communication that such an increase would exacerbate.—Sandy Thatcher, Penn State University Press (past president of the Association of American University Presses, 2007/8)
timebandit - January 7, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Why can’t we have both a supply-side and demand-side solution to the problem? I’m no proponent of supply side national fiscal policy in the 80s sense, but to think that we will go back to a system of huge TT departments seems equally mad. (Universities may be exploiting contingent labor in some cases these days, but on the other hand, they did not have the same massive pension and health care obligations in the past, and this does create pressures against TT positions. Not to mention higher costs in scientific research labs, equipment, etc. etc. etc.)I really don’t see why we can’t limit PhD programs to those training for a career in the academy only, and thus be able to fund these candidates better… In this case, a master’s degree would be the appropriate professional qualification for those who are not seeking academic jobs. OR, if you allow PhD programs to graduate too many people, the goal should be to provide training in alternative careers. Perhaps this could even be 2 tracks — max 4-5 years for a public historian training vs. the 8+ years for academic? This would create a clinical and academic track split, which seems to work well in medical fields… Well, it’s not like I have all the solutions – just throwing out some ideas here – but to think we’re going back to a perceived golden age in academic hiring seems unlikely, so why not think of new options to fit a new situation?
gmd1057 - January 7, 2010 at 2:48 pm
The overwhelmingly dominant cost in a university is full-time employees, including faculty. Administrators promote casual instructional hiring in order to create profit centers (tuition income larger than instruction cost) to balance out the excess of costs (salary levels, benefits, faculty support and overhead, etc.) over income that is necessitated by having full-time faculty. Bosquet’s analysis is always to blame administrators, as if the system isn’t in reality working its damnedest to keep making payroll etc. for him and his fellow full-time employees, keeping them in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed, and which they assume they deserve as a sort of natural right accruing to elite status.What’s the Marxian term for that? False consciousness? In psychology, it’s called denial. This mentality (“I should just naturally be taken care of, and not even have to be aware that it’s happening, let alone how”) is exactly the mentality he ascribes in his essay to welloff males of northwest european ancestry. Ipse dixit. — But these are attitudes characteristic of all elites that refuse either to recognize or to admit that they function as a privileged class being subsidized by other people’s efforts.The dominantly left-of-center ideologies of humanities acadcemics are *compensatory*.
fcshofstra - January 7, 2010 at 11:49 pm
In response to #6, gmd1057, I was under the assumption that the predominant cost of a university (based on the single data point of my instituion) is the cost of maintaining the physical plant.
gmd1057 - January 8, 2010 at 9:00 am
Check the figures. People are a lot smaller than buildings, but they get paid a lot more per cubic foot. Furthermore, many of the buildings are there precisely so faculty can store their books, have a place to hang out away from home, argue with one another in “meetings,” etc. That’s what I meant by “faculty support and overhead.”
gmd1057 - January 8, 2010 at 9:10 am
#7 is a great example of the tendency I mentioned in my penultimate paragraph in #6 — Why would a faculty member assume that their offices and other physical facilities are not part of what the university pays out for, to support the faculty? The buildings that the faculty use, in some cases nearly exclusively, are supposedly there by magic, rather than being something expensive that is done specifically for them.The big picture is that the university employs so many adjuncts in order to pay for the large expenses associated with fulltime faculty.
unemployedacademic - January 8, 2010 at 1:09 pm
gmd1057, in your comment (#9), you seem to mistake what the infrastructure supports. Are faculty only employed for their own benefit? It makes about as much sense to say that the physical plant is devoted solely or mostly to faculty support as it does to say that the entire university is devoted to the athletic program.
22097984 - January 8, 2010 at 1:53 pm
The problem with too many Ph.D.’s in the humanities or too few jobs in the humanities is AT LEAST 25 years old. Knowledge about the “problem” is widespread within the fields. Knowledge about the “problem” is widely available to individuals thinking about entering into the expensive and time consuming process of getting one of these degrees. If they are not aware of the problem, as adults they should research the area they are thinking about spending 5-10 years getting skills to work in. The solution to this “problem” is to either use draconian reduction of production of Ph.D.’s (determined exactly by which regulator…no doubt a product of the very ivy schools trying to protect their interests) or to mandate that the new education models coming into the market increase the coverage of classes with the right kind of teachers which, apparently, means Ph.D.’s in tenure track jobs. Might this not be a problem at all? Might it be that if young people want to enter into a Ph.D. program with little or no chance of later employment that is their business? Might it be that if they enter into the program not knowing they will not get a job it is their business? The evidence cited above says that history is dispropotionately children of wealthy people. That seems evidence that the people that enter the programs are willing to accept lower wages as they have income sources elsewhere. Some areas (such as computer science and business…especially quantitative marketing) do not have enough skilled people while others (history and english) have too many. The wages for one are and should go up. The wages for the other can and should go down. If you don’t like it, start studying statistical modeling so you can get into one of the higher paying areas. But do NOT ask me to pay taxes to support your idea of utopia. Everyone together: “I am an adult and I am responsible for my own actions.”
timebandit - January 8, 2010 at 3:42 pm
To previous poster – yes, individual responsibility should factor in, but many of us have been 20 and stupid at one time, or had misinformed advisors who said “you’d be a great professor – why not apply for a PhD program?” and so forth. Maybe you were both smart and strategic at age 22 when entering a PhD program, but I for one, was just a book-smart, strategy-dumb kid who had some well intentioned but bad advice. (Not a historian, btw.) Well, you can’t go back in time…
marcbousquet - January 8, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Folks, the six-month-old blogware here is still pretty glitchy, and rejected my update of this post showing parts 2 and 3, which address some of these comments. Read them here:Part 2 Who’s a “Historian” to the AHA?http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Whos-a-Historian-to-the-AHA-/19558/Part 3 History Job Czar Shuts Down Ph.D. Production(But PhD “Oversupply” Continues for Two Decades)http://chronicle.com/blogPost/History-Job-Czar-Shuts-Down/19566/
gmd1057 - January 8, 2010 at 6:15 pm
@#10.Yes, the faculty are employed for their own benefit. If they thought they had an overall better employment option, they would take it instead.Yes, buildings full of offices assigned to individual faculty members for their personal use are large organizational expenses intended to benefit the individual faculty members who use them. Office buildings are parallel, in many ways, to employer-paid health benefits. They don’t show up on the paycheck, but they are employee-support expenses that don’t show up as income. Ever since the US started a federal income tax (1913), employers have tried to find untaxed ways to compensate people, thus benefitting the employee at less expense to itself, because it therefore doesn’t have to send extra money to the government in order to benefit the employee. Health benefits started during war-related wage freezes after 1945, owing to employers’ need to compete for labor without violating the wage laws.Offices and other support are traditional in various fields, but in recent decades have also the benefit for employees of being nontaxabale. There are jobs where people actually pay their employer for work space. Example: If you get your daily newspaper delivered out of a depot by someone who drives his or her own car to make subscription deliveries (paying for their own car/insurance/gas, etc.), standard practice in that industry is to charge employees rent for use of a table area to sort and assemble newspapers prior to the delivery run. So the delivery person (often an undocumented worker) who throws the paper into the yard of a professor at 5AM pays for his/her office space, while the professor gets free office space, in addition to all the other upsides and perks of fulltime professorial status — but the fulltime professors still whine and refuse to recognize their welloff status. Meanwhile, I have seen many cases over the years where adjuncts are not offered any office space at all (not even office space shared with dozens of other adjuncts, as often happens). But via the excess of tuition charged for adjuncts’ services over their total compensation, adjuncts as a group pay for many overall university expenses, including the portion of faculty salary/benefits/upkeep/support that is not covered by an the student teaching loads of individual fulltime faculty members.
stinkcat - January 9, 2010 at 6:58 am
Real Estate agents also pay for their space and the services of the office that they use, such as their telephone line and computers, etc. Perhaps universities ought to start treating faculty like independent contractors and billing them for office space, computers, library usage, etc. They could pay faculty on a per student basis and then subtract off these expenses. That would reduce the number of faculty arguments over teaching loads and other issues.
johnwinthrop - January 9, 2010 at 10:34 am
Re #11 above: I would pay higher taxes for utopia. Seems like a pretty good deal, actually. Better than what we have now.
gmd1057 - January 9, 2010 at 11:39 am
@#15I suspect sarcasm, but that said it does remain a fact of life that the closer someone’s income and efforts/results are tied, the better the job they tend to do, and the more someone’s income and efforts/results are kept separated the more the human tendency to expect something for nothing tends to come to the fore and metastasize.Hairdressers and barbers pay for their workspace also, unless they own the shop (most are not owners). (Can you tell my grandfather was a trial judge for the NLRB?) It’s mainly a whitecollar/professional thing for people to expect a free office, but the upside/tradeoff for an employer is to be able to keep an eye on what people are doing during paid worktime. But when was the last time you saw a university keeping track of exactly how many total hours faculty spend in their personal offices, mandating a 35 or 40 hour minimum such as “9 to 5″, or telling them what they are allowed and not allowed to work on during the time they are in the office? At major universities, 1-3 hours a week of student-access office hours are customarily required/suggested, and even that amount of time is almost never really checked on for “compliance” or “”productivity” (are you seeing students who pay the bills? or doing your own non-job-related stuff?). The vast preponderance of the hours most faculty spend in their office, that office is functioning as an employer-paid work space used totally at faculty discretion — a “fringe benefit”.
stinkcat - January 9, 2010 at 1:09 pm
I saw the faculty handbook for one college and it contained a requirement that faculty were obligated to be on campus at least 35 hours a week. While I wonder about the effectiveness of such a policy, I can understand the motivation behind it. Some people in the academy get away with murder.